V for Vendetta, despite its pulp adventure plot and its stark propaganda, is not a morally simple book. The baddies, the fascists, are depicted as complex human beings with motives of their own, and sometimes even a kind of decency. V’s nemesis, Eric Finch, for example, is described in the text as “a policeman with an honest soul.” The hero, V, on the other hand, engages in any number of cruel and despicable acts — from systematic and serial murder, to the deliberate manufacturing of food shortages by sabotage, to torturing his young protégé, Evey Hammond, for the sake of producing a kind of conversion experience.
Isaac Butler, in his essay “V for Vile,” enumerates these and other various sins, both political and moral, at some length — writing, at times, not so much about the book as against it. In the comments to that post, others, such as Mike Hunter, counter that the character V may be reprehensible but the book implicitly condemns him and his actions. He notes, for instance, that V describes himself in the first chapter as “the villain” and is elsewhere identified with “the devil.” Such a defense, however, risks converting V for Vendetta from an anarchist book to an anti-anarchist book, one that can comfort timid liberals by equally condemning both political extremes. That reading not only undercuts Alan Moore’s stated intention (which may not be that important), it also ignores the story’s pervasive atmosphere of moral ambiguity, renders the ending arbitrary, and worst of all, prevents us from grappling with the genuine philosophical problems that the book poses.
Chief among these problems is, what may be the largest question in political philosophy since the time of Machiavelli, that of unjustifiable means. A great deal of evil has been done on the theory that some good will result, but looking back over history, it seems hard to defend the idea that the overall results have been good. And yet — what if evil means are the only ones available? More precisely, what if the means that might achieve our ends also contradict them?
In The Rebel, Albert Camus explains the paradox:
“If rebellion exists, it is because falsehood, injustice, and violence are part of the rebel’s condition. He cannot, therefore, absolutely claim not to kill or lie, without renouncing his rebellion and accepting, once and for all, evil and murder. But no more can he agree to kill and lie, since the inverse reasoning which would justify murder and violence would also destroy the reasons for his insurrection.”
One kind of solution, among the many that Camus considers, is that of the Russian terrorists who stand “face to face with their contradictions, which they could resolve only in the double sacrifice of their innocence and their life.” These martyr/assassins
“were incapable of justifying what they nevertheless found necessary, and conceived the idea of offering themselves as a justification. . . . A life is paid for by another life, and from these two sacrifices springs the promise of a value. . . . Therefore they do not value any idea above human life, though they kill for the sake of ideas. To be precise, they live on the plane of their idea. They justify it, finally, by incarnating it to the point of death.”
V is a terrorist of this mold. And so he plans his own murder — at the hands of the police detective Finch — just as meticulously as he planned his campaign of sabotage and assassination. V does, as Camus suggests, incarnate his idea to the point of death, but only so that the idea may survive: “Did you think to kill me? There’s no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There’s only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof.”
The idea of Anarchy does live on as, in a sense, V himself lives on — but in a new form, and in the person of Evey Hammond. Evey takes on the role of V, the mask and cloak, but her mission and her methods are different. She reflects: “I will not lead them, but I’ll help them build. Help them create where I’ll not help them kill.”
Evey’s new direction — her move away from violence — is only a renunciation of V’s methods, not of his vision, or even his plan. It is, in fact, the culmination of the latter. Earlier in the book, V himself acknowledged:
“Anarchy wears two faces, both creator and destroyer. The destroyers topple empires; make a canvas of clean rubble where creators can then build a better world. Rubble, once achieved, makes further ruins’ means irrelevant.
Away with our explosives, then! Away with our destroyers! They have no place within our better world. But let us raise a toast to all our bombers, all our bastards, most unlovely and most unforgivable. Let’s drink to their health. . . then meet with them no more.”
V’s dilemma, awful as it is, is that the methods that bring the new world into being stand in contradiction to the world they help create. Camus spells it out: “The terrorists no doubt wanted first of all to destroy — to make absolutism totter under the shock of exploding bombs. But by their death, at any rate, they aimed at re-creating a community founded on love and justice. . . .” Unfortunately, people who employ such methods may themselves be unsuited to live in the world they have helped to win. As Evey reflects, echoing V’s own words: “The age of killers is no more. They have no place within our better world.” The answer lies in V’s death. He must die so a new world can be born, a world where he is not needed and would not be welcomed.
V is vindicated, paradoxically, because he is condemned. V, the murderer, accepts his own murder in turn. And Evey — now, pointedly, “Eve” — becomes a new V, creator rather than destroyer. Violence is justified by the renunciation of violence. It is that renunciation that qualifies Evey for the new society, that justifies her efforts to build it. But V’s renunciation of violence is his suicide.
Camus’ solution to this dilemma — or rather, his resignation to it — was altogether more pragmatic, and more forgiving:
“Thus the rebel can never find peace. . . . The value that supports him is never given to him once and for all; he must fight to uphold it, unceasingly. . . . His only virtue will lie in never yielding to the impulse to allow himself to be engulfed in the shadows that surround him and in obstinately dragging the chains of evil, with which he is bound, toward the light of good.”
Camus, lyrically, leaves us with an image of the human condition: a solitary figure, bound in chains, surrounded by darkness, struggling toward freedom. As with his final view of Sisyphus — “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” — the image of the rebel is, perhaps, an optimistic one. For it suggests that we can resist the shadows, that the chains that bind us do not deform us with their weight, that we can recognize the light and do not grow blind in the darkness.
Camus suggests that struggle is possible, even where innocence is not, that we can assert our dignity even when we have not yet won our freedom. It is an ideal of heroism, not one of purity.
Bio
Kristian Williams is the author, most recently, of Hurt: Notes on Torture in a Modern Democracy (Microcosm, 2012).
“Violence is justified by the renunciation of violence. ”
I think this is in fact the way the book works…but I’m skeptical that that morality is a good morality. Does it justify drone strikes because Obama assures us that he takes them morally seriously? Is it better to be punched in the face by someone who declares he’s doing it for your own good? Is torturing Evey okay because V’s heart is in the right place?
Setting up the revolutionary as so all-knowing that he plans his own erasure just seems like a way to have your pulp violence and your sententious superiority too. Camus isn’t all knowing either, but I bet he’d have been able to see through this particular dodge.
Kristian,
Thank you so much for writing this. It’s really interesting to read a take on the material that tries to find some (qualitative and perhaps moral) good in it without explaining the troublesome bits of the book away.
Interesting…
Michael Walzer also brings up Russian Assassins (I’m assuming you’re talking about the anti-royalist assassins?) and actually offers them as counter-examples to terrorists of today, which he considers immoral. They showed restraint, which Walzer finds admirable. I recall Walzer using the example of how the assassins refused to assassinate adult nobility if their children were with them. He differentiates between assassins and terrorists because assassins showed restraints and had a moral code.
I think this article can also be summarized as “The Ethics of the Lesser Evil.” Have you read The Lesser Evil by Michael Ignatieff? He received a lot of backlash for it when he ran for political office in Canada (he wrote the book while he was at Harvard.)But this “one must sacrifice one’s own spirituality for the people” reasoning has been done in TV shows like Avatar, though the pay-off wasn’t quite as good, and Rowling’s Dumbledore was the patron saint of instrumentality, as far as I’m concerned.
But the thing about this comic is that V knows that what he’s doing is technically wrong, but he believes that the ends justify the means. In reality, there are a number of militants who justify THEIR MEANS as being totally just. If you look at Franz Fannon (not a militant, but his work is influential in IR ethics) he argues that oppression is systemic. In practice, that means violence against civilians is justified because they’re not innocent. If you look at Al-Qaeda’s ideology, they argue that Americans aren’t innocent because they live in a democracy and voted Bush in and consequently, they consider American citizens to be legitimate targets. The thing about terrorists is that they never call themselves terrorists. Even political philosophers grapple with who and what counts as a legitimate target. Governments are willing to argue that militant attacks against army bases are a form of terrorism, but I haven’t seen too many academics who agree.
I think we have this idea that these are topics that occupy militant minds, but I’ve seen them articulated more clearly by government officials than militants, especially when it comes to the question of state torture. Granted, I THINK early American anarchists may have had used the “means vs. ends” ideology, but my memory is fuzzy in this case and I don’t have access to my research right now to double-check. (N.B Ignatieff believes that Japanese Internment Camps were justifiable under the Second World War and he uses the ethics of the lesser evil to justify this position.)
Also, Eyal Weizman argues that “the lesser evil” is basically a boogeyman to justify state immorality. This article is excellent: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/the-least-of-all-possible-evils/
Anyway, I know this is quite a long response, so I will end it here.
A note about language: to talk about “unjustifiable” means, or actions being “technically wrong”, or means being “evil” is to beg precisely the question at issue. Of course the ends don’t justify the means if those means are unjustifiable. What is meant is something like “means that impose some harm on some moral patient”, where “harm” is understood very broadly; or, if you’re uncomfortable with such a broad notion of “harm”, “means that would uncontentiously be unjustified in at least the case where they were performed for something other than the greater good”. Since the latter is a ridiculously long thing to say, we might instead say “otherwise unjustifiable means”.
Maybe I’m crazy, but I can think of, like, a couple of cases where someone might think that maybe such means might have brought about the greater good: vaccination (which imposes a genuine, if small, risk on the patient), or indeed any kind of medical intervention ever (it’s a bad thing to cut people open and fiddle around with their insides!); the training of teachers and doctors (it’s a bad thing to knowingly provide worse service than what is otherwise available); voluntary euthanasia (it’s a bad thing to kill people!); incarceration, or indeed any kind of punishment by anyone ever, right down to merely inflicting damage to the “punished” person’s reputation (punishment by its very nature inflicts harm on the punished person — before anyone starts holding up the war on drugs or capital punishment as knock-down arguements, let me stress that the point is that at least some times some kinds of punishment, imposed by the state or other agents, have been justified — it would take a perverse moral disposition to deny even this weak claim about punishment); randomised controlled trials (similar to training doctors and teachers — it’s a bad thing to give people a treatment, viz. the placebo, when you have some reason to suppose that it’s worse than some other treatment that you could otherwise give); prosecution of civil rights (it’s a bad thing to make people do what they don’t want to do, as e.g. not serving “negroes” in their restaurant); the imposition of sanctions against apartheid; many forms of regulation (it’s a bad thing for the state to dictate what business can and can’t do); taxation of any kind (it’s bad to take things that belong to other people)…I don’t know, maybe there are some other cases?
–“But Hiroshima, eugenics, New Coke…”
Yes, there have been dickheads throughout history who have either used consequentialist reasoning as a smokescreen for their own interests, or mistakenly thought the ends justified the means when they didn’t. Such people are dickheads; V is obviously one of them. People throughout history have misused every moral position, and every piece of technology, so…?
Perhaps the argument is that there are certain kinds of actions that are never justifiable? Maybe so, but that means that the ends don’t always justify the means, which again appears to beg the question against the consequentialist. Which is fine, but that just means that the question is already settled.
Two quick replies, neither of which are likely to be very satisfying:
Noah- V and the Russian terrorists Camus describes aren’t just morally serious (as Obama may claim to be) and don’t just have their heart in the right place. They try to meet the demands of justice by also accepting the kind of treatment they dish out. In fact, V makes sure that he is killed.
Mr. Jones – It’s true that by making justice the main issue in his ethics he has already stacked the deck against consequentialism. The problem he poses is that, though murder cannot be made just, that doesn’t mean we can necessarily avoid it either. But yes, that’s a problem for deontologists and not for consequentialists.
Kristian, don’t you think it’s a problem to create a character who basically knows all and controls all, and then have him torture and murder people essentially on the ground that he knows best to such an extent that he’ll kill himself at the exact right time? It just seems awfully convenient.
That is…you’re saying that to be a rebel you have to be morally willing to repudiate your place in the revolution when the time comes. I’m suggesting that setting up your world so that the rebels are so morally superior that they’re allowed to do anything is the kind of utopian fantasy that excuses any level of violence.
Or to put it another way…saying that to be a rebel you must be a saint in practice pretty much inevitably means that anything rebels do is holy, up to and including (and indeed especially) torture, rape, and murder.
Noah — the moral argument isn’t mine. It isn’t even Camus’. It belongs to some 19th century Russians who, incidentally, didn’t succeed in starting a revolution. It also (I argue) belongs to a comic book character, V, and it seems to be endorsed by the narrative of which he is a part. That may mean the argument also belongs to Alan Moore, though some of his other work (most notably Watchmen) would seem to complicate his position.
In any case, the argument is not that the rebels are morally superior, nor that they are “allowed” to do anything at all. The argument is, precisely, that their actions are wrong, unjustifiable, yet necessary. Doing such things may make them heroes in something like the Classical sense, but it certainly does not make them saints. They have compromised their morality for morality’s sake, and they pay the price for doing so. V doesn’t just accept death as necessary, but as deserved.
Part of the problems probably lies with the fact that while V started out as a person/vigilante in Moore’s early years as a writer, he ended up more like a god-idea (with latter day Swamp Thing and Miracleman as his counterparts). So what began as an exercise in revenge and wish fulfillment (against a hated Conservative government) lands up being more a metaphor mimicking the known paths of revolutionary history. The thesis being that every revolution will have its victims and perpetrators, and that it is preferable that these violent men slink slowly away into the night (which they mostly never do). So I think Noah is right in saying that V for Vendetta is a utopian fantasy, but it’s a utopian fantasy which many liberals buy into (less the suicide pact). Which is why Sarah’s examples of Michael Ignatieff (a “liberal” imperialist) and Frantz Fanon (and his adherents) are so appropriate.
I do think Kristian nails the logic of Moore’s fantasy in his piece, though Moore partially repudiates this fantasy in Watchmen.
Kristian; deliberately dying for others is pretty much the definition of being a saint. Establishing your violent revolutionary as a saint seems to me really problematic.
And the argument from tragic necessity is, again, Obama’s argument for drone strikes, etc.
Right…I think Kristian does articulate what Moore is thinking. I just can’t help feeling that Moore’s thinking here is basically a moral atrocity and should be mocked.
I think the logic of Watchmen is pretty different. Veidt’s the V character, and Moore’s pretty careful to present him not only as a moral monster, but as a deluded nitwit obsessed with idiotic pulp narratives.
It’s probably true that Moore has too much affection for his character (and his ideology) to mock him thoroughly. His half-hearted fascist funeral for V at the end is more grand than pompous and ridiculous.
Noah – If “deliberately dying for others is pretty much the definition of being a saint” then Mr. Hyde from Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman is also a saint. Either you need to revisit your definition or the category is morally useless.
I think what you really mean to say is that V is glorified — which he surely is. However, that is not the only attitude the text promotes, and it does not seem to be V’s final judgment on himself either. I just wanted, in my essay, to point out that there is a moral logic underlying V’s actions, and that the story does not simply celebrate them as good or condemn them as bad.
Violence is justified by the renunciation of violence.
Sounds like the plot of Gundam Wing.
Jones said: “A note about language: to talk about “unjustifiable” means, or actions being “technically wrong”, or means being “evil” is to beg precisely the question at issue. Of course the ends don’t justify the means if those means are unjustifiable. ”
I wish that was true, except then we’d have to throw out Kant’s contributions on Just War Theory (Re: Evil, which he uses quite regularly to describe certain “means” and whether they’re justifiable.)
What I’m talking about in my comment is that militants justify their actions by arguing that their means are totally a-ok.
Not everyone does that. Others argue that the benefits of an action (its consequences) outweigh the evil of its means. Eg. Extracting information through torture. It’s a cost/benefit calculation. Yes, the word “justify” basically means “to reason” in this case, but I also mentioned that militants “justify their actions as being totally just.” I know that’s a mouthful, but there it is. I never said V DIDN’T justify his means…I’m not sure if you were referring to me, but I thought I’d clear up any potential confusion, anyway. :)
Noah said: “Kristian, don’t you think it’s a problem to create a character who basically knows all and controls all, and then have him torture and murder people essentially on the ground that he knows best to such an extent that he’ll kill himself at the exact right time? It just seems awfully convenient.”
That’s curious, because one of the main argument against consequentialist thinking is that it is always looking towards a future that it can’t possibly control. Consequences happen in the future, so how do you decide what to do in the now?
In More’s work, V seems to have an unreasonable amount of control. He KNOWS what’s going to happen, but most people don’t know if the ends justify the means. They have to make a guess that x, y, and z are going to happen in the future. V almost seems to have un-human qualities, in this regard.
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isaac says:
Kristian,
Thank you so much for writing this. It’s really interesting to read a take on the material that tries to find some (qualitative and perhaps moral) good in it without explaining the troublesome bits of the book away.
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Indeed so; “double kudos”!
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Kristian Williams says:
Earlier in the book, V himself acknowledged:
“Anarchy wears two faces, both creator and destroyer…”
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I’m astonished I didn’t catch the connection earlier, but this is a clear nod to Hinduism, whose deities — rather than fobbing off the “destruction” part to baddies — frequently are creators and destroyers; cyclically destroying one world that another may rise in its place.
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Camus spells it out: “The terrorists no doubt wanted first of all to destroy — to make absolutism totter under the shock of exploding bombs. But by their death, at any rate, they aimed at re-creating a community founded on love and justice. . . .” Unfortunately, people who employ such methods may themselves be unsuited to live in the world they have helped to win. As Evey reflects, echoing V’s own words: “The age of killers is no more. They have no place within our better world.”
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In, of all things, a Mickey Spillane book, his hero likewise reflects how he is the evil that destroys other evil, in order that the meek and good may inherit the Earth. (And then he Tommy-guns a bunch of Chinese Reds…)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“Violence is justified by the renunciation of violence. ”
I think this is in fact the way the book works…but I’m skeptical that that morality is a good morality…
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Well, did even Alan Moore himself consider it a good morality, that the world should live by, or rather an interesting, far-richer and more complex story than one where the heroes are all Good and the villains all Bad?
I’d rather take V’s morality than nonsense such as pacifism, which only “works” if the side being opposed is not too bad and is concerned with public opinion. “Where Tutu (and Gandhi) got it wrong”; http://articles.latimes.com/2009/sep/24/opinion/oe-hier24
Speaking of Gandhi, from the brilliant (and alas, mostly-retired from cartooning) Tim Kreider; “Who Said It: Gandhi or Batman?” http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly120125.htm
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Does it justify drone strikes because Obama assures us that he takes them morally seriously? Is it better to be punched in the face by someone who declares he’s doing it for your own good? Is torturing Evey okay because V’s heart is in the right place?
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Well, the results make all the difference, don’t they? If getting punched in the face turns out to be the crucial tipping-point that gets someone who’s been a doormat all their life to fight back, gain self-respect and become assertive, wouldn’t that be worth it?
And, V didn’t just torture Evey; he orchestrated the experience, sneaking into her cell the inspiring autobiographical account of the slated-to-be-executed lesbian who proclaimed the torturers and executioners could not deprive her of that “one last inch” within which she could still be free. Which itself had transformed V in his cell.
Offered the opportunity, Evey refused to betray V — even though she believed it would mean her death — and thereby, painfully, realized she was capable of greater nobility and a heroic self-sacrifice she would never, under comfortable circumstances, have dreamt herself capable of.
Sure, it probably wouldn’t have worked in real life; but “V for Vendetta” is fiction…
In Nature, consider the “tough love” of the parental birds who peck at and drive off the fledgling from the comfy nest that’s all the world it’s ever known, so it may be forced to survive on its own and become an adult. (Come to think of it, V does just such a thing to Evey, leaving her stranded in a deserted street…)
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Setting up the revolutionary as so all-knowing that he plans his own erasure just seems like a way to have your pulp violence and your sententious superiority too.
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(SARCASM ALERT) At least there’s no “sententious superiority” to be found here…
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Kristian Williams says:
Noah- V and the Russian terrorists Camus describes aren’t just morally serious (as Obama may claim to be) and don’t just have their heart in the right place. They try to meet the demands of justice by also accepting the kind of treatment they dish out. In fact, V makes sure that he is killed.
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Why, to a lesser degree, even Ozymandias, with his “sacrifice New York in order to save humanity from nuclear annihilation,” likewise accepts moral responsibility for the innocents he’d killed. “I make myself feel every death…”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Kristian, don’t you think it’s a problem to create a character who basically knows all and controls all, and then have him torture and murder people essentially on the ground that he knows best to such an extent that he’ll kill himself at the exact right time? It just seems awfully convenient.
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Again, “V for Vendetta” is fiction.
“Mrs. Christie, isn’t it awfully convenient for Hercule Poirot to notice that little detail…?
“Mr. Shakespeare, in order for ‘Romeo and Juliet’ to yank its audiences’ heartstrings, wasn’t it awfully convenient that the message to Romeo telling him of Juliet’s ‘pretending to be dead’ scheme went amiss?”
“I wish that was true, except then we’d have to throw out Kant’s contributions on Just War Theory”
Right, so what’s the down-side?
(j/k — haven’t read Kant on war, but he always makes for a good punchline)
Ha! I’m going to remember that one.
Hmmm…I think Hyde does end up as a saint, pretty much. He’s not as all powerful or all knowing as V is, though. But the comparison does suggest the extent to which our secular saints are created through war and violence.
I’m not sure why there being a moral logic means that the story can’t celebrate V’s actions as good? It seems like there needs to be a moral logic for the actions to be celebrated as good, actually.
Mike, Christie does stack the deck for Poirot, and Shakespeare’s plots are kind of notoriously contrived. Building a moral system around either of them seems like you’d want to take that into account. (And actually, in the final Poirot book, Curtains, Poirot behaves more or less like V…which raises similar problems, I think.)
Sarah…I think your point about V and means and ends is right. The fact that he knows all outcomes is a real problem for taking the moral system of the comic as seriously as Moore seems to want you to take it. Being all-knowing has major implications for what is permissible, in a way that makes any means justified. The comic does suggest that V’s morality is guaranteed by his willingness to die or remove himself…but I think the truth is that the real guarantor is his narrative privilege, the fact that he is never wrong and even organizes and anticipates his own demise. Knowledge is morality. (Again, in Watchmen, Veidt claims to know everything — but the comic undermines him, which also undermines his moral claims.)
Hegel, via Zizek, has the Terror not as an excess, oversight, or compromising blight, as a necessary element of instituting the revolutionary State. Like Marx saying you need imperialism in India in order to have trains, and trains are good.
And I like Zizek and Hegel. But all this consequentialist discussion does illuminate the point that knowing the future does eliminate the risk of action and non-action. Martin Luther justified official bloodshed and financial usury on the same basis (although the usury ban obviously had some apocalyptic consequences).
Just wondering if people are thinking about the difference between necessity and justice, and thus between pleasure and morality. In real life horrible things really are just going to keep happening, via a combination of necessity and pleasure. In stories, which is where justice and morality come in, the choice to sanctify violence is one that is not compelled in favor of violence. If Alan Moore wants to erect a deep nuanced justification for violence, I find that troubliog– more so in V than in Watchmen.
Isn’t the deck stacked for Jesus? And, yet, people still draw moral conclusions from that. On the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t …
And I think the word Noah is wanting is ‘martyr’. Not all saints are saints because they died for others, either in the popular sense of the word or the more technical one, right?
One last thing: reading V from a consequentialist perspective kind of robs it of drama. The idea of corrupting oneself for the commonweal just seems so much heavier. It’s even heavier if he believes in a soul, where he’s risking his own eternal damnation (e.g., Bonhoeffer was very dramatic). Consequentialism is kind of cold, like a business transaction, which is probably why a lot of people have a problem with it.
Martyr might work better.
Lots of people, like Nietzsche for example, don’t want you to draw moral conclusions from Jesus. I’m not exactly sure what you mean by saying that the deck is stacked for him, though? I mean, he gets crucified; he loses. It’s about him not being able to control events — even as God. That seems fairly different substantively from V’s logistical divinity…? I mean, Nietzsche’s objection to Jesus is exactly the opposite — i.e., he’s not sufficiently competent and controlling.
Wow, that was an eloquent and thoughtful essay that provoked really insightful comments, especially from Jones and Sarah. Okay, that’s enough cheerleading for now — on to my now-predictable long, moralistic post. They tell me awareness of the problem is the first step toward recovery.
Charles, I think we can all agree that we want to avoid anything that makes V even heavier. And I’m still in favor of drawing moral conclusions from Jesus. In his case, the omniscience does not detract from the moral significance; it multiples it. He not only knows what the outcome will be, he knows how much it will cost. Of course, you could say the same thing for V, but for probably obvious reasons, I dislike the comparison.
I think one of the questions that Jones brings up is where the difference is between what is unpleasant/distasteful/morally complex/just plain ugly, and what is actually wrong. I think this is one of life’s big, important questions, and consequentialist or not, consequences matter. If the SS are at your door, the right thing to say is that you haven’t seen any Jews, even if you’re hiding them in your basement. When moral absolutes collide (e.g., tell the truth versus protect innocents), I think the consequences on real human beings decide which one gives way. I know real world examples are rarely so clear-cut, (Jones’ are messier and more relevant to us in daily life) but that’s what makes it a good illustration, darn it. And so in real life, some imperfect forecasting is required to make those moral calls….which brings me to drones.
Noah, I know you’re very much against drone strikes in Pakistan, but I’m not sure why you seem to be more against those than you are other airstrikes on terrorists. Regardless of target location or whether the aircraft is manned, dropping a bomb on an enemy combatant (lawful or unlawful) is a process subject to the same international laws governing conflict. (See this link for a good overview of the topic, and jump to page 12 to get to the meat: http://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/law1_final.pdf ) Those laws are heavily influenced by the aforementioned Just War theorists, of whom Kant was but one. In said law, noncombatants cannot lawfully be the target. This is the point that V inconsistently, but egregiously violates — and to no real advantage, I think. A planner as advanced as he was could have kept the civilian populace off his target list and perhaps achieved his goals even faster.
Anyway, noncombatants can lawfully be killed incident to the attack, but the attack must be against a militarily necessary target. Furthermore, the scale and scope of the attack and the foreseeable resultant collateral damage must be proportional to that necessity. So a greater likelihood of civilian casualties may be acceptable when the attack is against a key operational planner than against a local cell leader.
The only difference with drone strikes in Pakistan is, well, they’re in Pakistan. Noah, is the fact that they’re across Afghanistan’s eastern border (i.e., outside the delineated war zone) what makes them so offensive?
Noah, I think Charles’ point is that Jesus wins, because the whole thing plays out exactly as planned — even, counter-intuitively, the part where he gets tortured to death. Nietzche misread the source material, I think.
Wow, now I’m making Jesus sound like V. I’ll shut up now.
“he gets crucified; he loses.”
1 Corinthians 15:55-57
Well, I didn’t shut up for long.
The passage in 1 Corinthians 15:55-57 starts off with Paul referencing Hosea, the Old Testament prophet. “Where, o death, is thy victory? Where, o death, is thy sting?” He goes on to explain, “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory in our Lord Jesus Christ!”
This is clearly post-game trash talk from the winning side. “‘Sup, death? Is that all you got? Is that your best shot? I didn’t feel nothin’! My man Jesus got yo’ number, dawg!” That’s a paraphrase, of course.
John, I think drone strikes in Afghanistan are monstrous as well. I’m sure we’re doing other dreadful things around the world too. Pointing out one dreadful thing doesn’t mean it’s worse, or that I approve of all the others.
For more unsportsmanlike conduct from the same author, read Romans 8:31-39.
In addition to John and Dean’s point about Jesus’ victory on the cross, I’ll just note that while Jesus dies for other people’s sins, V dies for his own. So by Noah’s earlier definition of Saint, V wouldn’t qualify because there’s no clear sense in which he dies “for others.” I think he would still count as a martyr, though, since he does sacrifice himself for a cause.
Okay, Noah, that clarifies it some, and I apologize for assuming a distinction where you made none. But how are either of them morally worse than the bombing of German industry in World War II? That was far less discriminate, with far greater civilian casualties, primarily because the technology was so much less precise. It seems like your real complaint is about war in general and the fact that people die. That’s completely valid, of course, but I think I’ve even seen you argue that war is necessary sometimes.
I generally detest affected ebonics, but that is a compelling paraphrase of Paul. Aw snap.
G,K, Chesterton has the whole thing about the group of anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday that turn out to be (spoiler alert) policemen– the intended rub being that intellectual criminals are the most amoral and therefore evil, but you also get the auxiliary conclusion that the guardians of order are the last step of cynicism of crime beyond criminality. So you get Christ as the ultimate transgressor, denying sin and death and therefore being consumed by it– and denouncing God in the agony of death.
But the only life he sacrificed was his own, which is perhaps the only life that is ours to dispose of honestly– and even then, it’s a borrowed and shared gift.
I’m pretty sure V is dying for others. He’s killing himself so that the revolution can succeed, right? That’s how I read it, anyway, and that seems like your point about his need to erase himself for the greater good. It seems clear to me, anyway, that he’s sacrificing himself for the greater good.
I think there’s actually a fair amount of theological question about what sense Jesus can be said to have planned his death. C.S. Lewis in his space trilogy argues forcefully that seeing it that way is pretty thoroughly misguided…basically because having Jesus turn into V is a heresy (from his perspective.) That is, humans have free will; God isn’t controlling them. Good came out of Jesus’ death on the cross, because God is good, but the killing of Jesus was still evil; Judas is not a pawn of Jesus the way that V’s killer is his pawn.
I mean…V clearly is meant to be a Christ analog to some degree. But he’s a Christ analog who substitutes violence, murder, and rape for turning the other cheek. That’s a pretty stark moral contrast it seems like — and I think a deliberate one. Stanley Hauerwas talks a fair bit about the choice between the church and the church of violence.
I think carpet bombing Dresden was pretty heinous. So were Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I vacillate between pacifism and Just War. I don’t think there’s much argument for the drone strikes even on Just War grounds, though. Just War is pretty firm about the need for proportionate response, and the fact that you really are not supposed to kill people unless you’re in imminent danger. None of those people crawling around Pakistan or Afghanistan are an imminent, immediate danger to US interests, much less US civilians. You don’t get to kill civilians over there on the off chance that someone standing nearby might kill civilians you care about sometime in the future. The threat of terrorism doesn’t justify you becoming a terrorist.
Drones could possibly be justified on Niebuhrian grounds — i.e., politicians must make difficult choices, balancing good and evil, etc. I bet Niebuhr himself would not be particularly impressed with that argument in this instance; he was pretty cognizant of how imperialism works. If Obama bothers to justify these things to himself at all, though, I’m sure he does it on Niebuhrian grounds. Which is why everyone in power loves Niebuhr, unfortunately.
V does die so that a new world, without people like him, can come into being. But I don’t know that anyone in particular benefits from his death, or is even meant to. He’s disqualified himself, by his actions, from the world his actions help to create. He dies because, by his own lights, he deserves to. That’s all rather different than the Jesus story.
Badiou compares Paul to Nietzsche partially because Christ is, in Paul’s view, “beyond good and evil.” Because of Christ, nobody “deserves” punishment, any more than anyone “deserves” wealth. This is not the only way of viewing Christ– he did after all say that he came not to overturn but to fulfill the Law. But judgment, while not eliminated, and in some ways intensified, is nonetheless indefinitely suspended. This really takes some wind out of straightforward ethical readings of his legacy. V by comparison seems pretty straightforward– a superhero/Ubermensch/Napoleon figure, who is only beyond good and evil because he is just special like that, according to himself.
Kristian, I think V and Jesus are very different too! I think Moore still posits him as a Christ figure, though…precisely because, as you say, he dies so a new world will come into being.
Chesterton and Lewis! I love you people!
Bert, if it helps, in my head Paul was a suburban white kid affecting the over-the-top ebonics. I think your points from the Chesterton story are excellent, and ”the last step of cynicism” — I am totally feeling that one. I think Jones is, too, based on his list above of the awkwardly unpleasant things we do to be good. Your line, ”But the only life he sacrificed was his own, which is perhaps the only life that is ours to dispose of honestly– and even then, it’s a borrowed and shared gift,” is outstandin. That’s the difference I never expressed above nor even fully articulated in my head.
Noah, I’ve read some Narnia and several of Lewis’s non-fiction works, but I have not read the space trilogy. Now I have to, to confirm that my hero’s reading of the Passion is that different from mine. When I read the Gospels, I see a series of engineered and even tightly scheduled events leading up to the Crucifixion Jesus clearly had planned well in advance. Every step from allowing Lazarus to die so he could miraculously heal him (and thus confirm his threat to the religious leadership), to which questions he answered at the Sanhedrin and in front of Pilate — it all seems calculated to provoke a specific decision. His frequent predictions seem pretty clear in retrospect, too. None of that, in my mind, negates free will. I’m both predictable and transparent, and people who know me often know what I will say or do before I do it. That doesn’t mean they control my actions (wait…or does it?). Anyway, as I have been allowed to believe that it was my idea to say, this is God we’re talking about — the one who Exodus says ”hardened Pharoah’s heart” because He had a few points He wanted to make…publicly. He’s the only one who can be consequentialist, because He knows the consequences, and humans aren’t the only ones doing hard things for good reasons. Besides, if someone’s culpability was mitigated by either engineered circumstances or direct divine influence — well, He is the righteous judge, so we can be sure that will be taken into account.
Noah, this debate motivated me to do some research on the current status of the drone strikes. (http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/11/world/asia/pakistan-musharraf-drones/?hpt=hp_t2; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_attacks_in_Pakistan). I was not aware that targeting had changed to include “signature” strikes, based on what is considered behavior. I hope that the more cautious descriptions of tareting are still true. I understand, based on media reporting and public statements by both government officials and insurgents, that for years the people targeted in the drone strikes were actively planning and preparing attacks on Afghans, Pakistanis, and even Americans. Their intended victims were not just military, but as you specify, even civilians. The sites were identified training camps and terrorist headquarters. I hope that even now, that is still largely or entirely the case. The people on such sites are much more culpable than conscripted Wehrmacht and much more dangerous than the ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt, although they were both lawful targets. Admittedly, the ball-bearing factories were a poor use of resources for little effect. I make no excuses for Dresden. I think Dresden an excellent *bad* example of not only proportionality, which you cite correctly, but also humanity, another principle of the law of armed conflict. I don’t want to touch Hiroshima and Nagasaki, since we all have our own favorite “What If?” story on that one. Plus, even if one can argue for the military necessity of a course of action that killed hundreds of thousands and inflicted keloid scars on the survivors — who wants to?
Going back to Afghanistan, if this is imperialism, it’s the shoddiest possible version. We spend money on Afghanistan, we help them get to their raw materials, but then instead of taking those materials, we help the Afghans develop a processing capability and move up the value chain so they get all the cash. We do this because we want a functioning state, not a failed one that becomes a safe haven for Al Qaida again like it was in 2001. Some people might argue we’re trying to build a future market for Ford and Apple. That’s giving America a lot of credit for planning, and I think that would actually be a good use of power (like the Marshall Plan was). But that’s like saying the Steinbrenner family donates to Children’s Hospitals so the sick kids can be Yankees prospects some day. It might happen, but the odds are too long for them to make the bet. For anybody who’s still listening, we didn’t invade Iraq for oil, either. We were already getting Iraq’s oil at a discount through the UN’s oil-for-food program. We can talk about all the good or bad reasons we went in. We can even cry over the way we wound up at that policy the way you end up at a Denny’s at 2:30 in the morning and can’t figure out why, but it wasn’t the oil.
“Based on what is considered behavior” in third full paragraph above should read “based on what is considered suspicious or telltale behavior.” Noah, if you could correct it please, I’d appreciate it. I’m aware that you might believe it’s more accurate as it stands.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, Christie does stack the deck for Poirot, and Shakespeare’s plots are kind of notoriously contrived.
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(Sarcasm Alert) Nice to be clued in about the argument that I had just made!
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Building a moral system around either of them seems like you’d want to take that into account.
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(Looks around) Has anyone rhetorically “buil[t] a moral system around” “V for Vendetta”?
(Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!)
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The fact that he knows all outcomes is a real problem for taking the moral system of the comic as seriously as Moore seems to want you to take it.
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But, does that a creator “seems to” — by some folks’ estimation — favor a certain way of behaving, actually translate into seriously believing it, and trying to push that “moral system” as The Way Things Ought To Be?
Why, one would then think that Patricia Highsmith, in her Tom Ripley books, was then advocating murderous amorality…
And do you really think that Alan Moore truly believes that V’s pet cause, Anarchy, would in the sorry-ass real world lead to anything but bloody, horrendous chaos?
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Being all-knowing has major implications for what is permissible, in a way that makes any means justified.
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One could go on a theological bend with that one!
But say, suppose you knew that in a few years someone would die a hideous, agonizingly painful and prolonged death. Would it not be arguably a morally defensive action to kill them now, and save them the suffering?
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Bert Stabler says:
G.K. Chesterton has the whole thing about the group of anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday that turn out to be (spoiler alert) policemen…
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Arrk! At least you had the “spoiler alert”; wish I hadn’t been reading so fast…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…V clearly is meant to be a Christ analog to some degree. But he’s a Christ analog who substitutes violence, murder, and rape for turning the other cheek.
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Ah, yeah, the “rape” thing. Just like James Bond forcing Pussy Galore to kiss him was likewise repeatedly described as “rape.” ( The actual scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pUXH1Bye88 )
Sorry, but slinging accusations of “rape” all over the place (“He forcibly grabbed her butt! RAAAAPE!!!!!”) doesn’t heighten the masses to the heinousness of the act, it just “devalues the currency” by grouping the actual, vile crimes with far milder stuff.
And, don’t feminists say “rape is an act of hate, not sex”? Well, where was the hate — or sexual interest, for that matter — in V’s, while impersonating a jailer, “examination” of Evey, no different than is given to anyone being imprisoned? The very act which is now being called “rape”?
Feminist say it’s an act of violence. It doesn’ have to be about hate. The Steubenville rape; those guys didn’t seem particularly filled with hate. You can inflict violence out of indifference, or because it’s fun, or because you feel like it. Hate doesn’t have to have anything to do with it.
John, the discussion of free will and god’s will and predestination is mostly in the second book (Prerelandra, I think). They’re all amazing, though.
But not as good as Till They Have Faces, his last novel written with his wife, which is I think one of the great novels of the 20th century, and criminally underread. Also, perhaps not coincidentally, it’s Lewis’ only feminist novel, and one which is comfortable with non-traditional gender roles as well.
Anyway…drone strikes. I’ve seen a couple places that one reason they target you is if you attend the funeral of someone who was killed in a drone strike. It would be nice if that weren’t true.I don’t have any trouble believing it is though.
Re: imperialism. Imperialism doesn’t have to be about markets. It can be (and often is) about safety and hegemony. Control has its own logic. We invaded Iraq mostly because we were pissed after September 11 and felt like it. It didn’t have much to do with oil, nor with any particular American interest. We just had all these guns and wanted to use them. That’s imperialism too.
Noah’s comment is as good an excuse as any to trot out those well known sentences by Joseph Schumpeter in his chapter “Imperialism in Practice” (from The Sociology of Imperialisms, 1918):
“There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome’s allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented. When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest—why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was always invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome’s duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs. They were enemies who only waited to fall on the Roman people. Even less than in the cases that have already been discussed, can an attempt be made here to comprehend these wars of conquest from the point of view of concrete objectives. Here there was neither a warrior nation in our sense, nor, in the beginning, a military despotism or an aristocracy of specifically military orientation. Thus there is but one way to an understanding: scrutiny of domestic class interests, the question of who stood to gain.”
That’s pretty great. I think the point is too that the people who have to gain by the exercise of power are the people who have power. An imperial nation is a more centralized, more authoritarian nation, almost (or even not almost) inevitably. Therefore the people in power always have an interest in exercising authority. The military wants to show that it’s worthwhile spending all that money on guns; the President wants to show he’s a strong leader; etc. Power has its own logic and its own inertia.
To which Jesus says, give up power…and V says, exercise power, but then give it up at the exact right moment. Jesus’s advice is supposed to be less practical, though I’m not exactly sure why….
Noah and Ng, I’m used to people throwing imperialism around as an epithet that means land or resource acquisition. I’d seen the broader definition you’re using in a Robert Kaplan book, but didn’t realize that was what you meant. As such, I would not challenge its use in reference to American foreign policy. Of course, the insecurity is often justified. As Rome learned, the Prom Queen attracts a lot of attention, much of it negative.
Regarding the Lewis books, thanks very much. I haven’t even gotten to Graeber yet, but my schedule should open up soon, and I have a birthday coming up, so I think HU has made my list for me.
Regarding the drone strikes, I find the idea that someone would be targeted merely for attending a funeral extremely difficult to believe. It would be a flagrant and severe violation of the law of armed conflict and would involve way too many people for a proper criminal onspiracy. On the other hand, I have no problem believing that one terrorist might predictably attend another terrorist’s funeral, and once identified, become a target. I hope they don’t read HU.
Regarding Jesus’s way (The Way, in New Testament language), you and Ng already explained why people see it as less practical, since it involves an immediate loss of control. We all have our little empires.
I received a DVD of a dramatized debate between Freud and Lewis as a gift. It’s called The Question of God, and PBS produced it. I haven’t watched it yet. Have you (collective you, I.e., “any o’ y’all”)? I suspect it will be awesome, but it’s four hours, and I’m already giving up some sleep just for HU.
And I forgot to add regarding Jesus’s way, that voluntary loss of power is one of the reasons faith is a requirement – and such a difficult one.
Haven’t seen Freud vs. C.S. Lewis. That sounds great though.
And, just fyi…Ng Suat Tong’s given name is “Suat”; Ng is the family name.
Don’t get your hopes up. I’ve seen the play based on the book and it’s entertaining without being especially intellectual. There’s only so much depth you can fit into a play. The PBS documentary might be better. Some of the criticism I’ve read that the deck was stacked against Freud in this production/imagined meeting is not far from the truth. Also, I don’t think I’ve seen Freud held up as a great advocate of the atheist side of the equation much before. He’s hardly a factor/bugbear in mainstream Christian Apologetics at least.
Oh well. So much for that.
I think Freud was a bigger deal in Christian apologetics at one point. Now it’s all about Darwin though, and scientists more or less lump Freud with the religious whackos, as far as I can tell….
Suat, I apologize. Now I’ll never forget. And thanks for the info on the play. I think, if I were making this, I might pick Bertrand Russell as Lewis’s adversary. The more modern equivalents would be Sam Harris or maybe Daniel Dennett, who seems a more sympathetic personality for the audience. I always thought that Dawkins and Hitchens made terrible arguments, just setting up pathetic straw men and then acting as if they were fighting dragons. They’re more about pep rallies than substantive debate. But I picked up a couple Sam Harris books once and was immediately impressed. He is a serious opponent of religion.
Sam Harris seems pretty douchey to me. Freud is way more interesting than any of those guys. The “religion has done good things” vs. the “religion has done bad things” argument doesn’t deal with the main issues of why intelligence narrativizes reality, and the subsequent recursive weirdness of transcendently narrativizing that impulse.
Little parenthetical comment: did you know there was a fourth C.S.Lewis Ransom novel, never finished — ‘The Dark Tower’? In it Ransom and friends, at Oxford, have a device that can look into parallel dimensions. In one such, they see an army of demons, headed by an arch-demon with a rotating horn on its head called the Unicorn, busy building an exact replica of Oxford University…That fragment drives me nuts– what a hell of a terrific premise for a Lewis fantasy/allegory!
Have to agree with Bert. Sam Harris seems like the atheistic equivalent of a right wing fundamentalist. The kind of person who gives atheists a bad name.
Yep! I’ve got that…should reread it.
Apparently Lewis was horrified when various people pointed out the Freudian implications….
I’ll third the Sam Harris sneering. Hitchens’ prose is at least fun to read.
You know Harris believes in reincarnation, right?
Oh man, I love that Lewis fragment The Dark Tower. There’s been some debate over its authenticity, and frankly some of it seems a little un-Lewis-like, but it’s a great little story, even if it’s just “in the manner of” Lewis(Ransom fanfic?). It seems to me that there’s an obvious implied ending, but I’ll keep that to myself for now.
Noah, I did not know Harris believed in reincarnation — so he’s radically atheist, but believes in the immortality of the soul? Does he also accept the moon landings as genuine, but believe the Earth is flat?
Bert, “douchey” nicely sums up why I thought audiences might be unsympathetic. And I think your next point is valid. Saying God isn’t real because believers did bad things is like saying you don’t believe in kangaroos because you don’t respect the aborigines who told you about them. (Wait, didn’t something like that actually happen when Australia was first colonized?). Regardless, I don’t think rhetorical logic approves of bias against the source as evidence.
My understanding is that he’s sort of a Buddhist…which isn’t incompatible with being an atheist, but which maybe is incompatible with mocking other people’s religion, and is definitely incompatible with apologizing for torture, which he also does.
I’m interested in your concise construction of “power”, Noah.
In particular, the idea that we can “give up” power is interesting to me. By power here do you mean the legitimate exercise of force?
Also, for the record, I find your argument that “we went into Iraq because we had guns and we just wanted to use them” to be reductive. I think that a nuanced and complex approach should be used to meet the challenge of an event like that.
“My understanding is that he’s sort of a Buddhist…which isn’t incompatible with being an atheist, but which maybe is incompatible with mocking other people’s religion…”
Do you object to the mockery of religion? You just said,
“I just can’t help feeling that Moore’s thinking here is basically a moral atrocity and should be mocked.”
I think that’s a lucid moment, but that stupid comic takes on moral & social issues that religion also gets into and is just as capable of being crapheaded and scary about.
Owen: I’m pretty sure Noah is all for complexity with regards the Iraq war. It’s just that his main point is rarely brought up in relation to that event. Afterall, the more “enlightened” (cf. Cheney/Bush) Madeline Albright was widely reported to have written the following in her memoirs concerning a preceding war:
“What’s the point of you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?”
Owen, I think the call for subtlety or nuance in these matters can sometimes just end up as a way to not have to say anything at all. I think we went into Iraq because we were freaked out, because we had guns, and because people who spend their lives trying to get into power like to exercise power. I don’t see much evidence that there was a profit motive. Nor is there much evidence that any actual American interests were threatened by Hussein at any point. Psychological explanation about Bush and his father seem inadequate. I’m sure people disliked Hussein and felt he was a bad person, but we fund and support lots of bad people (including Hussein, at one point.)
If you’ve got a better explanation, I’d be happy to hear it articulated. But calling me out because the tone of my offhand blog comment is insufficiently academic seems kind of silly.
Deelish, I wasn’t saying that religion should never be mocked. I was saying that mocking religion is a weird thing for a Buddhist (even an atheist Buddhist) to do. Not that I’m an expert on Buddhism, but it has a long, long history of syncretism; it’s just not exclusive on issues of doctrine the way Western religions tend to be.
Basically, the militant atheism Harris, etc., practice seems like it comes out of a tradition of radical Protestantism, historically and intellectually. It just seems like it sits really oddly with Buddhism.
Actually, many Buddhists I know (white and raised in secular post-Christian households) are fairly bitter about Christianity. I think the observation that atheism is often Protestant doesn’t prevent Western Buddhism from also being fairly Protestant, much less mystical and more iconoclastic than older Buddhist traditions.
1) I too picked up a Sam Harris book once and was immediately impressed, by what a nitwit he is. He really does seem, in Suat’s words, “the atheistic equivalent of a right wing fundamentalist […] The kind of person who gives atheists a bad name”. And that’s exactly why atheists need him — why should the opposition have all the rhetorically dishonest sophists and charismatic demagogues?
Not really kidding here. Unreasonable idiots are usually the people who set the boundaries of public debate; when only one side has idiots, while the other is all mealy-mouthed and reasonable, the public sense of possibility and “truth in the middle” shifts in the direction of the former, even if the other side really is the one being epistemically responsible. Witness what has happened to political reality in the US over the last two decades, while the “reality-based community” worried about trifles like truth and accuracy.
The other advantage of your Harris or Dawkins is that they give atheist teenagers, and other mental adolescents, someone to latch on to, and a way to construct their identity as oppositional to the mainstream. Seems like a good thing.
2) Freud is a good choice of foil for Lewis for the time; as Noah says, he used to be a bigger deal in apologetics but, now being lumped with the nutjobs, can be generally ignored. Hard to think of another public intellectual at the time who was so famously atheist; Russell is the only alternative that comes to my mind. Freud has the extra advantage of having purported to explain the origins of religion.
3) Bert, if you’re still reading…hand on my heart, this is not a diss, but I have next to no idea what you mean by “why intelligence narrativizes reality, and the subsequent recursive weirdness of transcendently narrativizing that impulse” or what Freud has to do with it. If you’ve the time and inclination, could you maybe elaborate a little? I’m really curious.
Lots of “Eastern” Buddhists are also bitter about Christians. Apparently, Christians can be pretty hateful people. Not to mention the fact that Sri Lanka is supposed to be 70% Buddhist but we all know what happened there right? I guess Buddha wouldn’t be so special if liberation from Samsara was quite so easy.
Noah: OK, it just seemed from your statement as if you were expressing disapproval of the mockery of religion in itself. I’d hate to live in a society where that was even more discouraged. My understanding is that Harris finds value in the spiritual experience of loss of self and merging with the universe that many people in different cultures have experienced, but he wants to unhook that from mythologies about God and life after death. I don’t think he’s a Buddhist. I think he has done some really important work in interrogating the intellectual dishonesty of religious claims, especially as they keep finding their way into the mainstream media (like that neurosurgeon peddling a book about having experienced proof of the afterlife in a coma, and who I saw serve up his swill completely unchallenged on a CNN panel) but his aggressive line about Islam has been counterproductive and naive about the ways societies use their holy handbooks.
However, let’s let him speak for himself:
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2
Noah, if I ever get accused of having one major flaw, I hope it’s that I take the things you say casually too seriously.
Come out to NY, let’s get that drink.
” For anybody who’s still listening, we didn’t invade Iraq for oil, either. We were already getting Iraq’s oil at a discount through the UN’s oil-for-food program. ”
We got our oil, and tens of thousands died in the process.
And at least a few people might disagree with your last statement (via Glenn Greenwald
Gen John Abizaid– “Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.”
Chuck Hagel– “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are. They talk about America’s national interest. What the hell do you think they’re talking about? We’re not there for figs.”
Alan Greenspan– “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
“We invaded Iraq mostly because we were pissed after September 11 and felt like it.”
It’s all of the above. Check off every box. It was because of 9/11, oil, Israel, arrogance and of course ignorance. And of course the evangelical POV cannot be discounted. It’s all of the above for the terrorists from Wyoming/Texas, and it’s all of the above for the terrorists from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
“As Rome learned, the Prom Queen attracts a lot of attention, much of it negative.”
The prom queen has invaded and heavily interfered with dozens of countries. Unlike Rome, no one has invaded us. All in all, based on recent and past history I’d say we’re the barbarians.
“I find the idea that someone would be targeted merely for attending a funeral extremely difficult to believe.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/11/three-lessons-obama-drone-lies
I think the reason we’re focused on the middle east in general has to do with oil. I don’t see what advantage we got in invading Iraq per se at that particular time. But maybe I’ll read those links and they’ll convince me….
And Bert and Suat, fair enough about bitter atheist and violent Buddhists.
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John Hennings says:
As Rome learned, the Prom Queen attracts a lot of attention, much of it negative.
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Indeed; “Uneasy lies the head that wears a tiara!”
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Regarding the drone strikes, I find the idea that someone would be targeted merely for attending a funeral extremely difficult to believe. It would be a flagrant and severe violation of the law of armed conflict and would involve way too many people for a proper criminal onspiracy.
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So it’s legally OK if they’re just “collateral damage” rather than specifically targeted…
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Bert Stabler says:
The “religion has done good things” vs. the “religion has done bad things” argument doesn’t deal with the main issues of why intelligence narrativizes reality…
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Um? I’d think the answer is obvious, it’s just a side effect of that useful for survival “pattern recognition” thing, which helped distant ancestors note there was a lion lurking amid the bushes, or see reality in the form of narratives (“UG went out of the cave after dark, and got eaten as a result!”) rather than scattered events with no causality whatsoever.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Owen, I think the call for subtlety or nuance in these matters can sometimes just end up as a way to not have to say anything at all.
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Thus, it’s better to toss out simplistic, incendiary arguments rather than risk not saying anything about a subject? Okaaayy…
From Tim Kreider; http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/MySlogan.jpg
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Jones, one of the Jones boys says:
I too picked up a Sam Harris book once and was immediately impressed, by what a nitwit he is. He really does seem, in Suat’s words, “the atheistic equivalent of a right wing fundamentalist […] The kind of person who gives atheists a bad name”. And that’s exactly why atheists need him — why should the opposition have all the rhetorically dishonest sophists and charismatic demagogues?
Not really kidding here. Unreasonable idiots are usually the people who set the boundaries of public debate; when only one side has idiots, while the other is all mealy-mouthed and reasonable, the public sense of possibility and “truth in the middle” shifts in the direction of the former, even if the other side really is the one being epistemically responsible. Witness what has happened to political reality in the US over the last two decades, while the “reality-based community” worried about trifles like truth and accuracy.
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Brilliant, superbly put! I tip my hat in admiration…
Come to think of it — I’d not read ahead to Jones’ comment while digging up that link to the Kreider cartoon above — doesn’t the wimpy body-language and expression in Kreider’s self-portrait therein, the mass of nuanced argument, replete with caveats and footnotes, look like exactly the kind of thing Boobus Americanus would sneer dismissively at?
“Narrativizes” is my neologism for “constructs narratives to understand.” Which has nothing to do with escaping from lions– plenty of insects have fight-or-flight “pattern-recognition” impulses that work just fine. There’s obviously no large agreed-upon narrative; science provides rational speculations without meaning, while most other traditions (Buddhism included) provide meaningful statements without descriptions that are rationally convincing. So the fact is that nothing is resolved, except that we need to do this, and then we apply some story to why we (not just individuals but societies) need to do this, either within or in lieu of a coherent image of the cosmos. “Nothing is resolved” is in itself not an unreasonable conclusion, except then you get into the kind of “why even utter the thought” kind of nihilist solipsism that I and my fellow teenage atheists were prey to.
Oh, and Sam Harris’ assholery as a good in itself because it moves the world closer to atheism is only true if you already believe his contention; i.e., that the world is somehow improved by moving closer to atheism.
I don’t see any evidence for that. Faith has its atrocities; atheism has its atrocities; faith has its injustices; so does atheism.
Harris advocates for idiotic Islamophobia, torture, hatred, and intolerance. He’s a fool and a bounder. Arguing that stupidity and viciousness are okay as long as it’s your guy advocating them is pretty much the definition of partisan hackery, which doesn’t generally lead anywhere good no matter who’s engaged in it, as far as I can tell. I admire the contrarian elan of Jones’ formulation, but I think it’s basically sophistry.
steven, the Guardian article essentially says people can be targeted for their behavior without their actual name being known, but it offers only hyperbolic speculation as to what that identifying behavior is. If it were merely attending a funeral, then everyone at the funeral would be targeted, which wouldn’t require precision weapons from a drone loaded with sensors at all. That’s more a sixties era carpet bombing problem. A more modest solution would be an artillery barrage like you might use against an enemy battalion encamped in the field. And after that happened exactly twice, no one would go to funerals in western Pakistan anymore. My point is that what you’re suggesting would not only be against the law of armed conflict and the rules of engagement, it would make no military or even common sense.
Mike, yes, it’s legally okay, as long as the military value of the target is proportional to the expected collateral damage. As a speculative example, if the target is directing operations that kill dozens of people a year, then maybe killing the other people in his car with him is an admittedly tragic, but acceptable loss. Precision weapons make the standard much tougher, since they make targeting small areas accurately so much easier. In World War II, bombing runs would destroy multiple city blocks to take out one large factory — not because there was much military value in killing or injuring city blocks’ worth of mostly civilian Germans, but because they couldn’t avoid the collateral damage and still hit the factory. Now they can destroy one or two key pieces of the factory. Civilians still die, but in much smaller numbers. Again, the International Committee of the Red Cross has a great article on this. The effect of precision weapons on the acceptable collateral damage standard begins about nine pages into it, but the whole thing’s pretty illuminating. Please see URL below.
http://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/irrc_859_schmitt.pdf
Noah, thanks for being the atheist who pointed atheists have atrocities, too. In the twentieth century, tens of millions were killed in the name of godlessness, and many tortured as well. Some estimates indicate that many more have been killed in the name of atheism than have been killed in the name of God. Of course, to be fair, church atrocities had slowed to a relative trickle by the time the industrial revolution came along.
Bert: “science provides rational speculations without meaning, while most other traditions (Buddhism included) provide meaningful statements without descriptions that are rationally convincing… ‘Nothing is resolved’ is in itself not an unreasonable conclusion, except then you get into the kind of ‘why even utter the thought’ kind of nihilist solipsism that I and my fellow teenage atheists were prey to.”
But science and religion aren’t the only cultural conversations devoted to finding meaning, and no atheists argue that science should become the only cultural conversation about meaning (or that it’s about meaning in the first place.)
Nihilist solipsism is a disingenuous & cynical position to take, but the fact that sentiments like “nothing means anything, so I’m going to get mine” tend to be met with hostility doesn’t suggest a thriving school of thought, nor does that message seem to be prevalent in culture & the arts even on a coded level. Our culture is very concerned with finding meaning, direction, and applying justice. Now, of course people will behave cynically without advertising it, but the news I get doesn’t make it look as if cynical, irresponsible behavior is less prevalent in the more religiously saturated parts of our culture, or even that there’s a balance.
‘“nothing means anything, so I’m going to get mine” tend to be met with hostility doesn’t suggest a thriving school of thought, nor does that message seem to be prevalent in culture & the arts’
deelsih, do you ever listen to any contemporary pop, especially hip-hop? Nihilism is flourishing. I have students in my class (low-income youth of color) making comics (a fwe, not just one) in which the hero is wealthy.
Faith has not solved the world’s problems, but the smigness of contemporary atheism is hard to admire.
“Smugness.” dammit.
” My point is that what you’re suggesting would not only be against the law of armed conflict and the rules of engagement, it would make no military or even common sense.”
Yes. It would be, and it is. Are you denying that innocents have not been killed as part of the drone wars? You’re free to assume good faith, but the details on the ground completely contradict your point of view. No hyperbole, just facts.
It’s worth pointing out that imperialism and violence often don’t make any military or common sense. Iraq didn’t. Incompetent imperialism is still imperialism.
And the main point about imperialism, as Suat’s quote says, is that it’s not about military or common sense. It’s about domestic politics. There are reasons for leaders to look “strong”, and those reasons are often more important than whether a policy is actually doing anything worthwhile.
No mass killings have occurred because of atheism. What is this, evangelical radio?
Charles — Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Ceucescu (sp?), etc.
steven, — If the sources of your “facts”are articles like the ones in The Guardian, then I think you’re being misled. I’m not denying that innocents have been killed. I’m not denying the possibilty of error. I’m denying that they’ve been intentionally targeted. You’re accusing people of murder. Have you ever met the people who do this? Do you have direct knowledge pf their operations? These are strong accusations on scant information, about operations that can involve dozens, if not hundreds of Americans. Do you really think so poorly of the men and women recruited by the armed forces?
There have been several articles in recent years where reporters quote insurgents on how effective and disruptive the attacks have been. I don’t think that would be true if the military were just bombing things to show effort and “look strong.” If one is deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, there are plenty of legitimate insurgent targets to choose from. They hide among the populace, so it takes a massive intelligence effort to find them, but they’re there.
Charles, are you serious? Communism is an atheist philosophy. For pity’s sake.
They even kill people on the basis that they’re religious, occasionally.
Come on, John, you really believe Stalin and rest killed mainly to promote atheism? Why did they kill atheists, then?
Communists are atheists. Communists kill people. Communists kill because they’re atheists.
There’s an airtight argument.
But seriously, commies killed for all kinds of reasons, mostly having to do with possessing a totalitarian mindset that would brook no disagreement with the guiding ideology. This means that they would kill religious believers because of their beliefs, yes. But to bean count every single death that can be traced back to Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot and summarize all of it as “because the victims were not atheist” is really just flimflam sophistry, created by the religious right for their own persecution agenda over here.
Charles, Crusaders killed people for all kinds of reasons, too, like controlling Jerusalem or to enable looting. They even, famously, killed Christians (“Kill them all. God will know his own.”). Atheism is a core tenet of communism, and they used that ideology — some would say distorted that ideology — to justify mass murder. I don’t think there can be a closer parallel than that.
Right…Communism’s a materialist philosophy. The materialism is closely tied to the beliefs in class warfare, and the justification for revolutionary violence. It’s a militantly atheist philosophy, and it’s been responsible for a lot of atrocities.
Nazism is basically atheist as well. Their particular racialized anti-Jewishness had a ton to do with Darwin, though it was influenced by Christian anti-Semitism too…just as traditional Christian anti-Semitism had a large dose of not particularly religiously motivated power politics behind it, involving rulers looking for scapegoats and funds to be easily expropriated.
The bizarre insistence that Communism isn’t atheist, or that the atheism doesn’t matter, and then turning around and whining about the unfair argumentative tactics of the religious right…it’s just pretty ridiculous. Christianity’s atrocities are never pure Christianity either; Islam’s current nuttiness is tied up in nationalism as well. People’s reasons for killing each other are always going to be multiple, but the fact is that atheist philosophies have been involved in murdering giant drifts of people over the last century or so. Atheists really need to get over themselves and stop pretending that their philosophy is some sort of mystic pass to humanitarianism, just as Christians really need to deal with the amount of blood that they’ve spilled in the name of their pacifist martyr.
Communism in practice and the imperialist rhetoric of prominent new atheist like Hitchens certainly show that murderous foreign and economic policies can be enacted without religious justification. Still it seems to me that there’s a clear correlation between secularity and progressive social policies. Even the Soviet Union had a pretty good record there. Sadly that argument isn’t really emphasized by those prosperous white atheist men.
I would say that there’s a clear correlation between socially progressive policies and a separation of church and state. The church itself has championed many a socially progressive cause (abolition, care for the poor and the infirm, human rights in totalitarian regimes, anti-gladiatorism in ancient Rome, etc.), usually with non-religious fellow laborers, but that seems to be de-emphasized when the church becomes politicized.
Noah, thanks for such an articulate and in my opinion, valid, statement. I would add that with the exception of the Thugee cult and Charles Manson’s followers, it’s not usually the devout doing most of the killing. In the Balkans and northern Ireland, for example, and in a lot of Shia-Sunni Islamist violence, they killed their neighbors because they were the hated other or just had something they wanted. Religion was used to rationalize killing someone who would worship differently, if either victim or perpetrator really bothered to worship at all. I think that has a lot in common with the history of communism.
Problems with Noah’s formulation: atheism isn’t a discrete tradition the way Christianity is. A Unitarian shares a tradition with a Copt or an Orthodox that people across creeds and cultures who don’t believe in supernatural beings don’t. They don’t take their skepticism from a single tradition or look back to a single founder. They just think religious stuff sounds like somebody made it up. A lot of them obeyed the forms of belief because they would have gotten in trouble if they didn’t, and now they’re more open about it, but even so many don’t feel the need to label themselves. So saying, “atheists should own up to the blood spilled by their category, as Christians should own up to theirs” is a false equivalence. Atheists should own up to blood shed by atheists to the extent that Christians should own up to blood shed by every religion. And where do you draw the line when it comes to weird, empirically unjustified beliefs? Further, reading Noah I see a lot of attacks on secularism and very little concern with the religious right; when he remembers its existence they’re either weird and marginal or their problems are attributed to totally un-Christian cross-currents like money, nationalism, the military-industrial complex, and the smugness of atheists. Very few Christians have ever actually followed Jesus’ instructions and the ones who tried lived in caves or on pillars, so obviously the identity is not about that and there could be some more healthy owning up to Christian problems around here.
thanks, Bert
Deelish…but the contrast isn’t usually between atheism and just Christianity right? It’s between atheism and religion. The argument folks like Hitchens make is that religion, in any form, is evil, whether it’s the Aztecs or the Jews.
So in that context, it seems like contrasting Communism and Christianity as exemplars of each side makes sense.
Oh, and I don’t generally see a lot of reason to attack the religious right because virtually everybody reading me hates the religious right. I’m willing to preach to the converted on occasion, but there need to be some limits.
I think the religious right in this country is pathological and horrible, pretty much, if that makes you feel better. But there are lots of Christians who have tried to live up to the best traditions of Christianity, just as there are lots of atheists who have embraced traditions of tolerance and humanism.
Oh, and sure, I think believers of every stripe should own up to the effects of belief, just as atheists of every stripe need to think about the effect of materialist philosophies like Communism and Nazism and economics. In general, I think it’s more useful for people to think about the bad places their own philosophies lead than it is for them to blame others for everything that’s wrong with the world. You don’t need to think Jesus is god to find some truth in the bit about the mote and the beam in various people’s eyes.
John, that’s interesting about the idea that it’s not the devout doing the killing…but I sort of wonder. The Aztecs are a pretty major counter example (at least as far as we know.) And then there’s the Inquisition…and of course radical Islam is tied up in anti-imperialism, but I don’t know that exactly means that al-Qaida, etc., aren’t devout….
Oh, and religious whackos kill religious people, Charles. Therefore they can’t be killing because of religion by your argument, right?
Communists believe that material this-world factors like economic class and economic action determine morality. On that basis, people’s worth is determined by their economic class, and enemies of the good economic class need to be destroyed. The materialism is at the ideological basis of the terror.
You can certainly argue that Stalin was more motivated by imperialism and pathology than by Communism when he killed all those people in Ukraine. But such multiple motivations are also the case for religious slaughter as well (even the Aztecs probably had imperial motives.)
And there’s plenty of cases of Communist religious oppression too. The Chinese are still persecuting the Falon Gong, for example…and harvesting their bodies for organs, according to particularly unpleasant reports.
Deelish already covered this if you’d use a little inference, but religious whackos and nonwhackos kill other religious people because they don’t share (or are perceived to not share) the same religious beliefs. This simply can’t apply to atheism, since all atheists share the same lack of belief. Nothing else has to follow from atheism, other than you don’t believe in theism. The Chinese Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, etc. was not done primarily against theism. In fact, Christians can be communists.
No, the reason all those people died under communism is that it’s an anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeoisie and anti-capitalist ideology. Thus, it’s anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist beliefs to blame.
What next, white racists shouldn’t feel bad because there are murderous black dictators in Africa?
And, once again, I’ve not denied religious persecution happened under the commies. What I’ve argued against is the sophistry that counts all the death caused by the commies as the result of atheism.
I’ll own up to the blood shed by all my fellow theists — poly, mono and pan. But I would counter that those who are doing the most to live what Jesus taught are engaged with other people and helping them, like he was. Neither Christ nor any of the apostles were monks or ascetics. They lived and worked in the real world, in relationship with their fellow human beings.
The last comment was in response to Deelish. In response to Charles, my point is that my fellow theists don’t generally kill people because they believe differently. They kill people who are in the way of their objective and use religion to make it okay. That’s why the Crusaders didn’t try to kill all the Muslims, and Muslim imperialists didn’t try to kill all the Christians. Total genocide was never the point, just as Communists generally don’t try to wipe out all the theists, just the ones that open their mouths and make things difficult.
And Christians can’t be communists– not really. They can be, and have been communalists, but that’s not the same as those following someone’s interpretation of the teachings of Marx and Engels. That’s what I mean when I say “communist,” and what I think most people mean. For M&E, religion was anathema so Christian communism is a non sequitur. Black people can be racists, but they can’t join the Ku Klux Klan.
Noah, there are exceptions to my point about the devout, but i think they are generally a percentage of the foot soldiers, not the leaders with the bigger picture. They believe whatever theological (or materialist, geneticist — ideological, anyway) distortion was handed to them to such a degree that they’re outraged and confused when the killing stops and somebody makes a deal. “What do you mean we’re not killing Muslim Bosniacs anymore, now that we’ve got the land? They’re the enemy!”. Many Al Qaida types use drugs, view pornography, engage in homosexual or heterosexual sex outside of marriage, or even drink whiskey in strip clubs, like Mohammad Atta. They’re confident their life of jihad and eventual martyrdom will cover a multitude of sins
And yet there are Christian communists despite your belief in their impossibility.
I don’t much care what kind of tyrant is doing the killing. Basically, he uses some ideology as justification for his tyranny and that’s that. I wouldn’t hold all commies responsible for the Holodomor any more than I’d blame all Christians for the Inquisition. But the Inquisition was a lot more about religion than the Holodomor was about atheism. Them’s just the ideological facts of the matter, so when you start adding up deaths because of atheism versus theism, you need to really suss out when the people who were killed were killed because they weren’t atheists.
Or take Russian pogroms, they were going on before the Bolsheviks and continued afterwards. Do we blame atheism for the Jewish slaughter? Clearly, that would be nonsense.
… about as much nonsense as blaming materialism and atheism for Nazism. Thanks for getting even more ridiculous, Noah.
Charles, the Nazi’s racial theories were very much influenced by Darwinism and social darwinism. They were influenced by the history of Christian anti-Judaism too, of course. But I don’t know why you’d want to admit the second without admitting the first…unless you had some sort of ideological blinkers on, of course.
“since all atheists share the same lack of belief.”
Good grief. That’s such nonsense. Freud’s atheism and Marx’s atheism and Darwin’s atheism are really quite different from Buddhist atheism.
Mao and Stalin were not Christian Marxists. The existence of Christian Maxists is therefore relevant how?
And Communism is anti-imperialist? Are you shitting me? I mean, yes, they claim not to be imperialists, but only some ridiculous dupe who hasn’t read Orwell would believe that.
“What next, white racists shouldn’t feel bad because there are murderous black dictators in Africa?”
What on earth does this have to do with anything? I’m not arguing that right wing religious whackos “shouldn’t feel bad” because of Stalin. It’s like the suggestion that atheism isn’t all good has sent you into some sort of hysterics….
Russian pogroms…they’re pretty interesting, I think. I don’t think the continuity over time means that Russian attitudes towards Jews weren’t affected by atheistic communism. I think the rationale for persecuting the Jews just shifted — from killing them as Christ-killers/usurers to killing them as theists/capitalists. It’s not so much that you’d blame atheism or Christianity for the slaughter — I mean, surely the slaughterers should be blamed, rather than anybody else. But it’s pretty clear that both Christianity and atheistic Communism have resources for genocidal violence against Jews.
And materialist, pseudo-Christian, sometimes-atheist with weird pagan overtones national socialism; and Persian Zoroastrianism; and Egyptian polytheism; and radical, politicized, Islam. My list is done at that point, but I have a feeling it’s only because I don’t know enough history. Apparently (and unfortunately).it seems any excuse will do.
I think you can’t really discount faith and religious traditions when explaining violence or what form it takes. Sure there are always many reasons for conflicts but pointing to Islam or some traditions therein in explaining the differences in tactics adopted and justified by Muslims engaged in some conflict versus those of other religions or secular traditions must be a part of the puzzle.
I’m not singling Islam out as uniquely violent or anything, if there is any uniquely violent tradition then it’s the European one of genocide and imperialism (that ties into Christian traditions then), only that it’s not just about nationalism or everything else but religion.
Same with atheist traditions, a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist is going to have different ideas about violence than the average member of the Norwegian Human-Etisk Forbund. The former might for example have an almost religious justification in the inevitable utopia comparable to heaven in monotheistic religions. And although I do think Marxism is in many ways attractive everyone dabbling in it should have a long good think about Stalin.
Noah: “Communists believe that material this-world-factors… define morality.”
Does being an atheist make me a materialist? This gets back to my comment to Bert… religion is not the only cultural conversation devoted to finding meaning. The choice is not only between religion and science; culture and the arts are devoted to finding meaning, morality and direction, and have respect for subjective experience. The claim of religion that I don’t accept is that there’s a supernatural, invisible realm that gives our world moral value. Noah can draw an equivalence between atheism, materialism, and Communism/Nazism:
“Communism’s a materialist philosophy… it’s a militantly atheist philosophy, and it’s been responsible for a lot of atrocities… Nazism is basically atheist as well…. atheists of every stripe need to think about the effect of materialist philosophies like Communism and Nazism and economics.”
…and then say:
“Communists believe that material this-world factors like economic class and economic action determine morality. On that basis, people’s worth is determined by their economic class, and enemies of the good economic class need to be destroyed. The materialism is at the ideological basis of the terror.”
But if so, why not say,
“Christians believe that immaterial other-world factors like correct belief and faith determine morality. On that basis, people’s worth is determined by their belief system, and enemies of the correct belief need to be destroyed. Religion is at the ideological basis of the terror.”
I don’t believe that all the morality, value, meaning, and direction of this world is determined by a higher, invisible, supernatural world. I also don’t believe that it’s determined by invisible, magical realms like the worker’s paradise or the land of blond supermen. Am I materialist because I derive my morality from the interpretation of this world? I just don’t think morality comes from fantasy worlds. But I look to many forms of cultural conversation in the media and the arts to help me find meaning, value, and direction, not just science, and fictional narratives are part of that.
deelish, I’m perfectly happy to say that Christian beliefs are implicated in things like the inquisition, and that religious beliefs are implicated in Aztec sacrifices or Muslim terrorist attacks.
Your beliefs as you describe them sound materialist to me. So does your insistence that fantasy worlds can be separated from something real, whatever that may be.
“And although I do think Marxism is in many ways attractive everyone dabbling in it should have a long good think about Stalin.”
Ormur, I agree with that 100%. I’m a socialist myself, pretty much, and a radical in a lot of ways, but looking at Russia and China really has to give you pause in advocating revolution or revolutionary change, I think.
“Your beliefs as you describe them sound materialist to me. So does your insistence that fantasy worlds can be separated from something real, whatever that may be.”
Here’s a separation: religious narratives constitute a different kind of truth-claim from those of fiction.
Sure, I’d agree with that. Though it depends on the religious narrative and the fiction to some extent, and how exactly they differ can be kind of complicated.
“See this link for a good overview of the topic, and jump to page 12 to get to the meat: http://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/law1_final.pdf )”
The International Red Cross is not in bed with the USA. As stated here, the US hasn’t even publicized what criteria its using to justify its strikes. You’re making a jump that doesn’t match up with this country’s actions for the past decade.
“I’m not denying that innocents have been killed. I’m not denying the possibilty of error. I’m denying that they’ve been intentionally targeted. You’re accusing people of murder. Have you ever met the people who do this? Do you have direct knowledge pf their operations? These are strong accusations on scant information, about operations that can involve dozens, if not hundreds of Americans. Do you really think so poorly of the men and women recruited by the armed forces?”
The armed forces are paid to do what they’re told. I’m grateful that they haven’t chosen to take over the country, as has been historically the case with standing armies. But it’s the CIA that’s been in charge of the drone program, not the military.
“Regarding the drone strikes, I find the idea that someone would be targeted merely for attending a funeral extremely difficult to believe. ”
Obama terror drones: CIA tactics in Pakistan include targeting rescuers and funerals
New Study Asserts Drone Strikes in Pakistan Target Rescuers, Funerals
How the Drone War Plays Out in Pakistan
Rare Photographs Show Ground Zero of the Drone War (NSFW)
John, if these reports were about Russia or China, would you find them so hard to believe? The U.S. has engaged in officially sanctioned torture and illegal detention, not to mention aggressive war, for the last decade and more (to just point to the most recent flurry). Given that, I don’t see targeting civilians as all that much of a stretch.
steven, the ICRC isn’t in bed with anybody. They jealously guard their neutrality. They also happen to be one of the organizations that acts as a watchdog on the law of armed conflict, so I used them as a credible, knowledgeable source on that topic. I’m not sure what you inferred from my doing so.
You say, “the U.S. hasn’t even publicized what criteria its using to justify its strikes.” Correct. That’s one of my points. The people making these accusations don’t really know why the people who died were targeted. What the people on the ground know is that somebody attending a terrorist’s funeral (probably on the way to or from) got blown up. Some people within the U.S. Government told reporters that it was a drone strike. They can’t really articulate the process by which the targets were selected, because the people who do that aren’t talking. And I hope they continue to keep silent, because as soon as the target knows the signature that identifies him, he avoids that behavior and becomes much more difficult to find. There are layers of oversight on military operations, all the way up to the civilian leadership in DoD and Congress. So somebody is watching the watchmen, but it can’t be the general public in this case.
And yes, the military generally does do what its told, as long as it’s a lawful order. If you obey an order that’s clearly illegal under military law, the “I was just following orders” defense gets you just as far as it did Eichmann at Nuremberg, especially if you’re above the most junior enlisted ranks. If the military is operating in support of a civilian agency, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the law of armed conflict still apply.
Noah, would I believe that the Chinese or Russian military were targeting people merely for attending a terrorist’s funeral? I might be more likely to. They have a history of attempting to terrorize civilian populaces into compliance that the U.S. Military (excepting a few incidents during the Indian Wars), does not share. Even Sherman ordered his men to spare noncombatants and merely target the means of production they used to support the war effort. Of course, in an agrarian economy, that was still devastating. But getting back to the Chinese and Russian militaries, post-Tiananmen Square and post-Grozny, even they might be too sophisticated to think that targeting people merely for attending a funeral would pay-off at the strategic level.
So, let’s look at some of the statements in the articles steven posted links to:
From the Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Referencing a 2009 drone attack: “We lost very trained and sincere friends‘, a local Taliban commander told The News, a Pakistani newspaper. ‘Some of them were very senior Taliban commanders and had taken part in successful actions in Afghanistan.’
“The researchers have found credible, independently sourced evidence of civilians killed in ten of the reported attacks on rescuers. In five other reported attacks, the researchers found no evidence of any rescuers – civilians or otherwise – killed.”
So after the first bomb or missile strikes, sometimes they continue and sometimes not, implying that a decision. What is the determining factor? Might the difference be the target-list status of those still present after the first strike?
The article goes on to describe how the intelligence sources used the funeral of a mid-level Taliban commander as an opportunity to target Baitullah Mehsud. Please note, they weren’t just randomly targeting funeral attendees, they were focused on Baitullah Mehsud, founder of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, the organization believed to be behind the 2010 attempted Times Square truck bombing, the assassination of Benazir Butto, and many far more lethal attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The next article is from PBS’s Frontline:
“Proponents of the drone program argue it is based on intelligence that ensures accuracy and precision. Anonymous officials told The New York Times that the drone program had only killed 50 non-combatants since 2001, a figure reporter Scott Shane described as ‘a stunningly low collateral death rate by the standards of traditional airstrikes.‘
The discrepancies in civilian casualty numbers underscores just how difficult it is to get credible reporting from the tribal areas, as The New York Times noted in August:
Reporters in North Waziristan, where most strikes occur, operate in a dangerous and politically charged environment. Many informants have their own agendas: militants use civilian deaths as a recruiting tool, and Pakistani officials rally public opinion against the drones as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty.”
Based on the history of this war and others, numbers of casualties are often inflated, especially in initial reports, regardless of which side was hit. To be fair, the Bureau here accounts for the typical initial inflation in their methodology. But inflation well after the fact still happens, and those who have a reason to inflate the numbers (as explained by the New York Times) do a better job than those who rely on gross estimates and chance.
Another complicating factor: They’re ALL civilians. The peace-loving, actively anti-terrorist Muslims, the terrorists themselves, the guy just trying to deliver some food to the madrassa because the boss said they placed an order — theyr’e all civilians. Osama bin Ladin was a civilian. He just wasn’t a non-combatant. And it’s not just a semantic point. That ambiguity is used polemically. When Ahmad’s mom comes out and tells the world that her son who was taken away by the army or the police (or killed in the funeral procession) was just a student, usually the only false word in her statement is “just.” She does not mention the assortment of weaponry, propaganda, and cell phones the security forces took from his room or the operational plans on his computer.
Finally, with only one closing comment, excerpts from the Bureau of Investigative Reporting explanation of their methodology:
“The majority of our information stems from news reporting. Commonly cited international media sources include CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Reuters, the BBC, Associated Press, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent, TIME, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, the Nation, the Atlantic, Salon, Xinhua, Army Times, Bloomberg, AFP, NPR, Al Jazeera, and Al Arabiya.”
“In Pakistan, the Bureau has carried out field investigations into possible civilian deaths on three occasions.”
“Even within a single report there can be contradictory information on how many individuals were killed or what the target was – for example the report might say it was ‘either a house or a vehicle’ that was hit. Reconciling accounts from multiple sources can be even more difficult.
Where credible sources differ over how many people were killed we provide a minimum and maximum count of the number of people reported killed.”
“Of more than 3,000 people the Bureau has identified as being reported killed in US covert attacks since 2002, fewer than a third have so far been identified by name. We do not know who the majority of the dead are. However, field reports from journalists, government officials and militant sources often provide clear suggestions that they are allegedly militants….The bulk of those killed fall into this category.”
That number, 3000, is an approximate median between the minimum (2,541) and maximum (3,586) reported killed by “CIA drone strikes” in the Bureau’s findings. By similar median reporting, about 450, or 15%, of those were civilians — really, non-combatants, because despite its use of the misleading “c” word, the Bureau is careful enough to define its terms. I’m not saying those numbers are accurate. Given the difficulty of finding accurate information about militant and military activities in western Pakistan, how could they be? And given the Pakistani insurgents’ and their sympathizers’ proven habit of lying to support their cause, they’re probably too high. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume they’re accurate. Fifteen percent. The U.S. government conducted remotely piloted airstrikes from altitude that targeted individual enemy combatants that ate, slept, and worked among the non-combatant populace, and only killed fifteen percent of the people they were not aiming for. That is like spearfishing with live grenades duct taped to your spears and only hitting fifteen percent of the fish you weren’t aiming for, even though the fish are traveling in schools.
You may oppose airstrikes in Pakistan for moral or pragmatic reasons. Good men and women can disagree on this topic. But you cannot justifiably say the targeting is indiscriminate. By these numbers, those men and women deserve medals.
Crap. Median estimate of civilian deaths, according to the Bureau, was about 650, or 22%. I hobbled my closing argument by rushing the math, but I stand by the conclusion.
“you cannot justifiably say the targeting is indiscriminate”
They won’t tell us how or why they’re doing the targeting, so there’s not much way to know if it’s indiscriminate or not.
The “they’re all civilians” line is used by both sides, not just the people getting bombed. It’s even more useful to the bombers, arguably. Anyone you kill can be called a combatant. IF they were hit by a drone they’re a bad guy.
Again, the fact that you don’t have enough evidence to make accusations of murder is one of my points.
And Al Qaida and the Taliban make a different point about civilians. They say western civilians are legitimate targets because America and the other western powers are democracies and choose their governments. I’m saying that the fact the enemy isn’t in an army makes discriminate targeting (and evaluating the military’s performance at discriminate targeting) difficult. It also makes it easier for terrorists to hide among the populace and then falsely claim non-combatant status. This is yet another violation of the law of armed conflict, specifically because it endangers the non-combatants (http://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/irrc_853_pfanner.pdf).
The military is trying not to kill the non-combatants. Al Qaida and the Taliban just come up with a reason why it’s okay, even laudatory, to do so. They have no concept of proportionality, either. They’ll kill a hundred good Muslims to kill one infidel, because they say the Muslims are martyrs and will go to paradise. There’s no moral equivalency here.
The Taliban are horrible. That doesn’t make killing civilians standing near them right, though.
“They hide among the populace, so it takes a massive intelligence effort to find them, but they’re there…. ”
The key word is “populace,” isn’t it? And the “intelligence” used to determine who the so-called “militants” are has been in at least some cases highly dubious:
“Micah Zenko, an expert with the Council on Foreign Relations, a bipartisan foreign policy think tank, who closely follows the target killing program, said McClatchy’s findings indicate that the administration is “misleading the public about the scope of who can legitimately be targeted.”
The documents also show that drone operators weren’t always certain who they were killing despite the administration’s guarantees of the accuracy of the CIA’s targeting intelligence and its assertions that civilian casualties have been “exceedingly rare.”
Noah, I agree, but until you convince us as a nation to adopt the pacifist stance you admire, it’s going to happen sometimes, no matter how hard we try to avoid it. That’s combat.
steven, that’s a great article. The author drew from a variety of sources and gave a pretty good picture of the successes and limitations of the air strikes in Pakistan. He also talked a lot about the oversight already in place ensuring that for good or ill, this is never a rogue operation. Zenko sounds like someone who is genuinely trying to improve targeting procedures, and I hope he succeeds. My only gripe is how some of those quoted seemed shocked that “Al Qaida, the Taliban, and associated forces” includes some additional terrorist groups beyond the first two. That seems to be either disingenuous or evidence of poor listening.
I think we come at this issue with different assumptions about what the American national security forces are likely to do. I know that big, lumbering bureaucracies have natural tendencies toward stupid and/or evil decisions. There are also the pressures and frustrations of the battlefield at the tactical level that tempt people to take shortcuts around what’s right. But I know that in this particular bureaucracy, there are a lot of decent, highly capable men and women trying to get it right. Most of the time, they’re effective antibodies. I know they lose battles sometimes, especially when it comes to acquisition and budgets, where the forces of evil can be overwhelming. They still win more than they lose. Their record, as compared to that of other active militaries in history, is exemplary. So when I hear that the people who sacrifice their families and risk their lives to defend me are secretly exhibiting systematically and criminally reckless disregard for innocent life, my standard for evidence is pretty high. I don’t know how many of them you know. Based on the ones I know, and what I know of the system, I just don’t think the situation is as bad as the Guardian article portrayed. I think the McClatchy article and to a lesser degree some of the ones I quoted at length, are more even-handed and probably more accurate.
Regardless, thank you for an engaging and informative discussion.
“The people on such sites are much more culpable than conscripted Wehrmacht and much more dangerous than the ball bearing factories at Schweinfurt, although they were both lawful targets.”
Originally we went into Afghanistan because of 9/11. Most of the ones responsible have been taken care of. Among the problems with comparing the “militants” to Nazis is that overall, the “militants” are a varied bunch. There’s various factions with differing agendas. Most of their objectives are resolutely local. And that goes for the Taliban too. There’s “militants” who know next to nothing about 9/11; they’re only fighting because we’re there. We should’ve left a long while ago.
“We spend money on Afghanistan, we help them get to their raw materials, but then instead of taking those materials, we help the Afghans develop a processing capability and move up the value chain so they get all the cash. ”
Yes, they should be so grateful after we killed of so many of their countrymen and after we rigged elections to support politicians and warlords who are probably more corrupt than the Taliban. I don’t see how one could make the case that we’ve ever known what we’re doing there.
“Of course, the insecurity is often justified. As Rome learned, the Prom Queen attracts a lot of attention, much of it negative.”
This is the crux of the matter. In the name of “security” and false pride we obsess about faraway places we know nothing about, in the process causing much havoc and bloodshed. I would like to know what “negative” attention we have received that we have not caused ourselves by sticking our nose in other country’s business? If we’re Rome that doesn’t make us the good guys, does it?
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Bert Stabler says:
Faith has not solved the world’s problems, but the smigness of contemporary atheism is hard to admire.
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“Smugness.” dammit.
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A happy accident! I like “smigness”; sounds like a humbler version of smugness. (“Look who thinks he’s nobody!”)
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Charles Reece says:
No mass killings have occurred because of atheism. What is this, evangelical radio?
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Well, in one case at least, it’s the old phenomenon of “liberals fiercely defending the honor of those who — if they had their druthers — would love to kill them”…
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John Hennings says:
Charles — Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Ceucescu (sp?), etc.
…Atheism is a core tenet of communism, and they used that ideology — some would say distorted that ideology — to justify mass murder. I don’t think there can be a closer parallel than that.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Charles, are you serious? Communism is an atheist philosophy. For pity’s sake.
…Communism’s a materialist philosophy. The materialism is closely tied to the beliefs in class warfare, and the justification for revolutionary violence. It’s a militantly atheist philosophy, and it’s been responsible for a lot of atrocities.
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Pfft! Communists didn’t kill tens of millions because “the Nothingness told them to,” or to promote atheism, but because they were Communists. Ideologues whose way was the One True Way, which would bring about Paradise on Earth; other belief-systems seen as a threat. Particularly understandable in the case of Christianity, whose churches far more often than not are reactionary, fervent supporters of right-wing, even Fascist regimes and established authority.
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The bizarre insistence that Communism isn’t atheist…
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Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!
(Scrolls back to reread everything Charles said) Nope, there’s nothing remotely resembling a “Communism isn’t atheist” statement, or even implication.
You might stick to arguing with what a person actually said, instead of some invented/distorted version thereof. But it wouldn’t be so easy then, or facilitate “riding the moral high horse.”
Rather than attacking some liberal for saying “The war in Iraq was a mistake that we were lied into,” isn’t it far easier for Fox News to get all outraged if that liberal supposedly said, “I hate America, and I want the terrorists to win”?
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…or that [to Communists] the atheism doesn’t matter…
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(Scrolls again back to reread everything Charles said) Nope, he didn’t say that atheism doesn’t matter to Communists either!
To Communists, religious disbelief is no primary or even significant driving force. They may despise religion as an “opiate of the people” (a fair enough criticism; don’t countless religions maintain, in effect, “accept the way things are, all the oppression and injustice; you’ll get pie in the sky when you die”), a friend of the established order.
So when they kill religious believers (as they do other Communists who don’t follow the Party Line), they’re driven by political motivations, not anti-religious ones per se.
Consider Liberation Theology:
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Liberation theology, is a political movement in Catholic theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in relation to a liberation from unjust economic, political, or social conditions. It has been described by proponents as “an interpretation of Christian faith through the poor’s suffering, their struggle and hope, and a critique of society and the Catholic faith and Christianity through the eyes of the poor”, and by detractors as Christianized Marxism.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_theology
…That LT’s “side with the poor against the greedy exploitation by the rich” message is met with such outrage by the Church establishment — rather than see as the embodiment of Jesus’ “class warfare” arguments — shows how much the Church was and often is on the side of the “one percenters”…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Christianity’s atrocities are never pure Christianity either; Islam’s current nuttiness is tied up in nationalism as well…
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“Never”? Okay…
I guess that “pure” means that if there was a smidgen of politics mixed in with the “burn the heretics” frenzy, the Church Is Not To Blame.
And the Taliban’s savagery can be mostly blamed on “nationalism”?
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Atheists really need to get over themselves and stop pretending that their philosophy is some sort of mystic pass to humanitarianism…
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Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!
(For starters, “mysticism” and atheism are not exactly compatible…)
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John Hennings says:
…The church itself has championed many a socially progressive cause (abolition, care for the poor and the infirm…
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Organized religion can be noble, but not consistently so. Re abolition, I saw a fascinating book which detailed how churches in pre-Civil War North and South found in Scripture arguments both for and against slavery!
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…The argument folks like Hitchens make is that religion, in any form, is evil, whether it’s the Aztecs or the Jews.
So in that context, it seems like contrasting Communism and Christianity as exemplars of each side makes sense.
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It makes no sense in or out of any contest. Communism may be an exemplar of “anti-Capitalism,” but it features a ton of political/economic baggage which hardly goes along with “atheism.”
What about all those smugly — no mere “smigly” here — atheistic, pro-Capitalism Libertarians?
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The Chinese are still persecuting the Falon Gong, for example…and harvesting their bodies for organs, according to particularly unpleasant reports.
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The Chinese “harvest” the organs of all executed criminals. And once again, they see the Falon Gong as a political threat to their Party’s power, hence the persecution.
Re Hitchens, I bought and enjoyed his autobiographical “Hitch-22.” Excellent! His political thinking is a lot more nuanced than portrayed. (He roundly attacks G.W. Bush, for instance.)
I flipped through his “God is Not Great,” and was not impressed, though. It mostly seems to be a listing of all the reactionary/oppressive/anti-science things that fundamentalist religions have done, rather than an “it’s wrong to believe in dumb things” argument.
The thing is, would people be making the “religion is evil” argument if, say, religion was all about some “the Moon is made of green cheese”-type idiocy, with no real-world repercussions?
“But I know that in this particular bureaucracy, there are a lot of decent, highly capable men and women trying to get it right.”
The whole point of bureaucracy, and of imperialism, is that that really doesn’t matter all that much. The bureaucracy is accountable to folks in the US, not in Afghanistan. That’s ultimately of a lot more consequence than whether or not the people pulling the trigger happen to be of good will.
“And once again, they see the Falon Gong as a political threat to their Party’s power, hence the persecution.”
Politics and religion have just been inextricably tied up in China for a really, really long time, is the thing.
You’ve got an atheist regime persecuting a group for their religion…and yet somehow that’s still not good enough to qualify. Do you think that Protestant/Catholic wars in England had nothing to do with politics? Or what? Any political persecution is going to involve politics. As John pointed out earlier, even the Crusades were in large part about greed and sacking and pillaging. I’m happy to say that motivations for atrocities are always complicated, but arguing that only atheists have multiple motivations seems like special pleading.
I’ll try to be even clearer (even though I doubt that’s the problem here, since Mike understood me just fine): the religious were persecuted under communism because they were perceived as threats to communism, i.e., collective cohesion and whatever ideological beliefs each regime had that supposedly contributed to that cohesion. If you want to link Stalin to Hitler to Pol Pot to Mussolini to whatever other murderous bastard might be mentioned here, why not point to the most obvious characteristic: belief in the collective? Clearly all these regimes believed in the importance of the whole, the spirit (how materialist), the collective, or the state over the individual. But that would relate the basis of their murder to all those peace-loving pacifist communes.
I am, however, a leftist, so I don’t really believe a concern for the collective is the real problem. The real problem is when anyone puts an abstract ideology as being more important than a concern for any real individual life. Thus, communist terror isn’t all that different from religious terror. It’s a collection of people giving themselves over to groupthink for the purposes of some grand idea that they’re forcing on others. Leftists shouldn’t be worried about Stalinism per se; they should be worried about any variety of leftism that diminishes the importance of the individual will. This should also apply to any individual and any ideology — religious, atheist or otherwise.
As for communism, in many cases, such as Maoism and Stalinism, the religious weren’t mostly murdered, but forced to diminish their religious practices to a varying degree (churches continued to exist under Stalinism, for example). I don’t actually know the number of people who were killed because of their religious beliefs, but no one else around here seems to, either. What’s clear is that it’s a really fallacious argument to assume all people killed with an atheist at the head were killed because they weren’t atheists. Since Noah never bothers to read about the fallacies I link him to when he makes them (the fallacy is treated as rhetorical style around here), I used an example of what he and John are doing: if a black dictator kills, it must be because he’s black. Noah didn’t seem to understand the similarity to: if an atheist dictator kills, it must be because he’s atheist. This would be the fallacy of cum hoc ergo propter hoc, or false cause, or what I learned in stats as the problem of the hidden variable. Correlation doesn’t entail causation. But the communists also killed atheists while they let the religious live. This isn’t the same as the Inquisition which was ostensibly and quite literally expressed by its proponents as a battle against heresy, i.e., a religious battle over religious doctrine. To say the Inquisition was primarily about politics or earthly matters would’ve gotten you branded a heretic. To say communist revolutions were primarily about ideology and politics, not religion, was the position of the commies.
Now, I happen to agree that terror done in the name of religion is more about power than any particular religious tradition. I don’t believe religion makes a person more likely to commit atrocities or less likely. It’s ultimately superfluous to morality. That the atheist is just as likely to be good or evil as the religious is another way of putting this. What I’m here disagreeing with is that you can find the same amount of terror done for atheism (in the name of atheism, or for the ostensible purpose of promoting atheism) as you can for some religious dogma. You want to say atheists have been just as responsible for terror as R (fill in your favorite religious dogmatist), then I agree. Stalin was an atheist and he was as responsible for as many deaths as any other human. (Hitler however wasn’t really a materialist, an atheist or a Darwinist.) That’s not the same statement as atheism is responsible for all communist terror, which is what Noah and John are claiming. That’s clearly false. It is true that the religious were persecuted for their religious beliefs under communism, though. But, again that’s not the same as citing every murder under communism as an example of religious persecution. I can’t imagine anyone being reasonable cannot see the difference here.
I’m forgetting some specific points, but I’ll have to get to them later.
Not sure where I claimed atheism was responsible for all Communist terror. At most, I’m saying atheism is as responsible for Communist terror as Christianity is responsible for terrorism by Christian regimes. Which is to say, somewhat responsible, though not exclusively. You seem to feel that’s an outrageous statement…and I guess we’ll just have to disagree. Soviet Communism was explicitly materialist and atheistic. Marx was a fairly systematic thinker; atheism was quite central to what he thought he was talking about, and to his this-world brand of millenarianism. I guess if you think atheism is somehow outside history or ideology, then that doesn’t matter. I don’t think it is, though. Communism wasn’t accidentally an atheist philosophy; Communism was used to justify the terror. That means there was a lot of killing done in the name of an atheist philosophy…which isn’t quite the same as saying it was done in the name of atheism, anymore than saying murder was done in the name of Christianity is the same as saying murder was done in the name of religion. Which religion and which atheism matters, certainly. But saying the religion matters and not the atheism seems like a polemical position to me, rather than a particularly rational one.
Stalin killed lots of everybody. He targeted Jews in particular in his last terror (the Jewish Doctors plot, I think it’s usually referred to as.) He most spectacularly killed Ukrainians, because they were Ukrainian. More about nationalism than religion of any sort (including atheism), probably.
I don’t exactly agree that religion is incidental to morality. You’re assuming there that there’s some morality you can measure that with that doesn’t refer to religion (or atheism.) That doesn’t really seem true. Certainly, there are good and bad people of all beliefs. But you can’t figure out “good” and “bad” separate from beliefs, it doesn’t seem like.
Noah: “Your beliefs as you describe them sound materialist to me. So does your insistence that fantasy worlds can be separated from something real, whatever that may be.”
Me: “Here’s a separation: religious narratives constitute a different kind of truth-claim from those of fiction.”
Noah: “Sure, I’d agree with that. Though it depends on the religious narrative and the fiction to some extent, and how exactly they differ can be kind of complicated.”
Right, and all genres have their narrative structures, conventions, and commonalities, from newspaper articles to histories to historical fiction to realist fiction to fantasy. But each of those genres has its particular kind of truth-claim and its particular kind of accountability. The distinction of religious narratives might not be easy to nail down but it’s real. A religious community that says, “this story in the Bible is an allegory” is still asking its members to take it differently than the Chronicles of Narnia. Truths are always kind of conditional and genre-bound, but there’s a demand for belief that’s specific to religion, and a claim to a more absolute truth. The guy who is required to believe in undying ghost duplicates of people, a universal creator which has destinations prepared for them, and the monopoly of his tradition on knowledge and access to that realm is claiming a firmer handle on reality than I am. Being an atheist doesn’t give me more in common with a communist or fascist who has a membership commitment to just as dominating, specific, and confident a narrative that also revalues people in light of a coming kingdom that will change all the rules. I might share a lack of belief with a communist in specific brands of supernature that would lump us together in the eyes of the kind of zealot who would divide the world between the converted and the unconverted, but to that communist we would both be atheists. As an atheist I have my narratives and group identities like everybody else, but I perceive value in people among many other reasons because they constitute worlds of conscious experience beyond my comprehension and there’s no evidence that they’re anything other than destroyed when they die. I don’t see how my lacking a prioritized membership commitment to maintaining belief in a destination that will solve all human problems makes me more prone to devaluing people than the guy who does.
” I don’t see how my lacking a prioritized membership commitment to maintaining belief in a destination that will solve all human problems makes me more prone to devaluing people than the guy who does.”
Religious people don’t necessarily believe that. And I never said that atheists were more prone to devalue people than others. On the contrary, I said that people of all stripes should probably own their own shit.
The demand for belief in religion isn’t actually all that unique in terms of ideological commitments, I don’t think. Depends on the religion too, of course.
Charles, I was taken aback and confused at your characterization of my statement. How could I possibly have been so misunderstood? So I looked back over what I wrote, and I think I have identified my error. I used the phrases “in the name of God” and “in the name of godlessness” when I talked about atrocities by theists and atheists, respectively. Please understand, I don’t really think belief in God has much to do with atrocities committed by theists, nor do I think belief in no god has much to do with the atrocities committed by atheists. I think in each case, those beliefs can be part of the ideological rationalization scheme, based on Christianity or Communism or whatever. I said things the way I did for rhetorical flourish. Had I known the beliefs that would be attributed to me based on that flourish, I wouldn’t have commented at all. It was a smug comment anyway (definitely not a smig one). I think Noah, my irreligious fellow traveler and I, generally agree with your characterization of communist atrocities. I may disagree with your characterization of religious atrocities, if I understand you correctly. Noah and I aren’t saying correlation equals causality. I think you’re implying by contrast that correlation equals causality with theist atrocities. Is that your intent? You then say that religious atrocities are about power and not religion, which would seem to contradict my interpretation.
As an example of what I’m asserting regarding theist beliefs and actions, the Inquisition didn’t really kill heretics because they believed it was their religious duty. Understand, they may have believed it was their duty, but religion wasn’t why they were assigned the task. Heretics are a threat to the church’s power. Theism is no more responsible for religious terror than atheism is responsible for communist terror.
FYI, my little red book of theism (same as the Inquisition’s), says put heretics out of the church, don’t support their proselytizing, and don’t wish them Godspeed. That’s a heretic, specifically — not a non-believer or someone of a different faith, but someone who perverted orthodox (little “o”) Christianity into something else. Neither the rack nor the iron maiden come up once. The introduction of such practices had nothing to do with Christianity. To say they did was, in fact, heresy. They were about maintaining control over the masses.
I have a friend whose father was a political scientist in China. When my friend was three, the Cultural Revolution was underway. My friend’s father told the people teaching communism that they were doing it wrong. My friend didn’t see him again until he was about go to college in the United States. My friend’s father wasn’t anticommunist; he did fifteen years for heresy.
steven, despite our differences over current targeting procedures for airstrikes in Pakistan, our assessments of the war effort overall are not that far apart. If we ever get a chance to really discuss it, I’ll by the first round.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“And once again, they see the Falon Gong as a political threat to their Party’s power, hence the persecution.”
Politics and religion have just been inextricably tied up in China for a really, really long time, is the thing.
You’ve got an atheist regime persecuting a group for their religion…and yet somehow that’s still not good enough to qualify. Do you think that Protestant/Catholic wars in England had nothing to do with politics? Or what? Any [religious]persecution is going to involve politics. As John pointed out earlier, even the Crusades were in large part about greed and sacking and pillaging. I’m happy to say that motivations for atrocities are always complicated, but arguing that only atheists have multiple motivations seems like special pleading…
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Re that last line; ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!
Did anyone here — whatever their side — proclaim that any group was solely, purely motivated 100% by religious (or anti-religious) zeal, uncontaminated by any extraneous factors?
Since human beings are involved, is such a thing even possible?
Again, the argument is that Communists have persecuted religious groups not because of the latter’s religiosity, but because they rightly saw political threats to their regime: complaints about human-rights abuses, a whole other belief-system sucking away fervor from the masses, even reactionary attitudes such as “women are to submit to the will of their husbands, when Communism wanted them laboring away in factories rather than tending to Hubby.
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…I never said that atheists were more prone to devalue people than others.
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No, you only called Communist regimes, who together slaughtered more people than Hitler, as “exemplars” of the atheist “side.”
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ex·em·plar
1. One that is worthy of imitation; a model.
2. One that is typical or representative; an example.
3. An ideal that serves as a pattern; an archetype.
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http://www.thefreedictionary.com/exemplar
As for that “even the Crusades were in large part about greed and sacking and pillaging,” in the name of Presentism the huge, MAJOR motivation behind the Crusades, to seize the Holy Land from those infidels, is thus greatly diminished in its importance.
Along that vein:
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John Hennings says:
…the Inquisition didn’t really kill heretics because they believed it was their religious duty. Understand, they may have believed it was their duty, but religion wasn’t why they were assigned the task. Heretics are a threat to the church’s power. Theism is no more responsible for religious terror than atheism is responsible for communist terror.
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But, wasn’t the Catholic Church considered the embodied representative of God on Earth? Rather dubious to consider attacking a perceived threat to the Church’s power as a political maneuver, rather than one in which religion was inextricably involved.
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Charles Reece says:
…The real problem is when anyone puts an abstract ideology as being more important than a concern for any real individual life. Thus, communist terror isn’t all that different from religious terror. It’s a collection of people giving themselves over to groupthink for the purposes of some grand idea that they’re forcing on others…
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Indeed so! Excellently put…
A fascinating insight from Robert Ardrey’s “The Territorial Imperative” — which made much of how important seizing, and keeping, territory of one’s own was to many animals and humans — was how humans could then extend this territoriality into mental realms.
Religion, politics, a favored ideology or Theory fought over, seized from others, attempted to be “kept pure” and protected from invasion or pollution (whether by heretics, party-line-deviationists, reactionaries)…
In a way, a kind of ideological imperialism is involved. Nodding to another tread: can’t the invading aliens in Meyers’ “The Host” also be seen as…missionaries?
I think it makes sense to see the aliens as missionaries, yeah. Missionaries weren’t all bad, though, by any stretch. Like Wanda, they were sometimes tried to advocate for the folks they were working with. (Though obviously the Host suggests many of the downsides as well.)
“…The real problem is when anyone puts an abstract ideology as being more important than a concern for any real individual life. ”
I think this is somewhat overly simplistic. Everybody since Orwell blames ideology for the world’s ills…but the fact is Genghis Khan didn’t have any particular ideology, I don’t think. And pragmatic centrists kill people these days at a rapid clip. You don’t actually need systemic abstract ideology for genocide.
Seizing the Holy Land from those infidels was just operationalizing the greed, really. What difference does it make whether the excuse I use for my rapaciousness is my duty to God or my duty to the proletariat?
Actually, from a believer’s standpoint, using God as my excuse is probably the worst kind of blasphemy, but from an atheist’s standpoint, I would think the crimes would be equivalent regardless of the hypocritical rationalization in use.
Noah: “Not sure where I claimed atheism was responsible for all Communist terror.”
Look, Noah, John said this: “In the twentieth century, tens of millions were killed in the name of godlessness, and many tortured as well. Some estimates indicate that many more have been killed in the name of atheism than have been killed in the name of God.”
And I replied this: “No mass killings have occurred because of atheism.”
And you then said: “Charles, are you serious? Communism is an atheist philosophy. For pity’s sake.”
That’s pretty clear that you were stating the significant fact about communism that led to mass killings was atheism and by doing so you were intentionally agreeing with John. He’s who’s now saying his rhetoric got the best of him — fair enough. I figure I’ll try to clear up my own statement above:
Communism wasn’t like a reverse theocracy that had as its main tenet to rid society of religion the way a theocracy exists first and foremost to mandate a religion, rather it believed that religion stood in the way of establishing a healthy communist state. To say the mass killings of monks by the Khmer Rouge were due to atheism is a pretty slanted way of phrasing it, since it was an atheism embedded within a particular brand of communism that led to that mass killing. There was nothing ideological about the atheism that said these monks must die, it was the rigidly enforced communist doctrine that supplied that. The problem of religion was as a threat to communism, not atheism — it wasn’t just a threat to a metaphysical position. This isn’t the same as the Huguenots versus the Catholics, where the politics are being driven by the religious engine. These were Christians fighting over the role of Christianity in society and its interpretation. In the former case, atheism was practical for the ideology (it’s dubious given the rise of the church from the earliest days of the Bolsheviks to the present that the country was awash in atheists). In the latter case, religion was the ideology because Christianity was the political regime. So, to summarize, for the cases of religion-related killing: in the communist case, you have atheism as part of communism; in the French Religious Wars, you have Christianity.
Noah speaks of owning up to dangerous tendencies in one’s thought. I don’t particularly agree with the way he applies his dictum, since he mainly uses it to blame Marx, Darwin and the like for evil deeds done by others acting on their own ideas and not the original sources (the Bible’s responsible for every evil ever done in its name? what about some responsibility to actual evildoer?).* Nevertheless, the dictum serves to clarify the distinction I’m making above: an atheist only has to worry if he’s also a commie or collectivist (like Marston and the Amazons). The Christian has to worry about theocratic wars, because religion is the ideology at work. Theocracy is inherently based on religion. Not so communism to atheism. It’s a lot harder to be an atheist theocrat than a theist communist.
John says: “Understand, [the Inquisitors] may have believed it was their duty, but religion wasn’t why they were assigned the task. Heretics are a threat to the church’s power. Theism is no more responsible for religious terror than atheism is responsible for communist terror.”
But a significant difference is that the church’s power is at its core theism, where atheism isn’t the core of communism. Consider: the Catholics were behind the Inquisition versus the atheists were behind the Bolshevik revolution. The latter leaves out so much more crucial info than the former about grasping those respective events. The Inquisition might’ve involved perverted Catholics, but they were Catholics, so one could argue about how the Catholics went wrong based on that summation. The primary ideological reason for the Bolshevik revolution is left out, however. People would think it was all about a country being taken over for the purpose of atheism. It might’ve been the capitalists for all we can tell.
*to wit: “Charles, the Nazi’s racial theories were very much influenced by Darwinism and social darwinism. They were influenced by the history of Christian anti-Judaism too, of course. But I don’t know why you’d want to admit the second without admitting the first…unless you had some sort of ideological blinkers on, of course.”
So perverting some “influence” is the responsibility of the source, not the pervert? Why not call Hitler a Christian, then? His views on other humans (e.g., mystical mumbo jumbo, how to treat them, a hierarchical evaluation) were a lot closer to Luther’s than Darwin’s. And being influenced by Darwin hardly makes one a materialist, cf. Bergson. Darwin should be no more responsible for Galton and Spencer than Nietzsche is for his sister. Old dead guys can’t absolve us of our sins.
Hey, Charles; you’ve outlasted me. I’m going to move on to other things I think. Thanks for commenting as always; I’m sure we’ll talk about these things again.
One last thing:
“”Freud’s atheism and Marx’s atheism and Darwin’s atheism are really quite different from Buddhist atheism.”
You’re confusing the atheism with what’s put in place of the theism. Really, the reason a religious tradition is susceptible to putting ideas over humans or the facts of the matter is because it’s a positive set of principles. Atheism is nothing more than a disagreement with a particular proposition. It offers nothing in return for rejecting this proposition. That’s why you have to have other ideologies and beliefs to fill the hole. An atheistic battlecry would be pretty uninspiring, if you think about it. So it’s these other beliefs that are just as susceptible to serving some ideologue’s mass killing as the religious belief. Religion isn’t unique in this regard.
Fair enough, Noah. I was just about to do that.
Argh…you pulled me back in.
I basically disagree with you about atheism being a negative and therefore not a tradition or a battlecry. There are lots of different nothings. (The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, as Wallace Stevens says.) And there have been tons of atheist battlecrys; (by Chris Hitchens, for example…but he’s far from the only one.)
Atheism isn’t “nothing more” than a disagreement with certain principles. It’s a bunch of philosophies and a bunch of traditions and a bunch of theologies — and a bunch of policy proposals, in many cases, some of which can include dropping bombs on people. The effort to make it none of those things is a claim for moral and epistemological superiority, but not one I find especially convincing.
Charles, I get your point that theism is more essential to Christianity than atheism is to communism, I just don’t think that difference is as relevant as you do to how the atrocities actually happen. Both the Medicis and Stalin, to name just two examples, violated the teachings of Jesus and Marx, respectively, when they committed those atrocities. I’m more confident saying that about the New Testament than The Communist Manifesto, because I know the former better, but I think I’m correct in saying that. So, since the atrocity violates the ideology, I think the role of the ideology itself is minimal, and once properly perverted, it’s used mainly as source material for rationalization and inspiring the masses, who know less about what the ideology’s source material actually says. So the ideology isn’t the engine of anything in either case. At most, it’s the drive shaft or the whole power train, a medium through which the energy of the real motivation is translated to the parts that do the work (wheels, foot soldiers, religious and/or secret police, etc.).
And I’m not blaming the source material here, and I don’t think Noah is, either. I think the dangerous tendencies he’s talking about are really the susceptibility to misuse. Darwin’s assertion that some members of a species are more fit than others was susceptible to misuse by the Nazis, despite being innocuous and even accurate in full context and applied as intended. The prophecy about Ham in Genesis that his descendants would be the slaves of slaves had nothing to do with the chattel slavery of Africans, but some people in the nineteenth century twisted it into a justification for such. Of course, I’m putting words in his mouth because I think I know what he means, but I could be wrong.
Noah: “And I never said that atheists were more prone to devalue people than others.”
It sure seems like you are when you say:
“Communists believe that material this-world factors like economic class and economic action determine morality. On that basis, people’s worth is determined by their economic class, and enemies of the good economic class need to be destroyed. The materialism is at the ideological basis of the terror.”
—-and define me as a materialist for not believing in the supernatural and perceiving a distinction between truth and fiction. To say that disbelief in the supernatural is the ideological basis of pogroms and holocausts is to say that supernatural belief adds a critical value to human life- and, of course, that supernatural belief is superior. Such an opinion founds human value on a specific belief in a higher, supernatural reality, a belief which usually manifests as being in a realm that only one’s own tradition perceives correctly.
No; it’s just to say that the particular way in which Communists justified killing people was atheist. Their materialism and their terror are linked. That doesn’t mean that people who aren’t materialists don’t kill other people. They do, all the time.
I mean..I’m an atheist, you know? And I think I’m right about everything.
And I’d say the ideological basis of Communist terror is the doctrinaire belief in a particular destination as the consummation of human experience. Things have to happen here to reach that destination, which sets all value. I’m not saying that’s the only reason people ever kill people, but it’s sure good for it.
Having no values except greed is good for killing people too.
The new atheist thing is to pretend that Communism is actually a religion. Which seems pretty silly to me, but I guess the point is polemical rather than rational, so the details don’t matter that much.
No, that point was made long ago and many times since. To not allow it is to concede a major propaganda point to Communism, which claims to have rationally determined the engine of history and to provide the consummation religion displaced to the afterlife. It’s not necessarily a swipe against religion to say, “no, it’s just another one;” I think the Christian response that when you try to create heaven on earth, you create hell is pretty sensible. Also, the early church was communist.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I think it makes sense to see the aliens as missionaries, yeah. Missionaries weren’t all bad, though, by any stretch.
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Just to agree with you for a change, I’d recommend the tale of St. Patrick as told in “How the Irish Saved Civilization”; he was great! He turned Ireland from human sacrifice and slavery — he was himself a former slave — by his own embodiment of Christian virtue and courage… ( http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/irish.html )
But with all this talk trashing “materialism” as an evil, I’m reminded of this comment about a “Gandhi advised the Jews that it would be heroic to let themselves be killed by the Nazis” article:
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It’s clear that when considering the age old problem of mind-body duality, Gandhi entirely favors the mind at the expense of recklessly discarding the body…
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http://sepiamutiny.com/blog/2007/03/16/gandhi_and_the/
Gandhi going on to write:
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…suffering voluntarily undergone will bring [Jews] an inner strength and joy….if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving..to the godfearing death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.
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Why, this is another version of the wondrously “non-materialist” attitude, “We’re burning those heretics’ bodies in order to save their immortal souls!”
And what about those suicide-bomber Muslim “martyrs”; with a dose of hard-headed materialism, they’d say, “The hell with this ‘pie and a bunch of virgins when I die’ B.S.!”
And what about the millions of people browbeaten into self-sacrificial lives, or denying their “unnatural” sexuality, with “anti-materialist” threats of Hell and promises of Heaven?
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John Hennings says:
…Both the Medicis and Stalin, to name just two examples, violated the teachings of Jesus and Marx, respectively, when they committed those atrocities. I’m more confident saying that about the New Testament than The Communist Manifesto, because I know the former better, but I think I’m correct in saying that. So, since the atrocity violates the ideology, I think the role of the ideology itself is minimal, and once properly perverted, it’s used mainly as source material for rationalization and inspiring the masses, who know less about what the ideology’s source material actually says…
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Well argued, and right in some ways (that bit at the end), yet — sorry! — fatally flawed.
Haven’t there been countless masses of people who knew the Bible intimately, believed in it fervently, yet still did all matter of horrendous things?
They just rationalized their actions; came up with stuff like “we’re torturing and killing for God.” Why, one modern-day Pope, in a sort-of apology for the burning of witches, described those doing so as motivated by a search for “truth.”
And as I mentioned earlier, those thoroughly Christian old South slave-owners found plenty of justification in the Bible and their churches, for their pro-slavery stance.
It doesn’t help that Book features “Thou Shalt Not Kill” also exults in all matter of mass murder; nowhere explicitly condemns slavery, but accepts it, and gives advice such as:
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What does the Bible say about beating slaves? It says you can beat both male and female slaves with a rod so hard that as long as they don’t die right away you are cleared of any wrong doing.
When a man strikes his male or female slave with a rod so hard that the slave dies under his hand, he shall be punished. If, however, the slave survives for a day or two, he is not to be punished, since the slave is his own property. (Exodus 21:20-21 NAB)
You would think that Jesus and the New Testament would have a different view of slavery, but slavery is still approved of in the New Testament, as the following passages show.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ. (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)
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Much, much more, in http://www.evilbible.com/Slavery.htm
Nah; no propaganda point to Communists. Being atheist and materialism doesn’t mean you’ve rationally determined anything in particular.
I’ve said my piece, but I thought this example from Lenin of interest to all:
He also spoke approvingly of Engels’ approach to religion, which gets at my point:
I figure quoting Lenin is a good place to stop. Thanks to everyone for the conversation.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Nah; no propaganda point to Communists. Being atheist and materialism doesn’t mean you’ve rationally determined anything in particular.
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As with Karl Rove getting the voters of Georgia to vote against a decorated, triple-amputee Vietnam war hero by sticking a photo of Osama Bin Laden next to him in a GOP campaign ad, note the transparent smear tactic of equating Communism with atheism and materialism.
And, yeah, there’s nothing rational about those atheists and materialists. They don’t believe in a supernatural Big Daddy in the Sky or a mystical, supernatural realm of existence because no solid evidence of either has turned up; obviously a bunch of emotionality and faith-driven loonies, no different than a “speaking in tongues” snake-handler…
Tim Kreider’s great “Science vs. Norse Mythology”: http://www.thepaincomics.com/Science%20vs.%20Norse.jpg
Religious folk don’t necessarily target other different religions or atheists. As John noted, Crusaders cheerfully killed other Christians of the same denomination. Atheists saying religion doesn’t matter doesn’t really preclude atheist philosophy giving one an excuse to kill others, it doesn’t seem like.
For pity’s sake, Mike, it’s an atheist philosophy. Communists are atheists and materials. And no, being atheist and materialist doesn’t mean you’re particularly rational. Sneering at religious folks doesn’t change that.
Sneering at and smearing atheist Noah doesn’t, either. All he said was that just because someone was an atheist, it didn’t necessarily mean he’d made that decision based on rationality. That’s true, by the way. Some people come to atheism with at least as much emotion as reason, because professed believers or the circumstances of life have hurt them. They decide the idea of no God is easier to accept than the God those bastards were selling or the God that would let this happen to me or my loved one. None of that negates all the atheists who came to the same conclusion simply because they found the theist argument unconvincing. Calling Noah a smear artist based on that comment is unjustified and based on the harsh comparison you used, even mean-spirited. It makes you look bad, Mike, not Noah. Call him a smear artist because of his insufficiently reverent statements about Jack Kirby, like everyone else.
Also, Mike, regarding slavery in the Bible — well, I wish you had just stopped where you said my point was well-argued, because I can’t adequately defend the view of slavery in the Old Testament. I can say that I understand the rules it laid down were better for slaves and did more to recognize their worth as human beings than any other system in that area and era. That’s unfortunately not the morally pure, empirical standard we’ve come to expect from the divine.
Slavery in Roman (i. e, New Testament times) was somewhat different than North American chattel slavery. There was no question that the slave was fully human, but of a different class with different rights. I don’t think the New Testament approves of this so much as acknowledges the circumstance and tells people how to live within it. Paul emphasizes more than once that slaves and free people are equal before God, and one book of the New Testament (Philemon) is Paul’s short letter to a Christian slave owner arguing (and requesting) that he should release one of his slaves. As you say, however, there is no explicit condemnation.
I’ve got more material to work with on the murder charge. There are a few spots in the Old Testament, primarily in Joshua but also in one or two of the post-Judges period historical books, where God explicitly orders the Israelite Army to go into a place and wipe out all the people, all the livestock, and take no spoils, although for the ones inJoshua, they are directed to occupy the land. I think without exception, these are societies practicing human sacrifice. What’s different about these instances than judgment by natural disaster or foreign army, as happens for other crimes, is that he’s ordering these soldiers to kill women and children, which seems harsh not only on them, but on the soldiers. I think he explains that if any of them survive, the nation of Israel will become infected with their pagan ways, which actually happens. Still, in this case a tsunami or volcano would be easier to take.
By the way, the commandment against killing is more accurately translated “Thou shalt not murder,” as “rashach” the Hebrew word used, means illegitimate killing or murder. “Harag” was the generic killing word. Most modern translations say “murder.”
Mike, I read over my difficult-to-read series of complex and compound sentences above and realized I never really answered your central point. No, I don’t think all the people who committed atrocities and knew the Bible well and professed Christianity negate my point. They were just better able to misuse it. Jim Jones and David Koresh both knew the Bible well and perverted its words to evil ends. Their teachings were directly contrary to what any reasonable reading informed by context would conclude. In a story recounted in Matthew 4 and Luke 4, the Devil quotes Psalm 91 in attempt to tempt Jesus into sin. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy to the Devil in his repudiative response. So knowing the Bible just makes those committing atrocities even more culpable. It doesn’t mean they are genuine representatives of the faith any more than Mengele was a representative of medical ethics.
I think saying that Christianity isn’t responsible for atrocities done in its name is maybe a little too easy? Traditions have various strands and various potentials. Christianity can be pacifist; the tradition can also be genocidal. The medical profession certainly has its downsides as well. It seems like rather than saying, “this isn’t ours,” it might be better to say, “this is one thing that could be ours, and which it’s important to try to work against.”
“And no, being atheist and materialist doesn’t mean you’re particularly rational. Sneering at religious folks doesn’t change that.”
Christopher Hitchens: “It is certainly true that emancipation from religion does not always produce the best mammal either.”
Also, since it relates to our discussion above, a good wiki entry on Stalin and anti-semitism, which I hadn’t read much about. Look at the pre-war Stalin’s view: “National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.” In practice, at least, his views changed after the war.
That’s interesting; my guess is that he was against anti-Semitism when it was something that the Nazis were associated with, then changed his mind for political reasons and/or because that’s where his paranoia happened to lead him.
I don’t think he was ever one to let a foolish consistency get in the way of mass murder….
Noah, I’m not shirking responsibility. Christianity isn’t responsible, but Christians are. I agree about watching out for the negative potentials, though. Legalism, hypocrisy, classism within the church, a superiority complex over those outside the church, being judgmental, getting caught up in petty controversies and church politics, concern with the opinion of people over the opinion of God, greed, the heresy of secret knowledge (which just becomes classism), and lack of concern for those to whom we are supposed to be ministering (external and internal) seem to be the classic blunders of the modern church. Based on the warnings and corrections the New Testament writers dished out, the early church had trouble with these, also. I think if we did a better job of avoiding these, we’d never approach the history-making crimes.
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John Hennings says:
…I can’t adequately defend the view of slavery in the Old Testament. I can say that I understand the rules it laid down were better for slaves and did more to recognize their worth as human beings than any other system in that area and era. That’s unfortunately not the morally pure, empirical standard we’ve come to expect from the divine.
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Well, some folks don’t mistake what’s in the Bible for actual expressions of the Divine will. To someone at the old TCJ message board who, as a Jew, took offense to my negative characterization of Old Testament religiosity, I pointed out that fortunately the Jewish faith evolved, became more enlightened. So that indeed nowadays the average Jew is likely more morally enlightened than the average Christian.
So what we see in the Bible is a evolution in perceptions and understanding of God; from a jealous, violently wrathful one to one that is more loving and forgiving.
And sure,
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When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment. (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT)
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…could be described as “rules [that] were better for slaves and did more to recognize their worth as human beings than any other system in that area and era.”
However, the problem is that Christianity is not humbly described by its adherents as “not perfect, but the best moral system that could be expected for such primitive times,” and the Bible itself is glorified as the eternal, unchanging Word of God, the foundation of moral behavior.
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John Hennings says:
… No, I don’t think all the people who committed atrocities and knew the Bible well and professed Christianity negate my point. They were just better able to misuse it…It doesn’t mean they are genuine representatives of the faith any more than Mengele was a representative of medical ethics.
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Medical ethics are a pretty simple thing; there are no parts of, say, the Hippocratic Oath that urge “If anyone insults the Medical Profession, they shall be put to death.”
Any Christian, whether Fundamentalist or utterly liberal, has to be a “cafeteria Christian”; ere they’d be meekly turning the cheek one minute, stoning their children to death for being disobedient (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) the next.
Are you claiming that “niceness” and tolerance are attributes of “genuine representatives of the faith”? Well, there are plenty of fundamentalist Christians who’d argue that real Christians should smite unbelievers, put homosexuals to death, etc.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Traditions have various strands and various potentials. Christianity can be pacifist; the tradition can also be genocidal.
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Yes. Thus — unless one specifies, say, liberal Christianity — the tradition as a whole is hardly useful as a moral compass.
Might as well have a Bible with one cover smooth, the other scarred, toss it up in the air; and if the marred side lands face-up, feel free to conquer, steal, murder, as long as it’s in the name of the Lord.
In a piece of music criticism in his 1918 “Damn! A Book of Calumny,” H.L. Mencken wrote:
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A hearing of Schumann’s B flat symphony of late, otherwise a very caressing experience, was corrupted by the thought that music would be much the gainer if musicians could get over their superstitious reverence for the mere text of the musical classics…
One discerns, often quite clearly, what the reverend Master was aiming at, but just as often one fails to hear it in precise tones.
[But] The conservatism which shrinks at such barbarities is the same conservatism which demands that the very typographical errors in the Bible be swallowed without salt, and that has thus made a puerile dream-book of parts of Holy Writ. If you want to see how far this last madness has led Christendom astray, take a look at an article by Abraham Mitrie Rihbany, an intelligent Syrian, in the Atlantic Monthly of a couple of years ago. The title of the article is “The Oriental Manner of Speech,” and in it Rihbany shows how much of mere Oriental extravagance of metaphor is to be found in many celebrated passages, and how little of literal significance. This Oriental extravagance, of course, makes for beauty, but as interpreted by pundits of no imagination it surely doesn’t make for understanding.
…These tropes are not the substance of Holy Writ; they are simply its color. In the same way mere tone-color is not the substance of a musical composition. Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony is just as great a work, in all its essentials, in a four-hand piano arrangement as in the original score. Every harmonic and melodic idea of the composer is there; one can trace just as clearly the subtle processes of his mind; every step in the working out of the materials is just as plain…
Form, after all, is the important thing. It is design that counts, not decoration—design and organization. The pillars of a musical masterpiece are like the pillars of the Parthenon; they are almost as beautiful bleached white as they were in all their original hues.
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Similarly, I think it would be more fruitful to spiritual understanding to look at the underlying structure — routinely clouded by human stupidity, limitations, evil — that the Divine reveals; the insights acquired by spiritual seekers in various cultures.
As it turns out, I’m no atheist, but likewise not a “believer.” Rather, I know the God and the Divine realm exist (as far as one can know anything in a world where we could be disembodied brains plugged into the Matrix) through direct personal experience acquired by simple spiritual techniques (primarily, meditation; secondarily, focusing on sacred images) available to many cultures.
Mike, you brought up so many good points that I want to respond with another essay, but I can’t do it today. I shall return!
Mike, I apologize for my long absence. In a truly just world, the mundane tasks of life would never impede my savoring the delightful prose of this oasis of enlightening erudition in the vast intellectual desert that is the internet. But alas, it is not so. (I’m trying my hand at extravagant Oriental metaphor. Constructive criticism is welcome, as always)
Starting with the Rihbany article: Wow, that was good — illuminating, witty, and theologically sound, in my opinion. (Sorry. Slipped back into the qualified speech of strained Western intellectualism.). I thank you for pointing it out and http://www.unz.org for making it available (http://www.unz.org/Pub/AtlanticMonthly-1916apr-00506). Now I have to read his book Syrian Christ (still don’t know how to italicize on my phone).
However, I must caution you against referring to 1916 (the date of the article) as “a couple of years ago,” especially on a comic book blog. Indicating such a long perspective could reveal to HU’s readers your status as a vampire, a Guardian of the Universe, or one of Jack Kirby’s Eternals.
I’ll now return to Eastern, positive speech.
Much of what is seen as contradictory guidance between the Old Testament and the New (e.g, “eye for an eye” versus “turn the other cheek”) is the difference between appropriate behavior for an individual of any century and government policy for a second millennium B.C. theocracy. Despite that distinction, there is more consistency than many people realize. For example, both the Old and New Testaments forbid private vengeance (Deuteronomy 32, Romans 12, Hebrews 10). Some Old Testament commentators even describe retributive punishment by the state as important for preventing people from taking the law into their own hands. For two good discussions on retributive punishment and why it can be more humane than punishment based primarily on deterrence or rehabilitation, see these two articles: (http://books.google.kg/books?id=mGpBBkbT0msC&pg=PA17&lpg=PA17&dq=retribution+mosaic+law&source=bl&ots=LZOiqEXdIn&sig=G5Pe7MCBOSPUzSA15wk4X3KPauk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=I-B9UczVD4_ltQauhoDIDw&redir_esc=y and http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_for_an_eye).
Similarly, there is textual consistency on the nature of God, if not consistency of emphasis. The Old Testament describes God as loving and forgiving just as the New Testament does (Daniel 9, 2 Chronicles 6, Jeremiah 9 and 33, and all over the Psalms, to name just a few examples). Conversely, the New Testament has some very clear passages about God’s judgment and wrath (Luke 10, Hebrews 10, several places in Revelation).
At the risk of stating the obvious, the New Testament describes both aspects of God’s nature (love and justice) as necessitating Christ’s death on the cross. God’s love for his children, who are estranged from him by sin, demands reconciliation. God’s need for justice requires payment for sin.
As an aside, the “jealousy” of God is also referenced in both Old and New Testaments and gets a bad rap. See this page for a fuller explanation (http://www.apologeticspress.org/apcontent.aspx?category=6&article=777).
All that said, I think your point about an evolving understanding of God has merit. It goes a long way toward resolving the apparent inconsistencies that remain even after taking my above statements into account. I’ll go further — much further — by pointing out that Jesus himself proffered a similar view in Matthew 19:3-9. Therein, he explains to the Pharisees that Moses permitted casual divorce only “because of the hardness of your hearts,” and that such action was never the will of God.
Mike, I come from exactly the Protestant tradition that dogmatically defends the validity of Scripture. This position does not exclude metaphor, allegory, or even sarcasm (see Paul in 2 Corinthians for withering examples), because those are pretty explicitly and undeniably labeled in some portions of Scripture. However, this school of thought is constantly on guard against the expansion of the short list of passages recognized as other-than-literal. The admission of any genuine error is anathema. I think we do it primarily out of fear. Once the idea that some of the Bible is wrong becomes accepted, the temptation to pick and choose the parts we like and ignore passages that are difficult can be overpowering. I, myself, have rationalized sin by deciding that Scripture really didn’t mean what it clearly stated. A secondary reason for our vise grip onto Scriptural inerrancy is our concept of God. If the Bible is God’s message to us about Himself and His relationship with us, how could he allow it to become adulterated?
I appreciate your experiential knowledge of the Divine. Rihbany made a great case in the article for why the emotional, affirmative, intense mindset of the Near Easterner, whatever it’s flaws, made a great vessel for the transmission of God’s message. Our very different Western mindset has denied many the experience you have successfully sought out. Both our lives and our understanding of God are poorer because of it — lacking color and flavor.
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John Hennings says:
…Starting with the Rihbany article: Wow, that was good — illuminating, witty, and theologically sound, in my opinion…I thank you for pointing it out and http://www.unz.org for making it available (http://www.unz.org/Pub/AtlanticMonthly-1916apr-00506)…
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Kudos to you for finding the article! I’d been fine with Mencken’s synopsis; dipping into the piece itself, found it to be a rich feast indeed.
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However, I must caution you against referring to 1916 (the date of the article) as “a couple of years ago”…
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Much as I’d like to claim such a sweeping perspective (“We sure could have used some Weed-B-Gon in the Cretaceous!”), it was Mencken who said that…
Appreciate your linked-to articles; fascinating! But, gotta get ready for work, no time to expound further…
Yeah, work’s been getting in my way, too. Noah, any chance you can subsidize our commentary? Or maybe we could seek out patrons? I guess it’s possible that corporate-sponsored discussion of morality could be perceived as suspect by the audience. How do you think this would read?
“Air strikes in western Pakistan are absolutely necessary and completely justified by our need to defend America, Afghanistan, and even Pakistan from the murderous actions of the evil terrorists in the crosshairs.” – JH, as brought to you by Lockheed Martin
(Before I’m contacted by LM’s legal team, I would like to explicitly label this as PARODY.)
I can’t even figure out how to make the blog subsidize the hosting fees, alas….