Who Are We, Really?

"I Just Bought Guilt & Paid Less Than You Are Going To"

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Time flies, doesn't it?  The release of part of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on torture in December set off a wave of right-wing tantrums not unlike what we just saw in response to President Obama's sermon at the National Prayer Breakfast.  (We never did anything like that, but we had no choice, and we enjoyed it, so there!)  I started writing a post in December inspired by an interesting article at Salon about the history of torture in the US, by one Charles Davis, which made some good points and still worth reading two whole months later.

In a nation-state founded by settler-colonial Protestants, the argument is familiar – it’s what’s deep down inside that gets one up into heaven, not the good or genocidal nature of what one does down here on Earth – and as with any half-decent lie, it’s relatable: as fallible human beings, we’d all rather like to believe that we’re not as bad as we are but as good as we say we would like to be.

As a rhetorical ploy, it’s understandable: Saying the United States has always been garbage is not going to be terribly popular in a nation that still fondly refers to a group of sadistic slave-owners as its “founding fathers” — so politicians savvy enough to know that openly embracing torture is not a good look for the world’s leading state-sponsor of holier-than-thou rhetoric, appeal to a history and set of values that never was and never were in practice, as a way to give political cover to their middling, public relations-minded critiques of the national-security state’s least defensible excesses. It’s entirely false, this narrative of extreme goodness marked by occasional self-correcting imperfection, but it satisfies our national ego to think the American phoenix rises from a store of ethically traded gold, not a pile of rotting trash.

Good stuff, but something bothered me about it.  I soon realized that Davis was engaged in what I might call inverted American exceptionalism.  That's not to deny the facts Davis marshals in his indictment, only to say that I had the feeling he was wallowing in them like a Puritan preacher detailing the rot in his congregation's souls and the eternal punishment that awaits them.  Since most Americans prefer to ignore the horrific aspects of our history, they do need to be pointed out, dwelt on, often.  But I kept remembering something I read in a history of the American Indians, a simple statement I haven't been able to find again.  It went something like this: The Indians were not less civilized than the European invaders -- but that's not saying much.

I also thought of this, from Walter Kaufmann's Without Guilt and Justice (Wyden, 1973, p. 49):

In Paul W. Tappan's massive standard text on Crime, Justice and Correction, for example, all ten references to Freud (in seven hundred fifty pages) concern the light he shed on criminals. But Freud ... also turned a searchlight on respectable society, illuminating the unedifying motives that come to the fore in punishment. Not only is the criminal a human being like you, but you, alas, are like the criminal.

Now, let me repeat: none of this excuses the crimes and atrocities committed by the European invaders of the Americas and their heirs.  Davis is quite correct to rub his readers' noses in the history, to show the yawning gap between the pretensions of Christian civilization and its grubby, shameful reality.  It's not at all unfair to say, as Davis does, that "the United States has always been garbage."  I just want to say, and stress no less firmly, that by Davis's standards so was every non-Christian civilization.  Invasion, massacre, torture, slavery have been business as usual through most of human history, and we must never forget it.

After pondering Davis's article I found my copy of Will Roscoe's The Zuni Man-Woman (New Mexico, 1991), which includes a sobering account of Zuni society at the end of the 19th century.  Roscoe worked closely with Zuni elders and other influential people in his research, and his work is not anti-Indian; indeed, he engages in some of the same sort of apologetics used by champions of white Christian culture.

In 1882, the Zuni delegation touring the East with Cushing made a side trip to Salem, Massachusetts.  Told about the seventeenth-century persecution of witches at Salem, the Zunis became excited.  At a public reception, the bow priest Kiasi “thanked the good people of Salem for the service they had done the world,” and he gave them some advice should witchcraft trouble them again.  “’Be the witches or wizards your dearest relations or friends, consider not your own hearts,’ said he, ‘but remember your duty and spare them not, put them to death!’”  Because the Americans had rid themselves of witches, the Zunis decided, they had become prosperous and strong.  Belief in witchcraft represents a darker side of Zuni life, one that contradicts the stereotype of Pueblo Indians as uniformly even tempered.  While the Zunis had solved various social problems creatively and humanely, theirs was not a perfect society.  Some Zunis, like Nick Dumaka, grew up at odds with themselves, their families, and the community, unable to conform to Zuni ideals and social rules.  As [Ruth] Benedict noted, “Zuñi’s only reaction to such personalities is to brand them as witches.”

Because the Zunis did not make the distinction, typical of European law, between behavior and intent, the wish to do harm was as bad as doing harm, psychic violence the same as physical violence.  [Well, we’re catching up with them these days; also with Jesus]  Murder, assault, theft, arson, and other crimes were all tried as forms of witchcraft.  However, because the Zunis considered anger, resentment, bitterness, and envy as precursors of witchcraft, sanctions were often applied before overt acts of aggression occurred.  Suspected witches were subject to avoidance and criticism [isn’t that also a sign of anger, resentment, bitterness and envy in the accusers?], and their actions were closely watched.  This is why Zuni appears to have had so little crime.  [Because criminal impulses could be acted out by accusing others of witchcraft!] ...

Prosecution of witches was the responsibility of the bow priests. who tried “to bring them to wisdom.” They seized the suspect at night and took him or her to their chambers.  Witnesses both for and against the suspect, and the suspect himself, could speak.  If the suspect did not confess, however, he was painfully suspended by his thumbs or with his arms tied behind his back.  Hanging, with occasional respite, continued for a day.  Suspects might also be hung in the large plaza, from a beam protruding from the old mission.  If the suspect still remained silent after this, he was taken to the bow priests’ chamber once again, “whence he never comes forth alive.” Witches were not always executed, however.  If the witch confessed, especially with an elaborate story of occult powers, he or she might be released, usually to live in exile [101-103].

Because we have very little reliable information about pre-contact American Indian culture, we can't say whether Zunis dealt with witchcraft in this way before the White Man came.  The method of torture used, for example, is familiar from European practice, and indeed was used to interrogate suspected witches in Salem, Massachusetts.  It's not rocket science, though, and was probably reinvented by various cultures bent on inflicting pain for its own sake.

Torture was used by other Indian societies, and it won't do to engage in apologetics like "The Christians in Europe tortured to belittle and to demean and to punish. The Huron and the Iroquois tortured each other to honour and possess the power of the enemy."  Let me reiterate that I don't bring this up to justify the European invasion of this hemisphere and its dispossession and slaughter of the Americas' original inhabitants.  If the Islamic State is a "death cult," as President Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast, so is the United State of America.  But to return to Charles Davis, if the US is a "nation of torturers," so were the nations it replaced.  If the US has always been garbage, so were the First Nations.

Before Columbus, there was horrific violence in countries all over the world, too much to list here; I'd like to think that most of us have heard of it, even if we don't think of it much and tend to forget it when possible.  Off the top of my head, I think of the Roman practice of crucifixion, which they picked up from other sources.  Think of roads lined with crosses by the hundreds or thousands, each one with a human body on it, with carrion birds pecking at its tenant's eyes.  It's perfectly correct to denounce Christian violence against "pagans," but not if we forget the violence that "pagans" perpetrated against each other.  Much of human history is written in human blood, human cries of agony, in human bodies stretched out in torment. 

It's difficult to find a balance for denunciation of such horrors.  I follow Martin Luther King Jr. and Noam Chomsky, among others, in believing that people should first condemn the crimes of their own country before engaging in facile condemnation of the crimes of others.  I know I'm not alone in saying that I don't want to see America conquered:

-- not that America is in any danger of being conquered: the US has not fought a war of self-defense in my lifetime. But I don’t want to see any country conquered. People like [Joanne] Barkan get so furious at any mention of American malfeasance because they’ll gladly sic the dogs of war on any other country that behaved as the US has behaved, that killed a tenth as many people as the US has killed, that supported a tenth as many dictators as the US has supported, that harbors the kinds of terrorists the US harbors – so it is they who want to see the US attacked and humbled, if they had any consistency of principle. Those of us who can recognize the faults of our country, by contrast, simply want it to stop hurting people so wantonly.

But where do we go from that point?  What does Davis think is the proper way to deal with human "garbage"?  He concludes:

Torture and total war are not the work of a few bad people, but the product of a system that from its inception treated human beings as property and the right to property as more important than the rights of women and men – it’s who we are, and if we want the violence wrought by our system to end, we must honestly address the systemic cause. 

It is "who we are," but it's also who "they" are.  Davis's use of the singular ("a system") is misleading: there are multiple systems that have perpetrated violence and oppression, and the US is only one of those systems' heirs.  If we're all "garbage," as Davis's logic would require us to conclude, then what?  I think that recognition is a good starting point.  American exceptionalism, whether as the shining city on a hill or as an enormous, stinking mountain of garbage, is not going to get us anywhere.

Struggling with Heterosexuality

I'm now reading my third Walker Percy novel, Love in the Ruins.  I've been meaning to take a look at his work for a long time, since so many people whose opinions I respect have spoken highly of him.  (So do some whose opinions I don't respect, like Rod Dreher.)  Percy was a Roman Catholic convert, and I was curious to see how his religion would inform his fiction.  He also wrote essays on deep questions, which I'll get to in due time as I work chronologically through his books.

Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World, originally published in 1971, turns out to be a satirical, apocalyptic science fiction novel, set in 1983 in a rapidly deteriorating America.  Percy's narrator, Dr. Tom More, has invented a device he calls the "lapsometer," which he believes to be a scientific breakthrough that will put him in the pantheon with Isaac Newton.  The lapsometer reads the brain's internal states (what More, a bit prematurely I feel bound to say, equates with "the soul") and can also change them.  Its scientific basis is at best neo-phrenology, though maybe it seemed more plausible in 1971 than it does now; and anyway, this is a satire, so factual accuracy matters less than what the technology does in the story.  I haven't got far enough to say much about that.

The narrative can be dated fairly closely because it refers at one point to the entertainer Perry Como (born 1912) as seventy years old.  I'd have guessed it was later by a decade or more, because Percy didn't seem to leave enough time from the time of writing for the changes he describes to work out.  For example:

The war in Ecuador has been going on for fifteen years and has divided the country further.  Not exactly our best war.  The U.S.A. sided with South Ecuador, which is largely Christian, believing in God and the sacredness of the individual, etcetera etcetera.  The only trouble is that South Ecuador is owned by ninety-eight Catholic families with Swiss bank accounts, is governed by a general, and so is not what you would call an ideal democracy.  North Ecuador, on the other hand, is Maoist-Communist and has so far murdered two hundred thousand civilians, including liberals, who did not welcome Communism with open arms.  Not exactly our best war, and now in its sixteenth year [page 17 of the 1989 Ballantine paperback].

This war would have to have begun in the late 1960s for Percy's chronology to work.  But I won't be picky.  Maybe it's supposed to take place in an alternate / parallel universe? Try another example:

American literature is not having its finest hour.  The Southern gothic novel yielded to the Jewish masturbatory novel, which in turn gave way to the WASP homosexual novel, which has nearly run its course.  The Catholic homosexual romance, long awaited, failed to materialize.  But old favorites endure, like venerable Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann, who continue to write the dirty clean books so beloved by the American housewife.  Gore Vidal is the grand old man of American letters [16].

That final non sequitur turned out to be a fairly good prediction.  By "the Jewish masturbatory novel" I presume Percy's narrator means Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, which didn't spawn a "course" that I'm aware of, though it's typical for would-be curmudgeons to claim that a single case constitutes a runaway trend.

So far I'm a bit mystified by Percy's high reputation.  He was a good solid craftsman, but from what I've read of his fiction so far he seems to be a fairly ordinary chronicler of middle-aged heterosexual male malaise, given hopeful gravitas by the trendy "existentialism" that had largely run its course by the time this novel was written.  Love in the Ruins has flashes of wit, but it reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut, or Joseph Heller, and of neither of them at their best.  Like theirs, Percy's female characters are standard sexist cartoons, either hot young college-aged women who are inexplicably fascinated by his gloomy, middle-aged protagonists, or The Bitch-Goddess Wife.  In Love in the Ruins Tom More's wife Doris has run off with a "heathen Englishman," more fully described later as "a fake Hindoo English fag son of a bitch" (60).  I'm not particularly bothered by the narrator's homophobia; it's of a piece with his disillusionment with heterosexuality, and who knows what wide-stance desires lurk in the hearts of men?

Those were the days of short skirts, and [Doris] looked like long-thighed Mercury, god of morning.  Her legs were long and deep-fleshed, bound laterally in the thigh by a strip of fascia that flattened the triceps.  Was it her slight maleness, long-leggedness -- perhaps 10 percent tunic-clad Mercury was she -- that set my heart pounding over breakfast? [56].

For a Catholic writer, Percy seems not to have figured out that fornication is also a sin, let alone adultery -- Doris left Tom, but so far there's no mention of a divorce.*  This doesn't keep him from maintaining a harem of three hippie chicks and pursuing a colleague's twenty-six-year-old daughter.  But hell, Percy's protagonists so far have been, like Tom More, "bad" Catholics so maybe it doesn't count any more than the boozing does.  Maybe his essays will go deeper; his fiction so far seems to me quite standard for its time and milieu.

*P.S. It turns out that Doris died after she left Tom; that'll teach her.  But he's still a fornicator.

It also turned out that Tom was suffering from some kind of mental illness, for which he had been institutionalized as a sort of patient-practitioner.  I began to wonder how much of his descriptions of crumbling American society were hallucinations, and I'm still not sure about that.  As I finished Love in the Ruins, I was still mystified by the acclaim Percy has received, and I remain mystified.  He seems to be mainly a competent practitioner of the Male Pan-Life Crisis genre, which of course is so much more universal than the "Jewish masturbatory novel." 

Me and Christopher Against the World

I've begun rereading Andrew Hodges's 1983 biography of Alan Turing, Alan Turing: The Enigma, to see how Turing's life compares to the movie version, The Imitation Game.  It seems fair to do so, since the 2014 re-issues tie the book to the film.

I particularly noticed Hodges's account of Turing's relationship with his classmate and first love, Christopher Morcom, who died of bovine tuberculosis in 1930 while still in his teens.  The movie and the book agree that Turing's feelings for Morcom were unrequited, but the movie gives the impression (to me at any rate) that Morcom initiated the friendship as Turing's protector when the latter was being bullied at school.  According to Hodges, Turing initiated the friendship, which took some time to develop.  Eventually Morcom invited Turing to visit his home and meet his family, and their respective parents also developed an acquaintance.  After Morcom's death, Turing sustained a relationship with Morcom's family, visiting them and even traveling with them.  All this is missing from the film, which is understandable to some extent, but the fact that Turing successfully pursued, developed, and sustained a friendship with Morcom is at odds (again, to me at least) with The Imitation Game's portrait of Turing as a socially inept isolate.  Turing clearly was socially awkward, but he learned to overcome it and make connections with other people.

The film continues its depiction of Turing into his codebreaking years at Bletchley, where he is still an isolate, working on his own program, at odds with the other in his unit.  He takes over control of his team by going over his superior's head with a letter to Winston Churchill, who puts him in charge.  He builds his computer almost alone, from nothing, naming it after Morcom, and in a Hollywood-style climax proves his machine's worth against a deadline that would mean pulling the plug on poor "Christopher," symbolically killing Turing's love once again.  But the letter to Churchill was signed not only by Turing but by three others on the team, and the computer (called the Bombe because of the ticking noise it made) built at Bletchley was a development of earlier machines invented by others. Turing worked with another mathematician, Gordon Welchman, who helped make the advances in its design and construction.  And so on.  It's not unreasonable, for purposes of dramatic compression, for The Imitation Game, to focus on just one of the groups that worked on breaking German codes, even to give the impression that only that group achieved anything -- but it is seriously misleading to turn Alan Turing into the One Man who walked into town and beat the bad guys all by his lonesome, fighting against the misunderstanding of the ignorant mob.  Turing may not have been completely comfortable working as part of a team, but he seems to have adjusted to it pretty well, much better than the movie shows.  As L.V. Anderson wrote in a good piece at Slate, "One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park later recalled him as 'a very easily approachable man' and said 'we were very very fond of him'; none of this is reflected in the film."  Anderson's article goes into detail on the differences between The Imitation Game and history, and is worth a read if you're interested.

There's a common tendency in apologetics for this kind of movie to claim that there's no other way to tell the story, no other narrative, so what else could they do?  As I wrote before, The Imitation Game's portrayal of Turing's homosexuality may not have been motivated by personal homophobia, just creative laziness.  The same goes for its depiction of Bletchley Park, which forces the history into a very familiar narrative straitjacket.  That straitjacket, because of its familiarity, is comfortable for many people, and perhaps The Imitation Game wouldn't have sold as many tickets or garnered as many Oscar nominations if it had gone in a different direction.  Or maybe it would have: Benedict Cumberbatch is a hot property, and would have drawn in audiences regardless.  My point here is that I don't like it, and don't intend to watch it again.  I'm trying to explain here why.

Compare one of my favorite films, My Brilliant Career.  It flouts numerous narrative conventions: the conventionally plain heroine rejects the rich, handsome fellow who loves her and begs her to marry him, and goes on to write and publish her first novel.  To my surprise, some radical gay male critics were annoyed by this.  Yet the movie was a crowd-pleaser, won some awards, and made Judy Davis, who played the protagonist, an international star.  (It did no harm either to Sam Neill, who played her suitor.)  It can be done.  Moviemakers aren't obliged to go against the current and make movies that will please me, but I'm not obliged to like their productions either.  We're in better shape for gay protagonists than we were a few decades ago, but I still see The Imitation Game as a mess of bad creative choices.

We Can Kill Them for You Wholesale

And so I want to thank [NASCAR Hall of Famer] Darrell [Waltrip] for that wonderful presentation.  Darrell knows that when you’re going 200 miles an hour, a little prayer cannot hurt.  (Laughter.)  I suspect that more than once, Darrell has had the same thought as many of us have in our own lives -- Jesus, take the wheel.  (Laughter.) Although I hope that you kept your hands on the wheel when you were thinking that.  (Laughter.)

From yesterday's post the obvious next step is President Obama's sermon at the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast.  Predictably, liberals have been enjoying the predictable right-wing response of fury that Obama would point to the less-savory aspects of Christian history; conservatives have celebrated Darrell Waltrip's remark at the same venue, "If you don't know Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior ... you are going to Hell ... I thought I was a good guy, but folks, let me tell you something: good guys go to Hell."  This is the sort of thing that sends liberals and secularists into how-can-you-say-such-awful-things conniptions, but Obama said it was "wonderful", and you can not go against the word of POTUS.  From what I know of Obama's religious beliefs, he probably agrees completely with Waltrip's theology, which is ordinary mainstream Christianity, nothing to get excited about and certainly not in the context of a prayer breakfast.

What Obama said about Christian history was nothing out of the way either, though most American Christians, conservative and liberal alike, would like to forget the historical connection between slavery and racial segregation and Christianity.  The chief reason the right would object is because Obama said these things, just as the chief reason Obama's fans can ignore his reactionary theology is because it's his.

Obama's remarks were what Roy Edroso called "ordinary, meretricious bullshit," though of course Edroso was talking about the bleats of Obama's critics, not about Obama's preaching.  Take for example: "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."  Obama is quite sure, it appears, that slavery and Jim Crow are incompatible with true Christianity, though mainstream Christians for over 1500 years would have disagreed with him.  Christ himself healed a dying slave and returned him to his bondage, while the apostle Paul converted a runaway and returned him to his Christian master.  In the New Testament, slavery is the model for the relationship between the believer and Christ.  If either of them ever uttered a word against slavery, it hasn't been recorded.  You can claim that despite all biblical and historical precedent, slavery wasn't what Yahweh meant at all, but that's just because believers can invent just about any position they like and ascribe it to their god, as Be Scofield wrote in the post I quoted yesterday, and as Obama said elsewhere in his sermon, cautioning his congregation against "being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others."  But this backfires on Obama, who is sure that God doesn't speak to the religious apologist for slavery, Jim Crow, or "unspeakable acts of barbarism  -- terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions."  Really?  On more than one occasion, Obama's god commanded the children of Israel to invade Canaan and burn its cities to the ground, massacring all the inhabitants and their livestock in some cases, or to leave virgin girls alive in others so that they could be raped by the invaders.  This was justified, in Scripture and by later apologists who claimed the mantle of religious authority for such actions, because the Canaanites were worshiping the wrong gods.  The New Atheists who support the new American-British Crusade against Islam basically agree: they worship the wrong god, they belong to a "death cult" (in Obama's words), so kill them all and let no-God sort them out.

Here's a good example of someone using Christianity to justify war:

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

That was Abraham Lincoln, draping himself in the mantle of religious authority to justify the American Civil War, the most horrific war in human history up to that point.  (Christian Europe outdid Lincoln fifty years later, also appealing to religion.) "Lincoln wasn't a churchgoer," the commenter who posted the Lincoln quotation concluded, "but I like his God better."  Lincoln's god was Yahweh Sabaoth, the god of battles and carnage, the god of Isaiah and Jeremiah and the Revelation and the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," who tramples out the vintage of human blood from human bodies -- the same god as the god of ISIS, in fact.  The commenter likes that god better than the pro-slavery god of Alexander Stephens, who'd been quoted by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his post on Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast.  But they're the same god; the god of the Bible has no objection to slavery, or to war, or to atrocities against civilians.

The real problem is not extremism.  As horrific as the atrocities of Muslim "extremists" are, they are dwarfed by the atrocities of moderate, middle-of-the-road Western, mostly Christian but Jewish as well, governments.  That one Jordanian pilot was burned alive by ISIS is horrible, but in all-too-recent history the US has burned thousands of people alive, with incendiary bombs, napalm, and white phosphorus.  Isn't that thousands of times as horrible?  Some of these victims were military, to be sure, but then so was the Jordanian pilot.  Many more were civilians.  Retail violence, the terrorism of small usually non-government groups, is easy to focus on, especially for propaganda purposes, but the wholesale violence of states is harder to see for some reason.  Partly that's deliberate, as when Western media refuse to publish or acknowledge Western state atrocities.  Aside from that there's a will not to know, the discipline of memory through doublethink which ignores that it ignores what we do, and uses the cognitive dissonance to obsess over the crimes of official enemies.

Obama himself is responsible for many atrocities, and has justified others.  When he gave his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, for example, he said:

As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

Obama has also joked about using predator drones to kill innocent people.  I don't wish to single him out, of course.  As Noam Chomsky says, if the Nuremberg principles were enforced, every US president since World War II would have to be hanged.  That's the point: killing civilians in vast numbers, burning people to death, is as American as cherry pie, and as Christian as communion wafers.

Be Here Now, Then Be Somewhere Else Later

A friend posted this meme on Facebook, noting his own reservations about it as a meditation practitioner.  (We both agreed that we hadn't bothered to check its authenticity, being more concerned with the idea it expresses, a variation of which I've addressed before.) He wrote that he couldn't "say with that confidence that we can 'eliminate' violence. I'm positive though that it will have a huge positive impact on the world, including the minimization of violence."

I commented that though I agreed somewhat,

This meme reminds me of the Christian friend I have who posted a meme to the effect that the world would be better off if everyone spent more time on their knees. In a narrow sense, that's true: if someone's on their knees praying, they're not out on the streets making trouble. Same goes for meditation. But to eliminate violence -- or to lessen and minimize it, since I agree with you that we probably can't eliminate it altogether -- we need to address it directly, finding ways to get people to resolve conflicts without violence. So from that point of view, this meme is completely off the mark, recommending a simplistic and false remedy to a complex problem that can't be resolved simply.

By direct means of addressing violence, I had in mind various conflict-resolution procedures and strategies that have been developed by counselors and others, and in some form or other they are probably very old.  But also I thought of Miss Manners, who for all the disagreements I have with her is very good at devising responses that deflect aggression and micro-aggression from others.

I think we have to go even further, though, because conflict resolution tends to assume that the opponents are willing to forgo violence as a way of dealing with their conflict, and many opponents are not.  This is not because of a lack of mindfulness, but because human beings have long traditions of violence, which are probably rooted in our primate heritage but have been augmented with all the cultural baggage enhancements we could invent: pride, honor, vengeance, and so on.  If someone's culture demands that he (and it's usually a he) respond to a provocation with violence, then meditation is not likely to inhibit him much.

While trying (without success) to track down a reference to tie the quotation to the Dalai Lama, I found this blog post by an American Buddhist writer, Be Scofield, who went even further than I had.  She also points to what look like useful books related to the problem.

Author and Zen priest Brian Victoria has written extensively on the role that Buddhism played in supporting the Japanese Imperial Empire before and during World War II. In Zen at War and Zen War Stories, he chronicles the little known and disturbing history of renowned university professors, Zen masters, and lay monks of many different sects who gladly assisted their nation in waging multiple “wars of compassion.” The Japanese Emperor was compared to the Buddha, and Buddhist teachings became an excellent tool to eradicate individualism and dissolve the “small-self” into the larger nation-state. Hitler was jealous: “Why didn’t we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good?” ...

Although Yasutani’s influence on American Buddhism is widely revered, Victoria refers to him as a “militarist, not to mention ethnic chauvinist, sexist, and anti-Semite.” On the question of Buddhism and killing, Yasutani was unequivocal:

Those who understand the spirit of the Mahayana precepts should be able to answer this question immediately. That is to say, of course one should kill, killing as many as possible. One should, fighting hard, kill everyone in the enemy army. The reason for this is that in order to carry [Buddhist] compassion and filial obedience through to perfection it is necessary to assist good and punish evil . . . This is the special characteristic of the Mahayana precepts.

At the time, Japan was engaged in a cruel war of imperial expansion. This received full support from Yasutani, who stated: “In making China cede the island of Taiwan, and, further, in annexing the Korean peninsula, our Great Japanese Imperial Empire engaged in the practice of a great bodhisattva, a practice that reveals itself through compassion and filial obedience.” Yasutani also warned of the demonic ways of the Jews, dismantled liberal reforms, and reiterated sexist statements. He insisted that “the universities we presently have must be smashed one and all,” and referred to trades unions and alternative political parties as “traitors to the nation.”

Sadly, Yasutani was not a marginal voice. Rather, he was emblematic of how institutional Buddhism wholeheartedly embraced the worst aspects of Japanese imperialism.

This wasn't limited to Japan or to the twentieth century:

While these examples are disturbing in their own right, this pairing of Buddhism and war isn’t confined to the Japanese Empire. The edited volume Buddhist Warfare (2010), clearly illustrates how Buddhism has been used to justify violence throughout its history. In a review of the book, Vladimir Tikhonov notes that: “From its inception, Buddhism was integrated into a complicated web of power relations; it always attempted to accommodate itself with the pre-existent power hierarchies while preserving a degree of internal autonomy; and it inevitably came to acknowledge, willingly or otherwise, that the powers-that-be use violence to achieve their objectives, which often overlap with those of the Buddhist monastic community.”

And, of course, Yasutani's teaching on the virtues of killing in war echo the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, in which the god Krishna instructs the reluctant warrior Arjuna to kill his opponents not for gain or from anger, but without attachment, simply because it is his duty.  Many apologists have tried to interpret this as a metaphorical teaching against war, but the history of India would indicate that actual Hindus did not take it that way.

And then there's this photo, which is worth a thousand words in itself.

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Scofield comments:

The appropriation of yoga by the American military similarly challenges notions that internal spiritual practices will inspire practitioners to challenge the status quo. In 2006, Fit Yoga Magazine’s front cover featured a picture of two naval aviators practicing yoga – specifically, Virabadrasana II, or “Warrior” pose – on a battleship. At the time, even the editor of the magazine admitted that she found this juxtaposition of yoga and militarism a “little shocking.” On second glance, however, she realized that “on their faces, their serene smiles relayed a sense of inner calm.”

Like a Jedi knight, the adept will kill while smiling serenely.  This is no doubt why the New Atheist Sam Harris can embrace meditation as he cheers on the slaughter of children.  He's a scientist too -- no religion here!  Mindfulness will help us control that pesky empathy.

(I admit I'm not being entirely fair to Harris; I agree with him that "empathy is not an argument," but moral discourse cannot exclude empathy and other such factors altogether.  Besides, Harris begins by channeling the most depraved Israeli propaganda: "the government in Gaza is run by Hamas, an avowedly genocidal organization that uses its own civilians as human shields."  If he really wants to establish his impartial rationality, he should apply it to Israel, or to, say, the 9/11 attacks or the recent atrocities by ISIS that have outraged so many.  But Harris is an atheist jihadist, willing to put aside his disagreements with even right-wing Christians until Islam has been defeated once and for all.)

Some will claim that this is a misuse of yoga and meditation; Scofield replies:

Many believe that God, the supreme consciousness, or emptiness is supportive, benevolent, or on the side of justice. Of course, it’s understandable for someone to think that the universe supports his or her particular beliefs and values. The problem, however, is that many with quite different beliefs and values think exactly the same thing. As we’ve seen, countless people have been deeply entrenched in larger systems of violence and domination despite believing they were experiencing connection with the divine through meditation, yoga, or some other spiritual practice. Of course, others have used their spiritual practices and beliefs to resist these same power structures. Therefore, if we assume that there is in fact a divine foundation of reality, it’s extremely difficult to see how it wouldn’t be morally and politically neutral. If there were a distinct political or moral direction to the divine, and practices such as yoga or meditation were means of tapping into it, then all practitioners would eventually share the same political ideology. This, however, is obviously not the case.

Scofield criticizes Thich Nhat Hanh here in similar terms.  Her criticisms don't settle this question, of course, but they certainly should be taken into account to avoid an apologetic No True Scotsman approach.  And they apply no less to atheism, which like religion has no inherent moral content.

Take That, Patriarchy!

When Ted Cruz jumps to stand with you, you may be in trouble:

I saw this item Wednesday morning just before I went to work, and it intrigued me.  On the one hand, right-wing Republicans have thrown tantrums before when they imagined that the Obamas were violating royal protocol; surely they would be upset that Mrs. Obama should do it now, and to one of America's most important allies in the Middle East.  On the other hand, she was defying "sharia law," which is good, but she's a Democrat and married to a black man, which is bad. especially since her husband is widely believed by Republicans to be a Muslim bent on imposing sharia law on Christian America.  What to do?

But consider the dilemma for the Democrats.  On the one hand, Mrs. Obama defied patriarchal Muslim norms and totally destroyed the Saudi oppression of women! -- at the same time that her husband was defending US intimacy with one of the nastier dictatorships in the world, and his administration (along with the corporate media and other minor elements) was fawning on the late King Abdullah as a "man of wisdom and vision," even a "man of peace" who "nudged Saudi Arabia forward."  On the other hand, she disrespected another culture, which objectively put her on the side of the Islamophobes.  As far as I can tell, except for Cruz, most people chose to solve the problem by falling back on knee-jerk cheerleading.  Since the Right mostly did not mount an offensive, liberals didn't have to get defensive.  So when I looked around after work that day, I didn't find the slapfight I'd half-hoped to find.

What I did find was that Mrs. Obama's behavior was not unprecedented.  In fact, it was routine and bipartisan.  Neither Laura Bush nor Condoleezza Rice (who later referred to the headscarf as a "sign of oppression") wore a headscarf when they traveled to Saudi Arabia and met King Adbullah, and according to this Washington Post article, other foreign women have done likewise.  As foreigners and non-Muslims, they aren't even expected to cover their heads.  So why did Mrs. Obama's attire get all this attention (via)?  There was a fuss on Twitter by some Saudis, that's why: about 1500 tweets, some of which were critical, while others defended her.  A tempest in a teapot.

So, good for Michelle Obama, though it doesn't seem she was making a bold political statement.  Like her predecessors, she went with the flow, followed precedent, didn't make waves.

This item interested me, though, because lately I've been seeing a number of feel-good multiculti memes which declare that wearing a headscarf is a personal choice or an individual choice.

 
Which is, of course, nonsense.  Using a Hello Kitty lunchbox as a briefcase is a personal decision.  Dyeing your hair green is a personal decision.  Wearing a hijab, or other form of female head covering, is a custom tied to the status of women in a particular culture or religious sect (as shown by the fact that men aren't required to wear one), it's a declaration of one's religious affiliation and makes a statement about the status of women in that affiliation.  (If people were required to use a Hello Kitty lunchbox as a briefcase for religious or cultural reasons, it would cease to be a personal choice.)  It's not a universal Muslim custom, nor is the covering of women's heads as a cultural requirement limited to Islam; and outside of certain Islamist environments a woman can usually go bare-headed without being penalized for it, though even in Europe or the US she could come into conflict with her family or her mosque if she makes the personal choice not to wear the scarf.  It could be a personal decision if a non-Muslim chose to wear one in a non-Muslim society because they thought it looked cool, but how often does that happen?

This iteration of the meme is particularly dishonest, not just because it ignores the cultural context in which many women must cover themselves, but because of that bit about its being "oppressive to strip you of your freedom of choice" by calling the head covering a sign of oppression.  Discussing a cultural sign, criticizing it for what it signifies, does not strip a person of their freedom of choice.  Assaulting a woman and tearing off her headscarf would strip her of her freedom of choice -- but so would assaulting a woman who chooses not to cover her head.  So would laws or regulations forbidding (or requiring) women to wear the hijab.  By this logic, criticizing, say, antigay or antichoice Christians would strip them of their freedom of choice.  Such Christians and their apologists might very well try to claim that it does.  (As do ultraorthodox Jewish males who assault little orthodox Jewish girls for not meeting their standards of female attire.)  People of the mindset represented by this meme mostly reply that their faith is not legitimate, it's a religion of hate, and therefore their faith doesn't deserve respect.  As I've noted before, such people are highly selective in their implementation of freedom.  I suspect that they are so tolerant of the hijab because it has no hegemonic cultural significance in the US yet: it seems exotic, and they can fantasize about the inner lives of the women who wear it.  To some extent the hijab is a personal choice here, though young girls whose parents require them to wear it, or grown women pressured by their communities to wear it, could plausibly argue otherwise.

While it would be obnoxious to hector women who cover their heads, or accuse them of collaboration with the patriarchy, etc., such criticism does not strip them of their freedom of choice, any more than this meme strips me of my freedom of choice by trying to tell me how to think about the hijab.  We live in a pluralistic society, however much many people find that uncomfortable, and in a pluralistic society people are free not just to behave and believe differently, they are free to talk and disagree and argue about their differences.  Unfortunately the level of debate is generally very low on all sides, but the remedy for that is to raise the level, not to throw out debate altogether.

According to the meme, "Susan wears a hijab out of choice".  This is laziness, or as Bertrand Russell said about postulating, it has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.  Susan is a fictional character, created to grind the meme-maker's axe.  Real women's reasons for wearing headscarves will likely be more complex than that.  People have often chosen to go along with systems that oppress them.  The women in the anti-choice movement, for example, are as eager to police other women's bodies as any patriarch.  Or take as simple an example of female gender-cop behavior as women calling other women sluts.  I'm reminded of Richard Trexler, who wrote in Sex and Conquest (Polity Press, 1995) of claims that children chose to become 'two-spirit': "Compare these protestations that a child exercised 'free will’ to those in any traditional Catholic society that young girls married of their own free will, when of course they did not" (225 n14).  In the American culture of therapy, moreover, choice is highly suspect: it's only okay to be gay, for example, if it was forced on you by your genes; as this meme shows, choice is okay when it's an exotic multicultural manifestation, forced on you only by your parents and your imam.

I think it's time to reread Susan Miller Okun's Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, in which she and several other writer / scholars grapple with questions like this one.

Toward a Recognition of Evidence

A slight digression here.  I just reread At Eighty-two (Norton, 1996), the final volume of May Sarton's journals, and as usual it was a fascinating view into old age and ill health.  It also pointed me to a few writers I might explore, such as the poet Deborah Pease, and reminded me of Sarton's friend, the academic and novelist Carolyn G. Heilbrun, who championed Sarton's work when few academics were willing to consider it.  The cold shoulder she got from academic critics was something that bothered Sarton a great deal, a theme she harped on throughout the journals, including this one, and I admit I was surprised to be reminded that Florence Howe didn't include Sarton in her anthology of women's poetry No More Masks, not even the expanded 1993 edition.

Anyway, now that I've finished re-reading all of Sarton's journals it might be time to return to Carolyn Heilbrun's feminist critical writings.  Her book Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, first published in 1973, is probably still her best-known work.  I've read it two or three times, most recently last year, and it's one of those frustrating books that I remember positively but can't recall any of what it says.  The only notes I took from my last reading have little to do with androgyny, but they may explain why the book hasn't stayed with me better.

In the face of the evidence of Jewish life at the time of Jesus, or, indeed, at any time, more blatantly still in the face of the evidence of the Gospels, the Church was determined to deny sexuality its place in the religious world, to idealize celibacy, which the Jews and probably Jesus considered sinful, and to enshrine virginity, which the tradition had heretofore never seen as anything but a perversion.  Not only may Jesus not have been a virgin, but there is little beyond the patristic tradition to suggest that he was not born from an ordinary sex act.  The pagan tradition in which the father is a god (one need only recall Zeus’s many sexual affairs with mortal ladies) and the Jewish tradition which saw God as, in one sense, the father of all children were no doubt distorted for the uses of a Church which feared sexuality almost as much as it feared the feminine principle, perhaps for many of the same reasons [17-18].

On the whole, the factual errors in this passage are hard to excuse, though it reflects common views of Jesus and Christianity at the time, and down to the present.  I think that historical scholarship on Judaism since the 1970s has enriched our knowledge and understanding of rabbinical attitudes toward sexuality in Jesus' day, and I don't hold Heilbrun responsible for not taking into account work that hadn't been done yet.  But most of what she gets wrong was avoidable.  It boggles my mind when she says that the Church idealized celibacy and virginity "in the face of the evidence of the Gospels" and blames the doctrine of Jesus' birth to a virgin mainly on "the patristic tradition."  In fact the virgin birth is reported in two canonical gospels, one of which (Matthew) has traditionally been touted as the most "Jewish" of the four.  Jesus' harshly repressive teachings on sex in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew again) are hardly obscure, and then there is his commendation of those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven.  (That link will show you numerous translations of the verse, which are evidence of how uncomfortable it makes many modern Christians.)

There's a tendency, due I think to influence from 20th-century village-atheist polemic, to talk as though the gospels were written much later than most scholars today think they were, as if they were written in the second or third centuries rather than the first.  But the same downgrading of marriage and the body is found in Paul's letters, which were certainly written before the gospels, within twenty-five years of Jesus' death, though Paul was not merely Jewish but a Pharisee.  Paul is ambiguous on the point, but it's generally accepted that he was celibate, and he argued in 1 Corinthians 7 that marriage was a second-best relation, a concession to human weakness for those unable to control their lusts and give their full devotion to the Lord.  These passages were not discovered in a clay jar after 1973; they'd been there all along, and were not obscure.

Heilbrun goes on to cite William E. Phipps's Was Jesus Married? (Harper & Row, 1970), a popular controversial book at the time she was writing Toward a Recognition of Androgyny.  I've only read Phipps's later book The Sexuality of Jesus (Harper & Row, 1973), and it has been a while, but as I recall his main argument was to point to the universality of marriage in Judaism, which is a slight oversimplification anyway. Whether Jesus himself was married, let alone a lifelong virgin, we'll never know, but it can't be settled by appeal to mainstream Judaism of his time, because Jesus was not a mainstream Jew of his time, even on the evidence of the gospels, which show him at odds and in mortal combat with the mainstream Judaism(s) of his time.  This wasn't (or wasn't solely) a fabrication in the service of patristic propaganda; the hostility between the early Jesus cult and their fellow Jews was intense, and no less so if it was over issues that seem trivial to 20th century Americans.  Again, the apostle Paul, who on his own account had been a mainstream Jew, a Pharisee no less, was also hostile to marriage and sexuality before the gospels were even written; and even though we have some of Paul's own words about himself (unlike Jesus), it's not certain whether he was or had been married himself.

I don't know of any evidence that Jesus "probably considered [celibacy] sinful," and I've just pointed to evidence to the contrary.  As for the claim that "the tradition had heretofore never seen [virginity] as ... a perversion," that's absurd: virginity was mandatory for women before marriage in Judaism, as in other traditions.  It's also absurd to claim that the idealization of celibacy and virginity denied "sexuality its place in the religious world"; marriage and sexuality always had their place in Christianity, even if it was a second-best place.  If women and men were not to remain virgin or unmarried throughout their lives, that hardly indicates a respect for their freedom or well-being.  Compulsory marriage was as much a distortion of human potential as compulsory celibacy, but then individual freedom was not a Christian, Jewish, or pagan ideal.

I wish that Heilbrun were still alive; I'd like to ask her how she could have overlooked the evidence that celibacy had a place in Christianity from its earliest days.  If she cites the gospels, I presume she'd read them at some point.  Was no one who read the book in manuscript, or helped prepare it for publication, knowledgeable enough about the Bible to notice this strange mis-characterization of New Testament teachings?  It now seems to me that much of Toward a Recognition of Androgyny involved generalizations about culture and literature that I can't accept, even if I like Heilbrun's rejection of sexual polarization.