277. It's Not the Religion, It's How It's Taken

OK, both our religions, Christianity and Islam, urge violence here and there in their ancient scriptures.  There's no difference between Christians and Muslims on that score.  But there is a difference in how those scriptures are taken.  There are more Muslims who want to impose Shariah, a law for an ancient desert people, than there are Christians (or Jews) who want to impose the laws of the Old Testament.

I think we can go on and say the more dangerous (because we're on the edge of prejudice and persecution) thing: that Muslims generally are more willing to obey or approve ancient commands to violence than Christians are.  And pushing to the edge, that that makes them a greater danger to a state.

So we can argue accidental superiority.  History has given Christians a sociological condition that is more favorable to state security than it has given Muslims.  This superiority is functional and temporal (See my Post #77).  It does not allow claims to any other superiority (race, ethnicity, origin, genome, etc.) but in states needing to protect themselves it needs to be recognized.

In preceding posts I suggested that we could avoid prejudice and persecution by keeping our eyes only on security and the laws necessary to it.  But, raising our vision, we saw that for long-term security we needed something more.  I suggested a nationwide mandatory educational program which, in light of the above, would for Muslims help correct the accidents of history that had made them dangerous. 

When we think that way we can't help opposing strong liberal instincts: to avoid invidious comparisons of cultures; to find the merciful and humane in every scripture; to say that that expresses the true nature of the religion; to oppose restrictions on freedom; to resist mandates from the central government, particularly in education; and beyond that to make no moves whatsoever toward a totalitarian state.

Yes, and there before us in my last post is my move: broaden the definition of incitement to violence so we can arrest more people, make every school in the country, every private school, every religious school, even every home school, hold to the curriculum that will best protect the state, and specify the exact courses that will make children grow up our way.

And to what noble end?  I'll put it bluntly: so that our grown-ups won't become fundamentalists.  So that children raised in a religion will say something like this, "Well yes, there's God's law, and yes, it's there in our Scripture, and it's a wonderful guide to life, but shucks, it does go to extremes sometimes.  It's just got to have a few tweaks."

"You want to get that out of fundamentalists?  They're all, Christians, Jews, and Muslims, dead against tweaking.  If they tweaked they wouldn't be fundamentalists.  And you want to make tweaking, religious tweaking, into a virtue."

Not exactly.  I want to make refusal to tweak into a vice.  The Jewish settler on the West Bank who says, "The Law says God gave us this land and I don't care what law, Israeli or International, says otherwise, I'm following a Higher Law," that settler is threatening the peace of the world, and I consider such threatening a vice.  And I consider support of that threatening a complicit vice.  The American fundamentalists who support the settlers for the same reason, that the words are in Holy Scripture, are complicit.  My fundamentalist, tweak-abominating mother was complicit, and the grateful letter she got from Binyamin Netanyahu confirmed it.

"Ah, but refusal to tweak is just what made our ancestors strong.  Their fundamentalist religion strengthened their spines and gave order to their lives.  It helped them survive, out on the prairie, far from the home city, or in a new country, far from the old one."  I know I can hear the same from an Arab fundamentalist.  "It helped us survive, out in the desert.  It gave order to our lives."

I don't deny that.  I'm just saying that there's a flip side, a dangerous side, an even vicious side, to their virtue.   And I don't deny that by softening that vicious side with a liberal education we may be softening the virtuous side, and losing a character valuable to the nation.  I just believe that for our nation's, and maybe the world's, security, all fundamentalism now has to be exposed to the education that will destroy it.

"And you're confident that your liberal education will destroy it?  You'd better be sure about that before you go mandating it in every school.  David Ben-Gurion, you know, thought that in an Enlightened Israel Jewish Orthodoxy would just 'wither away.'"

Yes, my confidence is high because my expectations are low.  I don't expect a Muslim teenager in Britain to come out of school taking the Koran the way an Anglican adult takes the Bible.  You know, with gentlemanly ease.  I just expect him to take it with a little more salt.  From the French mines, from Voltaire.

"And you'll get that in your education for democratic citizenship?"

Yes, out of this curriculum that I'm sure any number of my liberal arts colleagues could quickly provide.  I myself would make Introductory Logic and Speech 1 (making sure it included debates) mandatory.   And heavens, English Composition, the most important one of all.  ("Address the question, avoid prejudgments, cite evidence, anticipate objections, be skeptical, suspect absolute generalizations" — I've quoted it a hundred times.)  Out of my colleagues' arguments we could add more — a political science course, a history course — to the list of required courses.  Taken somewhere along the line.  No degree without them.  I'm willing to say, "No degree in engineering, no degree in any technological field, without them."  That would include students from all Enlightenment-deprived countries.  No going back loaded only with the results of skeptical, scientific thinking.  You've got to learn the Socratic-scientific way.

"And to enforce this?"

No way but the Teutonic, I'm afraid. "Achtung!  Make it so."  From the President, after Congressional approval.

"And what do the president's subordinates then say to school boards, 'No government money unless you comply'?  To colleges, 'No student loans'?  To foreigners, 'No scholarships' or worse, 'No visas'?" 

You're showing how unrealistic my plan is.  But surely our academic realists could come up with something not too far from it, couldn't they?  I know that our Socratic-scientific inheritance is a strong force in them.  I know they're willing to sacrifice a lot for our long-term security.

267. "Evil" in the World

How variously we react to the word "evil."  George W. Bush, in his memoirs, thinks all the fuss about his use of "axis of evil" was over the word "axis," suggesting that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea had formed an alliance like the one Germany and Italy had formed.  "Evil" was not worth remark.

Years later, as his memoirs appeared, others were still lamenting the consequences of all that the word had brought into play.  "Oh that Manichaean view of the world.  Oh the demonizing of enemies.  Look where it's left us."  A leader who inserts "evil" into a speech about another nation, as Ronald Reagan first did, has dropped a canister full of bad germs.

Reviewing all that George Bush was unaware of is a fool's task, I know, but here we've got a puzzle.  He and his advisors seemed to be doing their best to make themselves aware.  I can't count the number of places in Rumsfeld's and Gates's memoirs where, sometimes at Bush's insistence, they stop to "review all the assumptions" and make sure they haven't missed any "concealed hazards" in the course they have chosen.  They are highly motivated, they are bright, and they have gone to the best schools.  And yet, as revealed by their casual acceptance of the bomb-word "evil," they are clueless.  Where it may have counted most.

And it wasn't rocket science.  David Loy, a teacher like the rest in our liberal arts philosophy departments, could have told them right away what was in that bomb.  As he did after 9/11, explaining that "evil" is a term that people in our society, in contrast to a Buddhist society (he was living in Japan at the time), need in order to feel good about themselves.  "We can feel comfortable and secure in our own goodness only by attacking and destroying the evil outside us. If you want to be a hero, well, occasionally a natural disaster will do, but the best thing is a villain to battle.  St. George needs that dragon in order to be St. George."

Listen to Loy and professors like him and you, as soon as you hear "evil" come out of Bush's mouth, will start wondering whether Iraq was maybe George's dragon. 

You have a lot to go on.  Bush certainly was rooted in the Christian tradition that makes the opposition of good and evil most dramatic.  He himself had fallen into evil and been reborn into good.   He had chosen a speechwriter from fundamentalist Wheaton College, Michael Gerson, who spoke the language of moral dualism most readily.  And for philosophical justification of the Iraq invasion he chose, for a visit to the White House, a University of Chicago theologian, Jean Bethke Elshtain, whose bedrock convictions, according to colleagues, included "the existence of an absolute good and evil" (see Post #213).  For an alert student Bush will look like just the person who would reach for the word "evil," and start the whole Manichaean thing going.

Except he didn't reach for it.  It was fed to him.  By that graduate of Wheaton, Michael Gerson, who sees "axis of hate" in a draft of the State of the Union speech and knows right away it's not going to get the most out of Midwestern voters.  Change it to "axis of evil."  What's wrong with "hate"?   It's "not theological enough."

So we get the word that drove liberally educated people up the wall.  Graduates of Wheaton College are not liberally educated; they are theologically educated.  And this puts them in tune with voters in the Heartland, most of whom still gain their education in church.  This is power, votes in the Heartland.  Manichaeism is in the saddle.

In a liberal education you learn how to stand outside a culture and its vocabulary.  In English courses you learn how words work, and, drawing on what you have learned in history and philosophy courses, you get an idea of the dangers in words.  In the word "evil" you see, or give yourself a chance of seeing, how it turns eyes from threats to be avoided to natures to be abhorred.  "Evil" is an extreme abhorrence word.  And it brings a string of abhorrent-nature adjectives in its trail — vile, monstrous, wicked, vicious, base, depraved.  You see how those who use these words will be carried further and further from the external world and any threats it might present them with. You see (oh history, history) how it polarizes, how it turns opponents into demons, how it makes compromise or surrender difficult.

And that's why, when your president, in apparent innocence (I leave open the possibility that it was cynicism in his speechwriters), opens the bomb bays in his State of the Union Address and drops a canister like this you are going to be halfway up the wall with everybody else who has profited from a liberal education.

And the only way you can go is further up, because nobody in power, and least of all the president, will be noticing you.  With the painful consequences of the president's neglect of the complex external world in Iraq already, after three years, registering on the nation there he is, in the chapel at Camp David, having "one of the best preachers" he's ever heard confirm the stand he has taken.  "Evil is real, biblical, and prevalent.... Some say ignore it, some say it doesn't exist.  But evil must not be ignored, it must be restrained."  There would be a cost, but, according to Bush's memoir, the preacher reminded the president that "there has never been a noble cause devoid of sacrifice" and assured him that "the Scriptures put great premiums on faithfulness, perseverance, and overcoming.  We do not quit or give up.  We always believe there is no such thing as a hopeless situation."  A Christian up against evil can't compromise, and can't quit.  A liberally educated student, standing outside the Christian culture and vocabulary, will observe how easy it is to substitute "Islamist" for "Christian" in the preacher's vocabulary.

And he or she won't be distracted by the goodness or brightness or earnestness of individual Christians or those who help them.  Bush's helpers, the ones who went over and over their assumptions and listed again and again the hazards, were as good and bright and earnest as any you can find.  They thought hard.  They just didn't think broadly.  It was all theological or military.  They all might as well have gone to Wheaton or West Point.

So, another plug for liberal education and English courses.  Parents, direct your children to them.  Children, listen closely and study hard.  Everybody hope that the teachers understand the tradition they work in.  The further it spreads among citizens the wiser the country's foreign policy will be.  Start in the Heartland.