284. A New Yorker Cartoon, Our Time, and Past Literature

In the cartoon (New Yorker, 3-9-15) a man lies face down on a bed with his head buried in a pillow.  The woman sitting next to him says, "Snap of it, Ray — it's just sex."  Taking the woman to be speaking for our time I couldn't help recalling (and looking up)  these passages from earlier times:

[...] suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

 — Robert Jordan and Maria making love in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Whom earthen you, by deathless lips adored,

Wild-eyed and stammering to the grasses thrust,

And deep into her crystal body poured

The hot and sorrowful sweetness of the dust:

— Edna St. Vincent Millay, of Endymion making love to Selene, Sonnet LII

Then Julia let me woo thee,

Thus, thus to come unto me;

         And when I shall meet

         Thy silv'ry feet,

My soul I'll pour into thee.

— Robert Herrick, "Night Piece, to Julia"

Rowing in Eden —

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor  Tonight —

In Thee!

— Emily Dickinson, "Wild Nights — Wild Nights!"

When my arms wrap you round I press

My heart upon the loveliness

That has long faded from the world.

— William Butler Yeats, "He Remembers Forgotten Beauty."

O my America! my new-found-land,

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man mann’d,

My Mine of precious stones, My Empirie,

How blest am I in this discovering thee!

— John Donne, "To His Mistress, G0ing to Bed"

Now from his breast into his eyes the ache

of longing mounted and he wept at last,

his dear wife,  clear and faithful, in his arms,

longed for

as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer

spent in rough water where his ship went down...

in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:

and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,

her white arms round him pressed as though forever.
— the returned Odysseus and Penelope reunited in their wedding bed, Homer, Odyssey    

283. What's It Like To Be a Muslim Prison Chaplain for Jihadists?

According to Salah Hamidi, writing in Wednesday's NYT (3-4-15), being a Muslim chaplain in a French prison these days is like being "between the cutting board and the cleaver."  On one side he's got the administration, expecting him to detect and counter Islamic radicalization with sound Islamic doctrine, and on the other side radicals thinking their Islamism is sounder than anybody's.  He tells us it's "mentally tiring" and we can imagine it, though for most of us Christians, not well.  We don't have enough Islamic doctrine to draw on.

How do we acquire enough doctrine to be able to put ourselves in Hamidi's shoes?  Through thorough study, obviously, though whether we will ever be able to bring ourselves up to Hamidi's level, or the level of any Muslim chaplain, is doubtful.  Seeing that, most Christians do what I do: Google. 

I can't begin to tell you what a mess that takes you into these days.  Page after page of the Quran's "peace verses," read one way then the other.  Proclaims non-violence, does not, justifies violence, does not, yes but the context, yes but the next verse, ah but there are more violence-promoting verses in the Quran than in other scriptures, there are not, count them, OK but there are degrees of promotion.  It's a contest as intense as the one over whose religion promoted the most, or the worst, atrocities.

Over all the Quran-quoters give as well as they take from the Bible-quoters, even though, as I see it, they're fighting under a handicap.  Too many other passages in the Quran make clear that the ground supporting all their effort is political, of this world, while the ground of all their opponents' effort is spiritual, of a another world.  It's hard to proclaim peace if you're responsible for victory over another faction or nation on earth.

It's easy, though, to claim that your side is peaceful if you think inductively (from observed behavior to general characterization), as Western peacemakers, usually liberals, do.  The Muslim who makes the following contribution to a forum (http://www.goodreads.com) is thinking inductively:

The majority of Muslims are peaceful people.... For example, in Indonesia alone, there are over 200 million Muslims. And how many of those are militants? A drop in the ocean. Unfortunately, some people stubbornly consider the acts of these militants as correctly representing Islam, instead of the acts of the 200 million Muslims.  (Femmy Syahrani, Indonesia)

The Christian says yes, but it's that drop that's killing us, and the drop comes from your theological water, distilled in the Quran. 

The observer, noting that the Christian is thinking deductively (from authoritative statement to particular consequence— see Post 275), sees them talking past each other forever.

Hamidi is facing passionate, narrow-visioned deductive thinkers.  "The Quran says this and I therefore must do that."  He gets no place if he says, "But millions of Muslims don't think it says this and are not doing that."  To the militant those people are not good Muslims and their reading is not sound. And he whips out the passages.  Who's the better Muslim?  Who's the better reader?  I can see why Hamidi would be tired.

I can't help picturing a Christian chaplain facing his killer-for-God.  What a pile of scriptural ammunition he has!  How little need to shape it and clean it for use. "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you."  No equivocation, no qualification, no following abrogation.  (What follows is "If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also.")  And underneath it all the solidest possible ground: "My kingdom is not of this world."  For those inclined to go political there's only the slightest compromise: "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's."

Yes, there are contrary passages, like "I come to bring not peace but a sword," but these are few and easily taken from the hands of a disputant.  The Christian chaplain goes home much less tired.

Now we're at the dangerous place, and I mean danger.  We're about to take the first step down the path to world-wide religious war. 

I don't think that's scare-monger's hyperbole.  I am drawing on the wars I have seen in my lifetime and those I have read about in greatest detail.  In those wars I think the first steps are taken when one people starts picturing another people as bad people.  They leave the practical and political, the specific injuries, the dangers, the threats, and go ethical.  These people, their religion, their culture, are bad. 

Say that and you've put yourself on a genuinely slippery slope.  Let those other people hear you and you help them onto their slope.  The two of you are soon in the goodness-badness war that leads to, is almost necessary to, a shooting war.

I think Femmy Syahrani, the Indonesian Muslim I quoted in the passage above, has the kind of ear we need to worry about.  It is tuned to the representation of Islam, Islam as a whole.   That will take in the Islam that, I daresay, gives order to her life.  Call that bad, call her people bad, and she will begin to think of  you as bad.  Already you are "stubborn" in considering "the acts of these militants as correctly representing Islam."

I know, worrying about the sensitivity of the other side's ears when ours are getting "Great Satan!  Baby killer!" may seem over-scrupulous, but I think the stakes here are too high to worry about that.  We claim to be the enlightened ones, don't we?  And doesn't that impose a greater responsibility?

So, what do we go for?  I say (and have already said, in Posts 273, 275) go for the smallest changes in our law books that will protect us from the new threats to our security.  Turn the problem over to lawyers.  The more we can get public commentators to follow the discipline enforced on them by judges the better chance we'll have of avoiding what endangers us most, free derogation of other people.  Badmouthing.

282. Calm Down, Listen to Netanyahu

I know, the Islamic State, beheading people as it goes, has expanded into Libya, has a foothold in Algeria and Egypt, and now has its eyes on Lebanon.  Republicans and the Wall Street Journal, followed by The Economist, are multiplying their attempts to get us more concerned. They even had me worried. And then along came this article in The Atlantic.

The Islamic State, I am convinced after reading Graeme Wood's unemotional account of it (The Atlantic, 3-15),  is run by such a bunch of losers, playing their parts in such a hopeless narrative, based on such a doubtful ideology, that Americans have nothing whatsoever to worry about.

Losers?  How's this: If the ruler of the State, the caliph, deviates even slightly in his implementation of Shariah his followers can replace him.  Have you ever heard a surer invitation to chaotic governance?  Can't you hear the charges of deviation, the quarrels over the exact law, the proclamations of opposing factions, the incitements to revolt, and, finally, the assertions of purer devotion by the usurping caliph, and his replacement, and his replacement.  It's the formula that made Muslim countries losers before every united modern country that wanted to take advantage of them. It's what will have these sky-shooters aiming at each other in no time.

Hopeless narrative?  Try this: In the last days "the armies of Rome [the West] will mass to meet the armies of Islam in Northern Syria" and "Islam's final showdown with an anti-messiah will occur in Jerusalem after a period of renewed Islamic conquest."  The believer's part is to effect the conquest and prepare the way for the messiah, the Mahdi, who with God's help will lead them in the final victory of good over evil.  Only losers crazed by their own losses would find any hope in a pre-musketry vision like this.  (Wood tells us that IS propagandists draw clips from "Hollywood war movies set in medieval times" with armies "on horseback carrying ancient weapons.")

As for ideology all you need is the losers' belief that all this is predicted and will be ensured by God.  Remind yourself of what has happened to those holding such an ideology, or theology, when they go up against superior weapons and you see how it's going to go.

Weapons now, think of them and you might see something really worth your worry, Iran with nukes.   Look at what the IS caliphs command and you see only backwardness and incompetence.  They can't get oil out of the ground by themselves, they can't refine it, they can't manufacture tanks and guns, they can't do anything but use things Western technology has produced.  In some of this they are expert, as when they design a web site or make TV clips.  Otherwise they are a laugh.  Not so with Iran, not by a long shot.  They've got most of the goods and all the know-how.  And nobody will be laughing if they, sharing the most dangerous parts of the IS ideology, have a chance to act on it.

Once again it's a matter of reflex vs. calculation.  We see an image on a screen and go out of our minds with worry.  "My God, these people are now only a short distance from Italy."  What are we thinking?   Islamic terrorists are no more capable of jumping that distance than Communists were of jumping the 90 miles from Cuba.  You want a jump look at the Iranian missiles.  Calculate the distance they can travel.  Figure the throw weight when producible A-bombs are aboard.  What are we doing worrying about guys with knives and scimitars?

I don't think we can go through that calculation without concluding that Benjamin Netanyahu, pain in the neck that he is, is way ahead of us in strategic thinking.  Maybe he shouldn't be addressing Congress the way he is going to, maybe he belongs to the party most likely to make suckers of us at a bargaining table, maybe he's got the support of some of the most unlikable people in America, but that shouldn't keep us from listening to what he has to say about Iran tomorrow.

281. "Safe Transgression" in "Fifty Shades of Grey."

"Safe transgression."  Is there such a thing?  In a column on "Fifty Shades of Grey" (NYT 2-15) Ross Douthat calls it a dream.  He sees the sado-masochism in that movie as a power exercise in which the woman is anything but safe.  On the other hand when my wife's parents played a game of cards that was forbidden I'd say they were safe.  They were 450 miles from their home town and they had pulled down the shades.  There were no victims.

Somebody with a higher view would no doubt say that the card game was not really a transgression.  It only violated a social code that my wife's parents had abandoned.  All that was left of the violation was the tingle.

So what is a real transgression?  If we say there are such things, how do we distinguish real ones from apparent, and therefore safe, ones?

One way, drawing on our examples above, would be to say that violation of a code you believe in is real (or, to avoid the objective reality problem, "real for you"); any other "violation" is only apparent. 

Fine, but from the higher view that's a poor way to do it.  The victimizer, by adjusting his code locator, gets off free.  The sexual revolution Christian Grey joins becomes, in Douthat's terms, "a permission slip for the strong and privileged to prey upon the weak and easily exploited."

Then there's the moment when the violation you thought was only apparent turns out to be real.  "That was a terrible thing I did to that woman."  The permission slip turns into a summons.

What explains such transitions?  Resurrection, through memory, of an earlier code, parental or religious?  Or just maturity, learning that life is not a garden where you can pick any pleasure you want?

Socrates would say that it's learning more about yourself, what's inside.  That might be your conscience, excavated by inquiry, or it might be your soul, seen in a vision.  If it's the latter you're really down there, uncovering the generator, the "nexus of your values," or, as Socrates would have it, The Real You.  You see that you've got something inside that can be injured and needs care.

You can't go down that far, though, without opening up your vocabulary to some striking changes.  "Soul" enters on grounds of vitality and tradition.  Who ever heard of caring for a nexus?  "Transgression" has to include transgression against yourself, and "victim," who does that refer to?  You, Christian Grey, you too.

280. The Return of Spiderman — in The Economist!

If a citizen of a democracy doesn't have the time or brain to figure all the ins and outs of his country's foreign policy he has to rely on a few newspapers and magazines.  And that, fellow voters, can be ticklish business.  Choose a publication that looks like it will save a busy middlebrow's time most efficiently and you discover that it's slanted, really, toward lowbrows.  With me that was Time magazine.  Pick one that seems the brainiest, and therefore least likely to slant, and you discover that its brains all slant, intellectually, one way.  With me that was the Partisan Review.  (I was equating brains with academic neutrality.  I had to age some.)

Now in old age my three-quarters of a brow counts, for the daily view, on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and, for the larger view, on The Economist, the New York Review, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker.  For fill-in and state of the controversy I count on Wikipedia, which tries harder than any of them to maintain academic neutrality.  (See its Guidelines for contributors.) 

With the conservative Journal in there you can see that I'm looking to balance the liberal Economist, particularly in foreign affairs.  But, with the Economist getting more and more emotional about Vladimir Putin that's getting harder to do.  In July they had him on the cover looking out from the middle of a spider web (see Post 253).  Now here he is as a puppet master, the strings from his fingers descending to darkly controlled agents, unseen below.  He's a man ready, as the lead editorial puts it, "to stoop to methods the West cannot emulate without sullying itself" (2/14-20).

I'm getting worked up the way Time used to work me up over the Communists allowed to spread their tentacles all over East Asia. Oh these evil people.  Oh how we need somebody to stand up to them.

But that can't be.  This is The Economist.  How can it be doing the Time magazine thing?  Wikipedia says "it targets highly educated readers."  Its own masthead puts it on the side of "intelligence" against "an unworthy ignorance."  Its brow is higher than anybody's.

279. "The Utter Absurdity of War"

Now here's Nora Roberts in Sunday's NYT Book Review saying that she'd like to have President Obama and every other world leader read Joseph Heller's Catch-22 because it's "a brilliant, funny, crazed story that perfectly depicts the utter absurdity of war."

I have little energy left to beat on Catch-22 (three blog posts, two articles, and a dozen or more dinner-table rants will really take it out of you) so I will simply say one thing: that I have yet to find, among all the people I have questioned, one person willing to say that fighting the Nazis was "'wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate" — that is, absurd. 

A lot of people are willing to say, "Men who gave orders in World War II were often wildly unreasonable or illogical etc," and a lot more are willing to say, "War is bloody and cruel and terrible," and the latter is probably what Roberts means, but there's this word "absurd," and she, and (my guess) all the professors who voted Catch-22 the seventh best novel of the twentieth century, can't resist it.  It's so existential-philosophical.  What else could elevate a shallow book for 1960s juveniles, a book full of frat-boy sexism, vaudeville logic, ponderous whimsicality, and specious humanity, to such heights?  And keep it there after all these years of education and sophistication?  (See Posts 7, 54, 125, 129, 224.)

278. Update on the Great Game

If you don't remember how Prof. John J. Mearshimer deplored our move to expand NATO eastward (Foreign Affairs 93:5, 2014, my Post 262) maybe you remember diplomat George Kennan's warning at the time, "I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely."  I placed the move as part of "The Great Game" played by Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century and joined enthusiastically by the U. S. in the twentieth (Post 262).

Even if you have been too busy to pay close attention you probably know that the game hasn't been going too well for us.  We looked either weak or stupid after Putin did what he wanted to the country of the good man we supported [Saakashvili, of Georgia] and we looked like a mere noisemaker when he went into Crimea. 

Now it looks like our opponent is going to put some serious points on the board.  As the leaders of Germany, France, Ukraine, and Russia sat down in Minsk he still, as the NYT analysis (Andrew Higgins, 2-12-15) made clear, "held the decisive cards."  The leaders "confronted the reality that Mr. Putin held the upper hand precisely because he is prepared to use military force to get what he wants in diplomacy."

Why couldn't we see that moving NATO so close to Russia was a bad move, that it was even what Kennan called it at the time, "a tragic mistake"?  Why couldn't we listen to Kennan?  Because, I think, we were deafened by our own sounds.  Democrats wanted to make good sounds and Republicans wanted to make tough sounds.  And now here we are, reduced to a squeak.   We weren't willing to go to war.  We never were.  Putin is.  Squeak, squeak while his points go up.

The game is played in front of American voters.  An administration can't retreat in front of Republicans because that would be soft.  An administration has to go forward because of Democrats, who can't leave good people to their fate (the first moves east were made under the Carter and Clinton administrations). 

Part of the problem is that we keep getting the wrong people into the game.  Generals and Defense department types (think Rumsfeld) are not the people to play diplomacy.  Not even, if they are in the administration, to comment on it.  Their job (as in the administrative reform I dreamed of in Post 271) is to carry out what the policy-makers decide on, and give advice on capabilities. 

 But just a week ago Lt. Gen. Frederick Hodges' view of  "NATO's Russian Front" appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion pages (7-8 Feb, 15).  He "won't weigh in directly in the Washington policy debate" but Russia, he says, "has set out to redraw the boundaries of Europe."  And he won't worry about our provoking dangerous responses.  "You know, frankly, you hear this often from people in the West, 'Oh, we don't want to provoke the Russians.'  I think concern about provoking the Russians is probably misplaced.  You can't provoke them.  They're already on a path to do what they want to do."

Once again I find myself wishing that American leaders, and behind them the American people, would ask themselves the question asked in tough bars, and the sooner the better: "Are you willing to fight?"  If the answer is no you sit back and keep your mouth shut.