|
|
|||||||||||
| 1 Introduction
This article was written after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, and refers to responses to them. At the same time, it deals with more general aspects of confrontation and forgiveness, which these traumatic events urge us to consider. It does not deal with bio-terrorist attacks, or the strategic issue of the present methods of bombing in Afghanistan, about which many who believe a military response is appropriate nonetheless have questions and grave uncertainties. a Evil people? When US Vice President Dick Cheney says, "We are dealing here with evil people," or when President George Bush calls the Al Qaeda terrorist network "evil doers," the implication is that this exposes them as irredeemably opposed to normal 'people like us.' They do not need to be dignified with ordinary processes of human justice. They are a non-human cancer which needs to be destroyed. This therefore justifies the use of armed force to destroy them - even if the euphemism "brought to justice" is employed by politicians to defend such action. Are they irredeemably evil? Is anyone? People once described as evil, such as Ben Gurion in Israel or Martin McGuiness in Northern Ireland, became successful political leaders. Were such instances redemption, or victories for evil? b The virtue of sides? British Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke constantly of "standing shoulder to shoulder with America," a phrase that was picked up again and again by other leaders and observers. In the UK Sunday Times, respected columnist Brian Appleyard wrote a passionate, intense essay on why so many peoples hate the USA. He enlarged on historian Michael Lind's thesis that since the Reformation people feel they need to protest against whoever is the dominant power of the day, and concluded,
Yet this language of "taking sides" disturbs many peace-making and anti-war groups, just as it alienates minorities in many Islamic countries who cannot believe their governments are taking sides with the USA against an Islamic leadership, the Taliban. This article will seek to understand what is good about taking sides, as well as what is bad. It seeks to uncover a spiritual dimension to taking sides, and to consider how vital taking sides is to the process of deep, lasting forgiveness. It also asks about our responses to evil, and the ease with which we demonise other people to justify our cruelty and our inability to do anything creative to improve a difficult situation. 2 Forgiving - 'You are on his side' Taking sides at a personal, one-to-one level has a very different meaning from taking sides at an international one. A lot of us naively tend to apply personal morality to much vaster and more complex situations. The sheer scale of the threat and the malevolence directed at the US has caused many liberals to review their position on this question. So, firstly, what of taking sides at the personal level? Recently a van overtook me on the M9 from Edinburgh to Glasgow, driven aggressively. The driver suddenly cut back in front of me, quite dangerously. I felt a surge of anger, and raised my hand to begin honking the car horn, flashing my headlights, and the rest. But then I sensed a voice within me say, "But why not see it like this – that you’re on his side." This had a profound effect on me. I forgot the incident - the van had disappeared anyway - and began to ask, Can I say this about many, many other people, including those who hurt me … "I’m here to help them. They’re often in a mess, or forced by too much pressure, or untutored, or lost … Can I take the step of placing myself on their side to help them?" This opened a new awareness for me of the scope and scale of forgiveness.
This question - "on your side against whom or what?" - will be the crunch question to explore here. Taking sides can be profoundly good ... not because people take our side but because we take sides, situation by situation, against the evils which divide and damage human beings and their possibilities for love. Usually taking sides evokes powerful emotions, both 'for and against' (!) In a reader's letter responding to Brian Appleyard's article, Brian Verity expressed a common assumption:
Does it echo the Gospels? Certainly President Bush is prone to lean on the language of the Christian Right. That language conveys a self-righteousness, a them-and-us in which we are the saved, the elect, the morally pure, and so on... and the others are not worth understanding.
3 Was Jesus' teaching about taking sides? Is this a correct position with respect to the Christian Gospels, though? Many within US religious groups, let alone those marginalised by them, do not find virtue in a religious culture's withdrawal into a safe haven or group of like-minded people who are majoring on "keeping themselves clean" and damn the rest. (Normally they would express this as, "The rest are damned anyway.") This is like the Essene cult in Jesus' time. It is constantly perplexing to realise that bourgeois church-going, though not cut off from everyday society like the Essenes, has no higher ambition than to be targeted in the same direction - keeping oneself and one's family clean. The ambiguity of being on one side is expressed not once but twice in two contradictory sayings of Jesus … "He who is not with me is against me" (Luke 11.23) and "Whoever is not against us is for us." (Mark 9.40). The first is divisive and polarising - a black-or-white, back-to-basics clarity which Jesus certainly often used in his sayings. The second is open, inclusive, inviting and welcoming. The first saying - the polarising one - comes when Jesus is accused of using evil power to exorcise and heal people. Jesus wanted to say very strongly that when you are confronting the prince of demons, Beelzebub, you have to "attack and overpower him, take his armour and share out the spoils." (v.22) But the second is in a different context - and it is important to understand the difference. Here Jesus was correcting his followers for stopping a healer from exorcising and healing 'in Jesus' name,' because he was not one of the followers. Jesus was welcoming and inclusive to human beings regardless of their social standing - outcast or Pharisee, Roman officer or criminal. Of course not all could respond well to that, but if they denounced him he strikingly maintained the openness in continuing to speak with them, challenging and inviting them to talk it through and sometimes even changing his own mind. (A Greek woman who challenged him to let the 'dogs' [non-Jews] eat the scraps as well - Mark 7.28). We can see here that, for Jesus, the way he set out for his followers was indeed to take sides and stand in forceful opposition to evil spirits and forces; but not to take sides against any other people or to use force and confrontation , but rather to look for deep conversation with them about the main issues of life and Spirit. One of his most unique teachings was about loving one's enemies, not hating them. 4 Beyond loyalty People get passionate because of a sense of side. Taking a side, or pulling people onto our side, is one of the most basic ways to bolster and enlarge our sense of self and of our confidence in our ability to change things. (See the article The no-name game for some of the ways people can take sides against you.) We are very familiar with the way knowing you have an enemy seems to unite people and energise them – the British during the Second World War, for example. Large-scale world leaders seem to become 'great' by standing in opposition to an enemy - Churchill with Hitler, Truman with Stalin, Kennedy with Krushchev over Cuba.
As a good motivator and energiser for evangelism this sounded convincing at the time. Many years later I realised that in Jesus’ time few if any people would have thought they were not on God’s side. In fact his type of evangelism and preaching were directed to a new awareness of God and to extraordinary intimacy with God, unlike today's evangelism, which is usually directed to bringing people into membership of churches. Taking sides meant something different for early Christianity. Dunion's approach focussed on loyalty to a particular human cause and side, not on any spiritual confrontation. Loyalty springs from this sense of side. There is a telling examination of it in Roger Donaldson's dramatised but largely factual movie Thirteen Days (2000), about the way the Kennedys handled the Cuba Missile Crisis in 1962. The film was scripted by David Self, based on pre-published White House tapes. Kenny O’Donnell (Kevin Costner) is the political advisor (Special Assistant) to the President. At the beginning of the narrative, on the phone to an aide in Chicago who is not handling things that well, he says,
Very gradually and subtly, the narrative and the history take O'Donnell (and us) on a journey in which some world leaders choose not to take sides against one another, but to assist each other to negotiate and step back. Loyalty is not the high virtue it seemed to be. Loyalty is a high virtue in institutional thinking and practice, and it is the military chiefs of staff who exhibit it so dangerously. The crisis was averted because the Kennedys chose not to polarise, but to believe and trust a constructive, forward-looking message from Moscow, not a second, disastrously divisive one. (An astonishingly classic "half-empty, half-full glass of water.") Bobby Kennedy met with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrinyn to convey this, and Dobrinyn concluded by saying to Bobby Kennedy:
Choosing to side with a human enemy against a 'thing', an evil spirit which is causing the division, the threat, the build-up of terrible powers, is a much larger-scale version of my 'divine nudge' in response to the van driver.
A voice of realism will begin to say, quite rightly, "But these 'evils' are so intangible! And if we are always taking sides with our attacker, then in effect we take sides with no one, and no one will know where we stand." As they say in the Middle East, "No one can be everyone's friend." Our loyalties will not be clear - and no one will know whom they can trust and whom they should avoid at all costs! In many ways, this voice of realism speaks correctly about our day-to-day world. Many spiritualities and religions encourage us to believe that 'in the end' or at the end of time, love may conquer all. But even if we have the capacity and spiritual depth to always love - and to forgive, and to reconcile - and as our constant response, we have no right to insist that others do. Almost all of us, as human beings, need our sides, our protections and securities. We are seldom so empowered that we can stand without the reinforcement of human certainties and loyalties of like-minded people. We can seldom stand in the manner in which greater spiritual leaders have to stand. In Robert Bolt's play and movie A Man for All Seasons, the great 16thC English statesman and spiritual leader Thomas More says with sorrowed but passionate wisdom to his idealist Lutheran son-in law William Roper,
It is a young idealism in spirituality which will argue that love conquers all, that all 'we' need to do is pray and generate love for the universe ... and bin Laden will repent and surrender. A more mature spirituality knows how weak we actually are, how ignorant of the consequences of our actions, how unable to see the course of action which would improve an enemy's life. (The fact that the rebuilding of Afghanistan is being so openly discussed and pursued by the UN, and the US and its allies, is a great tribute to those political leaders who have kept it to the front of the military agenda.) To an extent unparalleled in any other religion, Jesus' example was to continue to face his attackers and persecutors, accepting his own killing. His extraordinary value of non-violent martyrdom - accepting his own murder in order to help his enemies rather than oppose them - inspired many early Christians to adopt the same value. He and they truly believed they knew enough about how to internationally create, persuade and impose and live out a structure of international law and justice - the kingdom of God. He and they were drinking deeply of the power to forgive and release others. But most of us today use his language without much understanding of his methods, without being grounded in our peoples' suffering, and without the confidence to awaken other people to the presence and demands of divine transformation. And with a preference to label, reject and alienate other people rather than work to understand and oppose the evils which are affecting them.
6 Towards a mature spirituality
More generally, spirituality develops in us, and it develops us. Rather like the transition from a Freudian view of human life - where the main issues are about health, achievement and orthodoxy and how to get people back on track - to a Jungian one - where the issues expand to encompass complexity, unorthodoxy, creativity and evil. Growing into deeper spirituality means that we undergo transformation ourselves. (The longer article Growing into deeper spirituality explores these issues systematically.) Not merely a refinement, but changes in values and world-view, change in priorities and perception of ourselves and others. When we are relatively young in faith and spirit, we will want to protect the young and tender plants in our new and joyful world-view, even while speaking an idealistic language which implies that "heaven is just round the corner". We will make walls and hedges to protect the precious discoveries and doorways. The spiritually young are at once both mean and aggressive, and yet emotionally open and full of hope. Growing spiritually includes a greater awareness of our own frailties and failings. So we can see that, when people attack us or hurt us, it is not just because we deserve it, of course. But neither is it just because they are bad. To point to a related example, in our immaturity we can tend to believe that, when someone is kind to us, it is no more than we deserve. There is no need to express gratitude. (I think of my teenage sons - but also of the teenage self inside me, and of most work colleagues, religious congregations, and so on.) Whereas mature people are inspiringly grateful that they have some "wonderfully kind strangers" in their midst, and do not assume they deserve only the best. In the same way, when we are attacked, a more mature view can see that there is much we should have done to improve the situation - long ago. We recognise that we share the same world, the same resources and poverties, the same histories and kinds of failure.
But most of the time we lack the power to help our aggressor. This is where the enormous differences between personal spirituality and ethical action at international level become more evident. We can imagine and sometimes have the will to visit a personal enemy and seek to reconcile her or bring her to some evaluation and fair response. But in international conflict we simply lack the spiritual authority, cultural understanding, physical resources, energy, time and patience to provide safe opportunities to meet with an enemy, work out a common future with him, and provide him with the strengths he needs. The most we can do is to attempt to protect our society, culture, lifestyle, and so on. That will often entail responding to force with force. (Saying this is not to reflect on the rights and wrongs of a particular military strategy.) It was saddening and moving to discover that the Saudi family of Osama bin Laden had gone to him in 1993, when he was based in Sudan. They tried repeatedly to win him back to a more civilised side, and away from the terrorists he had joined with. They could attempt this then, and yet be unsuccessful. No one knows how to do this today, when he is in hiding and entrenched. Michael Griffin, the author of a lauded study of the Taliban, "Reaping the Whirlwind," believes that the US has to use force now. He comments that "since the bombings of the US embassies in Africa in 1998, the US government has tried unsuccessfully to get bin Laden extradited by diplomatic and legal means" despite presenting a large amount of documented evidence of his complicity. Ben Bradshaw, a UK Foreign Office Minister, has said that it is hard to see what else we can do to prevent further outrages, and that those who oppose the use of force "haven't come up with a better alternative." So we will tend to take sides. And we will tend to use force to defend our precious and cherished fellows, and will sadly tend to demonise or label our enemies as unreachable. Those world religions originating in the Middle East tend to illustrate rather than oppose this trend. The Christian crusades were one of the worst examples in history of political zeal replacing religious spirit. The Qur’an expresses a code for honourable fighting more specific than other religions ["Fighting is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you." (al-Baqarah, 2.216)]. Islam has often focussed energy on what was originally the lesser jihad ('striving') of confronting non-believers, even though the greater jihad of striving against carnal desires should take precedence. What does it mean to make a strongly spiritual response in the midst of such a history of polarisation? The truest we can be to the spiritual dimension in our chosen religion or journey is follow three strands:
As we shall see below, protesting against military action in the name of peace and love often uses and inflames methods which do not reflect that spiritual dimension.
8 The work of identifying evils Because evils almost always appear in their effect on human beings, the first quality required in identifying evils is a great wellspring of compassion. This means basing our actions on a perspective in which we can distinguish human beings from the forces, pressures, ambitions and institutional systems which so often drive them. In her moving book Magnificat, Elizabeth Ruth Obbard says compassion is
From a different perspective, Raymond Fung agrees that compassion is only possible when we see people as both wrongdoers and victims at the same time. (See The power to initiate forgiveness §9.) Most of our descriptions of evil come originally from religious traditions. Evil was ascribed to other religions and personalised in their gods whenever they posed a physical threat to the community. In some eastern religions, particularly Hinduism, evil was ascribed to some of one's own gods. The original Hebrew word for evil - ra - meant 'coming to bits' or 'rotting.' And gradually evils were referred to the forces and trends that disturb and dismantle one's own society.Popular, media-guided culture can reflect quite primitive fears whenever it applies demonising words to other people. People are labelled evil because they threaten to take away the little we have and can control. We label as evil because we fear that someone is threatening to dismantle our world. Author Stephen King understands and reflects on this again and again in his novels - think of the desperate, fundamentalist mother in Carrie, demonising anyone who might take her daughter away from her; the only thing she has left. Sometimes we view large businesses and multinationals as evil whenever we are brought closer to the personal suffering and desperation they have caused and perhaps concealed. Of course any religious or secular tradition today will have its list of evils. Child abuse comes near the top for most in the West. But usually there are marked differences and contradictions. The 'evil' of sexual freedom for one tradition is countered by the 'evil' of sexual intolerance for another. Eroding the values of the nuclear family by homophobia. The openness of the bodhisatva by the pursuit of religious reward for oneself in the next life. Racial and religious tolerance by pride in national security and identity. Environmental lobbies by jobs in weapons industries. Medical and genetic research by natural law lobbies. And so on. Evils are identified in a tradition because they threaten to undermine the values of the tradition. In this way, the cultural and economic imperialism of the US over the past 50 years has come to seem an enormous evil to many Moslems. And now Al-Quid seems an enormous evil to most Westernised or Westernising countries. Spiritual people in both traditions need to help their fellows to recognise the evils in our own traditions and cultures, as well as in our enemies. But is it therefore impossible to identify any absolute evil - forces that rot and decay people regardless of their national, cultural or religious position? We can go someway towards this by returning to the theme of this article - taking sides. To be concerned about this question means unavoidably adopting a certain perspective, in which international and global peace, economic and political justice, environmental well-being and health have primary value. Over the past 50 years our knowledge of nuclear weaponry, and of the fragility of the Earth in a dangerous universe, have focussed these values.In this world-view, what is most evil is the force of division itself. Polarising people, labelling and rejecting, stirring up emotional and sometimes violent protest, seeking to mock, deride or dismiss, lock away or abandon, or to profit from someone else's misfortune - these are the expressions of fundamental evil. And therefore one of the cardinal weapons for combating this evil is forgiveness - the power to release people from their past and their behaviour and set them on a new road. 9 The voice of human fallibility The voice of an open, public recognition of our own inabilities is missing in the attitudes and speeches of most world leaders. We know that they should accept their answerability before international law and an international near-consensus. If the US or any military power seems to be pooh-poohing the relevance of international standards to its military actions, it will lose its claim to moral rectitude. The real test comes with public answerability. Will the US and its allies accept evaluation of their conduct of this war by the international community? Before the air strikes began, Colin Powell, Tony Blair and others worked extremely hard to communicate and to seek world consensus, and that kind of endeavour has to increase if this answerability is to become significant again. This answerability to a larger court - however fragile - is the only alternative to imperialism and arrogance.
Improving international consensus and establishing enforceable agreements is nowadays a definitive part of a government's claim to greatness. The hardest step human beings seem to find at the moment is to provide "courts of just conversation," places of openness and peace where brutal men and women of force, and their victims, can meet face to face. (See The power to initiate forgiveness §11.) South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a shining but lonely example. But - startlingly - the voice of open recognition of our inabilities is just as absent in the protests of many peace-making agencies. Gandhi showed how non-violent protest is life-giving and transformational when disadvantaged or powerless members of a state use it as the only way they have to change the practices and attitudes within the state. This is protest by people enmeshed in the damage of the reality they are trying to change - protest for one's own rights and dignities. It is very different when people protest in the name of an ideal that they are not even suffering for themselves. And more so when they do not seem to acknowledge the scale of the threat to the civilised life they take for granted. There is a huge gulf between the values and ideals of peace-making, international reconciliation and one-world visions, and the frequent methods of angry protest against and condemnation of our political leaders. More insidiously, many will not take to the streets to protest, but will complain and condemn around the dinner table or coffee bar. There are legitimate concerns about the apparent impossibility of seeking change in an institution, which is a different issue from seeking change in other people. Institutions create their own powers and spirits, and can conceal evils and demons. And protest is often the only response we are able to make to them. In one of the great historical examples of protest against institutional evils, Martin Luther did not know how to start in order to win over the catholic hierarchy. All he could do was nail his protest to the local church door. But until his protectors took him away, he continued to speak to and try to win over his superiors. The way to protest against military action is not to complain but to seek to win over our own leaders by forgiveness, love and empowerment for difficult, courageous and long-term international negotiation. To return to Jesus' example, we may protest and challenge face-to-face, but if we do not then we begin to take sides against them ... and taking sides against fellow human beings is not part of a 'spiritual agenda.'
10 Spiritual talk without responsibility It will help us to look further into two strands in peace-protests. The first is what is involved in seeking a conversion in another person. Protests build on an underlying desire to see change in political leaders' attitudes and therefore policies. We want a kind of conversion of mind and heart in our leaders and our fellows. As we noted above, seeking someone's conversion is demanding, and can be costly. The face-to-face conversation it requires exposes one's own certainties and frailties, powers and lack of power. I know that many pious people will believe that praying for that conversion is the most and the best that they can do. I pray a lot, and have no desire to minimise prayer, only to properly focus it, reflecting the practice of primary founders of religion. Prayer with other people for the increase of their openness to divine power and transformation (and one's own openness) is eminently valuable and right-focussed. But I am struck by another profundity in Jesus' teaching. He prayed to God, "I am not praying for the world, but for those you have given me." (John 15.9) He saw his followers as agents of light who were to work in the world and he prayed for his joy to be in them and for protection from evil (vv.14-15) The conversion of another human being is not normally anything to pray for. It is something to work at face-to-face. Since it is institutional Christianity which has fostered this idea of praying for "the conversion of the heathen" so much more intensively than other religions, it is important to notice that from its source in Jesus, conversion is a consequence of active, sometimes dangerous evangelism. Not of prayer. This applies especially to the empty prayers for the Christianising of a country. Yes, sometimes God converts a Paul or a Cornelius or a Constantine without human action, etc., but these examples do not make it a realistic topic for well-meaning prayer. This also means that spiritual people should give more energy to seeking a change of heart in those they see face-to-face, rather than in those they see briefly in a TV news-bite. We are all connected to one another by a small number of separations ('six degrees of separation'), and this heart-warming observation should inspire us to sense that our local initiatives will gradually impact on many political leaders too. 11 Spiritual talk without gratitude The second strand is more insidious. Indeed it is difficult to discuss it without immediately suggesting offence - and I am not trying to do so. Sometimes in peace-making there can be an extraordinary lack of gratitude for the lives of military personnel who protect our society and ensure the freedoms we enjoy to pray for their conversion. There are some similarities with the manner in which later Western movies like Tom Horn began to reflect on the way carpetbaggers - the new breed of civilian - forgot the frontiersmen who forged the very freedom they now use for their profit, and treated them with contempt. (See the article Unforgiven: the movie.) This is very like a common self-deception many meat-eaters hold about killing animals for food. Many of us are unable to kill animals for food, and therefore pontificate about the need for the killers to avoid cruelty, without understanding the technology of killing which we take for granted and make use of every day of our lives. When I was a post-graduate student my girlfriend and I lived on a farm. The first Christmas neared, and the farmer asked us if we would like to help with plucking the turkeys. We said yes. Then we found ourselves sitting in a shed with five or six other men, surrounded by big white turkeys who wandered around, watching apparently indifferently as the men broke their fellows' necks and yanked out the feathers while in spasm the dead bird's wings flapped furiously for up to a minute. We found we could not continue. Over the years, the experience taught me to be more grateful for those who could. Others might respond by becoming vegetarian. There is not quite the same as taking one's country's military forces for granted – we personally choose to eat meat or not, and to sanction killing animals for food (or not), whereas we ourselves will not normally have sanctioned a military action or war even when we would have to admit we could not survive without it. But the way we distance ourselves from another group’s activities, yet use their work eagerly, is very similar. 12 Conclusion We have tried to consider the lasting virtue in one form of taking sides. Taking sides with damaged, even dangerous, people against the evils which can drive them is a profoundly courageous and inspirational act. It unites people in the highest aims. But taking sides against people is not ... and even more so, demonising them in order to justify taking sides is not. It may be necessary and unavoidable to take sides, to protect a mutual culture, society and values when we do not know how to speak meaningfully with our enemies ... but it is not more than that. When war or forceful action has been initiated, the voices of spirituality can best articulate our common failures - 'sins of omission' as well as 'sins of commission' - which led to the present conflict, and lay the ground for rebuilding and restoration as quickly as possible. They are able to draw attention to the underlying evils which threaten to rot, polarise and divide - not simply within a tradition but globally. The voices of spirituality are not expressed very clearly in further protest, which implies and often leads to a further taking sides against one's fellows. |
