ABSOLUTE DAMAGE
by Forrest Church
February 26, 2006
Let me begin by offering my sincere apologies to those of you who came to church this morning under false pretenses—to those who, reading my title and put in mind of those enticingly clever Absolute Vodka ads, came expecting or (even more poignantly) needing, to hear a sermon on temperance. "Absolute Damage" would indeed, at least seemingly, have been a splendid title for such a sermon. With a little tweaking perhaps, one day I'll have to recycle it.
By the way, if you happen to have a drinking problem, I do have a simple two-word piece of advice for you. It's so simple in fact that I can promise you will remember it long after you've forgotten everything else I have to say this morning: Stop drinking. For those among you with a drinking problem who have stopped drinking—say twenty or thirty times—I have a useful three-word piece of advice. Ask for help. You may opt instead to keep on ruining your life, of course. The only problem is, you will also keep on ruining the lives of everyone who loves you. Alcoholics and drug-addicts are suicide bombers. The shrapnel of their daily lives pierces dozens of innocent hearts. But since the decision to indulge yourself long ago morphed into an inability to stop indulging yourself, you may be unable to stop drinking without asking for help.
Unitarians tend to be what I call counter-dependent. In the Emersonian spirit of self-reliance, if we can't manage to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps we would almost rather die than ask for a hand. It takes courage to beg for help; confessing how weak we are is sometimes the bravest thing we can do. And also the strongest. When we are powerless, the one remaining act within our power is to admit our powerlessness. The strength to confess weakness is redemptive strength. Minds are freed from the spiral of deceitfulness. Hearts are mended. Souls are saved.
If you came here this morning grasping at my sermon title like a straw, I have one more bit of practical advice. Tuesday night is Mardi Gras. Spend it alone and drink yourself into a stupor. When you wake up the next morning (or next afternoon) Lent will have begun. The timing, in other words, is perfect. Before the last hangover of your life has lifted, reach out to someone who loves you and tell him (tell her) that you've decided to stop drinking for good and know you can't do it without help. Take her hand (take his hand) and follow. By the end of the day you will almost certainly find yourself at an AA meeting. You will be scared to death—remember, this is one of the bravest things you've ever done—but you won't take a drink on Wednesday. The following day, you will attend your second meeting, a little less scared, but you won't take a drink on Thursday. And then, if you dare to be humble, days will extend to weeks, weeks to months, months to years. Believe me. With some two thousand days and counting, one day at a time, to my own and my loved one's credit, I know how this thing works. One of these Sunday I may even preach a sermon on it.
Strictly speaking, "Absolute Damage" could not be a sermon on temperance, however. Absolute temperance is an oxymoron. Temperance crusaders are intemperate. All crusades are intemperate by definition, including the one sponsored in our own nation a century ago by the religious absolutists who brought us prohibition.
Far from being an absolute, temperance is the virtue of moderation. Temperance is a convivial glass of wine to complement a fine meal, a flute of champagne to toast friendship, a beer after work to help you kick back and relax, or, as the Bible preaches, a wee dram "for thy tummy's sake." Temperate people are able to control their appetites, they don't eliminate them.
By the world-denying logic of religious absolutism, human appetites—sexual and culinary alike—are invitations to the devil. "If it feels good don't do it" chime the world deniers. By such logic, we were born into a charnel house. The world deniers and flesh haters preach every manner of abstinence to ensure that we escape life's sordid embrace unscathed. "Die to this world and live forever in the next one" is their holy mantra and promise. "Mortification" the desert fathers called it—"killing"—and its compass has since widened to entangle the fates of innocent bystanders. The latest form of mortification to win the imprimatur of fanatical religion is suicide bombing, punching your ticket to heaven while hand-delivering innocent and infidel alike into the arms of death or, even more demonically, the maw of hell.
Let me return to Lent for a moment. If you're on the lookout for a literate bit of swordplay to add a splash of color to Lent, may I suggest Arturo Perez-Reverte's new swashbuckler, Purity of Blood. Perez's subtext is serious enough that at the end of six sword fights you won't pinch yourself for having completely wasted your time. Set in the early 17th century at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, the purity in question turns on the blood of third and fourth generation Catholics whose religious practice disguises the taint of their Jewish heritage, a human stain that can only be atoned for in the eyes of God's henchmen by an Auto de fé.
Pondering the pyre—a dozen bodies having been sacrificed in whole burnt offerings, its flames licking the night sky—one swordsman sighs to another, "At any rate, it was the will of God." Diego Alatriste, the half-redeemed, sad-eyed hero of the book, does not reply. "God's will or the Devil's," he mutters to himself. The narrator, who when a boy barely escaped the flames, presents the author's view, a bit of modernist wisdom that is still not commonplace today. "Worst of all is the person who acts as exegete of The Word—whether it be from the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran, or any other book already written or yet to come. I am not fond of giving advice—no one can pound opinions into another's head—but here is a piece that costs you nothing: Never trust a man who reads only one book." I read that, and as a good Unitarian approved heartily—too heartily perhaps.
For me to denounce the violence triggered by the most extreme of today's fundamentalists is, from this pulpit anyway, to flatter the converted. My damning an absolute that you abhor is no more likely to produce an added ounce of virtue to the world than my extolling the glories of sobriety to a group of friends who despise the taste or effect of alcohol. In fact, the contrary may prove true. Even as prohibition encouraged criminality without diminishing the urge to drink, damning suicide bombers without examining our own absolutes and the ways in which they may unintentionally provoke the very actions we so roundly and rightfully disdain is like bathing in a light whose very brightness leads us to forget that an unclouded sun casts the longest shadows.
So let's begin where we are and focus on our own blind spots—on, say, the liberal democratic absolute of free speech. We lazily imagine liberty to be a virtue, but it is not. More even than it is a right, liberty is an instrument; libertine and libertarian spring from the same root. Like free markets, free expression can have immoral and amoral as well as moral consequence. Mindful of this, one limitation we place on the right of free speech is the freedom to shout "Fire" in a crowded theater. We get that, because we understand how dangerous such reckless provocation can be. No one would be burned to death by someone merely shouting the word, "Fire," but people could be trampled to death. Cast in Biblical terms, "Thou shalt not kill" trumps "Thou mayest say anything thou wilt."
Following the logic of this principle, the best argument for banning hate speech is not that it expresses hatred but that it fans hatred. Think about the Holocaust deniers. Four centuries after the Spanish Inquisition and some three-quarters of a century after the outset of the Holocaust, being vividly acquainted with the history of the Jews most of us understand how the reckless spread of bigoted lies and hateful caricatures reinforces bigotry and foments hate. We can easily connect the dots from anti-Semitism to suicide bombers.
The resulting picture is why—though it may devolve into silliness—the taboo against hate speech on most college campuses and new laws in many Western countries against hate speech cannot glibly be dismissed under the condescending rubric of political correctness. An Austrian who confessed denying that there were gas chambers in Auschwitz was sentenced last week to three years in prison. The severity of this sentence may make civil libertarians cringe, but, after years of education, many of us finally understand why laws against denying the holocaust end up on the books. We are sensitive to how self-perpetuating myths feed the scourge of anti-Semitism. We know by heart how words as well as sticks and stones break bones, how the hate speech that once ignited furnaces today provokes not only stone throwing but also suicide bombs. When religion is involved, hate speech kills. It always has. And it likely always will.
Under any definition, satiric cartoons lampooning Mohammed can certainly be classified hate speech. Yet one Western paper after another raises (as they would never do about ridiculing the Holocaust) the totem of free speech as a sacred absolute in secular democracies. If we were less provincial in our religious understanding and less parochial in our appreciation for religious history—if we knew as much about Islamic history as we do about recent Jewish history for instance—we would surely feel the horror every good Muslim must feel when confronted by irreverent cartoons of the prophet's sacred image. Unlike representations of Jesus (which the Christian faith encourages, again to the point of silliness), in Islam representations of Mohammed, however reverent, are taboo, a desecration of the faith. We talk blithely about free speech even as we speak proudly about mutual respect, but when the two principles collide, when to speak freely is to be disrespectful, at the very least we must be prepared to connect the dots between untrammeled Western freedom of expression and riots throughout the Middle East.
I am not suggesting that hate speech justifies violent retribution, only that, in today's tinderbox, the resulting insult can easily kindle it. That Muslim rioters are practiced in hatred especially against Jews—witness only the rhetorical sewage spewing out of Iran—is more obvious and no less deplorable. But in deploring the obvious, we might begin to acquaint ourselves a little more closely with the encompassing ignorance that shadows almost everything we know about Islam. We might condemn the rioters in terms they would more easily understand, and in so doing join our voices with those in the vast moderate to conservative Muslim community, who are not only speaking out ever more eloquently but who also are far more intimately threatened by the spreading wildfire of violence throughout the Islamic world that we ourselves are or will ever be.
We might, in short, take a leaf from Imam Feisal's book. Feisal is chairman of the Cordoba Initiative, whose mission is to heal the relationship between the Muslim World and America (and a good friend of and regular speaker at All Souls). In deprecating violence, he draws not from Western traditions alone but from the Holy Qur'an itself. He invokes "the Islamic ethical imperative, which commands us to show compassion toward our fellow human beings." He cites "the Quranic command to be respectful of others' religious sensibilities, and to not mock those who worship other than the One God, unless they curse God out of their ignorance [6:108]." This Koranic injunction supports religious freedom of conscience, with but a single caveat—hate speech. We should make ourselves familiar with it. He reminds us that "more odious than the destruction of property, which is a major sin in Islam, is the willful creation of human strife, sectarian hatred, social turmoil and mayhem. The Qur'an condemns this mortal sin, calling it fasaad fi'l-ard. It equates those who commit this major crime with having killed all of humankind [5:32-34] and promises them a grievous punishment in the hereafter and deserving the worst penalty if caught in this life." And did you know that the Qur'an "urges us to respond to evil by doing what is more beautiful in behavior, so that the person with whom one bears enmity transforms into a close friend [41:34-36]? This is the Islamic ethical imperative, to transform hatred into compassion."
In every scriptural tradition there are texts that sanction terror. "I come not to bring peace to the earth but a sword [Matthew 10:34]," Jesus tells his disciples, who, generations later follow his injunction by sponsoring the crusades. And there is this from the Hebrew Pslams:
Babylon, Babylon the destroyer
Happy is he who repays you
For what you did to us!
Happy is he who seizes your babes
And dashes them against a rock [Psalm 137:8-9].Appalled by its letter, modern secularists have stashed away more than enough ammunition to dismiss any of the world's scriptures, but until they begin to appreciate the redemptive value of the spirit that teaches Christian, Jew and Muslim alike to reconcile with our enemies, the most enlightened skeptic will continue to be as much a part of the modern world's problem as they are of its solution.
One final suggestion. If our leaders hope, as surely they do, to stem religious violence, to rename the war on terror the war on radical Islam as our president has recently done, or even the war on radical Jihadism, is to objectify evil in terms sacred to hundreds of millions of the world's people. To put this language in perspective, a war declared on Christianity, no matter how one should choose to modify it, would rightfully incite a Christian backlash. We needn't sacrifice principle in being careful about what we say, simply remember that words are heard differently by different ears. The most powerful nation in the world can choose either to lead a religious crusade or to walk beside all the world's peoples in a shared intolerance for the wanton, indiscriminate violence that terrorism, no matter what cloak it wears, inflicts on everyone.
None of this comes easily or naturally to us. I know that. Our ignorance is so profound that Western enlightenment on the guiding principles of Islam will require more than a state briefing or weekend seminar (though both would represent a start). Remember, it took half a century before Christendom was stung awake by the horrors of the Holocaust. But as we educate ourselves, mindful of our ignorance and with it our inevitable insensitivity, we might at least be careful about what we say. Irreverent words break bones or cause bones to be broken. Words loosely, insensitively, ignorantly spoken by so called enlightened individuals who couldn't possibility imagine that anyone in his or her right mind could care so deeply as to take violent offense add oil and bodies to already burning pyres. In short, when elevated onto the secular altar of freedom of expression and exercised with casual, ignorant disregard for deep religious feelings, whether it kills its object or inspires its object to kill, anti-religious hate speech must share with religious hate speech the burden of responsibility for the ongoing tragedy of internecine violence in our ravaged world. We may be as horrified by the latter as we are accustomed to the former, but the damage inflicted by both is absolute.