CHOOSE YOUR ENEMIES CAREFULLY
by Forrest Church
May 16, 2004
My family and I went to see "Troy" on Friday night—the Hollywood epic not the sleepy upstate town. If your taste in bodice rippers leans toward Brad Pitt's bodice being ripped, I can happily recommend it to you. Otherwise, it's cartoonish fare. Perhaps my favorite moment is when, in the midst of a ferocious battle of some ten thousand combatants, Hector of Troy says to one of his antagonists, "Well, that's probably enough for one day. We'll see you tomorrow."
I've had the same feeling a lot recently. With each new installment of tragic news from Iraq, I say to myself, "Well, that's probably enough for one day."
"Troy," by the way, is one of those movies that suspends all action about every ten minutes, in order for its characters to deliver little set speeches to make sure that no one in the audience has missed the moral of the story. "War is old men talking and young men dying," Achilles reminds us in one such aside. "Imagine a king who fights his own battles. Wouldn't that be a sight." And so we go on to learn that pride comes before a fall, vengeance is blind, violence begets violence, and the saga of war is riddled by unintended consequences. In a story whose message isn't subtle to begin with, normally this device would be as insulting as it is irritating. Yet, somehow I didn't mind it. In fact, I hope it is screened in the White House. For today, it increasingly appears, we need all the help we can get to keep from overlooking the obvious.
The squalid revelations of prisoner abuse in Iraq and this week's grotesque act of direct retaliation have been a wake up call, a reminder that being American, despite this nation's lofty ideals, doesn't immunize us from sponsoring evil. Statesmen employ the word, evil, often, though rarely in reference to themselves. It holds a particularly high and sometimes apt place in the moral rhetoric of our own nation. For three quarters of a century now, we have aligned ourselves and our democratic ideals first against the evil of Hitler, then against the evil empire of our erstwhile allies, the Soviets, and, now, against the so-named axis of evil—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Some religious liberals clutch at the word, evil. I don't. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Sadaam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden are not basically good people who sometimes did bad things: they and the structures they erect to enforce their will and expand their power were and are agents and agencies of evil.
I want to make that as clear as possible, because it helps account for the predicament in which we, as a nation, now find ourselves. Our leaders are so outraged by the evil of our self-appointed and chosen adversaries—so blinded by the light in which their own and our nation's high moral idealism bathes them—that they cannot see, or even imagine, that we ourselves might cast a like shadow. This is not a new predicament. In 1973, near the end of our tragic adventure in Vietnam, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. pondered the abiding effect on the national psyche of our certainly just war against Adolph Hitler. Having vanquished so evil a foe, he said, took its purchase on our souls. "Our enemies were so awful, so evil, that we, by contrast, must be remarkably pure. That illusion of purity, to which we were entitled in a way, has become our curse today."
This problem is compounded when our leaders sponsor a highly developed theology of evil, unleavened by any appreciation whatsoever for their own sinful nature. I once wrote a book called The Seven Deadly Virtues. National, or corporate, sin almost always cloaks self-interest in the garb of higher virtue. Not only as individuals but as a nation, we justify questionable means by noble ends. We exculpate ourselves by pointing out that others do worse. We rationalize away our crimes as aberrant. in short, by shifting moral responsibility away from ourselves, we proclaim ourselves innocent.
I would love to hear our president and his challenger as well—however well-intentioned their policies or votes may initially have been—accept responsibility, the former for misgauging the complexity of our foray into Iraq and the latter for sailing with the wind. Yet, ever since Adam blamed Eve and Eve blamed the serpent, we humans have avoided taking responsibility for our actions (and therefore accountability for their consequences) by proclaiming that the buck stops elsewhere. That, in a nutshell, is original sin.
Liberal theology don't take evil seriously enough, and we seem to have lost our doctrine of sin sometime in the mid-19th century. American fundamentalism takes evil seriously to be sure, and would certainly seem to have a doctrine of sin. But, by trivializing sin into a moralistic catalogue of personal foibles, American fundamentalists reserve the badge of real evil for others. With sin, however, there are no others. The world is not divided into sheep and goats; each of us is both sheep and goat—making original sin a corrective to any theology based on an "us versus them" model, and conducive as well to the development of a clear-eyed, unsentimental universalism.
Martin Luther put it this way: "The final sin of man is his unwillingness to concede that he is a sinner." And the great Christian realist Reinhold Niebuhr described our penchant for adjudging ourselves good because our enemies are evil as "the secret of the relationship between cruelty and self-righteousness." "Every victim," he said, "makes the mistake of supposing that the sin from which he suffers is a peculiar vice of his oppressor."
Last week's revelations of prisoner abuse in Iraq and this week's act of retaliation should serve as a reminder to all of us, especially the idealists who drive our nation's foreign policy, of the first law of history: to "Choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them."
Abu Musab Zarqawi and his henchmen beheaded Nick Berg, recording it on video tape in retaliation for the brutal and humiliating treatment of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Gharaib prison, itself captured on video. In turn, listen to some of your neighbors' suggestions for retaliating against the retaliator. Karlene Mikhael of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, says this: "They should be tortured first, shot a few times on worldwide TV. Then they should be skinned alive for all the world to see." Will Aroca, Astoria, Queens: "Whatever happens to them should be nice and painful." Bill Matters, West Chester, Pennsylvania: "Kill. Public display. Pay-for-view."
What happened in Abu Gharaib prison does "not represent America," our President said. And he is right. It represents human nature. It's not only that good people sometimes do bad things or that in every barrel there are a few bad apples, but that the veneer of civilized behavior is thin, fragile, and of relatively recent application. There has never been a war in which we humans have not dehumanized our enemies, leading the victors to treat the vanquished like animals. Barring strict internal controls and often outside independent oversight, prisons are, almost by definition, inhumane. Beyond this, under stress, especially in crowds or small packs, human behavior easily becomes wanton and brutal—bestial, we say, though animals, to one another, are almost never what we refer to as inhumane. If you don't like the word sin, substitute another—humankind's innate inhumanity—but don't underestimate the concept, or think that we are all born good and then somehow got destroyed or twisted by society. Given our natural egotism and instinct for survival (which together easily morph, through opportunistic self-rationalization, into the drive to dominate), sin is bred in the human bone.
The founders of our nation certainly understood this. They knew that, unchecked by moral and state stricture, people act for their own self-interest, mindless of the common good. They weren't cynics. They knew that we humans, as the Bible says, are at once scarcely higher than the beasts and just a little lower than the angels. Blessed with high ideals yet tempered by realism, they crafted our government with an eye both to the intrinsic potential dignity and the inevitable corruption of human nature. Their ideals set this nation under a remarkably, perhaps impossibly, high set of standards: liberty and equality for all. At the same time, they attended to the lesser angels of our nature, deftly establishing a balance between competing factions and interests to ensure that no group—neither a majority nor a minority—could impose its will unchecked by competing interests. In short, they understood original sin.
People argue about American exceptionalism. The United States of America is not exceptional because our people our exceptionally decent or honest or good. Our nation is exceptional is because the system our founders established—improved over time better to reflect in practice their lofty ideals of liberty and justice for all—both inspires and enforces an unusual, though by no means perfect, degree of mutual respect among our citizenry. This kind of American exceptionalism we demonstrate once again today by the openness with which we are airing the inquiry into American misdeeds in Iraq. Yet we risk betraying it as well, whenever we are tempted to cut the cornerstones our founders laid.
Carolyn and I were in Holland when the abuse scandal broke. Gathering in a magnificent 15th century church in Middleberg, Zeeland, in the company of the Queen and ambassadors from nations around the world, I had the great honor of helping to present the Franklin Roosevelt Four Freedoms medals to selected international laureates who have dedicated their lives to establishing freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. On alternating years, we honor exemplary American citizens in Hyde Park and exemplary world citizens in Holland. The ceremonies are always stirring. They invest my life with hope.
I present the freedom of worship award. This year our recipient was peace activist Dr. Sari Nusseibeh, president of Al Quds University and long-time head of the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem. It turns out that he and I received our doctorates from Harvard together in 1978. We had never met, but discovered that we share two Jewish friends in common, Guy and Sarah Stroomsa, both now professors at Hebrew University.
Together with former head of the Israeli securities forces, Ami Ayalon, Sari Nusseibeh is co-sponsor of the "People's Voice" peace initiative. They have collected signatures from 200,000 Palestinian and 200,000 Jewish individuals demanding that their respective leaders break free from the retributive spiral of violence, a literal murder-suicide pact that dehumanizes and jeopardizes everyone.
Peacemakers may be blessed, but their lives are fraught with peril on all sides. Four days before Sari Nusseibeh arrived in Holland he was arrested at the order of Ariel Sharon and spent two nights in an Israeli prison. The day Sari returned to Jerusalem, Yasser Arafat fired him as head of the Palestinian authority.
Sari said two things that I will always remember. In his acceptance speech he noted that the Palestinian people demand and deserve freedom from occupation and that the Israeli people demand and deserve freedom from fear. Until each cedes the freedom longed for by the other, the other will deny their longed-for freedom to them.
On our last night together, the delegation and laureates shared a long, wonderful supper, with many toasts and a deep sense of mutual camaraderie and commitment. I will never forget is Sari's toast. Haltingly, with characteristic humility and honesty and unforced eloquence, he mused on how strange he felt, "as if in an alternative world," he said. "This evening, the love and common humanity we celebrate for all our many differences, relaxing together, raising our glasses . . . I've been asking myself, is this what it feels like to be a complete human being?"
To be a complete human being. Not, that is, first and foremost a Jew or Palestinian. Not a Christian or Muslim first. Or an American first, but a complete human being. Seeing our own tears in one another's eyes. Recognizing that we have so much more in common than could ever possibly divide us. We are all alike mysteriously born, fated to die, the mortar of mortality binding us fast to one another, the same sun setting on each of our horizons. We all want and need love, and security, and freedom, and acceptance. We need others' forgiveness and understanding. All of us do. We ache in the same way. We bleed in the same way. At times, we all feel awkward and unworthy and inadequate. And we all fail at times to hearken to the better angels of our nature.
This, by the way, is the centerpiece of theological universalism. To whatever extent we place our primary identification with creed or nation, with race or gender, with school or party, we betray our common humanity. Party to faction, we are prey to the beguiling logic of division, the logic of retribution and judgment, the logic of brotherly hate. In short, we live in a state not of grace, but of sin.
I define the word sin simply. It is anything that divides us: within ourselves; against our neighbor; from the ground of our being, the god of all creation. Salvation, from the Latin, means health. The Teutonic words heath, hale, holy, and whole all share the same root. Salvation from sin is, to use St. Paul's word, reconciliation—katalage. On those rare yet blessed moments that we make full peace with ourselves, with others, and with our creator, we experience salvation. The Realm of God is within us.
The Israeli leader may arrest Sari Nusseibeh and the Palestinian leader may fire him, all within a single week, but his witness is to a higher authority than theirs. Our own history can guide us here as well, even our presidential history. During the darkest days of the civil war, an admirer told Abraham Lincoln that God was on his side. Dismissing this banal and dangerous flattery, President Lincoln replied , "It is more important that we should be on God's side." "Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God," he later said. And, finally, as the war finally was coming to a close, he called on all Americans, Unionists and Confederates, to repent:
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish and just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
To which I saw Amen. I love you. And may God bless us all.