After the Future

Naive Idealists

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". My frame of reference here is political, not philosophical.

I have elsewhere talked about naive idealism as Jacobinism, but that term has more of a leftist connotation, and I want to define here more broadly. Naive idealists as a type, whether they are on the left or the right, hate the world as they find it and are committed to work toward the realization of an ideal world as they wish it would be. They believe in the righteousness of their cause, and they believe that any one who opposes them must be evil. And for this reason, they are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Since for them evil is the force that prevents the world from conforming to their ideals about how it should be, they often become explosively angry, and this anger at the intractability of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries. They see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, but instead they become a force that promotes it.

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror, Stalin's and Mao's purges all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the red guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but also in secular ideologies like Marxism and fascism.

Naive idealists always present their murderous causes in the most lofty of terms. Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course, not. But he was an unhinged fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil than for good. Is Islamo-fascism evil? Without a doubt. Does that mean that it should be purged from the world? The impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it and those who seek to exterminate it. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. We Americans are vulnerable in this sense. One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck.

Contrast this attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction of Jesus' confrontation with the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is not one of liberal tolerance, but neither does he condemn. His attitude contrasts profoundly with those who were about to stone the woman, because whether they realized it or not, their desire to kill her made them just as much a part of the system as she was. There was a karmic loop in the making there that would have continued in perpetuity unless there could be an intervention from outside of it, and that's what Jesus' confrontation with the woman represented--not a condemnation, but the chance of liberation from the loop. And the story is so moving because she appeared to have accepted that chance. She understood what was being offered to her.

But the point is this, the only way you escape the loop is by being thrown a lifeline from a source outside of it. The person caught in the loop, of course, has to choose to use it to climb out. There's no forcing compliance. But it's not even a possibility unless such a lifeline is thrown. The task for the genuine Christian and for every person alive to the possibility of grace is to throw lifelines, not to condemn or to force their will on those who are resistant to it.

That's my understanding of the meaning of original sin. None of us, if he lives in the real world, is ever free from the influence of evil in it. It's just there; it's not the whole story, but it's in the air like toxic fumes. We are all of us caught in an all-but closed system, and we would eventually suffocate if something were not offered from outside of it, a lifeline which does not lift us out, but rather pumps oxygen to us which strengthens us to live more effectively in a world full of toxins. But I do believe that it's possible to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins, both as individuals and in communities, but no one is ever free so long as he walks the earth. That's why we need to throw such lifelines to one another and to be grateful when one is thrown to us.

The Middle East is a horrific mess right now. The Israelis and Palestinians are caught in such a violent karmic loop, and now so are the Americans and the Islamic fanatics in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's the same old, same old story. But who is there now to throw us a lifeline?

What if Al Gore Invaded Iraq?

Saturday, October 1, 2005

Fischer remarked that, after September 11, the American officials could have come to Europe (meaning France and Germany) and proposed a vast strategic campaign to transform the larger Middle East, beginning with Afghanistan, and proceeding to Iraq, and including a Palestinian-Israeli settlement. If the Americans had proposed such a thing, and if they had seemed honest and aboveboard, the Europeans might have responded by saying, no, let's do Afghanistan first, and Palestine-Israel second, and Iraq later on. And if the Americans had insisted on Afghanistan first, and Iraq second, the Europeans--well, they might have gone along. --Paul Berman reporting on conversation he had with Germany's foreign minister, Joscha Fischer in his book Power and the Idealists.

What if Al Gore had been elected, and what if his administration had developed a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the insanity of the Middle East along the lines suggested by Fischer in the quote above? What if he worked hard to get a strong multinational coalition on board--not just France, Germany, and England, but Russia, China, India as well. Would this have been easy to do? Would it have resulted in a flawless strategy and execution? Not likely. Maybe it wouldn't even have been possible. But the point is that a stable Middle East is in all these nations' self interest. It's in the interests of the sane majority of Muslims throughout this region as well.

If something like that happened, I might have got behind it, my Burkean reservations about huge social engineering projects notwithstanding. I'm not certain I would, but I would have been more open to the idea of it. Maybe some kind of proactive intervention in the Middle East could have helped. Maybe an effective strategy for such an intervention could have been developed. I think that I would have had to have been convinced that there was a reasonable chance that the kind of disaster that we have in Iraq now would not have been the only possibility. Sometimes there is simply nothing you can do without making matters worse.

Perhaps with more competent management, an intervention in Iraq could have been pulled off in a way that moved the region toward greater stability. But never did I ever think that the bully-boy mentality behind this administration's policies to be capable of developing such a strategy. It would have been better if these fools did nothing. And it would have been better if Kerry were elected because he would have had a better chance of rebuilding the international trust and goodwill that the Bush administration destroyed in the same way it destroyed our budget surplus. Kerry may not have succeeded, but he would have had a chance. Bush has no chance.

This administration is such a disaster on so many levels, I think we have only begun to fathom how awful it is. And it still has over three more years in office. Just think about the enormity of that fact for a moment. If there were only some way of locking them in a closet where they could do no more harm for the remainder of the term. That was essentially the GOP strategy for Bill Clinton in his second term--tie him to a chair with an impeachment. No possibility of that here, though.

So think of it. Three years and three months more the world has to suffer this level of world historical bungling and cronyism. With no controls or oversight from a complicit congress and a complicit corporate media. I am not for leaving Iraq in chaos, but I am for getting these people in the administration as far away from making policy there as possible. They have the capability only to make things worse. Maybe pulling out is the only realistic option now. It's all so disheartening.

I am not a multiculturalist, if being one means that I think it's ok in some cultures to stone women who are caught in adultery. I'm not one if it means that the people in that culture are subjected to any form of abusive power by their governments. All abuses of human rights need to be loudly condemned, and I'm ok with intervention in the affairs of those nations where the abuses are particularly egregious.

The world should have intervened in Rwanda; it should have intervened as it did in the Balkans, and in the early nineties, it should have intervened in Iraq when Saddam was massacring Kurds and Shiites. My opposition to the invasion and removal of Saddam was not so much a matter of principle so much as it was the idea of the arrogant unilateral neocon strategy for doing so. You don't invade countries willy nilly just because you have the power to do so. That's what shocked the world about the wild-west vigilantism behind the way the Bush administration went into Iraq. Sure there was probable cause, but he broke in to make his arrest without a warrant.

We don't allow the police to invade our homes at their whim. But when there is good reason to do so, such a thing is permitted in a country of laws when a judge grants a warrant. The same thing should be true on the international level. So who then is the judge that gives the warrant? It has to be done through some mechanism like the U.N.

Assuming we don't destroy the planet one way or another, we are headed toward some form of global social organization. There is no stopping it. Traditional cultures do not have a future. That's simply a price that will have to be paid, and the pain and identity loss that comes with that is something the globe will have to suffer through. The old ways do not give up without a fight. We went through it during our own Civil War, and every society has to work through it in its own way. But traditional societies as we have known them for the last thousands of years are all doomed to extinction.

We cannot look back with regret or nostalgia; that leads to LWS--Lot's Wife Syndrome. The symptoms of LWS are pillars of salt, the lifeless systems and dead thinking that we find in all formalistic traditionalism, and in fundamentalism and dogmatism. We must find a way to look forward in anticipation of something new. Already a process of retrieval and fusion is beginning which I believe is the energy that will produce the new thing, and it's there where hope lies. The loss of "given" traditional societies does not mean the irretrievable loss of the gifts those many cultures have to offer the world. The task now is to preserve them and integrate them into something larger.