Labels, war and simplicity
A reflection upon recent events
William Danes
After major disaster the inevitable question of how such devastation could possibly prevail under the supervision of a benevolent God is commonly thrown into question. For philosophers of the Enlightenment period, the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 threw into question foundational beliefs in God, and was an event that called for a response. Trauma in any way in the public eye always calls for a response. The people demand it; both academics, pondering the great questions of life and desiring verbal response for them themselves to respond to, and those who care for their own reasons. It is an expectation of us all that explanation is given, and perhaps that is part of the human quest for understanding.
An interesting comparison can be drawn between those philosophers and theologians responding to the Lisbon earthquake and the popular thought that stemmed from the terrible events named now simply as ‘9/11’. The Lisbon Earthquake called for a re-think in theological thought not because it raised new questions, but because it was so experiential. The problem of evil, at the time of disaster, could easily be renamed ‘The problem of the Lisbon Earthquake’, or ‘The problem of 9/11’ as it stirs the stagnating questions of the nature of evil, and churns seemingly new demons from the bog; and focusing on what has recently happened. The Enlightenment Philosophers knew the face of evil perhaps on a conceptual level, but experience brings to life age-old questions in a new light: in the faces of those killed, the buildings and homes destroyed, and in the hatred of those who caused that suffering, or those who turned away from it. The Lisbon Earthquake called for a re-think of traditional values, and ended predominantly with philosophy making that terrible event commensurable with their idea of God.
9/11 was different. The events of 9/11 re-awakened a chain of thought fundamentally emphasising the problem of evil until it became parody. God, for these thinkers, was not present. Not only is He never present, but the events that took place then delivered a final blow to God. The often deeply unsettling and disturbing Yahweh of the Old Testament was re-awakened. Richard Dawkins stated that "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Dawkins’ image of God may be one that resonates truly with the main events of 9/11, but it is easy to see that he attacks the actions of God in the Old Testament ruthlessly, ignoring all traces of symbolism for the sake of a rather clumsy attack. There is nothing new or trendy in the attack of atheist thinkers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins: apart from, perhaps, a racy new ignorance and extremism.
The only one appeal to that sort of atheism and simplifying of the problem of evil, for me, is that it's easy. It is easy to make a parody of something we don’t like. We are all guilty of cognitively distorting those who have wronged us into extreme antagonists. We might label our family members as ‘jealous’, ‘self-absorbed’, ‘control-freaks’, ‘afraid to love’, ‘ashamed’, and many other terms – even to the level of Dawkins’ shopping list of the attributes of God. Bertrand Russell advised us that “One ought to go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.”, and maybe there is a message here. It is at the heart of these terms that they are not just overly-simple, but that they are mere labels and do not take into account opposing opinion, because that would pose a psychological threat to our self-made processes of categorizing people and things we dislike.
Such labels have been applied to Osama Bin Laden. I am not calling for a re-think of popular opinion. I believe that he committed great evil, and in the name of God. I find it disturbing that it is so easy to find videos of American citizens rejoicing outside the White House at Osama’s death, calling “USA, USA” and “God bless America”. Even on the remains of Ground Zero, the site of the devastation of 9/11, people of New York leapt for joy, calling those same chants and singing the same songs in the rejoicing in Osama’s death. In one interview, a woman, having lost her son to the destruction, claimed to “feel (her) son’s spirit among them”, as she stood upon the site, celebrating in the death of the partial cause. Despite the evil of 9/11 the labels being applied by Americans to the Middle East are arguably a great threat to peace.
In words wrongly attributed to Martin Luther King but belonging to a 24-year old American named Jessica Dovey: "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." Ground Zero is a grave site. To stand upon it and rejoice for the death of Osama Bin Laden is not a triumph. It is a sad kind of satisfaction; internalized as justice, but defined by revenge. And this is reflective of the philosophy that stemmed from 9/11. It is the placing of blame and rejoicing in it, rather than search for acceptance and any deeper understanding of the events that happened. It is intellectually dishonest. As I stated earlier, as we categorize those we know in short phrases and cutting words, we ignore the significance of them in context: as people with shortcomings and virtues intertwined.
But to label actions and people as evil could give them an emphasis and power that they simply do not have. St. Augustine of Hippo observed that evil is a deprivation of good that causes injury; not an active force in itself. Archbishop Rowan Williams experienced 9/11 first hand, himself with a group of priests and clergymen and women actually inside one of the buildings when they were hit. When asked in an interview where God was in those events, Williams responded that God was where he always is: in the acts of good that prevailed in the destruction and dust of disaster. There seems to be a deep longing in all of us to stretch out beyond the labels we usually use. For instance, we can observe how the media latches onto the good which prevails in disaster, and the children that survive a terrible event as they become beacons of hope. This latching-on is interesting psychologically, as it reflects the human necessity to see light in darkness: a neural programming to ‘home-in’ on God in the goodness that comes; in the goodness that comes in acting in accordance with what we feel that God might be like. One might criticize this through suggesting that this ‘homing-in’ does not justify God's goodness or belief in his existence. Both Marx and Freud suggested that God was merely like war: born of the mundane psychological and sociological processes of man.
But there is a key difference between God and war: war is an event, and an action. God is part of action, but not event itself. We find God in goodness and love and war only as result of strife and disturbing ideology. The war against Hitler was arguably justified, but sometimes war can be done badly and in this religion is not alone. It can be done wrongly just as relationships can. It is exploring the times of wrongness and mistakes of history that we can come to truth.
The Enlightenment philosopher Hegel claimed that “The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history”, but perhaps that's wrong. Perhaps all societies stray on the path of what is good and religion does this too. It calls for a cutting simplicity of the message of Christ: that God is love, and that such love ought to be emulated and lived by. Perhaps we ought not to place the blame of action upon one label, one organization, one people, one book or one event, but should instead work by that ever-working message: that through acting in love, learn the nature of God. True simplicity is ever greater than endless and brutal categorizing.
