Question posed
by a little girl and reported in the press: "Why
are they killing themselves and killing all those
people?"
THE
GUILT GAP
The
government's answer was that we are good and love
freedom and these people are bad and hate it. That
vapid answer came from an arrogant national culture
that has lost its talent for healthy guilt. The
hatred that could so easily paralyze our nation has a
history and, as Teilhard de Chardin said,
"nothing is intelligible outside of its
history."
Why do
the deprived of the world hate us so?
To give
an honest answer to the little girl's question, to
start some meaningful reflection and move out of the
morass of American jingoism, I look to some
thoughtful witnesses and diagnosticians of humankind.
The first is J. Glenn Gray, an intelligence officer
with the army in World War II. In his book, The
Warriors, Gray wrote: "If guilt is not
experienced deeply enough to cut into us, our future
may well be lost."
Next,
Robert Heilbroner, the political economist, who
peeked behind the veils of our self-image, concluded:
"There is a barbarism hidden beneath the
superficial amenities of life." Close to
Heilbroner is Abraham Heschel, the Jewish theologian.
He cited "the secret obscenity, the unnoticed
malignancy, of established patterns of
indifference."
Gerd
Theissen, the biblical scholar, joins the chorus. He
noted the century-long quest for "the missing
link" between apes and "true
humanity." Call off the search, he said. The
missing link is us. True humanity could not do what
we have done to one another and to this generous host
we call Earth.
Frances
Moor Lappe is our next witness: "Historically
people have tried to deny their own culpability for
mass human suffering by assigning responsibility to
external forces beyond their control."
And next
I dare turn to words I wrote in 1993: "The
absence of pity is the root of all evil." I
continued: "Can we sit now in our First-World
comfort at a table with a view of the golf course,
and ignore starvation in the Third World and
joblessness and homelessness in our cities? The
prophets of Israel would answer 'no.' In Jeremiah's
words, there is no hiding from the effects of guilt
and morally malignant neglect: 'Do you think that you
can be exempt? No, you cannot be exempt.' (Jer. 25)
Injustice will come home to roost, whether in wars of
redistibution (the most likely military threat of the
future), or in crime and terrorism, or in
far-reaching economic shock waves. The planet will
not forever endure our insults. If the prophets' law
is correct - and the facts of history endorse it - we
will not be exempt."
And
finally, Count Cavour of Italy said that if we did
for ourselves what we allow our country to do in our
name, we would be jailed and hung as scoundrels.
These
were not the voices heard in The National Cathedral
on Sept. 14. Jeremiah was not invited to say to the
leaders of "the most powerful nation in the
world:" "Acknowedge your guilt!" (Jer.
3:12).
OUR
GUILT AND THIS STUNNING HATRED
Affluence
and comfort dull the optic nerve. The poor world sees
us differently. Draw a circle and cut me out of it
and I will see sharply what goes on there. The
attackers pinpointed the reasons for their outrage.
They struck at what they saw as the twin towers of
our indifference and at our haughty military heart.
They see our nation as an arrogant, spoiled,
500-pound gorilla: It pollutes and then scorns
treaties to end pollution; it owns a history of
enslaving others; it practices racism and shuns the
United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South
Africa. The poor of the world noticed that the
genocide of black people in Rwanda did not stir us to
action. They believe we would have acted differently
if Swedes or Irish were having their throats cut.
Living outside the circle of affluence, which we take
so much for granted, they are stunned at the way we
make caricatures of others, especially the poor. We
don't say that Timothy McVeigh represents Irish
Catholics, but the Taliban and Bin Laden somehow
symbolize Islam.
When
they see us getting ready to repeat the Soviet
madness in Afghanistan, a writer from that land
agrees that Bin Laden is properly compared to Adolph
Hitler and the Taliban are well compared to Nazis,
but the people of Afghanistan, with a huge proportion
of widowed women are best compared to the Jews in
concentration camps. They would love to be free of
that tyranny. Those outside our world hate us for
ignoring this, for threatening slaughter, the effects
of which American militarists describe as
"collateral damage."
Very
relevant to Sept. 11, many Muslims see us as
incapable of an even-handed policy in the Middle
East. Such a policy would defend, with equal vigor
and equal financial aid, the existence of equally
safe and secure Israeli and Palestinian states, each
with territorial integrity. There is no other
solution, but those who hate us see that our leaders
do not know that.
The
Muslim world has a nation-transcending unity that we
little understand. The UMMAH, the community of
believing Muslims melts borders between races and
nations. That is why so many African Americans were
drawn to Islam. All Muslims feel the pain of the
reported half-million innocent children dead in Iraq
because of our sanctions. I see it as the surest
principle in all of ethics that "what is good
for kids is good and what is bad for kids is
ungodly." Muslims grieve over those children-
sacrificed to what end? - as we grieve over our dead
in New York and Washington. They marvel at our
ability to kill in only a few months as many as a
quarter-million young Iraqi soldiers - young people
such as the students I teach at Marquette University
- in the Gulf War, failing in the end to remove
Saddam Hussein from power. (Even the Sicilian
"Mob" bosses would have been more kind and
effective to the Iraqis than our military was. If
Saddam were really the problem, the Mob would have
"whacked" him rather than slaughter his
nation's children.)
Our
hubris shines through our imperfectly disguised
attitudes toward Islam, attitudes that befoul our
policies in the Middle East. It is asked: "How
can we deal with these people?" As professor
Huston Smith wrote: "During Europe's Dark Ages,
Muslim philosophers and scientists kept the lamp of
learning bright, ready to spark the Western mind when
it roused from its long sleep." Muslim
philosophers and physcians such as Avicenna taught
medicine to the backward Europeans. Arab states like
Jordan and Egypt have shown the possibility of
peaceful progress in the Middle East. These are not
savages who can be calmed only by occupation. The
solution is much simpler, according to the prophets
of Israel. As Isaiah saw it, only if you plant
justice will you have peace (Isa. 32). And occupation
of another people is not justice.
The
problem goes beyond Islam. The poor of the world see
an absence of pity in our economic policies. At least
1.3 billion people live in absolute poverty, 70% of
those are women. And poverty kills: 40-million people
die yearly from hunger and hunger-related causes.
This is like 320 jumbo jets crashing every day,
points out Clive Ponting in his monumental book, A
Green History of the World. Half the passengers in
those crashes, he adds, would be children.
The poor
of the world are not dumb. They notice, as the United
Nations points out, that 82.7 percent of the world's
income goes to the top 20 percent of the wealthiest
people, leaving 17.3 percent for the rest of
humanity. The poor notice that this discrepency does
not result in any empathy from U.S. politics or
economics. We are the biggest actor on the world
scene at the moment and they note a cold absence of
pity, and they hate us for all of this.
SOLUTIONS
George
Kennan once compared large, powerful nations to
dinosaurs with brains the size of a pea. When struck
they thrash out, destroying much and helping little.
The Bush Administration seems intent in living out
this prehistoric image. Bombing the victims of the
Taliban will do no more good than bombing the
children of Iraq who had been forced into the army.
Building
a new Maginot Line of missile defense is tragically
comedic. Tightening up security at the airlines as we
should have done years ago is as late as it is
inadequate. (Biological, chemical, and small atomic
weapons are probably already in preparation for the
next terrorist attacks.) All these
"defenses" are efforts to plug the spigot.
What is needed is to turn off the faucet. The faucet
is perceived injustice in the Middle East, the need
for separate states for Israel and for the
Palestinians. The faucet is the disastrous
maldistribution of wealth in the world and the
proliferation of starvation.
Solving
this maldistribution is not beyond our fiscal reach,
though it seems to be beyond our moral grasp. James
Tobin, the Nobel prize-winning economist, suggested a
0.5 percent tax on all spot transactions in foreign
exchange, including futures contracts and options. As
economist David Kortin says: "The 0.5 percent
Tobin tax on foreign exchange transactions would help
dampen speculative international financial movements
but would be too small to deter commodity trade or
serious international investment commitments."
The money could be used to retire those debts of poor
countries that cannot be easily forgiven and it could
finance the efforts of the United Nations and other
agencies and non-governmental organizations to bring
education, soil conservation, water-purification,
micro-loans for cottage industries, family planning,
and improved communications throughout the world.
The
religions of the world need to rise to the occasion
as they have not done so far. Religion is a powerful
motivator. John Henry Cardinal Newman, a 19th-century
English theologian, said that people will die for a
dogma who will not stir for a conclusion. Nothing so
stirs the will as the tincture of the sacred.
Religions so far in this exploding crisis have mainly
fulfilled their Prozak function of soothing the pain.
This is good and all religions are into the purveying
of comfort and hope. But the challenge of prophetic
religion in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and
increasingly in "engaged" Buddhism and
Hinduism, is to "speak truth to power," to
bring discomfort to power, to give power and
power-brokers a conscience. This they have not done.
We can
pretend that we are purely innocent and that the
world's hatred for us is "unfathomable."
But the fact remains that the solution to the
problems of poor, enslaved, or occupied people is not
nuclear physics. All that is needed is the moral and
political will. The poetic author of Deuteronomy put
this exasperated plea into the mouth of God: "I
have set before you life and I have set before you
death, and I have begged you to choose life for the
sake of your children."
We can't
seem to do it. The hope now is that with our military
power embarrassed and our vulnerability terrifyingly
clear, fear might be the penumbra of wisdom.
Daniel C.
Maguire is Professor of Ethics in the Department of
Theology at Marquette University. He has written
numeorus books including The Moral Choice and Ethics
for a Small Planet. He was listed by Ms. Magazine as
one of the "40 male heroes of the past decade,
men who took chances and made a difference" in
1982. He can be reached at maguired@juno.com.
