Category: Justice & Compassion

Out of blogging silence I could not resist posting the following guest-article about peace by Scott Stephens, found at Ben Meyer’s blog today. It is nothing short of prophetic and quite nicely pulls back the veneer that hides the fallacy of a worldly understanding of peace that is in conflict with the essence of the gospel.

A guest-post by Scott Stephens

Peace
is one of the most deceptive terms in public discourse. Consequently,
it is not at all clear to me that people know what they are referring
to when they talk about peace.
Take the current political climate: peace most commonly refers to not
having been part of the invasion of Iraq in the first place, or now
getting the hell out of Iraq and thus bringing an end to our part in
this bloody war. When it comes to Iraq itself, the West’s dreams of
peace are for an end to sectarian violence and the emergence of some
kind of nascent democratic society. And yet even at this point things
are not what they seem.

Notice, for instance, that the
recommendations coming out of the United States Institute of Peace
(USIP) have increasingly stressed the importance of the creation of
low-wage employment for Iraqi youths (who comprise over sixty percent
of the population). The rationale is: get them spending all their time
working and saving for clothes, leisure activities or a new iPod and
they won’t have either the energy or the motivation to kill other
Iraqis. What I find remarkable about this is not just that the grand
American rhetoric of ‘bringing freedom to Iraq’ is reduced to the more
banal image of adolescent Iraqis flipping falafels at some street
vendor in Baghdad. It is the way that this image reflects back to
Western democratic societies its fantasies of what peaceful existence
looks like. Let me explain what I mean.

The fundamental delusion
that rationalised America’s invasion of Iraq was the belief that, once
set free from the grasp of a maniacal tyrant, Iraqis would
spontaneously adopt
recognisably democratic forms of social life. In other words, they
believed that beneath the skin we are all American, and that the
longing for freedom, peace and the advantages of the free market run
deep in the human soul. The reality of the situation, however, was that
deposing Saddam Hussein opened the gates of hell. As George Packer
wrote in The Assassins’ Gate, ‘Iraq without the lid of totalitarianism clamped down has become a place of roiling and contending ethnic claims’.

This
state of affairs should have come as no surprise, for the chaos to
which the nation reverted post-Saddam was anticipated in King Faisal’s
chilling description of his own people in 1933: they are, he said,
‘unimaginable masses of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas,
imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no
common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy and perpetually ready
to rise against any government whatsoever’. Far from releasing Iraqis
from the terror of the Ba’athist régime so that some repressed longing
for peace could bloom, the American invasion exposed the inherent
violence and sheer bloodlust that had been held in check for four
decades.

My point here is not to try to exaggerate the violent
nature of the Iraqi people, but rather to call into question the
widespread belief that peaceableness is a quality that underlies the
human condition, which is allowed to surface whenever the external
determinants of tyranny or extremism are removed. Is it not rather that
human beings partake in a violence so profound that it dwarfs even the
most aggressive mammalian behaviour? And are humans not remarkable for
their natural incapacity to organize themselves peacefully? These were
the observations that troubled Thomas Hobbes, whose immense political
theology stemmed from the conviction ‘that during the time men live
without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that
condition which is called warre; and such a warre, as is of every man,
against every man.’ War, for Hobbes, is not an exceptional state of
mass violence that interrupts a more fundamental tranquillity. War is
the human condition itself.

(I have to admit that I like Stephen King’s variation on this same theme. In one of his more gruesome novels, Cell,
there is a kind of electromagnetic ‘Pulse’ that is transmitted through
mobile phones, which seemingly produces uncontrollable aggression in
its recipients. As the book progresses, though, it is revealed that the
Pulse didn’t introduce or generate this bloodthirsty animalism; it
simply wiped away the veneer of human civility, exposing – to use Carl
Jung’s phrase – our more fundamental ‘blood-consciousness’. Here’s how
one character explains it to his companions: ‘At bottom, you see, we
are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime
directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is
that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or
even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most
murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse
exposed five days ago.’)

What then of the so-called ‘peace’ enjoyed and promoted by democratic societies? Isn’t it apparent from the Pax Americana
that now holds sway – whether at home or abroad – that such peace has
become little more than an obsession with the trivial, a benevolent
boredom, or worst of all, the inalienable right to excess? It acts, in
other words, like a palliative, a form of cultural sedation aimed at
distracting us from our violent predisposition, all the while
satisfying our bloodlust through vicarious means (television, movies,
sport, etc.).

I think it is important at this point to register
the extent of my disagreement with Stanley Hauerwas, someone I
otherwise greatly respect, on just this question of the substance and
character of peace. For all his notorious anti-American rhetoric, it seems
to me that on this very point he remains an unreconstructed ‘good ol’
boy’, and his ethical program is perfectly at home within the greater Pax Americana.

I
have already suggested that the conception of peace as a deeper
(ontological) reality than violence – a concept that is fundamental for
Hauerwas, John Milbank and David Bentley Hart – is theologically
problematic and ethically impotent. But it is the way that Hauerwas
characterises a life narrated by nonviolence as one of profound boredom,
marked by the willingness to enjoy the trivial (he often likens the
life committed to nonviolence to watching baseball) that I find deeply
problematic. For he seems thereby to have accepted in advance the price
to be paid for becoming a beneficiary of this idolatrous peace: that we
abandon any kind of moral seriousness, renounce every ‘higher’ cause –
such a subordination of one’s life to the state, party or cause,
Hauerwas says, ‘is the character of totalitarian regimes’.

At
this point, isn’t Hauerwas pandering directly to the American obsession
with leisure? And further, is this depiction of the ethical life as one
which ‘takes time for the trivial’ not an uncanny reiteration of George
W. Bush’s urging of people to fight terrorism by continuing to indulge
in the excesses of the American way of life? Hauerwas thus unwittingly
confirms the accuracy of Slavoj Žižek’s recent observation, that ‘the
split between the First and Third World runs increasingly along the
lines of an opposition between leading a long, satisfying life full of
material and cultural wealth, and dedicating one’s life to some
transcendent cause. We in the West are immersed in stupid daily
pleasures, while Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything.’

Perhaps
now, more than ever, it is important to be reminded of Jesus’ words,
which war against this pseudo-peace – whether the bloody
peace-through-submission of the Pax Romana, or the indolent peace-through-sedation of our current Pax Americana:
‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell
you, but rather division!’ The intense conflict introduced by Jesus and
radicalised in his resurrection, cuts through every organic or ethnic
tie (family, nation, gender), leaving those who follow him alone and
unprotected in a world determined by self-interest. The apostle Paul
goes even further, locating this conflict at the level of the
Dawkinsian ‘selfish genes’ themselves – his term for which is ‘flesh’.
If there is any peace recognized by Christianity, it is this experience
of being profoundly disconnected within a world that knows only
violence.

But today, the Church has traded peace for leisure,
whoring after the trinkets of our pleasure economy and abandoning its
calling to risk everything for the sake of Christ’s kingdom. Our Easter
declaration that ‘Jesus is Lord’ is a manifesto for the only peace that
really counts. Will we have ears to hear?

Today in the traditional Church Calendar the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi is celebrated. St Francis, lover of creation, champion of justice, patron saint of animals, founded the Franciscan order. His famous prayer goes as follows:

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

A History of the prayer

Today is also the International Bloggers’ Day for Burma. This day and the prayer above are fitting to consider in light of the violence and injustice that plague Burma. May we make space to remember, pray, and imagine how we might participate in the realization of Kingdom peace for the people of Burma.

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