Make ME the Channel of Your Peace

Is it just my wishful thinking?

Or is there more than a hint of family resemblance between St Francis of Assisi and the Lord God of the first few chapters of Genesis? Walk closely through Genesis 2: 8-15. Here we are, amidst all the surely violent terrors and horrors of that very first wilderness of Creation - Tennyson's famous "Nature red in tooth and claw" (or so we've since learned in our evolutionary wisdom; no doubt the ancient Hebrews were faith-blinded to the nastier side of Mother Nature). And, imagine! - not yet a working human soul to add Locke's productive labor and value to the otherwise profitless scene.

So what does God do? He goes and plants a garden.

Why We're Still So Miserable (with no end in sight)

The world today is awash in religion. But is it any closer to God?

The question is not as presumptuous as it might sound at first to many Christians ("Gasp! How can the world ever be close to God?"). To be sure, the world in and of itself is very likely incapable of ever getting closer to God. But that doesn't mean we should welcome the prospect of its drifting ever farther away. "Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light." (Amos 5: 18 - KJV)

My point is that none of us really likes looking at something hideous, even when that thing is just "being itself," or acting according to its nature. It may be the intrinsic nature of that thing we call "the world" to make itself more and more repulsive, even as it strives more and more to separate itself from the beauty of God. But the fact that this is the nature - or natural bent? - of the world doesn't mean we have to like it that way. Or even that we will like it, bad as we ourselves may otherwise be. Man without God - and isn't that, after all, what most of us Christians mean when we talk about "the world"? - Man without God has never been a pretty picture to look at. Not even to those who think he's better off without God. For instance, I've yet to read of many atheists (apart from the really dogmatic Marxists) who actually enjoyed visiting or reading about the glories of that supreme atheists' utopia, Maoist China. Indeed, I wonder if many of them weren't frankly bored or even revolted by the spectacle. Which, if true, should come as a surprise to no one. It is only as Man steps "out from behind" God - or worse yet, starts seriously thinking that God is behind him - that he begins to look naked and ugly, sore-ridden and pestilent.

Of course we may think we have every good reason to step "out from behind" God. We may think of our Maker as bad, or primitive, or unreasonable, or unjust, or tyrannical. But even then, how often do we become better than He is by trying to move away from Him? Notice how it is precisely those most eager to throw aside, or strip away, some yoke they perceive as tyrannical - be it Divine or human, Godly or governmental - who so often end up becoming the worst, most hellish tyrants of all. (What was it Orwell said? "All animals are equal, but some . . . ")

No doubt everything that is exists for a reason. Even Hell. Indeed, what is any human tyranny if not a kind of anticipatory hell? If I may paraphrase Voltaire: If Hell were not subterrestrial, man in his ceaseless ingenuity would have found a way of making it terrestrial. And I do mean that. I don't believe we humans have ever been very good at accepting the really easy way out - much less making it easier for any of our neighbors. And least of all when that same Way has been God-provided.

I know it probably seems just the opposite today, what with all our hyperpoliticized Religion-on-Steroids. But the fact that many people talk about Hell (mostly as a place where other people should expect to go) doesn't mean that on the whole we believe in it in quite the ways we used to. For example, suppose it were true that record numbers of people today - as contrasted with, say, the previous three or four generations - believed that the single most important thing in their lives was where they were going to go after they die. And maybe that is the case today, especially in our unabashedly religious America. But if that's so, then perhaps you can tell me: Why do so many of us live - yes, even here in America - as if the most important part of life were how much we leave behind us when we go? Or even as if how much we've accumulated - goods, honors, profits, etc - will determine our precise elevation in the place where we go?

We forget that there are many ways of disbelieving in Hell, or discounting its relevance. Or indeed the relevance of any place or life beyond death. One of the most popular is to try to prolongue your conscious physical existence by any and every means possible here on earth. Another, already mentioned just now, is to try to leave as many things as possible behind you on earth (marks? legacies?). Remember - as our glorious Early Twenty-first Century never fails to remind us - you are what you acquire. And how much more what you pass on? (Cf. Psalm 49 passim for an alternative view.)

Certainly Man wouldn't be the first creature of God who, in finding his Creator to be a tyrant, a suppressor of legitimate ambition, or even a devil, only succeeded in becoming his own devil, tyrant, etc. Maybe that's why it so often happens that, the more reluctant we are to believe that Hell is "down there," the more successful we become in bringing it up here.

American Wisdom

Arrogance and stupidity: Two words that, in modern American political discourse, seldom if ever occur together in the same sentence. Unless, of course, as direct antitheses.

Progress! "Where? where?"

I swear, we Americans keep getting this whole business of technological change backwards. It's not about the welfare of you or me or in fact any of us. The real reason - whether fully grasped or not - why things keep changing ever faster is not that our things may be ever better adapted to our selves. It is that our selves may be ever more pliably adapted to our things.*

* And since we're on the subject: Which of the two - our things or our selves - do you suppose is the richer, more storied, more untraceably imaginative? Or more Divinely inexhaustible? And which of the two is more likely to remain as richly abundant as it was before, once the other has gotten through with it? 

Honestly, how else did you think Man was ever going to become his own (supersedable) god? How else, other than by making things that so re-create him - methods, systems, technologies, organizations, ideas, intelligences - so thoroughly re-create him, I say, as to leave no trace of the original Designer?

"But that's impossible!" you tell me. "Surely there'll always be some trace?" 

Maybe. But isn't it funny, I could have almost sworn we'd entered an Age in which nothing was impossible, given sufficient will, effort, energy and (when all else fails) chutzpah. 

And in any case Who's to blame us for trying?

Some Earthly Good

I don't know if we're living in one of the Great Ages of Satire. But even if I could be sure of it, I don't think I should find much consolation in the fact. For one thing (and I know this from very direct personal experience), satirists are not always the most pleasant literary company. Particularly the great vehement, violent satirists of our human nature and human condition, like Jonathan Swift. Or, a bit more recently, H L Mencken. It's not that they're always blind guides, like the Pharisees. But seldom do they ever manage to see everywhere they're trying to look. Especially when it comes to seeing such little (or much) good as we poor humans actually possess. Under their guidance, indeed, we can often find ourselves regarding Man as such a vilely, repulsively corrupt creature, it might seem an unending wonder that any human being could ever have been loved by anybody anywhere. And an even bigger wonder that God should have bothered to create us in the first place. But God does not make anything merely in order to "show it up": merely for the sake of showing how awful it is, and how wonderful He is. God does not make devils. And it is only as we embrace this simple core truth - that God not only made but fully intended us - that we can begin to understand something of the nature of the good that is in us already, prior to anything we humans think or will or do (much as a wildflower or an oak tree is good, simply by being what it is). And also where that good in us came from, and how it got there. And why, so often since then, it's been so devilishly hard to see and hear.

One reason why, I believe, is that its roots lie considerably deeper than anything we could ever imagine. Because the good in us humans - by which I mean specifically that in us which delights in the beauty of any thing's being all that it is, and having all that it needs* - the good in us, I say, is not just something that's innate. It is in fact much older than anything in us that could ever be revealed by the most clairvoyant of future biologies or sociologies. So old is this goodness, in fact, that so far as it's concerned, the whole debate about which came first - the nature or the nurture - ends up becoming more than a little silly. Rather like debating which grade of weaponry was most decisive in causing the Civil War. And surely, even in so relatively simple a human phenomenon as war, there's a world of difference between what causes, and what merely contours, amplifies, accelerates an event?

* And - if we're to take literally both Isaiah and St Paul - no lion's joy in slaughtering an antelope has ever been greater than its own need for the Savior of the world. 

In any case, the goodness in us goes back much farther than anything any biochemist - or biophysicist - could ever measure, much less any sociohistorian ever document. It is, in other words, a most anciently yearning, brooding, remembering thing. Almost as if it were a kind of junior mirror-image, so to speak, of that most ancient of all broodings, over those very darkest of all waters. Indeed, I suspect we might have a better chance of tracing its beginnings, had we but some real hope of tracing, charting and measuring all the other movements of God.

And yet despite its great antiquity - or perhaps because of it? - the good in us has always had the most brutal and disheartening difficulty making its voice heard. Above, I mean, the din of all the newer, seemingly more urgent and important voices going on within and among us. But that's not to say it can never be heard. On the contrary, it has been known to make the most enrapturingly, heart-achingly lovely, sometimes even eloquent sounds, in the hands of the right coaxer, trainer, elocutionist. And that itself is no exotic event, but something that can happen pretty much anytime, anyplace - given, that is, the right pairing of any one of us with any other. We all have within us the right sounds, and even words, just waiting at eventide, as it were, to crawl out from under the rummage and rubble of our loud, noontime, marketplace voices and selves. And we all have in us the capacity to be the right voice-trainer, given the right student crossing our path. All of which pairings presuppose, of course, that that particular Jesus whom we most often call Christ is already at work in us both. And not just as our covering but as our life and breath. Breath - in other words, spirit. You know, that least understood and most neglected part of us. "I know that nothing good dwells in me," declares St Paul, " - that is, in my flesh." Thank God, then, that we humans are so much more than our flesh - more even than the mind of our flesh. For that is where all really Divine work in us begins: beyond any mere carnality, whether of body or of mind. And who knows the way into and out of us - into, and out of, that strange, seemingly inexhaustibly-roomed and -compartmented house of our spirit - better than its carpenter?

Which brings me to my other point. The "evening " good in us is not just hard to hear above the "noontide" noise of our self-importance; most of the time it's all but impossible to see. Like a small, timid animal, that customarily hides because it's grown all too used to being hunted, the good in us usually has to be flushed out. And often - at least when it's not hiding in the house - from out of some pretty dense foliage too. Not to be hunted down, of course, but rather reassured that the coast is clear, that it's now free to move about, provided it keeps to certain paths, and to the company of a certain unrivaled wilderness-guide.

And so again we thank God that we have, in His Son, not just a carpenter who knows the house, but also an explorer well-apprised of its often treacherously-overgrown gardens and other grounds. In short, we have One who knows a thing or two about navigating (and even taming) jungles not just every bit as inhospitable as any found on earth, but more fearsome than any terrain this side of Hell, too. All that - imagine! - inside of us: and each one of us.

Yet it isn't, and never has been, the whole Story. For as I hinted earlier, we too can be trained to keep house and grounds in good order. Both our own and (hard as it may be to imagine in today's semi-Randian America) each other's. But in order for that to happen we need to grasp two things: first, that we even have a spirit, or soul - as well as a mind and a body; and second, a little something of why we have one. (final 2 paragraphs)

And that is, I find, the one most damning problem with most man-despising satirists, and what makes them so opposite of our wilderness-guide and (if we let Him) grounds-keeper. They can't see the human soul for the human flesh. They spend so much time getting lost in, and angered by, and frustrated and disgusted with, the ill-kept grounds of the estate, that they seldom discover there's a house there at all. Much less the good in that house: the tiny, timid, quavering animal huddled in a dark corner somewhere inside. Rather not unlike Cinderella, quietly lost amid all the commotion of her loudly self-promoting stepmother and stepsisters. But whom did the Prince finally choose?

Which brings me to one last question, apart from which I doubt this essay would even have been possible. For one thing, I'm not sure how far you can judge an entire household merely by who most often comes in and out of it. Or how far you can determine the real worth of a family by considering its Marthas only, and not its Marys. For instance, you'd hardly judge the whole character of even a deceased father's house by ignoring his one surviving daughter, Cinderella; after all, the remaining mother and daughters are only step-. But that's just the problem with most writers of satire: They look at the whole house - the whole man, if you will - from the outside, and they hear the various noises coming from within, and frankly they're no longer even sure the real daughter still exists. I mean, you never see her come out anymore; and in any case she probably always was more or less of an idiot. And, of course, in thus judging "Cinderella" they only succeed in judging themselves, and that the very core, the very heart of themselves. As well of you and me.

Which is exactly my point. For if satirists aren't even sure they have a soul worth bothering about (much less any "Cinderelic" vestige of good in it), on what grounds do they judge and reprimand and castigate ours?

When My Dream Becomes Your Nightmare

Want to read a really good article on US-Russian relations? Or on the challenges more broadly facing US foreign policy in the coming years, if not decades? You could hardly do better than one of historian Walter Russell Mead's Via Meadia blog entries from four days ago: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/09/26/reset-regret/. Here, in just two short paragraphs, I've encountered more sanity, level-headedness, nuance, balance, and good old-fashioned common sense than I'm sure I could find in a whole year's worth of either The National Review or The New Republic on the same subject:

There is a good case for a businesslike relationship no matter who runs Russia. There are many areas of vital strategic interest to both sides where our interests are aligned. Neither country wants China to dominate Eurasia, for example. Neither country wants Islamic radicals to destabilize Central Asia or get control of weapons of mass destruction.

There are also a number of areas in which our interests come into conflict.  The US does not want the Russians to rebuild something like the Soviet Union by incorporating former Soviet republics into a tightly centralized sphere of influence.  Nor do we like the idea that Russia could use its energy resources to detach Europe and especially Germany from the Atlantic alliance. Americans by and large remain convinced that governments like the Putin system in Russia are ugly, unreliable and in the long run justly doomed.  Prime Minister Putin disagrees.

But just to give you an idea of the overall caliber of the blog, and of the general quality of the posts submitted in comment, here's a sample from one of the best responding posts of the day:

I doubt that Germany is thinking in terms of being a client state of Russia. It may well be looking to rearrange European politics; it is practically inevitable that that would mean looking East rather than looking West, considering how heavily tilted West it has been since the end of the second world war. 

In any case, if Germany rearranges its foreign policy, it will be because it is to Germany’s advantage, not because of Russian pressure. It will also be to some arrangement where Germany takes more of a leadership role (as “befits” a country of its economic clout), not an arrangement where Germany bows to a superior.

Now inevitably all this got my own overheated brain going in its usual geopolitical channels. And of course my own reading of Modern History tells me, again and again, that just about any combination of Germany and Russia - and particularly one that works at the expense of the countries lying in between - tends to bring out the ungodly worst in both parties. And so my own posted comments on the original article follow, in a form revised and slightly expanded for the purposes of this blog. But first let me re-highlight just one crucial sentence from the original Mead quote:

Nor do we like the idea that Russia could use its energy resources to detach Europe and especially Germany from the Atlantic alliance. 

If that isn’t one red devil of a geopolitical nightmare, I don’t know what is. And again - as is clear from the responding poster's comments - how easy it is to imagine dog and tail trading places! Picture, say, a Germano-European-managed or -orchestrated Russia, its resources increasingly at the disposal of a most Eurasianly- (rather than Atlantically-) minded Germany. A Germany quite willing to borrow a page from the nineteenth-century American experience of “limitless” frontier expansion. It would be, if I’m remembering correctly, an outcome very much in keeping with Hitler’s own admiration of an American settler-driven land empire, as opposed to the older Western European pattern of maritime, soldier-and-administrator-dependent colonization. At the same time, this new “New Order” could hardly afford to treat all pre-existing inhabitants as just so many Red Indians – or Jews and Slavs? – to be disposed of. On the contrary, I should think a new, eastward-facing Europe would be happy to work with demographically dominant or “stronger” nations (like the Russians?), at the expense of “weaker” or dwindling peoples (like today’s endangered Baltics). Here I keep being reminded of John Foster Dulles’ grim, almost apocalyptic pre-World War II dichotomy of “dynamic” vs “static” nations; small wonder he opposed “dynamic” America’s tilting towards "decadent" Britain and France in the 1930s.    
     

For some reason, too, I have very little trouble imagining this latest New Order mending fences with the sort of emerging Sino-Saudi-Pakistani axis explored in a previous Mead post. After all, might they not both perceive in the US a common enemy – or at least a common competitor? If not the “Anglosphere” as a whole? And what better incentive could they then have for rationalizing and streamlining the resources of their common Eurasian interior? And that for the benefit of all big local buyers – er, powers? 
     
Some might argue, of course, that a Germano-Russo-European combine would have at least as strong an incentive to work with India and Iran against a Saudi-Paki-Chinese axis. Yet somehow I doubt it. Historically Germany – and not least its more Russophile elements (e.g., General Hans von Seeckt during the interwar period) – has enjoyed techno-military ties with China going back to the earliest days of the Nationalist government, if not earlier. Nor can I imagine any rationally-motivated China letting its “fears” of India stand in the way of upgrading ties with Russia and Iran. I mean, if there’s one thing geopolitical Goliaths can agree on, surely it’s the need to eliminate the common obstacle of a bunch of scattered or isolatable Davids?    

The key for us here, I suspect, lies in somebody persuading the Chinese that they’ve far more to lose from a radicalizing and imploding – or implosion-exporting? – Pakistan than from a stable, modern, secular India. (Again assuming, in India’s case, that the modernity and the secularity haven’t already become inversely proportionate.) And that outcome, in turn, may depend on China’s ability to see itself more as a specific, concrete nation and territory, to which jihadists pose an existential threat, and less as a globe-straddling, corporately-organized civilization for which jihadists may be just as much geostrategic assets and business partners. The same may be more or less true of Russia – in which case their real, national interest lies most emphatically in partnership with the West, NOT with an eastward-facing Germany. In either case, I believe the key lies in persuading these two great powers that, humanly (as distinct from corporately) speaking, they’re far better off regarding themselves as national and territorial entities, whose populations are finite and therefore valuable, rather than as corporate and civilizational entities whose human resources are infinitely renewable, downgradable and disposable. I just wish I knew whose gifts of persuasion we could rely on. Ours seem to be in a state of steady depletion since George H W.  

In any event, should both “axes” ever solidify and combine – say, in an effort to limit the Eurasian reach or leverage of Anglosphere – then personally I fear greatly for (quaint old diplomatic phrase!) the “liberties” of Central Asia. And naturally also, in time, for the political freedoms of the whole Euro-Asian land-mass. For one thing, the bulk of the “smaller” peoples would be under immense pressure to go more or less the way of our own native Americans. Or, to phrase it with more geographic relevance, to become "Tibetanized." 

Yet even then, mind you, it’s not like there would necessarily be nothing to celebrate. No doubt the result would prove to be an amazing triumph, on an unprecedented scale, of one version of the American Idea – namely, the American Geohistorical Model of the nineteenth century. Albeit mostly at the expense of the solidarity, power, influence, perhaps even ultimately independence, of the present American Nation. Or, for that matter, of any nation as we presently know it. (Right, as if anyone still cared . . .)   

And then just think: The lifelong horror of that grand old geopolitician Mackinder – a unified Eurasian continent able to command (“No, no, you idiot – AMERICANIZE!”) the globe – would have become a reality. 


Once again: God heal America (before it’s too late?).   

POST-9/11 Anniversary Reflection

POST . . . because there’s nothing like even a day or two’s dust-settling for helping one see the ground more clearly. Besides helping me to see things in a less jaded (i.e., more wide-eyed and wondrous) fashion.    

For one thing, it never ceases to amaze me how unpredictable, “wildcat,” and unco-operative human political evil can be. Especially when it comes to meshing with our prevailing US political assumptions and agendas.

Take jihadism, for instance. Really, you'd think that what began as a major Godly anti-Communist force of the latter twentieth century (one which - apart from a dash of ideological cement from the Saudis- we and the Pakistani military raised up from practically nothing) would at least have had the  decency not to imitate the barbarism of the godless Soviets they’d just defeated. To say nothing of going those same Russkies one, two or even three better. And then think of the sheer treachery of what eventually followed. I mean, when you consider whom they ultimately proceeded to turn on  (“No, no, Frankie, not me – I’m your CREATOR!”) . . . 

And no, the various al-Qaeda/Taliban/Hizb-ut-Tahrir, etc, franchises may not yet have succeeded in creating their own “god”-anointed Gulag.  But in the event they finally do fail, do you seriously think it will be for want of trying?     

Anyhow, one thing we all do well to bear in mind: Whatever may be the future of al-Qaeda and Sons as a global and organized political force, the peculiar genie called jihadism is now out of the bottle. And it came out of the bottle under our Free World watch (the Communists having by then been well out of the picture), and among our Free World allies. Nor, for once, is this truly monumental wickedness in any way tainted with anything liberal, secular, socialist, atheist, materialist, Eastern European, Russian, Orthodox Christian or even Slavic. Indeed, the sheer absence alone of these characteristics not only seems to have stumped us. It has left us, I would argue, singularly unready to confront the uniquely monstrous evil of this new villain.    

After all, what is jihadism? It is in essence the human preparedness to destroy any human being anywhere without limit. And all in an effort to appease the wrath of one very strange god indeed. A god who – even if he’s not exactly Hate Incarnate – is such, in his blanketing hatred of both sin and sinner, that he seems to like nothing better than the chance to consume them both in one fell swoop. (Then again, isn't it we Yanks who've always said “You are what you do?”) Now for some reason that hatred strikes me as a considerably more hideous menace to decent society than any mere prejudice against non-whites, women or homosexuals. Of course I lack the soaring imagination of more politically correct souls. And so I’ve never understood why we did not, long ago, stigmatize this belief as every bit as reprehensible, shameful and unthinkable as our worst racism, sexism and homophobia. Indeed, as immeasurably worse than any of them. In fact, if we continue NOT to, then I, for one, don’t see how we have any hope of returning our societies to anything like a sane, moderately surveillanced normality.    

Right now, of course, we Westerners prefer to be more or less undiscriminating in the thoroughness of our security procedures (as in airports, tall buildings, etc). That is, we prefer “officially” to treat every man, woman and child, without discrimination, as either a potential jihadist or the potential instrument of a jihadist. Thereby conferring upon one and all the blessings of at least potentially Maximum Public Visibility. Which, I will admit, is very much in the interests of those who market to us all, and sell to us all (i.e., can one ever really know enough about one’s customers?). But meanwhile the jihadist – especially if he’s “only” a sympathizer – is able to escape the one stigma he most richly deserves: that of being a social pariah whose ideas are no more worthy of polite consideration than those of the most hardened neo-Nazi. And we, as states and societies, in our efforts ever more closely to monitor the actions of certain monsters we dare not name, only succeed in becoming more intrusive, more overweeningly arrogant - in a word, more monstrous, ourselves. Not, of course, that our own growing monstrosity should give us Westerners any great cause for alarm. After all, what better way to render even the worst political evils co-operative and pliable than to embrace and enfold them into oneself?