Beyond Rivalry

Two ideas (one idea) from Book Group Buzz. The folks there find these quotes useful for starting a provocative conversation about a book. I think they would be, but even more so simply as a way to look at the world and relationships.

 

Two lines from Rumi:

 

Keep looking at the bandaged place.
That's where the light enters you.

 

 

And a comment made by a sex addict:

 

"After the first hundred beautiful bodies, it's the flaws that are erotic."

 

 

Reminds me of May Sarton's question (in Recovering), "Is there anyone, I sometimes wonder, who is not wounded and in the process of healing?"  Or perhaps not healing ...

More snow today!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The same galanthus (snowdrops), now covered with a few inches of new wet snow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This false bunny (left by previous owners) wanted her photo shot, too. 

The first in another series, this one documenting mob violence, vigilante justice, and crowd retaliation around the world.

 

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Mark Heim has well summarised Rene Girard's ideas on the expediency of scapegoating and sacrifice as a (temporary) peace-making tool, a way to limit the contagion of violence in a society:

 

"Social life, particularly in its infancy, is fatally subject to plagues of rivalry and vengeance. Escalating cycles of retaliation are the original social disease. Without finding a way to treat this violence, human society can hardly get started. The ability to break this vicious cycle appears as a kind of miracle. At some point, when feuding threatens to dissolve a community, spontaneous and irrational mob violence erupts against some distinctive person or minority in the group. They are accused of the worst crimes the group can imagine, crimes that by their very enormity might have caused the terrible plight the community now experiences. They are lynched.

"The sad good thing that happens as a result of this bad thing is that the scapegoating actually works. In the wake of the murder [sometimes just an ouster], communities find that this sudden war of all against one has delivered them from the war of each against all. The sacrifice of one person as a scapegoat discharges the pending acts of retribution. It 'clears the air.' This benefit seems a startling, even magical result from a simple execution. The sudden peace confirms the desperate charges that the victim had been behind the crisis to begin with. If the scapegoat's death is the solution, the scapegoat must have been the cause. ...

 

"Rituals of sacrifice originated in this way, says Girard. They were tools to fend off social crisis. And in varied forms they are with us still. The prescription is that divisions in the community must be reduced to but one division, the division of all against one common victim or one minority group. Prime candidates are the marginal and the weak, or those isolated by their very prominence. Typically, they will be charged with violating the community's most sacred taboos. The process does not just accept innocent victims, it prefers them-- 'outsiders' who are not closely linked to established groups in the society."

 

"No one thought out this process, and its effectiveness depends on a certain blindness to its workings. Myth reflects the scapegoat event but does not describe it. Myth is the product of a collective killing that all the actors found completely justified, entirely necessary and powerfully beneficent. It is the memory of a clean conscience that never registered the presence of a victim at all."

 

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Keeping in mind James Alison's comment, from a Sept. 2006 interview: "It is easy to look at mobbing and think: how primitive those people are. It is much more difficult to catch oneself being complicit in exactly the same forms of violence disguised in the values of 'religion' or 'family' or 'civilization.'" 

 

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I'm recounting current accounts of mob "justice" to witness to this ongoing form of sacrifice and so-called peace-making, and to see how -- as far as is possible having only media accounts of the incidents -- they do or don't conform to the aspects Girard and others have described.

 

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Four stories this morning:

 

 

1. (28 March) Villagers catch 'witch', beat up and parade her, in New Delhi, India:

"When she [returned to] the village on Thursday, villagers tied her to a tree, beat her up, sheared and set her hair on fire. They then tied her hands and paraded her through the village, with even the village elders joining in. The incident took place a stone's throw away [pun intended?] from the local police station."

 

Another article about the event reports that "The entire village joined hands in punishing the woman."

 

The police did arrest six of those abusing the woman, and they arrested the woman for "conning people." The CNN-IBN news article suggests that "the locals may have beaten up the woman because it is a 'traditional thing' to do when they are dissatisfied." (Apparently, per another CNN article, she had been brought in previously to help cure a sick woman in the village but had not succeeded.) NDTV also reports the incident.

 

Conformity: A 'witch' from another town is certainly an outsider. Her 'crime' was to set herself up as 'better than' others (able to cure the sick), and secondly, to fail. Her failure to cure may leave the man without hope, desperate, and it may also leave him humiliated for having pinned his hopes on her cure. The scapegoating seems to have united the townspeople, as the village "joined hands" in punishing her and the elders lent their support, too.

 

 

2. (26 March) Xenophobic violence: In South Africa, at refugee settlements near Praetoria, mobs of people are attacking those they consider outsiders, throwing stones at them, torching their houses, and in some cases beating and killing them.

 

IOL reports that "about 300 immigrants [have been] forced from their shacks by marauding gangs in the Brazzaville informal settlement" this week. One woman, a South African, said "her home was torched because a mob thought she was an immigrant. 'They burnt everything. How can a community turn on us like this? All they see is Zimbabweans everywhere and it doesn't matter if you have the same ID as them,' she lamented." 

 

The same source reports the death of Zimbabwean Chamunorna Kufondada, 38, who was beaten and burned to death by a mob of attackers. A neighbour, Mpho Mudau, "said he woke up at about 11pm when he heard Kufondada's screams and saw a fire from his window in a neighbouring shack. 'I don't feel good. I was in my house and could hear his screams, but I couldn't help him because they would attack me too,' Mudau said." He said that foreigners are being attacked because they take jobs and commit crime. The charred body of a man believed to be South African was found nearby Kufondada's. 

 

Another article (also from IOL) quotes the South African Human Rights Commission spokesperson to say that "some people are blaming the immigrants for illegal electricity connections and shortage of services even though they cannot prove that it is their fault." 

 

Conformity: The immigrants and refugees are outsiders, and in fact it's well-known that that's why they are targeted. Locals may also be targeted if they interfere with the mobs, who seem to feel they are well-justified in attacking outsiders for their purported crimes: taking jobs, commiting crimes, and causing a shortage of public services. That is, the outsiders are not seen as innocent victims but as criminals and as the cause of conflicts.  One question might be whether targeting immigrants is "helping" to allay other conflicts in the community.

 

 

3. Mob lynches yet another man in Bihar, in India (26 March):

 

"In yet another case of mob violence, a man from a dalit family was beaten to death in a Bihar town, the police said on Wednesday. ...The police said a mob caught the man in his mid-40s on suspicion of having stolen a cow from the house of Amarnath Pandey. 'He was beaten to death with bricks and bamboo sticks,' the police said. ...

 

The Telegraph (Calcutta, India) has a fuller report and notes that "The family and friends of the deceased have lodged a complaint but there seems to be no resentment as the man had criminal antecedents." 

 

Conformity: The man killed is not an innocent but rather apparently a known criminal, though only suspected of the cow theft; and therefore, because he is seen as 'set apart' in some way by being a criminal, there is "no resentment" felt by his family and friends for his killing, and it's implied therefore that there will be no revenge taken for his murder. I wonder if the man was killed for his cumulative deeds, his personality, because the cow's owner was particularly liked or esteemed in town, or mostly because he could be killed without fear of mob reprisal? This is one of a string of lynchings in this area over several years.

 

4. Mob justice for wheel thieves, in Johannesburg, South Africa (12 March):

"Johannesburg Metro police saved three men from certain death at the hands of an angry mob near Diepsloot, north of the city, on Tuesday. Spokesman Superintendent Wayne Minnaar said Metro officers rescued the men from an angry crowd of taxi drivers and commuters after they were caught stealing alloy-rimmed wheels from an Opel that had broken down on the R511 near Diepsloot.  Its owner was in a taxi as it drove past and saw the theft going gown. When Metro officers arrived the three had been stripped naked and had been beaten so severely that they were only semi-conscious."

 

Conformity:  There's not really enough information here to guess. Certainly the punishment seems extreme for the crime, but that's often the way with mob "justice."

 

Fun essay in the NYT's Papercuts by Bob Harris, listing his choices for the seven worst words frequently used in book reviews. The comments are even funnier, by which I of course mean compelling, nuanced, readable and haunting.

First in a new series, linking to articles, essays, op-eds, websites that mention Girard or Girardians:

 

Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams in the Observer on Sunday, in an article titled: "We live in a culture of blame - but there is another way: The Archbishop of Canterbury tells why the Easter story can help humanity escape a lethal cycle of fear and resentment."

Giles Frasier in the Guardian on Saturday, in a powerful article titled: "A funny kind of Christian: His thirst for scapegoats shows how poorly George Bush understands the meaning of Easter."  From which: "[T]he story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is supremely a moral story about God's identification with victims. The French anthropologist René Girard is the modern voice that has done most to explain the nature of this moral change."

Michael Kirwan SJ's article "Fear and Loathing in the Low Countries" in Thinking Faith (a journal of British Jesuits) in February "uses the insights of French philosopher René Girard to analyse what it is about the Dutch psyche that might lie behind such vociferous opposition to Islam." via A Vow of Conversation

There's a course to be taught this April-June at the Servant Leadership School ("an ecumenical center for theological reflection and spiritual formation located in Washington, D.C.") by David Hilfiker, M.D. titled "The Radical Inclusivity of the Gospel: Ending the Spiral of Violence" [scroll down] which will "explore the theories of Rene Girard, to see how they can help us get beyond our current cultural impasse, as well as see what they mean for our personal and spiritual journeys."

Girard in poetry: Poet Ange Mlinko's "Conversion Comedy" in the March issue of Poetry magazine pays homage to Girard's comment that "the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims." She also says that her priest told her to read Rene Girard and James Alison when she was deciding to be an Episcopal, "to give me a philosophical framework for Christianity quite apart from metaphysics." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you're looking for a 15-minute detailed summary of how the U.S. is spending three trillion dollars on the war in Iraq, listen to budget expert and former U.S. Asst. Secretary of Commerce Linda Bilmes giving a clear, careful outline of the costs in the first half of this Commonwealth Club of California presentation on "Globalization and the Three Trillion Dollar War." Following Bilmes at the podium is Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz talking about the benefits vs. the costs.

 

More, in response to the book by Bilmes and Stiglitz on the same topic, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, from Salon, Times Online, The Economist.

The media focus on the relationship between U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Obama's pastor for the last 20 years, Jeremiah Wright (who retired last month as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago), is surprising and disheartening to me. I can't help but feel that something is sorely amiss in the call to repudiate and neutralise both Wright's sermons (though most of us have read or heard only the barest snippets in a body of work over 20 years in the making) and the man himself.

 

Please don't take my remarks below, or endorsement of other people's remarks, to mean that I agree with everything Wright says. I haven't heard most of what he's said, and I'm aware that what any person says is open to many interpretations. What we say can be understood literally, metaphorically, symbolically, as part of a larger story narrative, intending to bring to mind words of others, a frame for historical events, to promote violence and unity and to inspire the imagination. In fact, sermons taken out of context -- read instead of heard, outside the church and the ritual of liturgy -- seem particularly liable to be miscontrued. (Just think of Jesus's words, or most of the Bible or the Koran, and how even adherents of the same religious path differ greatly on beliefs and actions concerning wealth and poverty, living in community, family life, fairness in society, social justice, the body and sex, the legal system, retribution, forgiveness, and so on.)

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I'm surprised by how widespread is the belief that most people agree with what their pastors preach, or the idea that most people would leave a church because their pastor's sermons aren't always in line with their beliefs. My experience is different -- the church is a group of people, the spirit and presence of a pastor is expressed not just in what s/he says in weekly sermons, the mission and vision of the church can supercede the influence of the pastor, the sensory experience of the rituals may matter more anything spoken during worship. Mark Oppenheimer says all this very well in his essay "How the Obama/Wright debate gets religion all wrong": 

 

"In short, you only think Wright matters is you think that Obama attends Trinity Church because of the beliefs taught there. And while it might seem obvious that people choose a church (or synagogue, or mosque) because they agree with its teachings, that's not necessarily the case. In fact, I'd argue that for most people the beliefs of their church are a small, often insignificant part of why they attend."

 

Oppenheimer goes on to enumerate other compelling reasons for being part of a church: the sense of community there, cultural loyalty, the music and ritual, even perks like free babysitting and childcare; and one that resonates with me, "because having a pastor whom they disagree with is more interesting than having a pastor who never says anything controversial." I like to be challenged during worship, which means I won't agree with everything I hear from the pulpit.

 

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Franky Schaeffer, son of the late Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer, makes the case that the essence (not every particular) of what Wright said was said years before by his dad, with rather a different response. When Francis Schaeffer "denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr.  ... Dad became a hero to the evangelical community and a leading political instigator. ... Take Dad's words and put them in the mouth of Obama's preacher (or in the mouth of any black American preacher) and people would be accusing that preacher of treason." 

 

Some have noted in the comments to Frank's story that Francis Schaeffer spent his life preaching against abortion, against euthanasia, using values and arguments "based and steeped in the bible." As Scott Hutchinson at Preaching Peace argues in his essay, "No Longer Do I Call You Friend?," however, many of Jeremiah Wright's most inflammatory words, even taken out of context as they have been, can be seen as social gospel, in the pattern of the Old Testament prophets and of Jesus himself.

 

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Melissa Harris-Lacewell at theroot.com (associate professor at Princeton and seminarian at Union Theological Seminary) makes the same comparison to the Biblical prophets and also sees the similarity of Wright's oratory to that of American abolishionist Frederick Douglass's when he was speaking against slavery. (We studied Douglass in high school as a great American orator.) She says that Douglass and Wright are both speaking in the tradition of the 'black jeremiad.'  Jeremiah, the Biblical prophet from whom the word 'jeremiad' is derived and the namesake of the Rev. Wright, "was among the biblical truth tellers who regularly warned the government that divine destruction was imminent if the nation continued to oppress the powerless. Frederick Douglass was a master of the jeremiad. He called slavery a curse to the nation and argued that, 'we shall not go unpunished.' He said it was the patriotic duty of blacks 'to warn our fellow countrymen' of the impending doom they courted and to dissuade America from 'rushing on in her wicked career' along a path 'ditched with human blood, and paved with human skulls.' Jeremiah Wright is a modern Douglass. Both men are like the Old Testament prophets who condemn the injustice and corruption of the rulers of their government."  

 

While his overall take on the matter seems wrong to me, E.J. Dionne Jr. at the WaPo compares Wright's "un-American" remarks with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s. Some excerpts from some of those speeches are here.

 

For instance: Here's King preaching against the Vietnam War at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta (4 Feb. 1968):

 

"'God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place.'

 

"King then predicted this response from the Almighty: 'And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power.'" 

 

 

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Back to Hutchinson's essay. He says that "the whirlwind enveloping Presidential candidate Barack Obama and his relationship to spiritual mentor and friend Reverend Jeremiah Wright" seems "a particularly Lenten drama, where we witness the powers of the world at work, demanding blind allegiance, wielding mechanisms of labeling and scapegoating, asserting dominion over matters of faith, threatening a bottom line quite at odds with God's realm."

 

Hutchinson says that rather listening to Obama defend his relationship with Wright even as he distanced himself from the pastor, "one longed for him to give as much, or more attention, to the gospel of Jesus Christ that he gives Reverend Wright recognition for preaching to him. ... How about the integrity to challenge when others would shamelessly prooftext Reverend Wright's sermons, to confront the failure of those howling in protest to listen more deeply and carefully to a word preached from the context of communal pain and alienation, to embrace a common commitment (even in honest disagreement and anger) to discern a deeper, penetrating, eternal voice speaking to us through this experience? Isn't September 11th part of a larger, tragic cycle of human violence and retribution (while indeed being inexcusable)? Don't the scriptures indicate that the taking of innocent life comes under the judgment of God?"

 

Hutchinson makes clear that he's not condeming Obama: "His dilemma is ours, albeit on greater public display. ... For me, this is a recognition scene.  .. I am beckoned to make an honest appraisal of the titans of this world that demand my allegiance and the spiritual 'pretzel logic' they insist I embrace. I must also be honest about the ways I accede to those demands."

 
(I am noticing my own pretzel logic this tax season, as the country seems to be in recession and house values are falling. I'm trying to maximize the tax return, thinking about how charitable gifts can be used to do so, worrying about the (paper) losses to my retirement funds, etc., and recognising in a corner of my being that this is not living as Jesus lived. My money anxieties and greed are not furthering the gospel. To the contrary.)

 

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Others have commented on the similarity of Wright's "God damn America!" to the prophets' and Jesus's "Woe unto you!" Just a few examples: Prophets: Isaiah 3:9, Isaiah 5, Isaiah 10:1-3, Jeremiah 13:27, Jer. 23, Habakkuk 2:12,15,19, Ezekiel 13:3,8, Hosea 7:13; Jesus: Matthew 23:23-33 or its parallel in Luke 11:42-54, and Matthew 18:7 and Luke 6:24-28.

 

United Methodist pastor Eric Folkerth's comments at TPM are particularly thoughtful. Also helpful, Kevin Considine's comments at religionand spirituality.com. Kevin is a graduate student at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

 

On the surface, "Woe unto you" seems more ambiguous about where the woe comes from than "God damn" does about where the damning comes from. We don't know if "woe" is a punishment for evil deeds or a consequence of those deeds. It's certainly possible that it's the latter. A simple example that removes the ambiguity might be if I said to someone who eats twice his required calorie intake every day and who doesn't get any exercise, "Obesity unto you!" Yes, obesity is what will probably happen, and it may feel like punishment, but it's clear that I'm not bringing anything to pass, that it's his actions, colliding with reality, that lead to some pretty predictable consequences. The meaning of Isaiah 3:9 seems to be similar to this: "Woe unto their soul for they have rewarded evil unto themselves." 

 

On the other hand, "God damn" seems to be unambiguous. We have an external causal agent, God, and a type of action, i.e., damning, which is de facto a punishment. I'm not so sure of this, though; it may be just a rhetorical way of recognising that actions and consequences are part of the natural order of reality, the way, some might say, that God created them. Or it could be an actual request or demand of God that God condemn people to suffering.

 

If the latter, while I can relate to the feeling and desire to bring suffering to those who I believe are causing others to suffer, I don't think this is a truly Christian call, and I think it is always counter-productive as a way to reduce suffering. Jesus in the Drama of Salvation by Raymund Schwager SJ and Mark Heim's Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross are particularly good explorations of Biblical passages that seem to posit God's condemnation and punishment but that ultimately can be understood as God handing us over to the consequences of our actions; God, in other words, doesn't intervene (see obesity example above). 

 

The full text of Obama's speech is here. 

 

As Betsy pointed out in the comments (thanks), you can watch Wright's 9/11 sermon (from which the "chickens coming home to roost" line was taken) in context on YouTube, and his "God Damn America" sermon in context on YouTube as well.

 

 

25 March 2008 Update:

 

Gary Kamiya's article in Salon today -- "Rev. Jeremiah Wright isn't the problem: The hysteria over Obama's former pastor's attacks on America shows we're still in thrall to knee-jerk patriotism" -- is worth reading: 

 

"But beyond the fake shockand the all-too-familiar racial politics, what the whole episode reveals is how narrow the range of acceptable discourse remains in this country. This is especially true of anything having to do with patriotism or 9/11 -- which have become virtually interchangeable. Wright's unforgivable sin was that he violated our rigid code of national etiquette. Instead of the requisite 'God bless America,' he said 'God damn America.' He said 9/11 was a case of chickens coming home to roost. Now we must all furrow our brows and agree that such dreadful words are anathema and that no presidential candidate can ever have been within earshot of them. ... It didn't matter that Wright uttered his curse in the context of demanding that America live up to its ideals -- all that mattered were those three talismanic words. Anyone this angry, our media gatekeepers solemnly informed us, must be rejected. ...

 

"Turkey has a notorious law, Article 301, that makes "insulting Turkishness" a crime. We're a lot closer to this than we like to think. ...

 

"Our currently mandated version of patriotism is banal and genteel, as if we are afraid to dig beneath the surface of America and find out what's really there. But there is another tradition of patriotism -- a prophetic one. It is dark, angry, disturbing, even terrifying. And it cannot be dismissed, for its exponents include figures who exist at the very heart of the way Americans define themselves and their nation," including John Winthrop, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr."

 

 

7 April 2008 update: More today on the similarity between some of what Wright said and some of what MLK Jr said at the blog of America: The National Catholic Weekly.

 

 

30 April 2008 (can you believe it?) update: Essay entitled "Black Church, Black Theology, and the Politics of Religion in America: A Reflection on the Theology-Race Controversy" by Lee H. Butler, Jr., Ph.D. Professor of Theology and Psychology, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Black Faith and Life at Chicago Theological Seminary, and President, Society for the Study of Black Religion.