Sacred Violence

Anthropologist Scott Atran reflects on war, finding it unavoidably a product of man's irrational nature, no matter how rational its justification may seem.  He doesn't appear to be making a case for absolute pacifism, but rather reminding us that rational thought will always be colored by what he calls "sacred truths" we have accepted - for good or ill.  Further, as a violent project, war inspires in us certain tendencies.

In one study, we asked 656 Israeli settlers in the West Bank about the dismantlement of their settlement as part of a peace agreement with Palestinians. Some subjects were asked about their willingness to engage in nonviolent protests, whereas others were asked about violence. Besides their willingness to violently resist eviction, the subjects rated how effective they thought the action would be and how morally right the decision was. If the settlers are making the decision rationally, in line with mainstream models, their willingness to engage in a particular form of protest should depend mostly on their estimation of its effectiveness. But if sacred values come into play, that calculus should be clouded.

When it came to nonviolent options such as picketing and blocking streets, the rational behavior model predicted settlers' decisions. But in deciding whether to engage in violence, the settlers defied the rational behavior models. Rather than how effective they thought violence would be in saving their homes, the settlers' willingness to engage in violent protest depended only on how morally correct they considered that option to be. We found similar patterns of "principled" resistance to peace settlements and support for violence, including suicide bombings, among Palestinian refugees who felt "sacred values" were at stake, such as the recognizing their moral right of return to homes in Israel even if they expressed no material or practical interest in actually resettling.

A twist on "might makes right", the act of violence seems to inspire a passion that clouds out reason, focusing narrowly on violent response. 

Thinking of capital punishment, that the law is on the books, as a violent option, would by itself inspire violence. We've seen many studies in which the suggestion of an option or concept, changes decisions that would seem to be rational, and not directly connected to the suggestion.

I wonder if this dynamic in justice doesn't have to with a basic human fear impulse. The suggestion of violence triggers something deep in us, a sort of fear response, which is built to respond with violence. Something like a fear:attack mechanism.

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A larger question is what we mean by sacred ?  Surely, its basis is something quite ineffable, and changes over time. Today, not being racist is a sacred truth. But it surely wasn't a few decades ago. Other, almost invisible things have slipped away. Why were we ever racist? I'm not sure we even knew at the time - it was sacred truth. (I'm actually convinced that this lack of knowing is what allows many today to believe themselves above racism - accepting that sacred truth - while still falling subject to the many prejudices and cognitive failings that afflicted previous, consciously racist generations)

And each of us has our own sacred values, defined by various allegiances and assumptions. I think the oddest thing is the circular way in which we hold sacred truths to be self evident, yet which are based on values and principles derived from thousands of years of cultural evolution. And yet that evolution of values and principles was surely informed in no small part by "sacred" considerations. Our sacred is informed by a reason, which itself is informed by a sacred.

OK, this is kind of terrible, but I just finished Robopocalypse, by Daniel Wilson, and there's a horrendous scene near the end where the robot mind has created these little robot parasites that attach themselves to a dead body, and by squeezing the diaphragm, vibrating the voice box, manipulating the lips and tongue, are able to make the body speak. As you know, I'm a determinist, and this might be the most disturbing, misanthropic analogy for what I generally claim to be occurring in human thought! But, it is vivid.

So, seeing this kind of abyssal relationship between the sacred and the rational, and the frighteningly unconscious way in which we think - even indeed, as we think - make me all the more skeptical of the notion that we are much in control at all.

Mind you, I actually find this insight liberating, in that in a seemingly paradoxical way I feel empowered by it. In religious terms, as best I can relate to and understand them, I see this determinist operational dynamic, this causal force of the natural world, as the closest thing I can imagine to a God. And in the manner I imagine people have always taken solace from religion, as a part of something larger than themselves, something that reminds them that their personal struggles are petty in the grander scheme of things - God's plan, I too feel a sense of belonging, forgiveness and purpose in this great natural unfolding of biological and cultural evolutionary history.

Especially, when reminded of the silly ways in which I as a human am bound to think.

Doing What We Can

Some thoughts on Afghanistan.

When Obama was deliberating with his generals over the next course of action in Afghanistan, I felt considerably conflicted.  On the one hand, we were experiencing an economic crisis on the home front, and the prospect of spending hundreds of billions more on that war, not to mention the risk to soldier (and civilian) life, when a positive outcome - a somewhat stable and democratic government - seemed a tall order.  But on the other, leaving would seem to pave the way for a Taliban resurgence, bringing with it a horrible humanitarian crisis and the likely return of terrorist "safe havens", where global Jihadist groups would be able to establish operations with impunity.

But I accepted that there were likely those in power - such as Democrats in congress and the Obama administration - whose moral courage I had faith in, and more specifically who had access to expert advice that I did not.  Now that the planned draw-down nears, and yet the situation seems no better, one wonders whether it was worth it after all.  Will we achieve anything like stability there in the next year?  Or two?  Or ever? And with recent activity in Somalia and Yemen, the "safe-haven" argument seems less and less important after all.

As popular sentiment grapples with this reality, appeals to the humanitarian aspects of the war have grown louder.  Time magazine recently presented the case on its cover:

Peter Worthington at the Frum forum said this:

If anything indicates the need for a civilized presence in Afghanistan, it’s the recent slaughter of 10 aid workers by the Taliban.

But I don't think that's indicated at all.


First, “by civilized presence” he's speaking of our troops, for whom we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars, not to mention putting their lives at risk, and it is not at all clear whether they are now or will ever be a “civilizing presence” to that wretched and chaotic region.

Second, if we’re going to start arguing that any country in which horrendous abuses of human life are occurring ought to be invaded at great expense, the murder of 10 aid workers hardly puts Afghanistan at the top of the list.

If the question is “should Afghanistan not be the way it is?”, the answer is obviously “no.” But reality doesn’t care what you or I think. Thus we are forced to make rational decisions about what we should do based upon what we can do. Whether fighting the Taliban might result in a justifiable diminution of terrorist safe-havens is one argument. But humanitarianism is quite another. There are many areas of the world in which we can spend much less money and alleviate much more suffering.

I'm not sure our options are any better than they have ever been.  I'm really worried about what Afghanistan will look like when we leave.  But at some point, you just have to say, "it's a shitty world", and hope for the best. Are we there yet?  Again, I feel like I need to defer to those in power whom I trust to a degree.  In many ways I'm thankful I don't have to make the decision.  I'm OK with that.  This is why we elect people we respect.  But it doesn't feel much better.

Who Are We?

Judith Butler is a Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at University of California Berkeley.  In a recent interview she discusses her latest book, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
 A fierce critic of war, or at least our seeming endless tolerance for it, she has harsh words for Obama, who she says has not nearly been the critic of war she would have liked him to be.  But, as a philosopher, she's more interested in getting at deeper questions, and tries to see how we end up where we do.

Along with many other people, I am trying to contest the notion that we can only value, shelter, and grieve those lives that share a common language or cultural sameness with ourselves. The point is not so much to extend our capacity for compassion, but to understand that ethical relations have to cross both cultural and geographical distance. Given that there is global interdependency in relation to the environment, food supply and distribution, and war, do we not need to understand the bonds that we have to those we do not know or have never chosen? This takes us beyond communitarianism and nationalism alike. Or so I hope.

I think before entering warfare one needs to ask oneself whether, if it were to take place in their own country, they would fight in the same way.  If the answer is yes, then there is no moral hypocrisy.  But as soon as you begin to think of the lives of inhabitants of some far off land as less meaningful than those of your countrymen, you've begun to lose your humanity.

A similar thought occurred to me today, albeit on a much different subject.  We are putting an addition on our house, which is about 2 hours from the Mexican border.  Many in our community are migrant workers, some legal, some not.  Well, a couple of Mexicans came to my door, speaking very poor English, and offered a bid to stucco the exterior walls.  I thanked them for the offer, and said I'd give their card to the contractor - who as it happens has at least one undocumented worker in his employ.

I wondered how I felt about profiting from illegal labor - certainly their wages would be a drag on those of naturalized citizens.  How would I like it if an undocumented Mexican was able to compete for my job as a teacher?  And what if that meant a substantial pay cut?

I'm not sure I would have a problem with it.  I mean, sure, I want to get paid as much as I can.  But what right do I have over anyone else, if they can the do the same job for less?  What right do I have, just because the uterus I came out of 34 years ago just happened to have been a US citizen?  We only need to go a handful of uteruses back and my family tree would have been the ones doing the displacement.

Nationalism, while a useful and nostalgic concept, can lead to the most base sort of inhumanity and objectification.  What other tendency of human thought can be so soaked in the blood of injustice than provincial arrogance and arbitrary righteousness?  Such despicable, beast-like behavior.  Every man for himself, this is my lifeboat, get out.  The post-hoc rationalizations fill endless volumes of rhetoric down through the centuries.  They trickle slowly through the days like sticky-saccharine. 

Looking back, we've come so far.  But we have so far to go still.

The Corporatization of War

A popular, long-standing meme among the more radical progressive is that war is almost always driven by profit and greed of those who stand to gain from its engagement.

Aside from being wrong, the cynical, self-aggrandizing view that all this warmongering from the right comes down to profit is unhelpful. It detracts from the real motivations, which are more nuanced, less clear-cut, and demand a more thoughtful engagement with the facts.

I suppose the argument might go like this: the evil corporate overlords who ostensibly profit from war put out propaganda via their media tentacles and party apparatchiks. The average American conservative, unsophisticated as he is, mindlessly gobbles it up, ignorantly seeing it as sound political policy.

While nifty for the plot of the next Cameron flick (penned by Moore?), it's little more than paranoid left-wing hubris. The reality is that there is a considerable tradition of principled philosophy and political logic behind the "war on terror" and the rest of its neoconservative manifestations.

The tradition is mostly utter bullshit - expensive, ineffective and ultimately makes things worse. The entire profile is explained more succinctly by Freud than anything even the brightest CEOs could cook up. With the cigars, the oil-rig SUVs, the football & FOX 24 metaphors, the faux-classical pretensions, the manifest destiny theocratic sanctimony, mommy's boy indulgence - its all such rich material for warfare that the fact that a few lucky companies might see a profit is mere icing on the cake.

There are certainly structural arguments for how the military-industrial complex makes war more of a viable, sexy option. But to reduce humanity's longstanding tradition of the glorification and rationalization of war into a simple symptom of capitalism is an insult to the project of eradicating for good our reliance on it as a retributive substitution for effective and ethical policy.