Against the Stream

The Morality of Annexation

Over the past several days, a controversy has arisen over an article written in The Federalist by Jason Hill, a colleague of mine at DePaul University. Hill is a professor of Philosophy specializing in ethics, and the title of the article was "The Moral Case for Israel Annexing the West Bank." The article was notable not only for its choice of topic, but in its daring choice to make an ethical case for an immoral policy, without any pretense of allegiance to the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, its history, the status of international law, principles of human rights, or even principles of sound argumentation.

Ordinarily, I would not take to a public forum to criticize a fellow professor at my own institution. But after student inquiries led me to the article, and local news began to report on a student petition to have Dr. Hill censured or in some other way penalized for his opinions, I thought it was important to write something. There are two reasons for this. First, because his arguments are truly and deeply egregious in every way, and second, because I believe that it is important to model to students what a vigorous exchange of ideas in an academic setting looks like. Academic freedom does not simply mean that as scholars we are free to write what we like, but that we are also free to respond, and to engage with one another forcefully around issues of public political and moral importance. And as my field is also ethics, I believe I have a responsibility to engage Hill's arguments on their own terms.

So what is Hill's argument? His thesis, succinctly stated is that "Israel has the moral right to annex all of the West Bank (even Area C) for a plethora of reasons." He then proceeds to enumerate four arguments in support of his thesis. First, that Israel made a mistake in allowing the Palestinian "pretense," second, that the Palestinian Authority is a terrible government, third, that Israel has a right to defeat terrorists, and fourth, that the Palestinians have no moral authority.

I want to make a couple of general observations about Hill's argument before proceeding to examine the bill of particulars. First, it's worth noting that Hill offers very little, verging on nothing, that constitutes actual evidence for any of his claims. The entire article is made up of sweeping generalizations followed by broad claims and no factual backup. What's more, anyone familiar with the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as it has developed over the course of almost seventy one years would recognize that Hill's account is a massive distortion of the actual truth of the matter. This is not to say that there is not a way in which one can squint at Hill's account and see a version of the truth, but it is a version that has been thoroughly filtered through several layers of Likud propaganda. If the only thing one knew about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came from Hill's account, not only would one not have the whole story, but they would actually be more ignorant of the truth of the conflict than if they had not read his account at all. Total ignorance of the conflict would actually be less ignorant than what one would walk way with from reading Hill's article.

Furthermore, it's strange that Hill's article should be entitled a "moral case" for annexation, as it's not a moral case for anything. There's not a shred of morality about it. It's not even immoral. It's anti-moral. There's not an iota of a genuinely moral argument in the entire piece, and there's no detectable account of morality generally that undergirds Hill's account. To the extent that one could extract a moral principle from the article, it is this: What suits Israel, according to its most right-wing elements, is good, and what doesn't suit it, regardless of any other factors, is evil. This is not a moral case for anything, and it would have been more honest if Hill had simply made a Thrasymachean argument that the good is in the interest of the stronger.

Now, onto the specific arguments that Hill makes.

The Palestinian Pretense

At the outset, Hill argues that "Israel made an altruistic mistake toward the Palestinian people after the 1967 defensive war with Jordan. Rather than regard them as 'war settlers' or refugees or, after legally occupying conquered territory, as 'illegal occupants,” they made the Palestinian people their political and moral problem." On Hill's account, the conflict with the Palestinians is rooted in Israel's overly generous and altruistic spirit, as they chose to allow the Palestinians, who had, after all, only lived in the West Bank for thousands of years, to remain, instead of simply expelling them wholesale into Jordan. Lest you think I am exaggerating for effect, here are Hill's words: "Under a different set of political sensibilities, the Palestinian people would have been militarily removed from the area because, morally speaking, after the 1967 war, they never belonged there. The proper response from Israel should have been to immediately annex the land and make the people there the responsibility of their original political homeland: Jordan."

Of course, there is a reason that Israel did not annex the West Bank in 1967 and it was not because they were simply too nice. It was because under international law, it was illegal for them to do so. The West Bank was occupied territory and Israel was not entitled to annex it under international law. It's still not. What's more, under international law, if Israel had annexed the West Bank, they would have been obligated to make the Palestinians Israeli citizens. There is simply no provision in international law to expel the residents of an occupied territory, and certainly none to annex the territory and expel the residents. It's not that this is not covered under international law. It is. It's called a war crime.

So Hill's first argument is that Israel should annex the West Bank now, because it chose not to commit war crimes in 1967. Better late than never, I guess.

Because, to be clear, he is still not in favor of granting Palestinians citizenship rights post-annexation. More on that momentarily.

The Palestinian Authority Is a Terrible Government

First, it is undeniably true that the PA is a terrible government. It has been more or less from the beginning. However, it's a strange and ironic argument that says that Israel should annex the Occupied Territories because of the incompetence and corruption of the PA, given the looming threat of indictment hanging over the head of Benjamin Netanyahu himself. While on a gradient, the PA may be an objectively worse government than Natanyahu's Likud government, it should be clear that it's the same measuring stick. It's hardly a compelling moral argument to state that one terrible government should be abolished and replaced by another terrible government.

What's more, while Hill will no doubt disagree, the idea that Americans under Trump are in a position to stand in judgement over someone else's terrible government is rather laughable. The Trump administration is perhaps the most corrupt American government in US history. Certainly more corrupt than the Bush Administration (and let us never forget just how corrupt that bunch were!), more corrupt than Nixon. More corrupt than Harding! When the history books are finally written, it will be said that there was never a President prior to Trump who was more corrupt than he was. Nor a Congress more supine in its willingness to allow his corruption go unpunished.

So yes, the PA is corrupt, though it is a distortion beyond comprehension to argue that "PA has destroyed the freedom Palestinians enjoyed under Israeli rule." This is simply factually untrue. First of all, even in those areas putatively under Palestinian sovereignty, they are still under Israeli rule in every meaningful sense. The PA's authority in those areas is severely constrained and to the degree that Palestinians find their freedoms have been destroyed, it remains the case, as it was before the Oslo Accords, that the primary actor in the destruction of their freedom is Israel.

However, to be clear, Hill's real point in this section is not to offer an account of Palestinian corruption, but to make case for the cultural superiority of Jews over Palestinians tout court. "Jewish exceptionalism" he argues, "and the exceptionalist nature of Jewish civilization require an unconditional space for the continued evolution of their civilization. What’s good for Jewish civilization is good for humanity at large. Jewish civilization is an international treasure trove that must be protected." Unconditional space, please note, because of the inherent virtue of "Jewish civilization."

How then to secure such unconditional space for the expansion of "Jewish exceptionalism"? Hill is quite explicit: "Given the voting patterns of Palestinians—towards Islamicism and terrorist organizations for the most part—that openly advocate and work for Israeli and Jewish destruction and annihilation, a strong argument can and ought to be made to strip Palestinians of their right to vote—period."

Leaving aside for a moment the deeply misleading claims about Palestinian voting patterns, which in Hill's account is cleansed of any kind of context, analysis, history, or indeed data, note what is solution is: The total disenfranchisement of a population, a population which would then either be forced to live as rightless non-citizens or else expelled entirely from the West Bank. Please remember that this is a moral case for annexation, all appearances to the contrary!

Underlying the entire argument is Hill's central claim: On the one hand you have "exceptional" Jewish civilization. On the other hand you have a civilization that is "abysmally inferior and regressive based on their comprehensive philosophy and fundamental principles—or lack thereof—that guide or fail to protect the inalienable rights of their citizens." It's hard to see how this statement can be read in any way other than that the Arab population of the West Bank is some how subhuman. It certainly can't be the case that they are even in possession of "inalienable rights" that attach to citizenship, because Hill's chief argument is that they should be deprived of those rights, stripped of their land, and expelled from the territory so that "Jewish civilization" can have "unconditioned space."

Israel Has Every Right To Defeat Terrorists

In this section, Hill digresses into a discussion of the Gaza Strip, about which he argues "the wholesale destruction of Hamas in Gaza ... is an application of democratic law protecting the rights of the individuals who rightfully belong there." Now, as with corruption in the PA, so with Hamas, it is undoubtedly the case that it has engaged in a long running campaign of terrorism against Israel. Though if the argument is that no government or organization that has engaged in terrorism can ever be legitimate, that creates difficulties for, among others, the legitimacy of the United States government and the legitimacy of the Israeli government, both of which were founded by organizations that achieved their aims through acts of terrorism.

However, I don't think there's much point in defending Hamas. What's more interesting is the implication that Hill draws from this, namely that Israel "has every moral right to wage a ruthless and unrelenting war against Hamas and to re-settle the land if it ever so desires."

Those who have paid attention to the damage inflicted on the Gaza by the Israeli military over the past decade or more have some sense of what a "ruthless and unrelenting war" against Hamas would look like. Not to put to fine a point on it, but it would look like the wholesale slaughter of a civilian population. One imagines that Hill does not think that Israel has yet been sufficiently ruthless in its campaigns against Gaza.

However, it is worth noting here that, while it is certainly true that Israel, in a formal sense, "withdrew" from the Gaza in 2005, since then it has kept a stranglehold on the population there, keeping what was already a poor and immeserated population in continual and increasing misery, punctuated by periods of abject terror and death as the result of the latest round of bombing. One wonders why, under such circumstances, an organization like Hamas, which seems to be the only one willing to stand up to such intolerable social conditions, would gain public support, regardless of their many failings.

And of course all of this assumes that you can easily sort out behaviors on the one hand that can be called "terrorism" from those that on the other hand can be called "self-defense." Apart from eschewing violence entirely as a tactic, the question of when an act of violence is terrorism and when it is mere war is not nearly so easy to sort out as Hill might like to believe. If ineffectual SCUD attacks on Israeli towns, that result in no deaths, are terrorism, then how is it not terrorism when the Israeli military bombs highly concentrated populations centers, resulting in the deaths of thousands. While the moral discourse around the conditions of war can offer some insight into the distinctions, they are fundamentally meaningless to the five-year old girl, weather Israeli or Gazan, caught in the middle of the violence. Terrorism in this regard, as well as self-defense, are very much in the eye of the beholder.

This is, of course, not to say that one cannot make distinctions between acts of terror and acts of war. It is, however, to say that the distinctions are far murkier in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than Hill might prefer.

The Palestinians Have No Moral Authority

With perhaps unintentional irony, Hill opens this section by referring to Israel as "our political and moral alter-ego in the Middle East." This may be more true than he knows, to the misfortune of both the United States and Israel. He goes on to state that the Palestinians "have never come into their own as a people largely because they have never explicitly held a philosophy that can support freedom, the basic liberal principles of individual rights, and a free market economy." On this basis, he argues that they do not have the moral authority as a people to govern themselves. What's more, Hill argues "Whatever actions Israel or any of her allies take against them in a war against terror are their responsibility, and are moral." Whatever actions, mind you. Since he condemns what he alleges are the "genocidal aspirations" of the Palestinians toward Israel, presumably he's willing to make allowances for the genocidal aspirations of Israel toward the Palestinians. Whatever actions. Apparently this also includes "Forc[ing] Jordan to re-revoke its citizenship status of the Palestinian majority in Jordan." Not content to deprive the Palestinians of voting rights within a Greater Israel, Hill believes Israel should seek to deprive Palestinians of voting rights everywhere.

Hill concludes oddly, writing that "One cannot admit anti-Semitics [sic] devoted to the destruction of Israel into the domain of Jewish civilization. There has to be some semblance of re-shaping the political sensibilities of those outside the historic process. If this is not possible, then we have to admit to their intrinsic humanity, but also, nevertheless, confess to their tragic status as political ballasts." It's hard to see how, given the totality of his argument, he leaves any basis for affirming the "intrinsic humanity" of the Palestinians. The logic of his argument, as I noted above, implies that they are sub-human, not subject to inherent human rights or any of the prerogatives of citizenship, not only within Israel, but anywhere.

As I wrote at the outset, this argument is not merely immoral, but anti-moral. It is an argument that we would rightly reject if it were applied to Jews. We would rightly reject it if it were applied to African Americans. If his logic held, the British would have had free reign to continue to oppress the Irish from the days of Cromwell to today.

A morality rooted in any theory of basic human rights, whether as described by Aquinas and the Catholic tradition, John Locke, John Rawls, Michael Walzer, or Martha Nussbaum would have to recognize Hill's argument as philosophically incoherent and morally bankrupt. It is not an argument worthy of a professor of philosophy at DePaul or anywhere else. That said, academic freedom does not only apply to good arguments. It applies no less to abysmally bad, poorly constructed, and intellectually vacuous arguments such as these. Hill is well within his rights as a professor to make such a laughably terrible argument. And the rest of us have a right, indeed, an obligation, to respond, lest anyone be left with the impression that Hill's colleagues at DePaul approve of his argument, or in any way think of it as a credible contribution to the discourse. The best thing that the students who are outraged by Hill's argument can do is to clearly and loudly argue in opposition to him, to articulate a counter argument, armed with facts, which will make it impossible for such specious arguments to be taken with any kind of seriousness.

Was Reinhold Niebuhr a "Real Theologian"?

As I mentioned the other day, there is a new movie being released on the life and work of Reinhold Niebuhr. As a result, we are seeing the reemergence of the perennial question of whether or not Reinhold was a "real theologian." Most recently, this question was raised again  on the blog Die Evangelischen Theologan by J. Scott Jackson, who writes:

Just how theological was Niebuhr's work -- at least the main body of it? To what extent did specifically Christian theological and moral commitments shape his vocation as public intellectual? From what I've read, I'm inclined to answer the later question: "a very great deal." But the earlier question seems a little more ambiguous. To be sure, Niebuhr, who never earned a doctorate, did not write extensively, say, about the intricacies of trinitarian dogma; nor did he offer in-depth analyses of atonement theories; nor did he offer a thorough critique or defense of two-natures Christology. That said, I do have to point out that Niebuhr was a prolific and world-class preacher, who could engage biblical texts with extraordinary sensitivity and insight.

As Jackson's comment indicates, he is well aware that Niebuhr was a very biblically literate preacher, and was able to work with a biblical text in order to produce some genuinely stirring sermons (and for those who are interested in doing so, I highly recommend Niebuhr's book Discerning the Signs of the Times, which contains several examples of his sermons). So an important preliminary question to answer is "what do we mean by theologian?" And it turns out, that depends on who you ask.

Most of those in the "Niebuhr was not a theologian" camp are barthian -- followers of, or strongly influenced by, the work of Karl Barth. Barth's theology, of course, is vast and encompassing. His magnum opus, The Church Dogmatics, which was unfinished at the time of Barth's death at fourteen densely packed volumes. Barth is generally understood to be a "dogmatic theologian" or as we Americans might say, a "systematic theologian," and thus approaches theology with the goal of examining the theological enterprise as a comprehensive whole. Paul Tillich, while very different from Barth, is a theologian in the same sense: Interested in the doctrinal dimensions of Christian thought and their implications. Additionally, both Barth and Tillich saw theology as the work of the Christian community as manifested in the Church.

Probably the most trenchant critique of Niebuhr on this point, at least in the last few years, has been Stanley Hauerwas. Hauerwas, while clearly having carved his own theological identity, is among those for whom Barth's theology was a major influence, and this shows particularly in his treatment of Niebuhr. In his Gifford Lectures, With the Grain of the Universe, Hauerwas writes the following:

For Niebuhr, theology was tested -- or to use his language, validated -- by its ability to provide provocative accounts of the human condition. Accordingly, Niebuhr's theology seems to be a perfect exemplification of Ludwig Feuerbach's argument that theology, in spite of its pretentious presumption that its subject matter is God, is in fact but a disguised way to talk about humanity. (115).

In a similar vein, Shirley Guthrie, a student of Karl Barth's wrote his dissertation on Niebuhr's theology and ethics, and concluded as follows:

Nevertheless, we have seen that both on the basis of what Niebuhr has said and on the basis of what he significantly has not said, the questions we have raised about the "independent" character of his theology and ethic can and must be asked. Moreover, we have seen that they may all be summarized in one single question. It is the question, based on the New Testament faith itself, of the place of the person and work of Jesus Christ in Niebuhr's thought. An answer to the questions we have raised must begin above all with the question of his person and work as the risen Lord, and with the Church as the particular place in which he reveals himself and through which he works. For the problem of the Christian ethic, like that of any other ethic, is "what shall we do and say now?" and the Christian answer depends directly on what christ is today. We have seen again and again that this is the crucial point for evaluating Niebuhr's ethic and theology, the crucial point for judging the validity or inadequacy of his "mythical" or "symbolic" interpretation of the Christian faith, and for measuring his success or failure in fulfilling his own criteria. ... Is it not so that Niebuhr does not, and on the basis of his presuppositions neither need nor can, recognize the reality of the living, self-revealing, working Lord, Jesus Christ; and is it not so that just for this reason one must say that his presuppositions themselves as well as the theology and the ethic which follow from them cannot be independently Christian?

Guthrie packs a great deal into a short passage, but the implied answer to his question is that Niebuhr's thought cannot be understood to be "independently Christian," which is to say for Guthrie, as for barthians generally, it is rooted in some source outside of the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ, and thus not authentically Christian or in a real way genuinely theological.

In the Facebook conversation on Jackson's article, George Hunsinger recommended Guthrie's take on Niebuhr, asserting that it demonstrated that "all of Hauerwas's worst fears were realized." All of which is to say, all the barthians agree that Niebuhr was not a theologian. Though what they are really saying is that Niebuhr was not a barthian, which is self-evidently true, and a point that Niebuhr would not only have acknowledged, but celebrated.

But the accusation runs deeper than the idea that Niebuhr was not a theologian, even in the broad sense that he was not a dogmatic or systematic theologian. What is really being asserted by both Guthrie and Hauerwas (and, though I suspect he'd deny it, tacitly affirmed by Hunsinger) is that Niebuhr's work was not even genuinely Christian. Rather, there are three specific ways in which, for the barthians, Niebuhr fails the Christianity test.

First, they argue that he did not really believe in God, but was a form of religious naturalist, of the Feuerbachian sort. Hauerwas makes this accusation explicitly above. However, this is a drastic misreading of Niebuhr. As Gary Dorrian has noted, Niebuhr had a very strongly transcendent view of divinity:

Epistemologically, Niebuhr posited a divine ground of meaning and coherence beyond all finite notions of meaning and coherence; ontologically, he asserted the transcendence of God’s being over all contingent and temporal being while affirming that God is continually present to God’s creation in the workings of providence, the history of judgment, the grace of renewal, and the stirrings of individual moral conscience (The Making of American Liberal Theology, vol. 2, 468).

I've written on this topic myself in other places. In an article published in Political Theology, I wrote the following:

It is simply not credible for Hauerwas to attempt to paint Niebuhr as a “naturalist” for whom God was simply a projection of human desires and virtues and Christ was simply a good man. When Hauerwas makes such statements as “Niebuhr’s god is not a god capable of offering salvation in any material sense,” one wonders how Hauerwas can interpret such Niebuhrian statements as “the significance of a Christ is that he is a disclosure of the divine purpose, governing history within history,” or “the self-disclosure of God in Christ is significantly regarded by Christian faith as the final ‘word’ which God has spoken to man. The revelation of the Atonement is precisely a ‘final’ word because it discloses a transcendent divine mercy which represents the ‘freedom’ of God in quintessential terms.” ("Being Wrong and Being Right," 480-1)

Furthermore:

Given Niebuhr’s own emphasis on the human need for and longing for God as emerging from a realization that we are incapable of attaining our highest possibilities, it is difficult to understand how he could possibly see any version of “naturalism” as providing a solution to the problems endemic to the human condition. One might understand if Niebuhr were to reply in the spirit of exis- tential resignation, that the human condition is insoluble, but to posit God as the solution to the particular problems that Niebuhr identifies necessitates a rejection of religious natural- ism, not an embrace of it. (481)

Indeed, Niebuhr explicitly and emphatically rejects religious naturalism directly:

The trouble with religious naturalism is not only that it obscures the whole mystery of the divine, the mystery of creativity and grace, but that it also falsifies the whole drama of human history with its increasing heights of good and evil and in the paradoxical relation of persons to this drama. For persons are both the creatures and the creators of the process. Professor Wieman is under the impression that a classical Christian faith is merely a crude, pre-scientific way of looking at the world, God, and the self. He, with the help of modern science and the ontology of Dewey and Whitehead (more Dewy than Whitehead, for Whitehead did not understand the mystery of creation beyond the temporal process and consequently agonized about the relation of the "primordial" to the "consequent" God) will construct a more adequate view of God and the world. H will define either the temporal process itself as God, or that part of it which is value-creating. Since Hitler's day his is not so certain that the process of "integration" is of itself "value-creating."

This suggests that Hauerwas was far too eager to read Niebuhr through the Feuerbachian lens, and left on the cutting room floor any ideas or passages of Niebuhr's that didn't support his preconceived notion of what Niebuhr's theology, not being barthian, must necessarily be.

Second, they argue that Niebuhr did not have an adequate Christology. Though here again, the passages quoted above give a very clear indication of the way in which an incarnation Christology was central to Niebuhr's soteriology. And the entire second volume of The Nature and Destiny of Man is given over precisely to the question of the significance and character of Jesus Christ. As Langdon Gilkey notes:

This intimate relation in Niebuhr between social theory, political ethics, and "high theology" (Atonement and Christology) is nowhere more event than in Niebuhr's discussion of "powerlessness," the powerlessness and so the ultimate vulnerability of Jesus as the Christ. Here the agape of God, which represented the pinnacle of the divine transcendence and mystery, becomes in historical enactment the apparent opposite of transcendence, its paradoxical partner, powerlessness and vulnerability. In the divine love the ultimately unconditioned becomes the absolutely conditioned. And this paradox of unconditioned majesty and radical conditioned vulnerability, of ultimate power and absolute powerlessness, is for Niebuhr the center of the Christian gospel and of the Biblical message. (On Niebuhr, 186).

Paul Lehman as well, saw Christology as central to Niebuhr's thought, stating: "Christology has been and is the principal passion and purpose of his theological work ... Christology is pivotal, not peripheral ... a remarkably evangelical view of the person and work of Jesus Christ" (in Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, quoted in Fackre, The Promise of Reinhold Niebuhr, 104).

Third, it is often argued that Niebuhr did not have an adequate vision of the role of the Church in Christian ethics. Now here, his critics do have a point. Niebuhr did not write extensively of the role of the church or its place in Christian ethics. Both Hauerwas (for whom the Church often seems to be about the only thing that does matter) and Guthrie hammer Niebuhr on this point. Yet, two things need to be said about this. First, Niebuhr himself was a lifelong church-goer and was a pastor for many years. He regularly preached in churches around the country. Clearly Niebuhr was, in his life, very closely affiliated with the church. Secondly, Niebuhr's innate suspicion of the way in which group egoism and self-deception functioned in institutional settings was no doubt a factor in his lack of attention to the church as any kind of exceptional institution. Indeed, the sad fact is that the Church as quite often remarkable precisely to the extent that it is not an exception on these fronts.

However, Niebuhr did recognize this as a deficit in his own thought, writing:

I think that I have increasingly recognized the value of the Church as a community of grace which, despite historic corruptions, has the 'oracles of God,' as St. Paul said about Israel. The church is the one place in history where life is kept open for the final word of God's judgment to break the pride of men and for the word of God's mercy to lift up the brokenhearted. Inasmuch as this has been only a growing recognition, Professor Wolf's criticism is justified. But when I see how much new evil comes into life through the pretention of the religious community, through is conventional and graceless legalism and through religious fanaticism, I am concerned that my growing appreciation of the church should not betray me into this complacency. (Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought, 437)

While it was never the subject of sustained attention in his thought, it was always in the background of his reflections, even if not viewed that way by Hauerwas and Guthrie, for whom the only validly Christian ethic is precisely one that takes place in and through the church. Of course, Niebuhr's ethic was in and through the church. As Gabe Fackre notes:

Critics often accuse Niebuhr of lacking an ecclesiology. As a pastor and teacher in the church he helped to found-the Evangelical and Reformed Church-I saw for myself his deep immersion in and love for the Church. This ecclesial context is basic to who he was and how he thought, especially so his shaping by both the Reformed and Lutheran traditions of his church. While Niebuhr never attempted to construct a systematic ecclesiology, his life and faith cannot be understood without a grasp of the functional ecclesiology in which they are grounded. (The Promise of Reinhold Niebuhr).

What it was not was by and exclusively for the church, which seems to be the bone of contention for Hauerwas.

To return to the question of what makes a "real" theologian: If the only definition of "theologian" that is acceptable is "dogmatic" or "systematic" theologian, then I suppose Niebuhr wasn't a theologian, but then I'm not sure that Augustine was either. Both wrote occasional theology, writing in context and seeking to illuminate the particular pressing theological themes with which they were confronted in their own time and place. While Augustine's range may have been greater than Niebuhr's, that hardly detracts from the idea that Niebuhr was a theologian in the same vein as Augustine, any more than one can say that, because Tom Brady has won more Super Bowls than Payton Manning, that somehow means Manning isn't a quarterback.

Sometimes, the "Niebuhr is not a theologian" argument is grounded in an assertion that Niebuhr himself denied that he was one. This of course, requires taking his words out of context. In the volume of critical essays about his theology, to which he responded, he took specific note of Paul Lehman's critique of him:

Thus the Christological center of my thought has become more explicit and more important. But, as Professor Lehmann declares, I have never pretended to be a theologian, and so I have elaborated the Christological theme only in the context of inquiries about human nature and human history.

This would seem perhaps to settle the case, until one turns to Lehman's article, because Lehman was specifically noting that Niebuhr was not a systematic theologian. His statement? "Reinhold Niebuhr is not a systematic theologian (Reinhold Niebuhr: His Religious, Social, and Political Thought).

Honestly, the whole argument is intensely annoying to me precisely because it is typically used as a way of delegitimizing Niebuhr as a Christian thinker -- undermining his status not only within the field of Christian theology generally, but even as a Christian. At the end of the day though, I think, for all I've written here, I probably can't answer the question better than Langdon Gilkey:

To my knowledge, no one has tried to present Niebuhr's political and ethical views in the light of his entire theological viewpoint -- which was, I believe, the way that he always saw those views. that is to say, he understood politics and ethics theologically, in relation to what he regarded as the Christian understanding of human being, of the creativity and the ambiguity of freedom, and of the course of history under God. As he argued repeatedly, this theological framework is essential for any valid comprehension of the puzzles and paradoxes of our ordinary experience.

That sure sounds like a theologian to me.

 

What Is a "Nuanced" Stance on Abortion Anyway?

Yesterday I posted about Tom Groome's New York Times article arguing that the Democrats need to stop being the "abortion party," and noted the two Religion Dispatches articles criticizing Groome. After the article posted, Charlie Camosy chimed in on Twitter to argue:

 

It is pro-lifers (of mutiple parties) who have nuanced policy positions. Democratic party has utter lack of nuance. https://t.co/1CvFcQz78N https://t.co/Sl6SRGLDFa

— Charlie Camosy (@CCamosy) March 30, 2017

This led me to respond that I'd never found the pro-life position particularly nuanced, and that Groome's article reinforced that opinion. To which Camosy responded:

 

@ScottPaeth 20 week ban with exceptions vs #shoutyourabortion as a social good paid for by pro-lifers. which is more nuanced?

— Charlie Camosy (@CCamosy) March 30, 2017

And then it was on. You can go read the whole exchange on Twitter, but since it's very difficult to carry on a ... well nuanced conversation 140 characters at a time, I thought it would be worth thinking at a bit more length about the subject here.

As I read Camosy's defense of the "nuance" of a 20-week ban on abortion, I kept thinking I needed Inigo Montoya to show up and chime in "You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means." And this, it seems to me, was indeed part of the problem. We both understood by the word "nuance" something very different than the other did, though I have to say that, re-reading the thread this morning, I still don't think the word means what Camosy thinks it means, and it's certainly not very nuanced to portray "Shout Your Abortion" as representative of the default position of most pro-choice folks.

First of all, it seems to me that Camosy was repeatedly misrepresenting the current Democratic party platform on the issue, and Hillary Clinton's own words on the matter. To be clear, I was defending what for me has always been the best liberal approach to the question of abortion, as encapsulated by Bill Clinton back in the 1990s, that abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare." Camosy, citing himself, kept referring to an LA Times article in which he asserted that the Democratic Party platform "betrayed millions of party faithful." But that article is hardly an example of nuance. It criticizes the platform for insisting on the removal of state restrictions on abortion, and insisting on it as a core element of reproductive health, while eliding all of the ... well nuance of the reason why those provisions were included in the first place: Repeated conservative attempts to throw up insurmountable roadblocks to abortion under any circumstances.

Even a passing familiarity with the ways in which Republican state legislatures have sought to do end runs around the Supreme Court rulings on abortion by, for example, requiring doctors working in abortion clinics to have residency at a local hospital, and then refusing them that residency, or creating expensive and unnecessary zoning and construction requirements for abortion clinics. These tactics have sought to create circumstances in which abortion, even if technically legal, became impossible to actually procure in some states. Ignoring those particular circumstances is not very nuanced.

But more generally, it's worth noting that the Democratic platform actually did a pretty good job of accomplishing the goal of ensuring that abortion was both safe and legal on the one hand, and rare on the other. The planks insisting on the right to access to abortion, and its importance for a general policy of reproductive health serve to ensure the first two criteria. The third is accomplished through platform language that ties the right to abortion to the right to health care generally and, most particularly to the right to have a child. Here is the particular language:

We will address the discrimination and barriers that inhibit meaningful access to reproductive health care services, including those based on gender, sexuality, race, income, disability, and other factors. We recognize that quality, affordable comprehensive health care, evidence-based sex education and a full range of family planning services help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions.

And we strongly and unequivocally support a woman’s decision to have a child, including by ensuring a safe and healthy pregnancy and childbirth, and by providing services during pregnancy and after the birth of a child, including adoption and social support services, as well as protections for women against pregnancy discrimination. We are committed to creating a society where children are safe and can thrive physically, emotionally, educationally, and spiritually. We recognize and support the importance of civil structures that are essential to creating this for every child.

And indeed there is ample evidence to demonstrate that, if your goal is to reduce abortions, these are the policies that you should be advocating. So when Camosy complains that the platform kept the "safe and legal" while abandoning the "rare," it seems to me at least that he didn't read the platform with sufficient ... nuance.

There is also evidence that, in terms of implementation of these policies, abortion rates decline under Democratic administrations. When I made that case to him, Camosy responded by linking to a Snopes article that he claimed labeled the assertion "False." However, a more ... nuanced ... reading of the Snopes article shows that what was false was something that I wasn't arguing, and what wasn't false was what I was claiming. The Snopes article addresses the question of whether abortions both go up during Republican administrations and decline during Democratic administrations. And, since Roe v. Wade, it is apparent that abortion rates do not in fact increase under Republican administrations, but they do decline (and decline more) under Democratic ones. This chart illustrates the point:

Charlie contended that a "Stats 101" analysis of the data would show something else, though he didn't elaborate. But while the trend line seems to either hold stead or decline only slightly during the Reagan and Bush years, it drops precipitously under both Clinton and Obama. So perhaps Charlie will get around to elaborating on his point in some other venue, but it still seems to me that the evidence does demonstrate that if your goal is to make abortion rarer, Democratic policies do the job better than Republican ones, though of course it's always worth remembering that correlation does not equal causation.

OK, so then, is a 20-week ban, as Camosy advocates, "nuanced"? Well it's certainly far more nuanced than the position taken by the Republican party, but a getting hit in the face by a brick in a gym sock would be more nuanced than anything in the Republican party these days. However, what the 20-week ban fails to account for is the situation of woman who, late in pregnancy, discovers a fatal defect in the gestating fetus, and the emotional and moral turmoil that women in that situation face. I suppose the response is that such instances are fairly rare, but then, late pregnancy abortions are rare to begin with. Camosy does of course note that the ban would come "with exceptions," but there the devil is in the details, and if the exceptions were sufficiently broad, it would basically make the ban worthless as policy anyway. A 20 week ban would almost certainly not make most abortions more rare in any respect, while increasing the suffering of families in genuinely tragic circumstances. Whether or not you think that abortion should be available in those cases, it remains the case that at the ban Camosy proposes once again fails the nuance test.

In the end, both Groome's and Camosy's complaints seem to amount to the same thing: They want the Democratic party to move closer to their position on abortion. That is of course a totally fair position for them to take. But to argue that the current Democratic Party policy isn't precisely what I said above -- to make abortion safe, legal, and rare -- suggests at a minimum a lack of charity in how the democratic position is understood and interpreted. And it certainly represents a failure of nuance.

Why Go Niebuhr?

Last January I did a live streamed "webinar" with Tripp Fuller at Home-brewed Christianity. As always with Tripp, I had a blast, and if you missed it, you can now check it out at the link below!

Why Go Niebuhr?

Meanwhile, in other Niebuhr news, last night DePaul University hosted a showing of the new documentary about Reinhold Niebuhr, An American Conscience. The director, Martin Dobelmeier was on hand to speak about the movie, and I was on a panel with Reggie Williams from McCormick Theological Seminary. The movie great and I highly recommend you check it out. Here is the trailer.

Trailer: An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story from Jen Quintana on Vimeo.

Tying these two events together, last night after the panel discussion, Jeremy Sabella, who wrote the excellent companion book for An American Conscience, reminded me of something I said in the January podcast that I had completely forgotten about, but which clearly remains relevant as we reckon with the continuing disaster of the Trump presidency: We don't need a new Niebuhr, we need a thousand Niebuhrs!

Can We Infer the Intent to Offend?

Building on my piece from yesterday, a great deal of my objection to the idea of having certain speakers on university campuses was rooted in the idea that, given the university's mission as a place where ideas can be debated and discussed, and where those ideas can advance intellectual inquiry, a speaker whose sole motivation was to offend others was not appropriate for a university setting. The response I got, initially on Twitter, but also in other contexts as well, was "well, who are you to judge whether it was intended to offend?" Or "Isn't offense in the eye of the beholder?" To which I have typically responded: "I believe it is possible to infer the intent to offend based on the record of the speaker." In other words, from what was known about Milo, and what was known about his rhetoric, and the substance-free nature of the writing in which that rhetoric was typically contained, it was possible to infer that his sole motivation was to offend a substantial portion of the student population. I would extend that argument to the group that invited him: I think we can infer from their invitation to Milo that their entire motivation was to offend the progressive student groups that they knew would show up to protest the event.

Certainly the fact that Milo's events had been protested in a similar way at other venues suggests that everyone involved knew what the likely outcome was going to be. I'd suggest it was exactly what they were hoping for. But I want to expand the conversation beyond this particular speaker on this particular occasion and ask whether or not we can be permitted to infer the intent to offend, generally speaking.

My point here is not whether we can know that people are, as a matter of fact, likely to be offended by a particular speaker. I'm not suggesting that the mere fact that people could be offended is a reason to bar a particular speaker. On the contrary, as I noted before, I think that speakers of all positions on the left-right spectrum, whose views may happen to offend some portion of the student population, certainly have a place as speakers in a university setting. For example, I believe that a pro-choice speaker should be permitted to speak at a Catholic university, even though many Catholic would be offended by them, because the argument about abortion itself has merit, and having that argument in the midst of university life is part of the mission of the university. Similarly, I believe that a speaker advocating building a Trump-style border wall on the American-Mexican border should be permitted to speak, as that argument is part of the larger debate about immigration reform in the United States. I think in either case, it should be unsurprising if protestors showed up, and as in the case of Milo's event, I think it would be ill-advised if those protestors disrupted the event, but protest is certainly an appropriate response.

My question runs to a more difficult issue: To what degree are we permitted to infer that, when someone says something offensive, they are saying solely to offend, versus saying something for the purpose of advancing an important conversation which just happens to offend? The person advocating for abortion rights may indeed offend pro-life Catholics, but that would be in the context of advocating a point of view about the rights of women over their own bodies. Compare that to a speaker who was invited to a Catholic university for the purpose of trampling on a consecrated communion wafer. The later speaker would clearly have no goal except to offend Catholics, and I think it would be well within the purview of the university to exclude them.

Similarly, in the case of the advocate of the border wall, while their viewpoint would be offensive to many, and certainly to me, as long as it was not couched in an argument that Mexicans are in some way innately inferior human beings, but in say economic terms, then offensive as it would be, it wouldn't be solely offensive. On the other hand, inviting a member of the Aryan Nations to campus would clearly have no other purpose but to inflame anger and cause offense to people of color around campus.

Again, if you know what someone's record of speech and action is, I believe it is entirely possible to infer intent from action, and to infer future intent from past action. We do it all the time. A substantial part of human interaction in every context involves the inference of internal states from external actions. Much of human language is about negotiating the differences between what people say and what they intend. And of course, as imperfect creatures, we often get that wrong. But I would suggest that we get these things wrong most in ambiguous, marginal cases where what is being communicated is unclear, or the connection between external act and internal state appears to conflict. But again, to use the communion wafer example: Someone who came to campus for the express purpose of doing that would leave no ambiguity with regard to their goal of offending.

But then the rejoinder would no doubt be: Well shouldn't people have the right to act in an explicitly offensive manner? On the one hand, in your own home, I suppose you can act as offensively as you want. If you can find people who are willing to pay for you to be offensive, you can take the show on the road. If you set up your soap box in a public park, you can be as offensive as you please as long as you obey park rules. But that's not what a university exists to promote. If you are offensive because you are presenting controversial ideas that are otherwise of worth in advancing the intellectual mission of the school, then a university can and should permit that to take place. But no one has a right to be offensive in the context of a university setting, even when presenting controversial ideas. To put it another way: If someone is presenting an idea I disagree with, then it is not a refutation of their idea for me simply to say that I find it offensive. However, if a person is acting in such a way that they are advancing no real idea, but simply trying to get a rise out of me, then to respond by saying "You are simply being offensive" is indeed a refutation. It's saying, effectively, "You are not advocating an idea that is capable of response or rejoinder, but simply trying to be offensive for offensiveness's sake."

Take the communion wafer example again. Let's give the example some detail. Suppose I were to invite a member of the Church of Satan to campus to advocate for the idea that religion was false, that would be an acceptable speaker for a university setting, even a Catholic university setting. But if, as an illustration of his contempt for religion, he pulled out a communion wafer and trampled on it, that would cross the line to pure offense. It is entirely possible to make the anti-religion argument without the offensive act. And making that argument may indeed offend some people. The simple fact that the speaker is from the Church of Satan may offend some people. But those things are offensive in the context of advancing a conversation that is part of the university's mission. The trampling of the communion wafer, on the other hand, is not.

To push it a step further. If we knew that the particular speaker was in the habit of coming to campuses in order to trample communion wafers, then I would argue that it would be perfectly acceptable to say that the speaker was not welcome, because we, once more, can infer his intent to offend based upon what we know he had done in the past.

Next question: suppose our communion-trampler somehow bypassed the university administration and got invited anyway. When word got out, a group of Catholic students decided to protest the speaker, and what's more, some of them decided that they were going to interfere with the speakers act of wafer-trampling. What would we say about their actions? I honestly am not 100% sure. Would the university president have apologized to the member of the Church of Satan if those students succeeded in shutting down the event? I don't know. What I do know is that the problem started when the decision was made to invite the speaker who was known for committing such an act.

As I've argued elsewhere, given the substance-free nature of Milo's offensive rhetoric, and given the demonstrated tendency of his followers to respond to his opponents via intimidation, I believe that the original sin in this entire drama was the decision to allow him to speak at DePaul in the first place. I think it was entirely possible to infer his intent to offend based upon his past actions, and that those actions gave a good indication of what was likely to happen.

What university policies should exist to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future? I admit I am not sure. Where should the precise boundary be between acceptable and unacceptable speakers? I'm not sure about that either. I'm not even 100% sure that Milo fell on the wrong side of that line, though as I've argued, I have a strong suspicion that he does. But I do think that ultimately we should recognize that not every speaker is acceptable in the context of a university, and determining which are, and which aren't, is part of the university's mission.

The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster: Not a Religion

Earlier this week, a Federal District Court ruled that the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (CFSM) should not be considered a religion under U.S. law. According to an article on the ruling by the Religion News Service, this was based upon the fact that the Church was clearly intended to be satire, and not anything that could be considered a "genuine" religion.

In a 16-page decision, the U.S. District Court of Nebraska ruled that Pastafarianism is satire, not sacred, and that anyone who thinks it is a religion has made an error “of basic reading comprehension.”

“This is not a question of theology,” the ruling reads in part. “The FSM Gospel is plainly a work of satire, meant to entertain while making a pointed political statement. To read it as religious doctrine would be little different from grounding a ‘religious exercise’ on any other work of fiction.”

What I find interesting in the ruling is the fact that it makes a clear demarcation between something that is transparently satirical, and what would commonly be considered "genuine" faith. It raises a number of sticky issues, not least of which is "how can one go about distinguishing "genuine" from "inauthentic" religion. However, I don't think that the problem is nearly as difficult as the ruling's detractors are seeking to make it.

In the view of the CFSM's supporters, it is impossible to distinguish between a "real" religion and the CFSM, since everything that appears absurd about that faith is, in their estimation, no less absurd than the doctrines of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, or Scientology. By ruling against Pastafarianism (as the church is sometimes referred to), they argue that the court is  making declarations about what constitutes "true" versus "false" religion.

However, that's not how I read the situation. The question is not whether the object of the religion is true or false, but whether the belief in the object of religious faith is sincerely held by adherents. The problem isn't that there is no Flying Spaghetti Monster, it's that absolutely no one really believes that there is one. As an act of satire, the CFSM has done its job too well. It has set itself up as such a transparent attempt to troll genuine religious belief, that no one can possibly take it seriously as a religious faith, to the extent that, even if someone were to claim to believe it sincerely, it would be quite clear that this is simply part of the act. (And if you don't believe me, try listening to or reading someone affirm the doctrines of Pastafarianism without conveying an obvious smirk).

This is in distinction from, say Scientology, which I have in the past defended as an "authentic" religion. By this I do not mean that I believe its doctrines to be true, or even remotely plausible. Rather, in thinking of Scientology as a religion, I recognize that there are many people who, for better or for worse, hold it as a sincere matter of faith. Now, I have heard from former Scientologists that much of the leadership of the Church is corrupt and abusive. This is probably completely true. I've heard enough similar reports to grant that a high degree of probability. But it's irrelevant to the question of whether it constitutes an authentic religion, because again, it's not about the truth or falsity of the doctrines, it's about the sincerity with which they are held. It's not about the virtuousness of the church's leadership, it's about the degree to which they are genuinely held in esteem by their followers, or can at least make a credible case that they are.

And this is the problem with the CFSM. One respondent in a conversation about this asked "why must it be the case that a belief is held sincerely in order for a religion to be authentic," to which I responded, "because the very nature of the word "belief" implied the idea that the thing believed is sincerely held to be true. There is simply no such thing as a genuine "belief" which is not sincerely held. Since nobody claiming to hold to the beliefs of the CFSM has been able to make even the most basic case that they hold those beliefs sincerely, it cannot be considered to a genuine religion. It's too successful as an act of satire. If the CFSM had wanted to be held as an actual religion, it would have had to do a better job cultivating a base of followers that could credibly claim that they sincerely believe it.

This, to be clear, has nothing to do with the question of whether one can "prove" the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster any more than one can "prove" the existence of God. The response that the FSM is just as credible as the Christian or Muslim God is, from a legal perspective, beside the point. This is not a matter of philosophical proof or comparative theology. It's a matter of what the courts often call the "reasonable person test." Would a reasonable person, looking at the CFSM conclude that its adherents held its beliefs sincerely, or merely for the purposes of satire. On that basis, I think a court could validly conclude that the CFSM is not a religion because it's precepts are not sincerely held.

Now, there may be other grounds on which one could make a case for the validity of the CFSM as a religion, but I'm of the opinion that, as New Religious Movements go, it's really not very interesting precisely because it's so obviously satirical. What I'd be interested in seeing would be a case where, for example, someone who followed the Jedi religion wanted that to be officially recognized. There are, after all, those who hold that Jedi-ism is a genuine religious belief, and they hold it sincerely. I think one could make a very compelling case, in a way that one can't for the CFSM in favor of adherents of Jedi religion, on much the same grounds as Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Scientology.

The Morality of "The Hateful Eight"

Last night I had the opportunity to see The Hateful Eight (in its much vaunted 70mm, roadshow format, with a souvenir program and everything!). Tarantino's movies are, of course, always controversial, and this movie is no different. But as I discussed it afterwards with my companions, I realized that, despite the complaint that his movies revel in violence and nihilism, there is actually a moral core to Tarantino's work that is often overlooked.

There will be spoilers in what I am about to write, so consider yourself forewarned.

The Hateful Eight is Tarantino's homage to the Westerns of Sam Peckinpah, but it's equally indebted to the drawing room mysteries of Agatha Christie. It tells the story of seven bad men and one bad woman trapped together in an isolated way station in the old west, waiting out a blizzard. Two of the men are bounty hunters. John "The Hangman" Ruth, always brings his bounties in alive to be tried and hanged. Major Marquis Warren is an African American Civil War veteran, who claims to be in possession of a personal letter from Abraham Lincoln. The woman, Daisy Domergue, is Ruth's bounty. Along the way, they also pick up a man who claims to be the town's new sheriff, but who also turns out to be an unrecalcitrant racist, who once belonged to a unit of Confederate soldiers who terrorized black towns in the name of "honor in defeat." Before we even arrive at the way station, tensions are running high among these four.

Once they arrive at the way station, they meet four more men. A Mexican named Bob who claims to be running the place, a cowboy on his way to spend Christmas with his mother (did I mention this is a Christmas movie?), the local hangman, and a former Confederate general. As the snow traps them, the central question driving the action is who is there to betray whom, and who will make it out alive.

It's no spoiler to say that not everyone does. Nor is it a spoiler to note that, along the way, enormous amounts of blood will be spilled. This is after all a Quentin Tarantino movie. If he really wanted to surprise us on this score, he'd make a movie with no violence at all.

However, that having been said, the level of violence is relatively muted for the first two hours of the movie. From the early panoramic scenes of a stagecoach traversing a mountain pass to the bulk of the time our cast of characters spends trapped together in the way house, most of the movie passes with relatively little violence (however, unfortunately most of the violence that does take place in those first segments is inflicted on the one woman in the cast). The third hour more than makes up for the slow burn, however, once the masks come off and the participants in the setup are revealed.

Here is your last warning about spoilers. After this point I will be revealing elements of the movie's plot that you might rather not know.

In the last act, it's revealed that Daisy's brother, along with the Mexican, the Brit, and the Cowboy, have staged an ambush at the way station in order to rescue her. After killing everyone there except the Confederate general, they set up the scene to appear innocent and then wait for Ruth to drop his guard. Eventually he does and gets himself poisoned to death along with their stage coach driver. At this point, Marquis and the Sheriff, who have every reason to hate one another, team up to figure out who the murderers are. They quickly establish that everyone except the two of them is now in on it (Marquis had killed the general right before the intermission, after a long scene where he described his humiliation and murder of the General's son, an act of revenge for the General's misdeeds during the war -- again, these are all bad people).

As violence, murder, and chaos descend on the cabin, everyone finds themselves dead except for Marquis, the Sheriff, and Daisy. Marquis is fatally wounded, and the Sheriff is not much better off. Daisy offers him a deal: If he will kill Marquis and let her go, he can cash in the bounties on the men her brother had brought to help rescue her.

Before I talk about what happens next, it's worth talking a bit about the connection between the western tropes that Tarantino is accessing (such as those in Sam Pekinpah and Sergio Leone) and naturalistic fiction. Naturalism stressed the struggle of human beings against their environment and their nature. It tended to be morally pessimistic, and leaned toward a degree of nihilism, in that it portrayed human beings as ultimately slaves to their own natures, and to the whims of fate. Watching the movie, I could see Tarantino dipping into that well, presenting us with eight characters who were not bound by any rules of morality of any sense of transcendent value, looking only to their own survival and sacrificing whoever and whatever was necessary in order to do so. At best, perhaps, they were bound by notions of kin and blood, whether Daisy's brother's attempt at bloody rescue, the Sheriff's lingering loyalty to the values of the Old South, or Marquis's desire to see justice done for the years of slavery and repression heaped on black Americans. But even there, one could argue that those bonds of blood and kin are tenuous at best, and can break under the right stressors. If this were a work of naturalistic fiction, then when those bonds were finally dissolved for the surviving characters, all that would be left would be the desire for survival and gain.

However, that's not what happens in the bloody aftermath, once everyone is dead except for Daisy, Marquis, and the Sheriff. After listening to Daisy's offer, and perhaps even seriously considering it for a moment, he instead rejects it, on the grounds that, as the Sheriff of Red Rock, he has a duty to perform, and furthermore, he doesn't believe Daisy's threat that, if he kills her, fifteen additional men are waiting in town to kill everyone. He is about to shoot her when Marquis insists that, for the sake of John Ruth, they enact a rough form of frontier justice and hang her themselves. Thus, as both men lay dying, and despite the fact that they each have good reason to hate one another, they overcome their mutual hatred in order to see some form of justice done.

Now, perhaps I'm stretching more than a bit in seeking to skim some form of moral redemption from this grand guignol, and there is certainly much to criticize in the way that Tarantino brings this drama to a conclusion. Certainly the violence is excessive. Certainly Tarantino seems to take far too much glee in acts of casual misogyny (directed mostly toward Daisy, though she is as thoroughly despicable as every other character), and in allowing the characters to express and explore their own depravity. And certainly the light of redemption at the end of this very deep and dark tunnel that Tarantino has led us down is very dim, yet I would still argue that it is there, and that, in spite of the racism, in spite of the misogyny, and in spite of the violence, Tarantino's message in this movie is about the possibility that, even under the most brutal circumstances, we can overcome even the most entrenched differences between us in the name of some transcendent reference point. Naturalism does not rule the day. In the end, our lives exist for the sake of something more than mere survival. John Ruth may not have been much of a moral guidepost for The Hateful Eight, but he did believe in the need for justice, and his example ultimately inspired the two remaining representatives of social order in that cabin to seek to bring about what justice they could, given the limited means at their disposal.

Religion, Violence, and Rene Girard

Rene Girard, the anthropologist and social critic, died shortly before last month's Paris bombings. Today Religion Dispatches reflects on his life and legacy. A key paragraph on the relationship between religion and violence:

For over three decades, scholars of religion have drawn on Girard to inform their work. Christian theologians and New Testament scholars have found Girard’s insights on the scapegoat mechanism of special salience. Girard has argued that myths attest to the scapegoat mechanism from the perspective of persecutors: the victim of mob violence is guilty. By contrast, the Gospels break with myth to present the victim as innocent. Living at a time of social crisis, Jesus is the victim of mob action; but his innocence, attested to by the Gospels, breaks apart the scapegoat mechanism, forever shaking the foundations of a culture built on sacrifice. Even scholars who disagree with Girard about his insights attest to his influence on their work; as a consequence, Girard has had a pervasive impact, especially on scholars who want to understand the dynamics of ritual, the meaning of myth, the origins and history of violence, and the relationship between violence and religion.

For my part, I've always appreciated Giard's ability to interpret and translate the anthropological substance of religious ideas in creative and socially constructive ways. His work has also be extremely useful to me in understanding and interpreting the idea of the atonement in Christian theology. He will be missed.

Iraq's Lessons For Syria

As sabers rattle in preparation for an escalation of the conflict in Syria -- putatively with ISIS, but really it's just an enormous open-fire scrum there now -- it's worth revisiting the debate in the run-up to the Iraq war. Check out this episode of Charlie Rose, vis Vox, in which Michael Walzer and Christopher Hitchens, among others, debate the prospect of war.

 

I've always been sympathetic to Walzer's approach to the morality of war -- not wholly pacifist, in favor of humanitarian interventions under some circumstances, but also demanding a high bar for the moral justification of armed conflict. Here he is a cogent voice of reason in response to Christopher Hitchens, who for his part offers nothing but smarm and condescension.

As the Vox piece notes, it's remarkable how much Walzer and David Rieff got right in their analysis:

Walzer and David Rieff, by contrast, aren't really representative of the debate as it occurred then, mostly because thoughtful, nuanced criticism of the case for war wasn't given a lot of voice in most media outlets. Walzer rightly notes that the war would require a huge occupying force and cost a fortune, at a time when conservative pundits were predicting the war would be a "cakewalk" and administration officials were saying it would be so cheap it could be paid for with Iraq's own oil revenue. Rieff predicts the "fragmentation of Iraq, a war between Shia and Sunni" with eerie prescience.

Observe, by contrast, just how much arrogance, and how little substance, there was to the pro-war side in 2002. It's much the same now. The issue is not that ISIS is not horrible and should not be stopped, the issue is whether the strategy currently being contemplated will stop them. And what the pro-war side has consistently failed to do, from 2002 till now, is explain in a convincing way just how their policies would actually lead to a positive outcome to the conflict, and for the region. The fact that Hitchens is incapable of responding to Walzer's objections with anything better than a confident "well, I don't think that will happen" or "I think that's trite" demonstrate the vacuity of his position. All he really knew was that he wanted a war, and therefore any objection was merely an obstacle in his way. He was more than happy to unleash his formidable rhetorical power in order to bypass those objections. It's the quintessence of sophistry, and Hitchens was a master of it.

We refused to listen to cautious and thoughtful voices then. Perhaps, just as a change of pace, we should listen to them now.

Donald Trump: Tyrant-in-Training

An article at Lapham's makes the case that Plato's Republic can offer an excellent analysis of how someone like Donald Trump comes to power, and what kind of government they represent:

As Trump never ceases to remind us, he remains at the top—or near the top—in national polls. What explains the Trump craze?

Plato would not have been surprised. He would diagnose Trump as an aspiring tyrant.

The Republic offers a detailed description of how it is that democracies (of which Plato was not fond) transform into Tyrannies, and how thoroughly Trump fits the mode of incipient tyrant:

Of course, a full-fledged tyranny does not occur until someone suited to the role manages to seize the reins of power. Consider, though, the characteristics of the tyrant that Plato warns against in his Republic. Tyrants arise from democracies that allow for everyone to pursue his or her own ambitions. Some individuals who are governed by “a gang of harmful appetites” and have a habit of “bragging speeches” amass wealth with a purpose only to satisfy their hedonistic desires. In a democracy, this kind of person “frequently goes in for politics and bounces up and says and does whatever happens to come into his head.” Moving from democracy to tyranny, the worst form of government, the proto-tyrant is “drawn toward utter lawlessness” and transforms into “a monstrous winged drone.” Tyrants are “faithless” as well as “friendless,” according to Plato. “Passion lives…in him in complete anarchy and lawlessness, as his sole ruler, and drives him…to dare anything that will provide sustenance for himself and the unruly mob around him.”  A tyrant is therefore prone to foreign wars and redistributions of wealth to favor himself and his allies.

It's hard to read this description and not feel as though, whatever may come to pass in the next election, we now rest on the cusp of a descent into tyranny, and it may be that even wise leadership won't be able to pull us back from the brink.