c. 2006 Religion News Service
(UNDATED) What a week.
Violence spun out of control in Israel and Lebanon, then receded. Scotland Yard foiled a major terrorist attack on U.S.-bound airplanes. Iraq descended closer to civil war. Iran plowed ahead on developing nuclear weapons.
Under cover of that darkness, Washington politicians tried to throw more favors to the super-rich, Big Oil flexed its muscle in Alaska, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman threatened to split the Democratic Party rather than accept defeat at the polls, and Oliver Stone’s new film on 9/11 showed how much oneness we lost when politicians turned national tragedy to their partisan advantage.
It almost makes a fella yearn for John Wayne and the simple language of competing opposites: white hat vs. black hat, Christianity vs. Islam, right wing vs. left wing, rich vs. poor, tough-on-terrorism vs. soft-on-terrorism. The language of competing opposites can go on forever naming enemies and simple choices.
What that language cannot do, however, is resolve anything. The world is far too complex to be reduced to a few simple choices. The disaster in Iraq proves again that you can’t just start shooting “bad guys.” You can’t just shout, “Go, Israel!” or “Go, Hezbollah!” and think you have said anything.
We need more supple views than that, more nuanced understandings, more willingness to hold competing opposites in tension. We need to think deeply, not indulge in demonization, fundraising e-mails and sound bites. We need to have enough self-discipline to control primitive urges like us-or-them and win-or-lose. We need to have enough humility to recognize the other’s just claims and to respect even those whose words and actions set our teeth on edge. Macho hubris will kill us all.
The foiled bombing plot, for example, isn’t an easily exploited rationale for the Iraq war. If anything, it proves that a misguided war has strengthened Islamist terrorism, not crippled it. But even that is too simple. Like Saladin laying siege to Jerusalem again and again until finally he defeated European Crusaders in 1187, al-Qaida will regroup and try again.
How, then, do Westerners live in a world where many loathe us? How do we respond to religious extremism without unleashing our own self-destructive religious extremism? In a domestic political environment that rewards shallow thinking and incompetence, how do we citizens play our hand?
Those questions _ and dozens more like them _ don’t fit neatly into the black hat/white hat world of John Wayne. A call to self-examination sounds soft, but how can we understand a dangerous world without probing how our behavior has helped to make it dangerous?
We know how to do such thinking. It happens in business every day _ it’s called market analysis _ and in any healthy marriage. But somehow the worlds of politics and religion have avoided embracing self-examination, repentance, nuance, subtlety and complex approaches to complex problems.
Instead, in those oddly paired worlds, we have bullies who never admit error; simplifiers who reduce the complex to a single campaign slogan or Bible verse; diversionary tactics to mask seamy intent; attacks on external enemies to avoid personal accountability; and claims of ultimate authority for what proves later to be hubris, appetite and greed posturing as righteousness.
The sort of deep thinking I’m talking about isn’t necessarily academic. It’s more likely to be common sense awareness of fallibility and grayness. It isn’t rigidly pro-this or anti-that. It sees the dynamic tension between competing opposites and understands that the tension is both danger and opportunity. It recognizes that a future worth hoping for won’t come from demolishing an enemy but from finding common ground, as non-cinematic and non-macho as that might be.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, consultant and leader of workshops. His book, “Just Wondering, Jesus: 100 Questions People Want to Ask,” was published by Morehouse Publishing. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. His Web site is http://www.onajourney.org.)
KRE/PH END EHRICH
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