Religion, war and peace -A Christian contribution to an interfaith event

Last night, I was one of the speakers at a Voices of Faith event where a Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist also presented their own takes on the topic. I used a prezi to navigate through the 15 minute presentation. I thought I'd give a write-through of the content (bearing in mind I had to abbreviate my presentation to fit into the time available so this is a filled-out version with a bit more background and explanation in it. the prezi is here.

First off 

[dove image made up of weapons' silhouettes), a note that this approach to war and peace is my own reading of the Christian tradition, it is also one that takes a rather different 'tack' to what might be expected in the interests of trying to make a proposal which could be more than a simple exposition of a Christian 'take' but rather something that invokes the nature of Ultimate Reality to invite us to consider how our respective faiths construe that in relation to the issue of violence. So I'm interested not just to give a basic exposition of Christian scriptures and framing them within the development of Christian thinking over the following centuries, but rather to seek something that opens out what I take to be the theological deep-structure in relation to human history.

Christmas Truce 

 [Picture of WW1 Christmas Truce handshake with swapped soldierly parapernalia]. Christmas Eve 2014 sees the 100th anniversary of one of the most remarkable events in the history of warfare: the unofficial Christmas truces of 1914. They commonly began with German soldiers and officers putting up Christmas trees, shouting or writing Christmas greetings, and singing songs recognisable to their British counterparts such as Stille Nacht (Silent Night). From these beginnings troops met in no-man’s land to bury their dead, exchange gifts and souvenirs, share festive food and drink, give cigarettes and cigars, sing and entertain each other, swap names and addresses, conduct joint Christian services, and even, it is rumoured, to play football. These were not isolated incidents but were widespread right down the front from the North Sea to Switzerland, made possible in part by shared traditions of Christian celebration. It was a hopeful moment of recognition of common humanity and a rejection of the cruelty of industrialised warfare pursued by rulers in a deadly game of global imperial competition for territories and resources. It was quashed by orders backed by threats, and by replacing troops with men ‘untainted’ by the Truce (including soldiers from the Empire who didn’t share a tradition of celebrating Christmas).

WW1 was a war arising from Imperial ambitions clashing -principally those of Germany on the one hand and Britain and France on the other. It was precipitated by a failure of the deterrence supposedly offered by huge military alliances and offers of mutual aid in literal co-belligerence. At the heart of it were supposedly Christian nations -the next picture frame focuses on the German troops' belt buckle with the words "Gott mit Uns" which means 'God with us' and while the British didn't have a direct equivalent in terms of clothing it is clear that many British propagandists and opinion-formers held a similar view -that God was keen for the British to win because they were the guardians of Christian civilisation against German barbarism. The mirroring of each others' official 'theologies' of war and nationhood is tragic and would be laughable if it weren't what actually happened with such dire consequences. Obviously, they couldn't both be right.

My question in this forum is how they ('we') arrived there? How did two supposedly Christian countries both with good civilisational credentials end up demonising each other and slaughtering one another and claiming it was God's will? Worse yet, we should recognise it's not just Christians implicated in this. In an interfaith understanding event, we should also understand that troops on both sides held different faiths and also secular and atheist views. On the British side, one of the means to put a stop to the informal truces at Christmas in 1914 was to draft in other-faith troops from parts of the Empire that didn't share the Christian sentimentality about Christmas.

A Myth and a riposte [picture of an Ancient Near Eastern deity and a piece of art depicting a visual interpretation of the seven days of Genesis 1-2:4]. Here I press on into the unusual turn of my exposition, looking at something more ancient that most of our religious traditions.

There were two ways of viewing humanity in relation to our purposes on earth and relatedness to deity in the Ancient Near East (ANE). Both deal with origins, ostensibly: chaos and order; what is the human place in the cosmos; what are we humans here to do; what is authority in human affairs? But each have a rather different message for us as humans.

Ancient Near Easter myths:

[picture of ANE deity in full armour holding thunderbolts] though these varied in characters and the detail of plot lines, they tend to tell stories which indicate that order is created out of chaos by the might of the gods and that order is establish and maintained by violent actions. Human beings are, in this kind of schema, made out of the offal of the slaughtered defeated god (who represents chaos) and are made in order to do the work that the gods don't want to be bothered with. So we're getting a picture of humans not being high in the value and dignity stakes -we're almost afterthoughts made from disrespected  materials to slave for the gods and their representatives on earth (the kings and priests). For our purposes though, we should note that the created order is violently produced: ultimate reality is violent, 'agonistic'.

Genesis 1-2:4

[picture of seven thin panels hinting at the 7 days of creation] seems (to me) to be telling a counter-story emphasising that creation is founded in an original peace rather than violence, and that we humans have a dignity since we all image God -a view which automatically flattens hierarchy and deligitimises kingly and priestly claims of privilege. We are also created for rest as well as to participate in the work of God.

So there are two world views on offer, and I would argue that these are still a fundamental choice set before us. Do we believe ultimately reality is about love, peace, co-operation, dignity and so on or do we believe it is ultimately about self-assertion, violence, hierarchy, winners and losers. Every time we claim that there is no choice but to do violence, we are in effect asserting that ultimate reality is about violence rather than co-operation: division rather than relationship.

Moving from ANE to Jesus

 [picture of figure on cross with dove alongside a sunrise photo], we consider the specifically Christian dimension.

[focus on picture of figure on cross offering a dove] Jesus's teaching is heavy with love of neighbour, love of enemies, forgiveness. His ministry is full of reaching out to the despised and the hated, and his last earthly week is full of choosing not to offer violence but rather to absorb the hatred and violence offered. For these reasons the church of the first three to four centuries consistently teaches that Christians may not be involved in violence.

There occurs in the fourth century a growing rapprochement of the Roman Empire with its Christian minority which eventually leads some Christian theologians developing just war theory

[see green table labelled 'Just War Theory'] which sought to allow Christians to participate in the defense of civilisation while maintaining moral limits and building in mitigations. This is consolidated by the emperor Constantine who supposedly has a vision [see picture of sunrise]

probably prompted by a sun-halo like in the picture. But overlaid by hearing a voice

[close in on next picture -red cross and words]  saying in hoc [signo] vinces -'Conquer by this sign'. Constantine then put the sign of the cross on his army's armour and went on to win the battle. He politically then makes Christianity a licit religion and sets the Roman Empire on a course to absorb Christianity and the Church to legitimise the Empire (and its violence).

The next thing we know on this trajectory is that not only is the Church giving comfort for the doing of limited violence but developing a holy war theology which creates the possibility of crusades -violence as a way to extend the church's mission. By this point it becomes obvious that the limited allowance of deadly collective violence by the just war theory was indeed the top of a slippery slope into warfare as an instrument of policy for the church. In effect overturning the teaching and example of Christ. And that is how we end up with troops killing and maiming each other each side in the name of Christ, justice and 'peace'. Truly, the decision to offer any kind of justification for violence is likely to be increasingly loosened in scope and ways are found to express reasons for taking up arms in terms that look like they might be 'just'.

On not feeding the four horsemen.

[Painting of the four horsemen of the apocalypse]. The ANE creation myth is essentially a myth of redemptive violence: a way of proposing that violence is what effects important change and brings about good, the goodies must employ violence to make sure that their 'good' values prosper and prevail. It is a myth that is propagated in many -most- Hollywood films. It encourages us to think that means are not necessarily directly or inherently related to ends; that we can create good by doing harm.

Our societies are held captive by the Myth of redemptive violence. The Judeo-Christian traditions question that. Jesus' teaching very strongly undermines it. Our faiths have been co-opted by the MRV and our imaginations colonised by it. We must stop sanctioning violence, full stop. Only then will we be able to stimulate imaginations to envisage solving problems peacefully. Only then will we be committed enough to begin to tear down the automatic justifications and misleading chains of reasoning fed by the relentless MRV-form narratives spilling out of the media. 

If we allow ourselves to think that violence could sometimes be justified, very soon we will find that we are defending horrors such as firebombing, dropping nuclear bombs, waterboarding, drones ... the list will grow and grow.

Story Fields

I found this idea really fascinating. Not least because it seems to help locate 'story' more firmly in a cultural milieu.

Story Fields: A story field is a particularly powerful field of influence generated by a story or, more often, by a coherent battery of mutually-reinforcing stories -- myths, news, soap operas, lives, memories, games -- and story elements -- roles, plots, themes, metaphors, goals, images, events, archetypes -- that co-habit and resonate within our individual and/or collective psyches.A story field paints a particular picture of how life is or should be and directly shapes our lives and our world, often without our even being aware of its influence.

I like that this enables us not to feel we have to look for a 'metanarrative' but for plural narratives and the way that they might fit into a narratival ecosystem whose shared and mutually reinforcing themes would function as ideologies.

It's helpful to look at the further explanation of the metaphor:

The word "field," as used in the term story field, refers to a field of influence, a pattern of dynamic potential that permeates a physical, social and/or psychological space. I borrowed the word from physics, where the term gravitational (or magnetic) field refers to a zone of dynamic potential that shapes the behavior of the physical phenomena within its range. Gravity provides some interesting metaphors to help us understand story fields. There are many ways to look at gravity. We can view a gravitational field as not so much a separate phenomenon from the objects within it as it is an extension of them. We could also say, with equal validity, that objects are cores or nodes of the gravitational field. Or one could also say that both the field and the objects within it are facets of some larger whole system, as the dancers and choreography are elements of the dance. Yet another way to put it is that objects and their gravitational fields are dynamic dimensions of each other. A similar intimate, ambiguous, co-creative, co-evocative relationship exists between story fields and the people who occupy and create them.

I think that's spot on: it resonates with the kind of dynamic understanding of culture that I would favour in seeing stories as cultural artefacts in the ongoing dialogue and semantic negotiations that are culture. I can tell that this image /metaphor is going to stay with me and I'm wondering how it's going to pan out in my thinking...

Research shows Humans aren't natural-born war-mongers

This study is not doubt going to come under attack, but I think it has resonance with our experience. In brief, the article  Humans Not Predisposed to War, New Study Finds | Common Dreams points up:

Countering the prevailing notion that humankind is naturally predisposed to war, new research suggests that primitive humans existed mostly peacefully, with war developing much later than previously thought.

Now, as to why I'm disposed to take this seriously, leaving aside my commitemnt to taking seriously Christ's teaching. I think that the activity of warfare seems to require a certain amount of 'psyching up' rather than being something we 'naturally' slip into. As the study seems to show, murder is more likely -crimes of passion, resentment etc. Organising a unmber of people to warfare is a very different league and requires organising, arguing for etc -a far more expensive endeavour in terms of psychic and physical resources. Then consider that to get people to fight wars takes quite a bit of training -including desensitisation to killing and cuing aggressive responses (and even then typical soldiers tend to suffer fear reactions more than 'bravery').

 As an expression of that expense can be seen in the mythically-enshrined ideologies of ANE; the Babylonian and Sumerian creation myths which 'justify' organised violence. So the Genesis 1 account which reads to me like a counter-story is significant because it pictures a peaceable creation process presumably deliberately telling a different tale to warring god-factions and thereby giving a different vision of human purpose and dignity which is presumably the theological point. So I would see this as providing a pre-historical evidence that the theological assertion I'm seeing in Genesis 1 is mirrored by human development in history, And that the development of warfare is a later cultural development which required, among other things, ideological underpinnings which Genesis is resisting and countering.

That's not to say that a rosy view of early humanity is propogated by the Bible -far from it. However, in line with this interpretation of evidence, violence in scripture is seen more as interpersonal (Cain and Abel) first of all.

Military Social Influence in the Global Information Environment

A short while back, in giving my reactions to Dr Who of that week, I mentioned the Myth of Redemptive Violence. Well, this article brings home to me just why we need to pay increasing attention to the issue: the military are actively seeking to exercise hegemony in global society, that is they are seeking to win acceptance and a perceived 'naturalness' to their agenda.Scholarly commentary invited through December 2010.: Military Social Influence in the Global Information Environment: A Civilian Primer - King - 2010 - Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy - Wiley Online Library: "This ongoing “revolution in military affairs” (Metz & Kievit, 1995, p. iii) has precipitated, among other things, a steady increase in U.S. military capacity to conduct social influence campaigns at every level of the modern world's information environment: in local, national, regional (or “theater”), and global spheres; in domestic and foreign populations; among individuals, groups, organizations, and governments"
Whether or not this is explicitly tied to MoRV, said myth is clearly a 'sleeper meme' in our culture that can be easily activated to mobilise a population to support, fund and give bodies to the war effort. Particularly when the military use phrases like "perception management", we realise that they are after our minds and consent. The article referenced here is written with this end in mind: "it is now possible, if not imperative, for those who study and teach about social influence to understand U.S. information operations, arguably among the largest, most controversial, and most influential social influence campaigns in modern times."
This is more, for the most part, than simply the old propaganda battles, the new realities of weapons and IT mean "Our military's enemies, ... are most likely to be small, rogue groups who attempt to prevail by winning popular support and undermining U.S. political will for war ...The argument here is that in most modern war, physical battles, if they exist, will be for the purpose of defining psychological battlespace ... terrorists are “armed propaganda organizations”" -perhaps that latter remark is at least partly exponented by Al Qaida.
The other factors impinging on this are the greater transparency that IT tends to foster so that atrocities are harder to hide and for those whose soldiery are from democratic regimes this brings a change of role, particularly when combined with heightened awareness of human rights and international law: "the transformation of the role of the individual soldier in the context of the increasing transparency of the global information environment, the decreasing utility of conventional weaponry, and the increasing power of social influence. It has been suggested that the modern soldiers of western democracies are essentially “heavily armed social workers” ... These troops work to change behavior in the glare of a multi-technology-based global media. They are obligated to minimize casualties, manage the perceptions of the global audience, and influence behavior through nonviolent means."
Now, much of that has been stated in terms that sound as if there is a push towards the more ethical and applaudable end of warfare. And not particularly supporting the tone I set when I began the post. However, we should note that all of the above can be used -is used- simply to make the case. What is still going on is the violent and repressive exercise of brute force in furtherance of political goals by non-consensual means. Iraq has shown us that information manipulation and spin are also weapons of war. The mention of the soldiers of western democracies carries with it a certain irony since their most recent deployments have, it seems, been to impose democracy by non-democratic means. I know there is more nuance to it than that, but it is really hard to tell it any other way to ordinary people in Muslim-majority countries -just take a look at the bit and pieces of reportage about the way that Libyans, and others, have viewed NATO involvement there: there is a lot of suspicion around.

Of course, trying to do this in a global environment which has a lot of bottom-up about it is (or can be) like herding cats. It's working in a complex environment and so MI and IO is going to be about trying to find 'strange attactors' in information and opinion terms that allow the forming of opinion round certain perspectives most conducive to the interests they represent. It's always going to be a dicey thing: there is a lot of awareness of power interests and their wiles.

So it is important that we as Christians, following the Prince of Peace and the one who said 'Put away your sword', should continue to 'fight the good fight' (Blake's "mental strife") to demolish strongholds; ie we resist MoRV and other alibis for keeping elites in power and most people in the dark -sometimes violently herded into the dark.

The Curse of the Black Spot

I enjoyed last night's Dr Who, and I've found myself musing over a couple of aspects of it. Check out here (at least for the time being) for some further info or reminders: BBC - BBC One Programmes - Doctor Who, Series 6, The Curse of the Black Spot: "Beset by terror and cabin fever, the pirates have numerous superstitious explanations for the appearance of a mysterious Siren."
So, what I found intriguing having slept on it is the plot structure. A lot of popular viewing, and indeed literature, employs a plot line which is basically 'heroes and others are threatened by some malevolent force (whether a thing, a population or something more amorphous) and the goodies work together using their resources (usually cunningly) deployed to destroy, neutralise or rout the malevolents'.
Of course, that kind of plot arc is basically reinforcing, normally, the myth of redemptive violence (MoRV) which is arguably a key mythic pattern in our culture (I happen to concur with Walter Wink that it actually is). What I enjoyed about this plot is that it opened up the imagination to other ways of plotting the things we face.

In the classic MoRV take, the scenario that the episode opens with would be resolved by either leaving things with the discovery of how the Siren accessed their ship or hiding places and closing it off and getting away or, more usually, discovering something that enabled them to destroy or 'neutralise' the monster. What happened here was the discovery that the 'monster' isn't really but is actually an intelligent programme (an emergency medical hologram -borrowed from Star Trek Voyager?) whose mission is to save the injured and ill by taking them to a life-support unit and keeping them alive albeit comotose pending a visit by real medics. In this case, because the crew of the space vessel the Siren is from, have died from an earth virus (shades of War of the Worlds?), the medics are never going to come and, unlike Voyager, this holographic medic hasn't evolved beyond 'her' programming. So the EHM paramedic simply snatches anyone injured or ill and warehouses them. The resolution here is not from the MoRV script but by understanding the 'enemy', trusting their intelligence and working with their beneficent desires for an outcome of win-win. MoRV, of course is not about win-win but a zero sum 'game'.

I salute the win-win storyline. What this also tells me is that in the struggle for a more peaceful, safer and more just world a big part of it is to expand the moral imagination. Part of our problem as a global society is, I would contend, that our ability to think (collectively) about how to resolve conflict, differing aims and objectives etc is infested by MoRv in such a way that it disables possible win-win plotting. We need to big up stories of win-win plotting (and other kinds of non-MoRV) so that the resources that we have, collectively, to put ourselves into plot-lines-in-life that enable human flourishing for all. So let's have more of these win-win plots and let's celebrate them and encourage them to fill our hearts and minds and so drive from our real-life plotting the automatic recourse to win-lose and MoRV which, I think, made the mistakes of responding to the Twin Towers attack by going into Iraq.

The second thing I've been musing is much less cosmic but nevertheless still intrigues me.
The Siren (whom we discover is an emergency holographic paramedic) looks remarkably like the stowaway lad who we discover to be the captain's son. Maybe this was a co-incidence or merely a resemblance in my own mind, but maybe it has further significance. Within the information from within the story, it could be that the lad was the basis for the programme's choice of form to appear in (the alien skeletons were clearly not human and probably, in our eyes, properly monstrous -big teeth, bony crest on the skull). But then, if this was the case, how did it know (a) to put clothes on and (b) to put female garb on given that all the models it had on the ship were male?

Another mythbuster: heliocentrism

Nice little piece at Design of Life: showing that the myth that the heliocentric view of the solar system was a 'demotion' for the earth. "In fact, ancient and medieval Arabic, Jewish, and Christian scholars believed that the center was the worst part of the universe, a kind of squalid basement where all the muck collected. One medieval writer described Earth's location as 'the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world.' We humans, another asserted, are 'lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and most remote from the heavenly arch.' In 1615 Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, a prominent persecutor of Galileo, said that 'the Earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world.' [ ... ] By contrast, heaven was up, and the further up you went, away from the center, the better it was. So Copernicus, by putting the Sun at the center and Earth in orbit around it, was really giving its inhabitants a promotion by taking them closer to the heavens."

health myths

I only just bit my tongue the other day as yet another person referenced the idea that we only use 10% of our brains and how great or dangerous we'd be if we used the rest. It doesn't, of course, stack up with brain research. And I'd tried that 2 litres of water a day thing, and found that I went to the loo more often, so it did seem to me that I was merely eliminating the extra, which made me suspect that I didn't really need it all. It seems that I was right. Go read this in order to debug yourself of some more myths.
Heard the one about reading in dim light being bad for your eyes? It's just a myth | Science | The Guardian