As described by the historian, Will Durant, on page 478 of his wonderful history of the Reformation (which you can find at Amazon here):

Calvin faced on the left a group of radicals recently arrived in Switzerland from Counter Reformation Italy. Caelius Secundus Curio, teaching in Lausanne and Basel, shocked Calvin by announcing that the saved—including many heathen—would far outnumber the damned. Laelius Socinus, son of a leading Italian jurist, settled in Zurich, studied Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew in order to understand the Bible better, learned too much, and lost his faith in the Trinity, predestination, original sin, and the atonement. He expressed his skepticism to Calvin, who answered as well as possible. Socinus agreed to refrain from public utterance of his doubts; but later he spoke out against the exectuion of Servetus, and was among the few who, in that fevered age, stood up for religious toleration.

Caelius Secundus Curio (1503-1569) and Laelius Socinus (1525-1562): two moderate and educated intellectuals who pushed back against John Calvin’s theocratic authoritarianism in hard times. I want a public monument to them.

Here’s a bit more from an Internet source on Caelius Secundus Curio:

Curio sympathized with Zwingli’s favorable judgment of the noble heathen [Homer, Socrates, Virgil etc.], and thought that they were as acceptable to God as the pious Israelites. Vergerio, formerly a friend of Curio, charged him with the Pelagian heresy and with teaching that men may be saved without the knowledge of Christ, though not without Christ. Curio advanced also the hopeful view that the kingdom of heaven is much larger than the kingdom of Satan, and that the saved will far outnumber the lost.

And from the same source, a bit more on Laelius Socinus as well:

He was constitutionally a sceptic, of the type of Thomas: an honest seeker after truth; too independent to submit blindly to authority, and yet too religious to run into infidelity. His scepticism stumbled first at the Roman Catholic, then at the Protestant orthodoxy, and gradually spread over the doctrines of the resurrection, predestination, original sin, the trinity, the atonement, and the sacraments. . . . He enjoyed the confidence of Bullinger and Melanchthon, who treated him with fatherly kindness, but regarded him better fitted for a secular calling than for the service of the Church. Calvin also was favorably impressed with his talents and personal character, but displeased with his excessive “inquisitiveness.” . . . Calvin . . . warned him against the dangers of his sceptical bent of mind. . . . Various complaints against Socinus reached Bullinger. Calvin requested him to restrain the restless curiosity of the sceptic. . . . Socinus ceased to trouble the Reformers with questions. . . . The last few years of his short life he spent in quiet retirement. His nephew visited him several times, and revered him as a divinely illuminated man to whom he owed his most fruitful ideas.

These two guys are great. And in the long run, their curiosity, open-minded religious expansiveness, and skepticism won, didn’t they? As Martin Luther King said, “The arc is long, but it bends toward justice.” In fighting for human dignity and sanity it might not hurt to think of Caelius Secundus Curio and Laelius Socinus, and draw some perspective and inspiration from them. Their admirable spirits recall for me Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous observations:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

I like Richard Rorty’s definition of a theory: If it gives us some predictive power, it’s science; if it doesn’t, it’s philosophy.

Theology is a form of philosophizing, and therefore a form of theorizing. Theology theorizes under the assumption that IF there is a god of a particular sort, here’s some ways we might want to talk about life and the universe. Since I’m an agnostic, if the IF stays in play I have no problem with theological speculation, nor do I think of it as a waste of time.

Theology, like philosophy and poetry, is a language game with no predictive power. The people who do it like to speak the language. They like to write books in the language, and they like to read books in the language. If you don’t like theological language, don’t speak it and don’t read it. If you think the language causes harm of some sort, point out the harm.

Personally, I like four Western theological languages—two from poetry and two from theology. The two languages from poetry that I like are Dante’s and Blake’s. The poetic systems that they built are worth my time detangling. I think that they say true things. I also find Reinhold Niebuhr interesting, and like to read him. I think he says true things. I also find Gabriel Marcel’s Catholic existentialism an interesting language. I think he says true things.

Neither of the two nonpoetic religious thinkers above are particularly preachy, and their thoughts are on a high intellectual level. I think they liked writing their books (as I think Dante and Blake liked writing theirs). I don’t think the world would be a better place without their languages. Do I think that any of these languages correspond to reality in a privileged way, or can be used for predictive purposes? No.

As for the ontological mystery, I like talking about the universe’s existence as a profound mystery (because it is to me). For me, it’s not a humdrum problem. I acknowledge that the sense of presence that I feel when talking about the ontological mystery could be a psychologically generated illusion. It could be a phantom. But I also think that there might well be some sort of Platonic telos  or mind that precedes matter, and so the idea that there might be more going on in the universe than just atoms shuffling in the void is a live option for me. It’s one reason I like a meditative film like Baraka. If you are an atheist, and the ontological mystery is not a live option for you—and if you don’t feel any charge from the idea—then I can see why it would be something that you would roll your eyes at and yawn.

Atheists believe that the mystery of being is only apparent. From the atheist perspective, what we’re really confronting in the paradoxes and perplexities of existence are not mysteries at all, but just very complicated material problems that are not yet solved. As an agnostic, I have not taken the atheist’s leap of faith. From my vantage, I don’t know whether the universe’s existence is a dark mystery or a problem ultimately amenable to empiricism. It’s why I think that the energy charge from calling the universe an ontological mystery (and not just a problem) is important to me. It keeps existence snapping a bit, and keeps certain ideas (that atheists are happy to have already put to bed) in play.

It doesn’t embed, but I think that this Reinhold Niebuhr interview with Mike Wallace in 1958 is interesting:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/niebuhr_reinhold.html

Being immersed in the “be here now”-ness of post-New Age popular thinking, early 21st century U.S. residents are apt to forget that history exists.  Given that “historical consciousness” (the strong notion that other people at other points in time thought and lived quite differently than those in one’s own culture) was one of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment (roughly speaking), this is a bit disconcerting.

While this tendency is, for the most part, harmless, perspective does govern sight and our sight affects our knowledge and our actions.  (In Lonerganian terms, our experiencing and understanding are prior to our reasonable judgment and responsible deciding.)

This issue first struck me in relationship to the current U.S. debate regarding federal government involvement in health care.  Because of its recent vintage and widespread usage, one might even be tempted to put quotation marks around the term “health care.”  And, furthermore, even the reality (or at least the mentality surrounding its application) that the term describes is incredibly recent.

Then, I came across an excellent treatment by Joe Carter of the exaggerated reactions that some seem to have had to the amount of success that a Nigerian “child of privilege” (a term that I’ve hardly ever heard used of a white child of privilege) had in nearly carrying out a suicide attack; while it is certainly true that “mistakes were made,” the investigative witch hunts that followed the incident (WHO IN OUR GOVERNMENT CAUSED THIS? ask the cablenewsbots) demonstrate a pathetic amount of dependence on government authorities to protect us from evil.

Similarly, Rod Dreher called my attention to an excellent David Brooks column on current perceptions of what history is and how it works.  In the midst of a Niebuhrian rant on the necessary vicissitudes of human history (belief in which is not the same as a capitulation to blind fate), Brooks highlights the real issue:

Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.

In previous ages, people engaged in what we would now see as obviously religious practices and beliefs; those of our own culture, however, quite easily slip past us unnoticed.  This is a product of a lack of attention to history, to how others have really lived and thought.

But the fact is that concrete practices such as attending football games and walking through shopping malls and art museums are (as Jamie Smith points out in a new book that looks to be fascinating) more often than we realize deeply religious.  So, Brooks has pinpointed, is our media and cultural dependence on government: It is the system that either succeeds (validating our sacrifices and faith) or fails (indicating the need for institutional but usually not perspectival reformation).

And much the same is true of health care.  Although it is beyond understandable that we all would do anything possible to avert our own deaths and those of persons close to us, with a lack of historical perspective we forget just how peculiar our circumstance is.  That is to say, it is manifestly astonishing that our political debate coalesces around the topic of how to allocate resources that even fifty years ago would have been unimaginable.

In the same way, while all governments have the responsibility of defending their citizens from outside attack (by one means or another), the fact that even one person or weapon slipping through is considered scandalous is historically anomalous.  Under most previous (and current) governments, such an anti-septic standard of freedom-from-anything-or-anyone-deemed-undesirable would be inexplicable.  (Perhaps this is related to U.S. Americans’ remarkably high sanitary standards.)

While relative prosperity and military dominance explain a great deal of this tendency to assume that isolation from the evil that permeates “the rest of the world” is actually normative, historical coincidence (particularly the geographic isolation of North America) do a great deal more in explaining such psychological isolation: Other than (mostly indigenous or forcibly removed and enslaved) peoples who have been on the “wrong” side of Anglo-America’s military dominance, since the founding of the U.S. North Americans have not faced major devastation as a result of outside forces (e.g., Argentine hyperinflation, Dresden firebombing, Bangladeshi flooding).

Thus, it should not be entirely unexpected that cries of hysteria greet tragic yet not unthinkable events such as the flooding of New Orleans, then call for the removal of (ostensibly) incompetent government officials.  But this is the quiet continent, so we usually have to hire cablenewsbots to make our own noise.

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Jeremiah 31: 7-14, Psalm 147: 12-20, Ephesians 1: 3-14 and John 1: (1-9) 10-18

As Christians, we believe that our lives and indeed the creation itself are purposeful and have meaning. And that meaning and purpose has always had to do with God and God’s intervention in some manner within human history. Apart from God’s intervention we have always believed that life would indeed be bleak. Our lection from Jeremiah (31: 7-14) pictures a people in exile, a people for who despair and grief seem to be the only option. The apparent eternity of winter’s grasp dominates Psalm 147 (12-10) with its picture of God sending “snow like wool” and “frost like ashes.” The author of Ephesians calls to mind the blessings that have come from the entry of Christ into history. And John’s prologue imagines the hopelessness of life lived out in a dark world, a powerful place in which humans blinded by the darkness can’t see their way to a better life.

The message that sings through our lessons this week is that through these purposes of God, exile has ended, our hopeless winter has passed, and our dark world has been invaded by God in Christ from who, if heeded, flow the blessings of wholeness and health of both a personal and corporate nature.

Elisabeth Sifton in a book about her father, Reinhold Niebuhr entitled, “The Serenity Prayer,” raises the false claim, popular since the Enlightenment, that rationality and goodness are all that is needed for human fulfillment. Where, she asks, in all of human history is there evidence of that? Look around the world at starving children, war-blighted villages, and the plight in so many nations with inadequate or often non-existent health care. Look even at democracies and at the push and shove in the legislative process for personal and regional advantages. “Greed, corruption and vanity,” she writes in introducing her father’s insistence that “even the possibility of future usefulness of religion demands the largest possible measure of immediate detachment from the unethical characteristics of modern society. If religion cannot transform society, it must find its social function in criticizing present realities from some ideal perspective and in presenting the ideal without corruption, so that it may sharpen the conscience and strengthen the faith of each generation.” (Sifton, pg. 122)

That’s a tall and largely neglected order! Yet, the meaning and ethical balance that derives from an authentic grounding in the revealed religion of Judaism and Christianity is reason for hope. And at the beginning of a New Year, hope is certainly something we very much need. I find inspiration in two figures within my lifetime, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dag Hammarskjold, who lived public lives within the often boiling cauldron of human fear and greed, yet rose above it to be servants of Christ in furthering progress toward that promised Kingdom of God, so longed for in human history. As Secretary General of the United Nations during a contentious time (when has it not been?) Hammarskjold kept a notebook he called “Markings” a kind of white paper that reflected his struggles and hopes for himself and his world. His positive hope reflected a faith in God that allowed him to affirm a “yes” to life, given even all of its negativity. During the year that his life was dramatically changed as he assumed heavy leadership responsibility at the United Nations, he wrote, “Night is drawing nigh,” quoting from a Swedish hymn that his mother always read on the eve of each New Year. It was a solemn reminder to him of how tentative and precarious life really is. Yet, Hammarskjold in 1953, at the beginning of his difficult and almost impossible assignment, was also able to write “For all that has been — Thanks! To all that shall be — Yes!”

That “Yes” was to be repeated many times during the difficult years that lay before him to become fixed as a yes to God, to himself, and to destiny. Like Bonhoeffer before him, he lived a life of conscious and attentive faith while engaged in assuming the heavy and demanding responsibilities of discipleship in a world “come of age.” In the flux and uncertainty of such a world, both leaders found in their relationship to Christ a “cantus firmus,” so that Christ became for them a firm song in their hearts and minds that was a counterpoint to all the other often discordant and even strident melodies that life brought upon them.

As we enter into a New Year, as we reflect on our lessons this week, may each of us find our own “Yes” in the hope that Jeremiah posited as a consequence of the ending of Israel’s exile, that the Psalmist praised in his experience of the sovereignty of God, that the author of Ephesians rejoiced over in the benefits and blessings of Christ’s gifts of redemption, and that the gospel writer, John, announced in his discovery that in Christ is a light more powerful than any darkness the world can bring.

May our lessons as we near a new year and decade bring with them our own “cantus firmus,” our own firm song of hope, our own “yes” for what lies ahead!

Ralph Ahlberg

When Barack Obama was elected, I wrote a post on his connection with Christian realism of the Reinhold Niebuhr variety, which you can read about here.

Christian realism is basically the idea that the world is evil and that in order to fight that evil, you have to get your hands dirty. Christian realism says that an idealistic stance of non-violence allows evil to triumph over good. Although non-violence or pacifism may be an ideal, Christian realists say that this ideal must be subordinated to the utilitarian calculus of political force and violence. Augustine adopted a Christian realist position in advocating an interior ethic of love, but an exterior ethic of expediency. Luther adopted a Christian realist position against the peasants in his treatise “Against the Thieving, Murderous Hordes of Peasants.” Reinhold Niebuhr was the Christian realist par excellence in his support of strong-armed cold war politics.

In a recent op-ed, David Brooks notes that realism is still alive and well in the political philosophy of Barack Obama, articulated so very eloquently in his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations – acting individually or in concert – will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified. . . I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

Brooks commends President Obama for a “thoroughly theological” speech which “talked about the need to balance the moral obligation to champion freedom while not getting swept up in self-destructive fervor.” Brooks, himself a Christian realist, clearly finds the president’s moral position a prudent one.

I agree that Obama did a fine job articulating a realist stance and defending his political foreign policy on respectable moral grounds. But remember the context—Obama’s realist speech, which Brooks says “was the most profound of his presidency, and maybe his life,” was given at his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize is meant to acknowledge those idealists like Martin Luther King Jr. who choose not to get their hands dirty, who refuse to succumb to violent tactics even in the defense of a just cause. Such prizes are meant to provide recognition and encouragement to those idealists who provide a witness for what is morally possible, even if it isn’t morally expedient.

Christians like Brooks are supportive of the president’s speech because, since Christianity has existed, Christians have been more comfortable compromising with the world’s evil than they have been resisting the world’s evil with non-violent agape. Those idealistic, non-violent witnesses, minority that they are, are necessary and important reminders of the task to which Christians are called. One group of such idealistic witnesses were the Anabaptists.

The Anabaptists were a group of Christians involved in what was called the “Radical Reformation.” Concerned that reformers like Luther and Calvin were compromising too much in their political stances and failing to live up to the demands of the Christian life, the Anabaptist vision offered a new conception of the essence of Christianity as discipleship (die Nachfolge Christi), the essence of the Christian church as a community of brothers and sisters, and the essence of Christian ethics as one of agapic love and non-violence.

The Anabaptists refused to accept the state church system which reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin were a part of. They did not participate in the government for the precise reason that earthly institutions like the magistracy required moral compromise that the Anabaptists found inconsistent with Christian life. The Schleitheim Confession of Faith, an early Anabaptist collection of beliefs states this as an agreement to separation [from the world]:

A separation shall be made from the evil and from the wickedness which the devil planted in the world; in this manner, simply that we shall not have fellowship with them [the wicked] and not run with them in the multitude of their abominations. This is the way it is: Since all who do not walk in the obedience of faith, and have not united themselves with God so that they wish to do His will, are a great abomination before God, it is not possible for anything to grow or issue from them except abominable things. For truly all creatures are in but two classes, good and bad, believing and unbelieving, darkness and light, the world and those who [have come] out of the world, God’s temple and idols, Christ and Belial; and none can have part with the other. To us then the command of the Lord is clear when He calls upon us to be separate from the evil and thus He will be our God and we shall be His sons and daughters. . .

Therefore there will also unquestionably fall from us the unchristian, devilish weapons of force — such as sword, armor and the like, and all their use [either] for friends or against one’s enemies I would like the records — by virtue of the word of Christ, Resist not [him that is] evil.

In other words, the Anabaptists did not believe that Christ came so that we could continue resisting the corruption of the world with the tools of corruption or using evil to fight evil. Rather, Christ came to liberate us from evil, and by choosing to follow Him, the Anabaptists believed we must necessarily forsake force, violence, and political power of any kind.

Because of their commitment to non-violence and the principle of worldly separation, the Anabaptists had a lot of enemies. From 1527-1560, the Anabaptists were severely persecuted. The 1529 Diet of Spires passed a death sentence on all Anabaptists of either sex [by] fire, sword, or some other way.” The 1551 Diet of Augsburg decreed that any judge or juror who had scruples about executing an Anabaptist be removed from office, fined, and/or imprisoned. As a result of these decrees, thousands of Anabaptists were executed in the 16th century, without trial or sentence. Yet, as Harold Bender writes in his quippy “The Anabaptist Vision,”

The authorities had great difficulty in executing their program of suppression, for they soon discovered that the Anabaptists feared neither torture nor death, and gladly sealed their faith with their blood. In fact, the joyful testimony of the Anabaptist martyrs was a great stimulus to new recruits, for it stirred the imagination of the populace as nothing else could have done.

Bender goes on to conclude:

However, the Anabaptist was realistic. Down the long perspective of the future he saw little chance that the mass of humankind would enter such a brotherhood with its high ideals. Hence he anticipated a long and grievous conflict between the church and the world. Neither did he anticipate the time when the church would rule the world; the church would always be a suffering church. He agreed with the words of Jesus when He said that those who would be His disciples must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow Him, and that there would be few who would enter the strait gate and travel the narrow way of life. If this prospect should seem too discouraging, the Anabaptist would reply that the life within the Christian brotherhood is satisfying full of love and joy.

Compare this to Obama’s Nobel speech:

[A]s a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by [Gandhi and King’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason. . . So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another – that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy. The soldier’s courage and sacrifice is full of glory, expressing devotion to country, to cause and to comrades in arms. But war itself is never glorious, and we must never trumpet it as such.

Understandably, Obama cannot reasonably embrace the Anabaptist vision, but I do think that the Anabaptist vision can embrace Christians who have too long capitulated to the claims of realism. David Brooks seems pleased with the theological underpinnings of Obama’s political philosophy. He writes, “Other Democrats talk tough in a secular way, but Obama’s speeches were thoroughly theological. He talked about the “core struggle of human nature” between love and evil.” While Brooks may be correct in noting the theological underpinnings of Obama’s politics, Christians need to question whether those underpinnings adequately reflect the nature of discipleship to Christ.

Love and evil are not two warring powers, as Brooks so dualistically proposes. What the Anabaptist vision reminds us is that Christian love overcomes evil not by force, but by inspiration and imagination. Christian love, as lived out by the Anabaptists, provides a witness to what is best and noblest in human nature. In the wake of such love, evil simply becomes impotent. The County of Alzey, after executing 350 Anabaptists in Palatinate, was said to exclaim, “What shall I do? The more I kill, the greater becomes their number!” Barack Obama’s speech says that such love cannot ultimately triumph against the world’s evils, and that if good is to overcome evil, force will be necessary. But the Anabaptist vision says otherwise. Heinrich Bullinger, one of the Anabaptist’s enemies and persecutors, wrote that the Anabaptists taught,

One cannot and should not use force to compel anyone to accept the faith, for faith is a free gift of God. It is wrong to compel anyone by force or coercion to embrace the faith, or to put to death anyone for the sake of his erring faith. It is an error that in the church any sword other than that of the Divine Word should be used. The secular kingdom should be separated from the church, and no secular ruler should exercise authority in the church. The Lord has commanded simply to preach the Gospel, not to compel anyone by force to accept it. The true church of Christ has the characteristic that it suffers and endures persecution but does not inflict persecution upon anyone.

It is unfortunate that a peace prize meant to recognize those idealists who believe peace without violence is possible ended up rewarding a spirit of moral compromise this year. But it is even more unfortunate that Christians like Brooks think that Obama’s message is grounded in theology of Jesus Christ. So I will conclude this post with the same words in which I concluded my last post arguing against Christian realism:

As Stanley Hauerwas notes,

Jesus does not play power politics. He does not fight the evil of the world on evil’s terms. He does not use violence, power, and coercion to fulfill his mission. Nor does he expect his disciples to. Jesus invites his disciples to his own non-violent love, a love that will indeed overcome the powers of the world, but not through coercion and force.

The Anabaptist vision gives us a glimpse of what Jesus’ non-violent love actually can accomplish.

Apologies for skipping yesterday–we’re heading into the holiday season and things are getting BUSY at work!

News

• Some Guantanamo inmates will be moved to a near-empty prison in Illinois, marking a significant step toward shutting down the camp at Guantanamo Bay.
• Televangelist Oral Roberts, loved by some, scorned by others, passed away, aged 91.
• Mike Huckabee is one of several conservatives to praise Barack’s Nobel Peace Prize speech. (I find it interesting that so many people are surprised … must be too busy projecting their own issues onto the President to really hear what he’s been saying all this time.)
• David Brooks writes about Obama and Christian realism.

Green

• Hip-hop goes green in California.
• Did you know that the New York Times has a "Learning Network"? Because they do; and here’s their page on global warming.

Miscellaneous

• An oil lobby photoshops diversity into its ad.
• Marvel meets Disney:
  

Let’s go!

Leave it to a Catholic church to make you feel guilty about leaving a bathroom less than sparkling.

Difference between sex and love? Well, you’re not always sure you’re in love. But when you’re having sex, there’s really no mistaking it.
~ Saxophonist Ornette Coleman

Consider “cure.” Has there ever been a more underused yet overstated word?

Caller has questions re: letting someone without a license drive in a car that does not have insurance on it. After being asked for her name, caller said she would call again and hung up.
~ Watertown 911 log, Dec. 3

Extraordinary, and worth watching in its entirety:

Yesterday, President Obama visited Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.  Many people reasonably believe that the president does not deserve the award after serving less than a year in office and not having achieved many tangible goals when it comes to foreign policy.  But regardless of whether or not he earned the prestigious prize, his acceptance speech was excellent.  It was very Niebuhrian, and it revealed that the president holds a view of the world and human nature that can be described as “Christian realism,” although he did not identify it in sectarian terms  He believes that man is flawed and frequenty behaves in unethical ways, but he also maintains that the human condition can be improved through acts of goodwill motivated by moral principles.  Having just escalated the war in Afghanistan, he argued that war is sometimes justified and necessary, but he balanced his adherence to just war theory by stressing the need to achieve a just peace that serves humanitarian aims.

In addition to promoting humanitarian realism, he advocated what international relations scholars refer to as “institutionalism” and “constructivism.”  Institutionalists believe that peace and progress can best be achieved by nations acting in concert through international institutions like the United Nations and World Trade Organization, and constructivists believe that changes in norms such as notions of sovereignty and human rights can improve global society.  In his speech, President Obama said that international alliances like NATO are needed to keep the peace, and he argued that the US and other countries should embrace humanitarian concepts out of enlightened self interest.

For information about Rienhold Niebuhr, who President Obama has cited as a major influence on his thinking, and Christian realism click on this link.  For another perspective on the international relations theory aspects of the president’s speech, read Daniel Drezner’s recent blog post on ForeignPolicy.com.

Thursday, December 10, was an odd day. It’s not every day a sitting US president flies off to Oslo to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Teddy Roosevelt won it in 1905 for helping to end the Russo-Japanese War, but that was before air travel, when the Wright brothers were still back in Dayton at the bicycle shop. He stayed home – there was his Nobel Lecture given in 1910 when he finally accepted the award. He felt he shouldn’t accept it while still in office. Woodrow Wilson won it in 1919 after pushing to form the League of Nations, which turned out to be a bust as Congress decided that was a really stupid idea and America would join no such thing. And since Wilson was not present at the award ceremony, after the massive stroke that had rendered him speechless, on December 10, 1920, Albert G. Schmedeman, the United States minister in Oslo, accepted the prize on his behalf. That was low-key and polite. Jimmy Carter won it in 2002 – but by then he was no longer president and that was for the general humanitarian stuff, not for anything he had done while in office. So that doesn’t count. Al Gore won the thing, and he had more votes for president than George Bush had nine years ago, but we all know how that worked out. And Gore’s win was for the environmental stuff, which was a stretch.

And of course Obama’s win was a stretch too. He hadn’t even been in office for a year and was in charge of two wars, one war questionable – waged for reasons that turned out to be bogus, which called for years of saying there were other perfectly good reasons for that war, and when those turned out to make little sense, other reasons to consider – and the other war going so badly that he had just ordered a major escalation. The irony of Obama accepting the Peace Prize hung heavy in the air. But the prize was for potential, it seems – for changing the tone of geopolitics, by not being George Bush or something. Obama hadn’t done anything yet – no big treaty, no stunning end to any conflict. No, it was a prize for being a sensible, thoughtful guy who listens and thinks things through, and inspirers others to do the same thing. As that sort of thing is in short supply in the world these days, and has always been in short supply, the Noble Awards Committee decided that deserved a prize. Hey, it’s their prize. They can do what they want. They liked the cut of his jib.

So there was no point in taking this too seriously. But if you’re big on being sensible and thoughtful and listening carefully and thinking things through, and think that getting others to do the same is vitally important, you run with it. The world is complex, and the problems mind-numbing, and everyone should realize that and work with that. So Obama ran with that:

Newly enshrined among the world’s great peacemakers, President Barack Obama offered a striking defense of war. Eleven months into his presidency, a fresh Obama doctrine. Evil must be vigorously opposed, he declared as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday. At the same time, he made an impassioned case for building a “just and lasting peace.”

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” Obama told his audience in Oslo’s soaring City Hall. “For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world.”

Pronouncing himself humbled by such an honor so early in “my labors on the world stage,” Obama nevertheless turned his Nobel moment into an unapologetic defense of armed intervention in times of self defense or moral necessity. The hawkish message was an inevitable nod to the controversy defining his selection: an American president, lauded for peace just as he escalates the long, costly war in Afghanistan.

It short, just as the knee-jerk paranoid neoconservatives and jingoistic nationalists, who call for all-out war at the drop of a hat, are being stupid, the idealistic no-more-war-ever crowd isn’t thinking things through either. Each side says it’s simple, really. The speech was about how nothing is ever simple. Here’s a transcript.

And neither side likes to hear that. Alfred Nobel, the man who invented dynamite, might have felt all guilty and remorseful and set up this prize, but that was his problem. Sometimes you use dynamite, and sometimes you don’t.

Of course pundits back at home decided the speech was really about domestic American politics, so you got Mark Whitaker, Washington Bureau Chief for MSNBC, asking what he thought was the key question about the speech – Was Obama’s Oslo speech a retort to Cheney?

No, really – you could see it as a slap-down from Norway. Where’s your prize, you Dick? And that goes like this:

Every good speechmaker has an audience in mind. In President Barack Obama’s case, his Nobel Peace Prize lecture was a message to several audiences. Among them: supporters at home and abroad who cheered his election and the hope for racial and global reconciliation he represents, and critics who think he hasn’t done enough yet to warrant such an historic honor.

But as I listened to the address, it also struck me as a retort to one man in particular: former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Whitaker traces how, since Obama took office, Cheney “has taken it upon himself to become the most visible and vocal proponent of a conservative indictment that goes beyond merely questioning the wisdom of the president’s foreign policy.” Yeah, Cheney mocks Obama’s fundamental world view. It is naïve and unpatriotic. Maybe it’s even treasonous.

But mostly Cheney says the guy just doesn’t get it – after all, protecting America’s security is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business.” And you know the drill – “These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek.”

Whitaker says Obama countered with King and Gandhi:

“I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence,” Obama said, “I know there is nothing weak – nothing passive – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.”

“But,” the president immediately went on to say, “as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.… For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism. It is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.”

So take that, Dick! I get it, but I think things through.

And there was Cheney on Fox News saying that Obama is insufficiently proud of his country, and doesn’t believe that America is a unique force for good in the world – always “apologizing” for past injustices or misjudgments, which is just weakness. As Cheney told Sean Hannity – “That says to me this is a guy who doesn’t fully understand or share that view of American exceptionalism that I think most of us believe in.” We all believe we’re like no one else, and far better than everyone else in every way, so why doesn’t Obama believe that? What wrong with the guy?

And Whitaker sees this counter from Obama:

He detailed how United States has “helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms” - though this was something, he noted, that was done thanks to both national self-interest and global altruism.

And while he argued that America should not seek to impose its own system of government on other nations, Obama contended that “even as we respect the unique culture and traditions of different countries, America will always be a voice for those aspirations that are universal.”

In other words, the nation is unique in its support for universal freedoms, which, Obama made clear, should include – but not be limited to – pro-Western, pro-democracy movements.

And there was the matter of Cheney’s signature issue, the institutionalization of torture and kidnapping as a national policy:

As expected, the president also fired back at Cheney on the issue of torture. “Even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules,” he said, “I believe that the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war … That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed … We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.”

So Whitaker sees the whole thing as sticking it to Cheney. That may be an odd reading, but Whitaker thinks he is onto something, as Obama did say sometimes you do have to use the dynamite:

No matter what you think of Cheney and his beliefs, he knew how to wield power in Washington vis-à-vis ambivalent allies and tough customers around the world. And like it or not, Cheney’s dark reading of human motives and behavior was often helpful when it came to figuring out how to get his way.

As the president closed his speech, it was easy to sense that he has come to appreciate these hard realities a bit more than when he took office a year ago.

Ah, Obama secretly admires Cheney and wants to be just like him, or realizes he has to be just like him. So he may have countered Cheney, but he knows better.

And Newsweek’s Howard Fineman says that really, Obama realized that Bush was right about everything and wanted to be George Bush:

The Norwegians weren’t applauding the peace-prize acceptance speech President Obama just gave in Oslo and I know why. The speech in many ways could have been written for, and delivered by, a man they loathe: George W. Bush. Sure the speech had the pleasant stuff about banning torture and the value of negotiations, and Obama gave a nod to Martin Luther King, whose own Nobel speech in 1964 was a paean to pacifism. But Obama wanted to make it clear that he was NOT Martin Luther King. He was a commander in chief leading two wars, confronting an implacable terrorist foe, burdened by a wobbly job rating and a dysfunctional Congress, and facing a dicey electoral future for his party in 2010 and himself in 2012.

So Obama accepted most of the fundamental premises of his maligned predecessor’s post-9/11 theory of the world. Yes, Obama said, there is evil in the world and it must be confronted. Al Qaeda is evil, he said. No, “Holy War” – jihad – can never be a “just” war. America not only has a duty but self-interest in spreading free speech and freedom of religion around the world, even in places and cultures that seem to reject it, because those values are “universal.”

And he even used the word “terrorism” in Oslo, and sounded just like Bush:

He praised the peace-making maneuvers of two Republican presidents (Nixon and Reagan) and of Pope John Paul. Obama challenged Europeans and others to stand up to Iran and North Korea – which, he said indirectly but clearly, want to develop nuclear capability so that they could “arm themselves for nuclear war.” He was careful to avoid anything more than the most anodyne reference to the conflict between Israel and Arabs – a conflict Europeans depict as a one-sided saga of Israeli oppression of Palestinians, whom Obama didn’t mention.

And this fascinates Fineman:

The fascinating question of course is: why did Obama give the speech he gave? Surely there is something about reading those morning CIA briefings concerning Al Qaeda (something Bush famously didn’t always do) that concentrates the mind. There’s that hoary old line that conservatives like to use: “a conservative is a liberal mugged by reality.” But there is some truth to it.

Obama’s speech is not that surprising, actually. Even though his breakthrough speech was the one he gave against the war in Iraq in 2002, he doesn’t have the reflexive fear of the use of military force that so burdened Baby Boomer leaders. Even in 2002, and certainly in later years, he has made it clear that he views the American involvement in Afghanistan as not only strategically justified but also morally justifiable. Many of his early supporters didn’t listen. Having just decided to send 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, he had no choice but to make the case he made – however uncomfortable it was to do so in Oslo.

So he was George Bush all along, but no one noticed, or no one wanted to believe it. Or maybe it’s all political positioning:

Obama is having enough trouble with the conservatives in his own party – the Blue Dogs and various “gangs of” – to discomfit them culturally by hobnobbing with the Norwegian socialists who chose him for the Nobel award. Obama has health care and climate change and financial regulation and a whole lot of “government” to sell Congress. It’s bad enough to represent “the Washington power elite” without having to be seen in the admiring embrace of Europeans in white tie and tails. Remember: Obama won the White House in good measure because of swing voters in states such as Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Virginia. Look at Oslo through their eyes, and you can see why Obama went late and left early and sounded like a Texan. Not to mention the fact that few than one in four American voters think he deserves the prize.

So Obama is Bush, or found out that he had to be Bush, or something.

And at Politico, Eamon Javers reports on the cheering from the kill-them-all-now crowd:

The remarks drew immediate praise from a host of conservatives, including former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

“I liked what he said,” Palin told USA Today. “Of course, war is the last thing I believe any American wants to engage in, but it’s necessary. We have to stop these terrorists.”

Gingrich told The Takeaway, a national morning drive show from WNYC and Public Radio International, ”He clearly understood that he had been given the prize prematurely, but he used it as an occasion to remind people, first of all, as he said: that there is evil in the world.”

“I think having a liberal president who goes to Oslo on behalf of a peace prize and reminds the committee that they would not be free, they wouldn’t be able to have a peace prize, without having [the ability to use] force,” Gingrich said. “I thought in some ways it’s a very historic speech.”

And so it goes. They thought Obama went to Oslo and said it’s all very simple – kill the bad guys. That not exactly what he said, but that’s what they heard:

“The irony is that George W. Bush could have delivered the very same speech. It was a truly an American president’s message to the world,” said Bradley A. Blakeman, a Republican strategist and CEO of Kent Strategies LLC who worked in the Bush White House.

Added Walter Russell Mead, Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations: “If Bush had said these things the world would be filled with violent denunciations,” said “When Obama says them, people purr. That is fine by me.”

There are more details, and more examples, at the link. Obama changed his tune. Bush is vindicated. And Cheney was right all along.

But others don’t see it that way, as Mike Crowley says this:

Obama is a man trapped amongst the contradictions created by America’s awkward place in the post-Bush world. Last week, Obama’s address on Afghanistan both escalated and promised an end to the war there. Today, Obama opened his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech with a long disquisition on the nature of war and its necessity–complete with a brief survey of “just war” theory. (He even threw in a passage about the necessary role of coercion against states like Iran and North Korea that mess around with nuclear weapons.) I suppose it was the honest way to take such a prize at a time when America has about 200,000 soldiers occupying foreign countries. But it was something of a surreal exercise.

It’s complicated. The New York Times’ conservative voice, Ross Douthat, says this was not Bush:

In a sense, this was one of the clearer statements of foreign policy principle that Obama has delivered to date: An extended defense of using realist means in the service of liberal internationalist ends. It’s an approach that fits at least some of the challenges we face, and the turn toward modesty and pragmatism, in particular – toward the pursuit of “a more practical, attainable peace,” to quote Obama quoting John F. Kennedy this morning – makes sense as a corrective to some of the more hubristic elements of Bush’s foreign policy. (Thought that corrective had already largely taken hold in Bush’s second term.)

But Douthat sees Bush in play, modified:

He didn’t give the address that American neoconservatives would have written for him, obviously, but pieces of that speech showed up – the defense of the war in Afghanistan and the idea of just war in general; the Bush-ian, “make no mistake, evil does exist in the world” line; the insistence that “the United States has helped to underwrite global security for sixty years, with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms.” He didn’t give a Gandhian ode to nonviolence, or an activist’s paean to human rights, but those threads were woven in as well.

He talked up international institutions, promised action against climate change, and took credit for ordering the closing of Guantanamo (one of the few applause lines, inevitably), but at the same time he praised the use of force for humanitarian purposes, and reserved the right to act unilaterally in America’s interests. He defended diplomatic outreach to Iran, called on the world to put pressure on Iran’s nuclear program, and promised that the world would stand behind Iran’s protestors – and he made it all run smoothly together, in rhetoric if not in reality. And he managed to co-opt everyone from MLK to JFK to Nixon to John Paul II and Reagan along the way.

Kevin Drum counters those final quibbles:

I really don’t think neocons have much to complain about even if Obama didn’t use the opportunity to announce construction of a new generation of nuclear missiles or something. Given that he was, after all, accepting a peace prize, it was a surprisingly robust defense of war and America’s military role in the world. Surprisingly Bushian, really, with one obvious caveat: among the many wars he mentioned as necessary and justified, there was one that was deliberately conspicuous by its absence: Iraq. So neocons have that to gripe about if they’re in a griping mood. (And when are they not?)

But the whole thing struck Drum as being pretty mechanical, like Obama’s West Point address, like Obama was trying to thread a needle:

There wasn’t any single place where I felt like he laid down a marker and really spoke about something he believed deeply in. Dan Drezner made (I think) a related point: “Pick a paradigm, and you can find a sliver of the speech dedicated to its theoretical propositions.” But he also explained it – “Doesn’t this imply that the speech was logically contradictory? No, it implies that the world is a hell of a lot more complex than any of these theoretical approaches. Alas, knowing when to apply each of these worldviews is more art than science.”

And there’s another parallel between Obama’s West Point speech and this one: both times he told his audience (i.e., the one actually in the room with him) something they didn’t want to hear. At West Point he stressed that we have limited resources for war when those resources are desperately needed at home. In Oslo he stressed that wars aren’t going away and the United States is going to keep fighting them. Is this a demonstration of bravery?

Yes, Obama said things are complicated, not simple. These days that is brave, actually.

John Dickerson puts it this way:

As much as Obama talked about war, however, it was not a speech just about that. It was a speech about complexity and hard choices between the need for wars and the desire for peace.

His critics have claimed that this obsession with complexity equals weakness. After this speech, that’s a harder case to make. Just as you can recognize complexity yet appreciate the need for action, so you can debate for weeks about Afghanistan and still send 30,000 troops.

And Obama kept turning things on their head:

But if the United States has done the hard business of fighting and dying, then it must also do other hard and nonviolent things. Just as he was sounding like a neoconservative, Obama made the case conservatives won’t like at all: We must engage with our enemies. “I know that engagement with repressive regimes lacks the satisfying purity of indignation,” he said, then proceeded to cite three skillful practitioners of engagement: Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Pope John Paul – conservative icons all.

It seems Obama doesn’t much care for the satisfying purity of indignation, from the left or the right. And when you become a head of state it’s best to avoid it.

And Fred Kaplan argues Obama was channeling his favorite philosopher:

Read in its entirety, Obama’s speech seems a faithful reflection of another theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, who, during World War II and the Cold War that followed, sought to reconcile the principles of Christianity with the imperatives of national defense. In his influential 1952 book The Irony of American History, he wrote that American idealism must come to terms “with the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historical configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue.”

Obama’s speech doesn’t mention Niebuhr, but back in April 2007, early on in the presidential campaign, David Brooks asked Obama whether he’d ever read Niebuhr. The candidate replied, “I love him, he’s one of my favorite philosophers.” Asked what he took away from Niebuhr, Obama answered, “I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world”; that “we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate these things, but we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction”; that “we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism.”

Brooks observed in his New York Times column, “[F]or a guy who’s spent the last few months fund-raising, and who was walking off the Senate floor as he spoke, that’s a pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History.”

The Nobel lecture that Obama delivered today is a fuller elaboration of the same ideas.

And then Kaplan goes into great detail to illustrate that, but it comes down to this:

The key, he said, is to “balance isolation and engagement, pressure and incentives, so that human rights and dignity are advanced over time.”

This recitation raises many more questions than it answers. How does the United States, the United Nations, the West, or anyone pull off this balancing act? When is the right time for sanctions, the right time for summitry? (Nixon went to China entirely for power-balancing reasons; enriching or opening up the Middle Kingdom must have been the last thing on his mind.) And what is Obama hinting at for his own policy toward, say, Iran or North Korea: Does the speech presage the ratcheting of sanctions, the opening to a grand bargain, or – in some still trickier balancing act – both? And what happens if, unlike Moscow under Gorbachev or Poland in the time of Lech Walesa, today’s evil regimes are uninterested in openness and impervious to pressure?

“There is no simple formula here,” Obama summarized.

Kaplan says that’s the whole point:

His speech, like Niebuhr’s writing, reflects an active awareness of humanity’s ideals but also its imperfections – of our reach and our limits. It’s unclear how Obama, as president, will deal with the tensions and contradictions. But it’s good to know that he knows they exist.

So Obama is not Bush, and he does not secretly admire Cheney. Actually the speech might remind you of what Einstein once said, about how everything should be should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. But of course that is not how politics works these days. It’s quite the opposite, if you want to satisfy your base, and this raise big money, and thus gain office, and real power.

Given this speech, and the West Point speech, one has to assume Obama want to change that – to fix things, to do the right thing, for the good of everyone. Will America and the world accept that?

Maybe he does deserve that prize. This is radical new thinking, even if the grumpy left, who thought he was one of them and feel betrayed, and the perpetually outraged right, who now think he’s flipped to their side, don’t quite get it yet. But he deserves a prize for trying to get beyond all that and just make things better.

UPDATE: The Mormon Worker says that President Obama needs to read John Howard Yoder

HT: Antony Solomon

UPDATE II: Glenn Greenwald on The Obama Doctrine

I was half-awake/half-asleep at 7:00am yesterday morning when I had left my television on Fox News Channel.  As I was barely wiping my eyes, I was hearing a strange speech, and it almost sounded like Reinhold Niebuhr himself was talking to me, but I looked onto the t.v. screen, and low and behold, it was President Barack Obama giving his Nobel Peace Prize speech and defending his escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

Christian Realism rejects the polly-anna outlook of the early 20th century Social Gospel, which was liberal Protestantism bringing the kingdom of God here on Earth.  Only God can accomplish the impossible task of bringing heaven to earth, therefore Christians must work with the world as it is. Enter: Barack Obama, a politician who attracts the most politically progressive factions of the Democratic Party (the ones who advocate peace and diplomacy among other policy preferences).  In his speech, Obama argued that sometimes war is necessary, because it is the lesser of two evils. Reinhold Niebuhr even argued that there are empires of good, and empire of evil, and that it was up to the empires of good to distribute wealth and technology to their subservient colonies.

According to R.S. Sugitharajah, for Niebuhr, “imperialism was not in itself immoral.  Each empire must be considered individually. He also made a distinction between older and modern empires. The earlier empires were marked by nationalistic imperialism, where the stronger dominate the weaker.  These were considered morally inferior to modern empires.  The new empires are merely servants of the universal community [see Reinhold Niebuhr’s Nations and Empires, page 59].” (R.S. Sugitharajah, Postcolonial Reconfigurations, 146).

This is exactly what we are trying to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the end, Obama’s realist ideology blurs lines of difference between him and the politics of George W Bush, who I would argue was a socially conservative Social Gospeller  in the mold of Woodrow Wilson.

I am glad I was not the only one who noticed Obama’s Realist perspective.

Ben Witherington III adds,

“And I quite agree with President Obama that only a warped view of Biblical religion could lead to a belief in a doctrine of holy war as carried out by fallible sinful human beings. Fallen human beings are incapable of carrying out a holy war, incapable of making the necessary moral distinctions so that right is always done in any given situation, or at least so that there are more rescued victims of injustices than newly created victims in the course of a war.

But I must confess to being doubtful even when we talk about a justifiable struggle that it ever becomes a just war.  For what the President has admitted in this speech is that war is not merely hell, it is one of the ultimate expressions of human sin on earth, one of the greatest expressions of a violation of love of neighbor and even love of enemy imaginable.”

For the rest of his analysis of Obama’s speech, see here.

Truth and Peace,

Rod

Over the past two summers, I’ve attended international conferences at which I’ve delivered papers. Both of those papers will be published in peer-reviewed journals in the coming year, 2010. Here are the abstracts for both of them.

“Deconstructing the Secular Magisterium: Voices Past and Present for Conversations of the Future” – delivered at the Grandeur of Reason conference in Rome, Italy, Sept 2008, a conference of the Center for Philosophy and Theology at the University of Nottingham, will be published in The Heythrop Journal late in 2010. It should be available online ahead of the print edition as part of their “Online Early” Program.

Promoting intercultural, interreligious, and interdisciplinary dialogue requires that the conception of reason move beyond the privileged arena of scientific and logical reasoning alone. It must allow for the validity of other types of knowledge, including experiential, religious, and intuitive. The privileged forms of reason have consistently been challenged. In the nineteenth century J.G. Hamann emphasized the role of faith in all reasoning endeavors. In the twentieth century, Michael Polanyi offered a similar argument from the experience of a scientist. Karl Popper’s philosophy of science emphasizes the provisionality of scientific knowledge. William James and Reinhold Niebuhr offer a pragmatic account of reality, incorporating all types of knowledge, allowing for coherent, comprehensive presentations of reality which are persuasive while not demanding absolute status, but instead remaining provisional. Late twentieth century writers share equivalent convictions of these thinkers about the failure of the Enlightenment’s foundationalist conceptions of reason. They offer a means by which genuine conversation between apparently incommensurable bodies of knowledge can occur. This paper will explore the contribution of those past voices and allow these voices of the present to influence our approach to dialogue by embodying the nonfoundationalist epistemology advocated from the past to accomplish Benedict’s vision for the future.

“Challenging the Cultural Imaginary: Josef Pieper on How Life Might Live” – delivered at the Towards a Philosophy of Life Conference conference in Liverpool, UK, June 2009, a conference of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion, will be published in New Blackfriars sometime in 2010. It should also be available online ahead of the print edition as part of their “Online Early” Program.

Asking anew “How might life live?” is to offer an opportunity to re-imagine. In the midst of a cultural imaginary that imagines life in terms of the Protestant work ethic, resulting in a culture of total work, Josef Pieper imagines a different way of living. His work emphasizes the place of leisure in the life of the human creature. From within a culture of total work it seems impossible for leisure to have a place, yet Pieper’s reflections pose leisure as the very basis of culture itself, ironically the basis from which the current culture of total work may have emerged and at the same time, the only place from which it can be escaped. It is in the imaginative moment of leisure that one can affect a transformation of the cultural imaginary, for at one and the same time leisure is the basis for a new formulation of culture against total work and a living of life in a way that inherently stands in disobedience against the total work world.

I’ll post again when they are available in print and online. However, you’ll likely have to subscribe or be enrolled in a university with library access to the content of those journals in order to read them.

In the meantime, I’m working through some new abstracts for papers at upcoming conferences in 2010. I’ve got at least 4 I’m thinking seriously about attending. More news and abstracts as they approach.

Book Six — Chapter Six Living With Jean Shepherd, Parsing Dostoevsky, Parsing Neo-Orthodoxy, Dorothy Day, Student Interracial Ministry, Fiona Is Born, Don Benedict, Henry Pitney Van Dusen Is Miffed

CONTENTS

So much things to say. Let’s get to it.

Adam and Ganya stayed in Hastings Hall until the pregnancy became gloriously obvious. Then they moved to a Teacher’s College apartment in Bancroft Hall. It was a half a block away. Ganya continued working at Youth House. Adam worked in a venerable Presbyterian church in Brooklyn.

Academically, Adam sank deep into Dostoevsky as he had at Williams. He tackled the novelist’s vision of God in “The Brothers Karamazov”.

Life with Ganya proceeded happily, mainly from supper on. It can be said they lived with Jean Shepherd. Jean Shepherd was on 45 minutes each weekday night on WOR radio. Ganya and Adam sat expectantly through fifteen minutes of news, awaiting the theme music. There it was! Then came Shepherd.

Ah!

Scenes of Chicago. Gary. Of rump-sprung chenille bathrobes. Parades. Kid fights. Parental conundrums. The great Midwest. Shepherd’s would string together evocations, memories, contemporary glosses with no effort. With a hipster edge barely audible but there. Oh, there. Nearly an hour. Off the top of his head. If one could imbibe attitude, it is likely that both Ganya and Adam drank deeply of Shepherd that year.

A deeper parsing of Dostoevsky added another element to Adam’s core understanding. Dostoevsky was seen as an apostle of freedom. A man will do anything at all to prove he is a man and not a piano key. The philosopher Berdyaev said the height of Dostoevsky’s celebration of freedom was “The Brother’s Karamazov”, most particularly Ivan Karamazov’s story of The Grand Inquisitor.

Adam knew the story. The devil appears to Jesus in the wilderness and tempts him three times. Turn stones to bread. Leap from a height. Bow to Satan and he will receive all the kingdoms of the earth. Mystery. Miracle. Authority. ations, he said, were the pillars of Roman Catholicism. To Adam these were not merely the pillars of religion but of society and culture as well. The Grand Inquisitor was for Adam very deepest description of reality itself. It was what Genet brought forth “The Balcony”. Ganya and he had gone to see it in New York. Beckett knew it in his novels and plays.

But freedom was not the end for Dostoevsky. Grace was. The mystical reality Adam already knew. When freedom was no longer enough to cross to a realm of wholeness and completion, an inexplicable and mysterious grace makes possible an affirmation in the very face of death itself.

Adam pounded away on his Smith-Corona. Out came “Dostoevsky’s Vision of God”.

Adam was disturbed by the dominant theology of the time. It went by the name neo-orthodoxy. Neo-orthodoxy was like a surreal lump of chewing gum on the pavement. Step on it. You can’t move.

The grand presence of neo-orthodoxy at Union was Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a product of the midwest and the Evangelical and Reformed church. He’d been a firebrand in Detroit, defending unions, fighting Ford, flirting with Marxism, an intellect with national reach. He proved his theological mettle in several books, including a magnum opus, “The Nature and Destiny of Man”. The book was a wise bulwark against illusions of all kinds.

Adam’s moment of shock with Reinhold Niebuhr came during a presentation at the seminary by a teacher of religion at Wellesley named Joseph Haroutounian. The presentation was amiable. Love in the situations of life. It would not move mountains at Union, but it was a nice change from the norm. A Saroyan play in the midst of an O’Neill festival, as it were. Reinhold jumped al over Haroutounian. “Joe, this sounds a little sectarian.”

In other words, Joe was being unrealistic, idealistic, naive. Adam knew on one level that Niebuhr was correct but he also knew that Niebuhr thought churches were trivial. Adam felt offered no outlet for energies that might change the established order. Our hero saw in his approach little possibility of movement, save in retreat from an unwise position or “noble acceptance” of an unjust status quo as the lesser of two evils.

Reinhold Niebuhr was approaching retirement. He had already suffered a debilitating stroke. He had a brother named H. Richard Niebuhr who taught at the Divinity School at Yale. H. Richard was hardly the public intellectual Reinhold was. But many thought him as, or even more, intelligent. A certainly more far-ranging in thinking about the future of the church.

Not long after the public skewering of Haroutunian, H. Richard came to Union. He delivered a scorching noontime lecture. Adam had never in three years heard such seraphic words. H. Richard said neo-orthodoxy was dead. He said theological liberalism was dead. He said he had no idea what would take their place. Adam immediately went to his Smith-Corona and batted out an adulatory article for the seminary paper which he now edited.

The year galloped along . As if to flaunt the stasis Panflick was protesting, Adam and Ganya joined the saintly Dorothy Day in a protest against fallout shelters. It was on the lower East Side. The police showed up. They arrested demonstrators. Adam got in line to get into the paddy wagon. As he drew near the door, he decided he was not going to jail. He kept walking forward, skirting the front of the vehicle. Not a hand touched him. He escaped notice.

An activist student from Illinois named John Collins encouraged Adam to join the Student Interracial Ministry that coming summer. Students would go South and form interracial teams with pastors of churches. This sounded good to Adam. He would think about it. Word of sit-ins was beginning to penetrate the country’s consciousness. It looked as though people could affect things. Adam thought for a day and told John yes.

Ganya maintained excellent spirits through the year and was literally gung-ho for natural childbirth. When the pains began they jumped into a cab and went East to the hospital and four hours later, after some lusty screams, Adam was looking at a little baby who showed utterly no effects of her noisy arrival. She was soon at her mother’s forthcoming breast and receiving the very love that to Adam remained unknown and lamented, save for a few moments with Pandora and Rachel.

One remarkable thing about Fiona is that her arrival caused virtually no change in the routines of the parents. They carried her about in a blue bag with a flat bottom and an open top and set her down wherever they happened be. Had she been a participant in a game called Make Believe I Am Not Here, she would have won hands down.

On the very heels of Fiona’s arrival, a stir was felt throughout the graduating class. Don Benedict was coming. Adam had encountered Benedict at Williams. He was, with James H. Robinson, a conspicuous presence in Harlem, in his case East Harlem. Then in Cleveland. In one of the most conspicuous signs of the times, he had been selected to lead an organization called the Chicago City Missionary Society. This Congregational outfit would have been a sleepy sort of backwater but for a curious legacy from a man named Victor Lawson, who had published the Chicago Daily News. Lawson’s bequest grew over time and the Society was now flush, with around $13 million in the till. Benedict had a powerhouse with which to alter the sleepy priorities of the American church. He wanted them turned urban and inner city. His body and face was bathed in the charisma of change. He came to Union in search of students who wanted to pursue new and experimental urban ministries.

Adam was among those who met with Benedict. It took all of five minutes to indicate that he had a talent for writing and journalism. And for Benedict to hire him, saying “Then you’ll do an experimental program in journalism for the Society.”

At the same time, Adam had by this time determined that, if he was in a seminary, he ought to try to be a pastor. But his applications around the country yielded no takers. He tried to work at a prominent church in Greenwich Village but they wanted someone to work in the arts, The someone turned out to be Adam’s friend Al Carmines.

So it was a Chicago or slim pickings. Immediately after that, John Collins told Adam that he had been accepted as part of the Student Interracial Ministry. This was perfect. Benedict wanted his exploratory ministers to start work in September.

One thing remained. Adam had a keen awareness of the pulse of life at the seminary. From his vantage point there was a depressing lack of real community.He remained steeped in the thinking of Robert Nisbet. He said as much in a longish piece in his paper, The Grain of Salt. The occasion was a protest against the treatment of one of Al’s close friends. He had been sent away from the seminary for a year for no apparent reason.

After the article appeared, Adam received an invitation to the palatial apartment of the President of the Seminary, Henry Pitney Van Dusen. Adam knew Van Dusen from his neighborhood on 86th Street. He had even played with his son. But none of this counted for much at this audience. Along with Adam, another student, the class president, who would later become an Episcopal bishop, was present, presumably to provide some balance and moral support, should the President need it. Adam had no recollection of what was said, save that he did not back off from suggesting that the Seminary had acted unjustly. He did not mention the cloud he had uncovered at Riggs.

One weekend Adam took off in the Chevy wagon with Denis Loo and Joe Carter. Denis was a seminarian. Joe was a student from Brooklyn. Their destination was Black Mountain College near Swanannoa in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina.

They drove straight through.

The event was more momentous than Adam realized at the time. One of the main resource folk at the orientation was a man named Will Campbell who was based in Nashville. By whatever chance was involved, Adam was assigned to a church in Nashville. We shall be there soon, in the next chapter in fact. His relationship with Will Campbell would spell many things over time.

CONTENTS

Jesus did not ask to see proof of insurance coverage before he healed the blind man.

Reinhold Niebuhr

A friend of mine in Maine writes to say, “It is almost Thanksgiving. Why don’t you write something nice about somebody?”

I have to admit, I was taken aback. I have been so busy fighting New Atheists and Old Faitheists that I have forgotten the spirit of the season.

But my friend’s request is not as simple as it sounds. During the season we will be treated to stories about heroes waging war in far-off places, sometimes against conscience, for peace and security in the homeland, heroic mothers battling to keep their health insurance, assorted others who represent our seasonal tip of the hat to the poor and the victims of wealth and opportunism.

Christians did not invent Yom Kippur; their salvation-theology would not support the idea. But the holiday season, if you just dig beneath the glam, the pre-season sales, and the consumer market report for Black Friday, somewhere down there is a manger.

Repenting of the injuries the privileged have inflicted on the unprivileged (though no collection agency will be offering amnesty to its debtors) is our yearly token of contrition for our natural greed. “It wasn’t the failure of Mary and Joseph to book ahead that caused Jesus to be born in a cattle stall,” a terribly persuasive nun once explained; “it was the greed of the innkeepers.” A nice and doubtless correct exegesis of a non-existent verse.

I’m reasonably sure the word “hero” would never be used in ordinary discussion to describe the man I am writing about. He came from respectable Midwest Protestant origins and went on to Yale and then to a lifetime of teaching at Union Theological seminary.

As a young preacher, he was a community organizer in Detroit before the term “community organizer” became a disqualification for leadership on the lips of Rudy Giuliani. At great personal risk, the Klan having its financial center of gravity in Detroit, not the South, in 1924, Reinhold Niebuhr condemned it as the greatest human evil religion had ever perpetrated.

Then with equanimity he condemned Henry Ford’s repressive labor practices. He was a pacifist, a socialist, a communist sympathizer (going so far as to support the United Front agenda of the Communist Party USA), and prior to the outbreak of World War II a strong supporter of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church. Through the work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, perhaps Nazism’s most famous Protestant victim, Niebuhr’s thought was influential in Germany, one of the first American thinkers to make headway in the closed shop of German academic theology.

Niebuhr is best remembered for the evolution of his thought about “just war,” moving from his earlier pacifist position to a robust anti-communism in his later work—and eventually to a qualified endorsement of nuclear weapons-research. But his support of war as a “last resort” instrument of peace did not arise from the same mindset that the US military establishment used to justify both cold and hot wars across the globe.

As a Christian, and he would say as a realist, he believed in the existence of evil. It was everywhere. Its grip was as plain to him as the presence of God was sometimes obscure for its shadow.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity….Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.

Niebuhr’s roots in classical Protestantism–a stream that moved from Augustine to Calvin—were not grounded in speculation but in history. His Christian “realism”—the name given to his way of envisioning the relationship between theology and the state–came from a dual conviction: first, that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount had denounced all resort to violence and coercion; second, that this perfectionist ethic (which Jesus, he thought, also enjoined on his followers) is not practical in an “immoral society” where Jews can be killed by the millions and where the state assumes godlike (tyrannical) power in its own right. Alongside the pacifist ideal, he wrote, there must be a pragmatic or realistic ethic of responsibility. Humanity being humanity, that reality sometimes requires a choice of lesser or necessary evils on behalf of the community.

The Expulsion

Manifest injustice can therefore be opposed by force, and it is sometimes moral to do so. For Niebuhr, the war against National Socialism and the smoldering leftover in the form of soviet-style communism demanded opposition. By the same reasoning, Viet Nam was an immoral war, and we can guess what he would have said about Iraq and Afghanistan had he lived to see it.

For Niebuhr, perfection is never a possibility and imperfection is always a certainty: He worried about what he termed a “heretical form” of pacifism, held by his liberal Protestant contemporaries, who have “reinterpreted the Christian Gospel in terms of the Renaissance faith in man. Modern pacifism is merely a final fruit of this Renaissance spirit, which has pervaded the whole of modern Protestantism. We have interpreted world history as a gradual ascent to the Kingdom of God which waits for the final triumph only upon the willingness of Christians ‘to take Christ seriously.’”

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama cited Niebuhr as his favorite philosopher and John McCain in an interview commented that Niebuhr was right in stressing the “cost of a good war” (Paul Elly, “A Man for All Reasons.” The Atlantic, November 2007).

Niebuhr, of course, never talked about a good war. In his Gifford lectures (1940, The Nature and Destiny of Man), he reasserts that evil resides in power and the structures it inhabits. He lost neither his faith in the ability of humanity to control such structures, nor his belief that human beings would always seek to create and exploit such structures.

Millworkers

What is remarkable about his language is that so little of it is interpretation; so little of Niebuhr requires an elaborate “hermeneutic” to make his project accessible. At a time when the previously regnant models of theology were suffused with the German “paradoxical” style of Barth and Brunner, Niebuhr was able to introduce realism, commonsense, and clarity into the discussion.

His legacy? Hard to say. To read him is to be influenced by his “larger thought,” though many can now object to the christocentric nature of his ideas. An interesting twist that–for that tag to be a disqualification for taking someone’s thought seriously. It’s a bit like bringing up the obvious point that Jesus did not ask to see proof of insurance coverage before he healed the blind man.

So too, his emphasis on “sin”—more precisely, the imperfection of “man” and the social structures he creates–strikes many people as unprogressive, somehow opposed to the American dream of social and economic perfectibility. Niebuhr anticipated the reaction to the incongruity of his thought in an age of science and secularism: “The final wisdom of life,” he said in his Gifford lectures, “requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it.”

Note: Derrick Crowe is the Afghanistan blog fellow for Brave New Foundation / The Seminal. Learn how the war in Afghanistan undermines U.S. security: watch Rethink Afghanistan (Part Six), & visit http://rethinkafghanistan.com/blog.

The Center for American Progress (CAP) published a piece on just war criteria and the war in Afghanistan (we’ll come back to this, don’t worry) that paraphrased Reinhold Niebuhr, President Obama’s favorite theologian, on American self-image and action on the international stage:

One of the biggest problems of American foreign policy, Niebuhr contended, is that Americans are tempted to overreach, to overestimate the innocence of our own power, and thus also overestimate its possible effectiveness.

This made me think of Malalai Joya. The former member of the Afghan parliament wants the U.S. out of her country post-haste [h/t Tina Rife]:

They [occupying forces] say if troops leave, the Taliban will eat us. But they are supporting the Taliban today, supporting warlords. Both of them are eating us. To fight against one enemy is easier than two. We are between two enemies [the occupiers and the extremists].

This extreme skepticism of (or even contempt of) the idea that the U.S. military can be a good actor in that country often does not compute with American policymakers. For those that badly want to help, they can’t understand the way Joya wants to bat away their hand. For all my disagreements with Niebuhr on issues of war and peace, I would recommend that the “We Just Want to Help” crowd take a moment to reflect on CAP’s paraphrase of Niebuhr’s thought on just war. Neither we nor the people we try to help can afford continued American overreach and overestimation of the innocence of our exercise of power.

I have some miscellaneous and  enthusiastic recommendations.  They may not be everyone’s cup of java but they sure grabbed me, each wonderful examples of the reach of compelling content being extended by digital tools.

1) The first is outright embarrassing: Because, for a guy who at least tries to convince himself that he is wired,  it turns out that this “new”  discovery from American Public Media has been around since  2001.

Many of you farther along on the “wired” continuum already know about Krista Tippet’s Speaking of Faith, an American Public Media production billed as “public radio’s national conversation about belief, meaning, ethics, and ideas.” Well, I had no idea. And I simply want to pass on that, if you are someone who at least contemplates matters of the spirit, God, holiness, and compassion, you must give Krista’s broadcast a listen.  It moves back and forth between many of the world’s religions and, rather than working the typical extremes of the age of fundamentalism,  most of the discussions take place in the messy, complex middle where most of us actually live.

One broadcast worth downloading is a panel discussion with Krista, David Brookes and EJ Dionne discussing the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr..

Another program on German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is riveting.

2) I also recommend a new on-line version of a class entitled “Justice: What is the Right Thing to DO?” at Harvard taught by Michael Sandel that has long been one of the University’s most popular courses.  The entire course, filmed elegantly with multiple cameras capturing student reactions and questions, can be seen here.

3)  A great guide to all of the podcasts and courses and provocative discussion freely available for download can be found at http://www.openculture.com/.

4) Finally, and I will understand if you are a little skeptical,  is the incredibly rich and fun Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Each week they will send you a podcast of one of the biographical entries read aloud. I can only tell you that they are amazingly absorbing, incredibly entertaining.  Yes, I used the word “fun.” One week it is the famed, hard-living UK footballer George Best. And then comes poet Phillip Larkin. These are not standard reference entries. They are brilliantly written short takes on lives,  they have a point of view and — sometimes if the subject calls for it — they are hillarious.

Their podcast of the biography of spy Anthony Blunt is a great place to start.

5) Finally, to hear some extraordinary true-life story-telling from an organization doing all it can to keep the spoken, performed story alive, check out the podcasts from The Moth.  Real people. Real Stories. Performed live. And a lot of laughter, pain, and everything in between.

Fun stuff.

On November 10, David Brooks of  The New York Times, weighed in on the Fort Hood tragedy with a column entitled “The Rush to Therapy.” As often, Brooks sounded some important themes that resonate with me and then, at the crucial moment, went wildly off track. In this piece, he makes the altogether helpful point that we ought not psychologize away evil. Brooks, like president Obama, is a fan of one of my favorite theologians, Reinhold Niebuhr, who doubtless would be saying the same thing were he alive today. Brooks goes on to note that evil can be transmitted through narratives, including narratives about God.

Where Brooks fails his readers is in his noting just one example of such  a malevolent religious story, that of the one growing up on the fringes of the Muslim world, a story about the “conflict between Islam and the West”  that has played a role in the rise of suicide bombers and may, in fact, have contributed to the horrible events of last week in Texas.

This morning the Times printed seven letters to the editor responding to Brooks’ column. The one by a rabbi, Sheldon Zimmerman, agreed that the media has been  to eager to rush to a judgment of  “political correctness”  and thus may be missing out on a more serious threat to our country.

What would Reinhold Niebuhr have said?

It is risky to try to predict what someone who died in 1971 would say about an issue that emerged decades later. In the case of Niebuhr, I gather that this has been especially tricky. Both liberals and conservatives in the church claim to be his heirs. Based on what I know of Niebuhr’s fairmindedness , I am guessing that he would have had serious problems with the way Brooks has chosen to apply his teaching to this situation.

Yes, there is evil in human hearts. Yes, religion can be the carrier of malevolent narratives. But it is both historically and ethically flawed to write a whole column devoted to this theme and never once even mention that Islam is not the only tradition that has this problem. Brooks speaks about suicide bombers and terrorists but he does not mention that we have seen these troubled tales of “us and them” played out by many other religious folks.

As a Jew, David Brooks might have had the grace to remind us that in 1994 an orthodox Jew,  Baruch Goldstein,  killed 29  Muslims and wounded 150 while they prayed in Hebron.  Like Dr. Hassan, Dr. Goldstein, also a physician,  was both a deeply troubled individual and a product of a deeply problematic version of his faith tradition.

Niebuhr,  a  practicioner of  a self-critical Christianity, would likely have  mentioned the word “crusade” in that piece as well. Brooks, however, heedless of the real danger to Muslims in America of Islamophobia, concentrated solely on his message regarding Islam. Niebuhr was right. “Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem are insufferable in their human contacts.” The more I think about it, the more I am convinced. Niebuhr would have us look at the complexity of the human heart—not just the heart of radical Islam. And he would start with himself.

I look forward to hearing what others think.

“We’re put on earth a little while to learn to bear the beams of love.”

Reinhold Niebuhr

]]> http://returngood.com/2009/11/10/the-death-star-strategy-in-afghanistan/ Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:49:38 +0000 dcrowe http://returngood.com/2009/11/10/the-death-star-strategy-in-afghanistan/

"After this we'll clone some troops to fill the gap for an escalation in Afghanistan."

The last few hours have been a flurry of news reports on the President’s supposed decision on troop levels for Afghanistan. First, CBS News reported that the president planned to send roughly 40,000 troops to Afghanistan for about four years.  Then, CNN reported that the White House angrily denied CBS News’ assertions, with two unnamed “senior administration officials” accusing Pentagon sources of leaking the story to set expectations and box the president into executing what’s essentially McChrystal’s preferred plan. Now, ABC News reports that, while the president has apparently not made a final decision, all five of the options now on the table would send more troops to Afghanistan.

There are a few explanations for the mixed signals. The first could be that some staff flunkie at the Pentagon wanted to impress a reporter and phoned in a tip before they knew what they were talking about, prompting an angry response from a White House still settling on options, all of which involve more troops. The second is slightly more sinister: elements in the Pentagon could be attempting to force the president’s hand, which would be a very subversive move and an assault on civilian control of the military. The third explanation is even darker: that the administration is more unified than it appears, and that it’s using leaks about high-end troop level estimates to desensitize the public and position the president’s inevitable, smaller troop increase as the more reasonable option. None of these explanations provide much comfort.

The simple truth is that even if one grants all the administration’s other assumptions about war and international politics (which I certainly do not), the troops are just not available for anything remotely approaching McChrystal’s preferred way forward, and certainly not within the critical period mentioned by his strategy paper. Spencer Ackerman:

The thing is, can we actually get 34,000 new troops into Afghanistan before summer of 2010? Remember that in the McChrystal strategy review, completed in late August, the commanding general talks about a window of about 12-18 month wherein he’ll know if he can arrest Taliban momentum. (That’s different, notice, than rolling back Taliban gains.)

Ackerman points to Politics Daily, which notes:

Maintaining one brigade combat team in the field requires two others on standby. So, for every unit in combat, planners keep a second one in training and a third one in “reset” after a long combat deployment – time when the Army can send its soldiers off for advanced schooling, absorb new replacements, receive new gear. Thus, a total of three BCTs are tied up.

Just to maintain the 16 current brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan is, let’s see, three times 16 is 48 and – oops! We’re already out of BCTs! And here’s the White House blithely batting around numbers like 40,000 more troops. That’s roughly eight BCTs, which do not exist.

"So this guy pulls me straight out of the cloning vats and says, 'Congratulations, we're sending you to Afghanistan!' Guess what my first word was!"

One of the only ways available to provide the levels of troops needed for anything remotely approaching a McChrystal plan would be to shorten dwell time at home for troops. That would be, in short, a mental health disaster. As PD notes,

Tragically, and despite an all-out prevention effort, the Army is experiencing another record-setting year for suicides. From January through September this year there were 117 reported suicides among active duty soldiers, up from 108 reported during the same period in 2008.

This is why, as Robert Naiman notes, the Joint Chiefs are begging the president not to do anything to shorten dwell times at home. Shorter dwell times means more mental health problems, period. The fact that troops “volunteered” (which is a rather flexible term in many situations) does not give the government the right to use them up until they break their brains. See how long your beloved “all-volunteer force” lasts when future recruits see that you’re shoving them into overseas hell holes over and over with shorter recovery periods between nightmares. At some point basic human dignity demands we end this farce.

I have to admit a certain level of exhaustion as a member of the anti-war movement focused on Afghanistan, especially when the debate moves into a place where our opponents start sputtering, “Well what’s your alternative?!” as if the options they push are reasonable and moored to the real resources available. The simple fact is that a person pushing for anything resembling a McChrystal strategy either a) has no clue as to the manpower restraints on the U.S. military or b) doesn’t give a damn about the mental health of the people they want to throw into combat. In fact, they don’t even understand fully McChrystal’s reasoning because key sections of his report were redacted for public consumption. A person asking me what my alternative is to troop increases in Afghanistan might as well be asking what my alternative is to firing the Death Star at Kandahar.

I don’t have to know how to construct a working safety belt to demand the recall of a car with a defective safety belt. I don’t have to know how to fashion a health reform bill to know that the health care system is broken and to demand that my elected representatives do something other than endorse the status quo. And I sure don’t have to be able to plot out the detailed exit strategy for our forces in Afghanistan to be able to say with integrity that we shouldn’t have our military tramping around someone else’s country killing people.

What I do know is this: every single person I’ve heard the president cite as a moral and philosophical guiding light, from Jesus of Nazareth, to Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, Jr., to Cesar Chavez, to Reinhold Niebuhr, would reject the idea that the U.S. should be dropping bombs on people in Afghanistan in the pursuit of U.S. national security. Every single one. The president probably knows this too, and only the most cynical politician would continue to drop these names at campaign stops and press conferences while ordering more and more troops to fight and die and kill in Asia.

That’s enough now, Mr. President. Stop this war.