The Politics of Tragedy
I hope you spared a thought for this martyred leader last week, while you enjoyed your Monday off. Lincoln’s birthday falls so close to George Washington’s, in February, that congress finally decided to lump them together and create a three day weekend to celebrate Presidents’ Day. I actually do think that it’s worth taking a day every year to reflect on the function of the presidency in our nation; what it is that we ask of our leaders, and what they may or may not offer us; what has constituted their greatness in the past, and what greatness might look like in the future, if we are fortunate enough to find it. The Nobel Prize committee certainly gave Barak Obama a nudge in the direction of hoped for greatness by prophetically awarding him the prize for peace, apparently in expectation of the work they intend that he shall do as a national and international leader. The timing of this award was particularly ironic, since it put the president in the position of accepting the prize in essentially the same news cycle in which he also announced the escalation of the war being waged by the United States in Afghanistan.
Now I find myself in a position of some particular sympathy for Obama, since I have spent thirty years in the ministry dealing intimately with change that occurs at what my often frustrated colleagues and I have called “the speed of church”; to build anything that will be institutionally enduring is work of monumental patience, I know this. And public opinion in this day and age does not reward patience as a virtue in leadership. Moreover, I voted for Obama, with a pretty clear understanding of his intentions with regard to the American military in the Middle East, and as far as I can tell, he is carrying out exactly what he announced as a candidate he would do, so I don’t fault him for that. In fact, I tend to think that he ought to have at least the full first three years of his administration to demonstrate what thoughtful firmness and strategic patience might actually accomplish. But there is no denying that this Nobel Peace Prize business put him in an awkward position. He might have declined it, of course, and that would have been interesting to watch, but I’m not convinced that it would have really accomplished anything. On the other hand, there is something to be said for America having a president who is recognized, even prematurely, as a leader of world peace.
What really interests me, though, as someone who takes seriously the public impact of theology, is the understanding of war as a reflection of the human condition that is expressed in Barak Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, that to my ear echoes something from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address. Both of these public pronouncements come from presidents in the midst of prosecuting wars that were by no means universally popular. Lincoln was under tremendous public pressure, within a few months of the beginning of the Civil War, to negotiate peace with the seceded states as a sovereign foreign nation, and allow the remaining Union to expand westward without slavery. It is of course arguable that the US would be better served today by investing trillions of dollars in our homeland infrastructure, education and health care systems, rather than blowing up Afghanistan. Or even, if we are determined to throw away trillions of dollars in a desert halfway around the globe, that our interests would be better served in the long run by building roads and schools and clinics *there*. And if human beings were completely and thoroughly rational beings, that is exactly what we would do. But what both Abraham Lincoln and Barak Obama have recognized is that human history is not an arena of the purely rational.
Homo sapiens are driven, individually and collectively, by a variety of forces. We are theoretically at our most essential both rational and self-interested. Yet we are often enough capable of acts of altruism that seem to defy our self-interest, and we also respond to motivations that are far from rational. Humanism likes to celebrate the capacity of reason, and to suppose that all our problems arise from our failure to exercise it. Yet as humanists we also generally reject the principle of pure self interest, and report from our own experience that compassion, responsibility for others, fidelity to our promises, and other higher values may readily call us to set aside our own individual best interests in the service of others, or the common good. Indeed, I would maintain that without this proclivity – to base our actions on something greater than pure self-interest – we would actually be less than the humanity that humanism holds at its center. By the same token, there are forces at work in each of us that transcend the calculations of reason; love and loyalty, hope and creativity, ambition and adventure, all call us to attempt what is unknown, and in some way unreasonable. What defines you? Your reason, or your passion? Take away either of those, and would you still be the person you now are?
The human phenomenon of war could not exist without our capacity for passionate altruism; war feeds on precisely that which makes us larger than cynics and robots. And yet it is a great eternal fraud, war is; for its promised victories are always hollow, and its glory is forever bred of nightmares. And so war is humanity’s tragic temptation, the forbidden fruit that we have never been able to resist tasting, that brings its own immediate and terrible punishment. War is, as Lincoln saw so clearly, in its awful destruction, the punishment of our collective failures as a human community; our failures of justice, our failures of compassion, our failures of responsibility and mutuality, our failures of patience and understanding, our failures of humility and self-control, our failures of insight and foresight and moral imagination. We may have, as Barak Obama suggests, no practical choice but to be at war in Afghanistan today, but be under no illusion that that war is anything other than the consequence of human failure, on both sides; failure to learn, failure to share, failure to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly in the journey of our common destiny.
Some 2500 years ago, the Chinese author of the Tao Te Ching said this:
One who would guide a leader of men in the uses of life
Will warn him against the use of arms for conquest.
Weapons often turn against the wielder,
And an army’s harvest is a waste of thorns.
In time of war, men who are civilized in peace
Turn from their higher to their lower natures.
He who thinks triumph is beautiful is one with a will to kill,
And one with a will to kill shall never prevail upon the world.
The death of a multitude is cause for mourning;
Conduct your triumph as a funeral.
When called upon to give some word of reassurance to the embattled nation that had just re-elected him to the presidency, Lincoln spoke of war as a collective judgment that might require that “…all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword…” and suggested that neither citizens of the north or the south were in any position to complain of this being unjust. In the past century, another visionary president inheriting another American war on foreign soil said “Let us focus on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature, but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.” It is here that war and peace become questions of public theology, for what we believe about human nature will shape our thinking about the uses of war and its prevention. If we assume that life itself is a struggle between the forces of good and evil, with human beings choosing up sides as to which team they are going to play for, then holy wars can make a certain cosmic sense. And in that case, as Barak Obama observes, there is no reason not to engage in complete destruction; no holy war can ever be a just war, with humane limitations. If we see the world through the missionary lens of bringing salvation and civilization to the savages, then wars of imperialism will be inevitable, as the primitive and ignorant resist the superior wisdom of more advanced cultures that believe exploitation to be their due. If we understand ourselves as a heroic, embattled minority, surrounded by implacable enemies who wish only to destroy us, then we will live in such suspicion, and make such preparations for war, that war will surely come. And if we think of human beings as largely childish, in need of oversight by an enlightened superpower whose word must always be obeyed, and whose interests must always be respected, then it seems to me that we are likely to find ourselves engaged in an endless series of power struggles between those who seek to exercise such paternalism, and those who channel their resentment of it into subversive violence. In all of these scenarios, wars have a perceived right and wrong side; the innocent, or righteous, who are simply defending themselves, and deserve to win, and the aggressors, whose fault the war is, who are inherently wrong, and deserve to lose. It is rare to find a leader who, like Lincoln, understands that war is its own tragic consequence for both sides; that it is human finitude and failure on both sides that brings war about. It may be that Barak Obama gets this as well, at least in the moment of his being summoned to join the world’s greatest advocates of peace. “We are fallible,” he says. “We make mistakes, and fall victim to the temptations of pride, and power, and sometimes evil. Even those of us with the best intentions will sometimes fail to right the wrongs that are before us.” War pursues us in human history and culture because of that fallibility, and those mistakes, and those yieldings to the temptations of pride and power and outright evil. It is when we fail, even with the best of intentions, to right the wrongs that stand before us and cry out for justice, that war comes as the devastating result.
What then are we to do? Accept the mammalian heritage of social aggression as intractable, and determine that if war is inevitable, we might as well make sure to be on the winning side, whatever that takes? Shall we await some sort of great redemptive transformation, what JFK called “a sudden revolution in human nature,” by which we shall all become some altogether different kind of being, who will study war no more? Or do we retreat into a sentimental pacifism that refuses to confront evil, and tolerates injustice, so that we can keep our hands clean until the consequence of war arrives on our doorstep, and we have no choice but to suffer through it? The president calls us to reject these counsels of naivete and despair. “We do not have to think that human nature is perfect for us still to believe that the human condition can be perfected. We do not have to live in an idealized world to still reach for those ideals that will make it a better place… We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of depravity, and still strive for dignity. We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace… For if we lose that faith – if we dismiss it as silly or naïve; if we divorce it from the decisions that we make on issues of war and peace – then we lose what is best about humanity. We lose our sense of possibility. We lose our moral compass.”
It is the calling of humanism to help us live squarely in this dichotomy, between human nature as we know it to be from history and society, with all our self-interest and altruism, all our reason and passion, all the consequences of our finitude, and the moral ideals and evolutionary possibilities that summon us toward a vision of what our lives in community could be like. When Martin Luther King, Jr. accepted his Nobel Peace Prize in 19??, he said, “I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the ‘isness’ of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal ‘oughtness’ that forever confronts him.” War is a part of our heritage as homo sapiens that we have not yet outgrown, and perhaps neither your lifetime nor mine will see it happen, but that doesn’t mean that the day might not dawn. We have demonstrated that human resourcefulness can overcome some of the ancient, crippling diseases that for so long cut short the lives of many. We are beginning to understand how it would be possible to prevent absolute famine from happening anywhere in the world; how to make sure that pretty much everybody gets fed. I suspect that war will be the last of the fatal trio to go, for its elimination depends not upon our inventive cleverness, but upon our growth in moral maturity. It depends upon our willingness to prefer justice, humility, compassion and liberty to the self-righteous adrenaline rush of armed conflict. It depends upon our understanding the human condition that we all share not as a division between right and wrong, good and evil, nobility and terrorism, but as truly the interdependent web in which it is not possible to attack another without injuring ourselves.
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray,” said Abraham Lincoln, “that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away.” So do we continue to hope, and even perhaps pray, to this day. And it is that hope, and that prayer, not the prayer for victory and the hope of triumph, that might eventually save us all. When we summon to our service the leaders who know within their souls this lesson of tragedy, and who in turn summon us to the responsibilities and mutualities upon which peace must be founded, then a new possibility arises in the world. It isn’t magic, and it’s not going to fall out of the sky, changing us in spite of ourselves. The most recent Unitarian candidate for the US presidency, Adlai Stevenson, once observed that “The world is now too dangerous for anything but truth, too small for anything but brotherhood.” The truth is that there is no one to fight but ourselves; no one to kill but our brothers and sisters; no triumph that is not a funeral of our own loved ones. Let us have such leaders as understand this truth, who will hold up to us all the mirror of war’s tragic reality, and not the masks of noble righteousness and glorious victory. Then we might find that our ideals need not be naïve, nor our aspirations divorced from the realities of the human condition. Then we might find again the moral compass that has always pointed the way to peace as our true path, and the courage to follow it, step by finite human step, together.
Closing words:
With malice toward none, with charity for all,
With firmness in the right as we are given to see the right,
Let us strive on to finish the work we are in;
To bind up the world’s wounds,
To care for those who shall have borne the batter,
And for their widows and orphans,
To do all which may achieve and cherish
A just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
