Politics and Those Confederate Statues

  

Peace and Justice members of "the reality-based community" should take very seriously the title in "The Plum" line article in THE WASHINGTON POST for 17 August 2017, "Steve Bannon: Post-Charlottesville racial strife is a political winner for Trump" and the finding that on removing Confederate monuments, "A poll released Wednesday suggests that, on this at least, Americans generally agree with Trump. The survey from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist found that 62 percent of Americans think that memorials to Confederate leaders should remain in place, while a bit over a quarter of the population thinks they should be removed. Among Democrats, that percentage is lower, but even on the left, views are about split. Remarkably, 44 percent of black respondents said they should remain, versus 40 percent who said they should go."

Let me go full-bore pedant on this — or you can stop reading this post — and suggest thinking through the issue by starting with instances without a lot of emotional charge for most of us.

Let's start by noting that public/monumental art has been political since early antiquity. This is clearer when you add the knowledge that trying to separate religion from politics is a recent idea and WEIRD: common (only) among people(s) who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — and, largely, also American. Ozymandias, King of Kings, knew what he was doing when he built great monuments to himself as did anyone who tore them down. Displaying icons and smashing them are both politically-charged actions, as was destroying stained-glass windows during the English Puritan Revolution or blowing up statues of the Buddha by the Taliban or destroying statues of Saddam Hussein or building them to Genghis Khan as founder of the Mongolian nation and state.

So: Would you tear down statues of Stalin and, in spite of its fame for a crucial battle in world history, rename Stalingrad whatever the hell the Russians renamed it? I would, reluctantly: by Matthew White's estimate, Stalin was responsible for 20 million human deaths. But I'd keep Leningrad Leningrad: in terms of body counts, Lenin isn't in Stalin's league. Genghis Khan and Mao, though, outdid Stalin and pretty much everyone else, depending on how much you want to blame Hitler for World War II: some 40 million apiece for Genghis Khan and Mao. Should modern Mongols cut the shit with statues to Genghis Khan and the Chinese put into museums the artistic tributes to Mao? I'd have them do so.

I'd be cautious in arguing with the Mongolians and Chinese, though, since — for one reason — I've written on and taught Christopher Marlowe's 1587 play Tamburlaine the Great, Part I: a celebration of Amir Timur (flourished ca. 1400), #9 on Matt White's "Ranking: the One Hundred Deadliest Multicides" in world history, with hero credited with the deaths of some 17 million people.

The Atlantic Slave Trade is #10 on White's list, with 16 million dead — and that's deaths, not counting the kidnapping and torture, nor the function of the trade in selling human beings into slavery.

Unlike the clear, present, and infinite danger to souls of the idolatry of statues of the Buddha or Eastern rites icons or Papist stained glass — in the doctrines of the Taliban, iconoclasts, or revolutionary Puritans — the CSA (Confederate) memorials do their work more indirectly, and are a symbolic issue, symbols serving politically potent narratives, but still symbols.

What's to be done with them — US public art celebrations of the heroes of the CSA?

I taught and would have many more people teach Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 and Part 2. It is important that the first English blockbuster drama celebrated a serial mass murderer called "the Great." In a course in propaganda, I dealt with D. W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION (a k a THE CLANSMAN, 1915): technical film stuff aside, it is important that people know that a seminal film mourns The Lost Cause of the Confederacy and celebrates the "invisible nation" of the Ku Klux Klan.

So I would put the movable CSA statuary in appropriate museums, where they can be contextualized and their politics made explicit. With the really big monuments, especially any of esthetic value, I just don't know. But as a practical matter, moving toward the elections of 2018 and 2020 where this issue might be prominent — Yo, decent Americans! We need to talk.

Religion, Atheism, Body Counts, "Foma," and a "Vital Lie"

         Among the comments on The Diane Rehm Show for Friday, 15 January 2016, one complains that Derek McGinty, the guest host, had much too quickly dismissed a call for (ultimately) eliminating religion to eliminate terrorism and other bad things. McGinty said the idea was — if I heard right — a "nonstarter."

         The commenter was right to resent the offhand dismissal, but McGinty had a point, given the numbers. Atheists are a small demographic, while believers' numbers are massive. The world may be moving toward the secular — and a recent book called Big Gods suggests that there is the possibility of an ethical, post-religious world — but currently the idea of large numbers of people giving up their beliefs and accepting a life of "Emptiness! Emptiness! All is empty" and futile is a nonstarter.

         A relatively objective, scientific, realistic assessment of the human condition is that the human species is trivial even in just our universe, to say nothing of a multiverse in which the vanishingly small significance of our galaxy approaches literal nothingness in what may be an infinity of worlds. Statistically normal people want significance for humanity and even individual human lives, and it's difficult to justify such ideas without some sort of leap into the absurd. Believing in God is a leap of faith; beginning that in The Big Picture some individual human is significant is just "counterfactual," what Kurt Vonnegut labels a "foma" in Cat's Cradle (1963): a comforting lie.

         Other numbers that need to be looked at are body counts, conveniently tabulated by Matthew White on line and in The Great Big Book Of Horrible Things. Religion (God knows ...) has produced an impressive number of human corpses and other atrocities, with the monotheistic, Abrahamic religions no slouches in slaughter. Still, humans are capable of killing humans in massive numbers for reasons less rationally elegant than religious fanaticism. Simple greed and arrogance led to the small-scale genocides of California Indians during the Gold Rush, and — unless you buy the Christianizing and "Civilizing Mission" bullshit propaganda — the large-scale murder in King Leopold's Congo and other places in colonized Africa. Genghis Khan felt the Mongol form of the Mandate of Heaven, but his conquests with their forty million dead were mostly nitty-gritty political. And, of course, Stalin was officially an atheist and didn't pay a whole lot of attention to spreading the doctrines of the Russian Orthodox Church.

         Certainly Idealists and Guys With Theories and Weapons are major threats, especially when they believe that the real human reality is in a soul separable from the body and of infinitely more value than the body. The Theory, though, doesn't have to be specifically religious, just idealistic enough to get fanatical about. Or, as with slave trades and slave economies, millions can suffer or die for other people's profit and joy in power. 

         It is probably a "foma" to believe that God exists and cares about human life and indirectly gives our lives meaning and purpose. To use an idea from Henrik Ibsen's Wild Duck (1884), that human life has value may be a kind of species "vital lie," or "life-lie": a necessity for survival.

         Ara Norenzayan observes in Big Gods that most psychological research has been done on the "weird brains" of people who are "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic." That's a minor point for me; the major one is that the great majority of people are not weirdly wired and part of such statistical normality is religious belief. That's about as close as you'll come to an objective fact, and atheists who want the world to "get real" need to deal with that fact. They also need to deal with the implications of a rigorously materialist view of the human condition. The "Emptiness! Emptiness" of Koheleth ("Ecclesiastes") is one starting point for that discussion; so is the rigorous philosophy amid the twisted pornography of the Marquis de Sade in the "Manners" pamphlet — "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen …" — in Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795). The mad but logical Marquis can argue that murdering someone doesn't really destroy life, on balance, since if you bury the body and dig it up later, what we'd call biomass has, if anything increased; and there's no particular reason in nature — only in humans' bias in favor of humans and human consciousness — to prefer the biomass of a living human to that of the organisms of putrefaction.

          Me, I am by temperament a vulgar Pragmatist — I check out where logical premises are going before accepting them — and one who read some Existentialism for Dummies at an impressionable age and took a fair number of courses in the life sciences. I'm also a Vonnegut fan. There's much bracing stuff in Koheleth and de Sade and Vonnegut and Jean-Paul Sartre in simplified translation. Still/So, as a practical matter, I'd prefer it if my fellow humans carefully follow beliefs that hold down body counts; and I'd prefer it if people who see themselves as tough-minded toughed it through the implications of their beliefs.

Address to the Nation: Terrorism

         It's not going to happen, but if we could mix together a "gaffe" by John Kerry — a politician's slipping and telling an unpleasant truth — with the knowledge and intelligence of Barack Obama and the intemperance of Donald Trump, we might get a useful talk to Americans on terrorism.

*

            As Democratic candidate for President, John Kerry was impolitic but right in his assertion that for the foreseeable future, the best we can hope for with terrorism is to reduce it to the point where, in terms of America, it is a nuisance, even as it is deadly for some Americans.

            There's a distinction there we need to get. Terrorists threaten American interests and the lives of Americans and, more so, non-Americans in war zones; terrorists are not a threat to the American State, what we have of an American nation, nor, unless we panic, to the American Republic. One of the horrible lessons of World War II is how many people can be killed, wounded, and maimed, how much property and infrastructure and cultural products can be destroyed, without even bringing down a regime, let alone destroying a State or a people.

            So get that straight: terrorists are a variety of "existential threat" to Americans — they can kill (etc.) a fair number of us — but not to America.

            That, relatively speaking, is the good news.

            The bad news is that you will die. More or less unpleasantly, you will die; your children will die; and every human, animal, and plant you know and love (or hate or have never heard of) will die. As Hamlet's mom reminds him, "You know it's common: all that lives must die, / Passing through life to eternity," or passing on to just to being dead (1.2.73-74). You will die; unless we screw up badly, human life and civilization will carry on.

            Even if you are one of America's fairly numerous homicides, however — 13,716 in 2013 — it is highly unlikely you'll be a victim of terrorism or some other exotic crime where you'll be killed by a stranger. To repeat again a repeated statistic, "between 2001 and 2013, there were 3,030 people killed in domestic acts of terrorism" in the USA, plus 350 in that period killed abroad. "This brings the total to 3,380," as opposed to more mundane "American Deaths by Firearms on U.S. soil" during that period of 406,496, although many of those deaths were suicides — 41,149 in 2013 — which you may count as you like.

            Heart disease, cancer, respiratory diseases, or just some dumb-ass accident: those are the "leading causes of death" for Americans, saith the Centers for Disease Control; terrorism is nowhere near the top ten.

            So, first thing to do, fellow Americans, is to get your figurative spines stiffened and "grow a pair": increase the size of the part of the frontal lobes that does math and risk assessment, locate your gonads, and get those adrenal glands going at a good level for courage but not panic.

            Because we are threatened.

            President Obama was correct in 2014 in saying that ISIS (ISIL, Daesh) was a junior varsity team. The varsity would be a "kinder, gentler" successor group to ISIS, one that can hold territory without extreme brutality and for long enough time to prepare for the professionals. The true threat would be a territorial entity that is the origin of a mass movement with a charismatic leader, an expanding army, and, eventually, access to air and naval power.

            Think of Muhammad, Umar, and Abu Bakr (the first caliph), but with heavier weapons and a variety of fundamentalism necessarily absent when the fundamentals of a religion are in development. Speaking of initial expansion of Islam within and then out of the Arabian Peninsula, my 1937 Thompson and Johnson History of Medieval Europe notes that it is "impossible" in the early years of the Faith "to speak of Mohammedan [sic] fanaticism, except possibly in isolated instances. Mohammed himself in his conquest of Mecca displayed a fierce enough zeal; but in general no such militant intolerance as, for example, characterized the struggle of Christianity against paganism, characterized Mohammedan expansion. The fanaticism of Islam is that of much later converts, and even so Mohammedanism has normally been marked in practice by its tolerance" (164; ch. 7, "The Empire of the Arabs").

            Such tolerance is not a characteristic of ISIS, and they threaten wars of Reformation plus a Sunni vs. Shia civil war, combined with warfare against more obvious infidels.

            The serious danger is not the relative "nuisance" of terrorism nor even guerilla warfare, but full-scale war that parallels the European Wars of Religion following the Protestant Reformation in the Early Modern period, combined with the Medieval Crusades, in turn combined with the earlier expansion of Islam that marked the end of the Ancient World.

            Except that the Modern and postmodern world has a plentiful supply of nuclear weapons, including in places in reach of an ISIS successor, like Pakistan and Israel.

            The 16^th- and 17^th-centuryWars of Religion between Catholic and Protestant Christians killed over seven million people; if we are not careful, we in our times — with more lethal weapons and far larger populations — can make such numbers look trivial.

            And such a war would be fine with the members of ISIS with apocalyptic aspirations, and with potential opponents with similar hopes: "Onward Christian soldiers," marching into literal war, maybe joined by extremist Jews and Hindus, "depending on the breaks," all in a world awash with heavy weaponry.

*

            All of which is why we must "Be of good courage" in the face of terrorism and not panic. Our fears have led to enough damage already in Afghanistan and, far more so, Iraq. Getting sucked into Syria would compound the damage. We must indeed fight ISIS to prevent wars of religion that would be an existential threat not just to the United States but to the human world as we know it; but we must fight ISIS in cautious alliances that will not start the wars we wish to prevent.

            For Americans, terrorism is a deadly but unliely danger; for America, it is, in itself, a nuisance. A real clash of civilizations — fights to the death among the armed forces of States and a caliphate — would be massive slaughter.

Crusades and Historical Memory (16 February 2015)

Reference: Ann McFeatters column "Mike Huckabee: Right-wing huckster or serious candidate?" / Tribune News Service 12 February 2015
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         In the midst of an excellent column on Mike Huckabee, Ann McFeatters mentions President Obama's "artless remarks about the Crusades and Christian violence centuries ago. Obama is correct that great evil was perpetrated in the name of Christianity hundreds of years ago when civilization barely existed. Yet for Obama to compare that and Christian support of slavery to the horrors that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is perpetrating today was stupid in light of today's politics."
         McFeatters is right about the politics, but otherwise wrong.
         By the 21^st century, historians had compiled roughly reliable figures on human atrocities, and these have been conveniently summarized by Matthew White in The Great Big Book of Horrible Things (2012).
         "The Crusades" of Western Christendom went from A.D. 1095 to 1291 and killed some three million people, with Crusaders killing not just Muslims but Jews and non-Roman-Catholic Christians as well — with the Jews and non-Roman Christians generally unable to fight back. The Albigensian Crusade against heretics ran from 1208-29 and racked up about another million deaths, and the European Wars of Religion of the 17^th century killed off some 7.5 million people.
         Civilization had existed over five thousand years by 1095, and if it wasn't at a high point in darkest Europe, it was there, and truly mass slaughter is a civilized activity. "The Noble Savage" is a dangerous myth, but it takes technical sophistication, strong organization, and significant population to get massive body counts.
         And for Christendom's part of the slave trade, well, the Atlantic trade ran from 1452 to 1807 — a thriving time for European civilization — and whatever the churches' share might be, it's a share of some sixteen million victims.
         It was bad politics for President Obama "to compare" the crusades "and Christian support of slavery to the horrors that the Islamic State […] is perpetrating today," but it was wrong only because the horrors committed by the "Islamic State" so far have been minor by historical standards.
         ISIS has horrific potential, however, and recognizing the wide history of fanatical slaughter emphasizes that ISIS as a movement must be destroyed — but destroyed in a way that does not bring back jihads, crusades, and Wars of Religion where deaths are in the millions.