Seeker or Jihadist ?

Arrived back in Providence last night, after 5 weeks in St. Paul.  It's been a long time.  First thing I did after removing luggage from car was to shovel enormous mountain of snow out of driveway so I could actually park.

This week Pres. Obama is hosting a big conference at the White House to discuss ways to counteract appeal & tactics of terrorism.  Obama sounded the right note when he stated that government alone cannot solve these problems, but must work with individuals, families & communities.  In fact, with respect to Islamic terrorism at least, this may be doubly true.  Government, at least in Western nations, is necessarily, and rightly, secular : yet perhaps the most profound approach to the problem of religious fundamentalism is an approach which is itself grounded in religious belief, in theology.

Why?  Because, from a religious perspective at least, the root of the problem of violent religious extremism is this : its perpetrators have lost, or have never found, God.

The lead propagandists of the ISIS phenomenon - cynically or fanatically, I'm not sure which - uphold a kind of caricature of God as an avenging judge.  Allah & Muhammad serve as dual totem, or mythical facade (like the warlike friezes on Aztec temples), for an essentially political will-to-power, which is characterized by oppression, by tyranny, by the domination, victimization, and enslavement of others.  The movement is akin in some ways to other totalitarian movements in history : it flourishes in the soil of a utopian, all-encompassing vision of unlimited power & glory on earth, and vindication in the afterlife.

This utopia of vengeance, violence and military glory is the essence of its seductive appeal to alienated young Muslims in both the Middle East and the West, and elsewhere in the world.  One of the ironies is that ISIS may in fact be driven by aggrieved former officers of Saddam Hussein's regime - a regime which was characterized by a kind of Stalinist reign-of-terror program, cloaked (in later years) in faux-Islamic propaganda.  If this is actually true, it would help explain a certain creepily parodic, surreal aspect to its gruesome demonstrations of public cruelty.  This is an enterprise which uses violence as a tactic - as provocation, symbol, propaganda - with the dehumanized coolness of a Stalin or Hitler.

It seems to me that one way to defeat ISIS is to offer a clear public counter-message with a theological basis.  Obviously this is something that Western governments are not in a position to do.  But it is something that individuals and faith communities - Jewish, Muslim, Christian - can do, in different ways and in different spheres, on their own.  They can offer to alienated, angry young men perhaps the one thing they need most : a true understanding of God.

The true Abrahamic image of God is that of a loving Creator, who loves all the marvels of a universe s/he has brought forth from nothing.  This God has made humankind in his/her image; God's desire is for human beings to live in the benign shade of the divine wisdom, goodness, lovingkindness, righteousness.  God wishes Man to draw near, by putting away the things that are not God, and recognizing the divine wholeness & goodness of all things.

One of the distinct historical endowments to the theological knowledge of God was offered right here in Providence, by the teachings and example of Roger Williams.  Williams called himself a "Seeker".  His imposed exile from the theocracy of colonial Boston hinged on the central emphasis of his preaching : that no government could impose belief by force.  "Enforced belief" represents an oxymoron, a theological contradiction in terms, since God's greatest gift to the human person is free will.  A person must choose wisdom and righteousness; they cannot be imposed by political means.  Faith and wisdom are spiritual gifts offered directly to the person by God.  Williams called this sense of things "soul liberty".

This spiritual orientation is obviously in direct opposition to the theocratic/propagandistic vision offered by ISIS and related groups.  For Williams, it is the primal need for God which drives Man to become a spiritual seeker.  Yet the God he finds is not a vengeful ruler or tyrannical authority : God is the opposite of all this.  "God is Love."  God is the root of human freedom and moral choice.  Williams' newfound political entity (the colony of Rhode Island) was chartered - for the first time in history - on universal religious tolerance, and the separation of church and state.

Maybe what's needed in the U.S. and Europe today are three-person teams of "Abrahamic" spiritual advisors.  A priest, a rabbi, an imam, working together with troubled youth, specifically to offer a different, more humane (& accurate) vision of God.  This might be the most direct way to counteract the totalitarian/utopian propaganda of violent political jihadism.

Charlie Hebdo, Peter Chaadaev, moral freedom

Two Frenchmen, brothers, apparently with training & inspiration from the Yemen branch of the terrorist network Al Qaeda, murder a group of Paris cartoonists & journalists, for the crime of publishing satirical images denigrating the Prophet.

Obviously the shock waves produce varying responses, of many kinds, on many levels.

A phrase occurred to me today in this regard : "moral freedom".  The phrase comes from an early essay by Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, titled "Peter Chaadaev".   This curious short prose work reminds me of some writings of Whitman.  In describing Chaadaev, the 19th-century Russian thinker, Mandelstam seems on the one hand to sketch a version of his own iconoclastic mind & personality, and on the other, to offer a nationalistic icon of the spirit of Russia, situating itself dialectically (as St. Petersburg was perennially called upon to do) between the prestige of Western Europe, and the vast inchoate future of the Russian soul.   Chaadaev is presented as both that rare Russian emigre who returns to the motherland, with a message of intellectual rigor and cultural order - as a "Westernized" Russian, in other words - and as a representative of Russian moral freedom - the "diamond" of a perfected individual soul (in contrast to the enfeebled West, sunk beneath the weight of its own unquestioned tradition).

This Chaadaev is a fish out of water, a free spirit, an exile's exile : his rectitude is inward, spiritual, personal.  His moral freedom seems to stem (via Mandelstam's interpretation) from Orthodox Christianity, with its relative devaluation of "objective history" in favor of inward spiritual unity, perfection, "divinization".

What does all this have to do with Charlie Hebdo?  With events in Paris?

"Moral freedom."  The phrase rings.  Mandelstam says Chaadaev was obsessed with unity : the basic unity of intellectual vocation & moral value.  This was the source of his charisma, his personal integrity.  But where did he discover this unity?

I'm not a Russian scholar.  My guess is, Chaadaev was drawing from the well of traditional Orthodox values.  & what strikes me about Orthodox Christianity is its visionary focus on the unity and divine origin of the whole creation.  Life, with all its suffering & injustice, is beautiful & good because God made it so.  The Acmeist poetic movement, founded by Gumilev, Akhmatova, & Mandelstam, was grounded in this ordinary Orthodox sensibility.  Gumilev called it "chasteness" : an idea not very different from Whitman's notion of cosmic goodness. Each individual thing in nature is inherently valid & beautiful because it has its source in the supernatural Artist.  With this spiritual grounding Chaadaev (& Mandelstam) could represent a version of "moral freedom" : the dignity of humankind (& Russia) without the overpowering weight of Western grandeur & authority.  As Mandelstam wrote :

Let the names of imperial cities
caress the ears with brief meaning.
It's not Rome the city that lives on,
it's man's place in the universe.

But again : where am I going with this?  What has any of this to do with Charlie Hebdo?

My point is this.  So the phrase "moral freedom" - from Mandelstam's Chaadaev - came to mind as I pondered the events in Paris.  Why?  Because both Chaadaev & Mandelstam underline the central, sine qua non place of freedom in any architectonics of civilization.  For them, moral freedom is the primal divine gift.

& what then exactly is "moral freedom"?  It is the recognition that the whole benign cosmic order is balanced on a "givenness" or original context of moral choice.  The universe is designed for Man to choose goodness & righteousness : it is rooted in free will.  The path to Paradise and "divinization" is open to those who accept this free offer.

But if this is the case, then where are the powers of tyranny, force, compulsion, fear?  Where are the gods of domination?  Where are the thought police?  They have no place to stand.  They are vanquished.  They have been defeated by a supernatural power Who authorizes moral freedom : by the law that you must choose the path of righteousness yourself.

I tried to explain this in my letter to the editor published in the NY Times on Monday.  This is a basic theological tradition shared, actually, by both Orthodox East and Catholic/Protestant West.  You cannot impose spiritual values by force.  Why?  Because God ordained Nature for moral freedom : we are free creatures, as God is free : we are made in God's image.

The fanatics of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State want to punish others for disobeying the commands of their God.  In the process they commit murder and other outrages against God's own creatures, & against divine Law.  It may be that they are driven by political pressures and deep grievances : but my point is that their ideology, which provides them with propaganda and "moral" justification, represents the worship of a false god, an idolatry.  If God is neither hateful nor murderous, but instead calls on persons to redeem themselves through love of neighbor, then the propaganda of fundamentalism has no basis in reality.  They need to be saved from their own delusions.  There needs to be a new conversation about the nature of God.

Old bells, old beret

Listened to news from Paris today, after the Charlie Hebdo attack.  This afternoon they broadcast the bells tolling - old Paris bells, deep & groaning.

I blogged recently about "occasional poems".  My method, time & again, over 25 years, has involved a sort of recursive movement - a fold-back on what came before.  I have a lot to work with.  The poems roll out for a while; then they turn, making a kind of feedback loop, & going forward at the same time (hopefully).

This process is a motif in the poems themselves.  It's about recollecting what came before.  There's also a theological dimension to this.  History is about remembering something - someone - buried or misunderstood, but stubbornly there - will not go away.

I see someone on the street who re-appears often in my poems (over decades).  At the same time, I notice the final two stanzas of a poem I posted here the day before the Charlie Hebdo incident : lines which seem to celebrate or beautify the very name of the magazine.  Very strange.  This too is a kind of backward glance, an elegiac impulse.

Here's another occasional poem, then, written today.  Another collage, another cartoon - maybe topical, maybe not.

OLD BERET

Cherish yet this goblin-goblet

buried in George’s field.

Iron curve, silvered

by time & rain – thin graphene net.

Your delicate recursive thread

bears planetary load.

Her slow gait (pigeon-toed)

& long brown coat, her bowed head

musing down the street, black hair

beneath an old beret.

Agenbite of inwit,

egret; sad, by shoreline (ancient ire).

Time shunts loom’s backbrace (thundering

boom).  Young Charlie’s oak,

febrile with Hebrew spokes

(dove-speak).  Gdspd, my blundering

cartoon – your secret sunny man

is safe with me.  I fell

from towers of Notre Belle

Dame, late of Galilee (bold Magdalen)

when the lights went out.  Hawk’s eye

& raven’s wing, a shadow-

script of Jonah’s prow

just now emerging from the sea,

the Southern Cross of everything.

Rose octahedron in

your heart... ponderous bronze

groaning (pain)... OK, Ahaz.  Palm-king.

1.8.15 

sculpture is the art of muscle. what is explicit in dance is implicit in every sculpture.

that mangle of steel has a person inside it.

the sculptor is the opposite of the bomber (Conrad's "pest among men" - cf. Secret Agent).

"to be builders, not destroyers" [Cantos?]

It's an odd path I traveled to election day. I don't believe in military solutions to human problems. I don't believe in one nation imposing its will by force on others. I think there is a disconnect, as well as a relation, between American wealth and power, on the one hand, and the world's poverty & social oppression, on the other, which no amount of imposed political ideals, in themselves, can ever ameliorate. Only social justice and an effort to address grievances and basic economic problems can do that. I believe there is a fundamental contradiction in the notion that a few nations, armed to the teeth, can police the other nations, with respect to weapons of mass destruction : only further & universal disarmament will bring real security in that regard.

All that having been said, however... I hold another set of views, perhaps contradicting myself in the process. I think there is a global terrorist network & movement, dedicated to a mix of tyrannical politics and Islamic-fundamentalist expansionism ("the Caliphate"). I think for about the last half century, the Middle-Eastern Arab nations have chosen the path of authoritarianism and violence; and while the colonial powers of the West bear much responsibility for this outcome, the primary responsibility lies with the choices of the Arab governments themselves. I think that the events of 9/11 left the US government no choice but to deal with the problem of global mass terror in a systematic way, and I think the Bush policy of confronting state sponsors of terror, as well as the terrorist networks themselves, made sense. I think the nature & practices of the Saddam Hussein regime fit the category of state sponsors of terror. I think Saddam brought his downfall down on his own head, when he thought he could respond to US demands with belligerence and stalling. I think Iraq and the Middle East will be better off with the Saddam mafia out of power, and an elected government. I think the response of the anti-Bush peace movement and the European governments was blinkered by a kind of self-righteous and naive attitude of appeasement, in an untenable and unjust situation, in which Saddam manipulated the sanctions system to benefit himself & punish his own people.

Much of my progress to this position came about as a kind of dialectical protest against the attitudes and propaganda of the politicized "poet-networks".

current reading :  Terror in the Name of God, by Jessica Stern.  published a couple years ago to great reviews.  & it is a remarkable book, written by a Harvard academic who is anything but "academic" (the stereotype).  It's a page-turner.  She traveled the world interviewing religious terrorists of all denominations, at some danger to herself, trying to get into their minds & hearts.  Her style is original, personal - oblique & direct, analytical & anecdotal at the same time.

She describes how terrorist leaders, fanatics themselves, manipulate vulnerable young people (men, mostly), until religious ideology (& its psychological & material rewards in this world) becomes a kind of drug.  The phenomenon of psychological "doubling", whereby a humiliated, lost individual takes on a strong, heroic double identity - in a simplified us/them world which allows the terrorist-double to dehumanize & victimize the enemy, the other.

Stern does this with empathy (not sympathy - & she defines the difference) & insight.

As something of a religious person myself, & obsessed with the struggle with Islamic fundamentalism, it's helpful for me to see the dark side of religion (she interviews Christian & Jewish, as well as Islamic, fanatics).

We who are saying the word "God", who find the reality of God undeniable, had better turn to the light.

This notion of psychological doubling got me thinking about its relation to writing, too.  The idea that we create a "speaker" or narrator-identity whenever we write creatively; that this is, on a certain level, role-playing.  Kentjay is of course very focused on this.

I believe in the writer's capacity to write the truth, at least in a limited sense, imperfectly - that is, to write "with transparency" : though I guess it becomes some kind of "boundary problem" - on the one hand, whenever the writer identifies too strictly with her/his own expression, and on the other hand, when the writer becomes a trickster, a hoaxer, completely unreliable.

To think of Holy Scripture as role-playing.  Book of J, Wizard of Oz.

Life Imitates Art dept.:


Watched TV last night. A thriller from 1998 called Enemy of the State, with Will Smith, Gene Hackman, Jon Voigt. Rogue NSA officials commandeer hi-tech intel technology to attack innocent bystander-witness. Gene Hackman is lone wolf ex-CIA guy who operated in Iran & Afghanistan. He & Smith (innocent bystander) turn the technology around & use it against their NSA enemies. Film's last words are spoken by a corrupt senator, who had previously supported vast invasive intelligence-gathering on behalf of national security. Now, after the incidents shown in the movie, he has reversed himself, supporting civil liberties & right to privacy. His last words go something like, "they are attacking us in our own homes".

At one point the ID card of Jon Voigt's character, the evil bad guy who manipulates the NSA intel technology, flashes on the screen : birth date, 9-11-40. I did a google search this morning, found a few mentions of this coincidence. But I wonder : perhaps Al-Qaeda actually chose the date 9-11 as a commentary on the film.

In Al Qaeda's eyes, the "state" in question is an infidel imperialist behemoth; the "rogue element" is not merely some bad guys who have manipulated the control system, but the state system in toto; and the plot, involving turning its spectacular intelligence technology against itself & displaying its impotence, is Al Qaeda's own mission.

(As Jonathan Schell brilliantly shows, however - quoting Hannah Arendt, Adam Michnik, Vaclav Havel, Gandhi & others - violence is not actually the foundation of power, but its opposite. Power is the outcome of group action based on mutual consent and cooperation for shared goals. Violence is more often a symptom of the lack of power than an expression of same. The fall of the Soviet empire is only the most spectacular recent example of the action of nonviolent power based in popular consent. As Schell quotes Michnik or (or Arendt?) somewhere: "the phrase nonviolent power is redundant". Al Qaeda may attack the symbols of Western dominance & oppression with violence, but they offer no alternative to western civil liberties, on which democratic politics are based.)

More disjointed thoughts about the world crisis.

Consensus coming apart. The US has a strategy of global "peacekeeping" which involves pre-emptive military attacks on other nations. The rest of the world repudiates this more strongly every day, which increasingly isolates the US. Asymmetry of perspectives.

The strange shadow-symmetry between Bush & bin Laden. Oil boys who need each other's aggression to justify their own. Useful to each other. We go to war (against the wrong guy) & get color-coded threat warnings.

Yet still I can hear the weird optimism coming from the hawk planners : bringing down Saddam will make things better, safer. We will liberate Iraq. & strangest of all (to me) - I'm not yet ready to deny they might be at least partially right!!

I hear what Jordan & Anastasios & so many everywhere are saying - about the consequences, the pure immorality of aggressive war, the ordinary people who will suffer & die for the sake of these "plans". But then I also think of the Marsh Arabs, the Kurds, the people in Iraqi prisons & torture cells - the people who have been suffering from Saddam's killer regime since he installed it (via murder of his associates) decades ago. & of the nature of the Saddam regime : its sick focus on torture, repression, experimentation with WMDs. . .

So I am still not the one with the firm voice to say NO to Bush; not the one with the clear vision of a post-militarist world in balance. Have I lost my own morality? Am I become a "good German"? These are the thoughts that oppress me.

Looking at a book about Joseph Cornell at lunchtime.

"Those who live by the sword. . ."

"Do not return evil for evil but overcome evil with good. . ."

Listening to the poets on NPR last night in the supermarket parking lot. Whitman poem: "Are these what they call statesmen? Is this a President?" (or something like that.) Even if they happened to be wrong in this case, it's good to hear poems against war in principle.

I return to the idea that unless the hatred & bitterness & misunderstanding & alienation are overcome, "jihad" will remain after Saddam, after bin Laden. So something must be done on an entirely different level. Something to encourage the re-thinking of religion. Perhaps a shattering of mythological thinking rooted in all three of the Peoples of the Book. A historical re-interpretation & revaluation of events, beginning with Abraham in Ur. Not necessarily a secularization - but perhaps a kind of enlightenment (?). A re-reading : for the good & the evil, the wisdom & the folly, the knowing & the unknowing in "scripture" & all that followed.

Responding to Jordan's comment today:

There's rationality, and there's self-interest. Everybody has to integrate them both. But there's something else too: fellow-feeling, altruism, self-sacrifice for the greater good.

Isn't rationality, or enlightened self-interest, the ability to work beneficially for others as well as ourselves?

The past few weeks I've really begun to question my own capacity to think rationally, because I find myself tempted to take stands on the Iraq crisis which amaze me, which I can't believe I believe in, which I don't completely believe. That is, I'm tempted to argue FOR war (and marshall those arguments on my blog). Why?

1. For the hell of it. For the curiosity of it. Because Saddam has it coming.
2. Because all the poets seem to be marching lockstep, of one mind. I have a reflexive need to differ (learned in the Poetry Wars). I question some of the self-righteousness of those who are always ready to impugn the motives of the ones they disagree with (ie. perhaps it's not just "oil profiteering by Bush & Co.").
3. Because over the years, without even being aware of it, I've become complacent or conformist - I simply don't want to believe what's happening to my government & my country, I close my eyes.
4. Because I can't completely discount the arguments for attacking Saddam either. In the post-9/11 world, I can entertain serious justifications for a pre-emptive strike, if the claims being made about Saddam's aims & capabilities are really true.
5. Because I'm having a failure of imagination : failing to consider the real alternatives to attack; failing to reckon the carnage & suffering war will bring; being naive about the mentality of those promoting this war.

I'm having difficulty with this. . .