The Worst We Could Do

The images of medieval horror from the Middle East continue to pour our way, as helpless captives are beheaded or burned to death by the score in intentionally gruesome displays.

This is old school stuff, part of the pattern and dynamic of our dark past, and intended to both create fear and generate conflict.  Look at the terrible things we do, and fear us, ISIS seems to be saying.

Problem is, what they're doing is...well...quaint, in its bloodstained way.  Humanity has been through the 20th century and industrialization, and the peculiar retro character of their darkness seems callow.

I was reflecting on this while leafing through a book of the worst/most poorly designed weapons of all time, the sort of thing my adolescent sons seem to enjoy.  In that book was reference to arguably the single most horrific weapon ever designed by the United States of America.

This was the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, and the weapon system in question was the SLAM, a hypersonic nuclear ramjet missile, known alternately as Project Pluto, "The Big Stick," or the Flying Crowbar.  The concept was simple, really.

It was designed to fly at near-treetop altitudes, like a drone or cruise missile.  But it was also a hypersonic ramjet designed to evade Soviet radar.  To do that, it would fly under 1000 feet at speeds in excess of Mach 3.5.  The pressure wave of its passing over was enough to incapacitate or kill.

But wait!  There's more!  It also carried a payload of eight nuclear warheads, which it would scatter over targets as it passed.  It could obliterate every single inhabited area in an entire region, killing tens of millions.

But wait!  There's more!  The ramjet used for its power source an unshielded 500 megawatt nuclear reactor.  As it passed overhead at Mach 3.5, it would lethally irradiate everything beneath it.  And because it was nuclear powered, it could keep flying for thousands of miles.  During that time, it would layer death upon death, deafening and shattering and poisoning, passing over again and again.  It was a mindless automaton, an Angel of Death killing the first, second, and all-born, rendering the world below it uninhabitable for thousands of years.

This system was designed, concept proven, and ready to go.  The engineering was sound.  But it couldn't be tested, because, well, it would kill everyone and lethally irradiate an entire region during the course of the test.

And I look at the ritualistic, primitive butchery of ISIS, and know that it pales in comparison to what mechanized, technologically advanced civilizations can accomplish.  After the Somme and Dresden, Hiroshima and Auschwitz?  And considering what might have been, if we had wandered down that path?

God help us, but we're a mess of a species.

The Dark Fire of Reciprocity

As happens so often when I encounter an act of monstrousness, my thoughts turn savage.

The images of that Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a cage?  They were the heart of human brutality and evil.  Here, an act of torturous hate, a mother's son helpless and forced to die in carefully calculated and choreographed agony.

I see it, and...as with the horrors committed by Boko Haram...I feel, briefly, the touch of the fire of that hatred.  The rage of it.  I see an atrocity, and my heart leaps to atrocity.

Burn them.  Burn them all.  Expunge them from existence.  Wipe the planet clean.  I stop short at reviewing the square kilometers of ISIS controlled territory and calculating the megatonnage required.

I step back, and remember who I am.  I give thanks that I am human, and insignificant, and not empowered to act on rash impulse.

Nothing diminishes the evil of this act.  Nothing.

Oh, sure, it's been done before.  Medieval re-enactors may not feature this element of that culture quite so prominently, but Western culture was just as heinous five hundred years ago.  More so, if we study the history of our killing.  That means nothing.  It was a horror then.  It is a horror now.

I anticipated...exactly...the response of ISIS.  I could feel that rationale, the logic behind it.  The burning death of this man, they are arguing, is no different than the burning deaths of our own people when the bombs fall from the planes.  Mumathala, they call it.  "Reciprocity."  We are doing to him what he has done to us.

And which will be and is being done to them in return.

And returned again, payments back and forth, an economy of fire and blood.

I will do to you what I believe you have done to me.

It is not justice, not the justice of God, not the justice that heals and restores.

It is nothing more than the dark fire of our mortal sin, burning, ever burning.

Understanding Evil

In a recent article distributed by CNN, human rights author James Dawes suggested that calling the actions of ISIS "evil" was counterproductive.

"We only call people 'evil' as a pretext for killing them," Dawes said.  And there is, without question, truth in that.  Once you have affixed that label, it's far easier to radicalize your perspective, to see only a caricature of a person.  You shroud them in your own image of them, obliterating their humanity, seeing only everything that justifies your choice to hate them.

It's how we approach our falsely binary political "system," certainly.  The Clintons were not a left of center political couple.  They were murderous jackbooted liberals who were taking away our freedoms!  George Bush was not a genial, straightforward guy with a gladhanding way.  He was a genocidal monstrous tyrant who secretly engineered 9/11!  Obama is not a centrist intellectual.  He's a socialist crypto-Muslim traitor!

It's the easiest way to engage in conflict.

Once we decide someone is evil incarnate, that becomes all that we see.  And because it is all that we see, we can fail to go deeper.  We become so focused on destroying that personification that we do not see what shaped them as a person.  So we slice away at the surface, shaving at it, poking it.  We don't go to the heart of it.

That's not to say, of course, that ISIS is not evil.  They are.  Their actions, their ideology, and the fevered mockery of faith that rules them?  All of those things must be called evil, because they are the inverse of good.  Of course, you can always putter around with academic deconstructions of the idea of the Good, but...dude.  It's compassion, love, grace, patience, kindness, and mercy.  Those things are good.

The danger of naming things "evil," according to the article, is that it causes us to view things in a binary, absolutist way.  And I'm fine with that, up to the point where Dawes uses that observation to make a binary, absolutist statement.

"There is only one good reason to denounce a group as evil--because you intend to injure them."

This is not so.  Calling out a group as evil can also mean you intend to stop them from engaging in evil.  It does not mean you are going to seek their harm, but rather, that you're still willing to ascribe moral agency to them.  Only sentient beings can engage in evil, after all.  And it is not an "injury" to prevent a person or group from engaging in monstrous actions.

Naming actions as evil, though, demands that we go deeper.  Why is this happening?  Why are individuals acting in this way?  Why is an ideology so monstrous finding fertile ground?  Dig deeper, and we find that hunger, poverty, ignorance, and oppression are the poison that brings up that bitter crop.  The more desperate or purposeless a life feels, the more likely evil is to flourish.

And when we try to understand evil, we aren't saying "tolerating" evil.  Seeing through the eyes of hate only deepens love's horror at that state of being.

That is not love's end, as it pushes to the heart of the broken other.  Compassion seeks to truly understand the heart of evil, so that we can turn it, and heal it, and end it.

ISIS and the Purposes of God

"It's all part of God's plan," we like to say.

"It all works together for good," we say, part of the mysterious plan of God's providence.  This was something, frankly, that I used to believe myself.  We just let go, and let God, and all will be well.  All we have to do is trust that it'll all work for the good.

But as my faith has evolved and grown over the decades, I no longer believe that to be so.  Most particularly, I no longer believe that every action of every human being is part of the divine intent.

The recent actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria seem an agonizing case in point.  As they butcher their way across that troubled region, murdering and enslaving and raping, all of the bloody and difficult work to rebuild Iraq seems close to unraveling.  Whether we should ever have poured the lives of our citizen soldiers into that misbegotten quagmire in the first place is another, painful matter altogether.

Right now, though, that mess seems only to be deteriorating, spinning down into the dark chaos of ignorance, violence, and tribalism.

From that mess, the release of a video in which ISIS beheaded American journalist James Foley really did strike home.  As the son of a journalist who spent time in that troubled region, I feel the anguish of his family and friends strongly.  How would you watch as your loved one is forced to speak words he does not believe, and then is butchered like meat?  What a monstrous thing.

More significantly, how does a human being do such a thing to another?  And not just to one man, but to many, many others.

It is that latter reality, the actions of the ISIS members, that I cannot claim as part of some broader overarching divine plan.  Nor, frankly, would I ever tell someone that the murder of their loved one was a necessary part of God's plan for our lives.

It is not.

I believe this, oddly enough, because I will not allow myself to deny the humanity of the individuals responsible for this horrific act.  It would be easier to write them off as monsters, because they act as monsters.  That would make it easier to cope with them, and far easier to kill them.  Dehumanizing the Other always makes it easier to kill them.

But they are sentient beings, albeit ones who have chosen to live under the thrall of a monstrous ideology.  They are still free to choose their actions.  It is what makes them culpable, ultimately.

If God had structured creation as one single linear narrative, in which there was only one beginning and only one end, then this would not be true.  The members of ISIS would just be part of that story, and the blood and the suffering they inflict would have always have been their purpose.  God's purpose.

And if it is God's purpose, then they are not to blame for their actions, not in any meaningful sense.  If there is no freedom, there can be no sin.

I no longer believe, because it does not seem to be so, that there is only one way things can happen.  That's just not how God made things.

And if creation is not just one story, if we are indeed free to choose to move down other potential paths, then our choices count.  The Creator has laid out, clear as crystal, what it means to live rightly and in peace with one another.  If we choose the hateful path of bloodshed and sorrow, then God will allow us to shape our time and space into that dark thing.

Is that God's gracious desire for us?  No.  Neither is it necessary for us to choose that path.

Turn away, God says.  Turn away, because you don't need to live as you are living.  If only more of us realized that.