God, Asleep at the Switch, Again

Every time that fundamentalist lunatics appeal to their conception of the Divine to justify their very secular slaughters, I call to mind the thunderous poetry of the Book of Job. After listening to Job lament the injustice of the losses that God had inflicted upon him, Jehovah bellows: “Who darkens my design with a cloud of thoughtless words? Confront me like man; come, answer my questions. When I formed the earth, where were you then? … Who measured out the earth … who stretched the builders line?” (Job 38 1-7) I read the Eternal One’s diatribe as an object lesson in the radical difference between the understanding of a finite, earth-bound being and a divine omniscience. If there is an unbridgeable gap between the way in which an all-powerful intelligence understands the universe and the ways in which human beings see it, then humility would suggest– I take it that this is the point of the Book of Job– that humans not assume that they can see things as God sees them. If that is so, then they ought not assume that God assigns them divine missions that entail the indiscriminate slaughter of fellow humans.

If you pull the trigger, you and the leaders that ordered the attack are responsible.

Imagine the dismay an Eternal intelligence would feel at being invoked as justification for such a futile, murderous rampage as was unleashed against Russia by the four ISIS-K operatives in March? How is it possible for people to convince themselves that there is some coherent link between unbridled slaughter of the unarmed and advancing the political cause they purport to be serving? It is long past the time that the holy warriors of all sects, denominations, and religions stop appealing to their divinity as justification for their actions. The Divinity in which they claim to so ardently believe might not be interested in the human sacrifices that they offer up in its name.

But the problem is not, as secular critics of religion argue, the irrationality at the core of religious belief as such but a general unwillingness to accept personal responsibility for the pain and death one’s decisions cause. Secular politicians are also quick to off-load their responsibility for the blood that their strategies and tactics shed to political or military “necessity,” to the intransigence of the enemy, the demands of history, the need to protect the revolution or the homeland. The enemy of peace is not fundamentalism or fanaticism per se but the inability to feel the depth of pain that violence causes to fellow human beings. The function of an appeal to a necessity beyond individual or collective human control, the reduction of human beings to, on the one side, executors of the demands of cosmic or historical forces and, on the other, obstacles to the fulfillment of the goals of those forces is the ultimate enabling condition of mass homicidal violence.

Being and Feeling Responsible

Camus understood this depth enabling condition which unmatched clarity. Reflecting on Ivan Karamazov’s horrified exclamation that if there is no God, “nothing is true and everything is permitted,” Camus notes, calmly, wryly, that everything is permitted whether God exists or not, but that it does not follow that nothing is forbidden (The Myth of Sisyphus, p.50). Believers and unbelievers are criminals and that when it comes to social values, nothing is true save those principles to which we commit ourselves. Genuine commitment to a principle means assuming responsibility for the outcomes of actions undertaken on its basis. People who accept responsibility for their decisions are honest: they are “ready to pay up.”(p.50) They do not blame the enemy for their tactics, nor God, nor History: the person who acts is responsible. Therefore, if you order an airstrike that kills babies, you are responsible for their screams before they die and the ailing of their parents forever after. Therefore, if you order an attack that kills teenagers gathered to dance or listen to a concert, you are responsible, not the occupying forces, not the God in whose service you believe you are acting.

Mass killing as a political tactic will never stop until those who order it and those who carry it out stop deflecting, stop treating themselves as mere links in a mechanical causal chain, start thinking of themselves as agents who can think and deliberate about what the best course of action is when action is called for, and feel the consequences of their decisions. Those invested with political authority make decisions in a context, but if the decision is really a decision, it is part of the causal nexus that produces an event. The Hamas leadership could have decided on a different course of action than October 7th, and Israel could also have responded differently. Putin could have re-assessed his strategy in Ukraine after it became apparent that the West was calling his bluff: you can fold your hand and live to play another round or you can push in all of your chips.

The other side of invoking transcendent or historical necessity in order to deflect blame is the suppression of consciousness of the lived reality of fellow human beings by subsuming them under a category: occupier, terrorist, Nazi. Since categories do not have families, do not laugh or cry, have no goals or hopes, nothing valuable is lost when they are attacked. The members of the set cease to be living beings and become things, mere tokens of a type. But the responsible politician has to see that behind the category are people. And this recognition must be reciprocal. And when one realizes that struggles are conducted against people and not categories, and this recognition is reciprocal, it becomes possible to imagine the people who formerly treated each other as enemies stop and open their ears and listen to each other. And then it becomes possible to imagine that the two sides begin to discover the reasons why the other side acts as it does. And then it becomes possible to imagine that both lay their cards on the table, stop appealing to gods and historical forces and reified values and say: “this is what we need, how can we work it out?”

The belief in dialogical reciprocity would be utopian if there were not always people in the combat zones screaming over the explosions that the other side has a point, that ultimately everyone must sit down and talk, so better to do it sooner rather than later, when the body pile is higher the generation who will demand vengeance is larger as a consequence. They are responsible to a deeper principle, one which can also find religious or secular expression: each living being is a an unrepeatable singularity which, once gone, cannot be replaced. Thou shalt not kill because thou lackest the power to reproduce the life you take. New life does not make up for the loss of old life: we mourn the elderly even as we celebrate the birth of a baby.

Everyone who pauses even for a moment can understand that there is no casual connection between terrorist murder and the solution of deep structural problems, no road that leads from mass homicidal bombing to peace with justice for everyone concerned. While our collective intelligence encompasses the universe that we formerly appealed to gods to explain, politically we remain hostage to the illusion that gods and borders decide whose life is valuable and whose may be sacrificed for a greater good. But the only good worth struggling for is the maximal flourishing of the lives of each and all, and maximal flourishing, if one thinks through the logical implications, rules out mass sacrifice of present life for the sake of future life.

We who are not in uniform and watch in dismay also have responsibilities. Those responsibilities are not to cheerlead wars as if we were watching a sporting event, not to mindlessly chant slogans or demonize the other side. Our responsibilities are to understand the causes of the problem, criticise strategies and tactics unlikely to solve it, and, perhaps, above all, to stop putting people in charge who will not accept responsibility for the death and sorrow the execution of their orders cause.

We have a responsibility to expose contradictions between principle and practice. Putin said in response to the terror attack, that “We must never forget that we are a multinational, multi-religious country. We must always treat our brothers, representatives of other faiths with respect, as we always do — Muslims, Jews, everyone.” But in the Second Chechen War he ordered this, the complete destruction of the Muslim city of Grozny.

We have to call out the hypocrisy of people who claim to lead a moral army and are fighting for a righteous cause and ordered this, the systematic destruction of the life conditions of 2 million people.

And we have to call out the hypocrisy of people who claim to be fighting for the liberation of their people when they pursue that end by means of adventures like this, that lay waste to the lives of people who are going to be their neighbors in any imaginable future political arrangement:

We can learn from the poetry of religion as we can from the experiments of scientists and the arguments of philosophers. We can learn from books and we can learn from experience, from stories and from formal deductions. What matters is not the source of the truth but the truth itself: we are ultimately responsible for the lives we live. When the practical implications of this truth sinks in– intellectually and emotionally– perhaps we will stop repeating the mistakes of the past over and over and over.