January 17, 2011

• They Didn’t Die For Us

  Bumped in honor of the holiday. Original Post Date: January 18, 2010 11:17 PM. Also added video:

   

  In this entry I discuss The Bible, Martin Luther King, and Deepak Chopra amongst other things.

  Today is Martin Luther King Day. It seems a fitting day to talk about the essential difference between valuing the life of someone and valuing primarily their death. And since it was an overwhelmingly important component of King’s life, let us star the discussion with Religion.

  Generally I feel that the new testament of the Bible is somewhat better than the old testament.  Perhaps that is in part because I was raised primarily in a tradition that gave pre-eminence to the new testament, however I have reasons for that judgment. The old testament promoted a strict inflexible morality in the form of a set of unchanging inviolate rules. Further the prevailing motif of the old testament is one of the “chosen people” which quite clearly sets off certain people as being strictly better and more deserving than others. This, I feel is a recipe for racism and prejudice and discrimination in the name of “God”.  And that has stuck as a major pernicious component within all of the major judaeo Christian faiths and those that derived from them.

  However, the new testament pulled away from that chosen few motif and began to emphasize the plight of the poor and the suffering independent of their religious or cultural background.  Through the teachings of Jesus it promoted an ideal of compassion and placed more agency in the hands of people and less direct reliance on God.  

  But there’s one component of the new testament that powerfully entered the human consciousness with what I feel are disastrous results.  It came in the story of the crucifixion itself and the way that story was told and what people took from it.

  You see, we speak of Jesus’s death in terms like these:  “HE died for us. “  “He died for OUR sins.”  That is a prevailing motiff that came out of the new testament that quickly overwhelmed much of the other patterns and stories. The story of the resurrection, designed to be the centerpiece of the Christian faith paled as an instructive mind capturing story as the story of the death itself. The martyrdom of Jesus became the centralized pathway to the bringing about of a Kingdom of Heaven. This was much more compelling to some then the idea of the golden rule or the sermon on the mount. This bold vision of a powerful, beloved, heroic figure suffering and dying at the hands of evil men, carrying and forgiving us of our sins, saving us, was a powerful one that echoed throughout the whole of human history that followed it.

  And I wish it hadn’t.

  This celebration of Jesus’s self-sacrificing death promoted the idea that death and suffering can be worthwhile as an ends in themselves. The idea Jesus’s death taught people is that if the cause is Just enough then it is okay to die or suffer miserably in the pursuit of that cause.  And in the minds of many it even taught that one’s death can be justified after the fact if it in some way leads to the promotion of a Just cause.

  Perhaps we see this strongest reflected in the philosophy of radical Islam that embraced this component of Christianity to its fullest. For many of them, the idea of a young man dying, sacrificing himself for the so called greater good is not a thing to be repulsed by but a thing to praise.  That’s why young men in the radical segments of the religion of Islam can be willing to strap bombs to themselves and fly airplanes into buildings. They see themselves are martyrs. Their deaths are glorious. It is a triumph for them to die for the good of their people and they see no reason why anyone should be saddened or mourn for their deaths.  They are dying for their families and for their people just as Jesus did and all the other Christian martyrs.

  Funny how martyrdom was the centralized component of Christianity that Islam inherited from Christianity, and yet we attack Islam as an overly violent religion because of their use of martyrdom…

  Still it should go without saying that this kind of a philosophy of death promotion is twisted and repugnant. All of those people who “sacrificed” themselves had their whole lives ahead of them. They could have experiences a thousand thousand joys and moments of happiness in that time had their lives not been cut short in a momentary blaze of most likely ineffectual glory. Is it right for the survivors to praise their deaths and sacrifice? Ought they to thank them for dying for the cause?

  Often we speak of suicide bombing as if it were the most effective strategy for the underdog as if that justifies it. That is to say the weaker side can kill many more of their enemies while at the same time intimidating and hurting their morale by using suicide bombing. In that sense it “makes sense”.  There’s no doubt that that’s the reasoning of Osama Bin Laden and any number of radical revolutionaries in the history of the world. However, I wonder at Bin Laden’s reasoning. Even if his beliefs about the pernicious impact of Western occupation of his lands were unquestionably 100% true, is it really the case that training an army of suicide bombers is the best way to rectify that situation? Is it really true that the best use of those young men and women’s lives was to strap a bomb to their chests and blow them? This is not academic. Bin Laden had other options. Rather than training up an army of suicide bombers he could have trained up an army of intellectuals, of businessmen, of artists, of entrepreneurs.  Instead of using his wealth to create terrorism camps he could have made schools. How many brilliant ideas and wonderful discoveries are lost to human history because those people bin Laden recruited were taught to hate and die rather than to love and live. Bin Laden could have, and should have, used those men and women’s lives rather then their deaths to enact change.

  But the pattern of sacrifice for the Greater Good is a strong one that is hard to resist. It weaves its way through Christianity and Islam and into the basic American consciousness as well. And we see it all too often in the way we justify our actions and our history to ourselves.

  I remember when I was a kid in good old American History class there was one moment that stood out to me in stark relief. I remember it well for we learned of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The section on it was short and sweet but one part stood out. The history book explained quite clearly that some historian person or another had argued that the dropping of the bombs had saved an enormous amount of lives by ending the War in the Pacific that could have dragged on for years after. I’ve heard this perspective many times since then.

  Now it turns out that this is a load of bullshit. But I didn’t learn it was bullshit until much much later. The truth of the matter as many historians have later documented is that Japan was already on the verge of surrender. Simple negotiation could have ended the war just as quickly as dropping those two atomic bombs. It turns out that the 500,000 Japanese deaths and over 5 million homeless Japanese that resulted from the United States’ firebombing of Tokyo and 66 other Japanese cities was more than enough to impress upon the Japanese the necessity of surrender.

  Yet even if you assumed it was true what atomic force was needed to force Japan to surrender, even basic sixth grade logic should be enough to realize that there’s something fundamentally wrong about that statement I learned in school.  You need only ask the simplest of questions.

  Why two bombs? 

  If you believe that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima killing 45-83,000 people in one instance (and twice that with the after effects included) was necessary to convince the Japanese to surrender, why did you then after that have to drop the bomb on Nagasaki killing an addition 30-40,000. Is there any “convincing” that that second bomb did that the first didn’t achieve?

  But even that doesn’t really matter. That’s not what bothered me back then about this account at all. My problem was more fundamental.  Where do we get off being so nonchalant about the deaths of thousands of innocents?!?!?  How can be go so far as to be grateful, to celebrate the ending of a war thanks to our choice to decimate the lives of hundreds of thousands all at once. It’s not thanks to their deaths that the war ended. They are not martyrs for our so called “peace”.  I can’t but help but wonder if you could go back and ask the people who lived through the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima if they thought their suffering was worth it or was a good thing, would any of them answer yes. I can’t imagine I would. I would find the very idea intolerably offensive. I wonder if you asked them before if they would go through that for the sake of your peace in your corrupt war would any of them agree? I wouldn’t.

  Yet we think that ending the war in Japan was Good. Their sacrifice along with the sacrifice of our own men and women in uniform over in Japan facing suicide bombers (who had the very same sacrificial ideology) and being bombed at Perl Harbor was necessary. It kept us safe. It created a better world. Much like that bringing about of the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus wrought through HIS sacrifice. That’s how we think.

  This kind of thought is so pervasive we don’t even blink an eye when we see it. We’re used to thinking of the value of sacrifice and martyrdom.

  I saw this phenomenon pop up again to my surprise the other day when listening to radio program I generally quite enjoy. It was the Young Turks hosted by Cenk Ugyur with whom I agree on a vast range of political points and ideals.  But not this day. He was interviewing Howard Zinn for whom I have enormous respect about his documentary The People Speak, which I highly recommend to anyone wanting to see an alternative view of American history and the history of popular protest in America.  What surprised me in this interview was when Cenk decided to challenge Howard on what ought to have a fairly non-controversial point I thought. Namely Zinn in his documentary had spoken about the spreading of America westward and the taking over of native American lands, of the Trail of Rears and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Cenk to my utter shock took issue with this characterization. He questioned Zinn saying that some would argue that this expansion westward was a ultimately a Good thing since it brought about our powerful and unified nation and all the Good that followed thanks to the power the United States gained.  

  I don’t know if he was trying to just be a devil’s advocate or if that’s what Cenk really believes but either way it’s an idiotic thing to argue. Let’s put aside the fact that back prior to 1830, the United States had a policy of cultural transformation that was working and could conceivably have integrated the native american tribes into the United States and maybe even would have resulted in the United States becoming as strong or even stronger a nation had it been allowed to continue.  Even if you assume Cenk is right and that we wouldn’t be as great had Andrew Jackson and his successors not uprooted thousands of native Americans pushing them into smaller and smaller settlement, brutally killing them in war at times, sometimes putting them into concentration camps where they died of exposure, disease, starvation, and brutality in the thousands. Even if you assume he’s perfectly accurate and we can predict with such certain accuracy what the future what might have been, is it really right to suggest or imply that we ought to be grateful for that chapter of our history?  Should we be thankful that 46,000 Native Americans were forcefully removed from their lands and their homes in the short six year period between 1831 and 1837?

  It’s hard for me to countenance these justifications for past events as if they were ultimately Good. Are we really to believe these are simple non-biased utilitarian estimations of the effects of American actions? They sound much more to me like the shameless self-serving justifications after the fact by oppressors wanting to rewrite history in order to whitewash away their sins. And surely if this kind of shallow hypothetical post-justification analysis were in fact valid in the cases of atomic bombs and native relocation, it could easily be adopted as a pre-justification for any kind of unimaginably horror or atrocity in the future. It certainly has been the case that nearly every despot and monster throughout recent human history has called upon his people to “sacrifice” for the greater power and glory of their nation. And we can easily imagine a future Hitler or a future Stalin justifying the annihilation of <insert population here> as a necessary sacrifice in the name of putting an end to a war, creating stability, or building a “greater” nation.

  Notice how in all of these examples I’ve given we are promoting death. We are putting value upon death and suffering. We’re saying it’s good that they died, that we should be grateful that they died, that we’re better off thanks to the fact that they died. We are thanking them for dying. Thanking them for suffering. Patting ourselves on our backs for having let them die. That’s the inevitable consequence of the belief in the sacrifice pattern. Valuing death.

  It goes beyond just cases of atrocities committed by man against individuals or populations. We even think of accidental, uncontrolled, natural, and unpreventable deaths as if they were a part of this suffering/sacrifice/martyrdom motif.  I was reminded of this the other day when I learned of the words of Deepak Chopra, a famous lecturer and activist, in his twitter account. Responding the crises in Haiti he wrote:

      “Perhaps it is through the people of Haiti that a new world of compassion, love, and healing will be born. This is their sacrifice & gift to us.”

  Sacrifice & Gift to us?!? Really?

  My immediate reaction was to be immensely disturbed by this statement. I just imagine myself in the situation of being there and watching my family and friends suffer and dealing with the grief of the death of loved ones. I can’t imagine saying “oh well my life has been destroyed but at least it brought about ‘a new world of compassion’”!

  Nobody has a right to ask people to suffer for their happiness.

  I’m sure Chopra didn’t mean it this way exactly. He probably didn’t really think about what he was saying so entrenched is the sacrifice motif in our culture.  But it’s a really short step from this sort of reasoning to the idea of making people sacrifice their lives for the “greater good”.  If THIS Earthquake can cause people to be more compassionate and helpful to others, what’s to say we shouldn’t if we had the power engineer another tragic Earthquake in order to make people become even more compassionate? You could argue that maybe we should rebuild Haiti with poor shoddy architecture so that when another Earthquake hits in 200 years we can have another good old tragedy just in case we silly humans forget to be compassionate during that time period. And how convenient it is that it’s these poor destitute Haitians who are suffering to bring about this new world? Why is it never the rich wealthy people who die to create worlds of compassion, love, and healing?

  The people of Haiti didn’t die for us. When we build a dialectic that proclaims a kind of “thank goodness humanity reacted so well to the crises in Haiti!”, how are we not changing the tragedy around and making it a story about us, about our success or failure to help?  But this tragedy is not about us. Why do we feel the need to make it about us? Why are we patting ourselves on the back while people are experiencing the greatest devastation of their lives?

  That’s not to say I don’t find myself proud and happy that so many of the people in the world are willing to do so much to help people they’ve never met. That I think is a really good thing. We should be proud of our response. And if as a result of this people become even more charitable in the future, great. That’s wonderful. But we have to keep in mind, the people of Haiti didn’t ask to die.

  The incongruousness of this statement is perhaps the greatest condemnation of it. It’s as if the writer is saying that the deaths of up to 200,000 Haitians and the suffering of millions more can be justified by the fact that so many people are texting Haiti to 90999 to donate ten bucks to the Red Cross. Gimme a break. Do you think if you asked any of those dead before they died, that they’d agree to that trade off? Do you think that’s a gift that would be willingly given? What kind of a sick God or universe would consider that a fair trade?

  If someone’s life is lost in a violent act of nature, that is NOT a gift. They didn’t choose it. They didn’t do it for us. Their lives were taken from them. That’s theft. Any capricious spirit or God or force of nature who engineered a disaster of that scope for those ends is no force or power that *I* would ever want to worship. THAT God sounds like a thief and a murderer.

  I want nothing to do with a morality born upon the blood of innocents whether it be accidentally or intentionally drawn. I want a world of compassion love and healing to be born because people realize it’s the right way for the world to be, not because they felt guilty when they were shocked into the realization that suffering still exists in the world.

  And yet we can accept this reasoning so easily and in so few people does it raise alarm bells that people come out of the woodwork to defends Chopra for his statements. Why is that? Because it fits in so neatly with the prevailing sacrifice myths that drive so many of our beliefs. Much like Jesus died for us. He saved us. He made us into better people, gave us a greater destiny, by dying.  By suffering on the cross. So too can we say the people of Haiti are dying and suffering and believe without evidence or justification, that somehow this enormous unconscionable loss of life, is going to make the world better. But the world is not better. No matter WHAT happens next the world will not BE better because we had an Earthquake in Haiti. The Earthquake was a devastating tragedy. Pretending that it’s a sacrifice trivializes the tragedy and encourages us to ignore, rather than face the full extent of the tole this event is taking out on the people and their loved ones.

  We see this pro-martyrdom, pro-sacrifice ideology even today in the discussions of Martin Luther King Day. I read and hear over and over again how one important part of MLK’s legacy is his death. That it’s because he died, because he was martyred that his cause grew and he became a mythic figure who was able to change the world and bring about the end of racism.

  Bullcrap.

  Do you see how this goes? We’re starting to celebrate his Death. Just like their deaths in Haiti, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and in native American Concentration camps. Just like the Death of Jesus and the deaths of Islamic radical suicide bombers. We’re saying it’s his Death that mattered. It’s his Death that made Martin Luther King great.

  And that’s just wrong.  It’s NOT Martin Luther King’s Death that made him Great. IT’S HIS LIFE! It’s how he organized people and how he brought people together. It’s how he pushed for change and got people impassioned and empowered and managed to convince them that they COULD make the world better. It’s how he got the whole country to share in a vision of a dream of greatness for all of its people. He did these things while he LIVED. And it was by that example of that life and only because of how amazing he was while living that he was about to inspire people to take up the mantle after he was gone and continue to fight to bring about his vision of a peaceful coexistence.

  This is the case for all of these sacrificial martyrs. It’s not Jesus’s death on the cross that matters most, it’s his life by his principles of compassion and consideration and his teaching of those principles to others that matters. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, none of them chose to die for our sake. They lived for us. They fought for a better world for all of us. And had they lived they would have continued on fighting and changing the world for the better. And can anyone honestly say that they think the world has been better served by seeing their untimely deaths than it would have been had they lived to continue to serve?

  In Martin Luther King’s last speech (video above) he spoke of a time earlier in his life when he’d been stabbed in an earlier assassination attempt which he survived. He spoke of how he would have died if he had even sneezed and a little white girl wrote him a letter that he would never forget saying simply “I’m so happy you didn’t sneeze.” And then he went on to speak of how he too was glad he didn’t sneeze because had he sneezed he would have missed out on so much. He listed then so many of the great triumphs and glories of the civil rights movement that he helped bring about and was there to witness and enjoy only because he didn’t sneeze.

  I like THAT message of King’s. The message of not sneezing. The message of being grateful of life not of death. Of survival not of sacrifice. And the Good that was wrought because of it. He then went on to say that it was okay if he went on now because he believed he saw the future was on its way and would not be stopped. There I disagreed with him. It was not okay that he died. So much more could have been and might have been had he lived. How many more even more extraordinary things might he have seen, might he have been apart of? How many more great leaders might he have changed and inspired had he lived to meet them? How much more wisdom might he have gained and how much more wisdom might he have shared with the world? I wish he had been in a circumstance where he could have not sneezed again.  And I think we would have all been better for it.

  I don’t believe we should succumb to a philosophy of a preference for death. I think there is something fundamentally wrong with praising sacrifice and martyrdom above survival and service. We should not praise the deaths of our dead but celebrate their lives. We need to be thankful that they existed for however brief a time on this world and mourn their loss as the tragedy that it is. No more of this glorification of death. No more gratitude wasted on death. When people die or suffer it’s usually not because they wanted to make our lives better through their deaths and when it is they are usually mistaken about the consequences of their actions. When they can, they should make our lives better by LIVING and when they can’t we should be mournful of the whims of fate that did not provide them with that opportunity.

  To close let me perhaps invalidate the seriousness of this post by leaving you with an appropriate quote that sums up my beliefs on these matters from my very favorite cartoon.

  “Death is never the answer. Life is.”  
  -  Goliath

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