What does worry me, however, is faith-based foreign policy. Here, the influence is greater because the historical, cultural self-image of the American nation is one of divine sanction. There is one central reason embodied in this NY Times article. Basically, this:
Talk of good and evil in international politics has always been dangerous and has led to seriously misguided policies. But when we have a population that largely sees ethical and political matters in binaries (absolutism or relativism, moral or immoral, good or evil, universalism or contextualism, liberal or conservative, divine or pagan), and political leadership that has perhaps even fewer capacities of historical understanding and imaginative foresight, we're in big trouble regarding ongoing conflicts.At a dinner addressed by the Israeli ambassador, a handful of Republican senators and the chairman of the Republican Party, Mr. Hagee read greetings from President Bush and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel and dispatched the crowd with a message for their representatives in Congress. Tell them “to let Israel do their job” of destroying the Lebanese militia, Hezbollah, Mr. Hagee said.
He called the conflict “a battle between good and evil” and said support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.”
4 comments:
Only in international politics? Did you engineer that loophole for the evil of slavery and the American Civil War?
Oh, c'mon. I'm talking about the current influence in American politics. While I might find their views objectionable, their actions don't rise to the level of enslavement or civil rights abuses. And that's precisely why it bothers me at the international level - because these views influence policy more deeply than domestically.
Are we on the same wavelength? I had in mind anti-slavery activists I'd read about recently, who argued and persuaded peers mostly on religious rationales, and of course called slavery "evil." That looked like a counter example--religious policy being good. The US Civil War was the only U.S. history I remembered well enough to feel safe citing on the spur, and that didn't seem intersect with international policy making, but of course slaving once was as much of a global economic driver as oil is now. Anti-slavery became a strategically important leg of British policy toward the colonies when they began rebelling, acc. to Simon Schama, and he said it pushed white colonists to remain loyalists. I guess I took you to be shooting for a universal principle, and so I thought even a distant candidate counter-example would be important--or something it would be fair to demand your principle to address--or fair (if petty) to demand its author to address ala a concession "I'm not shooting for a universal principle here."
Phew.
Oh, ok. Don't worry - I simply took you to be doing the typical MT provocation thing I've come to appreciate greatly.
Although I'm not religious, I'll never take a hardline against those who are. One ought to believe more or less whatever one wants to believe, however deluded I may think they are about the nature of reality, the cosmos, whatever.
And, certainly, religious groups have played important roles in history for good causes. We see it now while the Catholic Chruch is anti-abortion, there is also that strong social justice tradition.
The problem comes when one comprehensive view seeks to impose that view on everyone else where that view may even be damaging to others. Religious arguments for slavery were like this (despite religious abolitionists) by drawing the racist distinction that non-whites were less human (and thus not equal in God's eyes - God, after all, gave dominion over the beasts, nature, etc. to "man").
It's that particular way of framing the world in terms of good and evil that is so damaging - to US citizens,non-citizens, people around the planet. It immediately organizes the world into a conflict to the death. The "American Taliban," in this sense, is an appropriate moniker.
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