zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted with brief intro from Alix Levine‘s blog — topic: Google’s Summit Against Violent Extremism ]

.

Google Ideas — the Google “think/do tank” — recently co-hosted (with the CFR and Tribeca Film festival) a conference on countering radical extremism in Dublin, with a mix of “former extremists, activists, academics, survivors, executives and public sector officials” in attendance.  Blog-friend Matt Armstrong was there, live-tweeting with enthusiasm. Dr William McCants of Jihadica and CNA wasn’t terribly impressed with the outcome, and posted at Foreign Policy:

I am not ready to give up on the enterprise of countering violent extremism just yet, but I am less sanguine about its chances of success than I was before I started working on the problem. Google Ideas’ summit has not increased my optimism, but its resources and potential do.

Alix Levine of Cronus Global attended the event, and reported back on her blog. I’ve commented briefly on McCants’ piece on FP, but wrote a longer piece as a comment on Alix’ blog, and am cross-posting it here in the hope that it will stir further discussion…

*
I’m comparing Will McCants‘ response to the Google Ideas conference on FP with yours, and I’m glad you wrote as you did.

McCants – whose work I generally admire — opens his comments by quoting Jared Cohen to the effect that the purpose of the conference was to “initiate a global conversation”. McCants then more or less dismisses the conference itself a couple paragraphs later with the words “If these are indeed the conclusions of the conference, Google Ideas needs more thinking and less doing in its approach”.

Conclusions? How does he get so quickly from “initiate” to “conclusions”?

Okay, we all know that a conference can lead to a volume of proceedings read mostly by the authors themselves and a few aspiring students eager to follow-my-leader and dead end there – but this conference was very clearly intended to be the start of something, not the wrap-up.

So your comment, Alix, “Instead of critiquing Google’s effort, it will be more productive and valuable to work in unison with Google on their mission to ‘initiate a global conversation'” seemed to me to bring us back to the actual intent Google had announced for the conference, and you reinforce that when you write, “I hope that more people will join in on the conversation in a meaningful and (gasp) positive way.”

My questions are: how and where do we do this?

There will have been contacts made at the conference that will lead to an exchange of emails, no doubt – but that’s not a global conversation.

Here are some of the problems I foresee:

(a) siloing: the conversation limiting itself to a few constituencies, each of which talks mainly among its own members, leading to

(b) group think: in which the widely assumed gets even more firmly entrenched as “wisdom”, with

(c) secrecy: meaning that potentially relevant information is unavailable to some or all participants, all of which add up to

(d) blind spots: topics and approaches that still don’t get the attention and exploration they deserve.

The solutions would need to include:

(a) networked diversity: by which I mean a structured means of getting the unpopular or minority opinion front and center (compare business brainstorming in which a facilitator ensures even the “quiet ones” get heard, and that even poor ideas are expressed without critique until a later, evaluative stage),

(b) contrariety: meaning that whatever ideas are “easily dismissed” get special attention, with

(c) transparency: meaning that whatever could be redacted and made partially available is made available, not (as in US Govt “open source” material, closely held), so that

(d) oddballs and outriders get to participate…

Jami Miscik who was Deputy Director for Intelligence at the time, caught my attention when she said in 2004, “Embrace the maverick”. Oddballs aka mavericks make the best contrarians, because they start from different premises / different assumption bases. Miscik accordingly invited science fiction and film writers to interact with her analysts at CIA, and found that when they did, they produced 80% already known ideas, 10% chaff, and 10% new and “valid” scenarios. But even then, “science fiction and screen writers” is a box…

Cross-fertilization, questioning of assumptions, passion, reverie, visualization, scenario planning, play – the number of strategies that could be employed to improve the chances of a successful new insight emerging are many and various – unkempt artists probably know some of them better than suits with high IQs and clearances, and Google clearly knows this, too…

But where?

I mean, what Google+ circles do any of us join, to join this global conversation? What twitter hashtag brings us together under one roof? When’s the follow up in my neck of the woods, or yours?

What’s the method for getting the conversation widespread, well-informed – and scaleable, so the best of the grass roots and local ideas can find their way to the influential and informed, and the best insights of the influential and informed can percolate through to the grass roots and local?

Lastly, I’d like to thank Google for getting a dialog going between those with a range of subjective experiences of radicalization, and those whose job it is to understand and thus be able to interdict it. Demonization never got the situation in Northern Ireland anywhere near peace – listening did.

And thank you too, Alix, for your own contribution. Let’s move the conversation onwards.

[ by Charles Cameron ]

*

It may be that the hardest thing for a human to wrestle with is the correlation of quality with quantity.

.
One:

I’m writing this post by way of a response to the comments of J Scott Shipman and Fred Zimmerman on my earlier post, Burning scriptures and human lives — but as I said in a comment of my own there, not in a point by point fashion, more in the manner of a meditation. Our conversation grew out of a discussion of the killing of humans and the burning of Qur’ans, and perhaps I should say at the outset that in my view, the burning of sacred books is in general a pretty offensive business, the taking of human lives in general even more so.

.
Two:

If, however, we wish to know our enemies, as Sun Tzu advises, let alone to love them, as Christ suggests, we might reflect that what is happening these days in Afghanistan in many ways resembles what was happening in Europe a few short centuries back:

A little later, after the definition of the dogma of transubstantiation by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, a new libel surfaced, known as host desecration. According to this calumny, the Jews obtained a consecrated host from the mass, with the assistance of a Christian who retained it from the administration of communion, took it to their synagogue or homes and subjected it to every indignity, including trampling on it and sticking pins into it. … The accusation was made for the first time at Belitz, near Berlin; all the Jews of the town were burned. One hundred instances of the charge have been recorded, in many cases leading to massacres.

William Nichols, Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate, pp 239-40

William Gibson is frequently quoted as saying, “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed” – and by the same token, the past is still with us, and no more evenly distributed.

For myself, I don’t see how I can condone or judge those whose values are as radically different from my own as those Christians, these Afghans – or the “religious but unstable” woman in Spartanburg County, Tennessee, who chained up and burned her nephew’s dog because it had chewed her Bible and was clearly a “devil dog”. Thankfully, it is neither mine to condemn nor to forgive.

.
Three:

I value human life way more than I value any physical book – and I revere those insights, not infrequently found in scriptures, which encourage love, wonder, compassion, insight, wisdom, peace, generosity, gratitude and praise…

I revere them enough that I can understand Sir Thomas More preferring to surrender his own life rather than to go against that which his own traditions, scriptures, and sacraments had taught him to venerate. Likewise, I can find no fault in the Zen of the monk who famously burned a wooden statue of the Buddha when the firewood ran out… a tale that is worth repeating:

In a famous zen story, a travelling monk was resting in a monastery during a cold night. He took down a wooden Buddha statue and used it as fire wood.When the resident monks saw what he did, they became very angry and demanded to know why he did that.

He replied “I am looking for sarrira (holy relics).

The monks then laugh and exclaimed: “How can one find sarrira in a wooden statue?”

In reply, the travelling monk then said “Well then, can you pass me that other wooden statues also?

.
Four:

I once climbed the many stairs and stood on the small platform atop the head of the great 6th century Buddha of Bamiyan, which just ten years ago was demolished by the Taliban, and I remember that day with great affection.

Historically speaking it is a tragedy for the world and the Afghan people that the Buddhas were destroyed.

What Buddha taught, remains, however. What the Beatitudes taught, remains., despite what dogs may chew. What the Qur’an teaches remains, beyond the pastor’s fire. What the host at the Eucharist embodies, remains…

It is in the sense of what I have written above that I wrote, “The value of one human life is the value of the world. The Qur’an is indestructible. It is deeply inadvisable to threaten, attempt or facilitate the destruction of man, world, or book…”

.
Five:

Mind you, I am not suggesting that others should share my view – my own life experiences just don’t encourage me to use scriptures or credal statements against others until I have first “removed the beam from my own eye”. In the meanwhile, I take my inspiration where I can find it.

.
Six:

And find it I do in this comment on my previous post, from Jimpa:

Books are paper and ink and can be republished. A human life is a miracle of creation (regardless of whose theory is used to explain it.) There is only one of each of us there are no copies of anyone, even cloning can not create a replacement.

To me, this gets to the spirit and clarity of the matter.

.
Seven:

But there’s also its soul, its blues if you like, its duende – and I find that quality – another voice in the music of inspiration, perhaps, in this impassioned post by Abu Muqawama, aka Andrew Exum:

The crime was horrific, and the mob outside the jail was angry. They had gathered before and demanded the death of the man inside, but a conservative cleric, who ran a religious school for boys, had appeared and told them all to go home and repent before God. Because the men in the mob were all religious and obeyed this particular cleric, they went home as he had ordered. When the crowd returned a few days later, though, while that cleric was away preaching elsewhere, they fought their way past the guards and found the man for whom they were looking. The man was from a minority group in the area, and though he was actually innocent of the crime of which he had been accused, that did not stop the violent mob from beating him horribly, tying a rope around his neck and throwing him off a bridge while hundreds cheered.

The year was 1906, and the place was my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The name of the man killed was Ed Johnsen, a black man who had been accused of the brutal rape of a white woman, Nevada Taylor. (The conservative cleric? Well, that madrasa he founded has produced several U.S. senators, governors, businessmen and one dyspeptic defense policy blogger.) …

The reason I mention the story, though, is because it popped into my head when I read my friends Dion and Maria’s account of what had happened in Mazar-e Sharif a few days ago when several innocent United Nations workers were brutally murdered because some fundamentalist crank in Florida thought it would be a hot idea to videotape himself burning a Quran. It was not that long ago, we should remind ourselves going into a discussion of what happened in northern Afghanistan and why, when the ugly kinds of mob scenes we saw in Mazar might have also happened in the United States. (The last lynching of an innocent black man of which I am aware took place in the American South in 1981.)

I see those two posts as working together like head and heart — the “soul” and richness of feeling in Abu Muqawama’s post adds depth to the “spirit” and clarity of thought in Jimpa’s. To have a high standard of measurement is fine — to forget one’s own human frailty, not wise at all.

[ to be continued in Of Quantity and Quality II: weighing man against world ]

[ by Charles Cameron ]

*

Which is more sacred? You own life? Or an ideal you would be willing to die for?

I ask this, because we often think, act and speak as though one human life, any human life, is automatically more sacred, more to be preserved, than any idea – or book.

We make allowances, to be sure, and “thou shalt not murder” is no doubt closer to the Hebrew than “thou shalt not kill” – but we tend to think of human life as a paramount value, and in this we have the support both of our legal code (“murder one”) and of many scriptures, including the Qur’an, which declares, “whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind” (for details, see below).

And I also ask this because Martin Luther King said, “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live” — and even if I find MLK’s exact phrasing a little strange, I think I know what he’s getting at.

Somehow, then, I think we can agree that there may at times be good reasons to value something that’s not a human life but an ideal of some sort more than one’s own life itself, but that in general, a human life, any human life, is of comparable worth to one’s own.

.

One:

Which brings me to this thought experiment – a list of rhetorical questions designed to elicit thought, not to be answered like a questionnaire…

.

Two:

These are rhetorical questions, and I’m asking them for specific reasons.

Under Islamic theology, for instance, the Qur’an cannot be destroyed, since it says of itself (Sura 82, al-Buruj, 21-22:

Surely this is a Glorious Qur’an, inscribed on an Imperishable Tablet.

It is physically possible to burn a physical “copy” [mushaf] of the Qur’an in book form— one particularly obnoxious pastor in Florida has recently done so, although he had been warned in advance by GEN Petraeus:

the safety of our soldiers and civilians would be put in jeopardy and accomplishment of the mission would be made more difficult.

— and the Muslims who recently bombed a Sufi shrine in the Punjab no doubt burned more than one such copy / mushaf, hence my final question in the list above.

.

Three:

I could add many other questions to the list — for instance:

• For Protestants: How precious is the Saving Blood?
• For Catholics: If someone bombs a church in which the Mass is being celebrated, does that destroy the Marriage Feast of the Lamb of which every Eucharist is a foretaste?
• And if someone assassinates the priest while he is “in persona Christi” (in the person of Christ) celebrating Mass, does that kill Christ (again)?

That last, I should add, did in fact happen, not only more recently to Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, but also, several centuries ago, in the little parish church of the village of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell near Oxford where I was raised — and is commemorated there by a brass which reads:

Here lyeth the body of Master John Scoeffyld who died on the 15th day of the month of May in the year of our Lord 1507, on whose soul may God have mercy, Amen

So you see, I have a personal interest in these things…

.

Four:

As to the value of a human life, opinions vary…

Some humans feel the need to hold ethical discussions before wantonly taking other human lives:

For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Some of them agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.

Mark Boal, The Kill Team, Rolling Stone, March 27, 2011

Around two percent of the human race is psychopathic, I’ve read, and most of us can be strongly tugged and swayed by peer-pressure, this was wartime — the pressure-cooker of souls — and whatever got into those men could very likely get inside me, too.

Who’s to say I wouldn’t buckle under pressure like that?

.

Five:

But I’m at peace, here, philosophizing.

One could perhaps be forgiven for thinking the US values the loss of “two sons, two daughters and one grandchild” to an Afghan villager in Gardez at two sheep, because that’s all the payment that’s mentioned in a 2-page ABC News article about VADM William McRaven‘s visit to the village, in which he offered to sacrifice one of the sheep at the door by way of asking for forgiveness, as is customary among the Pashtun. That ABC report, however, was based on and cited a first-hand report in the London Times, which mentions also that the Afghan generals present “gave the family a wad of cash wrapped in a handkerchief. Relatives said there was almost $30,000 (£19,000).” The ABC version omitted that part… That’s a bit better than a couple of sheep – but even so, two sons, two daughters and a grandchild?

Look, that’s better than what the German Bundeswehr is willing to pay for the victims of an admitted bombing error in Afghanistan that killed a hundred or so people, perhaps five of whom were Taliban. From another ABC News report, worth reading in its entirety:

Now the Bundeswehr will be paying $5,000 — not for each life that was lost, but to each family of a victim or multiple victims. In other words, all families will receive the same compensation, no matter how many of their members were killed in the Kunduz bombing.

.

Six:

But, you know – no mention there of the sacred, except perhaps in VADM McRaven’s exemplary gesture.

So let’s go back to some religious authorities…

There is the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4) teaching:

Therefore man was created alone to teach you that whoever destroys a single life from Israel, is considered by Scripture as though he destroyed an entire world; and whoever preserves a single life from Israel, is considered by Scripture as though he had preserved an entire world.

Some would argue that the qualification, “from Israel” renders this passage less than universal in its implications — yet the same passage goes on to say, without making any distinction between Jew and Gentile:

the Supreme King of kings, the Holy One, Blessed is He, fashioned each man in the mold of the first man, yet not one of them resembles another. Therefore, every single person is obliged to say: The world was created for my sake.

That would appear to cover every created human being… and that is clearly the sense of the Qur’an, in Sura 5, al-Maeda, 32:

We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind.

Less generous and more specific, alas, is the Shafi’i jurist Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, who writes in his Reliance of the Traveler:

The indemnity for the death or injury of a woman is one-half the indemnity paid for a man. The indemnity paid for a Jew or Christian is one-third of the indemnity paid for a Muslim. The indemnity paid of a Zoroastrian is one-fifteenth of that a Muslim

.

Seven:

I’ve already admitted that if the pressure were sufficient I might buckle – what about inspiration, how strong could I be if need be, how high do I reach?

So.

I ask myself: how much suffering am I ready to take on myself, to save the life of a child dying of leukemia in some country far from my home? And if my actions to date are anything to go by, my answer must be: not much.

That’s my walk.  Here’s the talk I talk.

Life is infinitely complex and rich in nuance — dappled, as Hopkins says, with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim…

The value of one human life is the value of the world. The Qur’an is indestructible. It is deeply inadvisable to threaten, attempt or facilitate the destruction of man, world, or book:

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

[ cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]

[ by Charles Cameron ]

It’s a very different approach…

I’ve been preparing to write up some of the episodes that represent how warm and close relations between Muslims and Christians can at times be – the meeting of St Francis with the Sultan Malik al-Kamil, the period of considerable tolerance and artistic flourishing under Umayyad rule in Cordoba – and I have to say I’m getting very impatient to see this film:

.
If you would like to understand why the Qur’an (5:82) says:

The nearest to the faithful are those who say “We are Christians. That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are free of pride.”

May I recommend you either read John Kiser’s The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith. Love and Terror in Algeria — or, when it opens in your part of the world, go see Of Gods and Men. Or both.

Wishing us all peace in the new year, decade, century…