Welcome to the World

The evening before the colossal horror of September 11, I was walking the streets of Istanbul with two Kurdish colleagues. Not far from where we stood, there was a deafening explosion; the buildings around us shook. No one batted an eye.

When I casually asked a nearby newspaper seller what it was, he checked quickly with authorities and replied matter-of-factly, "oh, there was just a suicide bombing up the road. Looks like an attack on a police check-point." No big deal.

Several policemen were killed and dozens seriously wounded. If not for the death of one foreign tourist, this would not even have been news outside of Turkey. That's because Turkey has lost 35,000 people to conflict between the authorities and Kurdish separatists over the last few years. When you count your victims of political violence in the tens of thousands, a relatively minor suicide bombing ceases to be big news.

This is the way much of the rest of the world lives, and so when I watched the events unfold in New York and Washington, I experienced a range of confusing emotions. First, feelings of frustration welled up; I had traveled to Washington in March to deliver a paper that warned of attacks like this, urging an immediate and dramatic policy change to forestall it. I was not heard then, and doubted that I would be heard now.

I battled with myself too, regarding how incensed and grieved I felt about this outrage. Like most, if given the chance, I could have killed bin Laden with my bare hands. A week later, I still feel those emotions; my impulse is for self-righteous revenge that includes giving a good spanking to some of our officials at home along with my desire to go after bin Laden.

Another part of me feels guilty. As horrific as the death toll is, why do I not feel the same outrage and grief over the tens of thousands of Kurds who have died on the receiving end of US made weapons? Shouldn't I feel hundreds of times worse for them and for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocent who have perished on the margins of a conflict played out between the Western powers and Saddam Hussein? They are as innocent as the WTC victims - they did not choose their leaders and this conflict. They just suffer the results.

As I was stranded in Istanbul, numerous Turks and Kurds called and visited to offer condolences. They felt for us. They cried. For many of them there was a strong sense of, "we understand...we've been there." And there was also the implicit hope "maybe you'll understand us now too."

Frankly, I doubt it. We Americans are too self-centered. During the past 30 years especially, we have lived in a fortress and looked out on the world as though viewing a movie. Even our wars of late have been scripted, edited and embellished with special effects. Most of us think that only a few died in the Gulf War, when in fact, only a few Americans died. Tens of thousands of forced Iraqi conscripts died, boys and men who did not want to be there, and who likely cursed Saddam with their last breaths.

Our view of the world has been abstract and calculating, perhaps because of the game board strategies employed in the Cold War. Since WW2 we have also relied increasingly on an abstractly objective foreign policy stratagem - so called realism - that, as it has been applied, is anything but real. Its formulas only calculate power and self-interest. They ignore reciprocity and the subjective reality of human relations.

This is a fault in our culture as a whole. Commercialism lends itself to abstractions. Everything is mediated, often by money, and little is direct and personal and accountable. So too our foreign policy is based on abstract, mediated ideology. Strangely, the father of philosophical realism was fond of this quote: "If you want a war, nourish a doctrine." He understood that real realism requires a healthy respect for the rules of subjective relationships, first and foremost the principle of reciprocity: You reap what you sow; as you give it will be given back to you.

Ideas, objective abstract notions, are interesting to ponder, but they are humanly uninhabitable. Human beings cannot live outside of the context of relationships. Our attempt to inhabit these more abstract spaces by grasping at knowledge and power outside our own relational experience is precisely what Adam and Eve’s sad eating of the forbidden fruit symbolizes. God alone is not defined by context or circumstance, and only he can inhabit that place. Only he can grasp and dictate the "big picture" and thus give and take life based on a strategic calculation.

But as America strides across the globe it seeks to shape it according to just such abstract ideas, as though our country were an incarnation of God and the globe was ours to direct and destine. Real people's lives and the consequences of our policies and ideas upon them, or even of the repercussions upon our own citizens, simply do not factor into a calculation to impose sanctions here, arm a Mujahideen rebel there, or bomb this or that place to preserve America's objective "strategic interests." It’s as if it were a game, divorced from the circumstance of real-world relationships.

However, our circumstantial nature is essential to our humanity. It is our humanness, that beautiful thing, the crown of God’s creative achievement, which we lose in our ideological abstractions and systems. Trying to inhabit God’s place, we cease to be human, and our pretense at being God fails as we mock divinity in ugly displays of god-like powers that are, in the end, only cruel approximations of deity.

We see this in the phenomenon of this century’s appallingly frequent mass killings. These occur as abstract ideals, empowered by abstract technological prowess, eclipse the merely subjective human, resulting in Holocaust. Hitler and Stalin saw the human race objectively, so it no longer mattered what the subjective circumstantial fate of any human might be. We think, "I must preserve the world in the image of this idea, for if it conforms to that ideal, the world will be as it should be." Deaths in the short-term are thereby deemed worth the price.

Thus our god-like pretense to know the world outside of its created context, coupled with powers approaching God’s (we can destroy the earth after all) results in a culture in which we fail to live as human beings and fail to honor life. It is a culture of coldly inhuman transactions, basically a culture of the dead.

Sure, we can conceive of things in objective terms. It is a way of thinking. These ideals can even be true. Yet, the objective truth of it must never tempt us to live outside of the human condition to which we were created. In attempting to do so, we are frustrated, never quite being God nor Human. It is exile from the Garden of Eden, our God-given subjective context, and from the tree that makes our life eternal in quality.

Our subjective relations there in the garden provide for us the experience of what we know to be true, and it is the experience of it, subjective, human and accountable, that is the essence of living. Take that away, and human life becomes cheap, as our recent experiences here and abroad show so clearly. We cease to be our brother’s keeper, and we slay him, or he slays us.

Our subjective value is real and important. From a Christian point of view, it is important enough that God became flesh, the ultimate statement on relationship versus abstract theory. For Christians, redemption is only accomplished through subjective reconciliation. To us God’s objective realities live and breathe in these subjective relationships. We see God’s love and beauty only in the face of those who express it as his image, and most perfectly in the person of Christ. It is our nature to live in this context, and God’s to both live outside it and to dwell in it for the sake of relating to each of us in our individual circumstances.

On September 11, America entered the real world too. We who constructed the new world order, and claimed victory over Communism, were forced to live for the first time in the new world we boast of having created. It is time to for us to feel, to connect, and not just with our own but with the suffering world at large. Let this event arouse us to build relationships based on reciprocity and responsibility for our brother, on the power of good-deeds instead of the power of domination. Our world is real, and so too the people who live in it. It is high time we lived in it too.