Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."--Lincoln (1865) The Second Inaugural.
In trying to find words to organize the jumble of my thoughts on this week's events Stateside, I was reminded of my second visit to Washington DC with the College Democrats in the early 1990s. One bright night I got bored with the networking and the efforts of the under-aged to obtain drinks, and went with a small group to the Lincoln Memorial. I had never been there. I had discerned that professional politics was not for me. One of my companions mentioned that Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream speech," was given at the base of Lincoln's statue.
A few years before I had visited the Jefferson Memorial and I had struggled with my response. The rhetoric gripped me at first, but over time I came to see in the particular choice of words a clumsy effort at propaganda. I was bracing myself for disappointment as I entered the Lincoln Memorial. And at first, I had to suppress laughter--Lincoln looked just like I imagined him to look and I expected him to stand up and play the part in a cartoon or a third rate horror movie. I recognized the Gettysburg address (recall my post), but the words of the Second Inaugural were unfamiliar. I was horrified and astounded by it: while allowing that God's providential plan may be unknowable, he was treating the suffering of the war inflicted on all parties (both North and South) as divine punishment for the evil of slavery.
I was astounded because I could not imagine a politician, certainly not a war-time leader, magnifying the voters' sins back at them. I had come to assume that while democratic political leadership was coextensive with some truth, it primarily entailed a form of flattery of the people by the politician. That Lincoln's stance had seemed impossible to me, made me feel not just physically small in his statue's presence, but I suddenly saw that my purported knowing-ness and realism revealed itself as underestimating democratic, no human, possibility.
I was awestruck, yet angry.
His words horrified and angered me because it reminded me of the Rabbinic argument that I had encountered as a teenager that the Holocaust was divine punishment of the Jews' sins. My teenage (modestly existentialist) self earnestly opted for nihilism given the choice between meaning-less suffering or a God that inflicts such (disproportionate) horrors on his creatures. (I didn't recognize that if God existed, my choice would seem comic to her.) Since, I learned that God is not required for the stance I rejected; I sometimes spot secular versions of a divine retribution theory (e.g., austerity measures inflicted on 'lazy' populations).
I have come to recognize the moral majesty of Lincoln's great sense of shared complicity in evil. And I am impressed by his willingness to entertain, subtly, such public doubt in God's possession of the attribute of justice and his sense of the absurdity even blasphemy of so much prayer. Yet, whether he believed his own words or not, I revolted against the embrace of divine retribution because (as a doctrine/explanatory principle) it seems biased against history's victims--it victimizes them twice over. Even so, while steady in my rejection of this theology, as the years have passed, I have come to wonder whether Lincoln's greatness and his theology are inseparable. (I am not claiming this theology is sufficient for greatness!)
So, here I am, a father of a young child, hoping that he will be surrounded by people willing to cope and adjust to each other without violence, knowing that I have no grounds for expecting this. Out of scholarly duty I look up the full text of Psalm 19, and there just before reaching, "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether," I read, אֵין-אֹמֶר, וְאֵין דְּבָרִים: בְּלִי, נִשְׁמָע קוֹלָם. There is no speech, there are no words, neither is their voice heard.*
I came to your blog looking for a post I'd noticed on education as a public good (that was not your point, but it was my interest), but with a troubled heart due to the recent events (I assume you mean the ones I'm referring to, namely the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile killings), and reading this new post of yours made me reflect on my pain a bit, so I was impelled to write down these thoughts in the box.
Slavery, to take the Lincoln example, was evil, and that it was necessary to fight a war to end it was terrible and unfortunate, but I don't think one can regard the suffering of the struggle as divine punishment. The notion of punishment as a response to misdeeds, or even evil, does not belong to any true system of ethical principles. No one "deserves" to have something bad purposefully done to them as a response to their misdeeds, and a divinity would be the last entity to do that. The ethical response to violations of ethical principles is compensation, as well as confession, request for forgiveness to the one who was harmed, and so forth. Religions involve seeing the divinity, the deontic source, as the one who was harmed. These reciprocating acts should go along with recognition of the ethical principle that one should henceforth follow, and that means that one should do one's best to follow it, and to adjust one's previous understanding of what is permissible and obligatory accordingly. This last part, the attempt to gain a full ethical understanding, is very important, a unification of the understanding that subsequently governs actions.
This process has not been fully carried out in the American community after the sin of slavery, and that is one of the conditions that makes possible the continuance of the right wing racist social paranoia that leads some police officers, in the grip of that paranoia, to go into full panic mode in their interactions with black citizens, and instead of protecting them, as they know they ought to do, they shoot and kill them for no good reason. Such people, such a mentality, should be screened out in the employment process, and the reasons for the exclusions should be made explicit and publicized. But the reciprocal process of reconciliation, compensation and unification of understanding has to be carried out by the whole community in the battle for its unified soul. It's not enough to describe the results of and to be intuitively appalled by evil; it's necessary to understand the conditions that make it possible, and to express this analysis explicitly. These problems are solvable. This applies to the case of the holocaust as well; I disagree with Elie Wiesel if he says that we should not try to understand abominations like these. How was it possible for such a horrendous event as the holocaust to occur? What made it possible for people to believe that it was permissible to own and trade another human being? The initial conditions, in the understanding that governs action, that led to the holocaust and slavery are still with us, in the US, in Europe, in Israel. The right wing mentality that I mentioned above, mistaken and misguided in its understanding, could lead yet again to a catastrophe; it remains to be fully comprehended, the logical structure of this persistent, incomplete, pathological, perverse, irrational mentality. I think it must be that people like Wiesel do not understand the idea of a causal explanation of action, including socio-political action, and including mistaken action. But I think such explanations are possible. The "judgements" of the Lord are not heard, are not in words, but those judgments are the implicit possible applications of the divinely guaranteed system of symmetry rules that I referred to as ethical principles.
The divinity's role is not to pass judgments, like a person would do, but to guarantee that the principles, like the axioms and definitions that make mathematical assertions true, are the ones that result in fairness for everybody and unity of a community. It's up to us to apply the principles competently, which we often don't, and in fact we don't fully understand the principles. Our suffering, all of it, is due to our lack of understanding, not because a divinity somehow allowed it or said we deserve it. The very definition of action involves freedom to choose a or not-a, a or b, and we choose one or the other on the basis of a reason. The reason is often based in ignorance. In this sense the suffering of the struggle for both parties is a consequence of our ignorance and incompetence in identifying and finding a way to end the evil without the suffering of violence and war.
Punishment and retribution, especially divine retribution, are ethically illegitimate notions. Reciprocity, symmetry, equality: these are the regulative ideals. (I realize there is a strange mixture of analysis and impassioned response here, but I'm open to any critique of anything I've said above.)
Posted by: James Dennis | 07/10/2016 at 02:24 PM