On terrorism, groups, and responsibility, in light of recent news
Jan 11th, 2010 by Micah Tillman | 8 Comments |
While I’m on the topic of terrorism, The Wife sent me a link to this article, called “Moderate Muslims? We’re Everywhere.”
It’s by Dr. Eboo Patel, director of Interfaith Youth Core, blogger for the Washington Post, and “member of President Barack Obama Administration’s new Faith Advisory Council” (Wikipedia).
In it, Dr. Patel expresses his frustration with the fact that terrorists are giving his religion a bad name, that he cannot stop them, and that people claim he and his fellow moderate Muslims aren’t doing enough.
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The Wife was disturbed by the comments below the article. There, people were claiming that Dr. Patel and his fellow moderate Muslims aren’t doing enough. One of the commenters even goes so far as to say that Dr. Patel and his fellow moderate Muslims are “empowering” the terrorists.
The idea seems to be that the members of a group are responsible for what the other members of the group do. If you belong to a group, the thinking goes, and someone else in the group does something, then — at the very least — you didn’t stop him/her. You have a duty, these people would claim, to keep the other members of your group in line.
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What’s ironic is that this is exactly the kind of thinking that the terrorists use to justify killing innocent people. If some member or members of a group have committed some crime, they think, every person in that group is responsible.
This is the kind of thinking behind blood feuds and gang wars. If one member of one group harms a member of the other group, the group of the victim holds the group of the victimizer responsible.
This is also the kind of thinking that people use to justify racism. Anti-Semite Christians, for example, used the claim that “the Jews killed Christ” to justify their hatred of Jews who were born thousands of years after Christ’s death.
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To support this kind of thinking, people have to come up with ontological theories in which groups are supra-personal entities, of which the individuals you meet in everyday life are mere parts or manifestations.
The Bizarre Ontology: The separate individuals you see are really just manifestations of the group, which is the reality that lies behind them and acts through them (and upon whom you act through the individuals you see).
That way, they can feel like they’re justified in punishing the person standing in front of them for something that some other person did.
According to the ontology these people invent, if both the person in front of you and the person who committed some crime are part of the same group, they’re really just two parts of the same whole. The whole, acting through the individual who is not in front of you, did something that you don’t like. Therefore, you punish the whole through the individual who is standing in front of you.
According to this ontology, the group acts through the person, and you see through the person to the group.
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Therefore, to justify blaming Dr. Patel for terrorist acts committed by other Muslims he’s never even met and with whom he strongly disagrees, the people who left comments below Dr. Patel’s article have to subordinate persons to groups. They have to take the group as the reality, and the person as the appearance. They have to see individuals as being mere appendages of groups, as being groups’ means of access to the world, and as being our means of access to groups.
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Furthermore, to justify blaming Dr. Patel for terrorst acts committed by other Muslims, the commenters would also have to think in a way that makes them defenseless against the claim that they themselves should be punished when one of their fellow Americans, Christians, Atheists, Republicans, Democrats, etc. does something that people in some other group would find worthy of punishment.
If your opponents are manifestations of their groups, then you are a manifestation of yours. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Why would someone want to give other people that kind of power over himself? What the commenters on Dr. Patel’s article want is to feel safe, and yet what they’re doing is appealing to a worldview that actually makes them vulnerable.
The complaint, as I’ve often heard it voiced, is not that moderate muslims should somehow be able to stop extremists, but that moderate muslims simply don’t make their voices heard; that there aren’t many moderates coming out and saying “No, this isn’t right, the Koran doesn’t teach this.”
Of course maybe they are and they just don’t get heard in the media, but I think it’s a fair question.
Plenty of moderate Muslims have come forward and said that they think this is antithetical to their religion but a) the media doesn’t normally give it more than a sentence, if that, and b) we just get used to it as the “obligatory statement from someone that this isn’t the real Islam.”
At what point have moderate Muslims fulfilled their obligation to answer for people to whom they have no wish to be connected? I don’t go around apologizing for abortion clinic bombers, gay bashers, etc, because I don’t think I have to apologize for them (though if it comes up in conversation I’ll certainly state my own views on a matter). I have no choice about their calling themselves Christians or their actions as Christ-like. Nor can I do anything about their theology than offer my own in contrast. The terrorists could start calling themselves born-again Christians and it wouldn’t mean what they’re doing is Christianity.
Don’t we bare some responsibility for the labels we choose for ourselves?
I’m sympathetic to people who call themselves Christ followers rather than Christians, because they don’t want to be associated with people who have wrecked the name.
I realize that there are two sides to this. If I were a Muslim, on the one hand, I’d want to reclaim the name from the crazies. On the other hand, I’d at least consider calling myself in Allah follower, or Muhammed listener, or something.
I’m not sure if or how it fits in, but my first thought was how it always feels unfair to be included “in Adam.” (See Rom 5 and 1 Cor 15.) Before we are included in Christ, Adam is our representative, our ‘federal head’ as theologians say. It seems somewhat unfair to be counted sinful because of someone else’s sin. But it also seems somewhat unfair to be counted righteous for someone else’s righteousness. It’s a beautiful idea.
Does is come to bear on this discussion? We’re blamed for decisions our country’s leaders make. We’re ridiculed for things “Christians” do. Like I said, maybe there’s no connection here.
Thoughts, anyone?
That’s an interesting comparison. One difference is that to some extent, we choose membership in some groups, but we’re born into Adam’s sin.
Jeff–
Great point about how we often choose our own labels. Your point could be expanded, then, to say that instead of having the responsibility to change other people who refer to themselves by the same name as you, you might have the responsibility to change what you call yourself.
Of course, even that is giving people more power over yourself than I would like. That would be giving other people the power to determine whether you could call yourself something (based on whether they besmirch the name, if that’s the right terminology).
And, of course, what I would like is often irrelevant :-)
John–
In response to your previous comment: “Thanks!” and “I definitely do remember you.” I’m excited to hear from you! :-)
The federal headship idea is very relevant, especially to Sean Penn’s claim that all Americans have blood on their hands because Bush and Cheney have blood on theirs.
In the case of terrorists, however, the idea is even broader still: everyone acts as a representative of the group. There is no single federal head. Rather, everyone is the “federal head,” as it were, of the group to which she or he belongs.
So, I think you’re exactly right to bring up the issue.
Of course, in the fact that I see a clear link between the theory of “federal headship” and an ontology/anthropology that I think is plainly wrong and destructive tells you what I think of the “federal headship” theory :-)
It seems that the idea of Adam and Christ as our “federal heads” derives from the Reformers in general, and John Koch in particular. (See, e.g., here, here, and here. It’s an interpretation of Romans 5, but isn’t actually taught by Scripture (any more than any other interpretation of Scripture is taught by Scripture).
I, personally, don’t find the interpretation convincing, especially as I find so much of the usual Reformed/Lutheran way of reading Romans to be unconvincing.
First, a “federal head” is a representative, and you don’t have a representative if the person doesn’t actually represent you — if you haven’t consented to be represented by the person, and the person doesn’t actually do what you would do. (If you don’t consent to the person’s representation, and the person doesn’t do what you would do, then the person isn’t an accurate picture of you — an accurate representation; he [re]presents you as being something that you are not, as agreeing with things that you do not. I.e., he isn’t actually representing you.)
There is a sense in which we consent to be represented by Christ, when we choose Him. But does anyone choose Adam as their representative? The Reformers wanted to argue that Adam was automatically your representative, but that Christ wasn’t — you’re born with Adam as your representative, but Christ comes to be your representative through faith — and yet they wanted to refer to them both as being our “federal heads.” I think there’s an incoherence in there.
Furthermore, the precedent that the idea sets disturbs me, not only because it makes the style of thinking behind gang wars, blood feuds, and Anti-Semitism seem legitimate, but because it goes against the principle of Deuteronomy 24:16.
In other words, I think you’re “right on” when you say that this all reminds you of the “federal headship” theory, and I think that should be reason for us to question that theory.
Thanks for the excellent comments!
[...] may recall my recent discussions of the “Bizarre Ontology” that makes individuals responsible for things [...]
[...] to prove that I hadn’t just made up the Bizarre Ontology, but that it was something that people actually believe, I used the “frontispiece” from [...]