Internet Darkness, Freedom

Wikipedia, Google, Twitter--three Internet heavy hitters--staged a 'go dark' protest against proposed anti-piracy legislation. These sites receive and drive so much traffic, the protest was dramatic. Some worried about the entire Internet going dark--whether by design of accident. The Web has ensnared us, and we can longer easily free ourself from its orienting power.

It's worth pondering whether a sabbath, an intentional go-dark period each week, would be restful to our clicked-through, side-tracked, netted, webbed souls. The Internet must remain free? Yes, I suppose. Should we remain free? Surely.

Cyberwar! Be (Un)alarmed

Image Courtesy
of Mingo.

At Matthew 24:6, Jesus darkly claims "And you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that you be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet." The context of these strange visions is hard to reconstruct, but the emotions--and the lordly transcendence over emotions--are timeless. Death is on the prowl. Be not afraid?

Isabel Kershner reports for the New York Times that a cyberwar is escalating in Israel. Israel, it turns out, is a formidable cyberattacker, but not very strong defensively.

The question may properly belong over at Theological Prescripts, but it's worth asking whether cyberwar should cause worry. How are we to be untroubled by such attacks?

When it comes to anxiety about war, nothing has changed. In the ancient world, war caused anxiety, the same as it does now. When it comes to methods, much has changed. Today's technologies of destruction are remarkably abstract, and it's hard nowadays to feel perfectly comfortable. Just as we're sitting down to a meal, our power supply might be cut by a variant of Stuxnet. If we invest through the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, oxOmar might succeed at shutting the exchange down. If not oxOmar, perhaps it will be the cyberattackers called Nightmare. All we have might disappear; all we need might be compromised. Our understandable (and in my view correct) reaction is to defend ourselves against such attacks.

But the strange world of the New Testament apocalypse--the vague allusion to Antiochus IV Epiphanies--offers counsel in these fearful times. Beware of false messiahs--those who provide overly neat answers to our worries and woes. Beware those who will set principles aside, or who will distort them to justify evil purposes. Be sure that messiahs of this sort will show 'great signs and wonders:' attacks on infrastructures, new forms of terror and new defenses against them, death by fear...

Our task is to see through the haze, to see matters differently. That is the challenging work of courage.

'Be not afraid' is a moral and existential claim, not a silencing of emotion. Get your bearings. Don't allow fear to limit your vision.

Dan Wheldon Tragedy

Jerry Garrett reports for the New York Times about the 15-car Indycar crash that killed Dan Wheldon. The report is troubling, especially in that conditions for the tragedy were obvious. There were too many drivers; they were averaging laps of 220 mph; the speedway's banks were high and dropped into dangerous flats. The crash was dramatic, and terrible.

Other sports--football, baseball, boxing, etc--also entail serious risks, yet we are drawn to participate in and watch them being played. When children develop, they engage in play that is inherently dangerous--sometimes to the chagrin of their anxious parents. Dangerous play is true of human and non-human animals, and there is evidence that without this play, full development is stifled. A certain measure of risk taking is required as a part of healthy development.

We live in a time of heightened safety consciousness. Our cars have 12-15 air bags and computers that recognize danger. They tell us if our tires are running low. In order to enter an airport, we submit to scans, screens, and challenge questions--all to ensure safety. In national politics, safety and security predominate.

Yet in spite of these safety measures, we take risks. We drive faster than we should (at least at times), talk on cell phones in the car or text while driving, consume too much food and drink, smoke, exercise too little...

The Wheldon tragedy is saddest because its risks were known, and probably preventable. The full story--the Indy and Nascar struggle, the role of money, the clearly known risks--is still being investigated. But the tragedy illustrates a deeper conundrum, in which living requires taking risks--and pushing limits. Absolute safety would be stifling and soul destroying, and thus we celebrate those who push limits with skill and expertise. The best of them accomplish in maximums what the rest of us pursue in smaller ways as we live our lives

Anwar al Awlaki, dead after Hellfire missile attack

Anwar al-Awlaki
courtesy, Wikimedia.

Laura Kasinof, Mark Mazzetti, and Alan Cowell report for the New York Times that American-born al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki is dead. A predator drone delivered a Hellfire missile killing Awlaki. RITN previosuly commented on the Awlaki case. Read here and here.

Check back later for further reflections on the significance of this successful strike against al Qaeda.

Health Care: The Bigger Questions

Reed Abelson and Nina Bernstein report today for the New York Times that U.S. health insurance costs are rising sharply. In some respects, that is not news; health insurance rates have been rising sharply since the 1970s. In another respect, however, the news comes at a turning point in American history—and quite likely a chapter demarcation of world history. Arguably, we are at a moment of transition equal in significance to WWII and the Cold War. Obama was elected to office by calling for change, but the changes we face exceed those he promised.

Image Courtesy Pass3456, Wikimedia

At stake, as the Abelson and Bernstein piece illustrates, are the promises made by liberal states—the United States and Europe—about retirement benefits, health insurance, education, care for children, and the like. As these societies age, non-wage earners (retirees, the sickly, and children) burden wage earners to the breaking point. A worker who retires at 67 may live another 20 or 30 years, nearly equally to the time he or she worked. And the cost of providing healthcare in this period will be extraordinary. On the other side, each child leads to immense child care, educational, social, and medical and dental costs, further dampening the birth rate.

We have known for some time that the revenue model of liberal states would prove unworkable, but we have wanted to have it both ways: to give to those who need (education, health care, retirement) and to keep as much as possible for ourselves (low tax rates). Even as we projected revenue shortfalls, we became more and more convinced that corrupt government—rather than a dated model—was to blame. Along came calls for ever-reduced taxes, as if that would solve rather than exacerbate the revenue crisis.

These domestic issues are set within a context of massive changes to the global structure: the end of the Cold War, the rise of non-state actors (terrorists, most notably, but also powerful corporations, the denizens of social media sites, bloggers, and the like), and the quickly growing ascendancy of China, India, and other developing states. Just as the U.S. became most dominant with the former Soviet Union’s fracturing, our mode of dominance has proved unsustainable and increasingly irrelevant.

We have staggering military power at our behest, but we also fear that this power is not enough. Against this backdrop came the attacks of 9/11. The ‘war against terror’, fundamental compromises of our legal and human rights traditions, and the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein that followed 9/11, however necessary they may have been in one respect, were driven as much by desire to assert our dominance (with the added consolation of proving it to ourselves) as they were to protect us from harm. What protected us in the short term may have redcued longer term prospects for meaningful revitalization.

Image: PD-USGOV, Wikimedia

Arguably, the Great Recession is a product of these changes, not their cause, but that is unknown. Whatever the causes of the recession—and one should not underestimate the ‘real estate bubble’ and dangerously overleveraged financial system—it is rendered more toxic by a sense of doom, that many of us fear America’s day in the sun is over. The Great Recession was prefigured by a period of orgiastic excess, and we have not yet fully grasped what went wrong.

One place to turn is core values that underlie the American Proposition, as it was called by the 20^th century Roman Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray. But the deeper strands of our culture—religious, philosophical, and historical—are inaccessible to many who hold anti-religious assumptions about how history works. Intellectuals such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens suggest that these deeper (religious) traditions are the primary source of our maladies.

The Tea Party may be wrong about many things (a tendency to anti-intellectualism, a penchant for stoking xenophobia, a fundamentalist impulse), but they have a keener sense of what has been lost, or is being threatened, than political aficionados, left and right, who want to play by the old rules. What we need is a thoroughgoing re-envisioning of America’s core purposes and fundamental values, but political stalemates in Washington suggest that we are not yet ready to hear articulated a viable forward-looking strategy.

The progressive impulse (Obama’s healthcare legislation, for example) has not asked, let alone demanded, shared commitment to fund its main initiatives. A progressive strategy requires increased revenue, or it is dangerous fantasy. The libertarian impulse (Ron Paul, for example) is guileless about unfettered individualism, but the larger issues we face outflank the nation as a whole, let alone individuals in their solitary, nasty, and brutish stations. The conservative impulse (Rick Perry, for example) wants to recover historically significant traditions but seems not to realize that such a recovery will require applying (and therefore altering) these noble traditions.

So what we have is an underfunded progressive impulse, an individualistic sense of accomplishment until someone ‘we’ love is in need, and a conservative strategy that stokes fears and harkens to yesteryear but fails to grasp the challenges of tomorrow. We do have something to fear besides fear itself. But do we have something greater? That’s the religious and social question being raised by the imperiled healthcare legislation.

The Dance of Reason and Unreason

Gardiner Harris reports for the New York Times that MMR vaccine has once again been cleared as a cause of autism. Scientific studies of this sort will change the thinking of some some people, but a great many others will continue to believe that vaccines cause autism. Presumably this will lead to higher incidences of measles, mumps, and rubella but no decrease in autism.

image credit: 2over0, wikimedia

There are complex reasons for the lack of trust in scientific findings. People are ambivalent about the explanatory power of science, and autism, which is on the rise for poorly understood reasons, is so fearsome that unreason simply pushes reasoned explanations aside. Also, as the article shows, vaccines do pose risks; they simply pose fewer risks than going unvaccinated. Since being vaccinated has some adverse effects, there is a store of ready anecdotes to illustrate how dangerous and unworthy vaccines are. Human beings have difficulty remaining reason-oriented when the stakes are high.

image credit: ceridwen, wikimedia

Religions are human enterprises, and so they are tangled up completely within this dance of reason and unreason, between seeing straight and being caught in a web of fear.

Critics of religion like to point to the unreasonable elements of religion: the concept of revelation, for example, or the notion of resurrection from the dead; the idea of reincarnation or the belief in a loving God. How loving is God, they ask, when the world is a hellish and difficult place. Frequently, however, these critics err (as do some rationalist defenders of religions) in holding all religious claims to a standard of reason.

There are some human activities that are a work of reason (artistic work, love and family, for example), even though elements of them can be understood using the tools of reason. For example, a great painting (say Picasso's Guernica) is not produced as an act of reason. The painting is full of suggestions and 'ideas', but it is not an argument. The painting was produced through passion. Thus, it makes no sense to suggest that it is unreasonable. The painting is wondrous and terrible--those reactions can be understood using the tools of reason--but it is not 'against reason.'

Much of religion also is not against reason; it is drawing from and commending something quite different. Reason's defenders are right to worry when people doubt the work of reason proper, as for example when scientific studies are ignored or nullified by fearful reactions. Reason's defenders are on less secure ground when they mock the unreasonableness of something that is not a work of reason.

Camping Flabbergasted! Me, too!

Will Kane reports for the San Francisco Chronicle that Harold Camping, whose rapture predictions proved premature, is flabbergasted. Me too.

To be clear I'm not flabbergasted that the earth remained intact and that Christians continue, like the rest of us, to be sojourners here below.

I'm flabbergasted at the economy, which remains broken; the climate, which is trending more than Bieber on a good day; the mean-spirited partisanship of Washington, with leaders on the left and right feckless in the face of our ills; the raging global war against terror, which is simultaneously hideous and necessary; energy crises in the Gulf and Japan, which show that we need to speed up and slow down, also simultaneously....

However much Camping believes he extracted his sense of doom from scripture and prophecy, like the rest of us, his insights were formed by this riptide of negativity.

Camping also could look abroad and see the growth of the Chinese and Indian economies, which are lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. He could focus on the upsurge of democracy in north Africa and the middle east. Such news could have leavened his sense of overt doom. But even these news items can be used to buttress a doomsday sentiments.

In fact, Camping's doomsday thinking is remarkable only for its oddity, its religious zealotry, and for the fact that most of us enjoy making fun it. That we do so to conceal our own sense of (secular) doom goes unnoticed; and for that, we owe Camping a big thank you.

Francis Fukuyama: 'The Origins of Political Order' - Newsweek

RITN recommends Francis Fukuyama: 'The Origins of Political Order' - Newsweek

Libya, the Obama doctrine

Obama's statement to the nation about actions in Libya are closely consistent with the overall Obama doctrine: it follows from a stance of multilateralism, is based on consultation, seeks to answer the call of a threatened people, and promises no American troops will be deployed on the ground. These seem like the right moves for now, though since the post on March 21, 2011, some have criticized Obama's actions.

Gaddafi has long been antagonistic to the U.S., but following 9/11 he appeared to realize that Islamist terrorists were as much a threat to him as they were to the secular governments of the West. What he must not have fathomed is how the U.S. will cooperate with someone of his ilk but turn quickly if a democratic tide pushes against him. This was the lesson from Mubarak, and it may yet be the case throughout the middle east and north Africa. The most interesting test case of American principles is Saudi Arabia. Will we continue to support its liberal monarchy for fear of its intolerant citizenry? Or will we allow a rising tide of democracy to push the monarchs aside, should it come to that? It is likely that they have grave misgivings about liberal Obama and wish for a return to the Evangelical Bush.

Woodrow Wilson
image: Wikimedia

Though it was but a few years ago, it seems a distant past when issues of this sort predominated in our relationship with China. Though we traded with them heavily, we insisted on making vocal claims about human rights violations. We have gone from being a major trading partner to being a major borrower, and the Chinese government seems more focused on economic growth than on political control. But what would our position be should there be a 'demonstration' followed by a 'crack down'? Of course, much would depend on the actual circumstances: some crack downs could be so grievous that we would need to say something, and some demonstrations could fail to gain our sympathy. But the deeper issue, as it is for Saudi Arabia, is independence of moral standing. Arguably, in both cases, our moral standing is compromised (or at least shaped) by our interests.

The realist position, the dominant U.S. approach to international relations, argues that interests must guide our work with and confrontation of other nations. Moral positions, the realists claim, are simply tools for advancing our interests. But the U.S. also has a strong sense of universalist mission, which is grounded in the common culture (various forms of Christianity) and is articulated in terms of liberal internationalism.

Arguably the Bush administration was as much guided by liberal internationalist views (of the President himself) as it was by hawkish neo-conservatives. In these dangerous times, let us hope that our actions afield are considered from many perspectives. This moment is pregnant with judgment. Much is at stake, and much could go wrong.

Obama, On Military Action in Libya

Check out the text of Obama's statement in military action in Libya. RITN will comment in the next day or two.