Age of the Demonic

Earlier this evening I was reading Nicholas Kristof’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. It occurred to me as it has before that we are living in the Age of the Demonic. I’m using Paul Tillich’s definition here, which, for the uninitiated, means neither ‘demon spirits’ nor ‘personal demons.’ For Tillich, the demonic was an upsurge in destructive and ultimately irrational forces.

In our time, destructive forces have been unleashed to a hellish degree in Afghanistan and Iraq. Individual leaders have been targeted by drones and many hundred have been killed. Thousands of foot soldiers have been killed. Women and children have seen their husbands and fathers taken away, never to return. Civilian deaths are not widely reported, but they number in the thousands or tens of thousands.

All of this may be necessary to suppress the hideous violence that al Qaeda and its affiliates wish to perpetrate, but our military actions, our ‘taking it to the enemy,’ our ‘pursuit of justice’ also require violence. Our view--my view--is that we are morally required to engage in these acts, but this is another sense of the demonic. Our actions are not wrong, but they nonetheless are profoundly destructive. They aim to preserve life, but they do so at a staggering cost. The context in which we operate is a gloomy fate in which we are free to act or withdraw, but no possible action is free of dire consequences.

Most of this violence is presented to us in sanitized form. And rarely do we think of long-term moral and spiritual cost of the war on terror. More often we think of the cost in terms of money spent. The Kristof piece cites a study by the Congressional Research Service which shows that the war on terror is the most expensive war the U.S. has ever fought, with the exception of WWII.

Frequently we hear or ourselves utter bloodthirsty statements about the enemy, but we have very little idea of who they are. We will never meet them face to face. We do not have any sense of their motives. Yet we are committed to their destruction, as they are committed to ours.

Al Qaeda may be eliminated, and I believe it already is significantly weakened. But there is no end in sight, and no sight of the end.

Human Nature? Full of bugs!

In Nature and Destiny of Man, his magisterial treatment of human nature, Reinhold Niebuhr avers that human beings frequently become anxious when their similarities to animals are noted. Imagine how many will feel when they read Carl Zimmer’s recent New York Times report on the role played by microbes in sustaining human life.

Human beings host colonies of hundreds of billions of little-understood microbes. No two humans are alike, not only because of our own separate genes but because the microbe colonies we host are unique. A baby born vaginally is different, at the level of microbial colonies, from a baby born by C-section. No two humans occupy identical environments, not even close family members. Apparently, even the right and left hands of any person have a very different set of microbes living on them.

Without these microbes we would die quickly. They help us digest food. They process waste. They protect us from other microorganisms. Many of their genes have become integrated into our own genome. These microbes contain genes that are separate from ours but without which we could not live; they constitute our unique microbiome.

This suggests a very different mental picture than the one many of us have. We tend to think of human beings as above it all. If we think of microbes--germs!--we almost reflexively want to be rid of them. Half of the hand soaps in my house contain bacteriacides.

The roots of contemporary religious thinking about human nature predate scientific knowledge. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism do, however, have greater awareness of interdependency. These religions, thus, teach non-violence toward other living things. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, on the other hand, tend to separate humans more completely from animals. Humans exercise dominion over animals, much as God exercises dominion over the earth.

If there is to be a credible twenty-first century account of human nature, it will need to include this sort of knowledge. A profound theological revision of theological anthropology is demanded. There will need to be greater stress on interdependency, life system, balance, and--quite paradoxically--a simultaneous reduction and increase of individuality. Human beings are not merely individuals; we are colonies! And yet no two of us are alike, since our microbial colonies are distinct one from another. Human dominance of and transcendence over nature, our ‘war’ with germs and bacteria, our confidence that we can master processes without causing more harm than good--each of these ethical ideas should be thought through.

None of this is to suggest that human life is unimportant. Rather it is to suggest that it is important in ways that we do not fully understand. These scientific findings issue a call to humility, but not a call to debasement. Here, too, Niebuhr’s Nature and Destiny suggests themes worthy of our consideration.

Atheism and Baptism

Join me at Creedible for a discussion of atheism and baptism.

Nate Oteka Henn

Tonight I am thinking about Nate 'Oteka' Henn. Join me in discussion at Creedible.com.

Indonesia at the Crossroads

Tonight I am blogging on Indonesia, Democracy, and Questions for our Future over at Creedible. Join me.

Patheos

Check out patheos.com. It's worth your attention.

Robert Wright on Afghanistan, etc

From big think: Check out Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God, on Afghanistan and related topics.