Editorials

Peace on earth. People talk it up at this time of year, but what’s being done to make it a reality? Quite a lot, and not nearly enough. 

A man I’ve known (though not well) for a couple of years called asking if I had time to read and comment on an opinion piece he was writing for the papers back home. I’d known vaguely that he was from a place called Nagaland, now part of India, but that’s all I knew about the topic. To prepare for his visit, I Googled up a few references which I found amazing. I didn’t know, for example, that Nagaland is the largest predominantly Baptist country in the world—the inhabitants, former head-hunters, were converted by American missionaries about a century ago.  

The writer had come to Berkeley 30 years ago to get a Ph.D. in archeology, and had stayed here, but his family of origin was still in Nagaland, and he was increasingly concerned about their safety and about the fate of his country, which now has a semi-autonomous status within India. There are at least 60 Sino-Tibetan language groups in Nagaland without a common language except English, and tribal rivalries have led to increasingly violent clashes in recent years. Assassination has become a favored technique. His essay, intended for op-ed publication in newspapers, was a moving plea for peace based on an appeal to Christian ideals of morality.  

All of this was completely new to me, and at the same time depressingly familiar. Humans, it seems, are the same all over the world. Given half a chance, they will slip into bloody factional disputes, often blamed on outsiders but really stemming from the unquenchable desire for power among locals. The recent death of President Niyazov of Turkmenistan prompted stories in the world press which could have been descriptions of Nagaland: “Despite Niyazov’s stress on Turkmen national identity, tribal and local loyalties continue to exert a strong pull in the country and are likely to be an important consideration in the political succession.” (Financial Times). 

In Palestine, despite the best efforts of a few of those at the top of the Hamas and Fatah organizations, assassination as a political strategy is finding a new constituency. Israeli democracy has never really recovered from the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by a right-wing activist, and now assassination is accepted by many Israelis as an appropriate tool of foreign policy. In Iraq various factions too numerous to follow are bent on mutually assured destruction. In Iran a dangerous crackpot who denies that the Holocaust took place controls the country, though polls say that voters there now favor saner candidates for Iran’s occasional more or less democratic elections. 

It’s noteworthy that in all the conflicts listed above most of the participants have been—at least as self-identified—believers in one of the major world religions. It’s tempting to blame religion for such problems. Richard Dawkins, prominent Darwinian professor at Oxford, has been all over the talk shows this week doing just that as he flogs his latest book. He was famously quoted in The Guardian after Sept. 11, 2001, as saying, “Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense,” and he’s still an equal opportunity attacker of all religions, not just of Muslims.  

What’s confusing about this picture is that it’s also religion which tries, if unsuccessfully, to work against the human failings which have produced this continuous world-wide strife. Christians a hundred years ago persuaded the Nagas to give up headhunting. The original and best-sustained opposition to the war in Vietnam was from Christian churches. Prominent American Muslims spoke out this week at the Holocaust museum to counter the Iranians’ folly. Religious (and non-religious) Jews took leadership roles in human rights movements in the United States and South Africa in numbers quite disproportionate to their representation in the population. Religion often speaks to what may be a natural human desire to do the right thing, even though humans don’t always listen.  

Dawkins also has theories on altruism which I know only from secondary sources, but I don’t think personal charity is part of the picture. There are no soup kitchens run by militant atheist organizations that I’m aware of. I don’t know of any kind of charitable programs organized by anti-religious people of the Dawkins stripe, unless of course you count historic world communism, which has gotten into a bit of trouble of its own in the places where it’s taken over. In fact, when you think about it, the excesses of religion and the excesses of militant anti-religion (think about La Terreur after the French Revolution) look quite a bit alike. It’s sobering to contemplate the idea that human nature seems to tend toward inter-group strife with or without the intervention of religion.  

Those of us who still wistfully hope for Peace on Earth have our work cut out for us.