Moral relativism is not enough...

Everyone will, like the Dalai Lama, find the death of Osama Bin Laden “understandable.” They will think his demise broadly desirable, and hope it draws a line under a particular strand of Fundamentalist militancy. But the manner of it, which is not entirely clear, raises disturbing questions for many people alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Given that Osama was more effective and dangerous totemically than operationally, have we, in fact, seen the last of him? Treating him as a warrior rather than a criminal could play dangerously into his followers’ fantasies about him. In a world where people deny the moon landings, 9/11, and the death of the Princess of Wales, we can look forward to a rich flourishing of conspiracy theories about it.

Nobody who was not in Osama’s bunker this time last week knows exactly what actually happened — indeed those who were present must have been in a state of mind very different from judge and jury. The troops themselves had to calculate their risks in real time, reacting to all the circumstances they found. The rest of us will be profoundly grateful we didn't have to make that call.

What the debate about Osama's death has revealed is a startling moral relativism in many reactionary journalists and a few of the politicians they phoned around as they strung together a story out of this.

We must respect humanity because it is an absolute created by God. He made human beings in his image and likeness. Humanity is not a privilege accorded by other creatures, but the Maker's Mark. My own sense of moral reference is a basic way of honouring God. My respect for the humanity of someone else is not a privilege for me to play God and give them, nor a reward for good behaviour. Furthermore, people are capable of all kinds of evil, all of us, Christians (Adam and Eve) believe. The Church calls realism about this the doctrine of the Fall, and it is the context of all human behaviour to a greater or lesser extent. This doctrine carefully preserves the truth that nobody is, in any simple sense, evil, although they can do massively evil things. God saw all that he had made and it was good.

It follows from this basic theology from page 1 of the Bible, that if I commit an act, like a lynching, that denies the image of God in another human being I not only act out my own fallen nature (thus losing the moral high ground), but I also behave in a way that compromises my own humanity — thank God he gave it as an absolute that no human being can take away, not even me.

The moral relativism of some journalists about this (“Normally, of course, we should respect life, but he didn't so we don't have to”) is a real slippery slope, morally. It betokens not Conservatism, but Pelagianism — one of the oldest heresies in the book. They must not be surprised if bishops, including the Archbishop, do not collude with their Pelagian views.

Wycombe aviation bombers conviction

The convictions of Assad Sarwar and colleagues have got our nearest town of Wycombe into the papers for all the wrong reasons. In the past day or so I've met various local people deeply ashamed and taken aback that anyone from round here, whatever their politics or religion, could think of doing such a thing, let alone plan it for real. They have brought shame and disgust on themselves and everything they say they were standing for. What's the learning?

Thanks to those who take a lead in our shared security, for geting the job done in trying circumstances. They get a lot of stick, understandably, when they get it wrong. They deserve our grateful thanks when they get it right.

Gerald Templer worked out in Malaya in the late forties that any campaign against terrorism is a not a movie, or a game of toy soldiers, but a battle for hearts and minds. Tactical Actions that legitimate violent world views actually make the problem worse. Northern Ireland got a future when terrorists were undermined from within, and genuine representatives got round the table to find another way. Imagine anyone had been evil and ridiculous enough to suggest bombing Dublin in the troubles, a laughable notion, which would obviously have made everything far worse.

Various people tell me our problem has been communities that just do not know their neighbours well enough. This is not just some fluffy bunny thing, though it's got that dimension to it. Strong, sympathetically connected and concerned neighbours will show up sociopathy for what it is, and share information for the good of all with those who need to know. They are more likely to identify and understand the significance of potentially evil behaviour in their midst, before it comes to this.

An over-individualistic atomised society will produce its own sociopaths from surprising directions, grounded in any habitual willingness to set people against each other. Remember the Oklahoma City bomber, or the Unabomber. There has been great progress in building the kind of relationships we need in Wycombe on various levels. We have to stick with that progress and show up divisive sterotypes on all sides for the dangerous rubbish they really are.

Them and Us — The Truth

After a bit of a blockbuster about clergy bullying, with some very interesting comment, something profoundly relevant caught my eye yesterday at our senior staff Eucharist. We were in Christ Church Cathedral, using the millennium Altar commemorating George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, supporter of resistance against Hitler and courageous opponent of saturation bombing during World War II.

The Altar is from a single huge oak, blackened. Renewed humanity is hewn out of, and emerges from, a charred and defaced reality. It carries this quotation from Bell, framed in the context of calls for reprisals in 1945. Today, from parish breakdowns to Iraq, there’s a simplistic sense among otherwise intelligent people that we are OK and they are evil. Bell exposes the root of the matter. In reality, we are all complicit, and in need of redemption:

No Nation, no Church, no Individual is guiltless. Without Repentance, and without forgiveness, there can be no regeneration.

One way ticket to a madman destination...

...will you stop or will you just keep going?" What has the "surge" achieved, and where is it all going anyway, now even George Bush is using the "V" word?

It's been a disturbing year. General Tony Zinni, led the US Marines ably and effectively in the gulf, and afterwards back home. Now retired, his Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy presentation at Duke (available for free on iTunes — just key in "Terry Sanford Zinni" to find a free audio or video podcast) tells it, pretty much, as it is from a military perspective — Iraq, failures, realities and the Future.

Thomas E. Ricks is the Washington Post Pentagon correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winning military historian. His analysis is now in paperback, and the title says it all — Fiasco: the American Military adventure in Iraq. It's a terribly depressing read (people suffering from a surfeit of cheerfulness after the holidays can get it on Amazon in a job lot with Bob Woodward's State of denial: Bush at War part III).

In Ricks' view not only have many people died on all sides, many of them innocent bystanders, but the effect of the whole thing has been to destroy US credibility and stoke up terrorism. "Effective tactics harnessed to bad strategy equals military disaster." He investigates how the US could start a pre-emptive war based on false information (step forward Paul Wolfowitz, among others), and tracks carefully through the disastrous resulting imbroglio.

His Afterword ("Betting against History") suggests one of four denouements:

1. The best case scenario: the Philippines, 1899-1946 — thousands of troops there for many years to come while the place dials down and normalises
   
   
2. The middling secnario: France in Algeria or Israel in Lebanon — keeping a lid on low level civil war for as long as possible, whilst trying to keep casualties down to a publicly acceptable rate, until something can be cobbled together domestically. This took the Israelis 18 years in Lebanon.
   
   
3. A worse scenario: Civil war, partition and regional war. T. X. Hammes, the counterinsurgency expert says "We have lit multiple fuses. There will be multiple explosions. I'm thinking our grandkids could easily be there."
   
   
4. The nightmare scenario. This is where the 74% of Iraqis who say "it doesn't matter whom, the country needs a single strong leader" gets one. Then if the US bottles out for electoral reasons, you arrive at a profound irony: Iraq run by a real dictator (Caliph?), who really is all the things Bush & Blair said Saddam Hussein was, which SH was, but only in his dreams. Unlike SH this guy would be the real deal. Anti-Americanism would unite all kinds of people around him SH could never pull in. Thus (almost like Greek tragedy) the result of the war could be to bring about precisely the scenario it was intended to avoid, but in a much more virulent form.

Is there a 5th scenario?

Signs of the Times in Stroke City

Nope. It's still there, Derry, in spite of all the confusion on this subject at Northern Ireland Railways.

But things are moving forward... The famous Free Derry sign is looking what Noel Coward would call "terribly Pink."

Work is also being done to incorporate some jolly stone-throwers and a Bernadette Devlin MP lookalike, armed to the teeth with, er, an official IRA Megaphone. Prods, of course, don't use megaphones. The Revd Ian Paisley proved conclusively years ago they don't need them.






The whole City has also been working on its image. In various places around the town its cheery traditional (and deeply symbolic, you may feel) coat of arms:

is giving way to the following namby-pamby rebranding, including the D-word:Incredible as it may seem, the times they are a'changing, even in London/Derry, which some are beginning to call "Stroke City" — an ingenious way to name the place without annoying anyone, except the medical profession, perhaps...

Progress may disappoint a Mexican tourist I encountered up on the walls who asked me if I knew where she could find "Bloody Sunday." She seemed rather put out when I told her she had shown up 35 years too late. She seemed to think it was a regular local custom, like the Olney Pancake Race. Which, of course, some of the locals seem to think it is, too.

Divis Flats, Falls Road, Sandy Row, Shankhill — redeeming some names from the curse of the past....

For as long as I can remember Belfast was a war zone. It seems incredible that people so decent, caring and pleasant should have descended into civil war for the best part of forty years. Belfast now is in full recovery, building everywhere to put behind it the legacy of the troubles. Thank God.

There's a particular theological challenge here. Jesus said people would know the genuineness of faith not by its content, or its conformity to some ideal specification, but by its fruits. How could religion bear such bitter fruit?

Dawkins, of course, would say it was religion wot done it. Dawkins has a point. Sometimes, as the Chief Rabbi tactfully puts it, people believe too much. But you don't have to know very much about the troubles to see that religious identity was only a background factor. Sir Edward Carson wasn't a religious leader, as such, nor were those who have driven this strife ever since. It's about far more than religion, and most religious people on all sides tried consistently to ameliorate the worst of it, rather than stoke it up. Anyway, the hypothesis that atheism somehow stops you being violent is ridiculous: most of the great Mass Murderers of the last century — Mao, Stalin, etc. — were, in fact, secularists.

As history begins to emerge from the headlines and slogans, here's one crude tentative hypothesis, overheard on the streets. It states that these nice people were let down catastrophically by their leaders, at all levels, including the highest echelons of the British government. Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments committed their fair share of cock-ups and bad tactical calls, but were essentially carried along by forces beyond their ken, reacting tactically to something they didn't really understand, and couldn't think through strategically.

The shocking, culpable failure came in the late 80's when the UK government pulled up the draw bridge, pursuing illusory military solutions to a non-military problem. Thousands died whilst they sat on their spotty behinds, trying to sound hard for Fleet Street, throwing shedloads of money at increasingly ingenious security measures — anything except the one thing needful.

History awards surprising prizes. I was never keen on the Major government, but they turned things round. Often panned by Fleet Street as weak and vacillating, Major had the imagination and moral courage to see there was no military solution, and the problem wasn't going to go away unless he did something. Far from the line that "you can't talk to people like that" that played to the gallery at home but accomplished nothing, Major (and, eventually, Trimble) came to see that the people they really needed to talk to were the enemy. Until that happened nothing was going to change.

Well there's a tentative historical hypothesis, from which we learn...

1. Wars on terrorism are, by definition, exercises in pointlessness and futility because they attack the symptom not the cause. When you win the hearts of people of goodwill, you win. There is no military solution — the lesson the British learnt at great cost in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, Aden, etc. etc., and Northern Ireland.
   
   
2. Positive change happened here, and in South Africa, when the two sides sat down together and talked. The role of leaders is to bring people together. Any fool can cheerlead abusive songs from their own camp. It takes courage and real leadership to talk; and until someone develops that courage and leadership you are descending into a deep abyss, from which it will take years to emerge. If you feel the urge to walk out, turn it round now, and get listening, get talking.
   
   
3. We have to find a more Christlike way of doing Christianity, for God's sake, for the peace and salvation of the world, for our own souls' good.
   
   St Paul's letters to Corinth dealt functionally with the bizarre phenomenon of schism among Christians — the body that rips itself apart for the sake of politics and being right, the Christian who fixes on a leader who comes to matter more than Christ. In Ephesians 2 he hits the heart of the matter — Christ has broken down every dividing wall of hostility that stands between people — race, or identity, or history. Who are we to rebuild them?
   
   Posture and manipulate as much as we will, in the end we have to sit down in peace as children of one heavenly Father. We are all laden with culture, expectation and identity. As we lay down those burdens for what they are, we will be free to discover each other the way God sees us, with perfect understanding and hope, and begin to live a bit of the life of the world to come now. That's how redemption works on the ground.