After listening to me ramble incessantly, a professor recently pointed me toward Stanley Hauerwas. I now see why. Hauerwas is a professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School, where he has earned a reputation as an outspoken critic of the complacency that has come to characterize much of the American Christian church. I’m on my way to the library to grab a book or two, and at the top of my list is A Better Hope: Resources for a Church Confronting Capitalism, Democracy, and Postmodernity, which sounds like it may have been written explicitly for me. Should be interesting.
Hauerwas is a ridiculously prolific writer, but here’s an interesting and timely introduction. When asked what advice he would give to President Bush, he responds:
It’s a tricky question because, if he had asked me, he wouldn’t have been President! (Laugh) So, I’d say, “You need to tell the American people the truth.” This is still about oil. We intervened in Kuwait to protect Saudi oil. You can say, “Well, gee, don’t you think you ought to oppose a tyrant?” Look, the United States is very selective about which tyrant it’s going to pursue. When Indonesia invaded East Timor twenty-five years ago, we didn’t do anything. Why? East Timor didn’t have any strategic interest to us. Bin Laden is clearly motivated by the fact that the United States is in Saudi Arabia. We’re in Saudi Arabia to protect the oil. We need to say that the reason America has such a problem is because we’re such a rich country, and we depend on the resources of the rest of the world. Therefore, maybe the best thing we could do… I mean, rather than saying, “Well, what can you do to support a reaction against bin Laden” — rather than saying “Go out and shop” — maybe he should have said we should put a three dollar tax on gas. (Laugh) That way we won’t use so much of it. That would have been a sacrifice. Yeah, I’d say, “Tell the American people the truth about these matters.” I’m not sure that people around the Bush Administration even know the truth because they need to tell themselves lies about what they’re doing — and they believe the lies — in order to carry forward.
And later:
I distrust words that try to explain. I think that we’re desperate to find some explanation when there just isn’t an explanation. I mean, George Bush saying, “Why did they do this? Because they hate us because we are free.” That’s not what they’re saying. They say that they’re enacting jihad against the infidel who they think are deeply corrupt. I think even to accept that — I mean, it doesn’t explain what was there. Of course it’s helpful to get certain kinds of background to put it into perspective, but the idea that somehow or other we’re going to understand this is a little bit like people wanting to have a conspiracy theory around Kennedy’s assassination. We so hunger for some reason that this might embody and make it intelligible to us. But genuine evil is not intelligible. Bin Laden understands some of this. He wants the action to be senseless. And it is senseless because he wants it to call into question America’s sense of non-vulnerability. And he certainly did.
And along those same lines . . . In January, Laura Bush stood with Hamid Karzai and said:
We will not forget that 70 percent of Afghans are malnourished.
We will not forget that one of every four children dies by the age of five because of lack of health care.
We will not forget that women were denied access to medical care — denied the right to work, and denied the right to leave their homes alone.
Her speech echoed the sentiments voiced by her husband repeatedly since the days immediately following the start of the U.S. bombing campaign:
In our anger, we must never forget that we are a compassionate people. While we firmly and strongly oppose the Taleban regime, we are friends with the Afghan people.
But, of course, the rhetoric of compassion is quite different from the practical problems of “nation building.” Like many opposed to war in Iraq, one of my main concerns has always been “the day after.” What do we do after we have destabilized a dictatorship? What do we do after, in Hauerwas’s words, “we bomb a Stone Age country back into the Stone Age”? If Afghanistan is any indication, then not much:
“Rather than getting out there in a leadership role and saying, ‘We need a Marshall Plan,’ and fighting for it, they’ve taken a minimalist approach,” complained Joel Charny, a vice president of Refugees International.
He’s right. The reconstruction funds the Bush White House requested for Afghanistan have been flowing slowly to the country. Moreover, several months ago the White House opposed an effort in Congress to add $200 million to the total. And the total number of US troops committed to rebuilding — after the doubling — will be 340. That’s not a lot.
Word of the day: nomothetic adj.
- Of or relating to lawmaking; legislative.
- Based on a system of law.
- Of or relating to the philosophy of law.
- Of or relating to the study or discovery of general scientific laws.
Maybe some context would help. From Jeffrey Alexander’s Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction, and the Problem of Reason:
In the postwar period, general sociological theory has been associated with the search for nomothetic knowledge. It has been viewed, by its proponents and critics alike, as the crowning glory of the positive science of society. (90)