My colleague Rabbi Brant Rosen in Evanston, Illinois quoted my last blog post(see below) in a recent post of his own about the discussion in the media around the Fort Hood killings.
I am always impressed by the level of thoughtfulness and respect shown by those who respond to Rabbi Rosen’s blog entries. Clearly, there is a community that follows his postings and is open to engaging with diverse views, taking the trouble to post their own thoughts when they agree and when they disagree.
This time, a correspondant expressed his disagreemet with the words quoted from my blog. He wrote, ” Please don’t say ‘well, they have their extremists and we have ours’. There is NO moral equivalence.”
I responded to explain that my raising the example of Baruch Goldstein, the infamous Orthodox Jew who murdered Muslims at prayer on Purim in 1994, was in no way intended to suggest “moral equivalence.” My comments were not about judging the morality of Major Hassan’s act, let alone ranking it better, worse or equivalent to Major Goldstein’s who, by the way, was also a physician with a high army rank. As someone who studies world religion, I certainly would not have attempted to make a moral ranking(or declare “equivalent”) two complex, evolving religious civilizations such as Judaism and Islam.
My judgment involved David Brooks and the responsibility he bears for his choice of words and for the way in which he failed to contextualize his comments about the dangers of radical Islam. He could have done so by noting that the vast majority of American Muslims condemn this version of Islam. He also could have noted that Islam is not the only religion with problematic versions. He did neither. Given the vulnerability of Muslims as a religious minority at a highly charged moment in history, I though he could have been more careful.
Of course, there are those who are even less careful in what they have to say. Consider this statement by Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School and executive editor for opinions at Forbes.
As the enormity of the actions of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan sinks in, we must ask whether we are confronting a new phenomenon of violent rage, one we might dub–disconcertingly–”Going Muslim.” This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American…discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.
Many folks responded positively to this post, with suggestions for websites such as jihadwatch.com or jihadtube.com where additional information could be found to support the concerns around “going Muslim”
One correspondant wrote
Any number of people will tell you {about} Bernard Madoff, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milkin, the Rothschilds, the Protocol referring to Capital and Finance in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the relative income of the American Jewish household compared to their population, literature through the ages about Jews and their relationship with money…..there are many parallels between your narrative of “Going Muslim” and these narratives of “Going Jew.” If the above “facts” I listed seem sparse you’ll find plenty at JewWatch.com.
The writer was not suggesting “moral equivalence.” But he was, tongue in cheek, suggesting(at least to me) that people who have suffered from overarching narratives about their group(Jewish greed/Zionist domination) might be especially careful not to help create potentially dangerous narratives about others.
I had a thought about the possible dynamics contributing to Major Hassan’s violent acting out. Ken Wilber, in his book Integral Spirituality, and elsewhere, describes a cultural “pressure cooker” which began during the Renaissance when a split between science (or other expressions of reason) and religion. Over the years, according to Wilber, the culture has increasingly leaned toward science and technology, which, in turn, rejected religion as being pre-rational. This rejection is one half of what Wilber calls a “steel lid” on the pressure cooker. Science-leaning culture has been “repressing” religious thought and spirituality. College students taste the fruits of the Age of Reason and become confused about thier faith, now mistaking it to be merely pre-rational. They must choose between reason and faith. They either reject their own faith (throwing the baby of transrational faith out with the bathwater of antiquated religious dogma), or worship in the closet. Such is the modern and post-modern world’s repression of faith.
But faith traditions themselves have provided the other half of the “steel lid”. By defending the legitimacy of their dogma and practices, faith traditions “fixated” at a mythic and ethnocentric level of development. They/we, in effect, clung to traditional understandings while the world left them behind. Over time, the world got bigger. Religion felt encroached upon. The more tradtional one’s religious cognitions, the more encroached upon one feels. At this point in time sociologists (Ray and others) estimate that the sociological group called the “Traditionals” are now surpassed in number by an emerging group called the “Cultural Creatives”. While the core of the Cultural Creatives group identifies with spirituality and values spiritual growth, it is likely that their voices only add to the Traditionals’ sense of losing the battle with the world. Put any being in a corner and what do you get? Major Hassan – perhaps.
The way out of the corner and the pressure cooker? According to Ken Wilber, the faith traditions themselves are in a unique position to almost heroically remove the pressure, by counteracting the fixation factor. This would be accomplished by the faith community’s increased support for higher stages of faith understanding and of spirituality.
In my own unpublished book, The Marketing of Virtue: Allsberg Rising, I, like Wilber, attributed some of the “walls between religion” to traditional faiths’ bais toward simpler, early-stage, forms. These simpler forms also tend to be more rigid and dependent on concrete thinking, thus contributing to divisive “walls”.
Unlike Wilber, who views the fundamentalism from more of a cultural evolution point of view, I posited a more economic factor to the bais toward more fundamentalist forms of faith. I proposed that each religion is in a kind of marketplace competition with other religions. An emphasis on instant salvation makes for more “sales”(more converts), not to mention that such a magic pill mentality resonates with the spiritually hungry masses who are not yet schooled in the ways of true spirituality. Faith traditions dummy down their “product” in order to speak at the level of understanding (still “worldly” thinking) of the target group.
In my opinion, religion in general has overemphasized the quick sell, and has underemphasized development of deeper and deeper (or higher and higher) levels of spirituality within thier ranks. I speculate that the traditional faiths justify the bias by assuming that once the recruits sign up, they will more or less do the deep stuff on thier own as they mature in their faith. Unfortunately, it looks to me that external prompts and supportive education is often needed to effect spiritual acualization. The assumption/rationalization amounts to a faith version of letting our members “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”!
Wilber attributes the rift between religion and science-leaning modern culture to an equivocation of pre-rational and trans-rational thought as regards spirituality. He calls this error in thinking the “Line/Level Fallacy” (in which the whole line of spiritual development is wrongly equated to the mythic and ethnocentric stage of faith). The scientific world wrongly assumed that all spirituality was prerational, dismissing the possibility of a higher-evolved transrational mode. Of course, modern physics is starting to glimpse the transrational (A funny thing happened in the lab!), but most of science and the modern world has not yet caught up. The modern world still tends to pit “rational” against an indiscriminate “irrational”. I would suspect that the largest of the three sociological groups, the Moderns, would tend to make this Line/Level Fallacy error.
In the intro section of The Marketing of Virtue: Allsberg Rising, as well as in the opening section of my current project, Christians Thinking Like Energy, I suggest that we begin a process of unifying the Cultural Creatives with the Traditionals, in order to have more leverage and sway with Moderns. My fictional account of the development of a model interfaith (or “transfaith”, as I prefer to call it) community is an attempt to give the Cultural Creatives an actual venue to invite Traditionals into our “town”.
In Christians Thinking Like Energy, I hope to show how Traditionals and Cultural Creatives can develop a mutual language which works for both camps. Starting with the modern concept of pure energy as a suitable metaphor for spirit, and visa versa, I will strive to elucidate resonances between the spirituality of the Traditionals and the spirituality of the Cultural Creatives.
Please pray for me as I endeavor to facilitate these new bonds in the spiritual community. If you would, please include the request or intention of lifting the lid off the pressure cooker which moved Major Hassan to act out. Pray that the next potential victim/victimizer finds a place (for his or her spiritual yearnings) in this world.
Darrell Moneyhon