The Power of Denial: the Challenge of Peacemaking within an Empire

Elizabeth M. Bounds
Conference on Ethical Issues Raised by Pre-Emptive War
The Churches' Center for Theology and Public Policy, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, D.C., May 1, 2003

INTRODUCTION
We are here today because of our common concern about how do we, as members and/or representatives of U.S. Christian churches, speak to the issues our country faces as it engages in war. When I first heard of this gathering, we were in the midst of enormous tensions-a sense of the steady increase of preparations by the U.S. government for war, combined with unprecedented popular protests both within the U.S., and, quite literally, throughout the world. Since then, we have endured a war that was as abstract as it was engaged-saturated with around-the-clock video screening accompanied by endless media commentary, marked by an underlying unease that people really were dying. Yet we had what commentators are now calling an "easy" war, at least from the point of view of those who have not been actually in the midst of the fighting.

Now we are in a new stage, termed "postwar stabilization" which is possibly even more confusing, as we set up a state in a country devastated by over a decade of different degrees of war in the midst of apparently unanticipated resistance from some of the very people we aimed to "free." And the administration seems ready to extend U.S. involvements, as we contemplate potential military action in Syria and North Korea. The confusion is demonstrated by the fact that there is little popular protest at the moment-no one know exactly what to protest (except for those in the Islamic world who are clear that they do not want the U.S. setting up one of "their" states).

But this lull-- at least from the perspective of those of us living here--is an opportunity for reflection and analysis about just what it is we are in the midst of. The event today has been sparked by an urgent concern not so much for the Iraq war in itself, but for the implications of the policy framework within which it has unfolded. What does the new prominence of the language of "preemptive strike" as used in the current U.S. administration's 2002 National Security Act signal? (Bush 2002) More important, in my opinion, is the question, why has there been so little public concern about the use of such language?

From the perspective of traditional ethical reflection perhaps the best approach for today is to reflect upon the impossibility of justifying a concept of pre-emptive strike within the normative structure of the just war tradition. This is very important work that I will leave to others here today. In contrast, I find my task here is to try to step outside of that just war framework and approach today's problem from some different angles. In some recent writing, Christian theologian Susan Thistlethwaite suggested that since just war theory rests upon confidence in the power of reason to restore and uphold order in a hierarchical world, it cannot adequately address what she terms the "national psychic narrative" in our anxious, plural, complex world (Thistlethwaite 2003). I think she would agree with my sense that ethical reflection that only works within the confines of rational principles, and, I would add, bounded moral problems is not adequate to address the tasks that face us.

The minute I say or write this, I recognize I face some challenges. First, I need to quickly state that I am not dismissing the use of rational principles-my claim is that they are necessary but not sufficient. But feminist work on elements of our moral processes that are not simply rational, such as care, emotions, and imagination have proved the limit of reason alone to fully address our moral challenges (I refer here to the works of such scholars as Claudia Card, Carol Gilligan, Alison Jaggar, Eva Kittay, Martha Nussbaum and Joan Tronto). Second, I recognize that these broader categories I am invoking are not the stuff of the life on Capitol Hill -my own time lobbying here on behalf of the churches certainly trained me to express issues in the most bounded, problem-centered way possible, limiting moral appeals to clear principles, and rendering judgments as close to yes and no as I possibly could. This is the utilitarian, short-term language of mainstream, functional politics. And it is a language we church people need to speak if we are going to participate in the public square of D.C. politics.

But we need to recognize that this utilitarian language represents only one kind of perspective and that there are other public squares and other moral languages. A favorite moral philosopher of mine, Dorothy Emmett, compared moral thinking to a prism that refracts the apparently homogenous white light of an event into a spectrum of differently colored features (Emmett 1979). Given the enormity of the moral tasks facing us, we need, I think, to explore as many of those features as possible, in as many languages as possible so we can address as many publics as possible. Such work enlarges our common moral vocabulary beyond the limits of any one perspective.

These limits were evident to me when I read a recent study done by the Pew Research Center which discovered that only 10% of American polled cited religious beliefs as the strongest influence on their thinking on Iraq in contrast to the 41% who said the media was the strongest influence (Pew 2003). While media is, obviously, a catchall term which can include both watching Matt Lauer on the Today Show and reading an editorial by Noam Chomsky, I suspect more people in the United States are watching the Today show than bellying up to Chomsky which suggests exposure to a limited set of languages and viewpoints. Such limited fluencies make us more vulnerable to the manipulation of language and emotions, the rhetorical work done by this administration and much of the media.

While there is no time today to explore this manipulation in detail, I want to look at the problematic use of pre-emptive strike language as an example of manipulation. From there I ask some questions about why the U.S. might be so vulnerable to this manipulation, finding some help from Reinhold Niebuhr. Then, finally, I will turn to what I consider a distinctively Christian call to peacemaking, suggesting that it requires us to work on nurturing new understandings of the sense of security foundational to peace.

LIVING WITH "COMMON SENSE"
What set me off on this exploration were a few little words I noticed in the September 2002 National Security Strategy document. The sentence that actually justifies pre-emptive strike reads as follows "And, as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed" (italics added). For anyone like myself who has found the concept of ideology useful in analyzing our social situation, the words "common sense" are nothing less than a red flag. For those here who don't like this kind of jargon, ideology simply points to the social mechanisms enabling something that is a particular imposition of power and interest to look like a plain old good idea, available to all of us-in other words, "common sense.". Ideology "causes us to view the world as somehow naturally orientated to ourselves, spontaneously 'given'", that is, something so obvious that there is no need to think critically about it (Eagleton 1994, 214).

The more I have sat with that sentence from the National Security Strategy Document, the more I have seen it as a brilliant piece of manipulation. The two main justifications for an unprecedented aggressive military policy are "common sense" and "self-defense." The appeal to "common sense" is, as I am suggesting, an appeal to the comforting nature of a world we all know (nicely papering over the reality that we don't all know the same world), while the appeal to "self-defense" summons up the world we are afraid we do live in, a world where terrorists can strike quite literally out of the blue and kill thousands of persons in about two hours. In other words, this sentence acknowledges, or, rather exploits, our feelings of insecurity in order to justify assuaging these feelings through the expansion of military power, possibly accompanied by the reduction of civil rights.

The presence of these little words, "as a matter of common sense and self-defense," reminded me that we are being encouraged to live in a false national psychic narrative, where the common sense of our good intentions and good nature are combined with the common reality of fear and insecurity in order to at least tacitly support the activities of an empire. Some of the moral work we need is work that will attempt to diagnose the symptoms of this false narrative, a narrative that has enabled us to be actively unaware of our own empire-creation. Here is where Reinhold Niebuhr proves helpful.

EMPIRE DENIED
Recently, there has been a surge of books and articles about empire in recognition of the unparalleled military power of the United States. Now, in a way, this is nothing new-U.S. military superiority has been evident in a variety of ways since the end of World War II. However, the conjunction of the post Cold War world with a U.S. administration willing to directly use military power has raised anew the question of American empire
Talk of a U.S. empire makes most Americans deeply uncomfortable. The national story we learn in school is staunchly anti-empire-we stood up to the Brits, to the Nazis, to the imperial Japanese army. Our motto is "Don't Tread on Me." We are Freedom Fighters, not Freedom Deniers. We are also "can do"ers, workmen (and, occasionally, women) who know how to get the job done. Thus, as Michael Ignatieff has written, "If Americans have an empire, they have acquired it in a state of deep denial" (Ignatieff 2003). The story of republican virtue we have told ourselves has actually been under strain since the end of World War II when we stood out as the clear military and economic victors, our land and industry intact, in the midst of ruins elsewhere.

Reinhold Niebuhr saw the challenge quite clearly in his book, The Irony of American History, written in 1952, at the beginning of U.S. global dominance. Although this work is now over 50 years old, I still find it filled with acute observations about our national identity and self-understanding. Niebuhr called the United States "the most innocent nation on earth." He stressed how we needed to work at the construction and maintenance of this impossible innocence, impossible since "we could not be virtuous (in the sense of practicing the virtues which are implicit in meeting our vast world responsibilities) if we were really as innocent as we pretend to be"(Niebuhr 1952, 23). He perceptively noted that the "opulence" or prosperity of life in the US had helped perpetuate our illusions-"thus far we have sought to solve all our problems by the expansion of our economy," bolstered by a Puritan sense that prosperity and moral virtue are compatible. He worried that our "schizophrenia" about the use of power would enable the same manipulation of history and state by people far from virtuous that he saw occurring in the Soviet Union (Niebuhr 1952, 29, 7, 5).

Niebuhr's characterization of post war US as "drawn into a historic situation in which the paradise of our domestic security is suspended in a hell of global insecurity" (Niebuhr 1952, 7) seems prophetic to say the least. So is his remark that we find it difficult "to believe that anyone could think ill of us" (Niebuhr 1952, 25) as we now find it hard to understand why all Iraqis might not be eager for the U.S. to set up a new country for them. It is painful is to realize that over the past 50 years we have not been able to shed the passion to maintain the illusory paradise-in spite of the challenges to innocence through the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 60's (I see the SDS and white student movements as more in line with the innocence), along with the experience of the Vietnam war.

Niebuhr wrote that our simplistic idealism, combined with our real power, could find itself frustrated with "the tortuous course of history" and resort to what he termed "preventive war" to simplify the situation. (Niebuhr 1952, 145-6). We do not have to wonder very much what he would have thought of the U.S. claiming a policy of pre-emptive strike. For him, American innocence was rooted in the liberal idealism and perfectionism he had criticized for so long. His solution was a dose of his brand of Augustinian realism that acknowledged the necessary limits of the activities of our endlessly sinful selves.

While Niebuhr offers commentary refreshingly at odds with much of the current conversation, I think that his explanation and remedy are not adequate because they do not do not take account of the active work we do in maintaining this innocence of common sense. Although he certainly understood there was a complicated intertwining of virtue and sin, Niebuhr did not always explore deeply the mechanisms of their interaction within the psyche of our nation. In particular, I don't think he engaged with a notion of security as an important part of human life. For him, human agency was about man (and I used the term deliberately) as an isolated liberal individual acting in a brutal, meaningless world. But I would argue that few of us can (or should) live out such a model. Rather, we seek connection and reassurance through many means: religion, family, community, possessions, etc. The acceptance of a preemptive strike argument based upon common sense and self-defense is achieved through an appeal to our desire for security in a world that seems increasingly insecure.

INSECURE FOUNDATIONS
To explore some of the roots of this insecurity requires a look at the underside side of empire. Paired with a refusal to acknowledge empire is a refusal to acknowledge that this war is being fought in a country with a troubled economy. At one end of the economic spectrum, we can read articles about folks with $300,000/year salaries who have been jobless for well over a year, compelled to sell clothing at the Gap. Clergy I met with recently, who are serving churches in very wealthy areas of Atlanta, told of the significant numbers of persons in their congregations who have not worked for the past one and ½ years. Of course, said one clergywoman, several of these folks are still out on the golf course as their savings still have a long way to go.

On the other end of the economic spectrum, Labor Department statistics note a significant increase over the past 2 years of persons who are neither employed nor actively seeking work-they are simply not in the work force. Indeed, the percentage of the population in the workforce is the lowest it has been in 40 years. For example, for the first time since the 1960's, the proportion of women in the workforce, whose participation has been essential to lower middle and middle class prosperity, has declined (Davey 2003).

Recently, the news has been filled with articles about states that cannot balance their budgets, due to a combination of economic downturn, reduced taxes/increased social spending during boomtimes, and devolution of federal programs to the state level. In most states, the sharpest cuts are being planned in health and education. I focus here on health care since it is something people often include as part of a sense of security. Almost every state has made or is planning cuts in Medicaid benefits, eligibility or payments to health care providers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Medicaid insures one-fifth of all children in the United States and helps pay for two-thirds of all nursing home residents, many of them from middle-class families whose assets have been depleted by nursing home costs, which average more than $50,000 a year. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research and advocacy group, estimated last month that as many as 1.7 million Americans could lose coverage altogether under proposals advanced by governors or adopted by state legislative committees this year. Presumably, these pressures will only increase given the costs of paying for the war in Iraq and homeland security, along with the prospect of a tax cut of $550 billion over 10 years.

What we particularly do not want to acknowledge publicly is not that we are under acute economic stress, but the fact that we are experiencing this stress in a country where economic inequality has radically increased in the last several decades. Income distribution has shifted as the less well off have done worse, the middle has shrunk and top has soared. From 1983 to 1998, the bottom 40% of the US lost 76% of income while top 1% gained 42%. As of 1998, the richest five percent of U.S. households held more than 59 percent of the nation's private wealth. The top 1 percent of households held 38 percent of the wealth (The Economic Policy Institute 2003). The pressures of this growing economic maldistribution have most profoundly affected the poor, who are disproportionately persons of color, but are also affecting many who had considered themselves safely middle class.

One of the results of increasing U.S. stratification is very evident in Iraq. In an article describing the changes in the composition of the military, the New York Times reporters remarked that "America's 1.4 million-strong military seems to resemble the makeup of a two-year commuter or trade school outside Birmingham or Biloxi far more than that of a ghetto or barrio or four-year university in Boston." The white and minority working class military is being sent to battle by a far more elite Congress-only one Congressperson, the Times reported, had a child sent to Iraq (Halbfinger and Holmes 2003).

These increasing inequalities are magnified by the loss of common or public space for interaction and dialogue. Those who can afford it retire to enclave housing areas that include enclave shopping and enclave churches. We have fewer opportunities to see one another (other than through the distorting lens of the media) and fewer opportunities to talk with one another. As Robert Putnam highlighted in Bowling Alone, we are far less likely to write our Congressperson or local newspaper, attend public meetings, or involve ourselves in political and civic organizations.

The result, I believe, is an underlying sense of anxiety, a profound insecurity and unease. We worry about the security of our jobs and the safety of our children, but we have no outlet for addressing these feelings. The Clinton government-sponsored National Commission on Civic Renewal notes:
Too many of us lack confidence in our capacity to make basic moral and civic judgments, to join our neighbors to do the work of the community, to make a difference. Never have we had so many opportunities for participation, yet rarely have we felt so powerless. Indeed, according to sociologist Alan Wolfe, an unpleasant feature of contemporary middle-class morality is a "perverse pleasure in powerlessness." (The National Commission on Civic Renewal, 1998) Fear without the possibility of reflection or engagement leads to the creation of frightening "others", shadow figures that lurk at the edge of our conscious thoughts.

PRACTICING PEACEMAKING
For Reinhold Niebuhr, the problem the United States faced was an illusory innocence and the solution was a realistic acknowledgement of sinful power and the construction of an equilibrium where power was balanced and checked. These recommendations are external constraints to be exercised on persons whose sin is assumed to be prideful self-assertion. The strongest internal or psychological recommendation calls for "an experience of repentance for the false meanings which the pride of nations and cultures introduces" (Niebuhr 1952, 150). Thus while Niebuhr's analysis uses a Christian framework to help us recognize our blindness to our imperial power, it does not address the paradoxical sense of insecurity we simultaneously experience. For him security is simply equilibrium, a balance of forces enabling a negative peace. His notion of Christian ethics cannot help us in the construction of a different kind of security -a practice of empowering peace that is rooted in a confidence in selves and others.

We are not going to be able to change a society that can be appealed to by preemptive strike unless we deal with these forms of avoidance or defense-mechanisms. Under conditions ranging from stress to trauma, human beings creatively form ways of avoiding the pain and anxiety they are experiencing by putting psychological barriers between themselves and the realities they are experiencing. Under milder conditions, stress can be handled by avoidance, simply ignoring what won't fit our picture of our selves as good and innocent people. This is the current attitude of the U.S. towards the war in Iraq. However, we can also see, by looking around the world at the violence that emerged in Bosnia or Rwanda, what can happen when insecure conditions become pervasive. Psychologist Robert M. Young writes, "In a reduced state people cannot bear uncertainty. What people do when they feel under threat is to simplify. To simplify in psychoanalytic terms is to regress, to eliminate the middle ground, to split, dividing the world into safe and threat, good and evil, life and death." (Young 2003). Or as Bush said right after September 11, "The forces of evil have chosen to destroy us, because we are good." (CNN 13 September 2001).

The political lobbying done by most of you attending today is vital. But it is only one part of the role churches can play in addressing war, violence, and peace in the world. Along with the rational arguments we can bring to the public arena, we must also work at the level of emotion and belief. Religion can foment violence, providing the symbols and languages for the simplified world of good and evil. But these symbols and languages can also contribute to providing visions and experiences of peace, security and common good. In communities suffering from violent conflict, religious rituals can help "free everyone to develop a new sense of self, to mourn the past together with the victims . . .in order to foster a new future" (Gopin 2000, 190). As the peacemaking role of religion is getting greater attention and exploration by those working in international conflict resolution, we need to also explore locally the ways religions can provide frameworks and locations for persons to deal with the insecurities and conflicts of their ordinary lives, to mourn pain and loss as part of the process of building a new kind of security. Perhaps, then, we will be able to see that a pre-emptive strike policy is not a matter of common sense but of common fearful anxiety. And it will not lead to self-defense but to self-destruction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bush, George W. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington, D.C.: Office of the President, September 2002.
Davey, Monica with David Leonhardt. "Jobless and Hopeless, Many Quit the Labor Force." The New York Times, 4/27/2003, A1, 28.
Eagleton, Terry. "Ideology and Its Vicissitudes in Western Marxism, " in Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 1994.
The Economic Policy Institute. The State of Working America 2002-03, available at http://www.inequality.org/factsfr.html.
Emmett, Dorothy, The Moral Prism. London: Palgrave Macmillan 1979.
Gopin, Marc. From Eden to Armageddon: The Future of World Religions, Violence and Peacemaking. Oxford University Press, 2000.
Halbfinger, David and Steven A. Holmes. "A Nation at War: The Troops." The New York Times, 3/30/03.
Ignatieff, Michael. "The Burden of Empire." The NY Times Magazine, 1/05/03.
National Commission on Civic Renewal, available at http://www.puaf.umd.edu/Affiliates/CivicRenewal/finalreport/
Niebuhr, Reinhold. The Irony of American History. NY: Scribners, 1952.
The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press/Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "Different Faiths, Different Messages,: released 3/19/2003.
Thistlethwaite, Susan. "Just War and a Post-Modern World." USIP Special Report 98, January 2003, 13-15.
Young, Robert M. "Psychoanalysis, Terrorism and Fundamentalism," available at http://human-nature.com.