Cultural Relativism for the Devil
“The Pope has blood on his hands…”
The past week has seen an interesting debate on the Anthro-L listserv, concerning the legacy of the late Pope John Paul II. An April 4 article from Common Dreams entitled “The Pope Has Blood On His Hands” was the starting point. Manchester University professor Terry Eagleton had a great deal to say about the Pope’s opposition to liberation theology, and his conservative stance on gender and marital issues in the Church. However, it’s only in the last of seven paragraphs that Eagleton addresses the title topic: JPII’s legacy of death.
The greatest crime of his papacy, however, was neither his part in this cover up nor his neanderthal attitude to women. It was the grotesque irony by which the Vatican condemned - as a “culture of death” - condoms, which might have saved countless Catholics in the developing world from an agonising Aids death. The Pope goes to his eternal reward with those deaths on his hands. He was one of the greatest disasters for the Christian church since Charles Darwin.
My initial response to the listserv, sent the same day:
I tend to see myself as a far-left radical, but I’m not so sure I can agree with the heftiest accusation of this article - that JP should be held responsible for countless Catholic AIDS deaths. HIV requires, in most cases, a certain amount of promiscuity in order to spread. (It’s not essential that both parties have multiple partners, and certainly a great many of the victims of AIDS have been monogamous - but most of these monogamous individuals’ partners have *not* remained monogamous.) I’m not saying that promiscuity is immoral, but the Catholic Church certainly does… Are we to expect that people have been comfortable with extra-, pre-, or non-marital sex despite the Catholic Church’s teachings, but have shunned condoms *because* of that church’s condemnation? And, if so, is it fair to hold the Church accountable? Please understand: I’m *not* trying to vilify the victims of HIV for their sexual behaviours. I’m just not sure it’s right to vilify someone else for the results of these behaviours.
I do see a difference between this - a religion’s statement concerning morality for those who *choose* to be church members - and what the US Right is attempting to do - withhold information from and feed misinformation (or sketchy information) to young people who may or may not agree with their moral agenda.
If JP’s opposition to Liberation Theology resulted in certain specific deaths, then I think it’s fair to hold him accountable for that. I don’t know anything about that, though.
Bob Offer-Westort
San Francisco, CA
Dustin Wax and my girlfriend both immediately saw an error in my argument: The Pope is not just a religious leader, but is also a major player in world politics. In Dustin’s words:
…the Vatican is not only a religious headquarters but is also a sovereign entity with representation in the UN and other international organizations. The Vatican, along with several of your less women-friendly Islamic nations (and, to a lesser degree, the US), routinely opposes adding issues of reproductive health and/or freedom to the missions of international health organizations. Thus do Catholic religious precepts and notions of morality become transformed into aspects of international realpolitik…
Dustin and Erin may be right: The Pope’s opposition to condom-use may well have political and social ramifications that extend beyond the Catholic world. (Though, see this article for an interesting response to the now-common accusation that JPII is responsible for thousands or millions of AIDS deaths.) The Vatican does have a seat in the UN General Assembly, after all, and is an influential body. I know of no evidence to support his viewpoint, but, even assuming that this is true, there’s something that seems to me a little off about Eagleton’s article…
3,000 little Eichmanns…
Former CU-Boulder Ethnic Studies Department Chair Ward Churchill has recently managed to make himself a very unpopular figure in the US media. In a piece that has been making the rounds of the Internet for three and a half years, now, Churchill now-famously has described the victims of the 11 September 2001 World Trade Center attacks as a ‘technocratic corps at the very heart of the America’s global financial empire’, and, even more abrasively, as ‘little Eichmanns’.
This last comment merits a little further explanation — explanation Churchill didn’t provide in “Some People Push Back”, but did cover in a speech at the 2005 San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair (audio available at IndyBay.org). I was lucky enough to make it to Churchill’s speech, and I’ll transcribe the Eichmann section, below, from the audio file mentioned above:
Eichmann: the epitome of evil in some people’s minds. A name that resonates without understanding, because of the association with a particular genocide performed by a particular regime with a particular point in Eastern Europe. Eichmann: the overseer of the process known as — singular — “the Holocaust”.
Well, the first response comes mostly from the Left, and demonstrates the profundity of ignorance it associates with the use of the term and the nature of the process, because no one in those buildings — those “innocent Americans”, one and all — you remember that point in time when “innocentAmerican” was all one word — those “innocent Americans” had killed no one.
Stunning, because Eichmann himself, having been abducted from Argentina in 1960 — he had escaped; he’d sought sanctuary in South America under Perón. He had received it. He was a manager in a Volkswagen plant when the Mossad caught him, whisked him away, took him to Israel, put him on trial, with survivors of the process as witnesses, the survivors of the victims of the process as prosecutors. No one accused him, even in Israel, of having killed a single human being, Jewish or not.
Eichmann — the real Eichmann — the big Eichmann — was a bureaucrat.
He was a logistician: he arranged train schedules, he arranged the transshipment of gas from the manufacturing points to the chambers in which it would be used. He arranged the transshipment of the gold extracted from the teeth and from the frames of the eyeglasses, to be melted down in ingots and placed in Swiss banks. He arranged the distribution of clothing and the shorn hair, but he harmed, in a direct sense, no one. He performed technical functions to an amazing degree of profficiency.
And even in his own context, the big Eichmann, the real Eichmann was symbolic: he symbolised the little Eichmanns that worked under him, because he did not do it alone; he rerquired an organisation of individuals who, in full knowledge of the consequences of the project in which they were engaged were prepared to perform their function without moral twinge, with a proficiency that made the genocidal process efficient — maximally efficient. They did it for the status, they did it for the stature, they did it for the sense of belonging to a self-appointed superior group, and for no other reason. That’s his own bureau: the bureaucrats under him.But he symbolised as well the technicians that manufactured the gas — they didn’t even administer it, they simply produced it, free in conscience. He represented the engineers and the brakemen on the trains, who could see what the cargo was in the cars, that they were transporting populations toward annihilation; but they killed no one either. And the engineers who kept the trains who kept the trains tressled and functioning in the face of Allied bombing, and those who provided the various other components of technical necessity to make industrial-scale killing possible, and make it work in an efficient manner. He was symbolic even in his own place and his own time.
I took this from Hanna Arendt, who was a noted scholar of the experience of the Holocaust, and who asked for the assignment as a journalist to go from New York to Tel Aviv to witness the trial. She wanted to confront the real Eichmann. In her mind, he epitomised the evil to her, expected to confront a monstrosity. And what she found instead was a mouse — an absolutely non-descript little everyman. And the true magnitude of the horror began to penetrate. And what it was that penetrated was not the malevolence of Eichmann as the Nazi, as the overseer of the Holocaust, but his absolute banality, his everyman dimension. Not that he was a Nazi, but that in this everyman capacity he obviously and clearly signalled the fact that everyone bound up in a mass [status society?] was potentially him. Him. His very absence of unique and monstrous characteristics was that which was most horrifying about him. Going with the program renders you Eichmann. Going with the program voids your humanity. Going with the program makes you not just implicit, but a participant in the process of genocide.
And, in his original essay, Churchill made it quite clear that we were nearly all of us little Eichmanns:
As a whole, the American public greeted these revelations [of the deaths of Iraqi children] with yawns.. There were, after all, far more pressing things than the unrelenting misery/death of a few hundred thousand Iraqi tikes to be concerned with. Getting “Jeremy” and “Ellington” to their weekly soccer game, for instance, or seeing to it that little “Tiffany” and “Ashley” had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords.
Well. I guess at least those of us who are white yuppies…
If it’s not clear already, it will be so soon, that I don’t like Churchill. However, he is often subjected to unfair accusations, in addition to the ones he brings on himself. While he appears to be shedding no tears (though he has used the term ‘mourn’), Churchill has explicitly stated that he does not believe that the 11 September 2001 attacks were a good thing, and he does not support such actions. Rather, he believes that they are a sad, but logical consequence of the United States’ similarly violent and inhumane actions elsewhere in the world (specifically, in this case, Iraq).
I have many arguments with Churchill’s essay, with his speech, and with the 2003 book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. I believe his causal analysis is wrong, his political perspective is implicitly racist, and his strategy and tactics are machista and borderline stupid. For the moment, however, these arguments are irrelevant. Churchill’s fundamental point is correct: Every able person who is not working sincerely to fight against the genocides and other injustices perpetrated by the US government is, in fact, an abettor, and is culpable of those crimes. As our beloved leader told us, we were either with him, or against him. As he told the soldiers of Iraq on the eve of our latest invasion, ‘I was just following orders’ is not an excuse.
We are, most of us, little Eichmanns, as were most of our brothers and sisters who died in that attack in 2001.
Cultural relativism for the Devil
But something’s still wrong. Ṣaddām Ḥussain saw plenty of opposition in his day, but when was Iraq’s last general uprising? Is the majority of the population of Iraq, then, comprised of little Fidā’yīn Ṣaddām? By Churchill’s logic, the only fair answer is Yes.
In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find a population on this planet where the majority did not stand aside and allow injustice of which it was fully aware. Eichmanns abound.
Eagleton and Churchill having had their say, here are my particular perspectives:
The Right is quick to criticise the Left’s use of cultural relativism (often confusing it with moral relativism) when considering foreign or non-white American peoples. Usually, this takes the form of a whiney ‘Why is it okay for Muslims to oppress women when you won’t let us oppress women?’ or something of that nature. But some of this skepticism may come from the fact that we don’t deal with the Right and with moderate America in the same even-handed fashion we would like to think we use when considering more distant cultures. There’s certainly something to the old aphorism which has it that familiarity breeds contempt.
Karol Wojtyła was born into a Roman Catholic family in one of the most heavily and conservatively Catholic cultures in Europe. As a priest, he spent a great deal of time working against the oppressive atheist communist regime. Like all of us, the man who would come to be known as John Paul II was in large part a product of his time, his place, his culture, and his specific circumstances. He was a religious conservative, but it was religious conservatism that had battled oppressive state socialism. He had compassion for the victims of AIDS, and he probably had genuine love for his flock. I see his view of condoms to be misguided, and, in a causal (rather than moral) sense, I believe it’s fair to hold him partially responsible for the AIDS deaths that may have resulted from the Vatican’s policies. But I do believe that the man was trying to do his best, and villification seems an unfair reward.
The majority of the thousands of working women and men who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 were people born in the United States to middle class families between the 1940’s and the 1970’s. All their lives, they had been inundated by commercial media, designed to make them focus on material acquisition, crude entertainment, and the fleeting frippery of American bourgeois life. They are our high school friends, our cousins, our parents, us. And like all of us, despite the emphasis on trivial banality that is drilled into our heads by our government, by advertising agencies, and by corporate media, despite history’s largest effort at brain-washing, many of them, maybe most of them, still managed to love other human beings in their daily lives. They still managed to care about things that mattered. We may not be able to condone paying one’s taxes, or working for the Man, or failing to risk one’s bodily life to oppose a tyrannous imperial government, but if we think about the context from which our fellow Eichmanns came, I believe that we ought at least to let them rest in peace.
I would offer the following thoughts to fellow humanists and social libertarians:
- When we attempt to evaluate individuals or groups of people, we would do well to attempt first to understand their specific conditions — individual and cultural. Most humans against whom we will find ourselves opposed are not evil or malicious but are simply, like us, acculturated.
- If we want to fight the ways of thinking that lead to social and global evils, we need to understand these ways of thinking, and consider the thought patterns and perspectives, rather than thinkers and perceivers, as our enemies. As Ward Churchill’s particular case demonstrates, villifying the banal, non-malicious perpetrators of evil usually does no good, and often actually harms our causes. I doubt that Eagleton’s characterisation of a tremendously popular pope as a murderer who will receive an appropriate ‘eternal reward’ is going to do much to benefit the global HIV/AIDS-prevention and condom-awareness campaigns.
The above points are pragmatic, but for most of us they will suggest a certain moral relativism as well: once we see that most people’s actions result from culturally-conditioned viewpoints, it’s hard to be terribly judgmental. This does not, however, mean that there is no such thing as evil. There are individuals capable of an evil that is truly inspired. There are people who seek personal gain above all, and will subvert cultural values and human emotion to these ends. The trick is to tell the Hitlers from the Eichmanns.