Rabbi
Michael
Death
with dignity is better than life with humiliation. – Maya Angelou
She
also said something to the effect that people will not remember hurts, but will
carry a grudge if you humiliate them.
“No
one wants to be a terrorist, but if you push them to a corner and give no
options to be out of it, they only satisfaction they get is hurting you while
going down”
War
on Terror is the dumbest idea ever floated - http://theghousediary.blogspot.com/2015/11/war-on-terror-is-dumbest-idea-ever.html
Editor's Note: We at Tikkun have long advocated for the adoption of a Strategy of Generosity in US foreign policy, decisively shifting our perspective on how we relate to the rest of the world from the "power over" approach which has failed miserably for 7000 years and produced nothing but violence and counterviolence to a deep spiritual approach that recognizes the humanity of others and demonstrates our care for the well-being of all who live on the planet. In the following piece published on Truthout yesterday, our Editor-at-Large Peter Gabel offer a philosophical foundation for that vision that shows the relationship between healing and repairing the wounds that separate us and ending the otherwise unending cycle of violence that causes so much human suffering.
If you find this compelling, help us spread the message. Join our interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org/join or donate to Tikkun at www.tikkun.org/donate. Read our proposed Global Marshall Plan which would be a massive step toward implementing what Gabel calls for in this article. Don't just read and love this article--join us in making it happen!!! This article will also appear in a new section of our Tikkun home page which will assemble a variety of articles on how best to deal with ISIS and all other forms of religious and/or nationalist fundamentalisms and which will be updated several times a week: check it out frequently at www.tikkun.org/nextgen/overcomingisis
So If you have a strategy or want to argue against ours, please send it in an email to me. ---Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor Tikkun rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com
Humiliation is the Root of All Terrorism by Peter Gabel
The
recent killings in Paris and San Bernadino have many people at once scared for
themselves and their families, angry in a way that makes some susceptible to
anti-Muslim rhetoric, and also utterly shaken that people in our own midst can
be drawn to ISIS and others who want to do us great violence for seemingly no
reason. How could anyone wish to start shooting and killing large numbers of
innocent, anonymous people in the name of restoring a patriarchal Califate from
a thousand years ago? Syed Farook was a seemingly normal county employee, an
environmental specialist earning $77,000 per year living in relative economic
comfort in southern California, recently married, and the father of a six-month
old daughter. How are we to make any sense of his and Tashfeen Malik's secret
devotion to ISIS and their decision to suddenly become mass murderers who
simultaneously effectively committed suicide, leaving their little child with
her grandmother? And how could tens of thousands of such people like these two
be massing in Syria and Iraq, ready to become martyrs for such a cause?
As
compelling as these questions are, one would have to infer from the public
discussion of these killings and from the mass media that we do not really want
to know the answers. The idea that ISIS and other radical jihadis are simply
"evil," or that they "hate freedom" or are simply incomprehensible purveyors of
a "hateful ideology" (to quote the repeated formulation of Barack Obama) just
begs the question of why they are the way they are and why they believe what
they believe. To actually understand Farook and Malik and those who engage in
violent terrorism, and based on that understanding begin to do something to
change the conditions that have produced and will likely continue to produce so
much human suffering and loss, we have to attempt to grasp the terrorists'
experience of life from the inside, to see them as human just as we are, and to
see what shaped them such that their thoughts and actions make sense to
them.
Only
then can we develop a course of action to alter the future that is more
effective than the plan to "defeat and destroy" a large and scattered population
in a decades-long, diffuse war that will involve our children and grandchildren.
Thus please consider the following:
All
human beings are born seeking love and affirmation from others and every child
manifests this longing in a way that he or she expects to be reciprocated. We
know this from the newborn child's search for eye contact, from the fullness of
the child's vulnerability as he or she extends him or herself to mother, father,
to all others whom he or she first comes in contact with.
But
up to the present time, the world that children enter is not only suffused with
love and generosity and care, but is rather also corroded by fear and doubt, and
by violence, rejection, and what we might call "non-recognition."
When
a child extends him or herself toward the other with a newborn's open heart and
encounters the trauma of non-recognition of his or her humanity, often
manifested as open rejection, indifference, or even violence, the child suffers
a profoundhumiliation. Instead of the world being the embracing and loving and
affirming place that the child had been born anticipating and fully expecting,
the world becomes a traumatic environment of never-being-seen and
never-being-embraced.
Although
every child begins his or her life inside the small cocoon of a family of some
kind, he or she immediately encounters in every adult the legacy of the wider
world that has shaped each adult's being and that expresses the wider world's
"quality of life," its interhuman essence. Although every child is born to one
or two or a few people, that child very quickly becomes enmeshed in a vast
network of social structures and social relations, interhuman patternings that
manifest either the love and affirmation carried by true recognition and
embrace, or the humiliation and pain carried by interhuman patternings of
non-recognition, rejection, the mutual distancing of the rotating fear of the
other.
In
today's world, some sectors of the world's population have spent decades or
perhaps centuries impoverished and demeaned by the world's dominant groups.
Although these dominant groups have themselves acted, often unconsciously, out
of fear of the other, accumulating wealth and power to protect themselves
against others and displacing that process of self-aggrandizement onto the
supposedly neutral effects of a globalized economic market, they have in so
doing created pockets of humiliation, in which whole communities and peoples
have experienced life as discarded, unseen, uncared about, and often on the
verge of starvation. This is true of whole sectors of the Middle East, where the
rooted lives of whole communities of people were destroyed and demeaned by, for
example the imperialist carving up of the region by Western powers following
World War I, by the imposition upon them of inauthentic puppet governments, by
the rise of internal dictatorships resulting from the hierarchical and
alienating distortions of these earlier interventions.
Furthermore,
to the extent that members of these humiliated communities have sought escape in
Western countries, they have often found themselves ghettoized and disappointed,
in a sense re-humiliated refugees who were thrown into supposedly "free"
societies, but where there was no plan for integrating them as fully human and
for connecting them with others in a way that would have provided for them a
sense of recognition, of being seen and embraced.
Against
this background of profound and diffuse non-recognition and humiliation, it is
not surprising that people from these marginalized and demeaned communities
would be drawn to narrative interpretations of the world that would address and
explain theirhumiliation and offer a way out, however pathological, however much
such interpretations may involve substituting for their experience of
humiliation an imaginary vision of the world that can seem to restore each
person's sense of recognition and value, channel the rage resulting from the
long legacy of collective humiliation into purifying violence, and bring into
imaginary being the "perfect" society that once existed until being destroyed
and defiled by "unbelievers," by those who might prevent the vision from being
realized by denying or opposing it.
When
terrorists engage in mass murder, they seek to reverse the dehumanization that
was done to them by dehumanizing their imagined oppressors while seeking to
bring about the redemption of an imaginary world in which they will become
healed, become recognized, become finally included and loved as they anticipated
they would be from their earliest days.
To
summarize this in a simple formula: longing and vulnerability when met with
non-recognition leads to humiliation, which leadsto substitute imaginary visions
that resolve the pain of non-recognition through prideful grandiosity, perfect
unity, and dehumanization of those who dehumanized you.
How
should we respond to this situation?
First
and in the short run, we must defend ourselves against harm and violence, since
there is no instantaneous way of rectifying a psycho-social problem of this
magnitude. Defending ourselves means not only engaging in whatever physical
struggle is necessary against those determined to kill us, but also finding
rational ways of protecting ourselves at home, in restaurants, in concerts and
other public gatherings.
But
second and most important, we must develop an approach to the problem of the
legacy of non-recognition that seeks toheal the wounds that we ourselves are
partly responsible for. This means transforming our policy toward those who have
felt humiliated by us, by our imperialist forefathers, and by our existing
institutions like the world market in such a way that we begin to truly
recognize their humanity. We should seek to eliminate hunger among the
impoverished and demeaned populations of the Middle East; we should help to
rebuild their roads, their bridges, their mosques; we should begin to relate to
these humiliated populations of the world as we always should have, with empathy
and compassion and generosity and care. We should see them as our fellow human
beings and offer them the recognition and affirmation and respect that they were
always entitled to, but which has been systematically and often ruthlessly
denied to them for decades, or even centuries, from the Crusades to World War I
to the Iraq War to the present-day exploitation for our benefit of their oil
reserves. In repair of disrupting, destroying and demeaning their historical
communities, we should enter into present community with them.
This
approach will not work with the most violent of our adversaries or with those
most committed to a delusional end-of-days Armageddon, but it will begin to have
an impact on those widespread communities—in the Middle East and in our own
Western cities—to whom the most violent and apocalyptic currently appeal. It
will begin to provide the "alternative ideology" that President Obama is
constantly calling for but seems unable to find. And it will gradually undermine
the appeal of the most delusional and most violent by healing the conditions
that produce their charismatic power.
The
United Nations Security Council could, if it grasped the truth of what I have
written here and wanted to address it, call a meeting tomorrow and begin.
Peter Gabel is editor at large of
Tikkun and the author of The Bank Teller and Other Essays
on the Politics of
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