The servers at the humming headquarters of The American Interest collapsed for about 12 hours yesterday, perhaps overcome with excitement that as Christine Russell points out today, New Year’s Eve this year falls on a blue moon.

However, not to worry.  The-American-Interest.com is on top of the problem; we’ve reviewed the literature and are handling this matter like any leading American corporation would do.  First we are flogging all the interns, followed by a reduction in pay and an increase in responsibilities.  Next we have identified some relatively highly-paid employees with large family commitments and laid them off. Third, we are applying for a massive Treasury bailout; $50 billion strikes us as a nice round number.  Finally, we are giving senior management large end-of-year bonuses.

If that doesn’t fix matters, we’ll try something else.  Larger bonuses, perhaps.

Meanwhile, thanks for your patience.

Now it gets tough.  That little baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying so cutely in the manger is the biggest trouble maker in world history, and the shocking claims that Christianity makes about who he is and what he means divide Christians not only from atheists and agnostics, but also splits Christians off from other religions.

If Christians saw that little baby as a beautiful symbol of human innocence and love, there would be no problem.  Even recognizing him as an important teacher and religious leader does not raise many hackles.  Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet and the predicted Messiah; Islam has no trouble with the idea that he was born of a virgin, and the Virgin Mary is a popular and well respected figure for Muslims.

But that’s not how Christians see the baby in the manger.  They don’t think he is a symbol; they don’t think he’s a messenger.  They think he is the real thing.  He is the meaning of meaning, the truth made flesh, the only begotten Son of God.  As a grown man, he would tell people that “I and the Father are one.”  Christians believe he was right, and speak of the baby Jesus and the man he grew to be as one of the Three Persons of God.

For both Muslims and Jews, this an atrocious theological scandal, a fundamental betrayal of the essence of monotheism.  It’s not just that God is One and indivisible; while God is compassionate and caring there is an infinite distance between the Creator and the created, between God and man.  The Christian idea that Jesus is God, non-Christian monotheists feel, is a direct assault both on God’s unity and his transcendence.

For many Muslims, shirk, the improper association of the created with the creator, is the ultimate in blasphemy.  For many Jews, to worship a human being as God is idolatry – one of the worst sins there is.  Either the Christian belief about the baby in the manger is a monstrous error, or it is the most important thing in the world.

That’s not an argument we’ll be settling in this blog, but winning an argument isn’t what I’m trying to do.  My goal is to help Christian and non-Christian readers, whatever they think of the claim, understand what Christians mean when they make it. And so today I will be blogging about the mysterious and controversial Christian concept that lies behind this idea that the baby is God.  This is the Christian idea of the Trinity: the Christian belief that the One God of Abraham is not one person, but three — but that those three persons are one God, not three.

In the old days, almost every educated American, whether he or she were Christian or not, would have some idea about what this doctrine meant.  Not all Americans were Trinitarians; in addition to Jews and the very small number of Muslims in the United States at the time, Unitarians and Mormons also disapproved of the concept. But understanding this idea and at least something of its history seemed important enough both for the sake of understanding American history and culture, English literature, and world history, literature and art that even secular institutions of learning made some effort to inform their students about this idea.

That doesn’t happen much anymore, so let’s take a look at it here on the blog. read more »

Yesterday I blogged about how theists and atheists are the same; we are almost all transcendentalists in the sense that almost all of us find some kind of moral, ethical and even spiritual meaning in life.  Human life amounts to more than eating and scratching, and we want to do something real with our lives.  We have itches that scratching won’t fix.

On this sixth day of Christmas, I want to blog about how theists and atheists are different.  While we all think life means something, we understand that meaning in different ways.  Atheists generally see the meaning of life on two levels: concrete experience and abstract ideas.  For theists, meaning is personal; the meaning of life has a life of its own.

Atheists and agnostics experience the meaning of life in two ways; theists add a third dimension.  The first dimension is experience; there are moments and relationships in life that point beyond the physical realities toward the meaning of life.  Painting a picture, talking with a friend or a loved one, volunteering in a homeless shelter, watching the surf roll up the beach as the sun rises on the horizon: these experiences connect us with something real.  Something triggers an experience of a special moment in which somehow the meaning and purpose of ordinary moments becomes clear.  For many people these experiences are ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘religious:  they experience a feeling of intense meaning and perception that isn’t grounded in any specific religious or theological context.

Some of us have these moments more than others and they seem to be more common at some stages of life than at others, but I’ve never met someone who doesn’t have and doesn’t cherish these moments when things all seem to come together, when the universe seems to make more sense than usual and we feel somehow at home.

A second way that theists and non-theists are in touch with something bigger than themselves is when we perceive the power of ideas and ideals.  Things like justice and freedom can’t be bought in a store or seen on TV, but we feel they are important and real.  They have no physical existence but we not only know what they are; if we don’t have them we hunger for them as much if not more than we hunger for real, physical food.

The idea of truth has the same kind of power.  Whether we think about scientific truth or moral truth, we want to know what it is and we want to see it recognized and honored.  We dislike hypocrisy because it is a crime against truth.  We hate censorship for the same reason.  We believe that human reason ought to be free to operate, free to reach its conclusions, free to share its findings with others.

Where theists and atheists differ is not as a rule on the question of faith.   read more »

[While I'm mostly staying away from politics over Christmas break, here are some thoughts on the White House reaction to the attempted bombing of the Detroit flight last week. ]

A lot of the things that presidents have to do are hard.  That is all the more reason why they should do the easy stuff well.  Handling an incident like the Christmas bombing is something they teach in White House management 101.  The easy part is managing your response to the news and making sure you get the optics right.  The hard part is the policy: figuring out what went wrong, taking the right steps to address the problem, and pressing on with your strategic vision of how to deal with the threat.  The problem for the White House at this point is that when you fluff the easy part, the public starts to wonder if you have what it takes to do the hard part of the job.

When something bad happens, the people want to hear that the President is as concerned as they are, and that he is determined to do everything possible to fix whatever went wrong.  He doesn’t have to have all the answers; he just has to show that he plans to get them — and that his priority in a case like this is the public safety, not the reputations or well being of bureaucrats and cabinet officers.  The President needs to get on the public’s side of the issue: he’s upset, and he’s not going to rest until he has all the answers.  He tasks someone specific with a thorough no-holds-barred investigation about what went wrong, and promises to take all necessary steps to ensure the public safety.

That’s the necessary business at hand; the bigger the problem the more august and confidence-inspiring the investigator (or panel) should be.  You can, by the way, ask a Republican to carry out the investigation.  Then, reassurances given, the President goes on to do something this President is very good at: educating the public about what has happened and what it means.  You put the incident in context, relate it to your quest of broader objectives and your overall strategy.

What the White House seems to be missing is that this sort of moment is an opportunity to connect with the public while its attention is focused and to get out the message about this administration’s approach to the terrorism threat.  In particular, it’s a chance to connect with women.  He’s lost the angry white male vote — not that he ever had much of it.  His danger is that he’ll lose the soccer moms: voters who like a lot of what this President stands for but who are worried about security and worried about debt.

Fumbling around on something like this hurts you twice.  First, there’s the damage done when you appear out of touch or defensive, subtly reinforcing the narrative that you aren’t good at this part of the job.  Second, and perhaps more important in the long run, there’s the cost of the missed opportunity.  You had a chance to connect with the people and reinforce your basic messages, and you didn’t do it.

The one thing that is certain about presidencies is that unexpected things happen.  This White House in many ways has been a surprisingly competent operation, especially for a first year team.  But the repeated failure to seize the initiative in the face of the unexpected is a serious weakness, and it’s one that needs fixing, fast.

Cross posted in The Arena at Politico.com.

Yesterday King Herod’s massacre of every child in Bethlehem under the age of two shocked us out of the idea that Christmas is basically a pretty holiday about presents and elves.  Christmas is serious business, at least as Christians understand it.  The birth of the baby in the manger is connected with the murder of the babies in the streets of Bethlehem and indeed to the sorrow and suffering that have marked the long and bloody journey of the human species.  Christmas is the unveiling of God’s plan to save us from ourselves without stripping our moral freedom from us.

The shocking claim of Christmas, that the baby in the manger is the God of Abraham and Isaac, the maker of heaven and earth, the uncreated creator of all things is at least as hard to understand as it is to believe.  But that shocking claim is why Christians celebrate the day: they believe that this baby, born of a virgin in Bethlehem of Judea, was the only begotten son of God, the long prophesied Messiah, and the savior of the world.  For the people who think this, it makes perfect sense that the world’s biggest annual celebration is held in his honor; his birth was the biggest and best thing that ever happened.

Forget believing or disbelieving this; if we are going to understand what Christians mean by these ideas, we have to unpick some concepts and examine some unspoken assumptions.  We need to know what Christians mean by God, why they think God had a son and what they think God’s son was doing being born at all, much less being born in Bethlehem.  These are some big questions and we won’t get them all answered in one day; those of you who stick with me through the rest of the Christmas season will, I hope, have a better idea how this all hangs together by the time we are done.

The place to start is with the idea of God: why do Christians and so many other people believe in an invisible ruler and creator of the universe – and then how does the Christian idea of God differ from the others?  We’ll go on from there to see how the Christmas story makes sense to Christians in the light of these special beliefs.

Whether we look at Christianity or at other religions, the idea of God doesn’t come from the realms of science or philosophy.  That is, most people don’t believe in God because they want to understand how evolution works or how the universe came to exist.  Most people haven’t taken classes in formal logic to evaluate the claims and counter-claims of various world philosophies before making their choice.  They believe in God because they feel that life means something. read more »

Manger is the French word meaning “to eat”; a manger is a place where you put hay and similar things for the animals in a barn to eat. The swaddling clothes, as in ‘wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger’ were used to wrap up the limbs of newborns so they wouldn’t injure themselves by moving too much.

Jesus was born in a shed, not at home, not in a palace, not in a hospital. (Not that anyone was born in a hospital in those days, or that any mothers had anesthesia.) At one level this is a message about the equality of everyone in God’s sight. He didn’t send Jesus into a palace. But when preachers talk about this scene as attesting to God’s identification with the poor, they get it wrong and they miss the real point of the story.

Mary and Joseph weren’t staying in the stable because they were poor. The problem was that the inn was all sold out; Mary and Joseph happened to turn up at a ‘peak travel’ time without a reservation. The inn did the best it could by them, but with all the regular rooms committed, they could only offer the use of an outbuilding. There would have been plenty such in those days built to store supplies and house animals; between the animals that the inn would use for work or to provide food and those accompanying travelers, the various sheds and barns attached to an inn would see a lot of use.

If the Christmas story had taken place in the United States today, the story might read that the hotel was full, so management found Joseph and Mary a spot in the security office of the parking garage. When the baby was born they put it in Pampers and laid it on the desk.

So far as we can tell, Jesus was born into something that corresponds, sort of, to the modern American concept of the ‘middle class’: more middle middle than upper middle. The family had money to travel as far as Bethlehem and could have paid for a room if there had been one. Joseph was a carpenter: a skilled workman at a time when such work was more valued than it is now. No one would mistake this family for a family of privilege or wealth, but in their home Jesus would be unlikely to go hungry and would have the chance to learn to read and get an education. It’s very hard to make comparisons between such different eras and societies, but one way for Americans to think about Jesus’ place in the life of his time would be to think of Joseph as something like a construction contractor from a town nobody has heard much about in a state people look down on. There might be a family story about some kind of genealogical connection with George Washington through Martha. The town librarian actually thinks there is something in it, but nobody, including Joseph, much cares.

Jesus came from a place in his society that gave him the opportunities to learn about the cultural and intellectual history of his people and to acquire the basic intellectual skills of his milieu (though there is no evidence that he learned Greek or Latin), but there’s no trust fund attached, no legacy at an ivy league college, and no one anywhere was ever impressed with his background.

I hate to say this to the liberation theology folks, but Jesus doesn’t seem to have been one of the ‘truly’ dispossessed. He was a hick and an outsider, but he wasn’t particularly poor.

Given this perspective, some of the ‘poor baby Jesus’ carols and sermons leave me cold. There’s a folk song that always rubs me the wrong way:

Jesus, Jesus rest your head
You have got a manger bed.
All the evil folks on earth
Sleep in feathers at their birth.

No: Christians think there is good and evil mixed up in all people, rich and poor. And while God has a special love and concern for the poor he’s not a trust-fund liberal who simultaneously romanticizes the poor and condescends to them. He knows that the poor can be just as nasty and conniving as the rich – and that rich people, too, aren’t all bad.

Christmas doesn’t need to be sentimentalized or hyped; it is shocking and moving enough as it is. And today, the fourth day of Christmas, the traditional liturgical calendar has a powerful way of jolting us into serious reflection on the meaning of the event, jolting us out of our turkey comas and eggnog overdoses with an unforgettably grim story.

December 28 is not just the fourth day of the Christmas season in the traditional Christian calendar; it is also Holy Innocents’ Day, the day we remember the deaths of the babies in Bethlehem who were murdered at Herod’s command. read more »

It is not quite the most controversial verse in the Bible, but Luke 1:35 comes close.  Mary has just replied to the angel Gabriel’s statement that she will be the mother of the Messiah with a question of her own:  “How shall this be,” she says in the words of the King James Version, “seeing I know not a man?”

Don’t worry about that, says the angel.  “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.”

In other words, Jesus would be born of a virgin, a woman who had not, in the biblical sense, known a man.

I only say this is not the most controversial verse in the Bible because the Virgin Birth of Jesus is one of the points on which Muslims and Christians agree.  In verse 21 of Sura 19 in the Quran, the angel tells Mary that although she has not known a man (verse 18) yet God will give her a child.  Between the estimated 2.1 billion Christians and the 1.5 billion Muslims out a total estimated global population of 6.8 billion, there are an awful lot of people who believe this — although of course not all Christians nor all Muslims accept the idea that their respective scriptures are literally true.

But even if both the Quran and the New Testament agree on this point, the idea of the Virgin Birth is one of the most controversial and confusing theological concepts around, and a Yuletide blog which didn’t take on the topic wouldn’t be doing its job.  So: what does this concept mean, and why do Christians care?

Maybe the first point to clear up is this: the Virgin Birth and the Immaculate Conception are not the same thing.  The Virgin Birth is simply the idea that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born and that Jesus had no earthly father.  The Immaculate Conception is the idea that Mary herself was born without original sin.  Until the last three more skeptical centuries, the doctrine of the Virgin Birth had been accepted by virtually all Christian churches and theologians going back to Biblical times; the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, widely discussed and debated for many centuries, was officially proclaimed to be a doctrine of the Catholic Church by Pope Pius IX in 1854.  Other major denominations do not accept this idea as official doctrine, although it is easy to find Eastern Orthodox and Anglican Christians who are in broad sympathy with the idea.

From the earliest times people have raised the obvious questions about the Virgin Birth.  A claim that Jesus was the son of Mary and a Roman soldier Pantherus has been making the rounds since at least 180 AD; it has recently been revived by the film director Paul Verhoeven.  I’m not holding my breath for a ’scientific’ resolution of this question; I am not sure in any case how you would check for God’s DNA in a paternity test.  People have to make their own decisions about what to believe based on the evidence that already exists.  I would only observe that if you believe (as I do) that God made the universe and everything in it, and if you believe that he upholds the universe and cares about the well being of each individual person, then to reject the Virgin Birth as a physcial impossibility seems a little forced.  Swallowing camels and choking on gnats, as Jesus might put it.  But that’s me: this is exactly the kind of question that everyone needs to face on his or her own.

In any case, for convinced Christians and curious non-Christians alike the question at hand isn’t really can we prove that the Virgin Birth did or did not occur; the question is what does the doctrine mean to those who hold it?  Why do Christians think this is an important idea?  There are, I think, two main points that the doctrine makes: one about Jesus and one about Mary as an individual and more broadly about women. read more »

For all the attention it gets in the world today, Christmas is not that big of a deal in the Bible.  The New Revised Standard Version that I mostly use is 1270 pages long; about one half of one percent of this text deals with the Christmas story.

(If you want to read the whole thing now, go ahead; it will not take you long.  The standard Protestant Christian Bible is divided into two ‘testaments’ and 66 ‘books.’  Books of the Bible are numbered into ‘chapters’ that are usually one or two pages long; each chapter is divided into verses that more or less correspond to a sentence of text.  In most Bibles, whether in print or on the web, the big numbers mean chapter breaks and the small numbers mark the verses.  The Christmas story is found in three of the New Testament books: Matthew, Luke and John.

In Matthew, the Christmas story and its immediate sequel runs from Chapter One, verse one through the end of Chapter Two at verse 23 [or Matthew 1:1-2:23 as this is usually written].  In Luke, home of the longest and most elaborate Christmas account, the story runs from Luke 1:5 through 3:38.  In the gospel of John, 1:1-1:18 give his version of the story.

If you invest twenty minutes or so reading these accounts you will know as much as anybody else in the world about the written history of the birth of Jesus; these are all the written sources from within one hundred years or so of his birth that exist.)

The first and oldest version of the story in Matthew starts out rather strangely; it gives a 42-generation genealogical tree for Joseph, “the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born.”  The purpose seems to be to link the baby Jesus not only to the history of the Jewish people going back to Abraham, widely considered the father of the nation, but also to the royal line going back to the heroic Goliath-killing King David.

That’s important; one of the main themes of the New Testament is that Jesus of Nazareth was The One, the heroic savior that the Jewish scriptures that Christians refer to as the ‘Old Testament’ foretold.  (The libretto of Handel’s Messiah is basically a collection of Old Testament passages which Christians believe are fulfilled by Jesus’ life and death.)  The Messiah was, Christians believed, predicted to be a descendant of the Jewish national hero King David and the ancient kings of Judah; he was also going to be born in Bethlehem, the town where David’s family had its roots.

As a literary device, starting a book with a genealogical tree strikes me as less than gripping.  In the older translations instead of translating the Greek word ‘egennaysen’ as ‘was the father of,’ they used the simpler and more literal ‘begat.’  “Abraham begat Isaac; Isaac begat Jacob,” and so on.  There are a lot of passages like this in the Bible, and “the begats,” as these are known, make some of the dullest reading around.

Think of these begats as ‘rolling the credits’ before the main story begins; Luke’s longer Christmas story will end with another family tree for Jesus, this one going all the way back to Adam.  So one gospel rolls the credits at the beginning, the other at the end.  Theologically, the point is the same: they anchor the story of Christmas and of Jesus to the larger stories of Jewish and human history.

However, the ‘begats’ in Matthew and Luke do raise two problems for readers. read more »

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all!  We are having a tense morning at the ancestral Mead home today, jumping whenever the telephone rings.  There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the other person’s presents.  I’ve never known anybody to actually get an extra present this way, but we all continue to try.  If you call us on Christmas Day, don’t expect anybody here to answer with “Hello?”  and give you a chance to say “Christmas gift!”  We are onto this trick and to protect our rich hauls of presents we always answer the phone with an aggressive “Christmas gift!” to get in first.  So don’t call us unless you are ready to part with a present.

Today the Christmas blogging continues; this is the second of what could end up being as many as thirteen Christmas posts.  The series started yesterday on Christmas Eve and will, as time and energy permits, continue through January 6, the traditional end of the Christmas season.  Unless something truly exceptional happens, I’ll be taking a break from the political and historical blogging until the new year, and for much of the time I’ll be conducting important research into tropical ecosystems in Belize.  Internet access may be intermittent; it’s possible also that the heavy snorkeling schedule that the intensive research requires will cut into the blog time.

When I was a kid my parents used to set up a manger scene every year.  During Advent, the four weeks before Christmas, Mary and Joseph would set out en route to the manger, passing through the different rooms of the house and getting a little closer each day.  On Christmas Eve they got to the manger and on Christmas morning, they would be there with the baby Jesus, an ox, a donkey and the requisite shepherds and angels.

That was also the day the figures of the three wise men would set out toward the manger, retracing Mary and Joseph’s journey through the house until they joined the baby and the shepherds on January 6.  By then we were all pretty sick of Christmas and were happy to pack up the manger scene, take down the Christmas tree, and get on with our lives.

The manger scene these days really is the face of Christmas for most people.  The first one seems to have been assembled by St. Francis of Assisi in 1223.  It was a bit more dramatic than the ones we see today; he used actual living people rather than plastic figurines.  The animals were real, too, although there isn’t any direct evidence in the Biblical story that there were animals anywhere nearby.

Christmas has been a contentious holiday at least since then. read more »

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care at the ancestral Mead mansion; and as I settle down for a long winter’s rest I am taking a break from politics and war, sort of, to do some good old fashioned Yuletide blogging.

In particular I want to blog about Christmas itself and what it means.  Somehow my generation decided to leave this part out of what we passed down: we’ve bought a lot of Christmas presents but we were too busy to think much about the meaning of the situation or to teach the next generation much about this holiday and the religion which it defines.

That was a mistake.  On behalf of us all, I apologize, and this Christmas I’ll be doing my little bit to make amends.

I’ve got some time to do it in.  As most of us know from the song about the partridge and the pear tree, there are twelve days of Christmas.  The season ends on January 6, traditionally celebrated as the day when the three wise men arrived in Bethlehem with those gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.  In Elizabethan England the last night of the Christmas season was celebrated with special parties and feasts.  Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night was written to be performed at that special time of year.

Even today, the twelve days of Christmas are more than a phrase from a carol.  In much of the Spanish speaking world, January 6 is when kids get their presents. Jesus got gold, frankincense and myrrh; they get video games and dolls.  In New Orleans, January 6 marks the end of the season of Christmas holiday parties and feasting, and the start of the Carnival season of parties and feasting.  When I lived there I remember people bitterly complaining how unfair life was; while everyone else in the country was going on post-Christmas diets, we poor put-upon people in New Orleans still faced a month of king cake parties and packing on the pounds.

In the old days people kept a Yule log burning during the holiday season; I’ll be trying the modern cyber equivalent this Christmas with a Yule blog.  From now until January 6, I’ll be Yule-blogging: reflecting on Christmas in ways that I hope will make sense to Christians and non-Christians alike.

The meaning of Christmas is much bigger than the trite clichés that usually come up in this context; I won’t just be writing about the Importance of Giving and the Desirability of Being Nice. Christmas, at least the way I was taught, is a lot more than a merry interlude in the darkest, nastiest time of the year.  It is more than getting or even giving.  It is more than carols and candy, more than wonderful meals with the people you love best in the world.  It is much more than the modern echo of the pagan festivities marking the winter solstice and the moment when the sun begins to reverse its long and slippery slide down the sky.

For Christians, 78% of the American people according to the latest Gallup poll, Christmas is the hinge of the world’s fate, the turning point of life.  It is the most important thing that ever happened, and we celebrate it every year because it is still happening now.  Whether we know it or not, whether we appreciate it or not, we are part of the Christmas Event that has turned history upside down.  There’s a reason why we date the birth of Christ as the year 1 and why traditionally the world’s history was divided into BC, before Christ, and AD, anno domini, the year of the Lord..  (Actually, the monk who tried to calculate it seems to have gotten it wrong; Jesus was probably born four to six years “BC”.)

Non-Christians, including the 9% of Americans who adhere to a non-Christian religion and the 13% who claim no religion at all, need to know about Christianity too.  Religious education has pretty much fallen by the wayside in American life today.  That’s a problem in more ways than one; I see the consequences all the time when students I teach – and policy makers and journalists I know – simply do not comprehend the cultural foundations of American politics and cannot understand the ways that so many people here and around the world are moved by religious values and ideas.  At Yale I teach a course on the relationship of American religious ideas to American foreign policy, and I have had smart, well traveled and otherwise well-read students in that class who have never opened a Bible (or any other holy book) in their lives. read more »

Merry Christmas to those who feel so inclined and Season’s Greetings to the rest!

Team Mead moves into holiday mode today; the halls are decked with holly and the wreath is on the door.

We are celebrating the season by shifting focus; on Christmas Eve and all through the twelve days of Christmas to come, I’ll be Yule blogging the holidays.  There will be much less than usual about politics, and, barring unforeseen events, much more about Christmas and the meaning of the season.

Regular political, historical and other blogging will resume soon after the New Year; until then, Lauren, Sam and I wish you and yours all the best at this special time of the year.

Scott Erwin, a former Team Mead associate, ditched his old friends at Team Mead and threw away a brilliant future as a lifetime Mead minion simply to chase after the illusory ‘prestige’ of a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford.  After several years of intensive study of the intellectual and theological links between Reinhold Niebuhr, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Scott has sent us a Christmas Eve blog post on the question of just how Niebuhrian President Obama actually is.

Meanwhile, in an equally extraordinary piece of disloyalty, official blog aide Sam has gone home to his family for the holidays.  Bah, humbug! I say; it’s a poor way to pick a man’s pocket.

But every cloud has a silver lining; we can hope that in all the holiday excitement Sam won’t notice this post and get ideas above his station.  Scott is one of three seemingly loyal team members over the years who defected to the UK for study at Oxford or Cambridge.  The fierce and implacable bench of lawyers working night and day to sue and harass the team’s enemies have informed me that the US-UK extradition treaties have no provisions to cover the case of runaway interns.

So: in hopes that Sam won’t check this post and discover that there are paths to the future that don’t involve decades of loyally underpaid service to the mighty force that is Team Mead, here are Scott Erwin’s thoughts on the question of just how much of a Niebuhrian President Obama really is.

From Scott Erwin:

President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech has opened another chapter in the debate over his indebtedness to twentieth-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.  Since Obama identified Niebuhr during the campaign as “his favorite philosopher” every one of the president’s major public addresses has been scrutinized for Niebuhrian themes.  What the majority of commentators and Obama, himself, seem to have overlooked is that Niebuhr was not only an intellectual but also a dynamic actor on the national stage in his own right.  This broader understanding is key to understanding Niebuhr and what lessons Obama should be drawing from him as the mission progresses in Afghanistan.

Any examination of Niebuhr’s life must feature the global events he influenced (and was influenced by), beginning with World War I.  As a young minister in the German Evangelical Synod Niebuhr became a forceful advocate for U.S. intervention and, in a show of patriotism, convinced the Synod to remove “German” from its name.  Disillusioned by the post-war settlement Niebuhr became a pacifist and joined the Socialist Party, actually running for a seat in the New York State Senate on its ticket in 1932.  His early recognition of the threat posed by Nazi Germany led Niebuhr to drop his pacifist beliefs and resign from the Socialist Party in 1935.  It is no wonder that the first biography written about Niebuhr was entitled Courage to Change.

It was against the backdrop of German bombing raids that Niebuhr gave his Gifford Lectures (a prominent theology lecture series) at Edinburgh University in 1939, later published as The Nature and Destiny of Man.  Although widely received as an academic treatise on sin, the work was also a political critique of Western civilization and its inability to stop Hitler’s rise.  In the early stages of World War II Niebuhr urged Americans to come to the aid of the United Kingdom by writings hundreds of articles and joining numerous political committees.  Frustrated by the isolationist sentiment of his country Niebuhr viewed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as an act of divine judgment to “overcome our recalcitrant will.”

Upon America’s entry into the war Niebuhr supplemented his unflinching support of the Allied cause with strong warnings against the jingoistic attitude he had embraced in the previous world conflict.  Additionally he condemned the widespread vilification of Germans in the American press by highlighting the domestic opposition to Hitler and the heroic efforts of martyrs such as theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  Indeed Niebuhr described his wartime approach as “being in the battle and above it,” explaining, “To be in the battle means to defend a cause against its peril, to protect a nation against its enemies…To be above the battle means that we understand how imperfect the cause is which we defend, that we contritely acknowledge the sins of our own nations.”

An attempt to strike this delicate balance defined Niebuhr’s journalistic writings and political advice to government officials such as George Kennan during the early stages of the Cold War.  While these efforts led Time magazine to identify him as “America’s greatest theologian” in 1948, Niebuhr repeatedly felt that he failed to live up to his own standards.  For instance, he repeatedly referred to the “evils of communism” and cast the emerging conflict between the two world powers in Manichean terms.  Feeling the need to restore equilibrium in his own perspective Niebuhr wrote The Irony of American History, a cautionary tale against national self-righteousness that continues to have salience in foreign policy circles today.

A revealing part of Irony is found in its concluding pages in which Niebuhr identified Abraham Lincoln as the historical figure which best embodied the principle of being in the battle and above it or combining a “moral resoluteness about the immediate issues with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning.” Given the overall emphasis of Irony, Niebuhr stressed the latter half of the formulation by highlighting Lincoln’s “brooding sense of charity” and magnanimity toward to South as found in his Second Inaugural Address (“Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God”).  Niebuhr’s many other references to Lincoln in separate works reveal, however, that he was equally as impressed by the combination of ruthlessness and resolve with which the sixteenth president successfully conducted the Civil War.

Given Obama’s interest in Niebuhr (and Lincoln) what implications should the president be drawing as he presides over the current conflict in Afghanistan?  It seems apparent from Obama’s humble and restrained rhetoric on America’s role in Afghanistan, and the world generally, that he is capable of securing a view above the battle.  What is less certain is whether he will show the mettle in battle that Niebuhr idolized in Lincoln and other political figures such as Winston Churchill.  Niebuhr may have wanted a leader who appreciated the moral ambiguity of warfare, but he would not countenance signs of ambivalence in his commander in chief.  Niebuhr, after all, accepted the fire bombing of German cities and the use of atomic weaponry to end World War II.  If Afghanistan is a war of necessity as Obama has claimed, then Niebuhr would want him to conduct the affair as if that were the case.  Commentators attempting to determine the degree to which Obama is relying on Niebuhr going forward would be wise to focus more on the president’s policies and less on his words.

Today as we observe the 30th anniversary of the Soviet move into Kabul, it’s useful to think about the concept of ‘blowback’: a term that originally referred to the unwanted consequences of covert action and is now often used to describe the ways in which foreign policy choices of the past come back to haunt us.

The term gained currency after 9/11; those attacks were seen as ‘blowback’ from US support for the Afghan resistance and their foreign Islamic allies during their war against the Soviets.  The Iranian revolution against the Shah has been called blowback from the U.S.-assisted overthrow of the Mossadegh government in 1953.

At one level I don’t have a problem with the term.  Actions do have consequences, many of them both unforeseen and unwelcome.  But the word has been used so foolishly and so broadly that in the words of the book of Job it “darkens counsel”; it confuses rather than explains. 

Take the Cold War.  In one sense the whole long and miserable Cold War was blowback from our support for Stalin during World War Two.  If we hadn’t supported him and propped up his economy during the war, Hitler might well have beaten him.

No aid to Stalin, no Cold War.  No aid to the Afghan freedom fighters, no worldwide terror threat today.

Well, maybe.  But if we hadn’t aided Stalin against Hitler, we might well have ended up with something worse: Hitler in control of Europe.  And if we hadn’t helped the Afghans fight the Soviets, the Cold War might have gone on much longer than it did, with God only knows what consequences for the world.

Just because it generates blowback does not mean that it’s a mistake.

The single most common error people make in thinking about foreign policy is to believe that the road to peace and stability is very simple.  If well-intentioned people pursue morally good and practically sound policies with normal skill, the thinking runs, our international problems will wither away and war and injustice will disappear.

The truth is that we are always facing choices like the choices of 1941 and 1979.  We are always having to hire Beelzebub to fight Satan.  “If Hitler invaded Hell,” said Churchill, “I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil on the floor of the House of Commons.”  You do what you can and must sometimes, and deal with the consequences later.

Somtimes it’s even worse.   read more »

Today is not one of the great days in the history of American foreign policy. In fact it’s the 202nd anniversary of one of the stupidest things we ever did. On this day in 1807 a besotted Congress passed a law essentially banning all US foreign trade at the request of President Thomas Jefferson. It was one of the great spectacular flame-outs of American foreign policy history, one of those rare ‘perfect failures’ that, like the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba or the response of Jimmy Carter to the Iranian Revolution, followed the famous road of good intentions straight to hell.

The misbegotten Embargo Act caused an economic depression that devastated the livelihoods of the administration’s supporters. Farmers couldn’t export their crops; urban industrial workers, sailors and artisans lost their jobs in droves. The Great Embargo also infuriated its enemies as powerful merchants and financial companies reeled under the disruption of trade. Jefferson was elected as a ’small government’ man; the Embargo led to the greatest expansion of federal authority and power before the Civil War as federal officials tried to clamp down on every ship in the country.

Yet it failed in all its goals. When the Embargo Act (and the equally bizarre and misguided follow up acts that closed down the loopholes left open by the first act) was finally lifted at the end of Jefferson’s administration, nothing had changed. America had detonated what it thought was the ultimate weapon in its arsenal, the economic equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. The result was a muffled squeak; the loss of America’s trade had almost no impact on the policies of the countries we hoped we would starve.

The failure of the Embargo did not discredit the ideas behind it.  Right up until the present day, Americans continue to overrate the power of economic sanctions to bend other countries to our will without war.  This is less because we are stupid than because we are narcissistic, slothful and vain.  We think other people are just like us, and we prefer pleasing illusions to ugly facts both when it comes to the wider world and also and especially when it comes to ourselves.

There are two ways the narcissism comes in:  we overestimate how important we are to other people, and we assume that decision makers in other countries are as motivated by pragmatic and commercial considerations as we are.

The embargo showed both of these delusions on full and glorious display.   read more »

The infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (work will make you free) sign over the main gate of the original Auschwitz camp has, it appears this morning, been found in Poland.  It had been reported stolen over the weekend.  As far as police have determined at this point, the thieves were thinking about money, not politics.  They aren’t neo-Nazis, anti-Semites or Holocaust deniers; they just wanted to make a buck and thought that working for it was too much trouble.

Regular readers of this blog know I visited Auschwitz some twenty years ago; it was there, at the site commemorating the execution of the camp’s commandant, that I realized that I don’t oppose capital punishment on principle.  I’m glad they hanged him and I only hope that before he died he acquired some insight into the enormity of what he had done.

In those days the grip of Communism on Polish life was slowly thawing; the freeze was still on at Auschwitz, where the old communist order was still running the camp.  It wasn’t quite as egregious as the communist presentation of Buchenwald near Weimar in what was then still East Germany.  There the communist propaganda was as inescapable as it was incredible.  My favorite was the proclamation from the communist mayor of Weimar hailing the “well known” spirit of restraint and order that marked the Soviet occupation of the region in 1945.  (For those who don’t know the history, the Soviets, though nowhere near as brutal as the Wehrmacht on Soviet territory, rather famously raped and looted their way across the Reich, and random group rapes of German women continued for many months after the fighting stopped.  Germany 1945 by Richard Bessel has the full story.)  It’s hard to know who they thought the German-language sign was fooling; practically everyone who visited would have known the real story from family and friends.

The communist role at Auschwitz was mainly demonstrated by the poor quality of the visitor’s cafeteria and book store, and I found myself wondering queasily what capitalism would do with the gift shop at Auschwitz.  And it was hard to complain about the greasy, heavy food in the cafeteria: “The food at Auschwitz was terrible” is possibly the whiniest and least appropriate comment the human tongue can make.

Possibly because they were demoralized by the coming political changes, the administrators of the camp were unbelievably lax.  Visitors could and did climb up on the roof of the small death chamber by the headquarters, pull up a small section of the roof and peer down to the cubbyhole in which the Nazis would place the poison gas.  It was the Disneyland of Hell; the different buildings had everything from the crematoria where the bodies were burned to the spectacles, shoes, clothes and color-sorted piles of women’s hair taken from the bodies.

The whole question of Holocaust tourism is a difficult one; on the one hand one wants to see and thinks the rising generations should know.  On the other — there is such a thing as obscenity. read more »