Disproportionate Response?

Recent event surrounding the alleged burning of a Qur'an (Koran) by an American political activist in Florida illustrate the dynamics of response to various cultural stimuli.

Terry Jones burned a copy of the Islamic text as a political statement. Debate continues about whether his action was good or evil. In either case, however, his deed falls into a context of public burning: in Islamic countries, flags and Bibles are often publicly burned as an expression of intense hatred toward other cultures. America and Europe have long chosen the tactic of not reacting, or under-reacting, to this hatred. We do see or hear protest or outcry every time an American flag is burned in a Muslim nation, or when a Bible is defaced, desecrated, or otherwise dishonored. The non-Islamic world sees such actions as expression of thought, which - however distasteful - our notion of freedom allows.

By contrast, one single instance of a burning Qur'an is met with an amazing level of response in the Islamic nations. Dozens of people were killed in rioting, and Hamid Karzai demanded that the U.S. government punish Terry Jones for exercising his symbolic freedom of speech. Indeed, Karzai went to great efforts to ensure that his Afghani subjects were informed, in detail, about both the burning and Karai's response to it. (Whether Karzai acted out of Islamic piety or personal political calculation remains an open question.)

As the Special Assistant to the President and White House Communications Director noted, many Muslims

believe beheading or stoning is the right response to an insult to Islam. And not only that.

Residents of Islamic nations who embrace Christianity face

the death penalty for apostasy and was forced to flee his own country. In some Muslim countries, death is the prescribed punishment for Muslims who convert, for Christians who seek converts and for any who insult Islam.

Remember that "insult" here includes political cartoons in newspapers, or making of documentary films about Islamic culture's treatment of women. Specifically, the former refers to Danish sketches made in 2005 (an order was given for the artist to be executed by assassins); the latter refers to the murder of artist and filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004. In these cases, the principle is that Islamic culture sees killing as an appropriate response to words or symbolic actions, while non-Islamic cultures respond to words and symbolic actions with opposing words and symbolic actions. The one response is disproportionate, the other proportionate and in kind.

Stoning is also seen as proper punishment for women who commit adultery. In Pakistan recently, the governor of Punjab and the Cabinet minister for religious minorities, both Catholics, were assassinated. Why? Both had opposed a law under which a Christian woman had been sentenced to death after some farmhands accused her of blasphemy. The governor was murdered by his own bodyguard, who was then hailed by 500 religious scholars who urged all Muslims to boycott the governor’s funeral ceremony, as he had gotten what he deserved. In the last two years, Christians have been burned alive by Muslims in Pakistan, and by Hindu extremists in India. Christian churches have been torched and scores of the faithful massacred on holy days in Iraq and Egypt. Few of these atrocities have received

significant media attention. A second principle comes into play: words and symbolic actions in non-Islamic cultures are scrutinized in the public media, while no questions are raised about the propriety of words or actions in Muslim nations. An American who burns a Qur'an is subject, at the least, to intense analysis and public rebuke, while deaths and death-threats in Islamic nations pass with little notice.

Which brings us to a re-examination of the idea that America can help bring democracy to the Middle East. First, we might ask if this is possible. Second, if it is possible, would these nations use democracy to elect governments which restrict freedom rather than expand it?

American Religion?

Historians have spent thousands of hours, and gallons of ink, analyzing the religious beliefs of the men who founded the United States of America: from Thomas Jefferson's youthful embrace, and later rejection of, deism to Washington's spiritually-motivated decision to free his slaves; from the traditional Christianity of beer-brewer Samuel Adams to the nontraditional theism of Thomas Paine; from Ben Franklin's abandoning deism to author his own prayer book to the religion of John Adams which sometimes placed more emphasis on the moral than the spiritual.

Although the Founding Fathers disagreed with each other, and historians disagree about what the Founding Fathers meant and believed, one thing is clear: spirituality was central to them as individuals, and to their process as a group in forming the nation via the texts of the last few decades of the 1700's. As Wayne Baker writes:

The one belief that unites our founders is the conviction that religion was the moral backbone of the new republic. Only religion - whatever that religion might be - could get people to rise above their self-interest and become citizens who cared about others.

One the one hand, we might be tempted to express disappointment that the Founding Fathers were often inclined to reduce spirituality to morality: to see religion merely as the path to civil justice. On the other hand, we can be thankful that they saw this clearly - and created the possibility for both liberty and honor.

Badly-Written History

Sadly, lots of good history is ruined by bad history books. The more interesting the historical topic, the greater the chances that someone has written something rather ill-advised about it. A recent mathematics textbook offered the following sidebar:

Most people have heard of Galileo, a colorful Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pisa. The final part of his career centred on an epic battle with the Spanish Inquisition on the validity of the Copernican view of the solar system.

Read carefully, this paragraph offers a stunning paradox: Galileo, who lived in Italy and never set foot in Spain, could not have had any meaningful interaction with the Spanish Inquisition! The author clearly had some vague notion of a disagreement between Galileo and a religious institution, but failed to check for any real facts.

It is true that Galileo, despite his sincere belief in the Roman Catholic faith, did attack, not the faith, but rather the institution of the church. Despite his attacks on the church, however, Galileo was never jailed, never tortured, never executed. He never received any meaningful consequences for his actions.

The author of the math textbook ruined what could have been an interesting historical sidebar, and instead offers us a comedy of errors.

Parallel Cases of Unintended Consequences

Sometimes unanticipated consequences are beneficial, as in the case of the medieval policy of setting up large hunting reserves for the nobility, preserving green space, often as parks, throughout England and other places in Europe. Sometimes unforeseen consequences are harmful, such as the Islamic policy of exiling numerous philosophers, writers, and thinkers during the Middle Ages, which led to a decline in scientific and technological advancement in the Middle East regions. A third class of unexpected consequences create the very opposite of the hoped-for effect: policies of the Czarist government of Russia in the late 1800's were designed to prevent any type of rebellion or revolution against the Tsar, but the harshness of these policies in fact fueled the desire for such an uprising.

History is full of unintended consequences; two parallel cases involve efforts to reform an organization which led to the unintended founding of new and different organizations.

In 1517, Martin Luther did not intend to create a new church; rather, his intent was to reform the existing church - to correct some of its errors and problems. The resistance of the existing church led to the formation of what would become the Lutheran church.

Likewise, in 1775, the Founding Fathers of the United States did not begin with the intent to form a new nation; rather, they (George Washington, Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams, etc.) intended merely to procure their legal rights as Englishmen, and obtain their lawful representatives in Parliament and the rights granted to them by the Magna Carta. It was the resistance of the English government which ultimately caused the Americans to for a separate nation.

The events for which Martin Luther and George Washington became famous were, therefore, unintended consequences!

Teddy Roosevelt and the Coin Controversy

The United States Congress has legislated that the phrase "In God we trust" is the official motto of nation. After voting this into law, it has been re-approved every year, by both Democrats and Republicans. It has appeared on coins and paper money for over a century.

From time to time, various political groups - communists, libertarians, left-wingers, and atheists - have challenged the propriety of the motto, either in the press, or in court. Notice that atheists are here categorized as a political group: in such a circumstance, it is not philosophy which motivates, but public affairs.

Jews, Muslims, Christians, and others have been content with the motto because it is sufficiently generic.

Perhaps a more interesting challenge to the motto came, not from an atheist, but rather from religious Christian who happened also to be the President of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt had long felt that placing God's name on a coin was actually disrespectful to Him, and for two reasons: first, because a coin is the object of greed and materialism; second, because it had led to a number of jokes about politics, money, and banks.

Roosevelt, who had given several speeches urging the American public to read the Bible regularly, saw his opportunity in 1907, when a new coin was being designed. He directed the mint's artist to omit the motto, which had been on coins for over fifty years by that time. Public sentiment, the Congress, and eventually the Supreme Court would uphold the motto, which remains the official expression of the government to this day.

It's Off to Work We Go!

The tension between the way elitists view work and a more moderate view of work runs through history. The nobles of Athens viewed themselves as superior in all ways to their slaves, and saw this superiority confirmed in the fact that the slaves had to work. Work was one of the worst things that could happen to a person in the minds of the Greek aristocracy of the classical era, and it was a badge of shame.

By contrast, the emerging Judeo-Christian tradition saw something respectable in work. The dignity of every human life lent itself to labor, and human effort dignified the task. Yale's Kenneth Latourette describes the attitude toward work among the monks of the early middle ages:

The Benedictine rule and the many derived from it probably helped to give dignity to labour, including manual labour in the fields. This was in striking contrast with the aristocratic conviction of the servile status of manual work which prevailed in much of ancient society and which was also the attitude of the warriors and non‑monastic ecclesiastics who constituted the upper middle classes of the Middle Ages ... To the monasteries ... was obviously due much clearing of land and improvement in methods of agriculture. In the midst of barbarism, the monasteries were centres of orderly and settled life and examples of the skillful management of the soil. Under the Carolingians monks were assigned the duty of road‑building and road repair. Until the rise of the towns in the eleventh century, they were pioneers in industry and commerce. The shops of the monasteries preserved the industries of Roman times ... The earliest use of marl in improving the soil is attributed to them. The great French monastic orders led in the agricultural colonization of Western Europe. Especially did the Cistercians make their houses centres of agriculture and contribute to improvements in that occupation. With their lay brothers and their hired labourers, they became great landed proprietors. In Hungary and on the German frontier the Cistercians were particularly important in reducing the soil to cultivation and in furthering colonization. In Poland, too, the German monasteries set advanced standards in agriculture and introduced artisans and craftsmen.

In addition to being centers of learning, preserving the intellectual treasures of Greek and Roman civilization, the monasteries were also centers of work, and of giving a value and meaning to work. Here we see the emergence of notions which speak indirectly to human equality and human dignity. This might perhaps explain why Europe didn't embrace institutionalized slavery to the extent that other continents did: European culture, and western civilization, could not bring itself to believe that one man was inferior to others merely because he found himself in the role of a manual laborer.

Napoleon's Big Mistake

The crushing defeat which Napoleon's French army experienced in Russia is legendary: Tolstoy wrote a novel about it; films have been made of it. But exactly how did this loss come about? How did an allegedly "great" military leader like Napoleon end up so badly?

To begin, we need to examine two assumptions, as phrased by Joseph C. Goulden (from the University of Texas):

that he was a consistently brilliant military general who ranks as one of the foremost battlefield commanders in history, and that his most calamitous defeat, in his 1812 campaign in Russia, was chiefly a result of "General Winter," the fierce cold and snow that caught his Grande Armee deep inside Russia, hundreds of miles from home.

Perhaps Napoleon wasn't such an excellent commander, strategist, and tactician; and perhaps the Russian victory wasn't merely due to the weather, but rather to the skills of the Russian military.

Napoleon made basic military blunders in the campaign, chiefly by overextending his lines of supply and not providing the logistics necessary to support his army.

In a fight against lesser opponents, those blunders might not be fatal.

But the Russian high command contained intellectual generals who studied military history and knew how to apply the lessons learned to the battlefield. The commander in chief, Mikhail Kutnzov, shrewdly chose to avoid a set battle with Napoleon's superior force. Instead, he relied upon a tactic perfected centuries earlier by the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus, who used small unit harassing actions to wear down a larger enemy through attrition. The "Fabian strategy" worked to perfection (and the concept survives today as part of special operations doctrine).

In addition to an intelligent and skillful leadership, the Russian military had another advantage: horses. Dominic Lieven (from the London School of Economics) writes that:

immense herds dwelt on the steppe lands of southern Russia and Siberia,

and

In many years, the greatest hero of the Russian war effort in 1812-1814 was the horse [which] fulfilled the present day functions of the tank, the lorry, the aeroplane and motorized infantry.

Goulden concludes that

Napoleon could not replace the thousands of horses he lost during the campaign; hence Russian light cavalry relentlessly harassed his retreating columns.

A final Russian advantage was in the field of military intelligence:

Another area in which the Russians enjoyed an overwhelming advantage was espionage. Czarist agents in Paris and elsewhere elicited intelligence from many levels of Napoleon's government.

As the tide turned, and Napoleon's advance became a retreat, the war became one of attrition:

Once Napoleon was put on the run, he desperately fought major rear-guard battles that further depleted his ranks. The Russians, meanwhile, put together a massive logistics operation - 850 carts daily for food and forage, stretching back hundreds of miles. Czar Nicholas and his advisers made an astute political decision: They were not fighting "France" but Napoleon and his insatiable ambitions. His officers strictly enforced an edict to troops to "preserve the strictest discipline and treat the civilian population well." (One cannot resist comparing this conduct with the Red Army's brutality in the waning days of World War II.)

The Russian army of 1812/1814 understood what the Soviet-Russian army of 1945 did not: raping, torturing, and killing the civilian population, along with stealing their goods, burning their houses, and creating famines by annihilating their farms and food supplies are non-productive ways for occupying soldiers to behave. Even as the Russian army of 1814 crushed Napoleon's ego, it won the respect of the lands through which it fought. By contrast, the Soviet army of 1945 earned the contempt of the world by sadistically mistreating civilians.

The legendary proportions of Napoleon's humiliation could, and have, filled books; but

one statistic suffices:Napoleon's Grande Armee numbered 450,000 soldiers when the campaign began. Only 6,000 returned home.