This morning I received an angry email calling me out for the arrogance and ignorance of my previous post. I plead guilty to both charges. What I was trying to do in the post was to connect the archaeology of ancient Israel (in particular, my photos of siege-walls and bullet holes) with my experiences as a traveller in the present-day (in particular, my conversation with an Israeli family). At the time I thought this was a rather clever way of stating the obvious: our willingness to fight one another is one thing that has remained constant throughout the ages.
Unfortunately this tactic also entailed an implicit value judgement that ran in my favor, and against the person I was conversing with. ("She doesn't see killing as wrong, whereas I do; therefore I am a better person.") I didn't intend for my approach to stack the deck in this way, and I regret doing so. Instead of using the situation to to sympathize with my Host's plight, or to examine my own cultural blindspots, I approached it as an analytic exercise to comment on the historical development of the near-East region to the present day as it has evolved through conflict and in-group/out-group politics. And I exemplified this point unfairly in a single, one-sided conversation where I was the "winner." In reflecting on the behavior of others without examining myself, I was wrong.
Botched though my execution was, my intent was not to offer moral condemnation, but to present a moral dilemma. Good people--genuinely good people--often do bad things. Horrible things. And that's a fact. We repeatedly, knowingly set aside the claims of conscience for other, purportedly higher, ends. In my post, I made it clear that I find this situation morally problematic; and I still stand by that judgment, even if my presentation of it was tactless. Ignoring the claims of conscience does not lead to a less violent world. Alternatively, I concluded by suggesting that the universal religious imperative to love one's neighbor might provide a different mode of perceiving the world, one which foregrounds (rather than occludes) the humanity of our adversaries, thereby eliminating one major reason why we fight: the "Us vs. Them" mentality. I argued that love and non-violence have an important role to play in bringing peace to the region. This was meant to be less a condemnation of a specific individual, or group of individuals, and more an explanation for the violence of the ages. If the only lesson you learn from history is that it is better to kill than to be killed, then you are most to be pitied.
In framing the issue this way, I did not mean to exempt myself from blame, although as my Angry Reader points out, that is more or less what I ended up doing. I made some effort to offer parallel critiques of U.S. foreign policy and Christian anti-semitism, intending to implicate my own identity-frames in the same shortcomings, the same lack of love. But I did a pretty half-hearted job of it, and always managed to position myself favorably so as to stand aloof from the problems I was discussing--the impervious critic occupying some Archimedian point of truth beyond all possibility of censure. I made my Host into a "Them," and in doing so I made a subtler version of the mistake I blamed her for: that of exempting myself.
For this reason, my retraction must, paradoxically, take the form not of negating but of reiterating, indeed, intensifying what I said previously, extending it to myself as well. My Host has her limiting frames that she must rise above, and so do I--and it is my own shortcomings that I should have stressed, without dwelling on hers. Self-deception runs very deep, as my own blindness in this matter proves. In that sense, my analysis of the moral dilemma may even be more on-target and more off-target than I previously realized. The operative point is that being right without being loving is wrong--in fact, it's the ultimate way of being wrong. Unless I'm mistaken, that's Jesus's main point, isn't it? Many thanks go out to the Angry Reader who brought it to my attention.
Maybe there are only two kinds of people in this world: those who believe that there are two kinds of people in this world, and those who don't. And if that last sentence is true, then what does it say about me that I am able capable of writing it?
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