ATTITUDE TOWARD MIDDLE EAST VIOLENCE

The statement, “Man’s inhumanity to man” is really a question. Why do we do what we do to each other especially to groups of other people? In fact, how do we identify groups to mistrust or to mistreat?  President Obama justified the bombing of ISIS in Iraq, in part, as a move to prevent genocide, which caused a flurry of verbal activity in the media. One of the things I made note of was what I considered an astute comment; the comment was that genocide happens for one of four reasons: religion, race, ethnicity, and nationality. I don’t remember who made the comment but, as simplistic as it is, it was accurate but didn’t seem to go far enough in terms of an explanation. What is it about these four groups that cause us to the group adherents of these groups in such inhuman ways? What makes all of this hate even more shocking is that every one of us belongs to one of these groups; thus it is personal, which means we should at least try to understand why we act the way we do.  

One of the most confounding factors about these “identities” is that we often live in integrated societies. In fact, in some cases, we have a choice but for others we are not able to chose; in the case of race, we are pretty much what we are. This is also true of our nationality and to the certain extent; this includes our ethnicity with the caveat that we can change allegiance to states. To a certain extent, we can deny our ethnicity just as we can emphasize it by language, manner of dress, and the food we eat, for example.

We form “moral groups” based on these four groups or complex combinations of these groups. The use of the word ‘moral’ introduces religion into the conversation. Religion seems to be the focus where we introduced the concept of moral groups but also the concept of reward and punishment in to our natural history. Unfortunately, it is also where some people carry the concept to extremes. It deals with how this form of behavior developed over time in respect to community—out of the fog of families, tribes, chiefdoms, etc as it relates to something as biologically based as genus and species. If you belong to this church, you go to heaven; if you don’t you burn eternally in a lake of fire. If you define heaven, it is personal, that is involves anything that you can imagine that makes you feel good, look good, or act the way the person doing the defining, thinks you should act. On the other hand, hell would be anything that makes you suffer the most. The “good” church, which is the one you chose, is the way you chose to define it, or at least the way someone imagined it should be. The flipside of “none membership” does not need definition other than it is not the good church.

I think of the power if “moral behavior” to foster extremes as inhumanity. How can it be? How can one group of humans treat another group of humans the way the do? Think of our recent history; how do you explain how the Nazi guard in a concentration camp could go home to his family of a wife and children after a day of killing innocent people because of their religious affiliation. It was as if ancient human behavior had come back to haunt us. By far, for most of us, the modern version of behavior in respect to “moral group” is a lot gentler but it still has the same “moral group” basis. Like a church, it is OK to condemn an apostate to hell; in fact, it is an obligation if you believe in that church; church members literally do not mean that in “our isolated modern” world; however, when we look at the Middle East, we see something far different. What is happening there is more like what happened in Germany all those years ago. Sunnis killing Shia and both are killing Christians because of differences in beliefs; the sad truth is that the differences are as minor as the differences between Protestants and Catholics. Most of us would be hard pressed to say what those differences are. We must do as we are doing, which is to respond to what is happening with horror and disgust. With modern technological advances in world communications, we can teach these people to behave differently.  However, really, who are we to tell them what to do and how to behave? Look at our political differences over the fight to build a mosque in New York City.  Look at the amassing of armed men on the boarders of Mexico and the United
States. Look at the Facebook post this morning depicting a group of Muslims in prayer and a football player on his knee obviously praying with the caption designed by political operatives to cause Christians to become angry; Christian prayer is OK but Muslim prayer is not.    

Humans of all descriptions seem to have carried the “moral group” behavior of religion into the other named groups or categories: race, ethnicity, and nationality. I could list examples of all of them in which one group or another carried the concept to an extreme. The history of humankind is replete with them including those that are happening now. What is important is what Steven Pinker pointed out in his book, The Better Angles of our Nature; overall, human violence is decreasing and has been for decreasing in scope and intensity for hundreds of years. Incidents like the massive casualties of WWI and WWII, Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge, Tutsi-Hutu massacres, and the current wars in the Middle East happen but are on a smaller and smaller scale. We can tract this diminution of violence down from race riots and labor strikes right on down to family violence. As mentioned and suggested above, we should look at ourselves as enlightened individual teachers of domestic tranquility and then act accordingly even in terms of what we advocate in posts on Facebook.   

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