An Augustinian take on our present troubles

Via Generous Orthodoxy comes this interesting paper on “An Augustinian view of empire” by religion professor Charles Mathewes. Prof. Mathewes does a good job avoiding the Manichean worldviews of those for whom America is either omnibenevolent or omnimalevolent (which is, really, what you would expect from someone working in the tradition of that arch-anti-Manicheist Augustine).

For starters, he gives an account of al-Qaeda and similar movements that refuses to endorse the simplistic accounts of “they hate us because we’re free” or “they hate us because we’re evil imperialists”:

Islamic terror movements are not nihilistic fascists, as many suggest: they possesses a fantasized ideal, and something like a deliberate strategy, even if the real motive is a recoiling disgust at or fear of others.Yet neither are they driven by Chomskian disapproval of US geopolitics; al-Quaeda expresses a hatred for “the West” that is inspired by what the West represents as well as by what it does. Finally the nature of the war’s violence is different. Al-Quaeda’s violence is not meant directly to effect strategic changes, but to do so only as interpreted by audiences. And the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq seems also in part intended as a message. The violence, that is, is fundamentally symbolic.

None of this denies the literality of the violence: real people die. But the deaths are instrumental to something else; both sides aim to use violence as a way of communicating to a much broader audience, in the Muslim world and in the United States (if not the West as a whole), differing messages. This is a semiotic war–a war by signs, over signs, and in a sense about signs.

For Augustine, signs are related to hope, for signs are promises of the real things to which they refer, and so the fact that it is a “war of signs” has implications both internationally and domestically. Internationally, what seems to US audiences to be a war of terror is more properly a war over hope–a war to see who will most shape the hopes and fears of the populations caught up in it. This is especially pertinent in the Middle East, where it seems cynicism and despair are the general condition. It is not a “clash of civilizations,” even though al-Quaeda would like it to be interpreted as such; it is a civil war in the Islamic world, a war caused by despair–not only in the “Arab heartland” but also in the Muslim ghettoes of Western Europe–a despair about the prospects for a real future for a very proud civilization. And in this civil war, the combatants embody various responses to despair.

Some of the best scholars of militant Islamism argue that the creed of violent jihad, and in particular al-Quaeda’s nostalgia for the caliphate, has already failed in the Muslim world. Whether or not that is true, it is at least arguable that the Bush administration has not helped its cause by the sending cripplingly mixed messages to the Muslim world as well. Certainly some members of the Bush administration believe that the Iraq war was part of a larger new strategy by the United States of “offensive democratization”–a sign in blood that the US has finally committed itself to expanding the democratic sphere to the Middle East–and things could still turn out that way. But so far that seems to be heard by most Muslims only as cynical sickly-sweet frosting on an essentially old, imperialist cake.

Mathewes argues that an Augustinian approach to the situation could help us respond to the threat of terrorism without lapsing into arrogance:

For Augustinians, hegemony and imperium are not in themselves bad things. Order is preferable to anarchy, order generally involves some hegemon, and there is no stable third alternative in this world. Of course order and hegemony can become bad, for Augustinians, if they are misused for ends other than justice and the tranquillity of worldly order. But a geopolitical critique here is not of central importance. Instead we should attend to the more immediate psychological concerns about the apparently inevitable tendencies toward national hubris and demonization in situations of hegemony. If 9/11 is best intelligible as a struggle between fear and hope, 11/9 [Mathewes’ shorthand for the fall of communism and the rise of the U.S. as unrivalled superpower] best designates the struggle in the souls of communities and individuals between faith and arrogance and envy–a struggle that Augustinians see as one over how to avoid idolatry and demonization.

[…]

Augustine worked against both temptations–against the complacency as exemplified in the cosmopolitan-Eusebian attitudes of Christian elites of his day (think of Jerome’s rather campy panic at the news of the Fall of Rome) and also the contrary temptations towards demonization, coded into the Christian Scriptures (especially the Book of Revelation) and carried forward in various sectarian and nativist movements like the Donatists and, arguably, the Pelagians. In all his writings on these subjects, Augustine’s goal was always the same: to refuse the mythology of the state. Political entities are fundamentally secular realities, this-worldly, and are useful in securing us space and occasion to signify our gratitude to God and in praise of God’s glory.

Given our contemporary challenges, Augustinians urge on us an attitude of resistance to both poles. They remind those tempted to idolize American geopolitical power that force is not ultimately the divine will but always at best a tragic stop-gap that can only be employed in the knowledge that one becomes answerable for all the consequences of its exercise. (This is why contemporary Augustinians like Paul Ramsey and Oliver O’Donovan simultaneously emphasize a workable just-war theory and yet also a theory that never allows the warrior the illusion of immaculate justice.) Augustinians will also remind those tempted to demonize American power (and idolize something like the international community) that some force is necessary–not to get them to switch teams and root for the USMC, but to acknowledge to themselves that the world is not and will never be the stable and rational place they would like it to be, but stands in dire and urgent need of redemption.

Essentially, Mathewes wants to dissuade us from thinking of the present situation in apocalyptic terms – as something on which the outcome of history depends. The challenge, for Christians, is to defuse “our tendencies toward apocalypticism,” toward seeing our political life in terms of choices between unmixed good or evil.

Isn’t our situation today apocalyptically different? We think so–we are convinced that this moment is the kairos-time. Augustine thinks that all moments should be inhabited as kairotic. But this disappoints us because it dismisses our superbia-funded presentism. Augustine sees this as another apocalypticism of which we should be shriven. Hence perhaps the deepest disquiet, and the newest news that an Augustinian perspective can provide for us just is this insistence that, in some basic way, an Augustinian look at empire today, for all its differences in detail, is little more than more of the same.