Masai warrior 



Today, what would be appropriate to discuss, I think, is the downside of our not living under one moral code, a code that makes love, or at least its minimum form, tolerance, of all other human beings its primary value. In other words, I need to talk about the complementary side of my post yesterday. What happens if we do give in to racist thinking and do let in-groups and out-groups in our societies form? 

History is full of evidence which shows us what happens when a tribe or nation begins to think habitually in terms of "us" and "them". Unfortunately, for centuries, it has been natural and human to do so, it seems. Most nations throughout history, most of the time, have spoken in these ways. To the Christians of Europe for centuries, all human beings were divided into two groups: Christians and heathens. Some Christians still use these terms. The Muslims speak of the faithful and the infidel. To the Chinese, for centuries, there were civilized persons (Chinese) and barbarians, though they did assign a lower, but still human status, to some other Asians. But "gweilo" is still a dirty word in parts of China. The word "Masai" means "the people", as do the words "Innu" and "Cheyenne", and so on. All of this, I have noted and described before in this space. 

But what evidence is there for my arguing that this way of thinking is immoral? 

We need only to look at the consequences. 



  
                     movie depiction of Saladin's siege of Jerusalem (from "Kingdom of Heaven") 


Consider, for example, the Crusades. The Crusades were a series of invasions on the civilized part of the world - at that time - by a number of waves of hairy, smelly barbarians. In an objective view, that is the best we can say of those wars. Being a bit more honest, we might even admit that the atrocities committed by the Christian armies were more frequent and more vicious than those committed by the Muslims. Ridley Scott, in his film "Kingdom of Heaven", catches a truer picture of what the Crusades really were like  than has ever been presented to movie audiences of the West before. And good on him for doing so. My point is that, for later generations, the Crusades were described in the text books of schools in the West in glowing terms. The reality was almost the opposite of what the text books portrayed, an instance of us-versus-them thinking at its worst. Any lie was acceptable if it justified our side.  


                         
                                                                             Quanah 


Some natives of North America accepted Christianity as a replacement for their own religion, but most did not, and many individuals even in tribes that supposedly had been "converted" held on to their traditional beliefs, Sitting Bull and Quanah being probably the most famous. The problem for most natives was simply that Christians did not practice what they preached. Hudson Bay agents, for example, even went so far as to pass blankets from families who had been wiped out by smallpox on to other Indian families. "Well, the natives were 'savages' after all." Us-versus-them thinking again.   

The word "Eskimo" is not an Innu word; it is a Cree word that means "raw meat eaters". It was a racist slur. The Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans have racist slurs in their own languages that are commonly used to refer to each other's ethnic identities. In India, an African can be referred to as a "hapshi". It is not a nice word.  

As we look at the evidence, we can't help but think, that this human predilection for racism and war - if it is as common as the evidence seems to indicate - must have served some purpose in human history. How else could it have become so universal? But what purpose could have been served by a built-in tendency to be racist, chauvinistic, cruel, and violent? 

My response has two parts: first, I think that humans have always needed a way to toughen their cultures and the codes that these cultures contain because if a life form is to survive, it must evolve. That is just a fact of this uncertain reality. We can't know what the future will bring; we can only try to continually re-new our resources for fighting back against surprise, decadence, defeat, and decay - to re-new our resources for adapting to change, in other words. 

We humans long ago gained such mastery over all other species that they just don't test us, as a species, anymore. So we hit upon this mechanism of toughening our "ways of life" against each other. Hitler, in particular, was absolutely convinced of the necessity of war. His claim was: "In eternal warfare, mankind has become great; in eternal peace, mankind would be ruined." 

The second part of my response to the question about why we seem so inclined toward war is a reply to the first part: the simple reminder to myself and all readers that, while Hitler's view might even have been correct in the past, nuclear weapons have made it obsolete. We can't keep doing international relations in the ways in which we have been doing them for six millennia. Or as John Kennedy put it: "Mankind must abolish war or war will abolish mankind." 

This is the inevitable downside, then, of our holding onto any form of racist thinking and, as a result, continuing to be xenophobic and violent. We will soon extinguish ourselves if we don't change our ways. 

Christianity, therefore, is particularly dangerous for a society if the form or Christianity that society practices tells them that they are different and special because they have been "saved". This way of thinking leaves out most of the rest of the human race who have not been saved. Such talk is just a trick with words that ends in reaching the same result that so many national propaganda devices have in the past: it teaches its adherents, "It's us against them." 

Christianity, in its worst forms, is the very opposite of a monotheistic religion.  

Thus, I believe this is the most important part of Mohammed's message and even a quick reading of the Koran bears me out. The belief that "God has no partners" is taught in the Koran in crystal clear terms. And this change in thinking has consequences. 

If you have only one idea of the divine, then you must have only one code of right and wrong to guide yourself, your family, and your society in all of the complex, real-world dealings that all of these enter into. Many Muslims may not live up to that ideal, but that single moral code is still the Koran's main intent, in spite of the failures of some of its adherents. Sharia, for me, anyway, is a later invention of imperfect human beings.  

In the meantime, believing, as many Christians do, that the divine is made up of a trinity, but is somehow still one, is just word play; the net effect of this belief in the real history of human beings is the same as it is for any other form of polytheism: in-group versus out-group thinking leading to continuous war. 


  



And I repeat: although this thinking may once have served a purpose, it has to be replaced in the nuclear age. As Einstein himself said, "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking; thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

Christianity is hardly the only offender in promoting this in-group versus out-group thinking, as my examples above have tried to show. But the much larger point we need to take from the whole story of our species so far is that calling a belief that is so ubiquitous "human" or "natural" does not make that belief right. If one is a moral realist, as I am, then what makes "right" is what makes sense, and what makes sense is whatever is necessary for us, as a whole species, to survive. 

Our learning to love one another - all of us aiming to love all of our brothers and sisters - is not just nice, naive idealism. It has now become the hardest, most visionary form of realism. We get that or we're done. 

And what of the problem of finding a substitute for war so that humans do stay fit? That will be solved by competition in business, science, sport, exploration, and so on. It can be done. 









  



In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, nevertheless, have a nice day.