Vinoth Ramachandra

We should welcome Charles Taylor’s recent conviction by a UN War Crimes Tribunal. While president of Liberia, Taylor fomented violent uprisings in neighbouring countries with the aid of brutal militias in order to extend his regional influence. It was during his rule that the term “blood diamonds” was coined, referring to the lucrative stones from Sierra Leone that financed his arms purchases. Many of these reportedly found their way onto the shelves of such signature stores as Cartier and Bulgari. None of the prominent diamond retailers who purchased “blood diamonds” without enquiring into their origins have been held morally and legally accountable. Nor the governments and companies from whom Taylor bought his arms.

It is noteworthy that the UN tribunal was funded mostly by the United States and Great Britain.  As I have often observed on this Blog, absent from the public discourse of the USA and Western Europe is any suggestion that Western powers be subjected to the same accountability procedures that are used to impose criminal liability on those who are perceived to be blocking Western economic and political interests.

A smug editorial on Taylor’s conviction  in Britain’s Financial Times (27 April 2012) begins thus: “A strong message was sent to tyrants and warlords around the world yesterday. International law may be slow, but even those in the higher ranks of power can be held to account for atrocities committed against the innocent.” There was no mention of the treatment of Bradley Manning by the US government for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan; or of any call to investigate the behaviour of French troops in the Ivory Coast. What the editorial should have said is: “those tyrants in non-Western nations whose operations interfere with American geopolitical priorities and Western corporate interests will be held to account. If they are allies of the West, like Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or Israel, their atrocities do not count. In fact, we shall continue to sell them military hardware. And if they are American citizens, they will enjoy immunity from war crimes prosecutions.”

My wife recently came across an interview that Nicholas Wolterstorff, the eminent Christian philosopher, had with Father Eliya Khoury, a Palestinian Arab, born and reared in the West Bank and a former Assistant Bishop in the Jerusalem Diocese of the Anglican church. Some years ago the Israeli authorities imprisoned Fr. Khoury for eight months (two of them in solitary confinement) and then, without granting him a hearing, expelled him from Israel. He had been too outspoken in condemning the injustices being wreaked on his people.

Wolterstorff had a private conversation with Khoury in Amman, Jordan, and he conveys the gist of what Khoury said (while admitting that he is unable to convey the deep sorrow and passion with which he spoke):

“Why, he asked, has the church abandoned us Christians here in the Middle East? We are deserted, forgotten by the church of the whole world. Why do the Christians in America support the Zionists instead of supporting us, their brothers and sisters in Christ? I do not understand. They do not even notice us… We are caught between the Israelis and the Muslims. The Muslims see western Christendom as behind Israel. They see Israel as an outpost of the West- of the Christian West. They want no part of it…. We are willing to become martyrs if that is demanded of us. We shall remain faithful. But you are forcing us become unworthy martyrs, martyrs in an unworthy cause.

… A few years back 12 percent of the Palestinians were Christians. Now only 6 per cent are. We are constantly shrinking, constantly getting smaller. They are being forced out of Israel by Zionist policies. Israel is destroying the church in Palestine. The old ones have their homes taken from them by the Israelis, confiscated. The young ones, seeing no future, leave- for the United States, for South America, anywhere. Why do you Christians in America support the Zionists, when the Zionists are destroying the church in Palestine? Why do you not support your brothers and sisters in Christ?

And now I am told that conservative Christian groups in the United States are planning to start a radio station aimed at the Muslims. Why do you not speak to us first about such things? Why do you act as if there are no Christians here? We have lived with the Muslims for thousands of years. Why do you not first ask us our advice? You say that we have not been successful in evangelizing the Muslims. What do all your Western missionaries have to show for their efforts? I tell you, this will only make the Muslims more nervous, more suspicious, more fanatic. Our oppression will become worse. You will cause Christianity to disappear from the Middle East unless you stop this ‘American evangelism’- and unless your government settles the Palestinian problem.” [From “An Evening in Amman”, The Reformed Journal, July 1982, abbreviated by me]

This was a cry from 1982. What has changed? In fact, the situation described, both within Palestine and in the US, has only worsened.

When Gandhi was once asked what he thought of Western civilization, he is supposed to have replied: “It would be a good idea”.

How do we persuade our friends in North America and Europe that believing in human rights would be a good idea?

Two years ago the American molecular biologist-cum-venture capitalist Craig Venter and his research team made a spectacular breakthrough. After years of painstaking work, they assembled in the laboratory a complete DNA molecule, consisting of about one million nucleotides of a micro-organism, and then inserted the synthetic DNA molecules into cells of another micro-organism from which the DNA had been removed. Those cells functioned, grew, and divided as if they were the species represented by the synthetic chromosome. Venter gave the name Synthia to this new life form, and went along with the excited media hype that he had “created life”.  This was not, of course, creatio ex nihilo, as the experiment required there to be pre-existing cells into which to transfer the DNA. However this did little to dampen the popular media’s enthusiasm for claims about the “creation of life”.

I was in London at the time Venter’s results were announced and I was greatly bemused to hear on BBC Radio, not only about the “creation of life” by Venter and his team but also a moral philosopher claiming that this was a resounding “proof of evolution”!  The philosopher had evidently forgotten that this self-replicating cell had not arisen through random mutations but by purposeful experiments planned by super-intelligent forms of life that were already on the scene! The BBC also went on, with its typically mischievous bias, to state that religious thinkers would bemoan this act of “playing God” (a much misused term) without giving a single instance of a respected religious leader or theologian in Britain who had indeed done so. (And I couldn’t find anyone who did so).

Walk into any major bookstore in a Western city, even in university centres, and you will find more books on Gnosticism or the occult on public display than Bibles or serious works of Christian theology. Open a major astronomy or physics journal and you will occasionally find a discussion about “multiverses”- the possibility of an infinite number of universes of which our universe is only one. This is metaphysical speculation, strictly non-science as it is beyond empirical observation and testability. Yet if somebody joined the conversation to suggest that seeing our universe as a creation also accounted for the “fine-tuning” of its physical properties that render the emergence of carbon-based life-forms possible, she would be derided and excluded for bringing “religious metaphysics” into physics.

Ignorance and its close cousin, arrogance, are found on all sides; and this is what makes talking about such matters in the media difficult. On the one hand there is a popular Christian media in the USA, with well-endowed institutions and publishing houses that still vilify evolution and promote either six-day creationism or Intelligent Design. Many evangelical churches in the non-Western world are influenced by them, partly because serious works of theology that distinguish the doctrine of creation from “creationism”  (and evolution from “evolutionism”) are not well marketed. Also, just like the BBC reporters, most Christians too prefer “sound bytes” and easy answers to complex questions. Writers like myself who have dealt with these subjects at length (in both my Gods that Fail and chapter five of Subverting Global Myths), or the websites of the Faraday Institute (UK) and the Biologos Foundation are competing in a popular church culture that is largely anti-intellectual and fearful of dialogue. So much easier to just lob grenades over the church fence, even at other Christians, than engage in serious study and genuine conversations.

On the other hand, this defensive and hostile posture is an understandable reaction to the kind of mass media hype described above, or the aggressive rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett and others who have become the poster boys for Darwinism. A biochemist friend of mine in Cambridge once told me that his biggest complaint against Dawkins was that he had made many Christians reject evolution simply because he had tied it to his militant atheist project. Some scientists think that their competence in one field qualifies them to speak with authority about other fields.

Exaggerated claims for science and the authority of scientists produce equally exaggerated defensive reactions. Creationism is a product of exaggerated claims for biblical authority (treating the Bible as if it were a sourcebook on biology or geology, something it never claims to be); while Intelligent Design is simply poor theology disguised as science and thus gets whacked by mainstream theologians and mainstream scientists. But I would still defend their right to say what they believe in universities and elsewhere, provided they also welcome and listen to criticism from their fellow Christians and secular scholars.

It is a great pity that the language of creation has come to be focused today on debates about cosmology and biology. This muddies the waters. Men and women in the arts and humanities are unlikely to confuse different levels of causation, or ontological dependence with chronological origin, or think that creation implies determinism and control. However, as the British theologian Frances Young has proposed, with echoes of Karl Barth, a better analogy for God’s creative agency is not that of a master-craftsman or sculptor producing a perfect work of art, lying entirely passive in the creator’s hands; rather, “It is the father letting go, allowing the son to go to a far country, abandoning power over all that has come into existence, while waiting and encircling and enfolding it all in love.”

All such models and analogies are limited. What are the better ones that you have come across to describe the Triune God’s creative agency?

I found myself last week in the unusual position of defending in public the United States government. The latter was the prime mover behind a resolution by the UN Human Rights Council calling on the Sri Lankan government to improve its human rights record and launch a credible investigation into war crimes. Some members of the ruling regime and their acolytes have been vilifying the resolution which was carried by a majority of nine votes in the Council, with China predictably defending us against “interference” in a nation’s “internal affairs”. (How China and even Malaysia, Saudi Arabia and Cuba can occupy seats on the UNHRC is another of those contradictions that makes the UN such an ineffective agency today- see my last Blog post).

The behaviour of the Sri Lankan regime before, during, and after the UN Resolution was carried only illustrates the necessity for such a Resolution. Such was the main substance of a newspaper article of mine which was carried by two leading English-language dailies. (No Sinhala- the majority language- newspaper will carry it).

We have been treated to the pitiful spectacle of a foreign minister wasting huge amounts of public funds in desperate last-minute trips to Africa and Latin America to canvass support; and the continued use of the state media to whip up frenzy against local and foreign critics, instead of explaining to the populace the content of the UN Resolution; and the manipulation of schoolchildren as well as religious leaders, among others, who were bussed into the capital by the ruling party to stage noisy protests outside the American and Indian embassies. Local human rights activists who went to Geneva to support the resolution have been threatened.

At the same time as we counter state terror, we expose the hypocrisies of those well-to-do Sri Lankan Tamils in Western lands who rejoice over the UN Resolution but who don’t call for the arrest of those within their ranks who continued to pay for arms shipments to the Tamil Tigers when the latter were using civilians as human shields and forcibly conscripting child-soldiers during the dark days of the war. So-called “diaspora” Tamils in the US, like many of their Indian and Pakistani counterparts, carry American passports and very few of them will return to live in Sri Lanka, even if we had a just peace. You will not find any among them joining George Clooney to protest outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington; or challenging the US government to bring all those Americans responsible for torture and war crimes abroad to face trial. What brings “human rights” language into disrepute is the use of it against our enemies, and not our own ethnic group and nation-state.

I don’t find these articles, letters and Blog posts easy to write. I can handle the hate-mail, it is silence that depresses me. Even on this Blog, whenever I write on some traditional “mission” or “apologetics” topic, the comments flow thick and fast. However, mention the state of American politics and a deafening silence sets in. Try appealing to American Christians to write to their national newspapers or do what George Clooney or the Occupying Movement are doing – getting out there and protesting, for instance, the inhumanity of Iranian sanctions (a violation of international law, given that no evidence has been put forward to show that Iran has breached the nuclear non-proliferation treaty), and you will find the shutters rapidly coming down.

In the current New York Review of Books, Michael Ignatieff superbly sums up what I have been trying to say in recent posts about the US and global politics: “Since Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the US has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them, while seeking by hook or by crook to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application. From Nuremberg onward, no country has invested more in the development of international jurisdiction for atrocity crimes and no country has worked harder to make sure that the law it seeks for others does not apply to itself.”

Most Christian pastors are unprepared by their seminaries to think globally about local issues, which is surely what employing a Christian mind entails. To those who say, even before they try anything, that they are “powerless” to effect change, there are many stories one can tell of how little actions of faithfulness by ordinary people have led to social and political transformations on an unimaginable scale. Every community has such memories.

However, I prefer to recall this medieval fiction from the pen of the great Jewish writer, Elie Wiesel, tireless campaigner against crimes against humanity and himself a survivor of Auschwitz. It probably explains why I cannot keep silent.

“One of the Just Men came to Sodom, determined to save its inhabitants from sin and punishment. Night and day he walked the streets and markets protesting against greed and theft, falsehood and indifference. In the beginning, people listened and smiled amicably. Then they stopped listening;  he no longer even amused them. The killers went on killing, the wise kept silent, as if there were no Just Man in their midst.

One day a child, moved by compassion for the unfortunate teacher, approached him with these words. ‘Poor stranger, you shout, you scream, don’t you see that it’s hopeless?’

‘Yes, I see’, answered the Just Man.

‘Then why do you go on?’

‘I’ll tell you why. In the beginning I thought I could change man. Today, I know I cannot. If I still shout today, if I still scream, it is to prevent man from ultimately changing me.’”

(From One Generation After)

One of the most moving letters I received in response to my last Blog post was from a retired professor of philosophy, now living in a small town in Texas. “I have never seen US politics in greater decline”, he laments, “and characterized as much by mere perversity as by obtuse partisanship and venality- and, the country itself is increasingly militarized economically. To the extent that the church is ensnared in these politics, it will be soiled, as it always has been in any country in this respect.”

The men vying for the Republican party presidential nomination reveal the depths to which that once honourable party has now sunk. They embody the very antitheses to the values of the Kingdom of God which Jesus announced: ignore the poor, protect and pamper the rich, plunder the earth, kill your enemies.

Let’s turn from the fiasco of American presidential politics to the terrible tragedy unfolding in Syria. The two are, however, linked in recent memory. Syria was one of the Bush administration’s favourite destinations for what was euphemistically termed “rendition”- sending any suspected “terrorists” to places where they could be interrogated and tortured with impunity. The West’s attitude has changed with the Arab Spring. But it is not surprising to find President Assad taking a leaf out of Bush’s book and calling his brutal crackdown “a war against terrorists”.

Syria represents yet another failure of the Arab League and, indeed, of the United Nations. The five permanent members of the UN Security Council are not only the biggest arms dealers in the world but can rarely act in concert, with national interest always trumping the global good. The possibility of losing Syria as a major military purchaser was the reason for Russia’s veto of the UN resolution on Syria. However, fears about US strategic interests in the area also contribute to Russia’s support for the Syrian regime.

Having lost key client states in the Arab world, the US is less influential in the Middle East. But maintaining control of oil markets and US strategic capacity are still key regional goals for the US. The nature of its military engagement is changing - away from large-scale deployments of ground troops in favour of rapidly expanding fleets of armed drones, and growing reliance on sea-based weapons. Thus the US backs Saudi intervention in Bahrain to ensure the US Fifth Fleet maintains its Bahraini base; Washington’s escalating sanctions give the West greater leverage in control of oil markets and the “threat” of Iran serves to justify expansion of the US naval presence in the gulf.

The main problem with the United Nations Organization is that it was conceived in a world of sovereign states, a world where the overriding concern of the post-World War II settlement was the guarantee of the inviolability of national borders and national sovereignty. But today’s world is one where wars happen typically within states. Whole populations, or minorities within populations, need assistance against their own governments. Thus the 1945 UN Charter’s emphasis on the inviolability of sovereign states poses a conundrum. It stands in blatant contradiction to the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. Moreover, lacking a well-equipped global police force of its own, and often hamstrung by the chronic lack of funds and use of the veto by the permanent members of its Security Council, its peace-making and peace-keeping abilities have been severely curtailed.

While despots (and even liberal democracies from time to time) invoke “national sovereignty” to deflect criticism of their brutality, “human rights” is the language that civil society and international non-governmental organizations like Amnesty regularly employ. The latter language is also the only weapon that the poor and the oppressed can use against their own governments. This is why the misguided rejection of “rights discourse” by some Western Christian leaders is unfortunate. It reveals a lack of historical awareness: of how much “rights discourse” is rooted in the Biblical writings, the early Church Fathers and then conceptualized by the twelfth-century European canon lawyers. It is not a product of post-Enlightenment individualism. All moral vocabularies can- and are- abused. But that is all the more reason Christians should be in the forefront of articulating and defending the rights of the poor and oppressed against their own governments.

There are no blueprints for preventing or resolving violent conflicts around the globe. We are a world in transition, searching for new forms of political organization and structures of accountability, as empires and nation-states become less relevant as well as lose legitimacy.

The early church, as an egalitarian, multinational, socially inclusive polity (ekklesia), in which the weakest members were to be the most honoured, stood as a radical antithesis to the politics of both empire and republic. But in the ensuing centuries it was quickly co-opted by empires and republics, and even took on the characteristics of empire in many of its manifestations. If Christians are to contribute to the quest for a more just and peaceable world, their proclamation of the Good News of the Reign of God has to accompanied by a decisive repudiation of all those forms of nationalism, chauvinism and ethnocentrism that still distort the face of Christ within the church. A national church that has been co-opted and domesticated by ethne or  Caesar has ceased to be the church of Jesus Christ- the sign and foretaste of a new world order.

The streets of Colombo have witnessed angry crowds protesting at the soaring fuel costs which have further crippled an economy already weakened by years of corruption and political mismanagement. Small countries like Sri Lanka are affected disproportionately by the economic sanctions against Iran imposed by the US and the EU. Iran is one of Sri Lanka’s principal buyers of tea, and the island-nation is also heavily dependent on  Iranian oil. The freeze on transfers by intermediate banks has badly affected both our exports and imports.

Economic embargos on nations are rarely effective. It is the “common man and woman’” who suffers most, not the political leadership. And other smaller and fragile economies suffer “collateral damage”. Embargoes are also typically hypocritical: as I have pointed out in previous posts, the Western nations are so beholden economically to China and Saudi Arabia, countries whose human rights records are far worse than Iran’s, that they can never even entertain the possibility of any action against them except the occasional verbal rap across the knuckles. And, as China ripostes, why does the US not take a long and close look at its own human rights violations at home (its criminal justice system, for instance)? As long as the US claim impunity on the global stage for its own human rights abuses and war crimes in other countries, despotic regimes around the world can truthfully protest that “human rights” and “war crimes” are sticks with which the strong nations try to beat the weak into doing their bidding.

The growing obsession in conservative sections of the Western media over Iran gives me a feeling of déjà vu. I have often been pushed into defending despicable regimes. I remember preaching in a famous Boston church in 1999, and to illustrate a point in my sermon, mentioned the hypocrisy of the US government’s rhetoric against Saddam Hussein and the way that economic sanctions against Iraq were not hurting him but millions of children who were dying daily due to lack of access to medicines. The college students loved it, but several older folk were furious that I had “brought politics into the pulpit”.  At least they didn’t stone me.

Three years later, in January 2003, I was speaking at an InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Graduates & Faculty conference in Atlanta. The other speakers (who included Marva Dawn, Miroslav Volf and Dan Trulear) and myself drafted a letter calling on the Bush administration not to launch its planned invasion of Iraq. We pointed out that there was not a shred of reliable evidence that Iraq had any links with al-Qa’ida, nor that it was developing chemical and nuclear weapons. The majority of participants signed the letter; but there was the usual small, but vocal, minority who typically charged us with being both “unrealistic” and “anti-American”. Well, the letter was obviously ignored, with terrible consequences; but at least our consciences are clear before God. If intellectuals cannot speak truth to power, then what is the value of intellectuals?

Today, the sabres are rattling again, with Iran replacing Iraq as the global “bogey” in another American presidential election year. The current anti-Iran mobilization doesn’t reflect any actual US or Israeli military or intelligence threat assessments, but rather political conditions pushing politicians, in Israel and the US, to escalate fear over Iran. The danger is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I pointed out in my last post that Iranian attacks on Israelis are universally, and rightly, condemned. But who condemns atrocities against Iranian civilians? Interestingly, the Iranian regime has angrily denied that it instigated the recent attempts on Israeli diplomats in Delhi and Bangkok, while American and Israeli leaders (including a Republican presidential candidate) have openly expressed delight at the murders of Iranian nuclear scientists. Also, unlike Israel and India, Iran is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons on the same grounds that Church leaders have used: the non-discriminatory nature of the weapons. Iran, ironically, seems to be one of the few countries in the world where the pros and cons of building a bomb have been debated in public.

Now we can dismiss all this as lies and bluster, as do many conservative Americans and others influenced by the pro-Israel lobby. But, then, why not also dismiss as bluster Ahmedinejad’s populist pledges to “drive Israel into the sea”? Don’t American politicians tell lies? And aren’t they generally noted for their bluster (remember Rumsfeld’s threat to “nuke Afghanistan”?) Unless the Iranians are possessed by a collective death-wish, sanity (and it is good to assume that our enemies are sane people) precludes their deploying weapons of mass destruction against Israel.

The International Atomic Energy Authority is never allowed to inspect the nuclear installations of  Western allies. But Iran’s refusal to let them do so is taken as an indication of moral turpitude and sinister conspiracy. Surely, sanity requires us to work for a nuclear weapons-free Middle East, indeed a nuclear weapons-free world. Such a multi-national move would ensure Iran never builds a nuclear weapon, that Israel would give up the bombs and submarine-based nuclear missiles in its arsenal, and that the US would keep its nuclear warheads out of its Middle East bases and off its ships in the region’s seas.

The mere possession of weapons of mass destruction, let alone their use, is an expression of hubris, man threatening to undo the covenant that the creator God has made with all his creation. Where, then, are the sane among us who raise their voices in protest?

I once had an argument with an American atheist Jew who insisted that being a Jew was a matter of ethnicity and had nothing to do with “religion”. Later, I found that I had on my side Jonathan Sacks, perhaps the most articulate and winsome spokesperson for Judaism in today’s world. “Judaism is not an ethnicity and Jews are not an ethnic group,” writes Sacks, “Go to the Western Wall in Jerusalem and you will see Jews of every colour and culture under the sun, the Beta Israel from Ethiopia, the Bene Israel from India, Bukharan Jews from central Asia, Iraqi, Berber, Egyptian, Kurdish and Libyan Jews, the Temamim from Yemen, alongside American Jews from Russia, South African Jews from Lithuania, and British Jews from German-speaking Poland. Their food, music, dress, customs, and conventions are all different.”  (Future Tense, 2009)

The late Arthur Koestler believed that most Jews today are descendants of the semi-nomadic Turkic people from the Caucasus, the Khazars, who converted to Judaism in the seventh to tenth centuries. The latest theory, advanced by Tsvi Misinai, a retired Israeli computer expert, is that the Palestinians are actually the people who may be ethnically Jewish. They are descendants of Jews who remained in the land when, under Roman rule, most Jews went into exile in Babylon and elsewhere. The Jews who left continued to practice Judaism. Those who stayed became first Christian, then Muslim. It is a theory once held by none other than David Ben Gurion. So the Palestinians at war with Israel may be “Jewish”, while the “Jews” may not be genetically “Jewish” at all!

I wish I could say this to those fundamentalists in the American “Bible Belt” and elsewhere who are uncritically pro-Israeli even as the Israeli state bulldozes Palestinian homes, forces thousands of men, women and children into dehumanized camps, and appropriates land to which it has absolutely no right. Selecting isolated texts from the Old Testament, and bypassing the New Testament entirely, they fail to see that the modern state of Israel has nothing at all to do with the ancient covenant people, the Israelites. There are more Jews living outside Israel than within. But, if you do believe that Israel today is an answer to biblical prophecy, then speak to the leaders of Israel the way the biblical prophets did: “If you continue to commit oppression and atrocities against others, I will spew you out of the land.”

Last month an Iranian university professor, 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan, was killed when unidentified men on motorcycles attached a magnetic bomb to his car in a Tehran street. He was the fourth Iranian nuclear scientist to be assassinated in recent years by what every reasonable observer knows are Israeli agents, with at least the tacit approval of the CIA. These are blatant acts of terrorism. If committed on Western soil, they would evoke outrage in the American and European media. But, instead, they are met with apathy. In typical fashion, the US administration is now bullying the rest of the world to boycott Iran economically and isolate it politically.

Iran has a scientific and intellectual culture greater than that of any of the West’s allies in the Middle East, excepting Israel. Thus the murder of its top scientist engaged in their nuclear energy program is an attack on Iran’s ability to function as a society without dependence on Western technical hegemony. And why should Iran not have nuclear weapons to match Israel? American-Soviet relations in the Cold War were conducted under the morally perverse doctrine known as MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction): as long as two hostile states could keep match with each other’s capacity for annihilating the other, they will not go to war. Why not apply MAD to the Middle East?

For all the bluster that comes out of Teheran, the real terror has been inflicted in the opposite direction, beginning with the interference in 1953 by the US and Britain to install a dictator who would protect their oil companies. And have Americans forgotten the shooting down of an Iranian commercial airliner in Iranian airspace by a US guided missile cruiser, the USS Vincennes, in 1988? All 290 passengers on board were killed. To this day, no U.S government has apologised to the Iranian people.

Much of the American public, including many American Church leaders, are profoundly ignorant of the history of the Middle East, let alone what is still being done by American soldiers and citizens in other parts of the world. I have nothing but disgust for their culpable ignorance, culpable because the facts are in their computers and libraries  if only they take the trouble to look. And I have nothing but disgust for those who know the facts but are too uncaring to speak out and hold their governments accountable for war crimes and other human rights abuses.

But I have nothing but deep admiration for those Israelis and Iranians who courageously seek to bring moral and political change in their nations; as well as for those Palestinian Christians who continue to show patience and goodwill to their American brethren who have betrayed them and the Christian faith by their guilty silence.

Let me end with Rabbi Sacks who writes that “at some stage Jews stopped defining themselves by the reflection they saw in the eyes of God and started defining themselves by the reflection they saw in the eyes of their Gentile neighbours…obsessed by the Holocaust.” And he calls on them to “take a stand, not motivated by fear, not driven by paranoia or a sense of victimhood, but a positive stand on the basis of the values by which our ancestors lived and for which they were prepared to die: justice, equity, compassion, love of the stranger, the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person without regard to colour, culture or creed.”

Christians and Muslims can learn from him to do the same.

Last February, the IBM supercomputer Watson won an exhibition game of the American TV show “Jeopardy” against two of its best contestants. This was a significant advance on Deep Blue, another IBM supercomputer, which had defeated the six-time world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997. It was hailed in the popular media as heralding the “triumph of machine intelligence over the human”. Of course it was nothing of the sort. It was the triumph of a top team of human researchers at IBM, aided by hundreds of others from many of the leading technological universities in the US, who had programmed Watson over five years and at the cost of $3 million.

In my last post I referred to EP guru Steven Pinker’s claim that the human mind is a “system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our natural ancestors.” In this “computational theory of the mind”, the latter is treated as a set of computer programs or “modules” that are being executed in the electrical wiring (“hardware”) of your brain even as you read this page. Linked to this is the key assumption that what the mind-brain essentially does is “process information”, and this is usually understood as the manipulation of symbols by rules or algorithms. By using a common terminology (e.g. “information”, “intelligence”, “neural networks”) when discussing minds, brains and computers, the human-machine barrier is easily straddled. The mind is both naturalized and computerized. And the brain can now be described as an incredibly powerful microprocessor, the mother of all motherboards.

It requires a certain philosophical sophistication to see through the sleights of hand that ends up reducing human minds and persons to bundles of neural activity in the brains. As Ludwig Wittgenstein famously put it, when looking back on the naive philosophy of science (“logical positivism”) that had once seduced him in the 1920s: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” (Philosophical Investigations, 1953)

There is nothing new in the way scientists take the most advanced machines of their day as models or analogies for human functioning.  Steam engines and telegraph systems have served this purpose before. But there is a short (though calamitous) step from modelling to identification. We then imagine that machines which help us perform certain functions have those functions themselves. We humanize the machines even as we mechanize humans. When we speak of “clocks telling the time”, what we mean is just that they enable us (conscious human persons) to tell the time. Walking sticks don’t actually walk, and running shoes don’t run. The same applies to “radar searching for aircraft”, “telescopes discovering black holes” or “smart phones remembering our appointments”: they do not literally search, discover or remember. If there were no conscious human persons using these prosthetic tools, these activities would not happen.

In one of the most cited philosophical papers of recent decades (“Minds, Brains, and Programs”, 1980) , John Searle invited us to imagine somebody totally ignorant of Chinese seated in a closed room and receiving inputs of Chinese symbols. He is also given a rule-book for processing these symbols, so he can manipulate them and produce an output. Suppose that the input of Chinese is in the form of questions. It would appear, then, from the output symbols that the person in the room was answering the questions. However, he has not understood anything that was passing through his hands. Searle used this analogy to argue that electrical flows in computers do not count as the processing of symbols, since symbols are symbols only to those who understand them as symbols. It is wrong to imagine the mind as analogous to a super-computer, because in the absence of minds computers do not do what minds do.

In our IT-obsessed age, not only is information confused with knowledge, but the special engineering use of the term is confused with meaning. A meaningful message may actually have less information (from a technical point of view) than a sentence made up of pure gibberish. It is all matter of the range of alternatives from which the message is selected and their prior probabilities. As Claude Shannon, a pioneer of the mathematical theory of communication, reminds us, the “semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering aspects.”

In a loose sense of “inform”, the books (and this Blog) I write may be said to be  “filled with information” and stored in print (or on the internet) indefinitely. However, it is strictly only potential information that can be inscribed and stored outside a conscious mind. Once the concepts of information, informing and being informed start to be liberated from a conscious someone being informed or intending to inform, language goes on holiday (another Wittgensteinian expression) and reason disappears.

Distinguishing person-talk from neuro-talk, and neuro-talk from computer-talk, are indispensable if we are to explore the distinctively human and rescue the humanities and human sciences.

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was notorious among his contemporaries for his cynical view of human nature. Hobbes held that we always act out of self-interest. Once a friend observed him giving money to a beggar and asked Hobbes if what he had just done did not disprove his own theory of human motivation. Hobbes replied that he had given money to the beggar not out of kindness, but because it gave him pleasure to see the pleasure the beggar obtained through his gift!

Reasoning like Hobbes’s (an example of “reductionism”) is rampant in many academic disciplines, and especially in the new glamour sciences of “cognitive neurology”, “genetic technology” and “evolutionary psychology”. A molecular biologist friend of mine in Cambridge once told me that the saddest aspect of the work of people like Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins was the way they identified evolution with atheist materialism. The result, among those Christians, Muslims and others who had little understanding of science, was inevitable: reject Darwinian evolution altogether. A clash of fundamentalisms, one religious, the other atheist, follows. But one does not have to be a theist to see the fallacies in biological reductionism (or “Biologism”).

This is how the reductionist argument goes. The human brain is undoubtedly a physical organ that has evolved over millions of years. So, start with this fact and make the  leap to the materialist creed that conscious awareness, self-consciousness and our sense of personal identity are nothing but neural activities located in our brains. The next step follows: the mind, too, is an evolved organ. Natural selection and environmental adaptation explains all there is to us human beings. As Steven Pinker, a prominent evolutionary psychologist of mind puts it: “The mind is a system of organs of computation designed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our natural ancestors.”  Human persons are not embodied subjects, merely living organisms seeking to optimize their reproductive capacity.

If the ultimate motivation for our behaviour is making the world safe for our genes, this has some rather disturbing consequences which don’t seem to have been noticed by those who advocate such views. To begin with, any claim to objective knowledge disappears. The evolved mind serves, not truth, but reproductive success. So, presumably Pinker’s arguments and beliefs are also designed to promote his “selfish” genes. If not, how does he exempt himself from his own assertions?

Moreover, all talk about love and justice, as well as truth, are ultimately self-serving. You may think you are sacrificing your life for others,  but what you are really doing is enabling the group that shares your genetic material to survive. All the ethical norms that govern your behaviour are boiled down to promoting the “inclusive fitness” of  your kinship group (sacrificing your life for other groups, let alone your enemies, is skated over in the literature). More generally, the reasons we give for the things we do (from occupying Wall Street to speculating on Wall Street, from composing music to pirating music videos) are mere rationalizations. Only the evolutionary psychologists can  reveal to us the real reasons, which are not actually reasons at all but biologically determined forces which motivate and determine our behaviour.

Evolutionary psychologists see us as the unwitting playthings of an immensely complex biological organ (the brain) that deceives us into thinking that we are still living in the time of our hominid ancestors or the pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer human groups. Whether we are choosing our life-partners or deliberating about energy policy, we are simply reflecting behaviour learned in Stone Age savannahs. Those forms of behaviour that favour the replication of the genome will preferentially survive, whether we know it or not. And, unless we are evolutionary psychologists, we don’t know it.

Hardly a week passes when we are not offered, in the serious scientific journals no less than in pulp tabloids, biological “explanations” of marital infidelity, economic risk-taking, rape or painting in terms of the influence of our genes or neurons acting on us directly – or indirectly through their cultural proxies (so-called “memes”, analogous to genes).

However, I am still waiting to read a scientific paper that gives a biological explanation of the emergence of biological science among humans. Also, a scientific account of what motivates people to become evolutionary psychologists, and why others are impressed by their “explanations”.

I am mystified that clever academics, some philosophers and literary critics among them, blithely quote those cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists who announce that our sense of being “persons” and of having free-will are nothing but illusions foisted on us by neural activity determined by our evolutionary past. Why on earth should we believe such statements when they, too, must be biologically determined? Moreover, isn’t it remarkable to find, say, in the same university medical department, doctors promoting “autonomy”/ “choice” as the supreme value in bioethics while their colleagues undermine all notions of selfhood and free-will?

Is it not hypocritical of people to accept academic awards and book royalties for work that was all pre-programmed in their neural circuitry and over which they had no choice?  But since all moral arguments, too, including outrage at hypocrisy and double-standards, are presumed to be neural reflexes or hangovers from our Stone Age past, I suppose they can be safely ignored. Until, of course, pseudo-sciences like evolutionary psychology are thrown out of our universities. The cries of moral outrage, then, will be deafening.

I return to Ha-Joon Chang’s debunking 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.  In one of his chapters, Chang argues that people in poor countries are generally more entrepreneurial than those in rich countries. Most citizens of rich countries work for a company, doing highly specialized jobs. As a result, they spend their working lives implementing somebody else’s entrepreneurial vision, and not their own. According to an OECD study, in most developing countries 30-50 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce is self-employed (the ratio tends to be even higher in agriculture). In some of the poorest countries the ratio of people working as one-person entrepreneurs can be way above that: 66.9 per cent in Ghana, 75.4 percent in Bangladesh and a staggering 88.7 per cent in Benin. In contrast, only 12.8 per cent of the non-agricultural workforce in developed countries is self-employed.

For developing-country entrepreneurs, however, things go wrong all the time: power cuts, delivery delays due to bureaucratic red-tape, bribery and transport breakdowns. Coping with all these obstacles, Chang observes, requires agile thinking and improvisation. An average American businessman would not last a week if he had to manage a small company in Maputo or Phnom Penh. Why then do these entrepreneurs remain poor?

Recognizing the entrepreneurial energy of the poor has led many secular and Christian NGOs to leap on the “micro-credit bandwagon” in the past couple of decades. The main idea behind micro-credit is that the poor lack the necessary capital to realize their entrepreneurial potential. Regular banks ignore them and local money sharks charge exorbitant interest on loans. Enter the micro-credit (or, more broadly, the microfinance) industry which gives  poor people, especially poor women, small loans at reasonable interest rates to set up a food stall, buy a mobile phone to rent calls, or buy a cow or chickens and sell their produce.

This was seen as the magic formula to end poverty. It proved immensely popular among American donor agencies who saw it as a way of making every poor person a capitalist, no longer depending on government handouts. Governments, in turn, could simply forget the poor and leave their welfare in the hands of foreign and local development agencies who would distribute microcredit loans far and wide. The popularity of micro-credit reached fever pitch in 2005, which the UN declared the International Year of Microcredit. The following year Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, widely hailed as the pioneers of microcredit, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Unfortunately, the cracks in the micro-credit industry began to appear before this. And they have widened. Several books have questioned the claims that microfinance has significantly improved the lives of its clients. The problems are too numerous to mention. But just consider the woman who initially makes good money by renting out a mobile phone in her village. As soon as more “telephone ladies” appear on the scene, the incomes fall dramatically. The answer to such overcrowding of the market is to start manufacturing the phones yourself or writing software to develop applications for the phones. But this is a major step up and the “telephone ladies” do not have the education or wherewithal to move into manufacturing or software design. The problem is that there is only a very limited range of simple businesses that the poor in developing countries can take on, given their limited skills, lack of education and access to technologies, and the limited amount of funds that they can  mobilize through microfinance.

What is worse, however, is that without subsidies from governments or international donors, microfinance institutions have had to charge near-usurious rates. It has been revealed that the Grameen Bank could initially charge reasonable rates of interest only because of the (hushed-up) subsidies it was getting from the Bangladesh government and foreign donors. When, in the late 1990s, it came under pressure to give up the government subsidies, the Grameen Bank was forced to re-launch itself (in 2001) and start charging interest rates of 40-50 per cent. In countries such as Mexico the interest rates can be high as 100 per cent. Since few businesses can make the necessary profits to repay the loans, most of the loans now made by microfinance institutions go towards “consumption smoothing”- people taking out loans to pay for their daughter’s wedding or to make up a temporary fall in income due to the illness of a working family member. In other words, the vast bulk of microcredit is not being used to fuel entrepreneurship by the poor, but to finance consumption.

What really made rich countries rich is their ability to channel individual entrepreneurial energy into collective, productive enterprises. Even exceptional individuals like Thomas Edison or Bill Gates could become what they have only because they lived in societies that had good collective institutions: laws that enabled them to build large and complex organizations; a scientific infrastructure that enabled them to acquire their knowledge and experiment with it; an educational system that supplied trained scientists, engineers, managers, and workers to run these companies; a financial system that enabled them to raise large amounts of capital when they wanted to expand; patents and copyright laws that protected their inventions; easily accessible local and overseas markets for their products, and so on.

Poor nations need help in building effective institutions and collective, entrepreneurial organizations, if they are to get out of mass poverty. There are severe limits to developing individual talents alone.

This raises a major question: Are NGOs, both secular and Christian, unwittingly helping governments evade their responsibilities for social justice?

The average human today lives longer, travels further, burns more carbon and eats more food than in any generation before us. The unsustainable consumption habits of Europe, the USA and Japan have been promoted worldwide and are now being emulated by hundreds of millions in China, India, Brazil and Indonesia. The carbon-fuelled, capital-intensive approach to economic development has gathered so much momentum that, however much the world’s leaders may pay lip-service to caring for the planet, very few have the imagination and courage to envision alternative pathways.

Not surprisingly, the face of the earth too is ageing. Its skin (the soil) is drying up and becoming more reliant on chemicals. Its arteries (the rivers) are choking with industrial waste and blocked dams. Its lungs (the forests) are gasping for air, having been steadily shredded for timber, paper, cash-crops, ranches and highways. Its energy reserves (oil, coal) are being consumed faster than ever. While all our countries display the symptoms of this deterioration, in none is it so glaring and amplified as in China.

This is the verdict of Jonathan Watts, the environmental journalist and China correspondent of the Guardian newspaper. I have just been reading Watts’s fascinating account of his journey from the Tibetan plateau to the decimated forests of Heilongjiang, describing the tragic contradictions of China’s accelerated ‘progress’. In When A Billion Chinese Jump (2010), Watts repeatedly points out the gulf between the stated aims of the Chinese leadership when it comes to ‘scientific development’ and the realities on the ground.

Despite its dictatorial leadership, the Chinese government seems less able to prevent an environmental meltdown than leaders in democratic nations because it is more addicted to rapid growth. Moreover, power lies neither at the top nor the bottom, but within a middle layer of bureaucrats, with their own fiefdoms, and local developers whom it is difficult to hold to account. The per capita energy use in Shanghai now exceeds that of Tokyo, New York and London, and is 50 per cent higher than the global norm. And it is the conspicuous consumption of rich Shanghai shoppers that is being pushed as the lifestyle norm in all the other mega-cities in China.

“Hopes for a green future are premature,” writes Watts, while fears of the red past seem outdated. “If any single colour predominates in today’s China, it is the grey of smoke and ash and concrete, of horizon-blurring smog, of law-obscuring vagueness and of colour-stifling monotony. More species are dying out, fish stocks are declining, water shortages are growing more severe, deserts are encroaching on cities, glaciers are shrinking and the climate is becoming more hostile. Countless millions die each year of environment-related disease. Yet the government is choosing farm animals over wildlife, monoculture over biodiversity, concrete over earth and weather modification over truly ambitious moves to tackle global warming.” (pp. 388-9).

Is China the biggest threat to global security? It would seem so, despite the American political and media obsession with Iran and Pakistan. For China’s domestic addictions and environmental problems have spilled over into the rest of the world. As its own forests, fields and mines struggle to satisfy an expanding national appetite, China is depleting Siberia’s forests and Mongolia’s ore deposits. Obese children used to be rare in China; now nearly 15 % of the population is overweight. To feed its growing livestock, China imports huge quantities of soya, much of it from Brazil, which has accelerated deforestation in the Amazon region. The high-protein, high-octane, junk-food lifestyle has consequences for global food security, climate change and South East Asia’s wildlife. Toxic dust from factories and deserts in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia drift across the Pacific to the West Coast of California. Dams and river diversion projects in Tibet and Yunnan are affecting millions of people living downstream in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Burma. Chinese cash and political support is accelerating the filthy extraction of oil from Canada’s tar sands and propping up evil regimes in resource-rich nations like Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burma.

In the lead-up to the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, China promised to cut the carbon intensity of its economy (greenhouse emissions relative to GDP) by 40-45 per cent by 2020. However, if it continues to grow at 8 per cent per annum, and remains unable to kick its coal habit, both its per capita carbon output and its historic emissions (those accrued over the past hundred years or more) will have exceeded that of the UK by 2020. There is still a long way to go before it catches up with the USA in both per capita and historic emissions culpability- but I think I have said enough on this Blog about the latter that I’ll quickly pass over this point!

If China is becoming the biggest threat to global security, India must lie not far behind. Its political elites care more about “national prestige” than human rights and the welfare of future generations. (How strange, then, that Europe and the US are looking to these Asian powers to rescue their economies!). If conservation is to stand any chance of working in China, India and elsewhere, environmental laws and well-articulated policies are not enough. There has to be a widespread cultural conversion: new values and attitudes, new understandings of what constitutes the “good life”. And, in my experience, that conversion has to begin in the middle-class Christian churches of Asia (which includes people like me).