Pontifex Tactlessness

(cross-posted)

The latest uproar over a perceived slight to Islam isn't going quietly into the night. One week on it's spawned its own wikipedia entry, a slew of rants throughout the wingnut blogosphere and obssessive mainstream media coverage. A speedy resolution hasn't been helped by Muslims round the the world again deciding that the appropriate response to barbs about their faith's peacefulness is to bomb churches and issue death threats.

Nor by the fact that this time the offending observations came not from a Danish newspaper but rather the head of the Catholic Church, albeit wrapped in a theology lecture (full text here). It's unfortunate that the Pope couldn't make a point about faith and reason without a reference to jihad. And he couldn't even do that without quoting that bosom buddy of medieval Catholicism, the Byzantine emperor -

Naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war... [he] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature... But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.

This passage amounts to the following claims: a) spreading faith through violence is irrational; b) Islam teaches violent conversion; c) Islam teaches an irrational approach to faith. The Pope's speech has to be read as tacit endorsement of all these propositions. You don't use quotes to illustrate a point unless you believe the quotes to be true in substance, even if you find their expression 'startlingly brusque'. And you can't seal yourself off from controversial assertions by putting them in the mouths of medieval monarchs, or by protesting that the statements were tangential to your main point.

The issue here is not whether the claims about Islam are true. The Pope is an official figure and as such doesn't have the freedom that he enjoyed as Joseph Ratzinger, Professor of Theology, to comment on the teachings of other religions. He has the right to say what he wants, but also responsibility for the consequences, especially when pointed observations about the religion in question have a history of generating violence. This isn't 'political correctness', it's political common sense. The pontiff can no more wash his hands of this than politicians who accuse foreigners of stealing jobs can divorce themselves from a xenophobic backlash in the electorate.

Pope Benedict would have done better citing the example rather than the ideas of the said Byzantine emperor. Manuel II may have argued that Islam is disposed to violence, but he and his Muslim interlocutor were debating the issue with words rather than swords (not that Manuel had much choice, at a time when the Turks were tightening the noose round his beleagured 'empire'). One might have expected some progress on interfaith relations over the intervening six centuries. Instead they seem to be heading back to an era captured by the opening scene of Alan Savage's Ottoman, in which Manuel II's son is presented with the severed, uncircumcised penis of a Hungarian knight as proof of the fate of the last crusade.

Thirty Years On

(cross-posted)

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The 30th annivesary of Mao Zedong's death has come and gone in China much as the 40th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution did four months ago - with a deafening silence, at least from the organs of state. But politics aside, perhaps we really don't yet have the distance for a discriminating appraisal; as one of Maos' colleagues remarked about the consequences of the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell. And as for any historical giant, a just verdict would require a book, preferably in several volumes. So here I'll just sketch some thoughts on the man whose face will always dominate 20th century China.

Westerners, accustomed to think of Mao in terms of a totalitarian trilogy with Hitler and Stalin, are baffled by the status that he still commands within China. We resort to conventional social science explanations - China's lack of anything comparable to the 'de-Stalinisation' that the USSR went through under Kruschev, nostalgia for the simpler and less unequal society that Mao supposedly presided over, etc. It's easier than conceding that, beneath the official bombast about kicking out the imperialists and allowing China to stand up, there flows a stream of genuine emotion. Foreigners still don't grasp the depth of humiliation and suffering inflicted on China during the century 1840-1949, and the credit accrued by the Communist Party and Mao specifically in bringing that century to an end.

Despite what was said above about hindsight, Mao was clearly the man for the hour. Steeped in traditional education and raised in the hinterland - barring one short trip to Moscow, he never left China in his entire life - Mao had an empathy with the country that the foreign-educated Sun Zhongshan and Jiang Jieshi seemed to lack. As a young man he was scholar enough to disdain the unwashed masses, but he matured to tap what's been called the deep-seated chiliastic impulse of the Chinese peasantry: that fiery underground river ready to burst forth and consume the old order. All it needs is a messiah, and in Mao it found one par excellence, a man who said that the People could achieve anything and who sought continuous revolution until the promised earthly paradise was achieved.

Small wonder that two and a half decades after his cult was officially disowned, Mao has been inducted into the folk pantheon that still flourishes at the roots of society (despite the best efforts of Communism). Mao built his political philosophy on social contradictions, yet was himself a contradiction, a product of the 'feudal culture' he spent his life trying to destroy; a man who quoted Chinese history and literature as much as Lenin or Marx, and spent his last bedridden days poring over the Chinese equivalent to Pride and Prejudice.

In material terms, Mao's record was less benighted than popular myth holds. His aversion to Soviet-style centralism preserved China from the worst of the economic distortions that brought down its superpower neighbour. Collectivisation and the Great Leap Foward were unmitigated disasters, but a balanced assessment must note that a) there is a dearth of evidence to prove the scale of mortality, in particular textbook claims about the 'worst famine in history'; b) the experiment coincided with some of the worst natural disasters of the century; c) the degree of economic damage is ambiguous, especially given that it's unlikely any strategy could have maintained growth in China's circumstances in the late 1950's. Nor should the overall failure of Maoist developmentalism obscure its achievements, such as the vast improvements in general health or the creation of an industrial base from virtually nothing.

It's safe to say that Mao had no small opinion of himself or his place in history, as apparent in this oft-quoted poem from his Yanan years:

But alas! Qin Shihuang and Han Wudi
Were lacking in literary grace,
And Tang Taizong and Song Taizu
Had little poetry in their souls;
That proud son of Heaven,
Genghis Khan,
Knew only shooting eagles, bow outstretched.
All are past and gone!
For truly great men
Look to this age alone.

Thus he came to commit the deadly sin of conflating his personal vision with the good of those he governed, or (worse) with the shape of history. This exagerrated sense of self led Mao to inflict greater misery on the laobaixing than any god-potentate of old. It led him to destroy men of greater integrity than himself, or who had at least as much legitimacy as Mao did - Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping come to mind - and to strip millions of their humanity on the basis of arbitrarily-defined 'class'. It led ultimately to the apocalypse of the Cultural Revolution, tearing apart China's social fabric while the Americans were putting men on the moon.

For very large numbers of Chinese for the foreseeable future, Mao will remain a flawed hero. But for me at least, the final judgment on the Great Helmsman must be that he steered China onto the rocks.