Having Moral Authority Requires Being Moral

Decades ago the noted Soviet political philosopher and humanitarian, J.V. Stalin, took a few moments off from the hard work of signing death warrants to meditate on a critical question. The Greatest Leader In Human History (to use one of his lesser encomiums) mused to a subordinate who had raised the issue of opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, "How many divisions does the pope have?"

Stalin knew the answer. None. At the same time even the bloody handed Soviet dictator well understood that the pope commanded a force far more powerful than an armored division or even an armored army. The pope exercised moral authority on the thinking of millions of people around the world--including more than a few who were not members of his congregation.

Moral authority was the pope's weapon then. It remained so as one pope followed another. That is until now.

Communities of faith such as the Catholic Church function best in the political, social, and economic lives of humans when standing apart from the instruments of government and state to act in the eternal prophetic tradition. The prophet has only one thing going for him. The one and only mechanism available to the prophet--be it an individual or a giant institution-is moral authority.

Moral authority provides the prophet, the church, with its only palpable form of legitimacy, its only claim upon the ears, eyes, and attention of an audience. The power of the prophet comes from both the fundamental accuracy of the message and the unassailable purity of the messenger. An accurate, critical message from a besmirched messenger will not be heard nor heeded.

While it is eminently suitable to take exception with aspects of the social, cultural, political, and economic messages of the Catholic Church, it is nonetheless necessary to acknowledge that the Church has put forth appeals and criticisms which rest comfortably within the prophetic tradition. The encyclical Charity in Truth is a good, recent example of this.

Charity in Truth is prophetic in tone as it is in substance. It delivered a message which deserved attention even if only that its predicates, argumentation, and conclusions could be rebutted. As was the case with many (but certainly not all) encyclicals, Charity in Truth invoked the highest human aspirations and chastised failure to live up to their challenge.

This appraisal is not undercut by the reality that the Catholic Church--or at least its Central Command, the Vatican, as well as the pope, Benedict XVI, who issued it stood as monuments to politically incorrect positions on such matters as reproductive rights, the status of homosexuals, or gender equality. While both unfashionable and arguably as wrong as a dog purring, the posture adopted by either the Church or the pope did not fatally erode the moral authority of the message or the messenger.

The same cannot be written of the Church's and the pope's response to the ever-widening revelations of priestly sexual abuse of children and adolescents. Starting in the US nearly ten years ago and spreading recently to Ireland, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, the tales of both sexual molestation and conspiracies of concealment have not only stained the hem of the pope's robes, they have splotched the entirety of the Church.

The repeated pattern of denial, willful concealment, covert payments, vows of silence have constituted a species of unilateral disarmament by the Church. The all too obvious inability or unwillingness of national hierarchies, the Vatican, and Benedict XVI to openly acknowledge the criminal conduct of priests and their superiors has resulted in the destruction of the institution's and the pope's moral authority.

The bunker mentality exhibited by the various actors in this sordid drama remind the observer of the Nixon administration at its worst. The conduct of Nixon and his minions in the wake of that famed "second rate burglary" cost the president both his perceived legitimacy and his office. While Benedict XVI cannot be impeached, he and the Church he heads can be tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.

The sentence which will be imposed and from which there is no easy appeal is the forfeiture of the right to be heard or heeded. Quite bluntly, without moral authority what claim does the prophet possess? No matter how accurate and perceptive the prophetic message might be, the blotched robe assures no one will pay attention.

Benedict XVI and the priestly politicians who surround him in Vatican City have engaged in a strikingly, shockingly short-sighted exercise in institutional protection at all costs. The irony is that the costs which these myopic defenders of the faith have imposed upon their Church both today and into endless tomorrows is and will continue to be far greater than those which would have been assessed had the kiddy-diddling priests been left to hang, twisting slowly in the wind when the first hint of scandal emerged.

Were Joe Stalin around to ask his question today, anyone and everyone could honestly answer, "None." And, that is both a pity and a tragedy considering how much the world needs honestly prophetic voices today.

Time to Get a Grip on Religion and History

Quite a few apologists for Islam, not all of them Muslims by a long, long way, enjoy pointing out that it was the followers of Islam who "invented" zero as an arithmetical place holder, preserved what little classical literature survived the long ordeal of the Dark Ages, and had a vibrant, productive period of scientific and medical research and discovery. Two of these three points are true--but not in a way that reflects any particular credit on Muslims.

First, the untruth: Muslims did not "discover" nor "invent" the use of zero as a place holder in math. That honor belongs to folks in India who were, then as now, Hindu. The convenience of zero in making basic business math type calculations was appreciated by the Arab merchants trading across the Indian Ocean, and they quickly adopted the Indian innovation. It then spread via trading routes into Europe where, along with the admittedly far less cumbersome Arabic numerals, rapidly sent the clumsy Roman system of notation to the scrapheap--and cornerstone dates for pretentious buildings.

The only credit due Islam per se is that it didn't inhibit all international trade with its giant appetite for war and conquest. The real kudos belong to Indian merchants and their Arab colleagues.

What about the other two? They are true assertions, no doubt about that. However, the truth rests less with the peaceful and scholarly nature of Muslims than with the deficiencies of Europeans.

It wasn't that the Europeans had suffered a terminal attack of stupidity when the Roman Empire in the West collapsed some 250 years before Islam erupted from the sands of Arabia. Nor did the Germanic tribes in the course of their folk migrations and displacement of Romans, Gauls and the other residents of the decaying empire have a single digit IQ level.

No. The ultimate responsibility for both the role played by Muslim scholars in preserving the remnants of classical learning from Greece and Rome and the splendid but short lived period of Muslim scientific and medical research rests with two facts on the blasted wastes of European society a thousand years and more ago.

Take a hold on the two facts.

Fear was one. Fear was pervasive in the aftermath of the collapse of Roman order, Roman protected trade and commerce, Roman peace. Decades, centuries of war, famine, death produced a very long lasting legacy of fear in all levels of the European population. Completely encapsulating fear produces a driving need for anything which will seem to take charge, direct perceptions, beliefs and behaviors. In short it produces a high number of authoritarian personalities eager to follow a leader, an institution, an ideology which offers to reduce fear.

The second fact was the existence in Europe at and after the implosion of the Western Roman Empire of an institution with an ideology and socially dominant authoritarians which was ready, willing, able and eager to take charge of the wreckage and move out.

That institution was the Catholic Church. The ideology was Pauline and post-Pauline Christianity. The socially dominant authoritarian personalities went by various job titles ranging from priest to pope. Ideology, institution and members combined as a total package which offered to reduce fear, reduce risk.

Intentionally or not, the Church considered as a religio-political system reduced something else, something even more important for a society, a culture, as a whole. The actions of the Church as it sought to provide a complete, integrated political and spiritual existence for its European adherents suppressed curiosity, repressed inventiveness, reduced almost to the point of elimination any individual questioning, thinking, acting.

For an authoritarian institution, as for the authoritarian personality, stasis is the desired state. The lack of exploration, the absence of change, innovation, creativity outside of narrowly defined boundaries are all considered good. Learning became a rote exercise in memorizing certain selected texts. Science and medicine--where and when either existed at all--consisted of repeating the work done a millennium or more earlier.

For centuries Europe froze under the heavy hand of an authoritarian institution and ideology. Nothing really changed intellectually, culturally, socially, politically, economically as one dreary year succeeded another. None of this occurred without good reason.

In the short hand of military intelligence manuals dealing with interrogation of prisoners of war, the reason is known as, "fear up; fear down." Authority over the perceptions, beliefs and behaviors of an individual (or an entire society with its many levels, ranks and functions) is established and maintained by manipulating fear up and down, of playing the most primal emotion of people like a musical instrument, running the scale up and down, higher and lower.

The Church painted horrifying visions of eternal damnation for those who did not follow all the many "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" purportedly found in the one and only Official Bible as interpreted by those institutional functionaries licensed by the Church to do so. At the same time the Church offered the comforting images of a perfect place beyond space and time where the virtuous would dwell forever. Of course, "virtue" was defined by the Church.

While Europe droned on in a semi-coma, Islam was in its most rambunctious phase. It was a young, energetic, highly motivated and successful ideology. It might have had an ideology susceptible to authoritarian abuse, but the time was not yet right for the contradictory components of the Quran to be put to that purpose.

Islam was quick with the sword, not only against external enemies but against its own membership. There was internal violence, inner fractionation, palace intrigue, all the things that make life exciting, vibrant. Along with conquest, in tandem with killing and looting, in companionship with backstabbing and seizing one gold ring of power or another while standing on the bodies of yesterday's friends, came a thirst for learning that quickly drained the sparse oases of Arabia and seized eagerly upon the new lakes of knowledge in Alexandria and elsewhere.

Learning, scholarship had been celebrated by Mohammad so the Muslims who cherished the knowledge of antiquity and pushed forward the boundaries of understanding in chemistry, physics and medicine properly saw themselves as doing the will of Allah. Every now and then, according to the Geek's reading of history, authoritarianism and untrammeled creativity and invention can coexist. The first two hundred, three hundred years of Islam was such a time.

From the contrast briefly outlined here, it is easy to see why Islam cruised by Europe in so many fields of learning. But, let's get an honest grip on the truth behind this. If the Europeans had not fallen under the sway of a fossilizing authoritarian institution with the goal of totally controlling all aspects of human life, is it not likely--likely to the point of certainty--that Europeans, not Muslims, would have made the advances whether in science, medicine, government, trade and business or even war?

The answer to this question is found a couple of centuries later as the High Middle Ages gave way to the Renaissance and Reformation. The hallmark of the Ren and Ref is a new celebration of the individual. In close second place is an increased willingness and ability to cast off the shackles of fear and authoritarianism.

As the Enlightenment replaced the earlier Renaissance and Reformation and as the failures of the Church's repressive efforts known as the Counter-reformation became increasingly evident, the day of the Individual fully dawned in Europe. To be sure this new emphasis upon the individual and his or her efforts came with increased risk and even new fears as well as the usual accomplices: war, famine, death--and creativity, innovation, invention, discovery, all the little things we have thought of for so long as "progress."

It is ironic to say the least that Islamists and Islamic fundamentalists want to stop the clock in its tracks or even turn it back to some supposed earlier and better time. It is ironic that Islamists and Islamic fundamentalists want to play the "fear up-fear down" racket to gain and maintain authority over fearful people. It is ironic that so many Muslims have given way to fears without basis.

It is ironic to see Islamists and their ilk try to kill their way to a social-political order frozen in a past which never existed in the way they believe it did. It is bitterly amusing to see Islamists and their accomplices try to bring a religiopolitical system into existence identical in all essential respects to that which so paralysed Europe that Islam could have had its great and brief moment in the sun.

There is something pathetic in the misuse of Western history by Western apologists for Islam. However, the Geek supposes it's inevitable that they do so. What else can be expected when they have so desperately misread the realities of today.