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Jon Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven
Still, this book is not irrelevant to my studies. It is a book of American history, about the birth and struggle of a peculiarly American religion, and about how faith in that religion can go terribly wrong. In the case of this particular book, the religion is Mormonism, and the tragedy centers around the murders of a woman and her infant daughter in 1984, at the hands of two Mormon heretics who claimed that they were directed by God to kill. Krakauer starts with this crime, and returns to it periodically, but in between he traces out the often violent history of the Latter Day Saints, especially the doctrines of plural marriage and blood atonement that figure so prominently in its fundamentalism. I don't know much about Mormons. I know, respect, even admire, some Mormons, and in general I'm impressed by their earnestness, industriousness, social conscience, and social cohesion. I don't think much of their religion or their devotion to it, but then I could say the same about any other religion. As for the tendency of people of profound faith to commit atrocities, that's hardly a peculiarly Mormon trait. While faith only rarely leads to such horrors, such horrors are very often accompanied by such faith. It is certainly easy to form casual correlations between what Krakauer writes about Mormons and what I understand about some Muslims. Indeed, that is to be expected, given that both religions are relatively recent constructions built on common roots. Krakauer does tiptoe into contemporary politics at one point, where he writes (p. 294-295):
I'm reluctant to go into this aspect of Bush and Ashcroft because it inevitably seems like an attack on their religion, whereas the real problem isn't what they believe, but how they use their religion to excuse policies and acts that are unconscionable. There are, after all, many people who share with Bush and Ashcroft the rough outlines of their religion, but who don't invade foreign countries or obsess over executing people. Just as there are many Mormons who never have and never will believe that God might tell them to kill someone, as Ron Lafferty claims to believe. Still, the parallel is clearly there: the difference betwen Ron Lafferty and George W. Bush is mostly one of scale. It's hard not to think of Lafferty's life and acts as pathetic; Bush, on the other hand, having sent thousands of people to their deaths, really does have a claim to be "the one mighty and strong." Whether, like Lafferty, Bush believes that his role is to usher in the "end of days" is something that Bob Woodward has yet to disclose. But given how little concern Bush shows for the future of America and/or the World even 5, 10, 20 years hence that's a theory that can't be disproven. The interesting thing is that hardly anybody even discusses the prospect. It's easier to think that Bush merely wants to dominate the world. It's easier to think that he's just in it for the money, or that he's just a shill for others who are just in it for the money. It's easier to think that he's a nitwit. Yet the evidence strongly attests that he is a man of deep conviction, and that he is exceptionally resolute. And we can clearly see what the fruits of his convictions bear: the world today is being torn asunder by his acts, and the prospects for healing while he remains in power are nil. Or so it seems to me, a person who learned the hard way that trust in the wisdom, integrity, and benevolence of America's leaders -- in politics, in business, in the press, in the academy, in religion -- is misplaced. I recall that R.D. Laing wrote an essay on "The Obvious," the point of which is that everyone has their own sense of the obvious. I'm tempted to generalize this point even further. It's more like we each live in parallel universes: not independent, and certainly not under our own control, but each conceived and understood on its own quasi-independent track. Each such universe starts ignorant, and its central actor makes sense of it the best he or she can. The cumulative interaction of events with our cognitive skills drives each of those universes forward: usually independently, as when we think private thoughts, or whistle in the dark, but as we each act within the shell of our own universes those universes also clash, rarely to any sort of dramatic effect. This creates the paradox that while our acts seem very important to us, they are almost always inconsequential to the other universes out there. Of course, this model is just a cognitive device. Perhaps worse still, it's just my cognitive device. It derives, perhaps, from having spent a lot of time thinking about epistemology, and perhaps from reading too much science (more or less) fiction. But, for me at least (your mileage may vary), this helps explain a lot of apparent behavior that otherwise doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. For instance, why are deeply irrational beliefs and phobias so rarely selected against? The answer is that they almost never penetrate significantly into other people's personal universes. And why is that? Three reasons occur to me: 1) preoccupation: each person's universe is primarily concerned with that person, not anyone else; 2) threat rejection: we tend instinctively to dismiss discomfiting news, lest it overwhelm us; 3) attenuation: each penetration requires more energy, and many are needed before anything becomes significant. Another problem is why is it so difficult to reason with people? Again, preoccupation and attenuation are part of this, but reason faces its own obstacles: the persistence of myths, insufficient common understanding, different perceptions of interests and allegiances, even an instinctive distrust of the process. There are domains were reason fares well, such as science and mathematics, and those are precisely domains where the obstacles listed above are weakest. However, in domains like politics the obstacles are strong enough that practical politicians rarely resort to reason. Instead, they tend to make emotional appeals to myths, symbols, and allegiances, often calculated to give them viable factional power rather than consensus. In political discourse, the effect of this is to disenfranchise reason. More generally, disenfranchisement results from another aspect of our parallel universes: the management of shared experiences. While each individual's reaction to a common experience is unique to that individual, in most cases it is for practical purposes possible to aggregate reactions statistically. That is, given an experience that large numbers of people share, some reactions will predominate over others -- probably because of previous shared experiences, although the limitation of practical options is also significant (e.g., to vote for one of a small number of candidates -- in the U.S., the number is typically two). The effect of this statistical analysis is to disenfranchise anyone who doesn't fit into a viable scheme. In a democratic political game we see this happening all the time. For instance, there are large numbers of atheists in the U.S., but nobody thinks that they can build a viable political block (a majority) around atheism, so nobody tries. This not only disenfranchises atheists, it cedes disproportionate political power to the conspicuously religious, reinforcing them through the legitimation inferred by political patronage. In U.S. politics this leads to the "no candidates" phenomenon, which by increasing the indifference of prospective voters further narrows the domain of political discourse, and limits our options for solving all-too-real problems. One of my more/less constant themes has been how we've become prisoners of our rhetoric. What I've tried to do above is to sketch out the conceptual model of how this has happened. We live in a world where we as individuals are profoundly powerless, even in the cases where we are mostly free to direct our own personal lives. Such freedom usually depends on the tacit accepteance of powerlessness: people are free to mind their own business, because it doesn't make any real difference to others, least of all the elites (who are at most relatively powerful, by virtue of their ability to manipulate symbols that are broadly acquiesced to -- religion, patriotism, material wealth, ideologies like capitalism, abstract concepts like freedom and democracy, tyranny and terrorism, mere character traits like toughness, resolve, fortitude). And such freedom is for most people quite satisfying, as is the sense of belonging to a well-ordered society. But some people are unsatisfied with the status quo: they want to test the limits of their freedom, they start to question the ordering of society. Most such people were driven to want to change the world by perceived wrongs done them. But some are driven more by an exaggerated sense of their own self-importance: Ron and Dan Lafferty, believing that they were chosen by God to do his work, are simple and pathetic examples. Where George W. Bush differs from the Laffertys is not so much in his self-conception as in his support network. Bush is a rare example of a self-possessed activist, a fanatic, raised to a position of extraordinary political power. Yet his possession of that power -- one built on the wealth of his political backers, on the cadres of the Republican party, on the institutional power of the U.S. presidency, on the symbols of American military might -- in no way changes the fact that he dwells within the limits of his personal universe. He can't see beyond those limits, which leaves him mostly at the mercy of his own mental baggage -- a world haunted by a God who metes out violence, and by a Karl Rove who vouchsafes that it is politically safe. With his support network, and with our acquiescence (or more likely out powerlessness), his mental paroxysms have can have immense impact. Never in American history has such a dangerous person been put into such a dangerous position. Even with my own preference for atheism -- the only sure antidote -- I believe that the real problem posed by Krakauer's "Story of Violent Faith" is violence, not faith. I suspect that religion is merely a shorthand form for a much larger conception of how we manage our personal universes, and as such is essential for those who aren't able or willing to work the whole thing out. Someone may eventually work out a religion that works to support a fair and just, stable and viable society; one that eschews violence without depending on fear and intimidation, and on the all-pervasive ignorance that religion usually compensates for. However, in the short run some of the worst threats we face are from people who frame their violent fantasies in words allegedly handed down from God. Bush is one, Bin Laden is another, and there are more. In this climate it helps to be very skeptical. A good example of these points appears in this TomDispatch quote:
The ability to reason out a course of action depends heavily on agreement on facts and on motivations or goals. Yet what this quote shows is that many people (committed to Bush) still dispute facts that have been broadly established. For those people a willingness to reject facts is their first defense of their commitment to Bush. How is it then possible to reason with such people? I can imagine patiently turning a few of them around on the facts, but the only thing that will turn many of them around would be if their faith in Bush is shattered. Hard to imagine what would do that, much as it is hard to imagine what drove those people in such a shell of know-nothingness. Conversely, those who do see through Bush are unlikely to ever put their heads back in the sand, leaving the country with such deep-seated divisions as have not existed since the Civil War. Knowing how that story turned out it's hard not to worry about our future. posted 2004-04-24 |
I took a break from reading Noam Chomsky's dissection of the New
American Empire to quickly read Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner
of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith. I didn't have any political
or philosophical purpose in doing so: I've read his three other
books (I'm a sucker for mountain climbing books), think he is a
terrific writer, and seized the opportunity when I found this
one in the library. Also I figured I could use a break -- I've
been reading heavy for nearly three years now, trying to focus
my own thoughts for the book that I figure has to come out some
day.