AwayPoint

‘A very generous people’

Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.), who is frequently outspoken in favor of U.S. humanitarian ventures, said he believes the initial U.S. response (to the tsunami) has been appropriate, even without a public role for Bush. "I think the world knows we’re a very generous people," he said. – MSNBC

Do they?  Are we?

U.N. Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland grumbled last Monday that the richest nations of the world give less than 1 percent each of their gross national product for foreign assistance.  "It is beyond me why we are so stingy, really," he told reporters.  Oops.  In the face of bitter backlash from, specifically, the U.S., Egeland has retracted his statement.  But the facts would suggest that his initial outburst was more honest – and more accurate – than anyone cares to admit. 

Research shows that Americans consistently guess wrong if asked to estimate the percentage of our taxes that are devoted to humanitarian aid – often by a magnitude of ten or more.  The bottom line is that on any ordinary sheet of paper with an ordinary sized pie chart, the amount devoted to humanitarian aid is vanishingly small. 

We are much more generous when it comes to providing military assistance to our allies – hardly, however, a persuasive indicator of generosity.  Not only does this assistance benefit a highly subsidized industry (weapons have been promoted for over twenty years as one of our major exports), but an overlord is rarely thought of as generous for providing swords to his foot soldiers.  Generosity is not the same as prudence.  Both may be virtues, but they are not synonyms.     

Among the world’s two dozen wealthiest countries, the United States often is among the lowest in donations per capita for official development assistance worldwide, even though our totals are often larger than the totals given by other countries or coalitions of countries.   According to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development of 30 wealthy nations, the United States gives the least — at 0.14 percent of its gross national product.  Those godless socialists, the Norwegians give the most at 0.92 percent.  That is why we don’t like talking about percentages.  If you listen closely, you’ll notice that what you hear in the media or from government officials is that our total constitutes millions or tens of millions of dollars or is greater than the total donated by this or that country — never mind that their economy and population may be a small fraction of what ours is.

But sometimes even the totals are embarrassing.  In response to the Tsunami that devastated countries around the Indian Ocean this week, Canada, with close to one tenth of our population, pledged 40 million.  The Bush administration, amidst international mutterings, bumped its pledge from 15 to 35.  Get it?  For us to donate as much per capita as Canada we’d be pledging closer to 400 million. A New York Times editorialist points out that the original 15 million was less than half of what the Republicans plan to spend on Bush’s inaugural festivities.  Feel at all egg-faced?  Colin Powell, Bush himself, and other spokespersons for the administration have insisted, with some irritation, that the 35 million is just for starters–the number will grow.  And it probably will.  In fact, the final tally will probably even include some diversion of our military resources to civilian command or search and rescue. 

But I, personally, can’t get past that 0.14 percent. 

As a child I was taught a story that imbedded itself in my moral core:  Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others.  They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything–all she had to live on.”    Mark 12:41-43

The message?  Generosity is measured not in total given, but in what it costs the giver. 

When I was traveling in India this October, I sat down in an airport next to two evangelical fathers who had brought their sons to witness the power of church-building among India’s rural poor.  It was the week of Durga Puja, the most holy holiday for Hindus in West Bengal, and the new converts, as Christians have done from time immemorial, were adapting the local holiday to their new faith.  They had pooled their resources to create days of communal feast and celebration, a time when their sharing meant none would go hungry.  But this, according to the men, was just one manifestation of their spirit of giving.   "These people are amazing," commented one of them.  "In the States, less than five percent of Christians tithe, but here they all do." 

I was tempted to point out that maybe American Christians, being uniformly literate and having access to Bibles, were more able to figure out that tithing is an Old Testament affair, part of the same holiness code that prohibits eating shellfish or milk and meat together–the code that condemns not only homosexuals to death but also nonvirgin brides and women who get raped within the city limits; the code where the price of a broken betrothal may be one shoe.  Maybe American Christians were less generous because they were more informed, and Indian converts were being exploited because of their ignorance. 

Maybe.  But do I think that is all that’s going on?  No.  The New Testament message is clear.  Giving should be voluntary, of the heart, but here is the apogee of generosity– a widow with two coppers.  If anything, the gospels set a higher standard than the Books of the Law.  They replace the ten percent rule, a flat tax if you will, with a standard that requires individual heart-searching and a priority on each giving as he or she is able. 

Not that I want to open a big can of nightcrawlers, but did you notice that it sounds almost like voluntary Marxism a la Israeli kibbutzim? In fact, the early Church, which took these commands quite seriously, apparently espoused a form of communalism, a god-ful socialism that made them look more Norwegian or Israeli than American.  And interestingly, when a rich man asked Jesus what he must do to enter the kingdom of heaven, the Teacher told him to sell all that he had and give the proceeds – not to the church or to the disciples or to Jesus himself (in contrast to some modern cult leaders and evangelists) – but to the poor.  "And come follow me."  John the Baptist, when asked how to prepare the way of the Lord, said, “The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same."  Definitely a higher standard, both for individuals and for Christian communities.   No, the difference between early Christians/Indian Christians and American Christians is not about Old Testament/New Testament distinctions.   It’s about American culture, a culture that prizes material wealth and individualism.  It’s about the amazing ability of that culture to filter the words of Jesus and produce an ethic that says, at its most crass, God wants you to be rich, and prosperity is a sign of His favor. 

Are we generous?  What would it mean to be generous by New Testament standards? 

I understand that thing about two tunics, but what if my ten are all different?  And what’s to be done with the Godiva chocolate that I hide from my kids?  And if I share my chocolate, do I have to share my collective resources, my tax money, too? 

January 2005

My Kind

As much as I try to see myself as a citizen of the world, as much as I work to embrace my kinship with all humans and with life itself, what makes me the most angry about the war in Iraq is its impact on My Kind:  Women. 

Many aspects of this war “against terrorism” or “for oil” or “for freedom and democracy” or “for hegemony” or whatever it is–many aspects of this war grieve me.  I am grieved by the thought of my countrymen – country kids, many of them – coming home in body bags or without limbs.  I am grieved by the images of Iraqi mothers holding their dead children and of dazed children clinging to dead parents.   I ache about cities shattered, about the shared patrimony of humankind stolen and destroyed by looters, about black oil clouds billowing into carbon-heavy skies.  But one thing in particular clenches my stomach and pounds in my temples:  the systematic degradation of my kind.

I felt it this morning, when the newspaper confronted me with imams in black halos followed by a crowd of marchers chanting, their faces distorted with anger, all male—not one of us in the whole mob.  I clenched my teeth, dropped the paper on the table, and left the room.

I felt it last week, when the same newspaper celebrated the face of freedom – an Iraqi woman at the polls, shrouded in black.   I stared.  I stared, and I wanted to scream.  Does anyone see the irony here?!  Is anyone seeing this?!  Iraqi women didn’t wear black shrouds, for the most part, before we took out Saddam Hussein.   

Perhaps you noticed the Reuters footage before the war – of Baghdad women in Western clothes or scarves and outerwear strolling between boutiques.  Did you also hear that Iraq had the highest level of education for females in the region?  That’s university education.  We’re talking Islamic women getting B.A.’s and Ph.D.’s  — before a club of old boys in D.C. who don’t wear black shrouds decided on behalf of all Iraqis that theocracy was preferable to repressive dictatorship. 

That’s not what they decided, you say?  They sure as hell did.  The current and growing fundamentalist oppression of Iraqi women was as predictable as the consequences of driving drunk on a crowded sidewalk.  Some of us – male and female – tried to say so before the bombing started, before the vegetable patches of desert dwellers became craters and the mosques of Fallujah lay in rubble.  Before the leering specter of a hated occupier recruited thousands of –I’m going to say it– fanatical willing-to-die-for-virgins males from all over the Islamic world to the streets of Iraq.   That was before they started systematically targeting females with professional jobs or too many years of schooling:  women with voices, women with power.   That was before the women of Iraq began clothing themselves like the legions of the dead.  Camouflage, I call it.  The theocrats aren’t in power yet, but their minions are patrolling the streets.  Look dead, and they may save their bullets.

After the Taliban fell, the media loved to show us faces of Afghani women.  Soft, round faces or old and creased, faces with brown eyes, green-flecked or surprisingly blue.  Freeing women from burkas in Afghanistan was great P.R.   Forcing them into Saudi abayas in Iraq is a minor inconvenience, one of those collateral consequences not worthy of mention when people are still losing limbs and lives in a war that consumes ever greater tons of explosives against non-military targets.   To the American media, it is simply uninteresting that women have been forced out of school, sequestered in single room dwellings, even executed and dismembered for wanting to marry someone they loved.  It doesn’t matter to the people who are exporting “freedom” that the free lives these women lived or dreamed of living are – for all intents and purposes – over. 

The farce of it all is bitter and grinding.  Which “freedom” would you rather have—the the right to vote or the right to feel the sun on your face?  The right to cast a ballot or the right to learn – to become a psychologist or teacher or engineer and to hope the same for your daughter?  The right to stand in line at the polls every few years and check a box for one of the feudal patriarchs competing for the loyalty of your clan, or the right to love whom you will.  Suffrage has meaning only when it builds on a foundation of personal and intellectual freedom.  In Iraq these days, it is merely window dressing for servitude. 

I, personally, am nowhere close to forgiving those who calculatingly or casually substituted this façade for the genuine, if limited, freedoms once held by my Iraqi sisters.

What I feel when the newspaper shoves in my face those images of disinhibited males and shrouded females is beyond anger.  It is rage.  When it hits, my whole body reacts.  I want to throw rocks.  I want to destroy things.  I want to pick up a gun and annihilate the forces that are turning my kind into Undead who carry their schoolbooks inside of shrouds, shop inside them, and do their grieving muffled in polyester darkness. 

I haven’t started accumulating weapons— in fact, I rarely touch them since my NRA rifle club dropped away sometime during high school.  I don’t throw rocks through windows or set anything on fire or talk to military recruiters or search the underground for private militias.  That isn’t what my kind do, is it?  But I am shaken by the power of hatred – my own – and by the power of tribalism – also my own.  And I am left with a slow, simmering burn that waits for the uprising of my kind on behalf of my kind.   

February 6, 2005     

Evolution is a Theory, not a Fact 

The success of current scientific theories is no miracle. It is not even surprising to the scientific (Darwinist) mind. For any scientific theory is born into a life of fierce competition, a jungle red in tooth and claw. Only the successful theories survive—the ones which in fact latched on to the actual regularities in nature. – Bas Van Fraassen , The Scientific Image, p. 40 (1980).

On Friday, January 14, 2005, the following “Brief” appeared in the papers across the country: 

Georgia – A federal judge yesterday ordered a suburban Atlanta school system to remove stickers in its high school biology textbooks that call evolution “a theory, not a fact,” saying the disclaimers were an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.  The stickers were put in the books by school officials in Cobb County in 2002.
            “By denigrating evolution, the school board appears to be endorsing the well-known prevailing alternative theory, creationism, or variations thereof, even though the sticker does not specifically reference any alternative theories,”  U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper said. 

The honorable judge’s logic—that the stickers constitute an endorsement of religion may puzzle many people.  It was based on the impact of the stickers—they were intended to and do in fact promote Genesis literalism in Cobb County schools.  Here is another way in which his ruling makes sense:  Since there is no viable scientific alternative to evolutionary theory, singling out evolution for such a sticker could only be attributed to pressures from the religious right.  If this were not the case, we would have similar stickers throughout the biology book, for example, in the part that described germ theory.  Imagine the infectious disease section being tagged with stickers that said “germ theory is a theory, not a fact.”  Sounds kind of silly, doesn’t it? 

Now for the twist:  Such labels might sound silly, but they would, in fact, be technically accurate.  The word “theory,” as used by scientists, has a very precise meaning–a theory is a system of logic that integrates a set of data points.  Encarta Dictionary defines a scientific theory as  a set of facts, propositions, or principles analyzed in their relation to one another and used, especially in science, to explain phenomena. 

A scientific theory is bound by certain rules. 

By these rules, Judge Cooper misspoke in his brief statement.  While discussing the scientific theory of evolution, he referred to “alternative theories,” meaning creationism.   But according to the definition above, creationism is not a theory.  It is a notion, a faith-based intuition, or a belief, perhaps, but not a theory.  Confusion arises from the fact that in every day speech, we use the word “theory” to mean just this, a notion, hunch, or idea.  Here is one non-scientific definition of the word “theory,” also from Encarta:  an idea of or belief about something arrived at through speculation or conjecture.  

Judge Cooper inadvertently played with words.   Alternative theories compete with the theory of evolution only if you pit the two definitions of the word against each other.  In the world of science, evolutionary theory has no viable competitor.  No alternative system of logic and evidence passes the test.  But the judge must be forgiven for blurring two very different kinds of “theories” into one.    Gullible school boards, earnest reporters, and ordinary truth seekers make this mistake all the time.  In fact, they are encouraged to do so by creation propagandists, like those of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.   

These are facts – observed evidence from the real world.  Evolutionary theory is called a theory because it is a logical structure that accommodates and integrates these facts.  It spells out regularities and principles.  It calls out the common patterns in the changes that occur over time in ideas, cultures and biological species.   It has stood the test of intense scrutiny.  Evolutionary biology is not mere fact, nor is merely conjecture.  It is scientific theory.  

 January 16, 2005