The Devil in Bin Laden
"They are either with us or against us." Judge - Arthur Miller's The Crucible
I've been reading Paul Carus' classic turn-of-the-century text, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil. The history draws out a few significant patterns. First, the earliest religions were what Carus calls "devil worshipping cults" where fear of maleficent gods - especially the gods of the desert drought, from Egypt to India - drove the practices of appeasement, like sacrificial offerings. The crucial turning point occurred not with the Israelites but with the Persian Zoroastrians (500 BCE), who first devised a duality of good and evil, with the devil as lesser deity. Carus' second insight is that, if one follows the development of deities, the evil deities that do emerge are almost always the highest deities of the closest enemies. The word "Satan" means "enemy" in the Hebrew tongue; Beelzebub was a high Phoenician god, and since the Phoenicians were enemies, it became another word for Satan; a Hebrew name for hell, Gehenna, was a place where the Phoenicians worshipped Moloch; Satan was a snake for the Hebrews because their enemies, the Assyrians, worshipped a high snake-god. While we often say that politics is affected by religion, it is probably more correct to say that religion has always been determined by the political.
Like a lot of folks, I have been trying to tease the religious symbolism out of the War on Terror. We hear a lot about the "perversion of one of the world's great religions." We also hear about "hating freedom." There is the perfunctory God Bless America at the end of every speech and references to "the civilized world." There is the obvious millennialism lurking in the background. Though the Bush administration pays lip service to the notion that this is not a "holy war" or (whoops) "crusade," the religious themes clearly shine through.
I think the best question to ask is: How has politics reconfigured the idea of evil? Certainly the evil of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda is different from the Soviet Evil Empire or the Nazi threat. (BTW, George Bush prefers the word "Nazi-ism" to "Fascism" conspicuously.) I would suggest that the War on Terror and its enemies fit the standard Christian idea of evil better than previous enemies--that this war beats out previous 20th C. conflicts as it is more amenable to a good v. evil framing. Another way of saying this is that the War on Terror is more of a witch hunt than the Cold War ever could be. Here's why. (I say "Here's why" when what I really mean is, "Here's a big pile of under-theorized ideas.")
1) The idea that Al Qaeda "hate our freedom" has a direct analogue in the Rev. 12: 7-9 story of the War in Heaven, where Michael and the gang toss Satan out. Bin Laden spitefully cannot stand freedom because he has been ostracized from "the civilized world." The highest satisfaction he have now is "killing as many Americans as possible."
2) The idea that "evil is among us" in the form of sleeper cells is much more salient story than it was even during McCarthyism. The Soviet threat, though advancing, was always external. Whereas the horrifying metaphor during the Red Scare was The Blob, the metaphor today is Resident Evil (the movie and the video game). The Onion captured this idea well running the headline: "Where's Bin Laden? There's a Little Bin Laden in Each of Us." This is no Cold War dialectic. This is a story that only makes sense within a global body politic - where one nation, the U.S., acts as the god power that must cleanse itself of the Goody Proctors.
3) Evil in the War on Terror grows like a mold in a petri dish where the penicillin of "democracy" is absent. The countries that harbor terrorists, like parents of truant kids, are as much responsible as the terrorists themselves. As we all know, idleness is the devil's playground.
4) Evil in the War on Terror is, to use a religious studies term, "uncreated." It, like Satan, is not an ideological response to anything. It's clear what drives Satan: primal hate - or in Bush's oxymoronic language, "an ideology of hate" (not a "hateful ideology"): hate springing forth out of itself. There can be no explanation or context, and any attempt to do so (say, in Bin Laden's pre-election tape release) must be ignored and left unaddressed. We already know why Satan does what he does.
5) Paul Carus suggest that the worship of a positive god (rather than the appeasement of a fearsome god) marks the beginnings of civilization. We could probably pull this through the creation of the high-tech global managerial corporate hub we call the U.S. In many ways, the Christian god is a high-tech one, and our wealth is often cited as proof of divine favor - that we're headed in the right direction. French theorist Paul Virilio makes the observation that post-industrial war is that of technological fundamentalism vs. brand X fundamentalism. The spectacle of the falling Trade Towers is proof of this. This was the long-awaited "sign" that ushered in a new story of cosmic struggle.
6) Finally, in the civilizing function of monotheism, we have the idea of a "god of order" and a "devil of disorder." In some Christian circles, this talk has all but replaced good v. evil. Thus, the enemy is not the "different order" of Sovietism; it is the disorder of not-global-American-empire. Thus Bill O'Reilly stops in the middle of the word "socialist," preferring to call Michael Moore an "anarchist, really." Though the word "anarchy" may have a specific meaning for Emma Goldman and Noam Chomsky, it is synonymous with disorder in the public eye. The most accessible image of this is the "black block" figure burned into the the popular imagination as it busted up the Starbucks in Seattle in 1999. Like Anton LeVey's Satanists in Christian thought, the black block anarchists play a crucial role in affirming the story of evil in uber-religion of advanced capitalism.
I'll get back to you when I get it all sorted out.
I've been reading Paul Carus' classic turn-of-the-century text, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil. The history draws out a few significant patterns. First, the earliest religions were what Carus calls "devil worshipping cults" where fear of maleficent gods - especially the gods of the desert drought, from Egypt to India - drove the practices of appeasement, like sacrificial offerings. The crucial turning point occurred not with the Israelites but with the Persian Zoroastrians (500 BCE), who first devised a duality of good and evil, with the devil as lesser deity. Carus' second insight is that, if one follows the development of deities, the evil deities that do emerge are almost always the highest deities of the closest enemies. The word "Satan" means "enemy" in the Hebrew tongue; Beelzebub was a high Phoenician god, and since the Phoenicians were enemies, it became another word for Satan; a Hebrew name for hell, Gehenna, was a place where the Phoenicians worshipped Moloch; Satan was a snake for the Hebrews because their enemies, the Assyrians, worshipped a high snake-god. While we often say that politics is affected by religion, it is probably more correct to say that religion has always been determined by the political.
Like a lot of folks, I have been trying to tease the religious symbolism out of the War on Terror. We hear a lot about the "perversion of one of the world's great religions." We also hear about "hating freedom." There is the perfunctory God Bless America at the end of every speech and references to "the civilized world." There is the obvious millennialism lurking in the background. Though the Bush administration pays lip service to the notion that this is not a "holy war" or (whoops) "crusade," the religious themes clearly shine through.
I think the best question to ask is: How has politics reconfigured the idea of evil? Certainly the evil of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda is different from the Soviet Evil Empire or the Nazi threat. (BTW, George Bush prefers the word "Nazi-ism" to "Fascism" conspicuously.) I would suggest that the War on Terror and its enemies fit the standard Christian idea of evil better than previous enemies--that this war beats out previous 20th C. conflicts as it is more amenable to a good v. evil framing. Another way of saying this is that the War on Terror is more of a witch hunt than the Cold War ever could be. Here's why. (I say "Here's why" when what I really mean is, "Here's a big pile of under-theorized ideas.")
1) The idea that Al Qaeda "hate our freedom" has a direct analogue in the Rev. 12: 7-9 story of the War in Heaven, where Michael and the gang toss Satan out. Bin Laden spitefully cannot stand freedom because he has been ostracized from "the civilized world." The highest satisfaction he have now is "killing as many Americans as possible."
2) The idea that "evil is among us" in the form of sleeper cells is much more salient story than it was even during McCarthyism. The Soviet threat, though advancing, was always external. Whereas the horrifying metaphor during the Red Scare was The Blob, the metaphor today is Resident Evil (the movie and the video game). The Onion captured this idea well running the headline: "Where's Bin Laden? There's a Little Bin Laden in Each of Us." This is no Cold War dialectic. This is a story that only makes sense within a global body politic - where one nation, the U.S., acts as the god power that must cleanse itself of the Goody Proctors.
3) Evil in the War on Terror grows like a mold in a petri dish where the penicillin of "democracy" is absent. The countries that harbor terrorists, like parents of truant kids, are as much responsible as the terrorists themselves. As we all know, idleness is the devil's playground.
4) Evil in the War on Terror is, to use a religious studies term, "uncreated." It, like Satan, is not an ideological response to anything. It's clear what drives Satan: primal hate - or in Bush's oxymoronic language, "an ideology of hate" (not a "hateful ideology"): hate springing forth out of itself. There can be no explanation or context, and any attempt to do so (say, in Bin Laden's pre-election tape release) must be ignored and left unaddressed. We already know why Satan does what he does.
5) Paul Carus suggest that the worship of a positive god (rather than the appeasement of a fearsome god) marks the beginnings of civilization. We could probably pull this through the creation of the high-tech global managerial corporate hub we call the U.S. In many ways, the Christian god is a high-tech one, and our wealth is often cited as proof of divine favor - that we're headed in the right direction. French theorist Paul Virilio makes the observation that post-industrial war is that of technological fundamentalism vs. brand X fundamentalism. The spectacle of the falling Trade Towers is proof of this. This was the long-awaited "sign" that ushered in a new story of cosmic struggle.
6) Finally, in the civilizing function of monotheism, we have the idea of a "god of order" and a "devil of disorder." In some Christian circles, this talk has all but replaced good v. evil. Thus, the enemy is not the "different order" of Sovietism; it is the disorder of not-global-American-empire. Thus Bill O'Reilly stops in the middle of the word "socialist," preferring to call Michael Moore an "anarchist, really." Though the word "anarchy" may have a specific meaning for Emma Goldman and Noam Chomsky, it is synonymous with disorder in the public eye. The most accessible image of this is the "black block" figure burned into the the popular imagination as it busted up the Starbucks in Seattle in 1999. Like Anton LeVey's Satanists in Christian thought, the black block anarchists play a crucial role in affirming the story of evil in uber-religion of advanced capitalism.
I'll get back to you when I get it all sorted out.
posted by thebaffler at 4:05 PM
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