Opp thoughts

While we were down in Phoenix last month, Meghan and I made it to the movie theater, and for only the second time in three years together. Of course, it was to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

One of the most important (and obvious) metrics for measuring the success of a film is the engrossing factor. If a movie is able to pull you into itself for the duration (three hours, in this case), then no matter what else, the movie is, perhaps in the most significant way, successful. By this measure, Oppenheimer was absolutely successful. I was completely engrossed. And I’m sure it was successful for all the reasons that knowledgeable movie critics would give. As far as I can tell, for instance, this may be one of the most historically accurate movies ever made. That achievement is quite interesting in itself. (Although, I’m less certain of how accurately it portrays Oppenheimer’s by-all-accounts complicated personality. The Oppenheimer of Oppenheimer is something of an enigma, but not a particularly complicated one.)

But I am not a movie critic and, outside of conversations over beer, I have no desire to be one. Neither am I a(n) historian. While I’m sure I was engrossed for all the same reasons that over 90% of critics and audience members were, I was also very caught by the film for more personal reasons.

The big moment, the apex of the movie, was not particularly enjoyable for me. I have no problem admitting (and neither does Meghan) that when it comes to movies, I am the crier in the relationship. Those moments are probably quite predictable most of the time. But who gets choked up over Trinity, over a remake of the first successful nuclear bomb explosion? Me, that’s who.

Oh, I’m sure the combination of music and silence and all the artistic buildup to that moment in the film did its work on me. But I also know what I was feeling, and that I have felt it before. I put up an essay from a history class that is about as much as I have ever said about that feeling. Here’s how it starts:

When I was eighteen years old, I remember feeling the chills of inspiration as my Air Force commander stood before us — in a church on Sunday no less — to remind my fellow airmen and me of the glory of our profession. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “we are here to break things and kill people.” Energized by his words, we were young, motivated, and stupid. In recent months, I have reflected often on that moment, on what I thought and felt then. I spent most of my summer this year [2017] working at a field hospital in Mosul, Iraq, where the familiar sound of bombs is not relinquished to a bitter past or confined to foreign soil, where violence in its most aggressive forms and destructive consequences is an ever-present reality. After seeing the other side of that “glory” — the broken homes and dead victims — I have felt increasingly restless with the thought of war.

… with the thought of war or any instrument whose chief purpose is war or with anything that reminds me of it.

I used to love fireworks, deeply, especially the sound and the boom you feel in your chest. Fun, excitement, awe, inspiration, brilliance — I felt only good and empowering things. Now, I’d rather be buried in the ground with a straw to breath through until the celebration is over. I grew up shooting guns about as regularly as anything else, and I loved those, too. But when my friend took a few of us to the shooting range for his birthday in late 2017, it was all I could do to avoid a panic attack. As I write that, it sounds even to me like a bit of an exaggeration, but if it is, it is only a slight one. The fact is, I did not enjoy any of it for one second and couldn’t wait to get out of there. And that was just such a complete and sudden one-eighty for me. I just don’t like any of it anymore, and I think it’s absurd that I ever did.

(There’s a scene in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead where John Ames’s father digs up a gun he had buried, smashes it to pieces on a stump with a borrowed maul, and throws the separate pieces of it in a river. “I got the impression,” Ames says, “he wished they didn’t exist at all, that he wouldn’t really have been content to drop them in the ocean, that he’d have set about to retrieve them again from any depth at all if he’d thought of a way to make them vanish entirely.” I feel exactly the same way.)

And yet, a very large number of us can’t seem to get over how cool it all is. And most of the time I can’t really blame anyone. The fact is, that change in me didn’t happen because I pulled my heart up by its bootstraps. There is an inherent separation between the makers of the instruments of modern warfare and the lives they leave buried and bleeding in the rubble. And it plays on another inherent separation in humankind altogether, one that can only be bridged by experience and by empathy.

“Who could convey this understanding across the barriers of his own human experience?” asked Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “Who could impress upon a sluggish and obstinate human being someone else’s far off sorrows or joys, who could give him an insight into magnitudes of events and into delusions which he has never himself experienced?”

One of the things that has struck me the hardest is that, even as a member of the military, I didn’t experience this, had no thought about the hundreds of sorties I supported, where they went or what happened when they got there. But that’s normal, isn’t it? It’s sad and it’s horrifying, but isn’t it normal? It’s certainly been normal with the history of nuclear bombs.

Why is it, for instance, that every single adult that I can remember while I was growing up had the same exact write-off response to the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? How could we justify it? No debate. No difficulty. No deep regret over vaporizing and crushing and radiating civilians. In my experience, having this conversation with the previous generation is impossible. The narrative is too deeply embedded for any reexamination: It had to be done. The Japanese would never have surrendered. The Bomb saved lives. And so on. Bottom line, it was un-American — and, somehow, un-Christian — to think or say otherwise.

Perfectly normal.

I’ve lost track now of where I was going with this, or maybe I’ve already said what I wanted to say. When the bomb went off on the screen in that theater, I felt the same way I feel when they go off in real life. I didn’t see scientific achievement; I saw mass murder and violence. I saw children on stretchers, in ICUs, and in graves.

Here’s what Rand Richards Copper wrote in Commonweal after seeing the film:

After watching Oppenheimer, I streamed The Day After Trinity. (“Trinity” refers to Oppenheimer’s name for the bomb test site, inspired by a Donne poem, and the “day after” refers to yet another hearing, in 1965, at which Oppenheimer was asked about talks on halting the spread of nukes, and responded, “It’s twenty years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.”) It may seem paradoxical to suggest that a documentary more acutely conveys the tragedy of Los Alamos than a feature film does. Yet for me at least, it did. In the decades since the Manhattan Project, many commentators seeking to capture the dreadful awe that accompanied the advent of the atomic bomb have invoked Oppenheimer’s quotation from the Bhagavad Gita—“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”—and Nolan leans heavily on it, using it not once but twice. The documentary pursues the horror more subtly, in a banality-of-evil way. It contains a small but terrible moment, when the Manhattan Project physicist Robert Serber displays a section of a wall removed from a classroom in Nagasaki, bearing the outline of a window sash imprinted on it photographically by the blast. “You see the angle here?” Serber says, holding it up. “That shows you that the bomb went off at exactly the height it was supposed to.” And Serber can’t quite suppress a smile—quickly followed by a look of sickly confusion. All these years later, he still feels pride.

That look does more to evoke the scientists’ moral disarray than does the pose of abject contrition in which the last third of Nolan’s film freezes Robert Oppenheimer. Serber’s smile reveals candor about the thrills of scientific discovery, even as his sickened look betrays an awareness of what resulted when those thrills were channeled into the priorities of what Eisenhower himself would call the military-industrial complex. What does it mean—for science and its practitioners, for civilization itself—when mass death becomes, well, a project?

Neil Postman made a similar point in 1985:

[T]o the modern mind … the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is. I will not argue the point. I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take. We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it.

Postman’s next line echoes in my head on a regular basis.

It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.

And yet we do praise ourselves regularly for just how so-damn-smart we’ve gotten, don’t we? One of the things that struck me the most watching Oppenheimer was how surprisingly boyish the whole enterprise seemed. I’ve had the tendency my whole life to think of many of these historical scientists as men of greatness. But what I saw in that theater — and maybe this is the most historically accurate thing of all — were only boys playing with chemistry sets.

Maybe this is simply one of the tragedies of growing up, realizing that there are no adults in the room. Or very few, anyway. In this case, just big kids and their chemistry sets. “You see,” the little boy said with a proud smile, “it went off at exactly the height it was supposed to.”

Satyagraha: A Brief Christian Perspective

An essay I wrote for a history class in 2017

When I was eighteen years old, I remember feeling the chills of inspiration as my Air Force commander stood before us — in a church on Sunday no less — to remind my fellow airmen and me of the glory of our profession. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “we are here to break things and kill people.” Energized by his words, we were young, motivated, and stupid. In recent months, I have reflected often on that moment, on what I thought and felt then. I spent most of my summer this year [2017] working at a field hospital in Mosul, Iraq, where the familiar sound of bombs is not relinquished to a bitter past or confined to foreign soil, where violence in its most aggressive forms and destructive consequences is an ever-present reality. After seeing the other side of that “glory” — the broken homes and dead victims — I have felt increasingly restless with the thought of war. And as a Christian, I have been compelled to ponder afresh words very different from the ones my commander spoke, and words that are vastly more common to a church setting: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God (Matt. 5:9).

If you asked a random stranger today who he or she thought has been the most influential promoter of peace in the world, there is a good chance the answer would be Mahatma Gandhi. With the early 20th century in the background, his fame is not difficult to understand. Gandhi’s popularized commitment to nonviolence stands in such contradistinction to the aura of his time — a century suffused with as much violence as the world has ever known — that the merit of his methods seems practically self-evident. In a modern century as bloody as any before it, a commitment to nonviolence stands out as a light shining in the dark. And that is, I think, the way Gandhi saw it as well, and why he named his version of nonviolent resistance satyagraha (roughly translated as “truth force”), both to differentiate it from the philosophies from which he borrowed, and to promote it as the ultimate force for good. Satyagraha was, hence, not just an alternative to war and violence, but it was a complete replacement, able (alone) to accomplish what violence never could.

In the West, there is probably no greater example not merely of the failure but of the complete inability of violence to resolve conflict or hatred than the American Civil War. As the Civil Rights era struggled to complete the unfinished business of the postbellum years, it was clear that war had not solved the underlying issues of slavery and racism in America. In 1868, Father Paul Joseph Munz wrote, “The North can free the slaves with force, but it cannot civilize them and deliver them from contempt and mistreatment.” While the first victory had been won by force of arms, the ultimate victory would require another approach. To fight contempt, we need a very different force than the one war offers. For this task, only a nonviolent force will do, and to this end Martin Luther King, Jr. employed Gandhi’s methods with great success.

With the virtue of Gandhi’s method in mind, King said he believed that “more than anybody else in the modern world, [Gandhi] caught the spirit of Jesus Christ and lived it more completely in his life.” As I think about that statement, I have to wonder why I’m so inclined to disagree. Jesus did teach, after all, in the Sermon on the Mount, to turn the other cheek rather than resist an evil person (Matt. 38:39). In a moment of introspection, I’m tempted to think that the part of me that thoughtlessly cheered at the notion of destroying homes and lives is the same stubbornness and pride that keeps me from embracing a more passive political stance. I’m sure that may still be part of it, but it has been fourteen years since I heard my commander give that speech, and today I am not the least bit moved by it. Yet, even stimulated by a fresh hatred for violence, I still find something in satyagraha distasteful. In fact, the very same thing that makes me hate violence is also what drives me to reject Gandhi’s approach. In all its historical detail, I’m sure the problem would be more complex, but as I see it, it is Gandhi’s approach to truth that causes the most significant problem.

Let me return to Iraq for a moment. I had been there for about a week when she showed up — a beautiful eleven-year-old girl, barely clinging to life. Though I cannot use her real name, I’ll call her Jaleesa. I remember setting up for the surgery, not knowing her face or who she was, knowing something only in the abstract: a transfer was coming in and we needed to do an emergency laparotomy for an abdominal blast wound. Within fifteen minutes, she was in the room. As the surgeons began operating, one of the national doctors realized that she had been his patient only a day or two before, on the other side of the Tigris River. He had performed an emergency surgery after she was badly wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round. Not believing she would live long, he stitched her up as best he could and left. Yet here she was again, about 10 miles east, still fighting to live.

Jaleesa stayed with us for a couple weeks, receiving several operations and spending much of the time with a hideous-looking ABRA system holding and stretching her belly together. Eventually she was transferred to a hospital in Erbil, where she died about a week later. It is both wonderful and shameful for me to admit that I don’t think I have ever loved anyone as much as I loved that little girl. In the many hours I spent with her, in the operating room or sitting next to her bed, I grew to hate the thought of what a bomb can do. And whether war is right or wrong, necessary or not, I grew to hate that part of me that was ever inspired by such things. How many little girls like her had been casualties of what I so thoughtlessly cheered for? (Think about that the next time those fighter jets fly over your favorite football stadium.) At this point, however, rather than turning to a theory of nonviolence, this is where I would put Gandhi to the test, and where I inevitably find his theories wanting.

Imagine for a moment that Gandhi was there in Mosul that day, watching from a distance. An ISIS fighter is about to drop a shell into the barrel of a mortar, the arc aiming at his 11-year-old daughter. With a sniper rifle in his hands, if Gandhi pulls the trigger, the ISIS fighter dies; if he does nothing, his daughter spends the next several weeks in pain, and dies. It’s not a very original scenario, I know, but it remains an important one. What do we think Gandhi would do if he were there? We can be fairly certain what he would do because he told every mother and father in Britain to do the same thing when he encouraged them to “allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered” by the Nazis rather to resist them. I don’t doubt that it is an interesting philosophical and historical thing to ponder — what the world would look like if the Allied Powers refused to fight — but it remains impossible for me to consider it noble, if it isn’t in fact criminal, for Gandhi to choose nonviolence if he were given the opportunity to save Jaleesa — that he would choose a principle over a child.

As I said before, I think the fundamental problem lies in Gandhi’s view of truth, or, more specifically, in his view of God. Bhikhu Parekh wrote that Gandhi did not ultimately believe God was truth, but that truth was God. For Gandhi, God was either reduced to or overshadowed by a principle: “His cosmic spirit was therefore not a creator but a principle of order, a supreme intelligence infusing and regulating the universe from within.” In other words, Gandhi believed that ultimate reality was an impersonal force. And therein lies the problem: what is truth without love, and what is love if it is not personal? Committing myself to a universal principle of nonviolence does not provide me with a noble answer to the problems of violence. Instead, it conveniently removes me from the personal nature of those problems. Rather than being moved by personal love, I am forced to ask what an impersonal force requires of me. This, I think, is why Gandhi could tell every British parent to let the Nazis kill their children (and why he could so arrogantly advise the Jews to adopt his method — as though resistance to the British was somehow on par with resistance to Germany).

Gandhi borrowed much from the Christian faith, and he quoted from the Bible often, but, as Parekh points out, his studies “did not involve understanding religious traditions in their own terms.” Aside from the fact that this approach itself is inherently untruthful, it means that he misunderstood the fundamental point of Christianity. Jesus did not simply point to the truth, as Gandhi would have liked to believe, but he claimed to be the truth. For the Christian, ultimate reality, virtue, knowledge — these are all found in a person. To overcome doubt in times of trouble, the author of the letter to the Hebrews encouraged his readers by reminding them where to fix their attention — not on a principle of virtue or hope, but on Jesus, “the author and perfecter of faith.” For the Christian, the question is not what principle to adhere to, but how best to love and protect life in honor of the Life to which they continually look. Even love itself is not a principle that exists on its own, but something found in the character of the person who reveals God to us. The truth is always and in every way personal because we find and know it most clearly in a person, not in a force. For Gandhi, it was the principle, which (ideally) provides only one option. For the personal, however, the question of whether violence is justified will always remain an open question, with different situations leading to different answers. That means that someone could very well be compelled to use violence in the name of love and truth, an idea rooted in the personal nature of morality, which Gandhi seemed intent on eliminating.

It’s important to note that I’m not talking about repaying evil for evil. It was not uncommon for us to treat members of ISIS at the hospital, and it has not escaped my mind that one of them may very well have been the one to kill Jaleesa, or any of the other victims we treated or never got the chance to treat. Trying to understand how violence may justifiably be used against a man in one situation does not imply that one may not try to save his life in another. These situations are difficult, and they require careful attention, not quotable maxims. In Iraq, the duty was not to maintain strict adherence to a principle of nonviolence, it was to love and care for the victims of war — in this case, to love and care for a person named Jaleesa. In her entire life, before or after her injury, she was never in need of a principle, or a “supreme intelligence.” Once she entered the room, the abstract procedure became personal. The truth was no longer that we needed to perform a surgery, but that we were compelled by love to save the life of a little girl. She did not need a principle to comfort her; she needed love and protection that was personal.

Though fourteen years have passed since that speech, I can still feel the chills as I think about my commander’s words now, but I feel them for very different reasons. Many questions remain, but at this stage in life, I think I can say that I long for an end to violence as much as anyone. For Christians, especially in a world that seems to take the “authority” and “power” of violence as a given, Gandhi’s method of satyagraha still stands as a modern reminder that Christ showed a better way. Contrary to King, however, I think for anyone who wishes to understand that way, Gandhi’s satyagraha will be a disappointment. And I think it should be disappointing, for the immense personality of Jesus Christ cannot be summed up by the words “Thou shalt not kill.” And everything that it means to walk among the world as a peacemaking child of God cannot possibly be simplified to a principle or an impersonal force.

meaningless thoughts and prayers

David Frum is exactly right. But his opening (and closing) paragraphs could just as easily have been written for David French’s piece yesterday, or Russell Moore’s the day before.

I don’t know enough to say how much I would or wouldn’t agree with Michael Budde, but it is difficult do disagree with his critique here:

Few people inside the churches seem eager to admit it, but in matters of human allegiance, loyalty, and priorities, Christianity is a nearly complete, unabashed failure. It has had little discernible impact in making the Sermon on the Mount remotely relevant in Christian life and lifestyles; it has provided no alternative sense of community capable of withstanding the absolutist claims of state, movement, and market; and it can offer nothing but an awkward embarrassed silence in response to the scandal of Christians slaughtering Christians (not to mention everybody else) in “just” wars blessed by hierarchs on all sides in slavish obedience to presumably more important loyalties.

The failures are so huge, the contradictions with the gospel so enormous, that they don’t even register as subjects of concern in the churches. When forced to confront our hypocrisy and our obedience to other sources of meaning, we wring our hands, lament the sinfulness of the human condition, and pray for a human solidarity that would terrify us if it ever came to pass. And the institutions of death grind on in our world, with good Christians serving them efficiently, responsibly, and in ways indistinguishable from those who reject the premise that Jesus of Nazareth incarnated God’s way for his people on earth.

Budde may focus on murder and “just” wars, but it’s important to see that that silence in the face of scandal exists for Christians faced with scandals of any kind. Exactly what is it that the Christian church has to offer to America or to the world, even on their own biblical or gospel terms?