Yesterday, I pulled Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace off the shelf, a random act impossible to regret.
Here are a few things from his chapter on “Embrace.”
In The Killing of Sarajevo, a soldier in the Serbian army says to his best friend living in Sarajevo, the city which was, even as they spoke, being pounded with Serbian shells: “There is no choice. There are no inno-cents” (Vukovic 1993, 41). The two claims seem inseparable: since there is “no choice” —since, as the same friend will later say, it is “either us or them” — there can be “no innocents,” and since there are “no innocents” there must have been “no choice.” Though it has a ring of truth, the logic is faulty. Within the vast expanse of noninnocence whose frontiers recede with the horizon, there are choices to be made, important choices about justice and oppression, truth and deception, violence and non-violence, about the will to embrace or to exclude, ultimately choices about life and death. The “no choice” world in which people’s behavior is determined by social environments and past victimizations is not the world we inhabit; it is a world the perpetrators would like us to inhabit because it grants an advance absolution for any wrongdoing they desire to commit. Suspicion is called for when, from behind a smoking howitzer, we hear the words, “There is no choice.”
As it is undeniable that “there is choice,” so it is also undeniable that our choices are made under inner and outer constraints, pressures, and captivities. We choose evil; but evil also “chooses” us and exerts its terrible power over us.
“Caught in the system of exclusion as if in some invisible snare,” says Volf, “people behave according to its perverted logic.” He goes on to describe what he calls a “background cacophony of evil.”
This is the low-intensity evil of the way “things work” or the way “things simply are,” the exclusionary vapors of institutional or communal cultures under which many suffer but for which no one is responsible and about which all complain but no one can target. This all-pervasive low-intensity evil rejuvenates itself by engendering belief in its own immorality and imposes itself by generating a sense of its own ineluctability.
But it does not always remain there; these are background flames that can be stoked into bonfires. This will sound very familiar:
In extraordinary situations and under extraordinary directors certain themes from the “background cacophony” are picked up, orchestrated into a bellicose musical, and played up. “Historians” — national, communal, or personal interpreters of the past — trumpet the double theme of the former glory and past victimization; “economists” join in with the accounts of present exploitation and great economic potentials; “political scientists” add the theme of the growing imbalance of power, of steadily giving ground, of losing control over what is rightfully ours; “cultural anthropologists” bring in the dangers of the loss of identity and extol the singular value of our personal or cultural gifts, capable of genuinely enriching the outside world; “politicians” pick up all four themes and weave them into a high-pitched aria about the threats to vital interests posed by the other who is therefore the very incarnation of evil; finally the “priests” enter in a solemn procession and accompany all this with a soothing background chant that offers to any whose consciences may have been bothered the assurance that God is on our side and that our enemy is the enemy of God and therefore an adversary of everything that is true, good, and beautiful.
As this bellicose musical with reinforcing themes is broadcast through the media, resonances are created with the background cacophony of evil that permeates the culture of a community, and the community finds itself singing the music and marching to its tune. To refuse to sing and march, to protest the madness of the spectacle, appears irrational and irresponsible, naive and cowardly, treacherous L toward one’s own and dangerously sentimental toward the evil enemy.
Of course, Volf is not interested mainly in describing but in prescribing. As a Christian, he is advocating, he says, “for a nonfinal reconciliation based on a vision of [God’s] reconciliation that cannot be undone.”
Enter the “politics of the pure heart,” without which, says Volf, “every politics of liberation will trip over its own feet.”
[E]ven under the onslaught of extreme brutality, an inner realm of freedom to shape one’s self must be defended as a sanctuary of a person’s humanity. Though victims may not be able to prevent hate from springing to life, for their own sake they can and must refuse to give it nourishment and strive to weed it out. If victims do not repent today they will become perpetrators tomorrow who, in their self-deceit, will seek to exculpate their misdeeds on account of their own victimization.
The word “whataboutism” gets thrown around a lot these days, and for good reason: it’s an old idea and perpetually rehashed in the foreground cacophony of evil. Against it — facing it every time we read the news and every time we respond to the news — it’s worth asking ourselves, What are we doing with that inner realm of freedom, that sanctuary of our humanity that is granted to us every day?
This chapter also contains this beautiful reflection from Volf on the imprecatory Psalms.