Terrorism continues to be on the minds of North Americans this week – north and south of the border. First there was the Boston Marathon bombing last week, and this week there was the foiled plot to derail a VIA train in Toronto. Terrorism, for whatever reason, invokes a certain level of fear that other much more dangerous risks do not seem capable of reaching. Boston, for example, was essentially shut down for an entire day as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, was a fugitive on the lose. In the Guardian, Michael Cohen asks a very logical question about America’s fear of terrorism after the most recent episode in Boston: Why does America lose its head over ‘terror’ but ignore its daily gun deaths? Because, as Cohen notes, more than 30,000 Americans die as a result of gun violence every year, compared to the 17 who died last year in terrorist attacks. And on the same day as the marathon bombing in Boston, which took the lives of 3 individuals, 11 Americans were murdered by guns. Yet despite these numbers, Americans seem to invest much more energy into staving off terrorist attacks than they do into ridding gun violence, because just this past week the US Senate blocked a gun control bill that would have strengthened background checks for potential gun buyers. As Cohen cheekily (and accurately) observed,
“Americans seemingly place an inordinate fear on violence that is random and unexplainable and can be blamed on “others” – jihadists, terrorists, evil-doers etc. But the lurking dangers all around us – the guns, our unhealthy diets, the workplaces that kill 14 Americans every single day – these are just accepted as part of life, the price of freedom, if you will. And so the violence goes, with more Americans dying preventable deaths. But hey, look on the bright side – we got those sons of bitches who blew up the marathon.”
However, the recent terrorist attacks invoked more than just fear, they also invoked a time of collective mourning. It is in these times of collective mourning that we are also reminded of our collective differences because in order to mourn together, to live in solidarity with people of other faiths against the evils of this world, it is necessary to respect the views of those faiths. The upshot of this is that it creates a civil religion, a religion of common language, that acts “as if God did not exist,” as sociologist Peter Berger recently pointed out. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just the reality of living in a secular society that wishes to separate church and state. As a result, the secular public square demands a common language or a “secular discourse” that essentially plays to the lowest common religious denominator, which unfortunately, is one that assumes that religion is bad and God does not exist. However, in times of collective mourning, Berger points out that established churches “become the official mourners of the nation, even though only a minority of citizens worship in their services.” The trick is to get people coming to church when it is not a time of collective mourning.
Unfortunately, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn New York thinks that the trick is to market Jesus as the “original hipster.” In explaining this new Jesus hipster ad campaign in Brooklyn, Monsignor Kieran Harrington, spokesman for the Brooklyn diocese, said, “It doesn’t seem to me so far-fetched that the representation of Christ would be a hipster… Jesus stood in contrast to the culture of his day. That’s what a lot of hipsters do too.” Oh dear. Suddenly I fear that I am not counter-culturally cool enough anymore to follow Jesus. Moving on.
To return to the recent terrorist attack in Boston, the newly selected Canadian Liberal Party leader, Justin Trudeau, has gotten himself into some hot water about the way he responded to the bombing in Boston. Instead of extending sympathy over the atrocity that occurred, Trudeau had this to say within 24hrs of the bombing:
“We have to look at the root causes. Now, we don’t know now if it was terrorism or a single crazy or a domestic issue or a foreign issue.
But there is no question that this happened because there is someone who feels completely excluded, completely at war with innocents, at war with a society.”
At first glance it might not seem so bad. He was, in many ways, saying what many people were thinking. The problem is that he didn’t realize that politicians aren’t supposed to say what people are thinking. And more than that, upon closer review, what he said was both conjecture and just plain wrong. David Frum from The Daily Beast had fun (it seems) raking Trudeau over the coals of political punditry:
“In Justin Trudeau’s comments on the Boston attack, we see a worrying formula: first, emphatic certainty (“there is no question”), expressed (as Andrew notes) vaguely and incoherently, all in service of an idea that is objectively wrong. Overconfident and mistaken: that is not the stuff of which successful prime ministers are made.”
Another interesting result of terrorism is that we tend to see a terrorist in everyone. Sometimes it seems that the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon – where you find an obscure thing everywhere you look, like when Catholics see the Virgin Mary in everything or when Justin Bieber sees himself in everything – is rampant. Well, this is what I thought Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, was doing when I first heard about his theory in the New York Times that Jane Austen was one of the first – maybe the first – game theorist. Yes, game theorist. Jane Austen as the new intelligence to fight terrorism? Well, not quite, but what Michael Chwe has to say is interesting nonetheless. Game theory is simply trying to understand human interactions as a series of moves and countermoves aimed at maximizing payoff, and there are few more adept at understanding human behaviour than Jane Austen. Is Michael Chwe’s claim about Jane Austen and game theory substantial? Probably, he seems much smarter than me, but this is just one more example of Jane Austen’s continuing relevance in contemporary society.
Need another example? How about Alan Jacobs’ recent critique of the HBO show Girls with the help of Jane Austen? Jacobs’ basic thesis is that the show Girls is emblematic of a society that has lost any notion of moral virtue. Girls, for example, is a show that follows a premise articulated by Woody Allen a number of years ago: “The heart wants what it wants.” There is no perversion or wrong as long as the heart wants it. In such a world, Jacobs’ says, “there is nothing for me to say.” The world of Girls is so different from the world of Austen that it is simply “incommensurable” for someone from Austen’s world to speak the moral language of someone from the Girls’ world. We “confront a linguistically unbridgeable gap.” So then, what can we do when we speak a different moral language from those we want to give moral instruction to? Here is what Jacobs’, in quoting Paul Griffiths, has to say on the matter:
Griffiths again: “What the pagans need on this matter is conversion, not argument; and what the Church ought do to encourage that is to burnish the practice of marriage by Catholics until its radiance dazzles the pagan eye.” Griffiths is encouraging here an engagement with the affections, an appeal not to diminish false or disordered desires but to increase in the love of the right ones.
To appeal to the affections of a world that is secular and violent and fearful with a world that dazzles is, I think, a good way to move forward. Not an easy way, but a good way.
Flickr photo (cc) by Rebecca_Hildreth
