The Harp and the Whip

“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no
religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear
of punishment and hope of reward after death.”

–Albert Einstein

Twenty-five years ago Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon because Lennon was “a
celebrity.” The irony of this would not be lost on the songwriter, whose “Imagine” became an
anthem after his death. In it, Lennon postulates a world in which we are all able “to live as one,” a
world without a heaven, with “nothing to kill or die for,” and “no religion too.” That he should be
felled by a deranged fan, an adherent to the least principled of all modern cults, the cult of
celebrity, adds to the ex-Beatle’s tragic, poetic arc.

Arguably, the retribution was itself divine, as Lennon was a member of a band self-described as
being “bigger than Jesus.” But then, he was being ironic, just as he was in “Imagine”; his anthem
was irony. It’s not a heaven that’s the problem, nor even the religions we ride there. Rather, it’s
the rotten way we treat the concepts of faith and destiny, using our prizes of harps and wings and
eternal life, our promises of 40 virgins (and a mule) as justification for all manner of earthly
malfeasance. If we allow ourselves to be judged solely on principles that extend beyond the here-
and-now and beyond our bonds of “sympathy, education, and social ties,” as Einstein put it, then
we can easily create any means we like to fit those ends. There simply is no need for reality-
checking nor for factoring in such petty concerns as human suffering when your place in the holy
choir is at stake. Car bombings are just as legitimate as carpet bombings when you are blessed and
they are infidels. Innocents who may happen to get in the way and get turned into jelly need not
fear; if they are truly innocent, they’ll go to heaven no matter how they die.

This past week, George W. Bush, the fundamentalist Christian we call president, flippantly told a
reporter that the number of Iraqis killed in his recently ordered invasion and current occupation of
their country was “about 30,000.” He later expressed no regret about this, even though the
respected Brookings Institution has estimated that two-thirds of the dead–20,000 people–were
non-combatants. Mr. Bush admitted that the intelligence he used to invade Iraq was “flawed” but
that he would do it all again anyway.

With the blood of 20,000 innocent people on his hands, George W. Bush seems to simply not
care. He does not care precisely because this war is not about weapons of mass destruction as his
“flawed” intelligence claimed. It is not about freeing the Iraqis from the horrible dictatorship of
Saddam Hussein as Bush now claims–after all, there are plenty of people more in need of
liberation, such as the North Koreans, the Burmans, the Sudanese. And anyway, 30,000 is about
the number of his own people Saddam himself killed outright (if you discount his eight-year war
with Iran). No, the real reasons are the need for Bush to prove himself to his father, who did not
accomplish ousting Saddam, and the needs of the eschatological aims of fundamentalist
Christianity. As neoconservative advisors to the president put it, this is the contention that you
reach “Jerusalem through Baghdad.” Since Iraq is the source of instability in the Middle-East, the
theory goes, it is what is preventing the stability required for the Temple of David to be rebuilt in
Jerusalem and the events of the Book of Revelation to be set in motion.

This idea is nuts, of course. It not only ignores political realities, it completely distorts the biblical
text. But it is easy for Bush to believe because of his religion and because, of those 20,000
innocents, Bush has social ties with exactly none. And because of his upbringing as the son of
rich, well-connected parents, living a life of privilege and having had his many failed businesses
bailed out by various Saudi royals, Bush has no sympathy with those too poor and ill-connected
to be under the bombs when they fall instead of safely on the golf course or cutting brush on the
ranch. Because he is ill-educated in faith, history, and the humanities, Bush is largely incapable of
imagining the plight of the Iraqi people who, after a decade of crippling international sanctions
and 30 years of Ba’athist rule, were hungry for liberation but not for more death. Absent
Einstein’s three qualifiers for ethical behavior, Bush could hardly be expected to act in a decent
way.

But I wonder how many of these–sympathy, education, and social ties–most human beings can
reasonably maintain. We have more people with college degrees in this country than ever before,
but few of them can we call truly “educated,” as colleges and universities have become glorified
trade schools to meet the demands of the market. Sympathy is an abstraction that requires having
lived among others to concretize, and as our communities balkanize, our spheres of experience
contract to home and work and retail space. Even our media experiences have narrowed to “all
food” or “all racing” or “all women’s tennis on clay courts” all the time. It becomes increasingly
difficult to understand how others see the world. Few of us ever read, and those who do have
similar options to read only within their tiny slice of interests: westerns, techno-drama, sci-fi,
romance.

Social ties, too, collapse as we pick up and move every five years, on average, in pursuit of more
dollars, cushier digs, the illusion of safety and quiet. Cities, divested of their high-income earners
by the siren call of the suburbs, can ill-afford to care for their homeless and starving, and business
long ago abdicated any responsibility it once might have felt for the health and the safety of
workers. Our own loyalties have dropped off in kind: why get close to a neighbor you won’t
know anymore in a few months’ time? Why be loyal to a boss who would just as soon get you off
his payroll to curry-favor with investors than look at you?

Maybe America especially needs religion, with all the dopiness Marx described, to fill in with the
heat from below and its riches above when our sympathies and educations and social ties wear
thin from the grinding of war and economic uncertainly and disdainful rule. Maybe Einstein’s
ideal–and Lennon’s–can only work as ideals; maybe the raw chaos and stupidity and dullness of
most of us can be made to feel in no other way than the harp and the whip.

When Mark David Chapman pulled the trigger and George W. Bush gave the order to invade they
were both practicing faith, both reaching out for something greater. He problem they both faced
was a breakdown of their respective religions. But for stultifyingly average men like these,
perhaps that is the best they could do.

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