KINGSVIEW

HONORING INSTEAD OF INFLAMING YOU, THE TERRORIST OR MY SPOUSE

Michael A. King

Every now and then I have a fight with my wife. Joan is a wonderful spouse; this column is in the end not about her. But it is about what our fights may teach, if I dare make such a huge leap, about fighting terrorists.

What particularly catches my attention, as I ponder our fights, is how quickly I find myself severed from rationality and possessed by the need for her to grasp how right I am and how wrong she is. If she dares fight back—as she often does, dear woman, this being one reason I celebrate being married to her when back to sanity—my flame flares white hot. Here I am, training her in truth, justice, and Michael’s way, and she dares—she dares, oh, the travesty!—to challenge me.

I order the generals within to provide reinforcements. Stat! Bring me my cruise missiles of maddened rhetoric hardened with hate. Fly in my bunker-busting bombs to destroy her generals as they huddle in her plotting against me.

Because after our decades of marriage she can fly across the blazing desert of my war-mode mind with her own Predator drones, she spies the shock and awe I intend for her. She orders in Apache helicopters backed by F-16 fighter jets.

And we draw near the brink. We glimpse now, through the smoke of battle, that destination called Divorce. If we press on, this country which is our marriage will be reduced to rubble, and no matter who dealt the other the final blow or who may still be left standing to declare victory, we will both have lost.

There is only one footpath around that outcome, but who will take it? The human spirit so flinches from that path, especially in the heat of battle. The path takes the walker into the very heart of the war, there where blood pools on the streets, the sniper bullets crack, the tanks rumble, and the fighter pilots aim.

And the walker of that path must throw down her (I say "her" because she often manages to walk there before I do) weapons. She must cry out to his generals and foot soldiers, and up to the snipers and the pilots, that she does, actually, glimpse part of why they’re so enraged at her. "I’m sorry," she must say. "I’m sorry for my part of this war, and for the ways in my own anger I set out to hurt you."

The horror of that path is that it takes her to peace, the promised land across the war zone, only if he softens. But he may not. He may use her foolish vulnerability to finish the job and mow her down. She risks her very life if she tries to end the war. Yet if she doesn’t, the war will only escalate, and both will lose no matter who wins. So she takes the risk. Or once in a while, when he can match her courage, he does.

And so far the one who first sets out on that path has in the end been joined by the other. So far the one’s readiness at last to stop escalating the war has in the end gentled the enraged heart of the other, until they reach that oasis called Peace. There at last they are able to engage in constructive discussion of what caused the war and what resolution of grievances will enable them to stay in peace rather than resume battle again tomorrow.

I know marriage partners are not nations. I know generalizing from two to millions can get us only so far. But I wonder why we mostly seem to learn nothing about how to relate to other nations from our most intimate relationships.

Every time I hear national leaders explaining why We are so right and They are so wrong, I imagine how I would feel if that were my wife speaking. Every time I hear it’s okay to bomb them first so they don’t bomb us first, I think of what happens if Joan dares to say something like that to me.

Every time I hear someone explain that we’re in a global war, we in the rational and civilized West against the irrational and barbaric Islamic fascists, I think of how in the heat of marital war each side always believes his side or hers is the right side, the rational side, the civilized side.

Then I wonder why we act as if people in religious or global conflicts are so different from people in marriage. In marriage, if you threaten people, if you demean people, if you explain why you’re so perfect and they’re so awful, you blow things up. The more you violate the other, the more the other wishes to violate you. The more you try through brute power to vanquish the other, the more the other schemes to build the weapons to vanquish you.

Yes, I know married people aren’t nations or jihadist groups. But what if the dynamics aren’t that different? What if every human being, whether in the West or the East, Christian or Islamic, needs some sense that she honors him, that he honors her?

Scott Atran believes such a perspective is not so far-fetched after all. Atran, a professor at John Jay School of Criminal Justice and elsewhere, has been drawing attention in such varied newspapers as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times with his studies of terrorism (available in such sources as "Sacred Values," 2006 web exclusive, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists online at www.thebulletin.org; and "The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism," Washington Quarterly, Spring 2006).

Key to Atran’s perspective is his conviction that many of the world’s conflicts are rooted in competing "sacred values"—passionately held beliefs people are willing to die or kill for. Attack a people’s sacred values, and they will never back down until you kill them or they you.

Among incitements to terrorism, says Atran, is experiencing one’s sacred values as violated and needing to fight back at all costs. Then when the West declares its sacred values are violated and justifies its own fighting back at all costs, the stage is set for endless global conflict.

Atran notes, for example, what a powerful sense of violation humiliation inflicts, such as at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and traces how it "leads to moral outrage and seemingly irrational vengeance (‘get the offender, even if it kills us’)" (Washington Quarterly, 138).

He observes that

Especially in Arab societies, where the culture of honor applies even to the humblest family as it once applied to the noblest families of the southern United States, witnessing the abuse of elders in front of their children, whether verbal insults at roadblocks or stripdowns during house searches, indelibly stains the memory and increases popular support for martyrdom actions. (139)

He also explains what a sense of offense among jihadists is generated by such a document as the National Security Strategy of the United States (published by the White House as its proposal for military and foreign policy in 2002), "which enshrines liberal democracy as the ‘single sustainable model . . . right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies’" (139-140). (See also Wendell Berry’s critique of the Strategy in "A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America," DreamSeeker Magazine, Spring 2003.)

Atran does not aim to justify or simplistically appease terrorism (nor do I)—and in fact even worries that too many governments are too tolerant of terrorism. But he calls for an end to overreliance primarily on strategies that inflame rather than vanquish terrorism.

And that takes us back to marriage lessons. Someone has to walk at least part of that frightening path toward honoring the other. Someone has to begin to send signals that "Yes, I see you hold sacred values too. They may not be mine, but now I begin to glimpse reasons why you cling to them as tightly as I cling to mine." Someone has to try treating the other as human being and not only as worm to squash underfoot.

Let me be clear: This is not the same as appeasement. If you seek as my spouse to appease me in the midst of marital battle, then in an effort to placate me you ignore or minimize the actual damage I am doing to you. Your peacemaking words are not sincere but intended to mollify me so that I may be less inclined to hurt you.

Needed are gestures not of appeasement but of honoring. To honor me is to rise above your own rage long enough to grasp what in my position is a kernel of truth I understandably hold dear. To honor me is not simply to give up what you hold dear or no longer to care whether I run roughshod over it. It is to find enough generosity of heart to begin to honor my kernel of truth even if I have not yet shown signs of honoring yours.

Certainly this honoring path is risky, whether for spouses or nations. The other side may use any vulnerability to smash rather than honor us. But surely the path the United States is on, which threatens to lead us into a scorched-earth war of unyielding sacred value against unbudging sacred value, is no less risky.

Yes, terrorists deserve their great share of the blame for using their sacred values as justification for slaughtering innocents. Yes, there is much to celebrate in the United States and the larger West and to expect our opponents to honor. But surely the most powerful country not only in today’s world but in the history of the planet also deserves blame when it in turn, refusing to honor any sacred values but its own, uses that power to humiliate, to demean, and counterproductively to inflame.

Atran himself, who has had extensive direct contacts with members of terrorist groups, sees breaking inflammatory cycles by honoring the other as more than pie-in-the-sky dreaming. As Sharon Begley reports in the August 25, 2006, Wall Street Journal article "The Key to Peace in Mideast May Be ‘Sacred Beliefs,’" Atran believes that, for example, the perennial antagonism between Israel and Palestine could begin to ease if each side found ways to honor what the other holds dear.

Atran has told U.S. policymakers

that the Palestinians will never give up their "right of return" to land they fled when the state of Israel was founded. Unless, that is, Israel gives up one of its own sacred values, such as its "sacred right" to all of Jerusalem.

Israel, in turn, would never apologize or give up Jerusalem unless the Palestinians let go of their sacred belief that Israel should not exist. (A9)

So I pray that someday we will hear Palestinian leaders truly releasing Israel to exist and Israeli leaders acknowledging and making amends for ways they have dispossessed Palestinians. I pray that someday United States leaders will not only compete to see who can most loudly promise to battle all terrorist vermin to the death. I pray that someday they will also risk dropping hints of understanding that sometimes only by honoring you can I step back from the brink of divorce or Armageddon.

—Michael A. King, Telford, Pennsylvania, is pastor, Spring Mount (Pa.) Mennonite Church; and owner, Cascadia Publishing House. Mostly no thanks to him, he and his wife Joan have managed to step back from the brink for nearly 30 years.