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The Wisdom Tradition: Seeing International Relations and Foreign Policy through Different Eyes: Five Norms of Wisdom for Thinking about More Cooperative Relations between the United States and the Muslim Middle East
I came to see this as wisdom under the sun and it
appeared great to me. There was a small city with few
men in it, and a great king came to it, surrounded it,
and constructed large siegeworks against it. Now
there was found in the city a poor but wise man,
and he saved the city from war by his wisdom. Yet
afterward no one remembered that poor man or his
words. So I said, "Wisdom is better than strength.
Wisdom is better than weapons of war." (A reflection
from the sage Qoheleth)
War
and Peace. We have lived with both since the earliest days of our
history, when brother first slew brother and third-party intervention
set forth the terms of a settlement meant to prevent its escalation.
Fat chance of that. If history is testimony to anything, it reveals a
race of people whose preference for solving its differences through
nonviolence stretches just so far and then snaps. There are of course
many and varied reasons for this, and we don’t have to look any further
than the vast literature of international relations and foreign policy
to find these reasons explained and subjected to analyses of all sorts.
Despite this expanding universe of commentary, however, the surge from
peace to war remains an enduringly lamentable history of human affairs.
War cannot be explained away.
In our day,
political ideology can be implicated in the causes of war, and my goal
in this essay is to offer some ideas salient of the historic wisdom
tradition as a way for our national leaders and their policymakers to
avoid sectarian ideological interests that can not only lead to war but
impede or obstruct human flourishing on the international scene. I see
this way ahead as particularly urgent when the political leadership of
the United States and Iran, for instance, in their dependence on
ideologically driven attempts to make nice with each other, seem to be
bringing the world closer to a war over Iran’s nuclear program. Before
that threshold is crossed, it might be wise if everyone paused, took
some deep breaths, counted to ten, and then reasoned together about the
alternative way of wisdom.
In short, the wisdom
way is a non-ideological way for enabling human flourishing across
boundaries. After years of research into the international aspects of
the historic wisdom tradition, I’ve become convinced that it is a
missing jewel in today’s bilateral and multilateral relations. For it
offers world leaders and foreign policy advisors a way to transcend, so
to speak, ideological sticking points that may contribute to war while
helping them to find reasonable and responsible approaches to defuse
adversarial relations and to build more cooperative international
arrangements. This seems particularly important given the absolutized
ideological interests that came to dominate the practice of U.S.
foreign policy for much of the first decade of the new millennium.
The following material has been adapted from a book I am writing about
wisdom-based approaches to relations between the United States and
countries of the Muslim Middle East. It enters an energetic foreign
policy conversation about those relations that has been taking place in
the halls of power, think tanks, universities, and across dinner tables
ever since powerful jet engines traveling five hundred miles an hour
disappeared with a burr into the Twin Towers. I believe wisdom-based
approaches will help national leaders and their policymakers search out
and find ways wiser than war for Western–Mideast relations.
To readers in the foreign policy community, I apologize for ignoring
many aspects and nuances of the conversation that you may be interested
in. To other readers, I apologize for taking you into the middle of a
foreign policy conversation whose antecedents you may be not be
familiar with. I hope to cover these sufficiently for all of you in the
book, but you are also welcome to contact me about them in the
meantime. (My sincere thanks to numerous political and religious
leaders and advisors – Muslims, Christians, Jews, and secularists — in
America and elsewhere — who have taken time from their busy schedules
to comment on various stages in this material’s development and
encourage me to “keep going.” Any errors, however, are mine.)
What I hope to accomplish, in what follows, is to briefly introduce some
basic features surrounding five norms of wisdom for international
relations and foreign policy in the context of U.S.–Middle East
relations. In the inescapable drama that is human life and death,
wisdom cries both in the halls of power and in the street for us to
listen to what she has to say about building more cooperative
arrangements between peoples who are different. As noted international
relations theorist Jonathan Schell has said in his remarkable book The Unconquerable World,
it is time that we addressed the larger and more fundamental questions
about war and peace and greatly de-emphasize the war system and
institute more peaceable paths. “Force can only lead to more force, not
to peace,” Schell writes. “Only a turn to structures of cooperative
power can offer hope.”
There has been a lot of
political dislocation, internationally, in recent years, as a result of
the national worldview crises that America and countries of the Muslim
Middle East have been faced with since the attacks of 9/11 and the
ensuing responses. New ways of reasoning are desperately
needed. Leaderships need new ideas and we all need to be discussing
them. The following is not scientific formulae but some wisdom-based
possibilities for fresh thought, creativity, and action.
Preliminary remarks
Some
readers may object to my use of the word “secular” in this essay,
because for them there is no such thing as “secular” life or any
dualism between the secular and the sacred. Instead, “all of life is
religious” because it proceeds in the direction of the ultimate faith
commitment that an individual or a society holds. In this view, even
atheist individuals or societies have ultimate faith assumptions
(commitments to beliefs about what lies behind the material world that
cannot be proved but must be taken by faith). Even though I am
sympathetic to the “all of life is religious” view, I am unwilling to
drop the word “secular” or employ it only as if it were describing some
sort of bad disease. I am using it as it is found on the lips of common
usage, in which “secular” merely denotes things that are not considered
“religious.”
I am using both words, then, in
what could be called their normally understood sense, rather than in
the technical sense meant by the “all of life is religious”
theologians. In common usage, religion is about how people express the
commitment they have to God symbolically and what goes on in their
churches, mosques, or synagogues. It is about their rituals, sacred
books, theology, explicit witness, or devotional activities such as
prayer and worship. Distinct from that is what people have learned to
call “secular,” a word to describe what takes place outside of their
churches, synagogues, or mosques. It is used to point to aspects of
life such as the arts, science, law, business, politics, legal
processes, social relationships, and so on, and especially often, to
one’s work in the world. (See: John Peck & Charles Strohmer, Uncommon Sense: God’s Wisdom for Our Complex and Changing World.)
My main source of inspiration for the five norms introduced here comes
from years of studying the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Scriptures,
the Christian Bible, and the scholarship that has grown up around the
wisdom literature of both sources. This literature arose in the
old-world Middle East, and what took me be surprise and began to grip
my imagination was: 1) how much of it surrounds the foreign policy of
the time, 2) that this dimension of the literature is largely
overlooked by scholarship, and 3) how winsome, believable, and relevant
the narrative is for our contemporary Middle East situation with its
religious and “secular” actors.
Also, this essay assumes that political ideology, whether secular or religious,
or some composite of both, can influence, if not control, the decisions
and moves of a state’s leadership in its talks with another state’s
leadership. This approach to international relations has figured large
in the prevention of wars between modern Western democracies because,
although these democracies are not identical, they have much political
ideology and social structure in common that is typically called
secular. A similar history can be found in the Arab world, or across
the larger Islamic world, whose countries have enough religious
ideology in common to sway its many and varied governments from going
to war with each other.
However, in relations
between countries of the West and of the Muslim Middle East, that
history, as everyone knows, has been one of war as much as it has been
of peace. Some of the blame for the wars lies at the feet of national
leaders and their policymakers (on all sides) who relied too
exclusively on political ideology for a thaw in their nation’s
relations with an adversarial nation. That approach usually doesn’t
work. No one likes to be forced. And so the other nation responds in
kind. Adversarial bilateral relations then get caught in a trap in
which each nation feels that it is being forced to sign off on what
amounts to the sectarian demands of the other’s ideological checklist.
This figures huge in the situation between the United States and Iran
today (President Obama’s more pragmatic approach may not in the end be
able to change this, and the ultrafundamentalist ideologues of the
Iranian regime don’t seem to want to). Instead of this lose-lose
scenario, I believe the wisdom tradition offers diplomats, negotiators,
and policymakers, as well as the domestic populations of both
countries, under creative and responsible leaders, the potential for
moving into a win-win situation.
Introducing five norms of wisdom
I
have identified five norms for international relations (there may be
more) in the historic wisdom narrative, and to these I have given the
names: peaceableness (e.g., peacemaking, peacebuilding, the pursuit of
cooperative agreements and arrangements); relations (among people who
are different); insight (from learned lessons and relevant other
experiences); skill (in diplomacy and negotiations; preventing and
resolving problems and crises between states); and mutualism (the
common ground interests, values, and concerns shared by all peoples
everywhere). The acronym p.r.i.s.m. makes a convenient memory aid for
these five norms, but the categories are by no means airtight. In the
light they shed on our subject, there’s plenty of overlap among the
norms.
Right off the bat, Christian readers will
notice that wisdom-based approaches to foreign policy are about
something quite different than finding clever verses from the Book of
Proverbs and somehow getting our elected leaders to apply them. And
although scholars do not see a wisdom literature per se
in the Quran that corresponds with that of the Bible, Muslim readers
will notice, in these five norms of wisdom, correspondences to features
of the broader Islamic understanding of ijtihad
(see “Two Theories of Ijtihad,” M. A. Muqtedar Khan, on the Web).
Foreign policy specialists, of course, will have recognized in the
p.r.i.s.m. normative roles that diplomacy has played ever since kingdom
first learned how to get along with kingdom, so it must not be
concluded that anything completely new is being introduced here.
However, rather than being informed by the wisdom way, the norms that
have given direction to the practice of international relations
traditionally have been shaped by religious ideologies (e.g., Europe
under Constantinianism, or the Middle East under the Ottomans) or by
“secular” ideologies (e.g., the modern West’s political idealism and
realism and their derivatives, or neoconservatism).
So constructed today, bilateral or multilateral relations between
nations that are quite different can easily freeze over. This does not
mean that every compass point of modern statecraft has been or will be
unwise or destructive. It does mean that the norms of wisdom would
provide somewhat of a different energy, shape, and trajectory for the
formation of international relations than national leaders, religious
figures, and foreign policy specialists might intuitively perceive as
possible from the paradigms that have become second nature to them.
Some of the following therefore may seem a bit foreign, if not alien,
if only because the vast literature of modern international relations
scholarship does not go back far enough. As a rule it starts with the
early Greeks, such as Plato or Thucydides and the latter’s great work
on the Peloponnesian War. I understand why classical Greece is the
common starting point for international relations studies today, but I
would like to suggest that it does not take students back far enough to
learn from a time and a place, the old-world Middle East, when
international politics was not so beholden to abstractions. There is
precious little scholarship about this period of international
relations. (Amarna Diplomacy: The Beginnings of International Relations, edited by Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook, is a notable exception, as is the little book Prophets and Wise Men by William McKane, if you can find it.)
The wisdom norm of peaceableness
In
its appraisal of human nature, the historic wisdom tradition is not
idealistic but realistic. That is, the wisdom literature acknowledges a
tragic flaw in human nature. Paradoxically, however, almost in defiance
of that realism, the paths of wisdom are fundamentally about peace, as
the literature makes clear, such as in the Hebrew Bible (Proverbs 3:17)
and the Christian New Testament (James 3:17). Wisdom calls people who
are different to find and build on cooperative ways of life in their
relationships with each other. (By the way, don’t think that this is a
“religious” article just because I’ve now cited two religious sources.
The most reliable literature we have of the historic wisdom tradition
appears in those sources, and that literature is not about religious
life per se, e.g., the way we
worship, pray, share our faith, theologize, and the like. Instead, it
is chiefly concerned with the affairs, issues, and struggles of what
today we typically refer to as secular life, including international
relations.)
In both sources also, although wisdom
cries in the halls of power for nations to beat their swords into
plowshares, the narrative is realistic about the possibilities. Here we
are in this world, where
Kalashnikovs, cruise missiles, and nuclear weaponry outnumber
plowshares; where even the pragmatic foreign policies of the West and
the Muslim Middle East remain guided by sectarian ideologies; and where
Samuel Huntington’s thesis about a pending clash of civilizations seem
horribly too imaginable. Are the peaceable paths of wisdom for another
world? Or do they intersect with the long and winding troubled roads of
our world’s international relations to show us ways to more cooperative
arrangements? Does the wisdom norm of peaceableness have resources for
us and for our leaders now, in this world? Let’s see.
In the modern inter-state system, the “absence of war,” which is
largely what the system means by “peace,” can end when the political
ideology of one nation starts to conflict too practically with that of
another nation (often over economic realities). To prevent that end,
diplomacy and negotiations become critical. But as someone has said,
the two world wars of the twentieth century removed all doubts that
peacemaking is one of the most ticklish tasks of diplomacy. Too right.
And today we would add the U.S.-led war about Iraq to that notion.
It is commonly misunderstood by non-specialists that the same
principles apply to easing tensions between adversarial nations as
apply to settling disputes between individuals, so, they ask, why all
the fuss? Peacemaking in the international community, however, is in
fact exponentially more difficult. In Moral Man and Immoral Society,
Christian political writer Reinhold Niebuhr put it this way, in his
compound-complex way of reasoning: Individuals, being moral, “are able
to consider interests other than their own in determining problems of
conduct, and are capable, on occasion, of preferring the advantages of
others to their own.... Their rational faculty prompts them to a sense
of justice which educational discipline may refine and purge of
egoistic elements until they are able to view a social situation, in
which their own interests are involved, with a fair measure of
objectivity. But all these achievements are more difficult, if not
impossible, for human societies and social groups. In every human group
[Niebuhr included nations in this designation] there is less reason to
guide and check impulses, less ability to comprehend the needs of
others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who
compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.” It is a
dilemma between what Niebuhr often called an individualistic ethic and
a collectivist ethic. Diplomats, negotiators, and international
mediators are among those who ply their craft in the latter context.
The wisdom norm of peaceableness recognizes that there are different
principles for thawing adversarial bilateral or multilateral relations
than for, say, mending a marriage. Within this collective human
predicament, when conflicting national interests are pressed
egoistically, if not demonically, against one another, or when the
threat of war arises, the wisdom norm of peaceableness urges national
leaders and their diplomats and foreign policy advisors to back it down
and concentrate instead on the better angels of human nature, the goal
being to marginalize the absolutized ideological interests that have
come to control the relations. Under the guidance of creative and
prudent leaders, the wisdom way, then, would provide a means for the
parties to talk through sticking point issues and seek agreements in
areas that were not possible when conflicting ideologies became
absolutized, adhered to, and controlled or ended talks between their
nations.
Also, the cooperative international
relations that this norm seeks is not that which is pushed and pursued
by absolutized ideological interests, in which the word “peace” is
one-sided. Frequently when war is on the horizon, one party will say,
“We only want peaceable relations with them,” but the other party is
thinking, “You just want peace for yourself. You’re just out for your
own good. What about my good?” Because the wisdom norm of peaceableness
is motivated by mutual good, a question for each party not only becomes
how can we prevent war but, “How can I help with your
well-being?”
The rewards of successful bilateral or multilateral talks
informed by the wisdom way will not just be the absence of war but
cooperation ordered toward the flourishing of the countries. For this
kind of peace to be successful in the long run, however, international
policy agreements must capture the hearts and minds of the domestic
populations the policymakers represent; in other words, major policy
pursued between two (or more) nations must be seen as legitimate by a
large percentage of the domestic populations in question if it is to
succeed.
I will say more about this under the
norm of relations; here I just note that although foreign policy
decision making is not particularly “democratic” — it is superintended
by the relatively small community of a state’s foreign policy elite,
who do not submit their policies to a direct popular vote — domestic
attitudes loom large in a nation’s international politics, especially
about the big questions of war and peace. If, for example, a large
enough number of American voters favor adversarial relations with Iran,
that collective attitude will carry considerable weight in Washington’s
policies toward Iran, even if the Obama White House wants to keep
talking. Conversely, however, if a large percentage of Iranians favor,
as they do, friendlier relations between Iran and the United States, it
is unlikely that that would carry much weight with the hardline
ultrafundamentalist elite that controls Iran’s foreign policy apparatus
(their repression and violence against Iran’s reformist leaders and
electorate demonstrates this, especially since the disputed June 2009
presidential elections).
In another part of the
Middle East, majorities among both the Israelis and the Palestinians
still want to see formal peaceable relations established between them.
Were this not so, it would be foolish for the Quartet and the League of
Arab States still to be favoring a two-state solution, especially given
the endemic violence that gnaws at the loom of peace. It seems to me
that there is a gut-wrenching sense of wisdom at work, here, in the cry
of these two majority domestic populations for a final agreement.
Having recognized that neither side is going to attain perfect justice
in a final agreement, both populations are nevertheless showing an
inordinate amount of patience in being willing and able to absorb (so
far) acute pain and suffering, tragedies of death, hope deferred, and
more as a sign of their enduringly mutual commitment to an equitable
peace. Where do they get this from? Not from any political ideology
that I am aware of. There may be a clearer present-day illustration of
two adversarial peoples relying on the wisdom norm of peaceableness.
But perhaps not.
The wisdom norm of relations
Wisdom is not an abstraction, an -ology, or an -ism.
Wisdom is the epitome of the personal. We see this in the literature’s
personification of wisdom (such as in the Book of Proverbs chapters
1-9) as an attractive, prudent, virtuous, and competent woman who
offers sage advice to others about the life in the world that she
shares with God. (In the literature, she is contrasted to another
attractive woman, a temptress whom fools follow to their destruction.)
In the Christian New Testament, the personal silhouette of wisdom is
manifest in the understanding of Jesus Christ as the wisdom of God. And
it is probably true that more books have been written about Jesus’
views on relationships than any other religious figure.
The wisdom norm of relations is dependent on the personal mien of
wisdom. Thus in the literature wisdom is found plying her craft not in
ivory towers but in the midst of human interaction (it’s a prominent
theme). Although, as religious traditions indicate, we may pray to God
for wisdom, the literature explains that wisdom may be searched out and
found among human beings in their varied relationships with each other,
and, importantly, not just among the like-minded but also among those who are different
and who are learning from each other. This becomes crucial, of course,
to the specialists who work in the field of international relations. Frankly, however, the word relations
in this designation today denotes much more about conceptual
connections between the abstract entities called states than it does
about relationships between the real entities who are the peoples of
those nations. (There’s a sad irony in this. The rise and spread of
“democracy” the past couple hundred years was meant, in part, to help
nations see themselves not only as states but as peoples.) So let’s
think about different domestic populations, or societies, for a minute.
The wisdom norm of relations can pay huge dividends for the peoples
of nations who are quite different from one another and who may have,
almost as a default setting, some pretty distorted ideas of each other.
Any two people who have ever begun a friendship with each other from
quite different cultures or religions knows how much work it took to
ditch the caricatures, stereotypes, confused feelings, ignorance, and
every other thing that sought to hinder the friendship. Raise the ante
to the arena of diverse domestic populations and it’s easy to see why,
for international agreements, getting to Yes can be terribly difficult.
Diverse domestic populations, however, can learn wisdom from engaging
with each other in ways in which even their cultures or religions may
not be able to help them. The British wisdom theologian David Ford
(Cambridge) suggests that wisdom emerges not so much from what is said between two or more people who are different, but from their cries. “Wisdom cries” for a hearing in the “intensities of life,” Ford writes in his groundbreaking book Christian Wisdom.
People cry for what they desire most, for “love, justice, truth,
goodness, compassion, children, health, food and drink, education,
security, and so on.” And “Christian wisdom” he writes, “is discerned
within earshot of those cries.... The insistence of the cries lends
urgency to the search for wisdom. The persistence of the cries,
together with the diversity and, often, novelty of their challenges,
constantly expands the search and refuses to allow it to rest in any
closure.” In other words, wisdom comes when, together, we openly and
honestly listen to each other’s cries for justice, peace, cooperation,
and so on. That is, wisdom is not an end. It is a way, a
non-ideological way, to justice, peace, cooperation.
It may take getting used to a little less reliance on our ideological
orientations than we think, but this mutual searching for wisdom is
especially significant for reaching international agreements between
peoples who are very different indeed. I believe diplomats and
negotiators have a special role to play in serving to make this happen.
(I have found both the English School and some constructivist
approaches to international relations, in their emphases on
international society and the social dimensions
of life, a pleasant relief from the ideological checklists, reified
abstractions, and causal materialism that has shaped and given
direction to political science theory and practice, and that thus has
seen international life much more in terms of system than society.)
The idea of cooperative and peaceable relations has become so normative
for the diverse groups who live under Western democracies that we may
take it for granted, and we might assume that there is no hope for
cooperative and peaceable relations with those who are not like us,
such as with the Muslim populations of the Middle East, unless they too
become like Western democracies. And vice versa. But that is simply not
true. The Muslim world is not without resources here. There is a
powerful idea in the Quran, for example, which, if I understand surah
49:13 correctly, affirms that human diversity (male, female, tribes,
nations) is part of God’s design for us get to know one another. The
implication seems to be that God could have made us all the same but in
His infinite wisdom chose to make us different, that in our
relationships we might learn ways of getting along together. This
surah, then, seems to have much in common with the wisdom norm of
relations.
A primary idea of the wisdom
tradition that may be helpful, here, is that wisdom is concerned not so
much with concepts as with situations. Thus for international relations
the wisdom way stresses human situations over ideological checklists.
Whereas political ideologies (realism, idealism, neoconservatism, and
others) emphasize aligning nations around conceptual thinking like iron
filings oriented by a magnetic field, wisdom emphasizes situational
thinking.
Conceptual thinking is of course so
basic to human integrity and activity that we would never want to be
without it. We need our ability to think abstractly; I am not arguing
against that. For international relations, however, situations
between parties need to be explored and sorted, and explored and sorted
by the parties themselves, that wisdom for resolving tensions and
problems may be searched out and found by the parties in question.
The creative thinking, then, that searches out wisdom for international
agreements comes not from afar. As necessary as outside mediation is in
some situations, such as between the Israelis and the Palestinians,
wisdom-based solutions for international situations cannot be found
apart from engagement between the actors themselves, for wisdom comes
to light in moments of understanding between them. (Some of these ideas
about “situations” I have adapted from Abraham Heschel’s God in Search of Man.)
For mediators, however, the wisdom norm of relations, being a personal
thing, helps them gain an intimate understanding of quarreling
parties in ways that conceptual thinking cannot. It helps them immerse
themselves in the situation that is being experienced by the parties
themselves and the peoples they represent. “There is little prospect of
mediating any conflict,” writes seasoned Middle East negotiator Dennis
Ross in The Missing Peace, “if one does not understand the historical narrative of each side.”
Chris Seiple, president of the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE),
often talks about “relational diplomacy,” which IGE practices and which
it believes is as crucial as traditional diplomacy is between states
for understanding situations, ending quarrels, and reaching cooperative
agreements. In tough situations between parties, relational diplomacy
keeps mediators and negotiators aware of two common traps. One is what
Seiple calls “mirror-image engagement,” in which we expect people of
other cultures to think and act like us. The other is “monolithic
engagement,” in which we expect the entire people or government to
think and act the same. “These basic reminders need to take place
daily,” Seiple writes, because it is easy to forget that other peoples
and governments have different worldviews than we do. Relational
diplomacy encourages listening to and learning from others, and in the
process “respect is demonstrated and ‘they’ will listen, learn, and
respect back. A relationship has begun.” (See “The Art of Relational
Diplomacy,” Chris Seiple, on the Web.)
In a
similar sense, Michael Schluter, founder of the Relationships
Foundation and Concordis International, talks about the need for parity
in tough situations, which he sees as “a real problem between the Arab
world and the U.S. or Britain. I think there is a feeling on the Arab
side that the West does not really show them respect, doesn’t hold them
in sufficiently high regard to listen to them carefully, to treat them
as equals. Obviously there are inequalities in terms of economics,
military technology, and average living standards. But from a relationships
point of view I don’t think we should measure a country’s ‘development’
simply by its income level.... So on parity there is a real issue here.
I think it is fundamentally a question of respect. If we in the West
could approach the Arabs with more humility, as if we are really
interested in what they are thinking and what is important to them, I
think we would find a much stronger basis for cooperation.”
(“Conversation with Michael Schluter, The R Man,” an Openings interview by Charles Strohmer, on the Web.)
Both Seiple and Schluter and their organizations have some remarkable
successes in tough situations. IGE’s ongoing and often experimental
liaison work between politicians, religious leaders, and policy
advisors in Washington and Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province is a
case in point, as was the work of the Relationships Foundation and
Concordis International in South Africa and Rwanda, and in Sudan with
support from the U.S. State Department. Both Schluter and Seiple,
however, are quick to point out that building honest and open
relationships that lead to breakthroughs in negotiations takes time, is
messy, and requires an inordinate amount of patience and persistence.
In the process, however, as Seiple notes, “a space is created where
differences are named even as common values are found and strengthened.
Now you are ready to have a principled and practical effect based on
mutual respect.”
Because relying on the wisdom
norm of relations can be a lengthy, demanding, and thorny process,
international mediators are, in my book, the unsung heroes of conflict
resolution. Former Senator George Mitchell, currently President Obama’s
Special Envoy for Middle East peace, is a poignant example. During the
1990s, he was dedicated to serving as U.S. Special Envoy to Northern
Ireland, and became a key actor in resolving the violent, decade’s-long
conflict in Northern Ireland. In what has been called a triumph of
patience, Mitchell, and not without personal cost, immersed himself in
relationships with the fighting parties until he was able to
demonstrate a shrewd understanding of the situation and lead the peace
talks through endless arguments about procedures and agendas to what
became known as the Good Friday Agreement (1998). (Alongside the formal
diplomatic track, see Marc Gopin’s inspiring book To Make the Earth Whole,
for mature insight into what he calls "citizen diplomacy" and its
importance in mediation and peacemaking across tough religious and
political lines in the Middle East.)
In short, the wisdom norm of relations cries to policymakers and
leaders: “Go beyond the abstract notion of ‘nation against nation’, see
the peoples of the nations as neighbors, and search out international
policies with them to enhance their lives.”
The wisdom norm of insight
That
we become wiser when we learn from experience is fundamental to the
wisdom tradition. When history repeats itself because no one is
listening, we become more foolish. Here we have entered a field of
vision called insight, and much of the insight that we find in the
old-world wisdom writings arose from observation over time, as the
sages learned lessons about life and relationships from studying both
human behavior and the order of the world to gain understanding of what
has been called the “act-consequence connection.” More popularly: you
reap what you sow. The literature abounds with such insights. For
example: do not love sleep or you will grow poor; the first to present
his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him; for
lack of guidance, a nation falls (Proverbs 20:13; 18:17; 11:14). The
sages, however, also accepted that there were contradictions to such
principles, that, for instance, the godly person may suffer or the
crook may prosper. Exceptions to rules, then, is also basic to the
tradition’s insight about human life and relationships.
Insight gained from learned lessons derives from what the distinguished
scholar of the Old Testament Gerard von Rad calls “experiential
knowledge.” In Wisdom in Israel
he writes that no one “would be able to live even for a single day
without incurring appreciable harm if he could not be guided by wide
practical experience. This experience teaches him to understand events
in his surroundings, to foresee the reactions of his fellow men, to
apply his own resources at the right point, to distinguish the normal
from the unique and more besides.” And yet we may miss the insight an
experience offers us, or lack the capacity to register it, perhaps
because we are incapable of fitting it into the limits of our current
understanding. Because of this, von Rad concludes that experiential
knowledge is both very complex and very vulnerable.
If we think for a minute about the bilateral relations between Iran and
the United States, we know from their past thirty-year history that the
ideological orientations of both governments are implicated in why
those relations are now stuck tangled. It is also arguable from history
that political leaders of such nations who try to thaw their
adversarial relations by hunkering down as loyalists to ideological
orientations can be doomed to failure. To put it crudely, if the
parties really want to work toward better relations, it’s no use to
keep relying on tools that tangle. When those tools, however, are ones
the leaders and their advisors choose to employ, we also know from
history that war, as they say, becomes a continuation of politics. A
wisdom-based policy would seek not to cut the knot with the sword but
to untangle it.
The bilateral situation between
the United States and Iran, not to mention between Israel and Iran, is
screaming for fresh insight to move the relationship away from the
precipice.
The situation needs a reasonable and responsible way
ahead that can be accepted as equitable by both governments and their
domestic populations. Although Americans tend to be impatient and want
to see immediate results, fresh insight for a wiser way ahead in this
relationship may come but it will not be easily applied, as President
Obama and his foreign policy advisors have discovered. It can take
place, though, if the parties are willing to talk openly and honestly
and compromise. As Moshe Dayan, an Israeli military leaders, once said,
“If you want to make peace you don’t talk to your friends; you talk to
your adversaries.”
For American and Iranian
leaders, and those of Israel, wise insight for more cooperative
relations will come from talking to each other outside the ideological
box. Such insight, however, will not emerge overnight in relations as
different and difficult as those between America and Iran, or Israel
and Iran, are. This is why face-to-face listening of each other’s cries
is crucial. But as Ringo Starr still sings, “You know it don’t come
easy.” In The Prophets, Rabbi
Heschel, a seminal figure in twentieth century religious studies and
political activism, wrote: “Insight is a breakthrough, requiring much
intellectual dismantling and dislocation.” It is a process that “begins
with a mental interim, with the cultivation of a feeling for the
unfamiliar, unparalleled, incredible. It is in being involved with a
phenomenon, being intimately engaged to it, courting it, as it were,
that after much perplexity and embarrassment we come upon insight –
upon a way of seeing the phenomenon from within. Insight is accompanied
by a sense of surprise. What has been closed is suddenly disclosed. It
entails genuine perception, seeing anew.”
In The Creative Word,
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls this way to wisdom a
“great brooding” process. With wisdom, he writes, we are “in touch with
a mystery that cannot be too closely shepherded, as in the Torah, or
protested against, as in the prophets. There is here a not-knowing, a
waiting to know, a patience about what is yet to be discerned, and a
respect for not knowing that must be honored and not crowded. It works
at a different pace because it understands that its secrets cannot be
forced.” He continues: “Wisdom is found in the experience of the
specific, concrete experiences which individuals discern for
themselves.... That is where wisdom shall be found — in the stuff of
life, the world, our experience.... It holds for the patient, diligent
observer what needs to be known.”
Insights from
learned lessons help leaders and their advisors apply good judgment for
foreign policy decisions. President Obama seems to get this, although
it is being strongly resisted by powerful political ideologues in
America and Israel, as it is by the ultrafundamentalists who currently
rule Iran. It remains to be seen whether the president will be able to
sustain even his own personal momentum to keeping talking with Tehran,
especially if he keeps getting the runaround by the regime.
In short, wisdom reveals herself in the dialogue among learners. Wisdom
is a way of seeing the past in the present to prevent future shock.
The wisdom norm of skillful diplomacy and negotiations
When
kings of ancient Egypt, Israel, Assyria, Babylon, and Persia ruled at
various times over parts of what is now the modern Middle East, the
wisdom way was invaluable in the halls of power for their ambassadors,
foreign ministers, policy advisors, and other government officials. One
of the principle duties of these high-level old-world officials, writes
von Rad, “was to advise the king on political matters.” Further,
despite the different religious ideologies of those kingdoms, which
were no less controlling than religious ideology is in today’s Middle
East, it was the wisdom tradition that provided old-world rulers and
their diplomats with a pattern for constructing and conducting their
more cooperative international relations.
To use
some specialist language for a minute, a broad class of prominent high
officials (chiefly men but occasionally some women) within ancient
Israel’s government were known as the hakāmīm. (When referring to the class itself, the hakāmīm
are occasionally short-handed in the literature simply as “the wise.”)
They served as what today we would call cabinet ministers,
policymakers, statesmen, foreign ministers, secretaries of state,
diplomats, and political advisors; occasionally, ecclesiastical figures
and even generals were included. Individuals of this sort make brief
appearances in the literature as advisors to the pharaohs, and as
integral to the rudimentary forming of Israelite jurisprudence under
Moses after the flight from Egypt but before the wilderness wanderings
had ensued. During that period of Israelite history, hakāmīm
were commissioned as judges to hear disputes and to render their
decisions fairly and impartially, whether between two Israelites or
between an Israelite and a non-Israelite.
This
last point is significant. It often goes unnoticed that ancient
Israel’s nascent social and political experiment under Moses and
Joshua, as well as its later monarchical rule over the land of Canaan,
included many peoples who were not Israelites. It was in a pluralistic
context, therefore, that ancient Israel’s hakāmīm
emerged and evolved as a class of government advisors essential to the
proper domestic functioning of Israel’s somewhat pluralist society.
Quite specific guidelines are given, for instance, to the
pre-monarchical hakāmīm in
the Books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, where they are instructed to be
impartial — literally, taking no one’s part, or side. They are to hear
disputes free from outside pressures and render their decisions fairly
between an Israelite and a non-Israelite. (It fascinates me that this
began with the sage advice to Moses from Jethro, who was not an
Israelite but a Midianite priest.) Further, the goal of the hakāmīm’s
impartiality in judging was that there might be peace, shalom, human
flourishing within this pluralistic society (see Exodus 18:23).
Afterward, during the monarchical period, the hakāmīm
were also essential to Israel’s proper functioning in its international
relations, as scholarship has discovered in the transition of the people
Israel into a formal nation (a monarchy), what today we would call a
state. Once up and running as a nation among nations, if Israel wanted
to benefit as an actor in the international scene, and it did, it would
need to be recognized by the region’s other nations (also monarchies)
as a formal participant in the pattern that had been established for
conducting the international relations of that time and place (think of
the need today for a new state to join the United Nations and the
benefits that would accrue to it). Although religious traditions were
part of the mix, there are many indications in the wisdom literature,
in other biblical writings, and in modern scholarship to suggest that
the wisdom tradition loomed large in the established regional pattern
for conducting international relations. Israel’s hakāmīm, then, engaged with their counterparts in wisdom traditions of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and elsewhere.
In other words, when old-world Israel became a formal nation, it turned
a political corner that demanded changes whereby it could gain the kind
of international footing that came from being “like” the other nations.
This meant, for instance, enthroning a king, picking a cabinet, raising
an army and the taxes to fund both it and the new bureaucracy, drafting
and institutionalizing new national laws, establishing a capital, and
so on. “Israel,” writes wisdom scholar William McKane in Prophets and Wise Men,
“became a state with a new political structure which demanded the
creation of a cadre of royal officials through whom the king
governed....” It was a political structure in which there was
associated with the king “a class of royal officials who had to do with
the army, finance, foreign embassies and administration. Such officials
were a ‘people of the king’ and had a common interest with him” both in
domestic peace and prosperity and in cooperative international
relations. McKane also writes that during the long reigns of Israel’s
second and third kings, David and Solomon, Israel was strongly in the
Egyptian sphere of influence, and that “we ought to seek there for the
models of Solomon’s bureaucracy.” His conclusion is that “the Israelite
state was modeled on the great states of the ancient Near East and [in
particular, early on] acquired a structure similar to that of Egypt.”
Evidently, this transnational property of wisdom was taken completely
for granted in the halls of power and domestically throughout the
region. That is, no one questioned it in principle. (Even the prophets
did not object to it in principle. What they objected to were the
unjust policies of the wise.) In fact, the wisdom way was such an
accepted fact of international politics that even devoutly religious
believers in Yahweh could serve with clear consciences in “pagan”
governments, whose rulers felt completely confident to employ. The
person whom Christians call Daniel the prophet immediately comes to
mind, as does the person often referred to as “Ezra the priest.” The
Book Daniel, however, appropriately enough, appears in the Hebrew Bible
in “the Writings,” and not, as in the Christian Bible, in “the
Prophets.” And Daniel himself, although a devout Jew, was educated to
become a statesman in the Babylonian wisdom tradition, where he
graduated with top honors and afterward had a long and distinguished
political career serving at the highest levels of government within the
elite of wise men who advised kings of Babylon. Ezra, though a Jewish
priest, also functioned as a Persian diplomat at the end of a long
period of Israelite change and reorganization under Persian rule.
It was not just the hakāmīm,
however, who were part of the old-world wisdom tradition. Other classes
are too numerous to mention here, but one of these should be described.
Close colleagues of the hakāmīm, the sōperīm are another prominent group of officials who were indispensable to old-world domestic and international politics. Some sōperīm
appear in the literature as diplomats themselves, but many were
political secretaries or professional writers whom English translators
of the Hebrew often call scribes.
There is a bit
of mischief surrounding that word today, however. “Scribes” has been
reduced — through popular books and films like The Name of the Rose
— to medieval monks in secluded monasteries leaning over stand-up desks
translating or copying old religious manuscripts (great film, though).
Although old-world scribes did function in religious contexts, others
held careers in government. They were educated to hold political
offices, and their curriculum included the specialized training in
writing and languages requisite to such a career. Some of them seem to
me to have functioned not unlike today’s sherpas do, as wordsmiths for
our heads of state and their international negotiating teams. I see
something of this in role of Ezra, not so much as a priest but in the
often overlooked fact that this Israelite was also a prominent sōper
(scribe) who, as an expert in Mosaic law, represented exiled Israel in
the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes. Jerusalem was at this time
under Persian rule, and during times of crisis between the Jewish
leadership in Jerusalem and their Persian overlords five hundred miles
away, Ezra served Artaxerxes as a shuttle diplomat between the Persian
capital and Jerusalem.
Referring to a period long
before Persian dominance over the region, McKane writes that at the
time of Israel’s political reorganization under David and Solomon, as
international negotiations and agreements with other nations were
becoming normative for Israel’s kings, a sōper
“had to master foreign languages for the purposes of diplomacy, and
that in doing so he acquired a knowledge of foreign literatures and
assisted in their dissemination.” He finds this similar to Egypt and
Babylon, whose sōperīm served
“in the circle of a high establishment which plays an important role in
the political and cultural life of the time [and thus] these scribes
have to be distinguished from mere writers. [It] may not be going to
far too say ... that these men, although primarily statesmen and
administrators, were born middlemen in the international exchange of
literature.”
As today, old-world diplomats
entertained their counterparts in their own capitals and journeyed on
political missions to foreign capitals. Also today, as then, the wisdom
norm of skillful diplomacy can be given free rein, or it can be reined
in, often depending on the ideological motivation of an administration,
whether that of the Iranian regime, or the White House, or 10 Downing
Street. As critics of President Bush’s first term (2001-2004) like to
point out, the steely refusal of his neoconservative advisors and
hard-nosed realists to talk to Iran unless the regime first met certain
non-negotiable preconditions was a lose-lose policy, because for Tehran
these preconditions were seen as ultimatums.
Of
course one could ask: What if Bush’s neoconservative advisors had
entered talks with Tehran? The question then becomes: Given the
religious-like authority that neoconservative ideology can hold over
its adherents, would such a negotiating team have been a wise course of
action? In such a situation it seems doubtful that the wisdom norm of
skillful diplomacy would have had much of a chance, given that the
talks would have been between the Bush neoconservatives and the
ultrafundamentalists of the Iranian government.
This norm at least had a fighting chance during President Clinton’s
second term (1996-2000), after the surprise landslide election of the
reformist politician Seyyed Mohammed Khatami as Iranian president in
1997. Khatami shaped a foreign policy around a remarkable initiative he
called “a dialogue of civilizations,” using it to reach out first
regionally to the Arab world, which produced a thaw in Arab-Iranian
relations, and then farther afield to Europe and America. This changed
the tenor of Iranian politics, and the second Clinton administration
sought to capitalize on that. EU-Iranian relations improved, and a
number of public speeches and warm comments from Khatami about the
United States were reciprocated by Clinton and his secretary of state
Madeleine Albright. The signals being sent by both states were
noteworthy, as were the practical, if tentative, gestures and
initiatives of mutual outreach that followed, even if they indicated
only the possibilities of a new beginning.
It
was a good start. The wise give-and-take began thawing the bilateral
relations. This continued somewhat, albeit not without bickering, for
more than a year after 9/11, but with a different administration. Then
Secretary of State Colin Powell and his team of advisors at the State
Department had succeeded in reaching out to Iran for crucial help in
ousting al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan. As the Bush
administration turned its sights to Iraq, however, the neoconservative
policymakers (brought into the Bush administration by Vice-President
Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld) worked
incessantly to derail furthering bilateral cooperation, even though
that was possible at the time. By May 2003 they had succeeded. Khatami,
still president of Iran and hoping to build on the cooperative efforts
regarding Afghanistan, had persuaded the regime to take a huge risk. It
sent a formal diplomatic letter to the Bush administration seeking the
start of direct high-level talks on a wider array of issues crucial to
the relationship between both countries, and to multilateral relations
in the region, and to the Israeli–Palestinian situation.
The
unprecedented offer was immediately rebuffed by Cheney and Rumsfeld.
The ultrafundamentalists in Tehran quickly used the snub to undermine
the credibility of Khatami, his team, and other reformist politicians,
who had been sticking their necks out since 1997 for friendlier
relations with the United States. And the rest, as they say, is
history, beginning with another surprise election, that of the radical
and controversial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June 2005.
No one has yet convinced me that it is wise for the United States not
to talk with Iran. The current situation between the two nations is
such that even some diplomatic principles that have been considered
inviolable may need to give way to wiser approaches (on both sides). If
not, the thinking of each actor may become even less known to the other
than it already is, the actions of each less predictable, and the
prospect of miscalculation leading to conflict more likely.
On the other hand, diplomacy and negotiations not reined in by
ideological constraints, such as seems to be being practiced at this
time by the Obama administration, frees the parties to search out the
wisdom necessary for them to ease tensions and reach agreements. Two
stunning examples from the Middle East, only briefly noted here, are
the Israel-Egypt (1979) and the Israel-Jordan (1994) peace treaties.
Many political ideologues in Israel and America had been arguing that
democracy in the Arab world was a necessary precondition for any
normalization of relations between Israel (a democracy) and her (more
autocratic) neighbors. Yet Israel managed to conclude peace treaties
with Egypt under Sadat, and with Jordan under King Hussein, and these
have both withstood perilous times.
The wisdom
way involves diplomats, negotiators, and their teams in the exercise of
boundless sensitivity to the parties’ problems and great tact and
pacing when working toward an agreement. To get the parties to Yes,
wisdom helps negotiators submerge their own ideologies to show an
evenhandedness for gaining the confidence of all sides. It also helps
address what Dennis Ross, in Statecraft,
calls the parties’ “comfortable myths,” that they may see reality as it
really is and adjust expectations to that, to reach midpoints that both
sides can accept.
Wise diplomats, then, are more
like dialecticians than apologists or polemicists. Imagine the absurd,
if not disastrous, outcomes if foreign ministers met across the table
during crises merely to vent political polemics or engage in religious
apologetics. Instead, wise diplomats and negotiators on both sides
could, I believe, take the toxicity out of U.S.–Iran relations.
“Negotiations are probably the most essential tool of statecraft,”
writes Ross. “Problems or crises can be resolved through
negotiations.... Every single instrument of statecraft in one way or
another involves negotiations.”
In the
diplomatic field, you can’t move your counterparts in other nations out
just because you have a problem with them. Like professors in a college
environment, you’re stuck with your fellows, for decades perhaps, in
situations where intense conversations continually go on among you
about things that cannot keep being shoved aside but which have to be
negotiated, even basic ideas about the teaching and the research. This
plays a large role in why colleges and universities can and do renew,
if not reinvent, themselves over time. If they remain static, if their
institutions are non-negotiable, the world moves on, life begins to
pass them by.
So, too, in the diplomatic field, which is likewise a
long-term environment for intense conversation, but one between
nations, where many are the things to think about and many the ways to
think about them. For international relations that are stuck in an
unacceptable status quo, the wisdom way enables diplomats and
negotiators to work together to apply insights and good judgments for
wise decisions for new ways ahead. Which brings us to the wisdom norm
of mutualism, and its amazing relevance and potential at the rough
intersection of the secular and the religious in Western–Middle East
relations.
The wisdom norm of mutualism
The
last shall be first. The wisdom norm of mutualism sheds light on mutual
or common ground. Having read this, readers will immediately be
reminded of the almost limitless supply of interfaith and multifaith
activity that has arisen over the past decade or more. Although the
wisdom norm of mutualism plays a huge role in that field, that subject
is for another time. Here, I want us to think about the special agency
of mutual cooperation that the norm possesses for human relations and
their structures when minding the gap between the religious and the
secular. As the British philosopher and theologian John Peck has helped
me to understand: wisdom concentrates on interests, concerns, and
values that are shared by the human family as a whole before a distinction is made about who is religious and who is not. (Let that sink in.)
I believe that the implications of this are so timely and important for
Western–Middle East relations that the wisdom norm of mutualism may
prophetically have been meant for our day, when Western states are
trying to determine what role religion should or should not play in
their foreign policies vis a vis Muslim Middle East nations trying to
determine what role secularism should or should not play in their
foreign policies. In recent years, this rough secular/religious
intersection has been subjected to increased interest at think tanks
and universities, by conferences and authors, and in the halls of
power. But it is still so newly arrived to the foreign policy community
that it has not been deeply engaged as yet, when compared to the
decades of concerted thought that people have given to balance of
power, anarchy, state sovereignty, democratic peace, national security,
and so on — areas considered the nuts and bolts of contemporary
international politics.
This
religious/secular intersection is one of
the main subjects in the book I’m writing, and I want to conclude this
essay just by showing what that problematic intersection looks like
to the parties and to start a conversation about why the wisdom norm of
mutualism can help willing parties negotiate the intersection with less
animus toward each other.
On the U.S. side of the
gap, the greatest obstacle lies in overcoming two hundred years of what
international relations historian Edward Luttwak calls “secular
reductivism”: a philosophical predisposition in capitals such as
Washington against including the concerns of any religion in its
foreign policy apparatus. That is, a lack of regard for religion per se
has been central to the political orthodoxy of modern Western states
and of political science scholarship in general. Luttwak roots this in
the West’s “Enlightenment prejudice,” which he finds “amply manifest in
the contemporary professional analysis of foreign affairs.” Thus
politicians and journalists (he’s writing this before 9/11) often
ignored “the role of religion, religious institutions, and religious
motivation in explaining politics and conflict” and focused too much on
geographic, economic, social, political, or other non-religious primary
causes. For Luttwak, this indicates “a learned repugnance to contend
intellectually with all that is religion or belongs to it.” (“The
Missing Dimension,” Edward Luttwak, in Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds. For a less technical discussion of this problem, see Madeleine Albright's The Mighty and the Almighty,
in which the former U.S. secretary of state opens a window on her
academic studies in the 1960s, to reveal how her education in world
affairs gave her with a strong distaste for anything to do with
religion in international relations, and how that attitude was typical
of international relations scholarship and influenced Washington’s
foreign policy decision makers at the time.)
Scott Thomas, an international relations scholar at the University of
Bath, has identified several primary contours of modernity that have
helped to marginalize valid religious interests and concerns in Western
approaches to international politics. Briefly noted here, those
contours are: 1) “Social theory,” which “helped to explain religion
away, rather than to explain its significance in social action.” 2)
“Secularization theory,” which “argued that the numbers of people who
declare themselves to be believers and who regularly attend religious
services will steadily decline as a country modernizes,” leading to “a
steady retreat of religion from the pubic square.” 3) The Westphalian
presumption, which deemed religion “to be the ultimate threat to order,
civility, and security,” and therefore religion should no longer be
part of international politics. 4) The modern scientific method, whose
twin controls of naturalism and materialism admit into its theories
(including its theories of international politics) only one reality,
the physical world. Religion is then seen as a mere epiphenomenon at
best, rather than as a basic instinct of human nature. (Scott Thomas, The
Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International
Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-first Century.)
U.S.–Mideast relations of course run both ways. Whereas Washington
approaches its international relations from what is thought to be a
secular orientation, the capitals of the Muslim Middle East rely on
varying degrees of explicit religious belief to inform their politics.
In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the powerfully influential network of
ultrafundamentalist Wahhabi clerics can be a deciding “vote” in
policies of the Saudi government. In Jordan and Egypt, Islam is the
state religion. In Syria, however, it is not, although the Syrian
government succumbs at times to religious interests both from within
Syria and from Iran.
Lebanon is different still. An Arab country with
the largest percentage of Christians by far of any country in the
Middle East, Lebanon has a political order unique to the Middle East,
designed to accommodate eighteen diverse major and minor religious
groups (Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Jewish) who are structurally
factored into the government. “Parliamentary seats, ministries,
governments jobs, and so on are apportioned according to these
different confessional groups. The political process formally
recognizes these religious groups, that each one should have a share in
the pie.” (Journalist Rami Khouri, interview by Charles Strohmer, “The
Christian Message in Lebanon,” Christianity Today, August 2007.)
Religious authority may even act as a constitutional arbiter of policy.
Iran is a case in point. The contemporary Iranian determinacy between a
particular interpretation of Islam and the international politics of
the state traces back to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise to power in
1979 (when he overthrew the country’s American-backed Shah). The
constitution drawn up under Khomeini states that Iran is an Islamic
Republic whose government must adhere to the teachings of the Quran and
the traditions of the sunnah and hadith. Since then, a supreme
religious leader (first Khomeini, now Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) has been
the absolute political head of the government. “The legal structure of
the Islamic Republic places ultimate political authority in” the
supreme leader, who has the final word on all matters of state,
including foreign policy. (Azadeh Moaveni, “Power in the Shadows:
Iran’s Supreme Religious Leader Keeps a Low Profile,” Time, July 3, 2006.)
Although the supreme leader is Iran’s highest political decision maker,
he is not elected by the public. He is selected by the assembly of
experts and is thought by Iran’s ruling clerics to be God’s
representative on earth. His politics are therefore theocratic, in the
sense that he is considered to be directly answerable to God and not as
susceptible to public opinion as are Iran’s elected president and
members of parliament. (Contrast this to a sitting U.S. president, who,
although the buck stops with him, is answerable to the people.)
Under the supreme leader is the president and the parliament. A twelve
member guardian council, comprised of six jurists and six religious
clerics (all of whom must be highly-educated, dedicated Muslims),
oversees parliament. The guardian council can, as may the supreme
leader, veto any piece of legislation that it deems to violate
Islamic laws (shariah) or the Iranian constitution. The council also
approves or disqualifies candidates wishing to run for election. One of
the more alarming ramifications of this for the Western powers has been
that the council habitually disqualifies nearly all of the reformist
candidates who seek to run for seats in parliament or for the
presidency. (Direct censure of the reformists has, as everyone knows,
reached such a pitch today that the regime, sanctioned by the supreme
leader, now brutally and violently suppresses groups of peaceful
demonstrators who continue to dispute Ahmadinejad’s reelection as
president in June 2009.)
Countries of the Muslim Middle East, then, face the equal opposite
problem to that of the United States. Because their governments are
allied with religious interests — in varying degrees and capacities,
and with differing interpretations of Islam — they must contend from a
religious point of view with how their relations should, or should not,
develop with a nation, the United States, where religious authority is
excluded from playing any official role. Very practically, this affects
how the different governments of the Muslim Middle East engage with the
United States in pressing matters of democracy, economic progress,
political checks and balances, equal opportunities for women, the
process of globalization, dealing with acts of terrorism, and so on. As
different interpreters of Islam vie for political clout over such
issues in the Muslim Middle East, that affects how the U.S. and the
other Western states interact with those countries.
The
protean religious and political alchemy of the Muslim Middle East,
then, plays a role in why each Western state does not have the same
foreign policy for each Muslim state, and vice versa. Nevertheless,
what unites these Middle East countries is their struggle with
America’s secular political reductivism, not to mention that of the
other Western states.
It’s quite a dilemma,
this international tug of war between “the secular” and “the
religious.” It may indeed need the wisdom of Solomon to resolve. I hold
the view that trying to wrest one side into the other’s camp is a
futile exercise at best and at worst moves the world closer to a clash
of civilizations. I would kindly like to suggest to all parties, and to
the different domestic populations those parties are meant serve and
represent, that wisdom stands silhouetted at the rough
secular/religious intersection where your two worlds meet. There, now,
today, she offers both religious and secular actors a way to begin a
new narrative together by
getting around absolutized ideological interests and building
international agreements on the mutual ground that we all share simply
but profoundly because we are all, whoever we are, whatever we believe,
human beings.
The wisdom norm of mutualism
helps us to be more conscious of and attentive to the interests and
concerns of daily life that all peoples everywhere, regardless of race,
religion, or politics, or lack of a religion or a politics, hold in
common. It may be hard for us, at first, to give sustained thought and
action to this today, in an age in which we have been conditioned by
ideological reasoning since childhood to accept as normative that
cooperative arrangements can be constructed only around adherence to
one cluster or another of sectarian interests. Since time immemorial,
however, everyone on the planet has shared the same world (what other
world is there?) and the same resources. Everyone has participated in
the same creation, shared the common bond of what it means to be human,
had the same basic interests.
We all want to be
able to provide for our families, to see our children raised properly
and safely, to live as peaceably as possible with our neighbors, to see
our social environments improve, to find ways to ease the suffering of
others, to increase possibilities for well-being in the world, and so
on. People everywhere have a fundamental interest in such things
regardless of their religion or their political affiliation, or whether
they claim neither. Believers and atheists alike are moved at the sight
of starving children or families left homeless by a tragedy, and both
will want to do what they can to alleviate such suffering. In fact,
this is precisely where many religious groups focus their efforts.
Religious callings throughout history have concentrated on caring for
people as they are, wherever they are, and regardless of their beliefs.
The same can be said about secular relief organizations.
The bulk of wisdom literature, in fact, focuses on the concerns and
practicalities of everyday life — work and wealth, family and
neighbors, economics and politics, relationships and communication,
kings and the administration of justice, prosperity and suffering,
happiness and grief, social life and the law court, and so on — and the
decisions people make about them in their relationships with others in
these fields. Today, such issues and concerns are often bracketed as
“secular life,” and according to the Hebrew wisdom literature the
choices people make in that life make them wise or foolish. The wisdom
way seeks to enable human flourishing in secular life across and
cultures, between and among peoples who are different.
Further, the wisdom norm of mutualism does not require people to ditch
their religious or secular foundations before more cooperative
arrangements with each other can be established (provided those
foundations are not built on or around violence). Religious conversions
are not the purpose or function of foreign policy. Instead, wisdom
cries in international relations for people who are different to look
up from the foreground of particularities about race, religion,
ethnicity, or nationality to see the horizons that are possible through
architectures of shared human interests and concerns. The wisdom norm
of mutualism, to use a Christian expression, seems to emphasize
cooperative possibilities based on who people are, more than on what by
the grace of God they may become.
To approach
this from another direction, wisdom does not require the parties to try
to find issues and concerns that have no relevance to secular or
religious belief before they can reach agreements. This is why I
usually favor the word mutual over the word common. The phrase “common
ground” sometimes carries the idea that there are issues of life that
are belief-neutral, issues which neither the secular nor the religious
person brings his or her beliefs to; whereas the phrase “mutual ground”
somewhat more emphasizes that all of life is shared by all of us. It’s
a way to point out a subtle, but I think a significant, distinction.
That is, the wisdom norm of mutualism is not saying, “Hey, look, here’s
a bit of neutral ground where we might be able to meet and agree.”
Instead, the wisdom way gives us freedom to engage on issues fully as
who we are. Belief is not divorced from negotiations. We look around
the table and we see: he’s secular; I’m not; she’s a Christian; he’s a
Muslim.
The depths of who we are, whether
religious or secular, are part of what is talking place around the
table in any issue we represent for our countries. Neutral ground
unaffected by belief is in fact one of the greatest myths of our time.
The wisdom norm of mutualism does not preclude depth of identity.
The norm, however, is not naive. The wisdom way, as noted earlier, is
realistic. At those places, then, where having different identities
means disagreements will persist, the wisdom way offers a freedom that
adherence to ideological stands may not. It enables diplomats,
negotiators, mediators, and others not to have mere tolerance of
another’s view but a respect of the other in such a way that
non-negotiable differences may yield “fruitful forms of virtuous
rivalry” (this phrase is from Nicholas Adams, Academic Director of the
Cambridge Interfaith Program).
The wisdom way,
then, gives national leaders and their policy advisors a way of
reasoning about human difference — right here, right now, in the
current states’ system — that is different from the political or
religious ideology they may be accustomed to. It is a way of reasoning,
however, that gets pretty short shrift in contemporary international
relations and foreign policy making. With the voice of wisdom muted by
the amped-up sectarian ideologies of our time, its revival today would
provide a reasonable and responsible way to re-energize, reshape, and
redirect Western–Middle East relations. In this, wisdom is of course
realistic about the future. She is not a utopian dreamer. On the other
hand, she would ask how wise was the ideological direction of the first
decade of the twenty-first century that promised to further
international mutual good.
When considering
dealing with today’s international crises, James Skillen, senior fellow
of the Center for Public Justice, writes in With or Against the World
that of all of life’s certainties, “one in particular has proven very
durable over the centuries, namely, that there is but one world.” Thus
the “American people need to gain a deeper understanding of what it
means that the world’s people and states share a single global commons,
the governance of which is becoming more and more difficult with each
passing year.... American failure to think and act cooperatively over
the long term for the international common good is part of what
threatens even America’s future.”
Because the
wisdom way is not subordinated to any particular theoretical
understanding of life or set of abstract principles or laws, its norms
provide both religious and secular political actors with a freedom to
search out, together, prospects for constructing and sustaining
cooperative international relations based on mutual interests and
concerns sans ideological restrictions. It offers this freedom in a way
that can be reasonably and responsibly accepted by all who do not have
violence in their hearts. It opens doors for both Western nations and
those of the Muslim Middle East to participate not just in reversing
adversarial relationships and improving existing relationships but to
help the international community toward human flourishing.
This is the special
agency of wisdom as she cries amidst our cries for us to build on the
unity we have around the everyday interests, concerns, and values of
this world that we all share before a distinction is made about who is religious and who is secular.
This is her forte because, if the literature is to be believed, she
predates religion. For she was there at the beginning. The Hebrew
wisdom literature, for one, asserts her presence at creation, her
mediating role in its design and in the way it was made effective, and
her special delight in our world and its race.
War, a rueful change-agent, is a narrow, wretched, and deceptive means
for arriving at the kind of social, economic, and political life most
Westerners and peoples of the Middle East would like to see achieved
with each other. The war about Iraq has made this, if not anything
else, clear. Instead of a war, wisdom provides paths of peace.
As noted earlier, wisdom is not an end. It is a way, a non-ideological
way, to justice, peace, cooperation. Not perfect justice, or perfect
peace, or perfect cooperation. No, not in this world, where we must
learn to accept imperfect international agreements and arrangements.
Nevertheless, she stands crying in the street and in the halls of
power, awaiting our decision. Right here, right now.
Charles
Strohmer is an independent researcher, seminar speaker, and author of
seven books (one co-authored). He is the founder and director of The
Wisdom Project and a visiting research fellow of the Center for Public
Justice. His articles appear in diverse publications. He is currently
working on a book about wisdom-based approaches to U.S.–Middle East
relations. Contact: wp2chars@charlesstrohmer.com.
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