In Islamic theology, Satan, the enemy of God and of mankind, is not quite the ubiquitous and insidious presence of evil that he is in the worldview of many Christians. Instead, Satan is something of a bumbling oaf, a fool, a infernal toadie whom, many Muslim scholars argue, will be forgiven by God on the Last Day.
Knowing this brings new light to that term, “The Great Satan,” which many Islamic radicals use to describe the U.S.
The description, as they mean it, holds true.
I realized this last night as I was watching Errol Morris’s latest documentary, The Fog of War, which is a collection of interviews with Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense for the seven years in which the Vietnam War really got off the ground. Now, we on the left tend to see, in the history of the U.S., conspiracies on the part of the military industrial complex to exert global corporate colonial hegemony upon the rest of the world, and the Vietnam War is often put forward as Exhibit A for our prosecution of the powers that be. The truth, however, is not that simple.
My reading had led me to believe that Lyndon Johnson basically lied about the North Vietnamese attacking the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin as a way of getting from Congress the war powers he so fervently desired. McNamara pointed out, however, that the sonarmen aboard the Maddox believed that they were having torpedoes fired at them from some unknown source; but sonar, especially at the time in question, is not an exact science but a matter of interpretation, and many of the crew were under extreme duress patrolling what they knew to be hostile waters. Like someone who lives in mortal fear of being mugged, these guys saw the boogeyman everywhere.
“War is infinitely complex. It is the most complex thing mankind can undertake, and we cannot even begin to understand all the variables that go into it,” said McNamara in describing what is called “the fog of war.”
Can we begin even to calculate for some yokel from western Kentucky on his first tour in the Navy looking into his sonar screen and seeing communist torpedoes instead of dolphins mating?
And the Great Satan bumbles headlong into something unintended….
Reflecting more upon this chilling movie as I tried to sleep, it occurred to me that many of the conspiracy theories floating around are really means of reassuring ourselves, of giving us comfort in times of stress—what detractors of religion say that faith does.
You see, the Catholic Church teaches that original sin is more a loss of status than a change in nature—mankind did not instantly become depraved with a bite of that apple, but he did lose a privileged status which made work painless, which held him the acme of all creation. Adam naming the animals was Adam in control, but that control is ours no longer; we are subject to creation.
Conspiracy theories, however, seem to be asserting the opposite, for they imagine a cabal of men who have that prelapsarian ability to lord over the world with impunity. I’m talking about the big conspiracy theories here, the kind embodied in such books as Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Gods of Eden, big mega-conspiracies which hold that someone somewhere has had a finger in every historical event from the rise of Napoleon to the assassination of JFK. Yes, they control the world, everything from the truth about extraterrestrial life to the International Monetary Fund. Not a cell divides unless it is a part of their grand scheme.
And the reason I believe such theories offer comfort to people is that they say, effectively, “Hey, somebody is in control. We do have the ability, if in the right position, to dictate world events.”
But then there’s Robert McNamara, one of what David Halberstam called “the Best and the Brightest.” One of the elite, one of those “in the know,” one of those behind the veil. And his message is that all the proper planning and good intentions can be undercut by an amateur sonarman imagining torpedoes in the water. We are, after all, human, and even good men make mistakes.
And the Great Satan lumbers on like a dumb beast….
But if there’s hope for him, there’s hope for us.
That hope lies in what is the very antithesis of the conspiracy theory—love. Love is, quite honestly, the opposite of control, which is illusion anyway. If you love your spouse, you do not lock her up at night to keep her from getting away, for you trust her to stay with you.
The Church fathers speak of the felix culpa, the necessary sin of Adam that gave us so great a gift as Jesus. I had always balked at the notion that a sin which resulted in a man’s death could be described as felicitous, but I think I am beginning to understand the mystery they were expressing. We had to be shriven of our power, our control, our exalted state in order to know truly what it is to love. Jesus never threatened or coerced people into joining him, for he loved all mankind, so much that he would not exert a bit of power to save himself from the cross. Felix culpa. God himself as one of us, without the power which is but a fiction anyway; God as more than simply powerful—God as loving.
An awareness of our inability to control events should permeate our consciousness. It’s the illusion of control that is the true fog of war, and no war, to date, has ever been won.
Posted at June 8, 2004 09:27 AM
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