National Sin

I have been pondering two different world views lately and wondering whether, in fact, they are as divergent as is generally supposed. I have a tendency to view the world as interconnected, a series of Venn diagrams that overlap to infinity. I watched yesterday as thousands marched on the US Supreme Court building to protest on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion in the US and based on the numerous nuns and priests, a good deal of them were Catholic. Today, I listened to an environmentalist on Science Friday on NPR discuss the need to keep the population engaged in saving the world. He sounded, frankly, a little evangelistic -- and I am quite the environmentalist myself. He even condemned the dissent among scientists regarding global warming since it damages their program for converting the public.

I thought about these two "religions." One would be recognized widely as religion, Catholicism, and the other, Environmentalism, is generally only called a religion by its opponents. However, one need not disapprove of the goals of environmentalists to note the comparisons to religious belief and activity (see, for example, my earlier post on Environmental Repentance).

Religion naturally led me to eschatology and I began to think about the collapse of civilizations throughout time. There have been, despite historians' wrangling over what a golden age actually means, ups and downs from renaissances to economic and political collapses. Pharaonic Egypt collapsed, Rome fell, the Mayans imploded, Andalusia crumbled. The eternal question and perhaps the original question of political science is why. The man who was arguably the father of modern sociology and political science, who brought together the philosophical inquiry of the Greeks with the bold empirical science of the Arabs, was Ibn Khaldun. His famous magnum opus began with its even more famous introduction which discussed historical theory and the whys of history, the first time that had ever been done. Simplifying it greatly, he argued that great societies endured so long as their cohesion or self identity endured. As people began to see their destinies as separate from that of the state, then the state weakened until a new group capable of coalescing the identities of the people around them overthrew the old empire and established a new one.

The whole history of political science since then has been trying to understand, empirically, the life cycle (or lack thereof) of the state and, in consequence of this understanding, how to guide, sustain, prevent, or direct this process as deemed necessary. It reached its positivistic ne plus ultra with Hegel whose teleological models have entranced authors from Marx to Fukyama.

Now, to return to my thoughts, which are truly not any less teleological than Hegel's, but rather less sanguine. History does not show progress to me as it did to the nineteenth century mind. I see at best cycles. I believe that modern civilization will collapse, eventually. I do not expect it soon, but it will be, when it comes, sudden. Change always is.

What causes a society to collapse? I thought about what I have been taught in Sunday School and I have tried to understand how it relates to all that I have been taught in political science and history courses. Ibn Khaldun believed that it was primarily internal, the result of the deterioration of society.  More modern scholars have argued that it is structural, though this does not preclude internal disintegration.  Jared Diamond in his famous book argued that societies rose and fell as a result of their relationship with their natural environment and that environmental stress either through natural climatic changes or through environmental destruction will lead to their collapse.  It is demonstrably true that climate and environment has had a profound impact on human society.  We are only just beginning to appreciate how climate shift has shaped history by driving migrations, sparking war for sparse resources, and so forth.  However, and Diamond admits this, the relationship is complicated by the nature of the society thus afflicted and its ability to react.   We cannot, therefore, predict empirically what will happen.

As a Latter-day Saint (or a Latter Day Saint if I wish to be bothersome and heretical (see www.strangite.org), I believe in the writings of the Prophet Historian Mormon as inspired texts.  Mormon's narrative argues repeatedly that righteousness leads to success which leads to class differentiation (something denounced fiercely by Mormon) which leads to internal strife which weakens the society until it is unable to confront disaster and war.  It is a surprisingly subtle argument.  Mormon and some of the prophets of the Book of Mormon show that when the people were righteous they worked hard.  The lack of strife amongst them during these times meant that all their efforts were focused on building their society, but this virtue became a vice as some amongst changed from building society and themselves to accumulating wealth.  One remembers the Parable of the Savior in which the wealthy man finds he has too much to fit in his barns and so rather than giving it away, he builds bigger barns only to die in the night and be condemned for his avarice.    Jacob condemns those who sought after wealth and neglected the people around them.  He describes in at least three places explicitly that wealth led to class distinctions and that those with greater opportunities for education and business began to persecute the poorer classes.  

 

In Mormon's sparse prose, we see how a society can dissolve from within because of sin.  A historian, however, would not see it in that terms, but I believe it can be fairly described so.  Lincoln, the bicentennial of whose birth we celebrate this year, saw this.  In his famous second inaugural address, he noted that the American Civil War could be seen as a punishment or atonement that must be endured to end slavery.  I do not wish, however, to oversimplify things. 

What is the relationship between sin and society's decay?  This has troubled me for sometime.  I believe however, that the link is there and empirically defensible.  A society given over to sin is a society given over to selfishness and pleasure seeking.  A society like that loses its ability to sacrifice for others and for the future.  Good and bad exist in all times and in all places, but when the time comes that the majority of the people of the society care more for themselves than for others -- and this pride is at the heart of all sin -- then that society cannot endure.  They will seek for wealth, establish impenetrable barriers, hardened class lines that oppress and corrupt.  Each individual will seek after his own god, his own wealth, his own glory, his own fame, his own good.  They will tear down the mountains in search of worthless minerals to make themselves rich, because only by having more can they be satisfied, but more is a relative and is insatiable.  A society given over to lusts and riches will not stop to plan for the future, but will consume itself into self destruction. 

Mormon says almost offhandedly that there came a time in the northern part of Nephite civilization that trees became so scarce that no one cut them down anymore, hoping to reforest the land.  This is born out by archaeological discoveries showing that deforestation was a continual problem in Mesoamerica.  Much of the rain forests we associate with the Yucatan was once all gone, having been stripped by the Mayans.  It was a problem for the ancient Greeks as well who had to enact laws forbidding the cutting of trees for construction.  A bad day for foresters, but a great day for stone masons.

The continual greed, lust, and conflict of a sinful society cannot endure and eventually, as King Mosiah tells us, the majority will choose evil.  Conflict will destroy the cohesion of the society and leave them vulnerable and incapable of defending against war, crime, and environmental threats.  I believe that this would be precipitated in a breakdown of social bonds amongst family -- and I refer not just to nuclear families, but also to extended families and amongst society in general.  People would be left without hope.  Without hope, there can be no civilization.

Just a few thoughts.  I hope to elaborate and improve the many deficiencies in this draft.

On Religious Persecution and Historical Perspective

History, the old adage tells us, is written by the victors. But that is not the entire truth; nor is it one hundred percent accurate. Athens lost the Peloponnesian War in the fifth century B.C., but most of our accounts of that conflict come from Athenian sources. What matters is good Press skills and the Athenians had that. Over the course of centuries, it doesn't matter that Athens was beaten, what matters is that they kept records and others did not. What this means is that the historical records is always skewed; even when the record keeper is honest. He invariably interprets events as his world view shapes them.

Let us look at an example. In the 1830s Mormon converts began migrating to Jackson County, Missouri, which had been designated in a revelation to the Prophet Joseph Smith as the site where Zion would be built. However, within only a few years, the Mormons were expelled en masse from the County and took refuge in northern Missouri where, after only a few years, they were again expelled, this time on pain of death if they stayed, under Governor Lilburn Boggs' justly infamous Extermination Order.

As Mormons tell the story, they were the victims of religious persecution driven because of their beliefs again and again until they were forced to make a dangerous winter flight to Illinois. The government, however, said that the Mormons were a threat to public order, and enemies of the state. What is the truth? Well, both.

When the Mormons began moving to Missouri they did upset the public order. Their more communal lifestyle was at odds with the more independent-minded Missourians. Most Mormons were also anti-slavery (despite what you may have heard about blacks and the Mormon church; they did, at least, oppose slavery). In the 1820 Missouri Compromise, Missouri a slave owning territory even though most of the Louisiana Purchase was Free. Still, the issue was revisited again and again. In the Compromise of 1850 and again in the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, legislators tried again and again to resolve the issue of slavery in the expanding United States. Missouri, though a slave state since the Compromise of 1820, still had agitators demanding Missouri become a Free state.

In the midst of all this, in 1836, the Mormon owned newspaper in Independence Missouri published an editorial advocating abolition. The day after this issue appeared, Mormon leaders were rounded up, tarred and feathered, and the press was destroyed. This incident is famous in Mormon history, but Mormons often forget the role that this editorial played in fomenting this violent act.

Mormons often portray this as the culmination of religious persecution, whereas it could equally be seen as a political riot. The truth is that both viewpoints have some aspect of the truth. Swelling numbers of Mormon immigrants instilled the Missourians with a fear that would lose political influence to these strange, religiously different, anti-slavery (mostly) northerners. Not only that, but Mormons were quickly outnumbering the previous immigrants and threatening to take over all political life. This threat of Mormon domination led to the election day riots in cities like Gallatin.

The Missouri Mormon War figures prominently in LDS history, but scarcely a blip on US history and barely a mention even in Missouri history. Both Mormons and Non-Mormons publicized their side of the story broadly in their day, but the Mormon version has become the more widely told tale today because Mormons have kept up the story long after many others stopped caring. The story is taken up by Anti-Mormons who wish to make it sound as if the Mormons were not the victims of persecution, but rather the justly expelled enemies of the state that Lilburn Boggs declared them to be. They have the Missouri State archives on their side in that battle.

Often, I noticed, Anti-Mormon or other writers will compare this story to examples from their own Faith traditions history to show that these upstart Mormons were trying to make themselves victims instead of criminals to tie into the long tradition of persecution that Christians have faced. What intrigues me here, though, is that is an uneven comparison. They take in insider's viewpoint of the Biblical persecutions and an outsider's perspective on the Mormon persecutions to prove their point.

In fact, Jewish and Roman sources depicted the Christians as enemies of the state who threatened the public order and deserved the violent actions taken against them. They broke up families, disobeyed laws, lived communally in their own areas (early on), and advocated radical social changes that disrupted the traditional values of Roman society. Consider the riots in Ephesus that Luke relates in Acts 19. As Luke tells the story, the craftsmen whose livelihood depended upon making votive statues and decorations for the Greco-Roman gods were worried that Paul's success would diminish business and so they rioted against Paul and the Christians.

This story is a nice parallel. The difficult is, however, that we have only Christian story. Doubtless, the pagan workers would have told a different tale of meddling outsiders upsetting the place, living strange customs so who knows what else they really do. In fact, Roman writers often wrote that Christians were cannibals (think of the Sacrament/Eucharist), drank blood, were atheists (they didn't believe in any of the gods!), who swore secret oaths against the government and practiced incest and all sorts of perverted marital arrangements. They often lived separately and shared all things in common and called one another brother and sister. Romans found this all very disturbing and riots ensued. The only solution was to persecute the Christians who were viewed to be the cause of the disturbances since no such problems had existed before.

What is religious persecution? Those who are prejudice and discriminate and persecute others would almost never say they did so because of prejudice. It is always the victims' fault. Victims are not altogether blameless in these situations. I do not mean that the victims' deserve it, but rather that their being different does, indeed, lead to the persecutions. It is contrafactual and hence weak to argue, but had Mormonism not arisen, likely no mass migration of anti-slavery, communal northerners would have settled a southern state like Missouri thus raising tensions and prompting violence (from both sides). So, in a sense, the Mormons did cause their own persecution.

Jesus was executed, not because He was the sinless Son of God and victim of a massive conspiracy to suppress the Truth, but because Jewish and Roman leaders viewed Him as a threat to public peace and the established order. As far as the Romans were concerned, Jesus was a political rebel who had declared Himself King of the Jews. Neither the Romans nor the Jewish leaders lay awake thinking that needed to prevent the "Truth" from coming out. They likely genuinely believed that they were right, which to my mind is more frightening.

Humanity is often prone to an arrogance of assumption. We assume too quickly. Truth is much larger than any one man's (or woman's) paltry ability to grasp. Its depths recede beyond the farthest horizon we can imagine. Pride is the most human of sins. It may even be the defining characteristic of our species. This extends even to our understanding of events. We forget that real people live on every side of every issue. In the end, the truth lies not in the middle, for that would somehow give every bigot some measure of undeserved dignity, but rather beyond, encompassing all the small-minded assumptions of our kind. James Lowell, an American Poet, wrote, perhaps envisioning this struggle:

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

Riyadh, city of Kings

Though the Arabian Peninsula has a long and storied history, first being mentioned in the Babylonian chronicles which complained of the bands of camel and horse riding warrior "Arabs" allied with their enemies, Riyadh is quite young and one of the oldest buildings dates only to 1856 or so. It is a fortress: Al-Masmak (picture at right). It is a giant, mudbrink structure built by the former rulers of Riyadh after the Saudi family had been driving out by a rival family and were in exile in Kuwait. In 1902, King Abdulaziz, founder of the modern state and father of King Faisal, the subject of my project, stormed the fortress and conquered Riyadh leading to a series of victories that ultimately led to the modern state of Saudi Arabia. In 1905, about the time of the of the early decisive victories, Faisal bin Abdulaziz was born. His name, which means (as the dicitionary puts) decisive criterion, was, according to some sources, named for this auspicious era (or for an ancestor).

This relative youth of Riyadh and the fact that it was built of mudbrick, means that much like the United States, Riyadh and much of Saudi was not burdened by the decaying or decayed remains of past civilizations, but has been able to build a modern city whose freeways and malls would not see out of place in LA or Las Vegas.


This is a picture of the skyline seen from the Globe, a highrise restaurant cum observation deck in Faisaliyah, the skyscraper my hotel is located in. The tower in the picutre, Kingdom tower, anchors the other end of the main road, though there are plans to build a larger skyscraper between close to Faisaliyah.

I was able to see some of the city with my new boss's secretary who was asked to chaperon me through the night life. I am somewhat troubled by the kindness of Arabs, not because I suspect ulterior motives, but because I doubt my ability to be so generous in return. We Americans are a solitary bunch and even Utah, somewhat more communal than most of America, is nothing, in my experience, to social life of Arabs. It is overwhelming to me sometimes, but I kind of like once I get my feet wet.

Here is a picture of some armor and weapons used in the battle to unify Saudi Arabia. Most of it is nineteenth century. It is a marvel that in less than one hundred years, Riyadh has transformed itself from a mudbrink regional capitol to a world city. You can see the contrast in this picture; chainmail, spears, sword, but at the same time they were using rifles and pistols. It was pragmatism. They used everything that had regardless of where or when it came from.

Tonight I was able to visit some of the nightlife of Riyadh-nothing exciting. With no movie theaters or clubs aloud, visiting the mall is, according to Raid, my guide to all things hip in Saudi, the major past time. He took me to a mall in Olaya, the fashionable part of north Riyadh and I was able to visit a books store, which sold everything from the complete sayings of Mohammad to the latest Ken Follett or Robin Cook novels. It also had a Starbucks and wireless hotspot. Very exotic.

I worry that in writing this, someone will either say, "You are pointing these out only because you had bigotted views about the backwardness and/or otherness of Saudi Arabia," or, "You are representing only how the westernized elite live, not the opressed majority." Both charges likely have some merit, but it is useless to deny that one has prejudices and expectations. That is part and parcel of the human thought process. In order to make decisions and avoid insanity, the brain creates categories and shortcuts to speed up decision making. Everyone has prejudices. Were it not so, you could not function because your mind would be constantly overwhelmed by every little detail. You would be, in other words, Autistic. It is interesting, therefore, to note that in some literature on Austism, researchers have pointed out that Autistics are less likely to be prejudiced; they are childlike in their openness to new information and hence overwhelmed by the minutiae of life.

This is a picture of some of the rock art in Saudi Arabia (don't worry they're are lots more where this came from! The ubiquitious sandstone and rock art which its delicate arches, mesas, and sheer rock cliffs reminds me of Southern Utah quite a bit. I hope at some point to be able to visit.

Finally, a picture of Faisaliyah Tower, my hotel is not visible as it is part of the lower complex that forms the base of the tower. The Globe, from which I took the aforementioned picture, is visible. It is primarily a restaurant with some stores. The complex also includes the King Faisal Foundation headquarters and the library/archives, though they are building new headquarters nearby that will have a place dedicated to the archives I am assisting with. There are also condominiums, offices, stores, a gallery and so on. The Faisaliyah is a major downtown landmark close to some of the major shopping districts.

As for the job. I have been doing some research. My new boss, Mashail (pronounced Ma-shaw-il with a slight pause between shaw and il like the double "t" in the cockney bottle or little (bo'il or li'il)), will be providing me with her research so that I can begin creating a database of the archives to ensure I don't waste days redoing work already done. That is one of my major tasks for this trip. I hope I get it soon so I don't waste much time. Right now, I have too much spare time to have fun! That doesn't feet right. I will right again soon.