Battling This Present Darkness

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. (Ephesians 6:12-14)

Peacemaking is a spiritual struggle. In the most fundamental sense, it is a battle for the soul of humanity. Today peacemaking is a struggle between two faiths, each very real, each elusive.

What the world accepts as its source of security is a faith system. It is built on the existence of a whole series of lethal apparatus and weapons--on submarines at the bottom of the sea, missiles in the ground that very few of us have ever seen, and on people going to work every day planning for, organizing for, and thinking about the conduct of nuclear war. Most of us have only a peripheral connection with any of this and never see it. But somehow, at a very deep level, we believe in it. We believe that our security is to be derived from intimidating others, by allowing the massive threat of death to be communicated in our name.

The other faith is a faith in God, a faith that is inseparable from a faith in human beings, because the two faiths are one. The possibilities of peace, other than through intimidation, stem from a fundamental belief that human beings can love one another. That is the injunction of the scripture that W.H. Auden once paraphrased, "We must love one another or die." This faith says that love is possible, indeed it is the only reality.

So the struggle is between a fear system and a system based on love. Christianity, the teachings of Jesus, is a system for the world based on the possibility and reality of love. But to move from love as an abstraction to the reality of love, one must bring it into the concrete circumstances of the world in which we live. And the world in which we live is one increasingly dominated by the fear system at every level.

Today one looks around the world and sees not only the gathering clouds of nuclear war, but also the militarization of the world political economy at a new level. Now the world is spending more than $500 billion annually on armaments, and the armaments are no longer limited to the great powers. The great growth in the armaments race is occurring in the poorest regions of the world. Those nations for whom investments in arms are made at the expense of investment in education, investment in the fundamental structures that can make a society possible, are engaging in the most blatant form of theft. That was the term that Eisenhower once used in a speech at the beginning of his administration. "Every dollar," he said, "spent on the military when people are hungry, without clothing, and without fundamental security in their lives is 'theft'." But one must recognize that the fear system is on the increase.

A new dimension in the reign of fear has come about as a consequence of the changes in the world economy. Over the last generation, we had a rather extraordinary period of economic growth in the industrial world, and in that period we introduced a number of ideas and innovations which moderated suffering for millions of people, principally in the United States and Europe. The so-called "welfare state" was the idea that a growing society could afford, indeed, had a duty to share a certain part of its resources with those who were less fortunate. Those ideas are now under severe attack, not only in the U.S. but in every industrial country. The assumption on which the welfare state, the humane society, was based--that we would have continuing growth, that we could spread the crumbs of the pie a bit more equitably--is now under severe challenge, because growth, it seems, is not taking place, and there is very good reason to believe that the period of rapid growth through which we have come is not likely to be repeated in the period ahead.

So the climate of fear, marked by the personal insecurity of individuals, is increasing. There is the insecurity of even finding enough to eat, the insecurity of finding a job, the insecurity of finding a path that would lead to a modicum of dignity in old age. A society in which the ruling ideology becomes increasingly one of fear, setting neighbor against neighbor in a competition ever more severe for limited resources--all of this has to be seen as the reality with which we contend.

The idea that a society can become great or secure through the process of setting class against class, race against race, rich against poor, is fundamentally an expression of the principalities and powers of which the writer of Ephesians speaks. That is the reality against which we must set the clear mandate of the gospel.

We need also to understand that when we talk about the issues of the day--when we see the headlines that are filled with concern about the Russians, the Cubans, the Africans-- that so many of the things we read in the newspaper that elicit fear are metaphors; that is, they stand for deeper fears that control our lives.

It's not so long ago that we thought the Chinese were the most incorrigibly evil nation in the world. They were the ones who caused us to go into Vietnam and stay in Vietnam--at least that was the official explanation at the time. We fought against the spread of the evils of China. Well, today China is on the verge of becoming a military ally, and we rarely read in the press anything terribly critical about China. The fact is that we deal in a world in which other people are just as imbued with evil and fear of evil as we are. Both are probably pretty well distributed around the world. We can afford to be just, we can afford to eschew evil, so the official ideology suggests, if everybody else is good as we define it. That's not the world that the Bible is talking about. That world never existed and never will exist.

The world that does exist is a world of human beings who are commanded to love one another because there is evil in all of us. That is the principle of self-protection, if you will, a security principle that rests on the idea that we are all fundamentally in the same boat but that God is in command of the vessel. The Christian message is the message that you can live without fear only if you convert, if you undergo metanoia, a change of heart.

What does it take to live without fear in a world lof five billion people, most of whom are very poor, living on the edge of desperation, living under conditions that those few of us who have seen them simply cannot believe. Most of us suspend our belief, preferring not to think about the reality of the world in which we live and the fact that those five billion people are individual human beings. It's much easier to make them abstractions. One of the abstractions that we have developed is the idea of the "deserving poor." In the early postwar period, when we talked about development, there was considerable naivete about what was going to happen to the world, about how easy it would be to "develop."

We thought that somehow, now that the 500 or 600 years of colonial exploitation was ended, Third World people would quickly learn to develop advanced, sophisticated societies, with notions of freedom and civilization that were copies of our own. All that clearly turned out to be naive. In the Third World there is corruption. In the Third World there is incredible conflict. In the Third World there is selfishness and lack of insight. Somehow we have taken this lack of development to mean that these people are not part of the "deserving poor," just as we write off the people in our city who don't try as hard as we think they should to get jobs or don't live the life we think they should in their cold-water flats or the circles of hell we call public housing. When they cease to be deserving, they become legitimate victims of policies designed to preserve the security, power, and position of those who have by writing off masses of people who have not.

Jesus' answer is that writing off anybody is simply unacceptable. Why is there so much emphasis in Scripture on the obligations to the poor? Is it not that unless you start with an absolutely clear obligation to the people who are helpless and weak, there is no way of preserving the sanctity of human life for anyone? Once you start the idea that there are groups that can be written off--and of course the poor and the powerless are the logical ones with which to start--there is no natural limit. It is clearly a mindset that allows the process of abandonment and the process of violence to go on without end.

The war system itself is a conspiracy against the poor. We need to understand the relationship between the issue of poverty in the world and the mounting violence occurring all around us. The questions of what you do with property, how it should be organized--how much public, how much private--are political questions to which there can be many different answers. No system in the world today has a very good answer for how to deal with the problems of organization, but in my view the idea that acquisition of money and property should be the central goal of either individual life or common life is a blasphemous and dangerous notion.

The market mentality with which one can infuse the whole of life, the business of getting and spending, is really a phenomenon of the last 200 or 300 years, the era we call the industrial revolution. Not long ago I spoke at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and the discussion was on something called "resource wars." It turned out that one member of the business world was there who goes to Africa to buy minerals. His view was that we need the minerals in Africa as a matter of "vital interest." That means that we cannot worry about human rights violations in South Africa. We must build up our military so that if we do not get these minerals on terms that we think are equitable, we will be in a position to take them.

What we call "vital" needs now to be examined. Some of the most "strategic" minerals like chrome and gold are used in vast quantities for such necessities as salad forks and gilded lipsticks. We never ask the moral question whether our economic interest in keeping an economy pumping out these goods justifies intimidating the people who live where the minerals are to be found.

We have such a peculiar view of priorities that we are prepared to threaten death for our lipsticks and salad forks. As a nation we are prepared to put our comfort over other people's right to life and property, over their claim to a share of the resources. We are ready to threaten the destruction of their very lives, and somehow we feel justified in doing so in the name of "vital interest."

Unless we begin to rethink our relationship with the poor in other countries, we will simply be in a continuous state of warfare with them. The Russians are the supposed adversary, but if we look at the situation that we face around the world, the Russians are actually the metaphor--the powerful metaphor--for those who I think are our society's real enemies.

There is no question that the Soviets are a great power that continues to build weaponry and that they are therefore a threat. But we are ultimately afraid of those people in a world society with whom we do not seem to know how to co-exist. They are our real enemies. We are worried not that the Russians are going to come and occupy the U.S. but that somehow the Russians are going to be involved in Third World countries, particularly those Third World countries where vital minerals and resources are involved.

So I think Jesus' first answer for what it takes to live without fear of the Russians or anyone else is that we must literally love every one of the five billion people. That requires, in a practical sense, coming up with a different system for figuring out how we distribute the resources of the world. The idea that half of the world or more is fated forever to go to bed hungry is simply not acceptable. To the extent that our security depends on maintaining the fundamental insecurity in others, we must change.

The second answer to the conquest of fear that Jesus gives is that we must love the earth. If in this generation we mistreat the environment out of an insatiable thirst for short-term economic gain, we are wounding God whose earth it is. We are also destroying the possibilities for our own children, our own grandchildren, and future generations. One basic aspect of being human is having a relationship in space with people you cannot see, but also a relationship in time. Crucial to security is the conviction that we are part of a chain of creation which does not end with us.

We are living in a time of enormous change, but I despite all the horrors, a time of unique hope. We are at the culmination of a 500-year historical process, and it is important to see ourselves within that time frame. A new consciousness of liberation is at work all over "the world and, in part, that is the reason for so much violence. It isn't that there is more violence than in the past, but that the violence is of a different kind. In the past, we have kept people in subjugation by authority that enjoyed considerable legitimacy. People who lived in farms and feudal communities felt that it was like the sun rising and setting, that some people are rich and some people are poor. But that kind of thinking about the world is changing, and that means that it is a very exciting time, a very dangerous time, but one that we need to see as having the seeds of a very different kind of world order.

One of the exciting things in the world is that parts of the church, by no means all of it, but parts of it at strategic points in Latin America, South Africa, and now increasingly in Europe, are beginning to see the seeds of that new order. For the first time in a very long time, parts of the church are playing out a truly prophetic role. But those parts face great opposition. There is an attempt now to roll back the ideas that developed through great pain, great struggle in the last few years by saying that those who worry about what we do, and the effects of what we do on others, are somehow guilty of self-hatred. It is said that we don't understand the realities of the world, and that we must throw off these feelings of inadequacy and guilt for what we have done. That is the message that Ronald Reagan has been giving in speech after speech, and it is the message of the Moral Majority.

But the fact is that it is not self-hatred but self-love that enables people to look critically at themselves and their relationships with others, as we are mandated to do. We must throw off the self-deception about who we are and what we do, and recognize the real effect of our actions on other people. Power is now diffused in new ways, and even for those who would like to be able to maintain security on the basis of military power, the cost of the arms race is increasingly unacceptable. The message now is that this generation, the first in history with the power to destroy the world--which sets this generation off from all other generations in history--is also the first generation with the power to demonstrate the will, the dedication, and the love to save the world.

The dictates of faith and rational politics are coming together. The respect for human rights, the sense that there must be a decent minimum, the idea that we have to share resources in new ways, the idea that people have to participate in crucial decisions if they are going to be fully alive and that they have to be fully alive if society is going to survive--all of that is a new possibility and a new reality which clearly causes the principalities and powers to quake.

When people who are genuinely aroused in a deep human way about what is happening to them and their fellow human beings act on their concerns, they can release tremendous power--power which can change the course of history. The peace movement in Europe is growing extraordinarily because there is a deep sense that the arms race is going to bring about the destruction of everything that people have believed in. Would it not be possible now to have a revival in the churches in the U.S. and around the world of a gospel message of love which would cause people to move in ways we have never seen before?

Next spring at the United Nations there is going to be another special session on disarmament. Why would it not be possible to have a million people in the streets of New York to demonstrate to the people who come there that the people of God and the people of the United States care about security and that they care about preserving the world?

In the churches lies the power of the gospel message that it is possible to live without fear. That message could be that source of new and creative initiatives for peace; for peacemaking is fundamentally a spritual struggle, a battle for the soul of humanity.

Richard Barnet was a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared. He is a founder of World Peacemakers, a mission of the Church of the Saviour, and a contributing editor for Sojourners. His recent book, The Lean Years, is reviewed on page 33 of this issue.