by Mputhumi Ntabeni

G21 AFRICA Staff Writer

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QUEENSTOWN, SOUTH AFRICA - Listening to the conceited partial confessions from the war-mongering leaders of the Allied Forces made me think of Leo Tolstoy; the Russian novelist who wrote War and Peace. Tolstoy's religious attitude makes me shudder at how good intentions on spiritual matters can sometimes pave the road to Hell. Tolstoy was tortured by what he regarded as the Christian ideal of self-perfection, which gave him what one of his biographers called "... the greedy envy of all who had the good fortune to be unfortunate." There're numerous spiritual benefits to suffering, but the likes of Tolstoy mistakenly make suffering into a virtue, which it is not.

The attitude of making suffering into virtue was not something novel to Tolstoy. Western thought, in men of good intentions like the stoics, fell for this trap. The ancient Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, was sowing on a ploughed field when he said "... learning comes from suffering," and called suffering a kind of savage grace from the gods. Tolstoy, with his fallen angelic pride, took the attitude further.

Listen to him writing to one of his protégés, Alexeyev about the depravity (read enjoying the money he made through his writing) he saw around his family:

"The folly of the people I live with saddens me. Often they fail to see how I can perceive their insanity so clearly when they're lacking in the capacity to understand the error of their ways. And so there we stand, staring at each other and not understanding, astonished by each other and each holding the other to blame. Only, there are untold hordes of them and I am alone. And they look happy and I look sad. . ."

If they were virtuous, according to Tolstoy, they would give up their wealth and live as peasants, something he constantly tried but failed to achieve.

Feeling righteous towards others deprives us the peace of God and fires us up with baleful fundamentalist anger. This attitude is the fundamental source of the so-called "Holy Wars."

There's patience that enables us to hear, spare, be reconciled and raise up those who are at fault. It is seen in Christ dealing with the woman who was brought before him for fornication. "Go and sin no more." This patience the Greeks called metriopatheia. This is what the world at large in our era lacks, metriopatheia.

Metriopatheia is the ability to preserve our peace with others even when they injure us, or are acting foolish and will not learn from their mistakes. It does not condone their faults, nor does it say we must be victims, but it will not issue in anger nor resort to evil to conquer evil. It is born of sacrifice and gentle sympathy. It directs others to the right way by provoking a gentle but firm attitude towards justice, seeking, and instinctively identifying with mercy in all situations where the faults of others are concerned.

Unfortunately, in our world today pharisaic public flagellation is admired more than metriopatheia and courage is judged by the ability to retaliate. Retaliation is the easiest thing to do when you're wronged but it puts you on the same wave-length as the wrongdoer.

Self-abasement can be used as a form of castigation, as seen when Tony Blair admitted that the information that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction was wrong. When one reads Tolstoy's Confessions one is subjected to a public exposure that springs from an "orgy of masochistic pride," and so it felt listening to Donald Rumsfeld's confession about the failure of their [the United State's] security agents concerning information about Iraq.

The flashy eloquence and the greasepaint with which Tolstoy struts his rags, wallows in the sham humility of the publican. One can almost hear Christ whispering on his ear: Be gentle and humble of heart and you'll find rest for your soul.

The truth is that the likes of Tolstoy, which includes the followers of Al Queda, wants to prove themselves worthy before the god of fire and brimstone. They've little patience for the gentle God of Christ who does not bring down the smouldering flame.

Their religion is of flinty indifference to other people's feelings, of a deliberate charmlessness that leads to the cruelty of hard-liners and fundamentalists. In the end it takes on demonic qualities, as we can see in Iraq today. The world today is on fire because of a serious lack of metriopatheia; this strange world where non-religious people out do the religious in generosity, patience and kindness because they lack spiritual pride. Lacking in spiritual pride almost alw ays endows one with metriopatheia. It seems the prostitutes and tax collectors will forever enter the gates of Heaven before the self-righteous publicans.

Too much theorising about violence and religion, especially from 11 September to Beslan, has been superficial and sensationally reactive. The gist of the matter is that it is no exaggeration to say most of modern problems, as it was in past epochs, come as the result of the impact of religion in societies and their cultures. Even France, with all its boast of separating religion from politics in a secular republic, has not managed to solve the problem, as seen by the protests against the ban on Muslim headscarves -- along with other conspicuous religious symbols -- from its publicly funded schools.

The impact of religion profoundly marks every field of moral study: theology, philosophy, economics, political sciences, history and sociology. Critiques as fiercely and eloquent presented as Feuerbach's and Marx's made their mark and changed the course of history. What is revealed, time and again, is the complicity of religion and violence in societies. René Girard, possibly the most compelling Christian thinker of our time, in his book Violence and the Sacred, describes violence as "the heart and secret soul of the sacred".

Our era is plagued by the self-serving bias, whose tendency is to see ourselves in a more positive light than others see us. The interesting thing about violence is the manner by which it exposes this illusion and put before us its paradox; i.e. making antagonists of violence identical even when their mutual hatred stresses only the differences (like race or religion). The conservative pundits of far right in the US, like Norman Podhoretz, believe that " we are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war, and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play. In World War II and then in World War III, we persisted in spite of impatience, discouragement, and opposition for as long as it took to win, and this is exactly what we have been called upon to do today in World War IV [the war against terrorism]."

Similarly, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his Al Queda gang believe they're engaged in the continuation of a "Holy War" that started with The Crusades. The rest of us are caught up in the middle of wars of pride, fodder for the [Western] Alliance's cannon (collateral damage) or suicide bombers (terrorists).

What these men of war have in common is the highly emotional self-absorption that fosters jaundiced partisanship. One side virulently clings to a veritable cult of the idea of liberty sucked dry of its visceral strength of renewal by their greed and the servitude of their populace to ingravescent consumerism. The other side clings to the obsolete ideologies that display neurotic hostility to any form of criticism, angry and frustrated because the ancient Arabic glory has been supplanted by Western technocracy.

The first side, especially under Bush II, is governed by a pure wind that has transmogrified self-defense into aggression, made greed respectable, murder excusable, and its lies take the form of skilled patter. The other side is governed by tyrannical monarchs and maniacs who gained power through the assistance of their current opponents and maintain it by an insatiable thirst for oil from their protectors with a provision that they're benevolent to Western needs. If not, they're terrorists.

A Martian who has studied the history of our world and come for a visit because he/she thought we were now living in the age of Reason would be justified to think he has fallen on a medieval epoch. Politicians and pundits speak proudly of killing, bullet-ridden corpses are triumphantly paraded and hostages decapitated like animals -- all before live cameras.

The self-identification of religion with a whole social structure and political ideology has come back in full force. The president of the modern, most powerful country in our world has no quibbles in identifying his actions as being of divine sanction. Anyone who has an axe to grind with someone feels compelled too to adapt to the climate of war before the frenzy passes. Israeli authorities, when unable to justify their atrocities on their own terms, quote the West's war on terror for some semblance of legitimacy: "Just as the USA ... has been acting in its war against terrorism, using all its might against terror, so we will act." India follows, so does Russia and Sudan. Fighting terrorism has become the trump card for settling scores, thank you very much, Emperor Bush II.

It's enough to make one want to join the pessimism of Italo Zvevo (1925):

"When all the poison gases (of the war) are exhausted, a man, made like all other men of flesh and blood, will, in the quiet of a room, invent an explosive of such potency that all the explosives in existence will seem like harmless toys beside it. And another man, made in his image and in the image of all the rest, but a little weaker than them, will steal that explosive and crawl to the center of the earth with it, and place it just where he calculates it would have the maximum effect. There will be a tremendous explosion, but none will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering thru the sky, free at last from parasites and disease."