I’ve just listened to the former CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, as he spoke about his moment of cowardice — when he learned of a memo from General Creighton Abrams which revealed the Army commanders in Saigon were deliberately lying about enemy strength. Mr. McGovern was a young CIA analyst and thought about revealing it to the press, which was willing to speak inconvenient truths at that time. McGovern admits he retreated from his moral duty because of concerns about his family and about his own career. Like Daniel Ellsberg who could have blown the whistle earlier, he reasoned he be able to do more good if he followed his career and gained enough prestige so that he could one day even tell the truth face-to-face to the President. (The audio of the interview can be found at Ray McGovern.) Mr. McGovern went on to an honorable career in the upper regions of the CIA and is now engaged in various battles to combat abusive use of power by at least the American and Israeli governments.
I wish to propose:
If certain forms and levels of power are such as to overwhelm the moral courage and strength of a typical human being, then we should be cautious about allowing those forms and levels of power to develop.
At the same time, I think that we shouldn’t adopt a view that all forms of authority and power are wrong. As a Christian, I believe in the Body of Christ and believe those who will live with Christ in the world of the resurrected will be a part of that Body while remaining individuals.
We, as individuals, are pilgrims in the mortal realm, pilgrims traveling through our own world towards a world which is a perfected and completed version of this world. The Body of Christ is, in an analogous way, developing in this mortal realm and grows, intends — in Thomistic language — towards its perfected and completed state which it can reach only in the world of the resurrected. The Body of Christ is currently riddled with entities which are cancers or parasites. Some of those malformed entities are classified in modern thought as criminal or terrorist and some are classified as political. I have little respect for the American government in Washington and I have a low opinion of it in nearly all of its manifestations since the passing of the Founding Fathers — and they weren’t perfect for sure. Even at that, my belief in the developmental nature of the Body of Christ forces me to acknowledge some legitimacy on the part of governments of even the worst sort — as Christ did though I don’t think He gave the all-out endorsement to the authority of mortal political entities which some have read out of His few words on that subject. As Lord Acton once pointed out, those who believe in the Christian Creator have to believe that these evil men who are so powerful and so prominent in history serve some purpose of the Creator. As I recall from my readings of Tolkien, he made a very similar point, at least in one of the ‘background’ histories.
How can Nebuchadnezzar or Genghis Khan or Stalin or President Bushclinbushbama serve God’s purposes?
I certainly don’t have a good answer in the usual terms, as was true with Lord Acton, a historian and — I’d say — philosopher of history with deep and wide knowledge and the intelligence and skill to put that knowledge into the form of true histories.
I can say a little on the topic from my viewpoint which combines short-term pessimistic with long-term optimism.
We should be careful that we not allow power to concentrate in a form or to an extent that it can be handled safely and morally only by creatures with greater ability and stronger moral character than we mortal men have. If I’m right that the Body of Christ is forming to some extent in this mortal realm, as is true of individual saints, then there will be some forms of concentrated power in our future as a a race. Those forms of power will evolve and develop by natural means, in ways beyond our capacity to plan or even to anticipate. It is my very optimism about this aspect of human communal life that leads me to advocate modesty and humility and to deny that I, or any of my fellow human beings, can see much beyond the next step.
Let us learn to take that next step in all modesty and humility, moving slowly along the path of development of the Body of Christ or at least toward some reasonable idea of better human communities after recognizing the evolutionary and developmental nature of this world. Evolutionary and development processes do include the possibility of catastrophes or positive events of a dramatic sort, but they’re mostly unpredictable. Even when we can reasonably predict some great change is coming, as is true in this year of 2011, we can’t be sure when it will hit or what form it will really take. For example, we don’t know if it will immediately cleanse human communities of the worst of these cancerous and parasitic men and gangs of men or whether we’ll collapse into some dark age when they’ll rule.