Robert Wright: All Publications, Events and Press

U.S. Author Traces "Evolution" of God | Reuters

Erin Drankoski — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:31:00 -0400

In his new book "The Evolution of God," he takes his readers on a journey through the spiritual beliefs of our ancestors to the development of the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. ... Original Article

The Evolution of God | Morning Joe

Erin Drankoski — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:14:00 -0400

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News,

A Grand Bargain Over Evolution

Erin Drankoski — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 07:48:00 -0400

The "war" between science and religion is notable for the amount of civil disobedience on both sides. Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight. Whether out of a live-and-let-live philosophy, or a belief that religion and science are actually compatible, or a heartfelt indifference to the question, they're choosing to sit this one out.

Still, the war continues, and it's not just a sideshow. There are intensely motivated and vocal people on both sides making serious and conflicting claims.

Robert Wright Discusses The Evolution of God | The Colbert Report

Erin Drankoski — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 06:46:00 -0400

The Colbert Report

Take Me to the River (or Somewhere Nearby)

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 09:35:00 -0400

I don't think I commit sins with higher-than-average frequency, but after accumulating them for five decades, I could sure use a born-again experience. Just a quick cleansing and a fresh start.

Actually, make that four decades. In the mid 1960s, when I was 8 or 9, I did get born again. At a southern Baptist church in Texas, I felt the tug of God and responded to the altar call, and several weeks later got baptized. But within a few years I was losing my Christian faith, and it finally disappeared. So that's about 40 years of sin accretion since the last bath.

The Evolution of God | Connecticut Public Radio

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:12:00 -0400

Since ancient times the God of scripture has been at times vengeful and wrathful--and at other times loving and compassionate. Author Robert Wright says that, even for the non-believer, there is a hidden message in these vacillations--a message with the potential to lead a modern, technological, global civilization towards a more peaceful existence. Today, Where We Live, We’ll talk with Wright about his new book The Evolution of God. We’ll explore how religion interacts with foreign policy, scientific discovery, and moral understanding.

No Smiting | New York Times Book Review

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 06:45:00 -0400

The Evolution of God

Cecille Isidro — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:30:00 -0400

A New America Event
06/15/2009 - 6:00pm

Is our people's God jealous of your people's God? Should religion unite us or divide us? Is our view of your God driven by theology, or is it shaped by whether we want to trade with you or take your land? Why can't we all just get along, anyway?

CA EVENT: The Evolution of God (San Francisco)

Elizabeth Wu — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:00:00 -0400

A New America Event
06/09/2009 - 7:30pm

The Evolution of God

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:42:00 -0400

Questions for Robert Wright: Evolutionary Theology

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:41:00 -0400

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

"The Evolution of God," your new book on the history of religion, strikes me as a welcome antidote to the stream of books by atheists that have become best sellers in recent years. Doesn't it seem as if atheism has become its own form of fundamentalism?

NYTimes.com Highlights Bloggingheads Video Featuring Mark Schmitt

Communications — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:47:00 -0500

Mark Schmitt, of the New America Foundation, and Megan McArdle, of The Atlantic, discuss whether vouchers are the answer to public education's problems. Please click here for a link to the video on NYTimes.com. For Schmitt andMcArdle's complete conversation, please follow this link to Bloggingheads.tv, where they also cover inequality, taxation, and gentrification.

Bloggingheads.tv, the video site where policy analysts, bloggers, and other pundits argue about politics and policy, was co-founded by New America Senior Fellow Robert Wright. The New York Times recently partnered with Bloggingheads.tv to excerpt “diavlogs” on NYTimes.com.

Planet of the Apes

Cecille Isidro — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 21:27:00 -0400

This week the mystery deepened: Why no space aliens?

On Tuesday, scientists reported finding the most “Earthlike” planet ever, Gliese 581c. Its sun is cooler than ours, but also closer, so Gliese is in that climatic comfort zone conducive to water -- hence to life, hence to evolution, hence to intelligent beings with advanced technology. Yet they never phone.

It’s actually a serious question, long pondered by sci-fi types. Since a civilization whose technological evolution was ahead of ours by even a few centuries could contact us from far, far away (and certainly from Gliese, a mere 20 light-years away), what does it mean that we haven’t heard a thing from any corner of this vast universe?

That life got started on few or no other planets? That on other planets giant asteroids kept pressing evolution’s reset button? Or, distressingly, that when civilizations reach the technological level we’ve reached, they tend to wipe themselves out, or at least bomb themselves back into the Stone Age?

O.K., that last one is pretty wild speculation. But you have to admit that current events aren’t wildly at odds with it. There’s an apocalyptic vibe in the zeitgeist, and it’s not hard to imagine how the technological sophistication that got us to the brink of global civilization could be our undoing. Let us count the ways.

(1) Classic nuclear Armageddon. This threat is in remission. Economic interdependence dulls enmity among nuclear powers, and crisis-averting lines of communication have gotten stronger since the cold war. Still, things can change.

(2) Eco-apocalypse. Solving climate change and other global environmental problems is a political nightmare. Nations are tempted to play “free rider” and not join in the sacrifices, since they’ll share the rewards anyway. The good news is that past environmental problems have featured negative-feedback loops: when negligence makes the problem bad enough, political will appears.

(3) Terrorism. Alas, the negative-feedback loop -- bad outcomes lead to smart policies -- may not apply here. We reacted to 9/11 by freaking out and invading one too many countries, creating more terrorists. With the ranks of terrorists growing -- amid evolving biotechnology and loose nukes -- we could within a decade see terrorism on a scale that would make us forget any restraint we had learned from the Iraq war’s outcome. If 3,000 deaths led to two wars, how many wars would 300,000 deaths yield? And how many new terrorists?

Terrorism alone won’t wipe out humanity. But with our unwitting help, it could strengthen other lethal forces.

It could give weight to the initially fanciful “clash of civilizations” thesis. Muslim states could fall under the control of radicals and opt out of what might otherwise have become a global civilization. Armed with nukes (Pakistan already is), they would revive the nuclear Armageddon scenario. A fissure between civilizations would also sabotage the solution of environmental problems, and the ensuing eco-calamity could make people on both sides of the fissure receptive to radical messages. The worse things got, the worse they’d get.

So while no one of the Big Three doomsday dynamics is likely to bring the apocalypse, they could well combine to form a positive-feedback loop, a.k.a. the planetary death spiral. And the catalyst would be terrorism, along with our mishandling of it.

Disheartened? There’s more: to avoid mishandling things, we may have to forsake our beloved evolutionary heritage.

We may more often have to resist the retributive impulse that worked fine in the environment where it evolved but now often misfires. We may have to appreciate how our moral condemnations -- which can help start wars -- are subtly biased by our primate brains in self-serving ways that, in some contexts, no longer serve our selves.

We may have to cultivate our moral imagination, putting ourselves in the shoes of people who hate us. The point wouldn’t be to validate the hate, but to understand it and so undermine it. Still, this understanding involves seeing how, from a certain point of view, hating us “makes sense” -- and our evolved brains tend to resist that particular epiphany.

If salvation indeed means transcending engrained irrationality, then the odds may well be against us. But look at the bright side: if you do run into any space aliens, they’re likely to be reasonable creatures.

The Neocon Paradox

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:34:00 -0400

Neoconservatives have been airing an explanation for the failure of the Iraq war that’s so obvious you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself: the war wasn’t neoconservative enough.

Last week Richard Perle, on The Charlie Rose Show, echoed what his fellow neocon John Bolton told the BBC last month: We should have turned Iraq over to the Iraqis much sooner. Then, presumably, the power of democracy to blossom pronto in even nutrient-depleted soil -- the neocon elan vital -- would have kicked in.

Nice try, but they’re just digging themselves in deeper. They’re highlighting a paradox within the neocon game plan that would have doomed this war even if it had been run competently (enough troops, a dollop of postwar planning, etc.).

On the one hand, we were going to bring democracy to Iraq. On the other hand, we were going to use Iraq as a platform for exercising military power. (Days after Baghdad fell, the neocon Weekly Standard festively titled an article "There’s No Place Like Iraq for U.S. Military Bases.")

But wait. What if the Iraqi people, once empowered by democracy, decided they didn’t want their country to be a U.S. aircraft carrier? And isn’t that pretty likely? After all, America is bound to use bases on behalf of itself and key allies, and one key ally is Israel. What were the chances this would sit well with an Arab Muslim nation -- not with the small ruling class of an authoritarian state like Saudi Arabia (our previous aircraft carrier) but with a whole electorate?

Maybe if we had resolved with miraculous speed the tensions besetting Israel -- from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran -- U.S. troops could have stayed in the Iraqis’ good graces. But neocons weren’t exactly pushing for dialogue on those fronts. They were going to let their new aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Iraq, do the talking. And surely Iraq’s majority Shiites would applaud the use of their soil to threaten Shiite Iran, right?

Meanwhile, neocons, and the Bush administration broadly, were endorsing the policies of Ariel Sharon, whose assertive policing of the occupied territories was proving counterproductive, helping to radicalize both Palestinian opinion and, via Al Jazeera, Muslim opinion globally.

You can empower people through democracy if you want. You can systematically antagonize them if you want. Doing both at once is ill advised.

Critics murmur that neoconservatism is ‘‘all about Israel.’’ I wish! Then the damage might be confined to one region. Alas, the neocon paradox -- empower people and enrage them -- is global. Neocons want to make China democratic ASAP; meanwhile, they pass the time arousing anti-American Chinese nationalism with vestigial cold war rants. Fortunately, they won fewer intra-administration battles over China than over the Middle East.

Even if neocons weren’t bent on spreading democracy, their chronic inflammation of world opinion would be unhealthy, because much of the world is already democratic and more of it will probably become that way.

But leave democracy aside. There’s another reason grass-roots opinion matters crucially.

A confluence of technologies, from the Internet to biotechnology, is making it easier and easier for far-flung hatred to assume organized form, intersect with weapons technology and constitute unprecedently potent terrorism. This growing lethality of hatred may be the biggest long-term problem we face.

Here’s a response favored by many left-of-center and right-of-center thinkers. Address the ‘‘demand side’’ -- the desire to obtain and use nuclear and biological weapons -- by reducing the number of people who hate the U.S. and the West. Address the ‘‘supply side’’ by improving arms control.

Neocons take the opposite tack: degrade the arms control infrastructure (the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, etc.) and antagonize the masses.

You can even do both at once! President Bush undermined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by agreeing to give nuclear technology to India, a nonsignatory. This ratcheted up anti-Americanism in Pakistan -- a Muslim nation with nukes, jihadist recruiters and an unstable government.

Neocons have their own formula for controlling arms: invade countries you think may have them. Of course, this approach will have to grow more cost-effective on repeated application if America is to warm up to it. But -- who knows? -- maybe we just need to make the next few wars more neoconservative.

Why Darwinism Isn't Depressing

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:41:00 -0400

Scientists have discovered that love is truth.

Granted, no scientist has put it quite like that. In fact, when scientists talk about love -- the neurochemistry, the evolutionary origins -- they make it sound unlovely.

More broadly, our growing grasp of the biology behind our thoughts and feelings has some people downhearted. One commentator recently acknowledged the ascendancy of the Darwinian paradigm with a sigh: "Evolution doesn't really lead to anything outside itself."

Cheer up! Despair is a plausible response to news that our loftiest feelings boil down to genetic self-interest, but genetic self-interest actually turns out to be our salvation. The selfishness of our genes gave us the illuminating power of love and put us on the path to a kind of transcendence.

Before hiking to the peak, let's pause for some sobering concessions. Yes, love is physically mediated, a product of biochemistry. (Why this would surprise anyone familiar with alcohol and coffee is something that has long baffled scientists.) And, yes, the biochemistry was built by natural selection. Like it or not, we are survival machines.

But survival machines are unfairly maligned. The name suggests, well, machines devoted to their survival. In truth, though, natural selection builds machines devoted ultimately to the survival of their genes, not themselves.

Hence love. A love-impelled grandparent sacrifices her life to save a child's life. Too bad for the grandparent, but mission accomplished for the love genes: they've kept copies of themselves alive in a vibrant vehicle that was otherwise doomed, and all they've lost is a vehicle that, frankly, didn't have the world's most auspicious odometer anyway. Love of offspring (and siblings) is your genes' way of getting you to serve their agenda.

Feel manipulated? Don't worry -- we get the last laugh.

Genes are just dopey little particles, devoid of consciousness. We, in contrast, can perceive the world. And how! Thanks to love, we see beyond our selves and into the selves around us.

A thought experiment: Suppose you are a parent and you (a) watch someone else's toddler misbehave and then (b) watch your own toddler do the same. Your predicted reactions, respectively, are: (a) "What a brat!" and (b) "That's what happens when she skips her nap."

Now (b) is often a correct explanation, whereas (a) -- the "brat" reaction -- isn't even an explanation. Thus does love lead to truth. So, too, when a parent sees her child show off and senses that the grandstanding is grounded in insecurity. That's an often valid explanation -- unlike, say, "My neighbor's kid is such a showoff" -- and brings insight into human nature.

Yes, yes, love can warp your perception, too. Still, there is an apprehension of the other -- an empathetic understanding -- that is at least humanly possible, and it would never have gotten off the ground had love not emerged on this planet as a direct result of Darwinian logic.

Some people, on hearing this, remain stubbornly ungrateful. They hate the arbitrariness of it all. You mean I love my child just because she's got my genes? So my "appreciation" of her "specialness" is an illusion?

Exactly! If you'd married someone else, there would be a different child you considered special -- and if you then spotted the child that is now yours on the street, you'd consider her a brat. (And, frankly... but I digress.)

O.K., so your child isn't special. This doesn't have to mean she's not worthy of your love. It could mean instead that other people's kids are worthy of your love. But it has to mean one or the other. And -- especially given that love can bring truth -- isn't it better to expand love's scope than to narrow it?

I'm a realist. I don't expect you to get all mushy about the kid next door. But if you carry into your everyday encounters an awareness that empathetic understanding makes sense, that's progress.

Transcending the arbitrary narrowness of our empathy isn't guaranteed by nature. (Why do you think they call it transcendence?) But nature has given us the tools -- not just the empathy, but the brains to figure out how evolution works, and thus to see that the narrowness is arbitrary.

So evolution has led to something outside itself -- to the brink of a larger, more widely illuminating love, maybe even to a glimpse of moral truth. What's not to like?

E-Mail and Prozac

adminn — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 12:23:00 -0400

I have a theory: the more e-mail there is, the more Prozac there will be, and the more Prozac there is, the more e-mail there will be. Maybe I should explain.

Twenty millenniums ago, communication was simple. Utterances were usefully accompanied by nonverbal cues: tone of voice, facial expression, nudging your fellow hunter-gatherer in the ribs upon reaching a punch line.

Twenty years ago, communication was still pretty simple. Much of it was by phone -- no nudging, true, but intonation could help distinguish, say, wry irony from bitter resentment. Plus, when you asked a question, the answer came in seconds, as opposed to minutes, hours, or never.

Don’t get me wrong. E-mail is great. It has vastly expanded my social horizons. Twenty years ago I rarely spoke by phone to more than five people in a day. Now I often send e-mail to dozens of people a day. I have so many friends!

Um, can you remind me of their names? Of course, it works both ways. My many e-mail ‘‘friends’’ also have many ‘‘friends,’’ and I’m just one of them. So they can’t afford to treat me like a friend -- you know, reliably acknowledging my existence, that sort of thing.

So questions arise. Is Joe -- who once answered e-mail promptly but has fallen silent -- mad at me? Or has my social status, in Joe’s view, dropped a bit, so I’m not quite worth his time? And if the latter: Who the hell does Joe think he is?

There are two cures for this condition: (1) Chanting, ‘‘It’s the spam filter.’’ (2) Prozac (or one of its rivals).

Serotonin, the neurochemical Prozac boosts, was shaped by natural selection to help us handle social hierarchy. Respect and other forms of positive feedback elevate serotonin, raising self-esteem and leading to the sort of self-assured conduct that befits a high-status primate. Disrespect and criticism can lower serotonin, leaving us open to self-doubt.

Self-doubt can be valuable when it’s reality-based -- if, say, Joe is really mad at you, and self-doubt leads you to wonder why and then make amends. So the serotonin gyroscope was a useful thing in the environment natural selection designed it for: the hunter-gatherer landscape of clear communication.

But the landscape of e-mail is full of noise and imagined signals. Serotonin can gyrate dysfunctionally.

Hence the Prozac temptation: Just open that serotonin throttle and cruise through your in-box, unhampered by fancied slights, groundless anxieties and other impediments to bliss. (Your mileage may vary.) And, bliss aside: Imagine the efficiency! With the time you don’t spend worrying about Joe, you can crank out e-mail to Jim, Sally and Sue. And efficiency is what e-mail is about, right? By ending the need to coordinate schedules, it lets us interact with lots of people -- and interact along such narrow channels that we skip the bother of getting to know an entire human being.

It’s an old story. Technological change makes society more efficient and less personal. We know more people more shallowly. The sociologist David Riesman’s 1950 book about his era’s part in this process was called The Lonely Crowd.

To be sure, there are lots of to-be-sures I should throw into a column this full of blithe generalization, speculative fancy and jokey hyperbole. For example: Prozac is a serious drug, not to be taken lightly. Also: however much time people spend networking shallowly, they can find places for deeper contact. Some parts of the Internet foster that, and e-mail can enrich it.

But that gets at the one point I’m not joking about.

The reason we’ve always carved out a place for deep human contact is because we deeply need it. Some contours of the mind are so firm they lead us to selectively defy the imperative of growing efficiency. Ultimately, technological evolution has had to accommodate human nature.

Until now. Now we enter the age of pharmacology and approach the age of genetic engineering. We can, in effect, change human nature to accommodate technological evolution. If the deft use of e-mail makes each of us more successful, we may, one by one, amend the structure of our selves until we are the optimal e-mail animals. And so, too, with the next empowering information technology: bend us, shape us, anyway it wants us.

If we’re indeed already entering this era, I can’t say I’m especially enjoying it. Then again, I haven’t tried Prozac. Yet.

Shock Talk Without Apologies

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 17:57:00 -0400

There has to be an Imus event every once in a while. Ethnicity being the volatile thing it is, gratuitously inflammatory remarks have to be discouraged, so bounds of acceptable speech have to be clarified. Clarity comes when, inevitably, someone oversteps and gets slapped down.

Maybe this particular boundary could have been clarified with less punishment, given how abjectly Don Imus has apologized. Still, there had to be a price, and, compared with the prices paid in some multiethnic societies (remember Yugoslavia?), this is a bargain.

But is America’s machinery for stigmatizing bigotry really working coherently?

If social harmony is the goal, sanctions should be focused along the ethnic fault lines that are most precarious.

The black-white boundary is such a line, given both the history of oppression and ongoing economic disparities between blacks and whites. But what about the line between Muslim America and Judeo-Christian America?

Here, economics isn’t the issue. American Muslims are better educated and wealthier than Muslims in Western Europe -- one reason homegrown terrorism has been a problem in Europe and not here. Still, given that jihadist leaders around the world would love to ignite American strife, and given how few radically aggrieved Americans it takes to commit terrorism, this ethnic boundary is dicey, and worth minding.

Which brings us to Ann Coulter. Full disclosure: Ms. Coulter once cited an Op-Ed essay I wrote for this newspaper about the Danish cartoon controversy as evidence that people like me had “affection” for terrorists. Thus ended any claim I might have to evaluate her work objectively. If you want a subject on which I report and you decide, today’s not your day.

In a speech last year before the Conservative Political Action Conference, Ms. Coulter used the word “raghead.” This is a dual-use slur, applied to both Arabs and Muslims, but she was talking about an Iranian, so presumably she was focusing on the religious dimension (consistent with her post-9/11 advice that we “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”) The word raghead -- whose only function is to denigrate -- seems as legitimately offensive to Muslims as Mr. Imus’s utterance was to blacks. The difference is that Ms. Coulter didn’t apologize.

Brace yourself for the seismic damage done to her career. The leaders of CPAC reassessed their relationship with her and invited her back to speak this year, an occasion she used to trot out the word “faggot.” And Ms. Coulter continued to be interviewed respectfully on CNN and (again and again) on Fox News -- treatment that presumably wouldn’t be accorded a pundit who used the “n-word” without apology.

Why the Imus-Coulter disparity? Maybe part of it is that Ms. Coulter isn’t as structurally susceptible to sanction as Mr. Imus. She doesn’t have her own radio or TV show, so advertisers on CNN and Fox have two degrees of separation from bigotry. Still, there are pressure points big enough for an Al Sharpton to find. Ms. Coulter’s column appears in newspapers with major advertisers.

Maybe the problem is that Muslims don’t have an Al Sharpton. And, truthfully, I wouldn’t wish one on them. But couldn’t they at least have an NAACP?

Actually, they have something like that: the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But CAIR is tarred by such people as Daniel Pipes for alleged sympathy to terrorists. I don’t personally trust Mr. Pipes’s judgment in Muslim-related matters, but I haven’t done the dissertation it would take to get to the bottom of his indictment. What I do know is that if Muslims never achieve the kind of political organization that gets mainstream respect, and indeed feel that all attempts at political organization draw special scrutiny because Muslims are viewed with special suspicion -- -- well, that won’t help matters.

I’m not making a moral argument. If I were, I would get into homophobia and anti-Semitism and other varieties of bigotry. This is a pragmatic argument about social cohesion. By my lights, the two American fault lines most likely to become chasms in the long run are between blacks and whites and between Muslims and non-Muslims.

And if anything, I’d say that the second fault line is the more treacherous. America has already done things abroad that are helping to make the “clash of civilizations” thesis a self-fulfilling prophecy. Let’s not make that kind of mistake at home.

Making The U.N. Look Good

Cecille Isidro — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 03:11:00 -0400

The United Nations. Among mainstream American political thinkers, those three words elicit reactions that run the gamut from deep antipathy to less deep antipathy. O.K., I’m overstating the case. Many liberals will go all the way to deep ambivalence, and some venture further.

Still, even defenders of the institution can’t seem to start a defense of it without half-apologizing and ritually reciting its structural flaws.

Today I’ll break new ground by saving the recitation of flaws for last. First, let’s celebrate an underacknowledged feat. During a crucial phase of history -- the run-up to the Iraq war -- the United Nations performed just about flawlessly and showed auspicious adaptability.

In early 2003, a few die-hard fans of multilateralism asked why America was launching an essentially unilateral war. A common reply was that the multilateral body whose support America sought, the United Nations Security Council, wouldn’t vote to authorize war, so President Bush had to proceed without it. Blame Security Council ‘‘gridlock.’’

Now that we know how the war turned out, it’s tempting to ridicule this logic by comparing Mr. Bush to a driver who runs a red light, kills a pedestrian and blames the tragedy on the light’s redness.

But that would be ridicule on the cheap. Let’s earn our ridicule with some laborious analysis.

A sacred duty of bodies that authorize things -- the Security Council, Congress, zoning boards -- is to sometimes not authorize things. (Imagine a world where everything was authorized!) People who want a thing authorized sometimes call the failure to authorize it ‘‘gridlock.’’ People who don’t want the thing authorized prefer to say ‘‘the system worked,’’ and refer to people who complain about gridlock as ‘‘whiners.’’ Who is right?

Truly dysfunctional gridlock happens when a body fails to take action it was designed to take. Under the U.N. Charter, the Security Council is to authorize armed intervention when one nation attacks another one. If, say, Iraq invades Kuwait, the Security Council should authorize a war rolling back the aggression. It passed that test in 1990.

But in 2003, Iraq hadn’t invaded anybody. It wasn’t doing the basic thing the United Nations was designed to stop.

Now, it’s fair to complain that the U.N.’s design is rapidly obsolescing. It took shape when war among states was the big threat to world order, but these days threats come from ‘‘non-state actors’’: terrorists.

So when a nation seems to be developing nuclear arms and fraternizing with terrorists who seek nukes, we need a systematic way of dealing with that. The U.N.’s focus on the external behavior of nations should be supplemented by selective concern with their internal conditions.

In theory, then, President Bush could say he invaded Iraq because the United Nations hadn’t yet evolved to a point where it could address the nefarious nexus between states and non-state actors. In theory. But in fact, this evolution was taking place before his eyes, and he aborted it.

In a remarkable precedent, the Security Council had demanded that Iraq submit to pervasive arms inspections, and had prevailed. On the eve of war, inspectors were being let into every facility they asked to see.

Indeed, inspectors had checked out the sites American intelligence deemed most suspicious and had found nothing. So the idea that the inspectors should scram so America could invade and then do a better job of finding weapons struck some Security Council members as less than compelling. They gave America the red light. (Insert ridicule here.)

An Easter Sermon

Cecille Isidro — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 21:23:00 -0400

Jesus knew viral marketing.

In the Gospel of Mark, the disciple John complains that nondisciples are selling bootlegged copies of Jesus’ miraculous powers. ‘‘Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”

Jesus tells John to quit obsessing about the intellectual property and to focus on getting the brand out. ‘‘Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.” Jesus adds, ‘‘Whoever is not against us is for us.”

Fast-forward two millennia. Weeks after 9/11, George Bush says roughly the opposite. His famous ‘‘You’re either with us or against us” means that those who don’t follow his lead will be considered enemies. The rest is history. Today, Jesus has more than a billion devoted followers. Mr. Bush has well, fewer than that.

The religious left -- yes, there is such a thing -- complains that Mr. Bush ignores the Bible’s moral injunctions. But leave morality aside. If he could just match the Bible’s strategic savvy, that would make a world of difference.

Consider a teaching of Jesus that seems on its surface devoid of strategic import. ‘‘You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Christians often cast this verse as innovative, a sharp break from Jesus’ Jewish tradition. But the same idea can be found in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), and here it is clear that the point of the kindness is to thwart the enemy: ‘‘If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on their heads.”

Coals of fire? As the editors of the New Oxford Annotated Bible explain, submitting to this treatment was an Egyptian ritual that ‘‘demonstrated contrition.” (And how!) ‘‘The sense here seems to be that undeserved kindness awakens the remorse and hence conversion of the enemies.”

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s unlikely that sending Osama bin Laden a Hallmark card would induce paroxysms of self-doubt. Still, there are other ways that reining in hatred can hurt your enemy’s cause.

Suppose, for example, you were nurturing a nascent religious movement in the Roman Empire, and your antagonists welcomed excuses to harass you. Suppose, that is, you were the Apostle Paul. When Paul preaches kindness to enemies, he uses not the formulation found in the Gospels, but the one from the Hebrew Bible, complete with the coals of fire.

Of course, Mr. Bush is more in the shoes of the Roman emperor than of Paul. America isn’t a small but growing religious movement. It’s a great power threatened by a small but growing religious movement -- radical Islam. But the logic can work both ways. Great powers, by mindlessly indulging retributive impulses, can give fuel to small but growing religious movements. If you want to deprive jihadists of ammunition, make it hard for them to persuade others to hate us.

Right after Paul espouses kindness to enemies, he adds: ‘‘Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” Sounds like naive moralizing until you look at those Abu Ghraib photos that have become Al Qaeda recruiting posters.

The key distinction is between man and meme. Yes, a great power can always kill and torment enemies, and, yes, there will always be times when that makes sense. Still, when you’re dealing with terrorists, it’s their memes -- their ideas, their attitudes -- that are Public Enemy No. 1. Jihadists are hosts for the virus of hatred, and the object of the game is to keep the virus from finding new hosts.

The Internet is fertile ground for memes, and jihadists are good at getting the brand out. One of the few things Osama bin Laden has in common with the Jesus of the Gospels is belief in the power of viral marketing.

The ultimate in viral marketing was Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice. Deemed a threat to the social order, he was crucified under Roman auspices. But the Romans forgot one thing: If you face a small but growing movement that threatens the imperial order, you shouldn’t attack the men in ways that help the memes.

Mr. Bush says his favorite philosopher is Jesus. One way to show it would be to spend less time repeating the mistake of the Romans and more time heeding the wisdom of Christ.

My Life in the Army

Cecille Isidro — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:34:00 -0400

In one sense, I was well positioned to enjoy the summer of love. In 1969, I was living in San Francisco, epicenter of hippiedom, antiwar fervor and utopian hope for perpetual peace.

Circumstances kept me from sharing the spirit. The part of San Francisco I lived in was the Presidio, which was then a military base. I was 12, and my father was an Army officer. I remember my family once driving toward the Presidio’s Lombard Street gate past tens of thousands of protesters who seemed to think my father was part of a very bad outfit.

I was sure they were wrong, and I still am. In fact, the whole, larger stereotype -- that the military is a right-wing institution, best viewed with skepticism if not cynicism by the left -- is way off. Growing up in, or at least amid, the Army helped make me a liberal -- not because I reacted against my environment, but because I absorbed its values. If all of America were more like the Army, it would be a better country.

People think of the Army as hierarchical, but compared with the private sector it’s a bastion of egalitarianism.

Yes, the Army’s ‘‘blue-collar workers’’ -- privates, corporals, sergeants -- defer to its ‘‘white-collar workers,’’ the officers. That happens in corporations, too. But on an Army base you don’t send the white-collar kids to good public schools and the blue-collar kids to bad public schools.

We all went to school together -- either on the base or at a public school near it. My claim to fame is having played basketball at the same high school, on Fort Sam Houston, where Shaquille O’Neal, son of a sergeant, later played. (I encountered O’Neal in a hotel lobby a few years ago, and it turns out he’s less fascinated than I am by our intertwined histories. Puzzling.)

I had friends from the Army’s biggest minority constituencies, blacks and Hispanics. Among soldiers, too, exposure to diversity, along with the practical need to live with it, could be benign. My father grew up in Texas in the 1920s, amid common use of the n-word, and I never heard him use it.

Which brings us to social mobility. My father was the son of a sharecropper, and he dropped out of high school after both of his parents and most of his siblings had died of various diseases. He lacked the polish to impress, say, a Morgan Stanley recruiter, but during World War II, the Army gave him a chance.

That meant better health care than his parents had gotten, thanks to socialized medicine. My ‘‘blue collar’’ friends and I went to the same doctors. The doctors weren’t all great, but I’m still alive, and we avoided one creepy thing about inequality in America today: people like me get arthroscopic surgery lest stray cartilage impede our golf swings, while low-income people, in unseen ways, die for lack of good health care.

My father said Army people were as fine a group as you would ever meet, and the evidence was on his side. They were conscientious and unpretentious. And they can be surprisingly soft. Good commanders have a commitment to their troops that borders on love, a feeling that in the corporate world doesn’t generally emanate from the executive suite downward. (I said love, not lust.)

That’s partly because in the Army, the stakes are so high. Sending people into battle isn’t something a good person does with detachment. Before the Iraq war, when the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, testified that the postwar occupation would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he was showing not just prudence but devotion. He didn’t want his soldiers needlessly imperiled.

As a reward for his devotion, General Shinseki was disparaged by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld wanted to show how cheap war can be, and now our soldiers are paying the price. I wish some people on the left had a deeper respect for the military, but lately the left isn’t where the most consequential disrespect has come from.

The crowning indignity was Abu Ghraib, an outrage that was initiated by civilians high in the Bush administration and has stained the U.S. military’s hard-earned honor, strengthening stereotypes that I know are wrong.

My father, Col. Raymond J. Wright, retired several years after that summer in San Francisco, having given three decades to an institution he loved. He died in 1987. There are lots of things I wish he had lived to see, but the way the Army’s been treated recently isn’t one of them.