If an alien from outer space were dropped down in our
society one day, having not been briefed with any kind of backstory or cultural
shading, what would she think about things?
For instance, if the alien saw a quadruped creature leading
a biped around by a rope and forcing the latter to pick up its excrement, which
species would she have to assume was in charge of things?
If she saw one group of said bipeds on a trading floor on
Wall Street jumping up and down and yelling at numbers on a screen, how might
they compare to another group that was conversing and laughing around a table
covered in playing cards and glass bottles? Which group would she assume was
high on a more destructive intoxicant?
She would find herself backwards and confused on a range of
such ironies running from the fun and quirky to the sad and horrific.
She might discover that
2,977 was the
number of American civilian deaths resulting from the attacks of 9/11/01.
Then she might find out that
210,000 is a
conservative estimate of the number of Afghani and Iraqi civilian casualties
resulting from the back and forth aggressions between American, Afghani, Iraqi,
and extremist forces since 2001.[1]
How is our alien friend to figure out which of these totals
will barely get a newspaper blurb, let alone a memorial, and which is the
perpetual justification for over a decade of calculated drone strikes, the
deaths and psychological devastation of some of our own society’s most precious
young people, a standing foreign military presence in a sovereign nation,
torture tactics, and numerous other breaches of constitutional and
international law?
If our alien friend wants to pick a side, then there may
have been a short window of time, following 9/11, where she may have easily
picked out which side was the victim and which side the aggressor. God help her,
sorting them out at this point.
If one is having trouble stepping outside of the narrow set
of platitudes and biases given by one’s culture and imagining an outsider’s
perspective, there are little linguistic tricks that we can use to help get
ourselves inside the mind of an alien.
For instance, lets imagine a seedily clad guy told you that he’d
invented a device in his basement called a Death Dealer 100. He can’t get into
the details of how the DD1 works, but the long and short of it is, he can walk
into a room filled with people and at the push of a button fire 100 death rays
in less than a minute, each one capable of killing a full grown adult. You
might be quick to say to him, “Oh, God help us, no, I must alert the
authorities. Such a thing must never be found in a lawful civilization.”
But upon a moment’s reflection, you’ll remember that an
almost identical invention very much exists in society, quite affordably too,
and the authorities aren’t concerned. And unlike so many of our compatriots,
our alien friend may not have a subtle enough mind to distinguish why a “DD1”
should never be allowed to exist in polite society whereas a “rifle” can be
grandfathered in with constitutional impunity because it shares a name with
another invention from centuries ago.
It’s a good exercise to try to see our society through the
eyes of an alien from time to time, because an alien isn’t susceptible to kind
of cultural drift that not only shifts individuals along the continuum of a
given debate but can shift the entire continuum itself. For instance, an alien
would see objectively that even our liberal presidents today would’ve looked
like war mongers to a conservative living in the pre-World War I United States,
when non-interventionism was the mood of the day.
Through alien eyes, we can see that there has been a
tectonic shift not only in the sides of the debate but in the ground beneath
it. What brought this shift on is simple: fear. We have allowed ourselves to
become a culture of fear. And you don’t need to get sucked into a conversation
on guns or foreign policy in order to sense it.
One day, an older man told me how, when he was a kid, he and
his friends used to run around the neighborhood completely unsupervised, and
the only rule was that they each had to be home for dinner. Then he made a
statement, which one hears from all angles, today—a statement which is regarded
as so self-evident that the speaker never puts it forward as a controversial
assertion but simply assumes that any other sentient being would agree: “You
would never let your kid run around like that in this day and age. Too
dangerous.”
When I politely pressed him for some kind of evidence that
the world had, in fact, grown more dangerous since he was a kid, he looked at
me like I was asking him to prove that fire is hot. He took a moment to recover
and then stumbled through a predictable litany: a couple high profile abductions
in far away states, a local convenience store hold up and a recent murder (over
a drug deal gone awry)—basically, the bread and butter of local TV news.
To his credit, at one point, he was thoughtful enough to
say, “Well, maybe we just know about these things today in a way that we didn’t
back then.” But it was too late. He had already shaped his parenting practices,
his political views, and his blood pressure around a worldview of fear.
Why force an otherwise kindly older man to justify what everyone
is supposed to know is common knowledge? Because I no longer believe that such
throwaway comments are as harmless as they seem. I believe that that kind of
unchecked anxiety, spread across an entire society, is capable of producing
evils far more powerful than those that brought it on in the first place. Even
a casual student of history can confirm this. The Nazis didn’t come into power
on a “Let’s all be evil” platform. They came into power by promising that they
could rid their society of evil and keep everyone else safe.
And in a society where even suggesting that maybe we should
resist a drone strike on a key target if there is going to be “collateral
damage,” or that we should kill and incarcerate fewer criminals, or that we
should limit the ways in which you can “stand your ground” is considered
unpatriotic bordering on treasonous, someone needs to stand up and act as a
fear circuit breaker. Doing this in a chronically fearful society will take independent
thinking, integrity and confidence in oneself, and a deep-seated hope.
I even tend to think that, long before sentimentalized
baptism ceremonies and altar calls, a “Christian” was someone who did precisely
this—someone under the leadership of Christ, who refused to concede to the
chronic anxiety of the age and the greed, the violence, and the scapegoating
that always comes with it.
Doesn't "Christian" mean, at the very least, in this jittery time, someone
who hopes in the life-giving promises of God? Does God offer us nothing more to place our trust in besides a large magazine clip and a beefed up military?
Would an alien from outer space ever think that we are a
“Christian nation?”
[1] I’m assuming, of course, that the second Iraq war
would not have happened, had our leaders not been able to focus the emotional
reactivity of the post 9/11 political climate into an invasion of an otherwise
unrelated country. Anyone who would like to argue this point might have a
hard time citing a reason for invasion that doesn’t make the whole thing look
like even more of a debacle.
