I haven't even listened to Leonard Peikoff's latest podcast yet, but I wanted to post it anyway before I forget. (I've been meaning to post these reminders every time Dr. Peikoff releases a new one.)
The World Watch section of Friday’s Wall Street Journal featured a brief description of the pope’s “pilgrimage” to Australia last week. The headline says it all: Pope Benedict Assails ‘Insatiable Consumption.’
Quoth the pope:
“Reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth, erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world’s mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption.”(Note 1.)
photo from The New York Times, credit to Paul Miller/European Pressphoto Agency (Note 2.)
There’s nothing new or remarkable about this stale complaint, though the “reluctantly” is particularly brazen considering his eagerness to embrace a cause that could salvage good old Catholic guilt from the clutches of earthly materialism. We are daily bombarded with intellectual hostility toward the western desire to live happily in full-bellied, disease-free comfort. We are rebuked for our addiction to oil, our petty consumerism, our wanton destruction of the world’s resources.
No, it is not the pope’s comment that is interesting. The thing that caught my eye is the photograph that accompanied the article. Unfortunately, the picture does not appear to be available online for non-subscribers, so a description must suffice.
In the photo, Pope Benedict XVI is standing in the hot Australian sun, his virgin-white cassock draped humbly over his stout frame. He has somewhat turned his back on us, but not quite fully, so we can see his left side and his general aspect. He holds his hands clasped together in front of him, just below the buttons (which we cannot see) of his blood red mozzetta; this has the effect of making him look like an old woman pulling closed her shawl to ward off a chill. His head is domed with the traditional white zucchetto, or skull cap, perhaps similar to the one perched atop the head of Barberini, in his role as Pope Urban VIII, as he bravely (if but temporarily) saved humanity from the heliocentrism that stewed in the bowed head of his old friend Galileo. Because of the angle, it is hard to tell if Pope Benedict chose to wear his impressive gold-embroidered stole for the occasion, or any of the jeweled ornaments that sometimes accompany his costume. Perhaps he left off these accessories in anticipation of raising an eyebrow or two among the adulating masses as he spoke of “squandering natural resources.” Besides, additional ornament is unnecessary, as the daintily embroidered cassock bespeaks his advanced rank.
Before the pope, not too far away - say about four or five paces, or roughly the length of a heretic’s body after having been hung for days by his wrists with weights tied to his ankles - dance a half dozen male aborigines. These are the indigenous natives of Australia. I assume they are dancing because the caption calls them “aboriginal dancers,” though if the caption had claimed that they were a group of natives frantically trying to remove the soles of their bare feet from scalding pavement, I would have been satisfied with this explanation. Each dancer is adorned with bright stripes of red and white paint that draws a coarse “∏” (pi) across his naked chest, a symbol that in this instance is not likely to represent the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, nor anything else that would require counting beyond the number three. These stripes continue downward past a disconcertingly brief loincloth onto the bare legs, where they terminate in a sort of spotted field of white on the shins. The dancers hold small tree branches in each hand, which they appear to be shaking like maracas or feather dusters. Some aboriginal women stand behind the group, moving their arms in somewhat less animated accompaniment to the men. Barely distinguishable in the photo is a crowd of modern onlookers, waving flags (American and German, among others), and apparently enjoying the show.
The pope is smiling.
A remarkable feature of the photograph is the contrast provided by the background. In the distance, past the pope and the aborigines, rises a portion of the Sydney skyline. It is not even a particularly impressive view, considering how dazzling the city is (see photo below), yet it is enough to emphasize the sharp disconnect between the foreground and the background; which is to say, between the subject of the photograph and its context; which is to say, between primitivism and civilization. Four or five modern apartment buildings ascend, pillars of concrete and glass, an absurd backdrop to a primitive tribal dance and to the pope’s archaic vestments.
photo of Sydney, Australia from Partnerfotographie (Note 3.)
I am beginning to think that just about any picture of the pope distresses me. After all, the theme of this essay is similar that of the post I wrote in April when Pope Benedict performed a Catholic ritual at Yankee Stadium. These scenes are always troubling for the same reason: they demonstrate a jarring and inappropriate juxtaposition of the modern with the medieval. If the pope and the Australian aborigines were simply dressed up for a costume party or historical reenactment, the scene would elicit a smile. They are not pretending: thus, the smile gives way to a shiver.
But more than demonstrating a mere contrast between the primitive and the civilized, the photograph reveals a broader point to anyone who cares to mark it: that the modern celebration of the primitive is inherently parasitical. Specifically, the orchestration of this bizarre demonstration relies upon the very civilization that it denigrates, a civilization revealed by the buildings in the background. One does not need an advanced civilization to be primitive, of course, but one does need an advanced civilization to be a primitivist. That is, to actually advocate a retreat to pre-history implicitly requires the intellectual and material framework that the modern world provides. It is possible to celebrate the squalor, labor, and disease of primitive life only from the comfort of one’s home.
Of course, this observation is not new; it is a point made crystal clear in the novels and essays of Ayn Rand.
Consider the “scars” that the unfortunate earth had to sustain in order to place the pope in Australia to admire simple savages and to lecture westerners about their thoughtless consumerism and squandering of natural resources. Presumably, Pope Benedict did not travel from Rome to Sydney in a dugout canoe that he painstakingly fashioned from a felled tree by scraping stones across its length for weeks or months. More likely, he flew in an airplane, a craft that consumes some five gallons of fuel per mile, fuel that must be extracted from the earth and processed via scientific principles so that it may be burned by an ingeniously-designed engine, which provides thrust for the body of the aircraft that in turn provides lift because of the cleverly devised wing-shape and control surfaces. All of this - and quite a bit more - was necessary to propel Pope Benedict 38,000 feet above his noble savages (the nobility of which he contemplates with a sigh), in a craft made of advanced materials and sophisticated electronics and traveling near the speed of sound, so that he could sit comfortably in a plush reclining seat perusing his itinerary (that had, just a moment before, emerged from an ink-jet printer on a sheet of high-quality paper that costs less than a penny), nibbling roasted peanuts from a sealed foil bag that had been brought to him by a lovely and polite flight attendant wearing sheer nylon stockings over perfectly toned legs that she manages to maintain with the thrice-weekly assistance of her personal trainer. Upon the airplane’s landing gear touching down precisely on the tarmac within a few feet of the ideal GPS target coordinates, the pope is ushered into an idling vehicle and spirited (along with a police escort) through the network of magnificently paved and bustling highways, moving in and out of shadows cast by skyscrapers, to the scheduled exhibition of indigenous folk. And here we finally arrive at the scene of our photograph: the aborigines dancing on a concrete platform cordoned off by fences made of steel posts and bright orange plastic sheets and guarded by armed Swiss guards with walkie-talkies.
This technology, along with the political freedom achieved with incalculable effort across centuries by Britain and its colonies, leaves Pope Benedict free to laud savages and criticize civilization.
NOTES
1. Pope Benedict Assails ‘Insatiable Consumption,’ Wall Street Journal, Friday, 18 Jul 2008, p. A6.
2. photo from The New York Times, credit to Paul Miller/European Pressphoto Agency.
3. photo of Sydney, Australia from Partnerfotographie.
My friend and I were talking about some old Bogart and Bacall movies today, and I recalled this scene, one of my favorites in The Big Sleep and maybe one of my favorites in any movie.
While pursuing clues, Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) steps into a bookstore to ask some questions of the proprietress (played by Dorothy Malone). The scene lasts only about three minutes and it almost stands apart from the rest of the film; we never see the proprietress again. But there is something about this scene that I love: Bogie tough and charming as usual, in the manner only he can pull off; the lovely and scholarly Malone, obviously of above average intelligence, and possibly devoting her intelligence in that moment toward calculating a pretext to rub her loins against Bogart without seeming too forward. The store empties out and the rain comes and it is as if the two have been thrust together, alone on the earth, on a desert island - no, better: in a bomb shelter. The passion boils beneath the surface, intense precisely because of its reserve. What is not said or shown makes the scene. (Of course, the innuendo is unmistakable.) They just don’t write movies like that anymore.
UPDATE: If you have trouble with the volume on this YouTube video, adjust the little pop-up slider in the bottom right corner.
It’s old news by now, but I’ve been meaning to post on the rescue of Ingrid Betancourt from the clutches of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Marxist group that has been terrorizing Colombia for four decades or so. She, along with fourteen other hostages, including three Americans, were spirited away by agents of the Colombian government in an operation that required not a shot to be fired.
The rescue was a terrific blow to the terrorist organization, which had already been reeling lately. FARC still holds as many as two thousands hostages, but Ms. Betancourt, who is a Colombian senator who ran for president in 2002, along with the Americans were the most prominent of them.
The plan required months of meticulous planning, and the reports read more like an adventure movie or novel than the typical dry daily news. Colombian agents, wearing Che Guevara T-shirts and posing as members of an unnamed NGO, duped the FARC guerrillas into corralling the hostages into two helicopters. The terrorists complied, thinking that the hostages were being transported under orders from high up in the FARC command. Once the helicopters were in the air, the agents revealed to the hostages that they were now free. The rush of emotions - the elation that the hostages must have felt after years of being bound, tortured, humiliated, and assailed by diminishing hopes - must have been surreal.
Shortly after, Ms. Betancourt was reunited with her two children, Mélanie and Lorenzo, whom she had not seen for six years.
photo from NYTimes -
Ingrid Betancourt was kissed by her daughter, Mélanie, as her son, Lorenzo, looked on at the airport in Bogota, Colombia, on Wednesday.
It goes without saying that I am thrilled with the outcome, and I can only imagine the joy that Mélanie Delloye-Betancourt must feel to see and touch her mother again. Nevertheless, I must call attention to a comment of Miss Delloye’s that I heard on NPR shortly after the rescue. She said (through a translator), “we were afraid the military operations would be deadly, and we never wanted to put my mommy’s life in danger, or that of the other hostages that were with her. But this was not a military operation; it was an intelligence operation. It was done perfectly.” [Emphasis mine.]
With all respect to Miss Delloye, and with utter sympathy for her and the ordeal she has endured, I must disagree with this distinction between military and intelligence operations. Insofar as intelligence contributed to this case - as it obviously did - it was intelligence of a military nature. Miss Delloye’s statement seems to suggest that something other than military action - something non-violent - prevailed in this case. That is simply not so.
It is important to call attention to this because I think many people would like to believe that there are non-violent ways to deal with ruthless killers. Many would like to believe that terrorists may be dealt with through diplomacy or negotiation. Of course, Mélanie Delloye certainly did not say that it was diplomacy that worked here, but by explicitly denying that military force was used, she left the hint in the air that a “peaceful” resolution was attained. If it was not her intent to imply this, I cannot understand why she would have put it quite that way. (Note 2.)
It’s quite true that no shots were fired in the operation, and that is fortunate because I believe the good guys (the Colombian agents) were completely unarmed. But that does not mean the rescue was “peaceful” or non-violent. One can hardly imagine a more perilous situation than that of the disguised Colombian agents or the ones that infiltrated FARC in the prior months in order to obtain the valuable intelligence needed for the operation. With chillingly dry understatement, a Colombian official (unfortunately I did not catch his name in the NPR broadcast) concisely noted that if anything had gone wrong, “all of our assets would have been killed.” The Colombian agents marched unarmed into an unforgivingly hostile den. The risk was enormous, and obviously the peril faced by the agents was that of a soldier, not that of a diplomat.
That the Colombian government chose trickery over raw firepower is a matter of strategy and calculation, not of choosing “peaceful” means over military means. Extracting prisoners safely from the grip of armed thugs operating in their own territory seems to a layman like me to be an almost unsolvable puzzle, so I am always amazed when even partial success is achieved. (Note 3.) What must be understood, however, is that if harm comes to the hostages from rescue attempts, the responsibility falls entirely on the terrorists, not the rescuers. This may provide little solace to the friends and family of hostages that are killed, but it is nonetheless true. Thus, even in botched rescue operations like the horrible Beslan school siege in 2004 or the Nord-Ost theatre siege of 2002, both of which were heavy-handed Russian attempts to rescue civilians from Chechen terrorists and which resulted in hundreds of dead hostages, I place the blame firmly on the terrorists.
I admit that I know very little about whether or not FARC has been met with strict resistance or appeasement during the last forty years - and further, I claim that I don’t need to know the details to know the answer. The simple fact that FARC exists and makes a living on extracting ransom money (to supplement their drug-dealing income) indicates that appeasement has been the rule, not the exception. As I indicated in Note 2, I hold blameless the friends and relatives of hostages that pay the ransom, but it is undeniable that such Danegelt has literally created a market for further hostage-taking. In an interview, Mélanie Delloye mentioned that 80% of the world’s hostages are in Colombia! If this is even close to an accurate figure, it is a testament to the fact that capitulating to terrorists is a formula for failure.
NOTES
1. Photo from NY Times, Bold Colombian Rescue Built on Rebel Groups Disarray(http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/04/world/americas/04rescue.html), 4 Jul 2008.
2. This view would be consistent with a 2005 interview in which Mélanie Delloye definitely favored a “humanitarian agreement” to end the hostage crisis. This involved a sort of diplomacy: discussions and “mediation” between the United Nations and FARC. However, I must stress that I am not directing my criticism toward Miss Delloye herself; I would not expect a distraught nineteen year old girl to advocate sending in commandos with guns blazing to rescue her mother. I am criticizing the idea that negotiation and appeasement with killers is effective.
3. Even in successful rescues there are often at least some casualties. Interestingly, the Betancourt rescue on 3 Jul 2008 marked the 32nd anniversary of the Entebbe Raid of 3 Jul 1976, in which the Israeli Defense Forces rescued some hundred or so hijacked travelers from a Ugandan airfield. In this operation, the IDF performed brilliantly and rescued the hostages, though the leader of the assault Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, was killed in action and three hostages were killed in the crossfire.
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