Wisdom-based Foreign Relations
The wisdom norm of human mutuality
The last shall be first. The wisdom norm of human mutuality sheds light on mutual or common ground. Having read this, readers will immediately be reminded of the almost limitless supply of interfaith and multifaith activity that has arisen over the past decade or more. Although the wisdom norm of human mutuality plays a huge role in that field, that subject is for another time. Here, I want us to think about the special agency of mutual cooperation that the norm possesses for human relations and their structures when minding the gap between the religious and the secular. As the British philosopher and theologian John Peck has helped me to understand: wisdom concentrates on interests, concerns, and values that are shared by the human family as a whole before a distinction is made about who is religious and who is not. (Let that sink in.)
I believe that the implications of this are so timely and important for Western–Middle East relations that the wisdom norm of human mutuality may prophetically have been meant for our day, when Western states are trying to determine what role religion should or should not play in their foreign policies vis a vis Muslim Middle East nations trying to determine what role secularism should or should not play in their foreign policies. In recent years, this rough secular/religious intersection has been subjected to increased interest at think tanks and universities, by conferences and authors, and in the halls of power. But it is still so newly arrived to the foreign policy community that it has not been deeply engaged as yet, when compared to the decades of concerted thought that people have given to balance of power, anarchy, state sovereignty, democratic peace, national security, and so on — areas considered the nuts and bolts of contemporary international politics.wisdom concentrates on interests, concerns, and values that are shared by the human family as a whole before a distinction is made about who is religious and who is not
This religious/secular intersection is one of the main subjects in the book I’m writing, and I want to conclude this essay just by showing what that problematic intersection looks like to the parties and to start a conversation about why the wisdom norm of mutuality can help willing parties negotiate the intersection with less animus toward each other.
On the U.S. side of the gap, the greatest obstacle lies in overcoming two hundred years of what international relations historian Edward Luttwak calls “secular reductivism”: a philosophical predisposition in capitals such as Washington against including the concerns of any religion in its foreign policy apparatus. That is, a lack of regard for religion per se has been central to the political orthodoxy of modern Western states and of political science scholarship in general. Luttwak roots this in the West’s “Enlightenment prejudice,” which he finds “amply manifest in the contemporary professional analysis of foreign affairs.” Thus politicians and journalists (he’s writing this before 9/11) often ignored “the role of religion, religious institutions, and religious motivation in explaining politics and conflict” and focused too much on geographic, economic, social, political, or other non-religious primary causes. For Luttwak, this indicates “a learned repugnance to contend intellectually with all that is religion or belongs to it.” (“The Missing Dimension,” Edward Luttwak, in Religion, The Missing Dimension of Statecraft, Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, eds. For a less technical discussion of this problem, see Madeleine Albright’s The Mighty and the Almighty, in which the former U.S. secretary of state opens a window on her academic studies in the 1960s, to reveal how her education in world affairs gave her with a strong distaste for anything to do with religion in international relations, and how that attitude was typical of international relations scholarship and influenced Washington’s foreign policy decision makers at the time.)
Scott Thomas, an international relations scholar at the University of Bath, has identified several primary contours of modernity that have helped to marginalize valid religious interests and concerns in Western approaches to international politics. Briefly noted here, those contours are: 1) “Social theory,” which “helped to explain religion away, rather than to explain its significance in social action.” 2) “Secularization theory,” which “argued that the numbers of people who declare themselves to be believers and who regularly attend religious services will steadily decline as a country modernizes,” leading to “a steady retreat of religion from the pubic square.” 3) The Westphalian presumption, which deemed religion “to be the ultimate threat to order, civility, and security,” and therefore religion should no longer be part of international politics. 4) The modern scientific method, whose twin controls of naturalism and materialism admit into its theories (including its theories of international politics) only one reality, the physical world. Religion is then seen as a mere epiphenomenon at best, rather than as a basic instinct of human nature. (Scott Thomas, The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-first Century.)
U.S.–Mideast relations of course run both ways. Whereas Washington approaches its international relations from what is thought to be a secular orientation, the capitals of the Muslim Middle East rely on varying degrees of explicit religious belief to inform their politics. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the powerfully influential network of ultrafundamentalist Wahhabi clerics can be a deciding “vote” in policies of the Saudi government. In Jordan and Egypt, Islam is the state religion. In Syria, however, it is not, although the Syrian government succumbs at times to religious interests both from within Syria and from Iran.
Lebanon is different still. An Arab country with the largest percentage of Christians by far of any country in the Middle East, Lebanon has a political order unique to the Middle East, designed to accommodate eighteen diverse major and minor religious groups (Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Jewish) who are structurally factored into the government. “Parliamentary seats, ministries, governments jobs, and so on are apportioned according to these different confessional groups. The political process formally recognizes these religious groups, that each one should have a share in the pie.” (See: journalist Rami Khouri interview by Charles Strohmer on this site.)Whereas Washington approaches its international relations from what is thought to be a secular orientation, the capitals of the Muslim Middle East rely on varying degrees of explicit religious belief to inform their politics
Religious authority may even act as a constitutional arbiter of policy. Iran is a case in point. The contemporary Iranian determinacy between a particular interpretation of Islam and the international politics of the state traces back to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise to power in 1979 (when he overthrew the country’s American-backed Shah). The constitution drawn up under Khomeini states that Iran is an Islamic Republic whose government must adhere to the teachings of the Quran and the traditions of the sunnah and hadith. Since then, a supreme religious leader (first Khomeini, now Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) has been the absolute political head of the government. “The legal structure of the Islamic Republic places ultimate political authority in” the supreme leader, who has the final word on all matters of state, including foreign policy. (Azadeh Moaveni, “Power in the Shadows: Iran’s Supreme Religious Leader Keeps a Low Profile,” Time, July 3, 2006.)
Although the supreme leader is Iran’s highest political decision maker, he is not elected by the public. He is selected by the assembly of experts and is thought by Iran’s ruling clerics to be God’s representative on earth. His politics are therefore theocratic, in the sense that he is considered to be directly answerable to God and not as susceptible to public opinion as are Iran’s elected president and members of parliament. (Contrast this to a sitting U.S. president, who, although the buck stops with him, is answerable to the people.)
Under the supreme leader is the president and the parliament. A twelve member guardian council, comprised of six jurists and six religious clerics (all of whom must be highly-educated, dedicated Muslims), oversees parliament. The guardian council can, as may the supreme leader, veto any piece of legislation that it deems to violate Islamic laws (shariah) or the Iranian constitution. The council also approves or disqualifies candidates wishing to run for election. One of the more alarming ramifications of this for the Western powers has been that the council habitually disqualifies nearly all of the reformist candidates who seek to run for seats in parliament or for the presidency. (Direct censure of the reformists has, as everyone knows, reached such a pitch today that the regime, sanctioned by the supreme leader, now brutally and violently suppresses groups of peaceful demonstrators who continue to dispute Ahmadinejad’s reelection as president in June 2009.)
Countries of the Muslim Middle East, then, face the equal opposite problem to that of the United States. Because their governments are allied with religious interests — in varying degrees and capacities, and with differing interpretations of Islam — they must contend from a religious point of view with how their relations should, or should not, develop with a nation, the United States, where religious authority is excluded from playing any official role. Very practically, this affects how the different governments of the Muslim Middle East engage with the United States in pressing matters of democracy, economic progress, political checks and balances, equal opportunities for women, the process of globalization, dealing with acts of terrorism, and so on. As different interpreters of Islam vie for political clout over such issues in the Muslim Middle East, that affects how the U.S. and the other Western states interact with those countries.
The protean religious and political alchemy of the Muslim Middle East, then, plays a role in why each Western state does not have the same foreign policy for each Muslim state, and vice versa. Nevertheless, what unites these Middle East countries is their struggle with America’s secular political reductivism, not to mention that of the other Western states.
It’s quite a dilemma, this international tug of war between “the secular” and “the religious.” It may indeed need the wisdom of Solomon to resolve. I hold the view that trying to wrest one side into the other’s camp is a futile exercise at best and at worst moves the world closer to a clash of civilizations. I would kindly like to suggest to all parties, and to the different domestic populations those parties are meant serve and represent, that wisdom stands silhouetted at the rough secular/religious intersection where your two worlds meet. There, now, today, she offers both religious and secular actors a way to begin a new narrative together by getting around absolutized ideological interests and building international agreements on the mutual ground that we all share simply but profoundly because we are all, whoever we are, whatever we believe, human beings.
The wisdom norm of mutuality helps us to be more conscious of and attentive to the interests and concerns of daily life that all peoples everywhere, regardless of race, religion, or politics, or lack of a religion or a politics, hold in common. It may be hard for us, at first, to give sustained thought and action to this today, in an age in which we have been conditioned by ideological reasoning since childhood to accept as normative that cooperative arrangements can be constructed only around adherence to one cluster or another of sectarian interests. Since time immemorial, however, everyone on the planet has shared the same world (what other world is there?) and the same resources. Everyone has participated in the same creation, shared the common bond of what it means to be human, had the same basic interests.
We all want to be able to provide for our families, to see our children raised properly and safely, to live as peaceably as possible with our neighbors, to see our social environments improve, to find ways to ease the suffering of others, to increase possibilities for well-being in the world, and so on. People everywhere have a fundamental interest in such things regardless of their religion or their political affiliation, or whether they claim neither. Believers and atheists alike are moved at the sight of starving children or families left homeless by a tragedy, and both will want to do what they can to alleviate such suffering. In fact, this is precisely where many religious groups focus their efforts. Religious callings throughout history have concentrated on caring for people as they are, wherever they are, and regardless of their beliefs. The same can be said about secular relief organizations.the wisdom norm of human mutuality does not require people to ditch their religious or secular foundations before more cooperative arrangements with each other can be established
The bulk of wisdom literature, in fact, focuses on the concerns and practicalities of everyday life — work and wealth, family and neighbors, economics and politics, relationships and communication, kings and the administration of justice, prosperity and suffering, happiness and grief, social life and the law court, and so on — and the decisions people make about them in their relationships with others in these fields. Today, such issues and concerns are often bracketed as “secular life,” and according to the Hebrew wisdom literature the choices people make in that life make them wise or foolish. The wisdom way seeks to enable human flourishing in secular life across and cultures, between and among peoples who are different.
Further, the wisdom norm of human mutuality does not require people to ditch their religious or secular foundations before more cooperative arrangements with each other can be established (provided those foundations are not built on or around violence). Religious conversions are not the purpose or function of foreign policy. Instead, wisdom cries in international relations for people who are different to look up from the foreground of particularities about race, religion, ethnicity, or nationality to see the horizons that are possible through architectures of shared human interests and concerns. The wisdom norm of mutuality, to use a Christian expression, seems to emphasize cooperative possibilities based on who people are, more than on what by the grace of God they may become.
To approach this from another direction, wisdom does not require the parties to try to find issues and concerns that have no relevance to secular or religious belief before they can reach agreements. This is why I usually favor the word mutual over the word common. The phrase “common ground” sometimes carries the idea that there are issues of life that are belief-neutral, issues which neither the secular nor the religious person brings his or her beliefs to; whereas the phrase “mutual ground” somewhat more emphasizes that all of life is shared by all of us. It’s a way to point out a subtle, but I think a significant, distinction. That is, the mutuality norm is not saying, “Hey, look, here’s a bit of neutral ground where we might be able to meet and agree.” Instead, the wisdom way gives us freedom to engage on issues fully as who we are.
Belief is not divorced from negotiations. We look around the table and we see: he’s secular; I’m not; she’s a Christian; he’s a Muslim. The depths of who we are, whether religious or secular, are part of what is talking place around the table in any issue we represent for our countries. Neutral ground unaffected by belief is in fact one of the greatest myths of our time. The wisdom norm of mutuality does not preclude depth of identity.
The norm, however, is not naive. The wisdom way, as noted earlier, is realistic. At those places, then, where having different identities means disagreements will persist, the wisdom way offers a freedom that adherence to ideological stands may not. It enables diplomats, negotiators, mediators, and others not to have mere tolerance of another’s view but a respect of the other in such a way that non-negotiable differences may yield “fruitful forms of virtuous rivalry” (this phrase is from Nicholas Adams, Academic Director of the Cambridge Interfaith Program).
The wisdom way, then, gives national leaders and their policy advisors a way of reasoning about human difference — right here, right now, in the current states’ system — that is different from the political or religious ideology they may be accustomed to. It is a way of reasoning, however, that gets pretty short shrift in contemporary international relations and foreign policy making. With the voice of wisdom muted by the amped-up sectarian ideologies of our time, its revival today would provide a reasonable and responsible way to re-energize, reshape, and redirect Western–Middle East relations. In this, wisdom is of course realistic about the future. She is not a utopian dreamer. On the other hand, she would ask how wise was the ideological direction of the first decade of the twenty-first century that promised to further international mutual good.
When considering dealing with today’s international crises, James Skillen, senior fellow of the Center for Public Justice, writes in With or Against the World that of all of life’s certainties, “one in particular has proven very durable over the centuries, namely, that there is but one world.” Thus the “American people need to gain a deeper understanding of what it means that the world’s people and states share a single global commons, the governance of which is becoming more and more difficult with each passing year…. American failure to think and act cooperatively over the long term for the international common good is part of what threatens even America’s future.”
Because the wisdom way is not subordinated to any particular theoretical understanding of life or set of abstract principles or laws, its norms provide both religious and secular political actors with a freedom to search out, together, prospects for constructing and sustaining cooperative international relations based on mutual interests and concerns sans ideological restrictions. It offers this freedom in a way that can be reasonably and responsibly accepted by all who do not have violence in their hearts. It opens doors for both Western nations and those of the Muslim Middle East to participate not just in reversing adversarial relationships and improving existing relationships but to help the international community toward human flourishing.
This is the special agency of wisdom as she cries amidst our cries for us to build on the unity we have around the everyday interests, concerns, and values of this world that we all share before a distinction is made about who is religious and who is secular. This is her forte because, if the literature is to be believed, she predates religion. For she was there at the beginning. The Hebrew wisdom literature, for one, asserts her presence at creation, her mediating role in its design and in the way it was made effective, and her special delight in our world and its race.
War, a rueful change-agent, is a narrow, wretched, and deceptive means for arriving at the kind of social, economic, and political life most Westerners and peoples of the Middle East would like to see achieved with each other. The war about Iraq has made this, if not anything else, clear. Instead of a war, wisdom provides paths of peace.
As noted earlier, wisdom is not an end. It is a way, a non-ideological way, to justice, peace, cooperation. Not perfect justice, or perfect peace, or perfect cooperation. No, not in this world, where we must learn to accept imperfect international agreements and arrangements. Nevertheless, she stands crying in the street and in the halls of power, awaiting our decision. Right here, right now.
Charles Strohmer is an independent researcher, seminar speaker, and author of seven books (one co-authored). He is the founding director of The Wisdom Project and a visiting research fellow of the Center for Public Justice. His articles appear in diverse publications. He is working on a book about wisdom-based approaches to U.S.–Middle East relations.
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