Somebody must have sense enough to dim the lights

I was talking today at the midweek Communion Service at St John's Seven Kings about Martin Luther King's story, from his Love your enemies sermon, of driving with his brother when none of the cars travelling in the opposite direction would dim their lights. King applies this story to the history of civilization saying:

"Somebody must have sense enough to dim the lights, and that is the trouble, isn't it? That as all of the civilizations of the world move up the highway of history, so many civilizations, having looked at other civilizations that refused to dim the lights, and they decided to refuse to dim theirs. And Toynbee tells that out of the twenty-two civilizations that have risen up, all but about seven have found themselves in the junkheap of destruction. It is because civilizations fail to have sense enough to dim the lights. And if somebody doesn't have sense enough to turn on the dim and beautiful and powerful lights of love in this world, the whole of our civilization will be plunged into the abyss of destruction. And we will all end up destroyed because nobody had any sense on the highway of history. Somewhere somebody must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love."

We were thinking about Isaiah 10. 5 - 16 and the sense there that God was speaking in and through the clash of civilisations at the time. In the passage, God's message is understood in terms of warnings and punishment. I was suggesting, using Martin Luther King's story, that, after Jesus' life, ministry, death and resurrection, God's message and work in and through history is best understood as movement towards love for enemies.

Interestingly a significant practical example of movement in such a direction within the clash of current civilisations can be found in the interview with Emma Sky published in today's Guardian about her role with the US military during the surge in Iraq. Such work, one would expect to be the polar opposite of King's dimming of lights but her explanation of what occurred throws up some interesting synergies.

Sky says:

'"There was a power struggle going on at every level, a communal struggle for power and resources. I knew from my time in Kirkuk that politics drives this kind of instability, and that politics needs to be managed to bring down violence. I believed Iraqis were using violence to achieve political goals. We had to stop stigmatising these people. We had to stop calling these people the enemy. We needed to identify all the different the groups and ask, 'why are they fighting? What are the drivers of instability?"'  

'"It meant we would have to start dealing with people we had been fighting and for any commander that is a very difficult thing to do. We couldn't afford to say 'we'll only deal with people as long as they haven't got blood on their hands'. We've all got blood on our hands," Sky says.'

'The campaign was given an Arabic name, Fardh al-Qanoon – imposing the law. As an important first step, US troops began to move out of their bases to live among the local population.

And they had to do two things which were fundamentally counter-intuitive; prioritise protecting the population rather than trying to defeat the enemy; secondly, reach out to the armed groups which were killing civilians and soldiers.

"The general challenged his soldiers to understand the causes of instability, to understand the 'why' not just describe the 'what'." He would tell the soldiers, 'the average Iraqi is just like you and me, they want to have their breakfast, take their kids to school and go to work. They are good people they are not our enemy'. People were using violence to achieve political objectives, so we had to create a process where they could achieve their objectives without violence."'

The interview explains how this campaign was implemented and how it helped in reducing fatalities from 15,960 Iraqi civilians killed in violence during 2007 to 4,859 in 2008, while US casualties went from 904 in 2007 to 314 in 2008.

Sky talks of being driven to find a way of improving the situation in Iraq. She says, "I don't want to live in a world where we see the killing of innocent civilians and don't yearn to stop it. However, the Iraq war should have taught us, if nothing else, about the limitations of our own power."

Clearly what she describes is a complex situation and one to which there continue to be many and varied responses, including viewing Sky as flawed for becoming part of the US military machine for a time. Yet what she describes, seen from her perspective, would seem to be a deliberate attempt to try to dim the lights which then contributed in part to a significant reduction in violence.

If, from a Christian perspective, we suggest that God can be found in initiatives which enable civilizations to dim their lights, then it may be that we should see something of God in the initiative that Sky describes.

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Edwin Starr - War.