"Dear GI, Please don't wear your 'crusader' patch on patrol in a Muslim country"

Got this from @dangerroom's Twitter feed, linking to this image:

Oooooooh, dear.  See the patch?  "Militum Christi."

Somebody, please go read this, or this, or this, or this, or this.  It seems to be a theme, doesn't it, almost as if there were people out there with an agenda, determined to spread hate and ignorance.

On "Just War": Understanding Pres. Barack Obama and His Nobel Speech

Augustine of Hippo, by Botticelli

UPDATED (now with more paper): An edited version of this post has now appeared in The Roanoke Times.  

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Today, Pres. Barack Obama formally received his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway.  The committee said:

The Committee knows that many will weigh his ideals against what he really does, and that should be welcomed. But if the demand is either to fulfil your ideals to the letter, and at once, or to stop having ideals, we are left with a most damaging division between the limits of today's realities and the vision for tomorrow. Then politics becomes pure cynicism. Political leaders must be able to think beyond the often narrow confines of realpolitik. Only in this way can we move the world in the right direction....

Today yet another American president is trying to renew internationalism. He reaffirms that the U.S.A. must lead together with others. Walls must be torn down. As he put it in his speech in Berlin in July 2008: "The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down".

Then, Pres. Obama gave his speech.  It's engendered quite a reaction already, mostly (in the US, at least) because he acknowledged that he has received this award even while the US is currently involved in 2 wars.  In doing so, Pres. Obama invoked the idea of a "just war", the idea that war and be wage morally, and ultimately for peace -- but a peace meaning "not merely the absence of visible conflict. Only a just peace based upon the inherent rights and dignity of every individual can truly be lasting".  Then later Pres. Obama said:

As the world grows smaller, you might think it would be easier for human beings to recognize how similar we are, to understand that we all basically want the same things, that we all hope for the chance to live out our lives with some measure of happiness and fulfillment for ourselves and our families.

And yet, given the dizzying pace of globalization, and the cultural leveling of modernity, it should come as no surprise that people fear the loss of what they cherish about their particular identities — their race, their tribe and, perhaps most powerfully, their religion. In some places, this fear has led to conflict. At times, it even feels like we are moving backwards....

Most dangerously, we see it in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint — no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or even a person of one's own faith....

It's a fascinating speech in many ways.  Agree or disagree on its merits, it's a learned speech -- one that understands its subject and that subject's history.  All in all, it's a speech that some might say is positively medieval.  I don't throw that term around lightly.

The invocation of "just war", and how it's understood comes from Augustine of Hippo.  In his City of God, Augustine wrote that wars are miserable but sometimes necessary.  A war, however, is only "just" (or, better, "justified") if it's waged defensively and aiming for an end result of last peace.  Augustine was writing in the late 4th and early 5th centuries, at the height of the Germanic invasions of the Western Roman Empire.  For Augustine, these tribes were the aggressors and their actions necessitated a military response on the part of the Roman authorities.  He wanted Christians to support those Roman military activities against the Germanic tribes.

Then, later, this understanding of war reemerged during the late 10th and early 11th centuries.  The so-called "Peace of God" movement sought to restrain violence by waging war, sometimes preemptively.  At great councils, first centered in what's now SW France but later spreading elsewhere, local nobles, commoners, monks, priests, and bishops gathered and swore oaths to God and the saints that they would respect the peace and censure/ excommunicate those who violated the peace -- this movement ultimately attempting to mimic the peace of Heaven here on Earth.  It didn't really work.  For example, in 1038, a "peace league" gathered around the city of Bourges and waged war against the breakers of the peace.  The league was eventually annihilated. 

This, however, was NOT the Crusades.  And this is an important, though often overlooked point.  As Pres. Obama noted, "no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint".  Absolutely.  When he called the First Crusade in 1095, Pope Urban II did his best to portray the expedition to Jerusalem as a "just war" in an Augustinian mold, while simultaneously marrying that idea to one of "holy war".  Urban invoked the Muslim attacks on Christians in Jerusalem and throughout the Byzantine East and the need for those of the West, his audience, to respond defensively to that threat.  Their conquest of Jerusalem and the restoration of Christianity there, Urban continued, would lead to a (perhaps apocalyptic) vision of peace.  The marriage worked, and more than 100,000 people from all over Europe went to the East, massacred Jews along the way, took Jerusalem, and massacred its inhabitants.  The crusaders reveled in that slaughter because they thought it just and righteous.  

But Urban's conception of the crusade was a willful fiction.  Not only did he not have a monopoly on the ideas flowing through crusaders' minds, he likely well knew (as Obama seems to, and now denounces) the consequences of marrying "just" and "holy" war.  Even as he assuredly thought that peace would come at the successful completion of the expedition, he likely well knew that slaughter would come.

Pres. Obama here wants to thread 2 needles.  First, he wants to separate out a thoroughly Christian (and that needs to be said, even though Obama didn't say it) idea of justified warfare from a more general understanding of holy warfare, one in which, because God is on your side, the ends always justifies the means.  Second, he wants to separate out the Christian bit of this Christian idea, essentially secularizing it, offering a more humane alternative to ideologically dogmatic realpolitik (which, really, it is -- even as oxymoronic as that sounds).  That's probably why Pres. Obama chose to close his speech with this: 

We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice. We can admit the intractability of deprivation, and still strive for dignity. We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.

This is something that Augustine seemed to understand, even if his later interpreters during the European Middle Ages fundamentally didn't.  For them, everything was ultimately zero-sum.  There was good and there was evil.  You were on one side or the other.  Obama, however, is saying that he believes that there are shades of gray here in this world that no place on this Earth can become a paradise.  For, to paraphrase Augustine, we are all pilgrims in this world; our constant wandering not necessarily dimming our hopes that we'll someday reach our destination.

Speaking of Modern Medieval Connections

Going to this event in a bit: "14th c. Western Political Theory & the Search for the Secular Islamic State".  Come join us.

Funny Medievalism of the Month

Amidst all the good, serious minded stuff that Matt has been posting while I've been silent, I saw this today and thought I'd share this medievalism: http://comics.com/get_fuzzy/2009-11-20/.

Blogging and Learning: Why Study the Middle Ages

In response to some of the posts that have recently been put up, I received this in an email from a former student (Garrick Bjur).  I share it, with his permission, in its entirety. 

I enjoy how your blog, as you said, continually looks at how the  Medieval period affects the present and how the people today see the  Middle Ages.  When I first asked myself how studying the Middle Ages  has been important to me personally, I came up with a different  reason that I thought worth sharing (that might also be relevant in  light of certain extended conversations with anonymous persons).

The thousand years of the Middle Ages is taught in Western  Civilization courses in such little time that even good professors have to settle for teaching general stereotypes in most lower-division courses.  Additionally, Hollywood has disconnected the  period from modernity with such fantastic romanticism that kids rename themselves and make costumes to pretend—not that they’re Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Martin Luther, or George Washington—but medieval knights and princesses.  The study of Medieval History has been important to me, personally, because of this “alien-ness,” and disconnectedness.

I was raised in such a way that it would have been minor blasphemy to seriously question the motives of the Founding Fathers in participating in the Revolution, the “spiritual” progress of the Reformation, the state of American politics, etc.  And I knew enough about the periods to think that I knew enough about these periods to debate with someone who contradicted me.  When, however, my surface stereotypes about the Middle Ages were dispelled, I couldn’t cite Tolkien or “A Knight’s Tale” to defend my point of view.  I had, 
essentially, a “tabula rasa.”  Because I “knew” the institutions of the Middle Ages were disconnected from modern institutions, I was free to be critical and critically appreciative of the good guys and bad guys.  As importantly, I was able to appreciate the quality of 
the academic research and discourse of the Middle Ages without feeling like my personal beliefs or values were being questioned.

I was led to these necessary conclusions.  If I could, at the same time, be critical of and appreciate St. Francis of Assisi, why couldn’t I also question while appreciating the Founding Fathers or Abraham Lincoln?  If describing the Crusades as a struggle between the evil Christian invaders and the Muslims was an over-generalization, why must I accept the generalizations we make about terrorism, politicians, or religious leaders?  People are people.  Mass movements are mass movements.   Heroes and great nations make mistakes and bad guys and rogue nations aren't often as evil as we'd like them to be.  To be sure, I studied the Middle Ages at a time when I was already questioning many of my assumptions and, already, becoming the black sheep of my family, but the study of history, and specifically of this period, further freed my thoughts to allow for complexity so that I can disagree with Bush without thinking him ill-intentioned.  So that I could condemn terrorists without condemning fundamental Islam.  For me, the Middle Ages weren’t as important for how they still affect the present as they were for how they allowed me to examine the present for what it truly is—a world as complex as the Middle Ages.

Blogging, Tweeting, and Publishing

I've been asked by JJ Cohen of In the Middle to compose something on the creation of my blog and my adventures in tweeting for an article he's working on.  The article will appear in a book centered around Geoffrey Chaucer hath a Blog, in Palgrave's New Middle Ages Series.  Now posted @ In the Middle.  Here goes...

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Modern Medieval began at the end of May 2007, mostly because I had something to say and I needed at least the illusion that there was someone out there who would listen to me.  In large part, the things I had to say came from my being a medievalist and being at Virginia Tech in the aftermath of the massacre on 4/16/07.  I saw something in the coverage of that event that was being neglected, an insight into the shooter's mentality -- one dealing with Christianity -- that no one seemed to be talking about.  So, my first substantial post was an expanded version of an op-ed I'd written for the local paper.
I got into academia because I liked the research and the teaching but also because I believe that there's a place for public intellectuals in our society.  Too often, however, academics lament that no one takes them seriously.  I think part of that is our fault.  The onus, to a large degree, falls on us academics to put ourselves out there and have something to say about something.

The blog has continued to be an extension of this idea.  But within reason.  The epigraph to the blog -- "Although long-dead, the people of the Middle Ages still have something to say." -- means something to me.  I know (a lot of) something about the Middle Ages but I'm also a well-educated US citizen, who knows what's going on in the world.  So, I try to use the Middle Ages to, as appropriate, both intellectually familiarize and destabilize the present with the past.  I try to show lines of (unexpected) continuity and problematize romanticized notions of what the Middle Ages were.  We, as both academics and medievalists, can and should contribute to the public conversation -- indeed, we must -- but the onus is mostly on us to get our voices heard. 

But this isn't just my voice.  I started the blog because I knew of other good, academic medievalist blogs.  That circle has only expanded and it welcomes newcomers with open arms.  At "Modern Medieval," I've tried to open things up too.  We did a 4-part "blog forum" with guest bloggers (parts 1, 2, 3, 4), which met its goals in that the series generated a good amount of discussion.  I've also been fortunate to have Larry Swain, also of "The Ruminate" and "The Heroic Age," as a co-blogger for some time now.  And I'm always on the lookout for other co-bloggers to help share this responsibility.  The more voices the better.

Moreover, the blog is just one way of getting our voices out there.  I see the blog as 1 part of a much larger whole.  I organize events locally, showcasing the extensive talent we have a VT and in SW Virginia more generally.  I podcast to promote events, to aid my teaching, to make the aforementioned events available to an even wider audience.  I sometimes write op-eds for the local paper.  And now, I tweet; one of a growing number who do.  I became more convinced about moving to Twitter shortly after Kalamazoo 2009.  I'm still excited about the possibilities.  I've used it for research and I've used it for more general conversation.  Now, for the first time, in Fall 2009, I've tried to integrate Twitter into my courses, telling students about my public twitter feed, using appropriate hashtags to keep material together, trying to use this form of social networking to have a public, academic conversation among professor and students beyond the classroom's walls.  It's a work in progress... 

Finally, we should be aware that there are new frontiers out there.  Facebook is the elephant in the room right now but there will be others (Google Wave?).  Blogging is just 1 thing.  Tweeting is just 1 thing.  This post, along with others, will appear in a book.  And that's another thing.  Each format reaches a substantially different audience, so it's imperative that we keep up and not be afraid to put ourselves out there.  We, as academics and medievalists, have good answers to some important questions.  Let's speak our mind.  Hopefully, some will be listening.

Fort Hood, Murder, and Islam

I don't have too much to say about this whole event, especially since nobody really knows anything about Maj. Hasan's motives at this time.  They will, however, get to talk to him eventually.  There's a lot of speculation, a lot of rumor, but little evidence to support anything.  Especially in the wake of these tragedies, even occurring as often as they unfortunately do here, rumors and speculation often turn out to be quite wrong.

This is more my point -- the speculation and rumor-mongering.  There's been a lot made of Maj. Hasan as a Muslim and some have taken this information to suggest that he may've been working for Al-Qaeda.  This seems to have a lot to do with what I recently talked about, Mr. Douthat and his blanket conceptualization of Muslims as "the enemy." 

Just stop.  Things will be figured out but "Islamic writings on his door" (by which I assume they mean "Arabic writing" since Islam isn't a language) and him saying something in Arabic don't mean anything except that he's a Muslim. 

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Oh, and 1 more thing.  After 4/16 and Northern Illinois, there's a lot of talk about letting students carry guns.  Hasan was stopped by a cop.  Others may've been firing though, trying to stop the rampage and here's what happened:

Officials were looking into whether some soldiers may have been shot accidentally by others trying to shoot the gunman. Investigators are analyzing "all the rounds, the trajectories, all the weapons, all the shots, where they came from," said Col. John Rossi, deputy commanding general at Fort Hood. "That will be determined by the investigators."

And these were soldiers, with extensive firearms training. 

Ross Douthat Thinks Islam is Evil

The battle of Hattin from a MS by Matthew Paris, 13th c.

But it's not.

The point, so I take it, of Douthat's recent NY Times editorial is that more "assertive" faiths attract converts, while the "ecumenical" denominations have lost them. (People like a tough God nowadays.) This is why, Douthat concludes, Pope Benedict XVI's outreach to schismatic Latin Mass adherents and conservative Anglicans were such strokes of genius. The real move -- and the real genius -- however, is that:

in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam....

There are an awful lot of Anglicans, in England and Africa alike, who would prefer a leader who takes Benedict’s approach to the Islamic challenge. Now they can have one, if they want him.

This could be the real significance of last week’s invitation. What’s being interpreted, for now, as an intra-Christian skirmish may eventually be remembered as the first step toward a united Anglican-Catholic front — not against liberalism or atheism, but against Christianity’s most enduring and impressive foe.

Christianity vs. Islam. Good vs. Evil. Douthat's quite comfortable with this manichean world and, in fact, he might be right that that's exactly what Benedict XVI's doing -- using an external "enemy" to broaden Catholicism's tent. That latter bit is more troubling than the former. Douthat can think what he wants. There are plenty of people who are foolish enough to think that you can reify a religion -- any religion -- then chop it down to its "most basic" elements, thus ignoring context and historical circumstance. Whatever. But is the Pope doing this too?

As Douthat notes, Benedict has indeed done this before, in his Regensberg address. Benedict was a medievalist, after all, so why not look back to Urban II or Innocent III as models? Better yet -- stunningly -- how about Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny? This last guy might not seem to fit but there does seem to be a pattern here. Benedict says of Peter:

he showed care and solicitude even for those who were outside the Church, in particular for the Jews and Muslims: to foster knowledge of the latter he had the Quran translated.

Mostly, Benedict speaks of Peter's love of "peace." Ironic. Dominique Iogna-Prat has done some excellent work on Abbot Peter and what Benedict doesn't tell you is that Peter had the Quran translated so that Christians might better write polemics against Islam and so that Christian preachers might better work to convert the infidel. Abbot Peter was a staunch advocate for the Templars, for Crusades against the enemies of Christ, for the persecution of the Jews. Ultimately, Peter was concerned with constructing an intellectual wall around Christendom, where all non-Christians -- Jews, Muslims, heretics -- wouldn't be able to touch/ to stain/ to pollute the faithful.

This was where a manichean world-view led in the late Middle Ages. Christians vs. non-Christians. Good vs. Evil. This was the path that led to the crusader sack of Constantinople, to the Albigensian Crusade, to the provisions of Lateran IV, to the office of the Inquisition, to the expulsion of the Jews from the fledgling nations of Europe.

This is a path we ought not retread and a path both Douthat and Pope Benedict ought be aware of. Benedict is not Peter the Venerable, nor is he Pope Innocent III, but Benedict is no liberal either.

"Mad Men" & Memory

Unless you've been living under a rock or have had more productive things to do, the interwebs have been agog about the AMC series "Mad Men." I admit to being sucked in as much as anyone else. I tore through the 1st 2 seasons on DVD in a couple of weeks and now am fully engrossed.

What I find most interesting, however, is the current cultural reaction to the show. Much like The Sopranos, the show particularly excites the comments of cultural critics (these are just 2 that I particularly like), while at the same time seeming to engender a longing for the unmitigated cool of the late 50s & early 60s. Hilton and Banana Republic, among many others, are 2 companies actively promoting tie-ins to the show, playing explicitly off that cool factor. You can even "Mad Men" yourself. Yes, that's (kind-of) me up in the corner... Anyway, this seems to be borne out by the demographics of the viewership - relatively young (majority under 50) and quite wealthy (many making more than $100k/ year).

That's what interests me.

What excites me about the show is how you have to pay attention to really get it. It shows you how cool Don Draper is, how neat martini lunches were, how wholesome family life in the late 1950s and early 1960s was, and how simple life seemed. It takes you in, makes you inhabit those memories, evokes nostalgia for this simpler time, and then (pardon my language) poops all over those thoughts. This is a society on the cusp of something transformational. The Civil Rights movement and Vietnam particularly stalk this seasons' shows. The thing is, the main characters are all on the wrong side of that transformation. They're standing in the way of progress. If you're paying attention, if you think about what they're doing and why they're doing it, you're not supposed to like any of these characters. You may well be able to understand them but it's hard to really like them.

I write here quite a bit about nostalgia, how we today are as guilty of it as our predecessors ever were. I try to warn about the dangers of nostalgia. It leads us to ridiculous positions, like lionizing certain periods and peoples by fossilzing them by only 1 of their many characteristics. Nostalgia makes you say dumb things like calling one group of people "the greatest generation," thereby eliminating their many foibles and utterly negating the contributions of others.

I don't think "Mad Men" is playing into that (even if others, like Hilton and Banana, are trying to profit off of it anyway) but I began to worry that people aren't paying attention -- much like many viewers who don't understand that "The Colbert Report" is satire. But, then I took another look at those demographics of "Mad Men's" viewers. If the majority of the viewership is under 54 (or even under 49), they would likely only hazily remember this period. Most of these viewers wouldn't remember this period at all. But if they did, they were Don and Betty's kids -- Sally, Bobby, and Gene -- who are little more than window-decoration for the adults (not a surprise then that the actors who play the kids aren't even listed on the "Mad Men" website). Sally's emotions when her grandfather died are ignored. Bobby's little more than a nuisance to his parents. We haven't seen Gene in a number of episodes now. The parents do anything and everything but spend time with them or show any interest in them at all. Certainly, this isn't to say that all parents from this period ignored their children but it complicates the picture.

And the show overall does this well, stripping off the superficial veneer that nostalgia paints the past with, forcing you -- if you're paying attention -- to ask some tough questions about people, behavior, and events that we might not otherwise question. And doing that, I think, can only be a good thing.

South Carolina as the New Byzantium

This past Summer, the me and the family took a little beach vacation to Hilton Head, SC. Beautiful beaches, upscale community, nice time had by all.

Getting there from I-95, you have to take some relatively small roads. Indeed, getting from Hilton Head to anywhere else requires a number of small-ish roads. On those parts of the drive I was struck by the stunning number of abandoned cars we saw on the side of the road. None, however, were burnt out or were missing tires. All were in pretty good condition, almost like the rapture had finally come. I was utterly confused by what I saw until I remembered this:

I was in Le pelerinage de Charlemagne and South Carolina is the new Byzantium! Those cars weren't abandoned but were simply left there to be reclaimed later by their rightful owners, who would have no reason to fear that anything would happen to their cars. A resurrected, imaginary paradise...

But, wait. Does that make me Charlemagne? And what does that make Gov. Mark Sanford?

UPDATE: and now, which character's Cong. Joe Wilson (R-SC)?