Scarcity and War
Posted
Saturday, November 24, 2007
by
Charlie Trimm
Categories:
Military Issues
The second paper at the SBL war session was by Hector Avalos, a secular humanist who is also a professor of religious studies (at Iowa State University). He argued against two current approaches to religious violence. One is essentialism (as Ellens had just argued for). This view says that religion in its pure form is not violent, but only a deviant or fundamentalist form. Avalos argued against it by saying that the “true view” is unverifiable and a faith based view, so it is not acceptable. This desire for verifiability was the key weapon in his arsenal and got used on a variety of occasions, showing that he was apparently a logical positivist: the only things that exist are those that can be proved by reason. The other view to explain religious violence is anti-colonialism: the colonized are fighting back against those who colonized them. But Avalos pointed out that Islam colonized the west before the west colonized Islam, and hence this colonial explanation does not work in all cases. So Avalos’ proposal is scarcity: all conflict is caused by scarcity of something. This is certainly nothing new and fairly obviously explains most wars. But his contribution is to use the idea to explain religious conflict: religion creates scarcities and hence creates war. It creates scarcities in the following ways: Scripture (not all writing is inspired), sacred space (one geographical location more important because of religious reason), election (one group or person more special), and salvation (not all are saved). Or for another way of looking at it, verifiability is scarce, so violence is resorted to in order to determine solution. He then discussed five ways to deal with violent ancient texts: accept, reject, relativize, reinterpret, and allegorize. He rejects all of these because they are unverifiable and not subject to reason. His solution? Make the scarce plentiful: give everyone water, for example. He did not explain how this would work in religion, but presumably it would mean that we should make plentiful the scarce by removing any kind of scarcity: either make all divine (make all ground sacred, make everyone saved, make every writing inspired) or remove the idea of religion altogether, which is the route he has taken personally. During the question and answer time he said that verifiability is the key: if the problem is water shortage, we can verify that there is a water shortage. But if it is salvation, we cannot verify that, so we might be fighting over something that does not exist. One question posed to him he did not answer well: what if there is a scarcity that should be present, such as the scarcity of A’s in a class? Should the teacher just give all A’s? He simply said that the teacher would need to discuss that with his student, a virtual non-answer.
to add comments