The Inevitability of Moral Error, Aging’s Subsequent Chance at Redemption, and Established Religion’s Complacence in Drawing on the Power of the Latter — Chris Hedge’s Account of Bishop George Packard’s Second Civil Disobedience Arrest

07 May 2012

Citation

Chris Hedges, The People’s Bishop, Truthdig (07 May 2012)

Who is Chris Hedges, and why should we care?

Chris Hedges is a former war correspondent who wrote the insightful book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning (2003).

He has Master of Divinity degree from Harvard that gives him an ethical slant on issues that many people evaluate too shallowly.

Bishop Packard’s story has emulate-able meaning

Chris Hedges today published a story about retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard’s second civil disobedience arrest in New York City.

The Bishop’s Veterans for Peace arrest is notable, not just because he is a hierarchically important person, but because his moral example shames established religion’s complacent non-action in the face of socially obvious moral wrongs.

Accompanying Mr. Hedge’s column is Stephanie Keith’s photograph of Bishop Packard being led away in flexcuffs. He is wearing a symbolically rich, burgundy-colored church robe.

The combination of the Bishop Packard’s moral example, Keith’s telling photograph of it, and Hedge’s examination of the former bishop’s motivation makes worthwhile reading for those who are interested in living ethically significant lives.

This essay consists of two parts

The first segment reiterates Chris Hedges’ point about established churches’ non-action in the face of social moral challenge.

The second adds my twist about the inevitability of ambiguity-caused moral error and our struggle later in life to rectify it.

Background — Bishop Packard’s May Day arrest

Chris Hedges begins his article with Bishop Packard’s May Day arrest at New York City’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

He and 15 other military veterans were taken into custody after they linked arms to hold the plaza against a police attempt to clear it.

[T]hose in the thin line from Veterans for Peace, of which the bishop is a member, stood their ground. They were handcuffed, herded into a paddy wagon and taken to jail.

Veterans for Peace said:

Nearly 50 members of Veterans for Peace, Vietnam Veterans against the War and friends marched together behind a banner that read, “The War Economy Is Killing Us.”

According to Hedges, because Bishop Packard had been arrested in December 2011 for a similar act of civil disobedience, he is now faces up to 3 months in jail.

Packard continues to be motivated by having violated the “thou shalt not kill” commandment in Vietnam

During a year in Vietnam, Lieutenant Packard and his platoon had killed without remorse:

He and his men killed in each encounter from 12 to 15 North Vietnamese, Viet Cong or perhaps Chinese mercenaries. They did it clinically. He said he stopped counting how many young men and boys he killed.

‘‘But with about 30 ambushes and firefights you can do the math,’’ he said.

There was a part of him that liked to kill, that sought out the high of combat. War was at once revolting and deeply seductive.

‘‘I violated the commandment ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ ” he said.

“I became in Vietnam a professional killer. I was proud of what I could do.”

He received the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars for valor. He spent his last months in the Army teaching ambush tactics to Rangers.

But he returned home shattered, ‘‘hating the war.’’

In 1971, Packard studied to become a priest, so as to confront the moral issues Vietnam had tossed his way.

Today, Packard’s life is one of atonement

Bishop Packard said:

‘‘You get wrapped in cellophane so you can function in this world of war. Only much later, long after you come out, something pricks that cellophane and it all comes out. Then you pray. You pray, ‘Lord, forgive me for what I have done.’ And you pray to get out of this.”

Contrast Bishop Packard’s example with established religion’s complacent non-action, even in the face of obvious socio-spiritual challenges

From the idealistic perspective, the main point to religious organizations is to serve, first, as repositories of memory and, second, as frameworks of constructive spiritual action based on that knowledge.

Organizationally-remembered “sin,” accumulated over many generations, is supposed to overcome the too-short learning period afforded by our individually brief lives.

As a result of this definition, established religion is (at least arguably) supposed to provide:

institutional memory,

workable spiritual guidance,

and (when necessary)

civilly disobedient revolt against government-sponsored wrongdoing.

This last is where Bishop Packard’s moral example shames the hierarchies of established religion.

Chris Hedges’ comment regarding the failure of established churches to act appropriately

Hedges wrote:

Packard’s arrests serve as a reminder of the price that we—especially those who claim to be informed by the message of the Christian Gospel—must be willing to pay to defy the destruction visited on us all by the corporate state.

He is one of the few clergy members who dare to bear a genuine Christian witness in an age that cries out in anguish for moral guidance.

Hedges’ criticism of organized religion may not be entirely fair

It seems to me that Mr. Hedges’ criticism should more fairly be directed at church hierarchies. High-ranking religious title-holders are, after all, the ones who materially most benefit from their rank and who, presumably, are supposed to most rigorously live the mantle of their spiritual calling.

That these socially eminent personages have ignominiously failed to walk their talk is not in doubt. Church hierarchies generally parallel the self-serving orientation of those who oligarchically control humanity’s governing institutions.

From my perspective — the life-cycle’s distribution of youthful error and aged atonement

Life is short. But this motivational thorn seems to consciously surface only toward living’s end.

Here, unlike Mr. Hedges, I see in Bishop Packard’s example a subtle comment about the moving target that is moral choice, as those decisions manifest across the life cycle.

Perfectly valid decisions of one stage of life can become “sins” in another — and that is to be expected

Being of Bishop Packard’s generation, his Vietnam remembrances resonate with me, even though I was not there.

He went and killed willingly. And now appears to regret, or at least confront, the moral questionability of those actions.

I tried to go to Vietnam, but was multiply rejected on medical grounds. And, apparently unlike Bishop Packard, I knew beyond doubt beforehand that the armed conflict was morally and geopolitically wrong. Nevertheless, like then-Lieutenant Packard, I was willing to kill in violation of the “shalt not kill” commandment, despite my abhorrence for harming essentially innocent people.

Why?

The answer to this is even more complex than the lure and narcotic of war as Hedges describes them in War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. Certainly, it had to do with youth, duty, courage, and membership in a clan. But it had nothing to do with the bloodlust that characterizes many young men. I have been aware of, and girded against, my inner darkness all of my life.

More important, my thinking at the time had to do with the range of limited choices that our youthful (male) psyches give us.

Here, conservatives are correct. Genetically unmodified human nature is not perfectible. We will make age-appropriate moral errors, simply as a result of the way that evolution has fitted us out.

In my case, an eventual sense of duty to other members of my generation compelled me to think that my responsibility to them outweighed both my duty to the no-kill commandment and to my own sense of right and wrong.

Consequently, during the Vietnam era — in my opinion then and still now — morally upright people could go or stay in perfectly valid ethical compliance with spiritual beliefs and secular ethics. I respect those who went to war, just as much as I admire Mohammed Ali, who went to prison in conscientious objection to the war.

Moral ambiguity.

Pertinent here, had I gone, I would have killed just as effectively as George Packard said he did. Had I lived, I would eventually have experienced the same remorse.

The cycle of individual life cycle-based ignorance

Trespasses are the expected products of youth-experienced moral ambiguities, and atonement for these is the expected reaction of wise aging.

How should we shortcut this self-perpetuating cycle of moral ignorance?

Wise religious institutions should clarify moral ambiguity by actively living their professed ethical positions

During the Vietnam War, just as today, church hierarchies were mostly inactive. We had no institutional help in weighing duty to country and peers against abstract, situation-free moral commandments. Our religious institutions of allegedly conserved memory and spiritual wisdom failed us. We were left to drown in our individualized youthful ignorance.

Example like Bishop Packard’s May Day arrest, multiplied many times, would have clarified the proper moral balance.

There is a weighty difference (to our apish, pecking order heritage) between:

“just someone” being arrested

and

a robe-wearing bishop, or his/her equivalent, being tossed into the clink.

That is the symbolic power that underlies Stephanie Keith’s photograph of his purple robe.

The moral? — Chris Hedges is correct — socially-involved examples from church hierarchies would short-cut some of the quasi-hormonal errors that we are likely to make on the basis of youthful ignorance

Evolution is not just about survival of the fittest.

It is also about developing the social and religious institutions that actively pattern appropriate development in spiritually responsible ways.

This is Chris Hedge’s point about the contrast between institutional complacence and Bishop Packard’s lonely counter example.

Veterans for Peace says a lot, simply in joining the two words.

PeteFree.com

The Inevitability of Moral Error, Aging’s Subsequent Chance at Redemption, and Established Religion’s Complacence in Drawing on the Power of the Latter — Chris Hedge’s Account of Bishop George Packard’s Second Civil Disobedience Arrest