Fields of Blood – Karen Armstrong – Session 02

Chapter Notes:

Introduction.

 

·   “In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident.”

o   “The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.”

o   “The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past.”

o   “In the premodern world, religion permeated all aspects of life.”

·   We humans  have 3 brains:

o   the aggressive reptilian,

o    the cherishing mammal, and

o   our own reasoning neocortex.

o   “Our neocortex makes us intensely aware of the tragedy and perplexity of our existence”

·   “Much of what we now call “religion” was originally rooted in an acknowledgment of the tragic fact that life depended on the destruction of other creatures; rituals were addressed to helping human beings face up to this insoluble dilemma.”

·   “war is a means of surrender to reptilian ruthlessness,”

·   “And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us a resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.”

·   “Still, we fight. But to bring ourselves to do so, we envelop the effort in a mythology—often a “religious” mythology—that puts distance between us and the enemy”

·   “human life changed forever in about 9000 BCE, when pioneering farmers in the Levant learned to grow and store wild grain.”

·   “in societies that produce more than they need, it is possible for a small group to exploit this surplus for its own enrichment, gain a monopoly of violence, and dominate the rest of the population.”

·   “a small elite, comprising not more than 2 percent of the population, with the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses” [and this] “created a nobility with the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible.”

·   “warfare was essential to the agrarian state.”

·   “every major faith tradition has tracked that political entity in which it arose; none has become a “world religion” without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire, and, therefore, each would have to develop an imperial ideology.”

·   “If we are to meet the challenge of our time and create a global society where all peoples can live together in peace and mutual respect, we need to assess our situation accurately. We cannot afford oversimplified assumptions about the nature of religion or its role in the world.”

 

Ch 1 Farmers and Herdsmen

 

·   “The Sumerians seem to have been the first people to commandeer the agricultural surplus grown by the community and create a privileged ruling class. This could only have been achieved by force. Enterprising settlers had first been drawn to the fertile plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates in about 5000 BCE”

·   “Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.”

·   “Civilization itself required a leisured class to cultivate it, and so our finest achievements were for thousands of years built on the backs of an exploited peasantry”

·   “What role did religion play in this damaging oppression?”

·   “the aristocrats had begun to study astronomy and discovered regular patterns in the movements of the heavenly bodies. They marveled at the way the different elements of the natural world worked together to create a stable universe, and they concluded that the cosmos itself must be a kind of state in which everything had its allotted function. They decided that if they modeled their cities on this celestial order, their experimental society would be in tune with the way the world worked and would therefore thrive and endure.”

·   “The cosmic state, they believed, was managed by gods who were inseparable from the natural forces and nothing like the “God” worshipped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims today.”

·   “There was nothing secular about the Mesopotamian state and nothing personal about their religion. This was a theocracy in which everybody—from the highest aristocrat to the lowliest artisan—performed a sacred activity.”

·   “no society ever found an alternative. By the end of the fifteenth century CE, agrarian civilizations would be established in the Middle East, South and East Asia, North Africa, and Europe, and in every one—whether in India, Russia, Turkey, Mongolia, the Levant, China, Greece, or Scandinavia—aristocrats would exploit their peasants as the Sumerians did.”

·   “As the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton pointed out, all of us who have benefited from this systemic violence are implicated in the suffering inflicted for over five thousand years on the vast majority of men and women”

·   “Thus writing, originally invented to serve the structural violence of Sumer, began to record the disquiet of the more thoughtful members of the ruling class, who could find no solution to civilization’s dilemma but tried at least to look squarely at the problem. We shall see that others—prophets, sages, and mystics—would also raise their voices in protest and try to devise a more equitable way for human beings to live together.”

·   “Not everybody in the Middle East aspired to civilization: nomadic herdsmen preferred to roam freely in the mountains with their livestock.”

·   “They soon discovered that the easiest way to replace lost animals was to steal the cattle of nearby villages and rival tribes. Fighting, therefore, became essential to the pastoralist economy.”

·   By 3000 BCE Pastoralists had developed chariots and bronze weapons and controlled the plains all the way to China.

·   “Aryanreligion, therefore, gave supreme sanction to what was essentially organized violence and theft”

·   “while Aryan religion glorified warfare, it also acknowledged that this violence was problematic. Any military campaign involves activities that would be abhorrent and unethical in civilian life”

·   “The Iliad is certainly not an antiwar poem, but at the same time as it celebrates the feats of its heroes, it reminds us of the tragedy of war.”

·   “We can only piece together the progress of Sumerian militarization from fragmentary archaeological evidence. Between 2340 and 2284 BCE, the Sumerian king lists record thirty-four intercity wars.”

·   “They discovered that warfare was an invaluable source of revenue that brought them booty and prisoners who could be put to work in the fields. …  Besides gaining plunder and loot, the chief goal of any imperial campaign was to conquer and tax more peasants.”

·   “novelty was suspect, not out of timidity but because it was economically and politically hazardous. The past remained the supreme authority.90

·   “Continuity was therefore politically essential. Thus the Akitu festival, inaugurated by the Sumerians in the mid-third millennium, was celebrated each year by every Mesopotamian ruler for over two thousand years.”

·   “myth and its accompanying rituals reminded the Sumerian aristocracy of the reality on which their civilization and privilege depended; they must be perpetually primed for war to keep down rebellious peasants, ambitious aristocrats, and foreign enemies who threatened civilized society. Religion was therefore deeply implicated in this imperial violence and could not be separated from the economic and political realities that sustained any agrarian state.”

·   The Assyrians (1300’s BCE) forcibly moved people through the empire for agrarian labour.

·   “Warfare had become a fact of human life, central to the political, social, and economic dynamics of the agrarian empire, and like every other human activity, it always had a religious dimension. These states would not have survived without constant military effort, and the gods, the alter egos of the ruling class, represented a yearning for a strength that could transcend human instability.”

·   “We shall see again and again that the experience of an unusual level of violence would often shock its victims into a dualistic vision that splits the world into two irreconcilable camps. Zoroaster concluded that there must be a malevolent deity, Angra Mainyu, the “Hostile Spirit,” who was equal in power to the Wise Lord but was his polar opposite. Every single man, woman, and child, therefore, must choose between absolute Good and absolute Evil.”

·   “by projecting all the cruelty of his time onto Indra, Zoroaster demonized violence and made him a figure of absolute evil”

·   “Zoroastrianism would become the ideology of the Persian ruling class, and Zoroastrian ideals would infiltrate the religion of Jews and Christians living under Persian rule.”

 

Ch 2 India: The Noble Path

 

·   “As for the pastoralists of the Near East, Indian Aryan ritual and mythology glorified organized theft and violence. For the Indo-Aryans too, cattle rustling needed no justification; like any aristocrats, they regarded forcible seizure as the only noble way to obtain goods, so raiding was per se a sacred activity.”

·   “The Rig Veda was rita, divine order, translated into human speech.  But to a modern reader these texts do not seem at all “religious.” Instead of personal devotion, they celebrate the glory of battle, the joy of killing, the exhilaration of strong drink, and the nobility of stealing other people’s cattle. … After a successful raid, warriors would distribute their spoils in the vidatha ritual, … This was not just a glorified party, however. It was essential to the Aryan economy: a ritualized way of redistributing newly acquired resources with reasonable equity and imposing an obligation on other clans to reciprocate. These sacred contests also trained young men in military skills and helped rajas identify talent, so that an aristocracy of the best warriors could emerge. It was not easy to train a warrior to put himself in harm’s way day after day. Ritual gave meaning to an essentially grim and dangerous struggle”

·   “new wealth and leisure gave the priests more time for contemplation, and they began to refine their concept of divinity.”

·   Aryan society developed into 4 castes: priests, warriors, commoners and servants. This division limited social violence by assigning each a place.

·   The next evolution in India was strip violence of religion legitimacy, thus internalizing religion.

·   “Ritual is, therefore, the creation of fallible human beings who can never fully realize their ideals.” 

·   “An entirely different polity, however, had emerged in the foothills of the Himalayas and on the edge of the Ganges plain: the gana-sanghas or “tribal republics” that rejected monarchy and were ruled by assemblies of clan chieftains.”

·   “the Ganges region was also experiencing a commercial revolution, which produced a merchant class and a money economy. Cities linked by new roads and canals … were becoming centers of industry and business. This challenged the structural violence of the class system,  …  A new class of “untouchables” (chandalas), who had been thrown off their land by the incoming Aryans, now took the place of these aspiring workers at the bottom of the social hierarchy.”

·   “As often in times of flux, a new spirituality emerged, and it had three interrelated themes: dukkha, moksha, and karma.”

o   Dukkha – life is unsatisfactory and awry

o   Moksha – fighting your way to liberation – release from suffering

o   Karma – your deeds determine your next existence, merit can be earned.

·   These new teachings in the Upanishads reflect it was an exciting time of change.

o   The warriors imagined life without priests.

o   Worship turned from ritual to contemplation within.

o   “The Upanishads bequeathed to India a sense of the fundamental unity of all beings, so that your so-called enemy was no longer the heinous other but inseparable from you”

o   This new discovery of an inner self would become a central insight in every religion.

o   The Upanishads also challenged the warrior ethos of fighting and stealing, of wealth.

o   “New meditative techniques induced a state of mind that was “calm, composed, cool, patient and collected”: in short, the very opposite of the old agitated Aryan mentality”

·   Renouncers

o   “the renouncers eschewed aggression, owned no property, and begged for their food.72 By about 500 BCE, they had become the chief agents of spiritual change and a direct challenge to the values of the agrarian kingdoms”

o   “Some renouncers returned home, only to become social and religious irritants within the community, while others remained in the forest and challenged the culture from without.”

o   “Perhaps the most important martial ritual revised by the renouncers was yoga, which became the hallmark of renouncer spirituality.”

o   The yoga aspirant had to meet 5 ethical practices;

§  Ahimsa – nonviolence neither kill, injure or speak unkindly

§  No stealing – be indifferent to possessions

§  No lying – no deceit

§  No sex or intoxicants

§  Listen to his Guru - Cultivate serenity and courtesy.

o   Jains come from such an enlightened one – Vardhamana Jnatraputra or Mahavira.

§  Kindly to everybody, not just your own people.

§  Everything had a soul – even creatures, plants, water, fire, air, rocks

§  Jains tuned into the pain of the world.

o   Siddhatta Gotama (the Buddha). Also a renouncer.

§  Non-violent to all

§  Friendship and affection to all creatures

§  “The Buddha’s enlightenment had been based on the principle that to live morally was to live for others. Unlike the other renouncers, who retreated from human society, Buddhist monks were commanded to return to the world to help others find release from pain.”

§  Taught 4 Noble Truths

·   Existence was dukkha

·   The cause of pain is greed

·   Nirvana releases us from suffering

·   Meditation is the means

o   Jains and Buddhists

§  Became a powerful influence in India.

§  Because of non-violence could not be farmers

§  Became part of new merchant communities

o   Strangely though empires continued their ways with their war and taxes, many of the emperors were from non-violent sects.

o   Ashoka – the most famous of the ancient kings.

§  Had a conversion experience when he killed 100,000 soldiers and deported 150,000 more in Kalinga, and inscribed his remorse on a rock face.

§  Thereafter he inscribed other cliff faces or pillars with his new policy of military restraint.

§  He took up the values of the Jains and Buddhists.

§  “He realized that even if he abdicated and became a Buddhist monk, others would fight to succeed him and unleash more havoc, and as always, the peasants and the poor would suffer most.

§  Ashoka’s dilemma is the dilemma of civilization itself. As society developed and weaponry became more deadly, the empire, founded on and maintained by violence, would paradoxically become the most effective means of keeping the peace. Despite its violence and exploitation, people looked for an absolute imperial monarchy as eagerly as we search for signs of a flourishing democracy today.”

o   The Mahabharata – India’s great epic

§  Contains the Bhagavad-Gita

§  Compelled all later generations to “grapple with the dilemma” of war and peace

§  A story of gods and the sons of god at war.

§  The transition between the legendary past and present history.

§  ““For heroism is a powerful disease that eats up the heart, and peace is found only by giving it up or by serenity of mind,” Yudishthira tells Krishna.”

§  “When enemies become too numerous and powerful, they should be slain by deceit and stratagems. This was the path formerly trodden by the devas to slay the asuras; and a path trodden by the virtuous may be trodden by all.”110 The Pandavas feel reassured and acknowledge that their victory has at least brought peace to the world. But bad karma can only have a bad outcome, and Krishna’s scheme has appalling consequences that resonate horribly with us today.

§  “For centuries, the Indian national epic has compelled its audience to appreciate the moral ambiguity and tragedy of warfare; whatever the warrior’s heroic code maintained, it was never a wholly glorious activity. Yet it was essential not only to the survival of the state but also for civilization and progress and, as such, had become an unavoidable fact of human life.”  

§  “Krishna introduces an entirely novel idea: a warrior must simply dissociate himself from the effects of his actions and perform his duty without any personal animus or agenda of his own.”

§  “Many politicians and generals have similarly argued that they are only instruments of destiny when they commit atrocities”

§  “We are flawed creatures with violent hearts that long for peace. At the same time as the Gita was being composed, the people of China were coming to a similar conclusion.”

 

Chapter 3 China: Warriors and Gentlemen

 

·   Five great kings

o   The mythological “history” of China which defined the nation was a mixture of men and gods centered on “Five Great Kings”

o   Again agrarian civilization evolves in China, with its development of violence and arts.

o   Created  5 C BCE while forging the greater nation

o    “five great kings, who had discerned the order of the universe and taught men and women to live in harmony with it. These sage kings drove the other beasts away and forced humans to live separately. They developed the tools and technology essential to organized society and instructed their people in a code of values that aligned them with the cosmic forces”

§  Shen Nung – the Divine Farmer. A man of peace. Everyone to grow their own food. Led to horrible wars.

§  Huang Di – the Yellow Emperor. Organized society around the seasons – the Way (Dao) of Heaven. A great warrior. At battle with mythological creatures. Til instructed by heaven in the art of war. So civilization began as a balance of warfare and agriculture.

§  23 CBE Yao and Shun established the Great Peace. It is likely there was an agrarian kingdom in the 3d millennium. No archeology yet.

·   By the 8th C BCE China is coming out of the mythical history.

o   Life was strictly structured in all element – clothing, ritual, law

o   A feudal society -  a 4 tier aristocracy of “gentlemen” – duke, marquis, earl and baron.

o   Aristocracy limited to killing – sacrifices, warfare, & hunting. Only ones allowed meat.

o   Warfare was carried out on a cycle around the kingdom and was often largely ritual.

o   The ancient kings were held accountable to the people – an important ideal in China.

o   By the end of the 7th C BCE China was under attack both within and without.

·   Confucious (Kong Qiu 551-479)

o   Traces of these early times are found in the Confucian “The Book of Songs” 

o   “The Analects” contain many of his maxims.

o   “He never achieved the political career he hoped for and died believing that he was a failure, but he would define Chinese culture until the 1911 Revolution. With his little band of followers, most of them from the warrior aristocracy, Confucius traveled from one principality to another, hoping to find a ruler who would implement his ideas. In the West he is often regarded as a secular rather than a religious philosopher, but he would not have understood this distinction: in ancient China, as the philosopher Herbert Fingarette has reminded us, the secular was sacred”

o   Confucius redefined nobility. Benevolence was central.

o   The Golden Rule “Do not impose upon others what you yourself do not desire.” This was not personal but a political ideal.

o   “Confucianism was never a private pursuit for the individual; it always had a political orientation and sought nothing less than a major reformation of public life. Its goal, quite simply, was to bring peace to the world.”

o   “If such an attitude became habitual, a junzi would transcend the egotism, greed, and selfishness that were tearing China apart.”

o   “Despite their convictions about equality, the Confucians were aristocrats who could not transcend the assumptions of the ruling class.”

o   Mozi was leader of 180 craftsman that travelled to teach how to defend a city.

§  A Confucian

§  Concern for everybody

§  “Mozi believed that a policy could be called virtuous only if it enriched the poor, prevented pointless death, and contributed to public order.”

§  “The Book of Mozi included the first Chinese exercises in logic, all dedicated to proving that warfare was not in a ruler’s best interests. In words that still ring true today, Mozi insisted that the only way out of the destructive cycle of warfare was for rulers “not to be concerned for themselves alone.””

§  More revered than Confucious

§  “Warfare was no longer a courtly game governed by li to curb aggression; instead it had become a science, governed by logic, reason, and cold calculation”

§  War continued until 221 BCE only 1 left, and we have the first Emperor of China

§  This continuous war shows how it is mistaken to blame religion for war.

o   In the sixth century BCE also came 2 wisdom books still popular today

§  The Art of War - Sunzi (Sun Tzu)

·   “Sunzi knew that civilians would look askance at this martial ethic, but their state could not survive without its troops.  The army should therefore be kept apart from mainstream society and be governed by its own laws, because its modus operandi was the “extraordinary” (qi), the counterintuitive, doing exactly what did not come naturally.”

§  The Daodejing (The I Ching)

·   Author Laozi (Lao-Tzu) means Old Master. A compendium.

·   We read it today as a spiritual text but it was a manual of statecraft

o   The Dao (The Way)

§  a philosophy from earlier times “the cult of the extraordinary”

§  perhaps back to Neolithic

§  Daoists resisted all forms of government.

§  The Way was deep within yourself.

§   

o   But actually it was the most powerful ruler Qin who one, not a gentle Daoist.

§  Qin actually buried 400000 soldiers alive after they surrendered

§  Legal reformer Shang created the framework for Qin’s success. The law became the important rule set, neither tradition, nor religious prevailed.

§  No aristocracy but beaurocrats directly reporting to the King

§  31 districts in the country. Magistrates at the top.

§  Nobility ceased to be worth anything. Only success mattered

§  “Qin had arguably developed the first secular state ideology, but Shang separated religion from politics, not because of its inherent violence but because religion was impracticably humane.”

§  “the same ideas and imagery informed the thinking of political scientists, military strategists, and mystics. People could have the same beliefs yet act upon them very differently. Military strategists believed that their brutally pragmatic writings came to them by divine revelation, and contemplatives gave strategic advice to kings. Even the Confucians now drew on these notions: Xunzi believed that the Way could be comprehended only by a mind that was “empty, unified, and still.”

§  “The old rituals that had presented the Zhou king as head of a family of feudal lords were replaced by a rite that focused on the emperor alone. When the court historian criticized this innovation, Li Si told the emperor that he could no longer tolerate such divisive ideologies: any school that opposed the Legalist program must be abolished and its writings publicly burned. There was a massive book burning, and 460 teachers were executed. One of the first inquisitions in history had therefore been mandated by a protosecular state.”

o   The Han Dynasty – founded by Liu Bang

§  When Qin died there were 3 years of anarchy

§  Bang learned from Qin’s mistakes.

§  He knew the state needed the Legalist framework.

§  He synthesized Legalism and Daoism.

§  Emperor Wu adopted the Confucian teaching and fitted it to Legalism.

§  For 2000 years all Chinese state officials would be trained thus.

§  Yet China was still agrarian and bound by the usual constraints of that

§  “That was the Confucian dilemma—similar to the impasse that Ashoka had encountered on the Indian subcontinent. Empire depended on force and intimidation, because the aristocrats and the masses had to be held in check.”

§  “The Chinese Empire had been achieved by warfare”

§  “Contemplating this chronic warfare, Mencius had longed for a king who would rule “all under Heaven” and bring peace to the great plain of China. The ruler who had been powerful enough to achieve this was the First Emperor.”