The Disposition of the Heart

In the 1740’s, tensions between Europe and the Moslem world were at their usual high level.  The final Crusade was less than 500 years in the past, a European fleet had turned back a Turkish invasion at Lepanto only 170 years before, and the Turkish army had besieged Vienna 80 years ago.  Sea warfare continued the ages-old struggle, and the new nation soon to rise, America, would fight its first battles after independence against the pirates of Tripoli.  In the midst of all this, a devout lady wrote to John Wesley, founder of Methodism, inquiring earnestly whether it was true that all Moslems went automatically to hell, a common belief at the time.  Wesley’s response to her was one of history’s great statements about inter-faith, and inter-cultural, understanding: “Of the judgments of God, I cannot speak.  But this I know, that God looks not to the clarity of the mind, but to the disposition of the heart.”

This is, in a way, our biggest challenge these days in dealing with Iran.  The statements of someone like Ahmadinejad strike us as at best irrational, and possibly the ravings of a monster seeking our destruction. He is speaking the political cant of a culture so different from ours, and with such a history of strained relations, that a common clarity of the mind seems impossible to reach.  We must seek, like God, to penetrate past that to an understanding of the disposition of not just his, but the heart of a people.  For while diplomatic exchanges are between individuals, wars are between peoples.  The insincerity he exudes when disclaiming any attempt at nuclear weaponry may or may not represent how the Iranian people will actually behave.  Real dangers of nuclear proliferation must be avoided, but so also must be “daggers of the mind” that arise out of cultural misunderstanding.

Beyond peoples, our enemy here is the widening gap in progress and modernization between ours and the developing world.  While we struggle over iphones, they struggle to bring electricity to isolated villages.  Nuclear power to us is a kind of luxury, easily turned to weaponry.  To Iran, it may be a necessity, both for bringing electricity to those villages and as a barrier against the invasions (from Iraq) and the interventions (from us) they have experienced within their lifetimes.   As the technology gaps widen, the cultural gaps widen even more.  We must seek past the cultural misunderstanding to understand each other as people. 

That is at the heart of the need for less inflammatory language, and less drawing of lines in the sand.  President Obama is right in his stout support for the right of free speech, even when it is obnoxious and blasphemous.  But that right must be exercised and that speech must be spoken, and understood, responsibly, with awareness of the cultural differences that impede understanding.  Censorship cannot be imposed, but self-censorship must be encouraged.  The right of free speech must not be construed as an invitation to the use of derogatory language.  The struggle against extremism must continue, but each side must focus as much on the extremists of their own nation as on the extremists from elsewhere. To do otherwise invites escalation into war.