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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 23, 2005
On prudence
I am going on holiday through the next four weeks. Let me leave my reader if he wants to mull something that has been in my mind through the last year. It is the theme of prudence as a public virtue. To my mind prudence is inseparable from the question of martyrdom. Here is a question nobody seems to have asked perhaps owing to "political correctness". Was it prudent for Islamist terrorists to hijack airliners and fly them into office buildings? Is it prudent for others to attach explosive belts and blow people up in Palestine Iraq Afghanistan and elsewhere? The idea of murder-suicide as a form of martyrdom is something that has come out of post-modern Islam rather in the way mindless tolerance has come out of post-modern Christianity. In both cases I think a parody of the faith has turned by increments into an inversion of it. Murder-suicide as an act of martyrdom would have been inconceivable before the emergence of the Wahabi sect in modern Arabia and cognate movements in Egypt Pakistan and elsewhere. This is worth remembering when we hear the demonic suggestion that Religious martyrs are the same everywhere, they are all just fanatics. As a Christian I cannot be opposed to martyrdom per se. So it is important to grasp the difference between what makes a Christian and what makes this kind of Muslim martyr. At the very least the Christian requires to be put to death by someone else; and only as the alternative to denying Christ. He must go out of his way not to endanger persons not involved since martyrdom can do no good to someone unprepared for it. It is necessary to make this distinction in order to understand how in extremis not only Christians but Jews and some people of other faiths have been able through the centuries to choose martyrdom as a prudent act -- each believing that his own death is for the good of all people including himself. This seems shocking to the post-modern mind for which self-preservation if not actual cowardice is the highest prudential good. To the Christian mind (and Jewish Muslim Hindu) the future of man and the world is in God's hands and we have no more power over it than over tsunamis. So the idea of preserving ourselves even as a species over the longest term is vain. Christ taught expressly that we should act today out of love and take no thought of the morrow. But he said this (in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere) using language that was sometimes hyperbolic; which therefore cannot always be taken literally. In one parable for instance he commends the man who has invested his master's money for a good return over the one who safely hid the sum he was entrusted with. These are different views of prudence. The Church has taught through the centuries on solid Biblical grounds that "prudence" is among the highest virtues; that it would be actually sinful to act without taking stock of the consequences of our actions. The refusal is one of the things that drives me wild about Christian "liberals" -- who think they are holy when they have done something "altruistic" and deem irrelevant what the immediate consequences must be for others. We should do what we can in light of everything we know. Though we can't and therefore shouldn't concern ourselves with what lies beyond the threshold of our knowledge. Evil often comes of good and good of evil in the longer run; for all we know the good we do now for a present purpose will prove injurious to some other purpose we could not foresee. So be it: we cannot see far. None of us has a clue what will be the crucial issues in public life one century from now. No one could have guessed what fixes we'd be in today from the perspective of 1905. The long-run is beyond our reach. At most in politics we can operate within an horizon that stretches a few years ahead. In the long run we cannot save ourselves. In any religious view that must be left with God and we for our part must get on with the business we can see before us. And the paradox here is like the paradox of martyrdom: that no public good can be expected from the person who isn't privately and prudently co-operating with God in his own salvation. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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