Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Our Wounds and Our Power

January 25, 2004
Palo Alto, CA
Reverend Amy Zucker

When I discovered the works of Agatha Christie, lo, these many years ago, I discovered a literary type: the retired officer of the army of the British Empire. No doubt memory exaggerates, but these colonels or majors seemed to pop up once every second or third novel. They were friendly, blustery, and abrupt--a sort of military-class good old boy, with splendid British names like Easterbrook and Summerhayes. They were vaguely comic to me and not a little pathetic, with their mutterings to themselves (and anyone else who would listen) about the fading glories of empire. Although I knew little of British history or the meaning of colonialism, my half-conscious response was "Who cares?" How could they invest so much of their estimation of themselves and their country in whether that country was successfully suppressing the inhabitants of India, or winning the battle against the Dutch for which European power would control the fate of South Africa? How sad, to consider the new generation irresponsible because it didn't clutch so hard onto empire as they had. Yes, their empire was on its way out, and good riddance.

The thing was, these were nice guys. They never, in my recollection, committed the murder (though since Agatha Christie broke every convention of her genre, there must have been at least one case when one of them did). They were disgusted by cruelty to animals and they upheld the decencies of civilization. And yet they saw empire, not as an evil that ought to be eradicated, but as a wonderful thing whose departure should be mourned. How confusing. I was reading these books in the mid-1980s, when "the Evil Empire" was a catchphrase and the Star Wars movies were coming out like clockwork to cheer the cause of the rebels against the empire. Empire was not a nice word. It was the paradox of British culture as a whole: this devotion to empire, with all its inherent cruelty and injustice, on the one hand, and this declaration of noble sentiments on the other.

Well, it's not the '80s anymore, I'm not 14, and in the intervening years, I've come to realize that I live in an empire too. I'll make my case for why I think our country's foreign policy is largely imperial in intent and effect. What concerns me most this morning is what that does to the state of our souls. I believe that like those blustery majors, we are trying to follow two contradictory impulses. I believe that the glories of empire not only bend the backs of colonial inhabitants around the world, but afflict us as well, its supposed beneficiaries back in the home state.

The title, "Our Wounds and Our Power," refers to a poem Adrienne Rich wrote about Marie Curie. Curie's brilliant career reached one of its many peaks early, when she and her husband isolated the pure form of radium. Pierre died just a few years later in a street accident. She lived thirty years more, long enough to contract leukemia - a predictable, almost inevitable fate for a woman who had spent all her career working with radioactive elements, when people were just barely beginning to understand how dangerous they were. Her accomplishments vaulted her over the ridiculous notion that a woman could not be a great scientist, and earned her the status she deserved. And then, in the end, they brought about her death. The poem is called "Power," and the relevant passage goes like this:

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified

It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

Empire has many aspects, and I won't try to talk about most of them this morning. But I call our country's foreign policy imperial by a simple definition: an empire is a form of government in which the people are ruled by a foreign power and its proxies. It stands in contrast to a democracy, in which the people are ruled by themselves or by representatives they freely choose.

Curie's wounds came from the same source as her power–what about our power? If our power to control our future, our economy, the direction of other countries' policies as they affect us, depends upon empire - which is to say, upon violence and injustice, which always back it up–then what wounds do that violence and injustice inflict upon us? What happens to us if we deny those wounds?

Unlike Curie, who could not have found healing from her cancer in 1934 whether she acknowledged the cause of her symptoms or not, for us, the difference between acknowledgment and denial can be the difference between life and death. That's partly about literal destruction, since the chickens usually come home to roost to an empire in time, and most empires collapse eventually of their own overextension: look at Rome, look at England, look at the Soviet Union. So there's that concern, but this morning I'm talking about spiritual death. The death of our democracy, the ideals that we hold sacred; and the death of our souls, because to deny one's actions is to split oneself into two halves as with an axe.

We are creating an empire - have created it since the beginning, since the Monroe Doctrine and belief in manifest destiny in those early decades, since we invaded Cuba three times in 1848 (the beginning of a long adventure in unsuccessfully trying to suppress that one small country in our hemisphere). The treaty that ended the Spanish-American War, the Treaty of Paris in 1898, was signed between Spain and the United States, without representatives from any of the colonies it concerned: neither Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, nor Puerto Rico. In that era, such figures as Theodore Roosevelt openly urged the creation of an American empire, with the same logic that the British used: it was our responsibility to civilize these benighted people in other countries. (Andrew Carnegie, of all people, was an active anti-imperialist of that time, and bitterly noted that "about eight thousand [Filipinos] have been completely civilized and sent to heaven.") Today, the justification has changed, but the fact remains the same: although we insist upon the government of the people, by the people, here at home, around the world we are too often the foreigner ruling over the people.

In order for us to accept this state of things, as people who value democracy and believe in it, we have implicitly to take the position that democracy must not be for everyone - that some people aren't capable of governing themselves. The British called it the white man's burden: to civilize those who had not attained their level of civilization. But it wasn't only applied to non-whites. It is the rationalization used by every nation that finds that control of another nation most suits its purposes. That way, intervention can be disguised as an act of mercy. We were on the receiving end of that argument 230 years ago, as 19th century anti-imperialist and Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote:

Sir George Trevelyan, in the best history of the American Revolution yet written, tells us that, when the war began, George III., his ministers, and his army agreed in the opinion that "no population was ever composed of worse men or poorer creatures than the rebellious town of Boston." Probably there never yet was an insurrection, large or small, in which the party apparently stronger did not honestly believe the weaker party to be utterly incapable of self-government.¹

Now, we look back and wonder: who was less capable of grasping the concept of democracy, the colonials who refused taxation without representation, or the colonizers who imposed the taxes? The rebels who insisted on self-government, or the monarchy that paternalistically deemed them incapable of it - and backed up its paternalism with force?

We, of course, are defending the world from empire, or so the Cold War argument ran, and many arguments before and since. Now that we are no longer the colonized, but more often, the colonizer, we use the same argument the British did. One hundred years ago, President McKinley was defending the Filipinos from the empire of Spain, though the "temporary" military occupation of the Philippines was supposed to end promptly with the establishment of a Filipino civilian government. It in fact went on for several decades.

We are not comfortable seeing ourselves as imperialists. And so we give other reasons for controlling other adult humans' fates - for deciding unilaterally that what we call their safety is more important than their freedom - for imposing the kind of rule that we indignantly shook off 230 years ago. We overthrow a democratically elected government because it interferes with our political or economic ends: Chile, Haiti, you can supply your own list . . . We bring military power to overthrow a genuine tyrant, as in the Philippines, but then we become the next tyrant, keeping our armed hold on the government for decades. It happened there, and we'll see what happens in Iraq, as the deadline approaches for us to turn over power to a civilian government, and already the date is starting to be renegotiated. We tell ourselves that we should feel all right about invading Afghanistan because the Taliban are cruelly controlling of women - as if our government had taken any interest in the fate of Afghan women before it needed to marshal support for this war, and as if we don't turn a blind eye to violations of women's human rights when they are committed by our allies. But these are the kinds of reasons we need to tell ourselves because we sense the division within ourselves, the division between our democracy at home and our imperialism abroad.

We want to be nice. Everyone wants to be nice. There are very few tyrants who come right out and say they want to be tyrannical. The British did not, by and large, consider themselves to be tyrants. They believed themselves to be the pinnacle of civilization - not only the strongest, but the best and most exalted of nations–while also imposing laws on other countries that condemned their inhabitants to little better than slavery. How does one hold such conflicting attitudes in one's mind at the same time? For the upholders of the British Empire, it was the principle of the white man's burden: they had not only the right, but the duty, to rule people who, in their judgment, could not rule themselves.

But, you see, it's hard to rule oneself. Democracy is messy. Democracies don't always choose wisely. The people may be foolish; they may elect bad governments that bring disaster upon themselves and upon their neighbors. But we chose democracy 230 years ago, deciding, as Churchill would say years later, that it is the worst form of government except all the others. It is the most basic tenet of the American soul that freedom means self-rule. A democratic country may aspire to empire, but when it does, it is not bringing democracy, but keeping democracy only for itself. Carnegie pointed out the hypocrisy over a century ago. He asked: "Is the Republic, the apostle of Triumphant Democracy, of the rule of the people, to abandon her political creed and endeavor to establish in other lands the rule of the foreigner over the people, Triumphant Despotism?"²

What does it do to our souls to argue for democracy at home, and at best paternalism, at worst violent intervention, abroad? What does hypocrisy always do? To say one thing and do another, to try to believe two contradictory things, requires that we be divided from ourselves. A nation can be divided from itself by some members believing one thing and others another - that isn't hypocrisy, that's just disagreement, and it happens all the time, in a democracy or any other nation. But I think it would be too easy to say that some Americans get it and some don't, that some of us are imperialistic and some completely committed to democracy. The division runs through each one of us, the wound cutting us into two, the civil war dividing ourselves from ourselves. Each of us needs to confront the emperor within ourselves.

As Rich observed about Curie, wounds may be inflicted by the same thing that bestows blessings. Perhaps even if Curie had recognized that the source of her power had inflicted mortal wounds upon her, she wouldn't have wished to go back - to give up the two Nobel Prizes and the position at the Sorbonne, the worldwide fame and the awards from the Royal Society. Perhaps we want the privileges of empire - the economic stability, the power to call the shots even though we are only a small percentage of the world's population, the ability to rally allies around ourselves even when they are very reluctant. Those here (and I know I'm speaking of most of the room) who did not and do not support the current administration, can sit back to watch it, shaking our heads at its hypocrisy and claiming a clear conscience.

But that would be just as hypocritical as what it decries. Democracy demands so much more than voting against politicians whose policies seem less democratic or republican (with a small d and a small r) than imperialistic. The bumper stickers that say "Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy" absolve us too easily.

Democracy demands of us that we question–that we question not only our leaders and our neighbors, but ourselves–and that we act. It asks us each to ask ourselves how we benefit from living in the home state of an empire, and whether we are willing to give up those benefits. That may mean fewer jobs; it may mean tripled fuel prices . . . I admire Utah Phillips for saying "My car doesn't run on blood," and leaving it behind for a while, but am I willing to do the same? Democracy asks so much of us: to continue to ask, again and again, whether we are in fact enacting democracy in all that we do and all that we support, and to act on what we see. We, along with the most ardent empire-builders, have benefited from the status quo. Are we willing to change it at the cost of those benefits?

I began with the words of a radical poet; I will close with the words of a conservative one. Rudyard Kipling, who was nothing if not a cheerleader for British imperialism, wrote a sobering warning on the occasion of, of all things, of all patriotic things, Queen Victoria's Jubilee. He reminded his readers not only that all empires must meet the same fate as the ones of old, but that empire alienates us from our ideals. The British called others heathen and lawless, but Kipling questioned whether they themselves were heeding their religion. And so he wrote these verses:

Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire;
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard—
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding calls not Thee to guard.
For frantic boast and foolish word,
Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

The "heathen heart" of which he speaks is clearly not African or Indian but English: the heart that trusts in the reeking tubes of guns and the iron shards of bullets. Elsewhere, in another verse, Kipling chides his people for being "drunk with sight of power." They are failing in their stated aspiration to be moral, to be civilized, to be the most civilized of any people they encounter. They have traded in their noble ideals for power.

The poem is called "Recessional" - as if Kipling foresaw the retreat of his beloved empire from its holdings around the world. It would hold on through two world wars, but the title seems to see the end coming. And it is a prayer for mercy, for it suggests that to believe that our petty empires can, or even should, last is an affront to God, who treasures a humble heart greatly and power not at all. How much more is empire spiritual death for those who put their faith in human freedom, and proclaim that their religious task is to serve the good of humanity and its world.

A nation divided against itself cannot stand. A people that proclaims one belief and acts upon another will in time crumble from its lack of integrity - literally, from its members being unable to hold the two halves of their souls together. Our faith, the faith both of this church and of the American experiment in democracy, calls us to wholeness.

1. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Where Liberty Is Not, There Is My Country,”Harper's Bazaar (Aug. 12, 1899).

2. Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth (New York: The Century Co., 1901). Originally published in the North American Review (Aug. 1898)