Valson Thampu

I write this even as ominous clouds of a potentially cataclysmic war lour over the Middle East. War is exciting, irresistible grist to the media mill. War may be bad news, if not for humanity as a whole, at least for those who are directly afflicted by it. But it is a gold mine for media entrepreneurs. CNN, for example, became a household name in India, and many countries in the world, thanks to the Iraq war. Do you want to attain instant fame as a journalist? Become a war-reporter; ideally one ‘embedded’ in one of the two warring factions.
What is it that makes war such a mouth-watering media banquet? What is the psychology underlying its appeal? None of us wants to be afflicted by war. Yet, nearly everyone is stimulated by a war raging at a safe distance. Strangely, this doesn’t strike us as odd!
Try this out, if you have the time. Watch CNN and Al-Jazeera on the Israel-Hamas war. You will see the former focus almost entirely on the unprovoked atrocities inflicted on the Jews. Spine-chilling visuals and videos of Hamas-ravaged homes -husbands butchered, little infants abducted, old women brutalized, young men shot in cold blood, girls outraged, unsuspecting dancers in a music festival of the youth massacred – spiced with real-time transmissions of the rockets and missiles raining on Israel. Now switch to Al Jazeera. You will see bombs raining on Gaza, the apocalyptic devastation they cause on the ground -parents running helter-skelter with bleeding children, houses reduced to debris, corpses and bruised bodies being extricated from the rubble, forlorn faces of the famished and the shell-shocked, and a great deal more- doctored with expert discussions aimed at sharpening the righteous indignation of viewers against Zionist brutality as though it is only an iron-fisted one-sided blow. What you see on the one, you won’t see on the other; and you begin to wonder if both channels are covering the same event.
We have known for long that war involves a summary suspension of truth. Everything is permissible, as a cliché goes, in love and war. It is impossible to care for truth and fight -or, even want to fight- at the same time. Truth is the soul of ahimsa, or non-violence. In theory, we love truth and hate untruth. But, we have far greater affinity to war than to peace. War-reporting is, consequently, a thousand times more exciting than peace-broadcasting. War-reportage, to be exciting, has to partake of the psychology of war-mongering. Both short-change truth.
This notwithstanding, our residual affinity to truth persists. It is inelegant to dish out blatant falsehoods as truth. So, truth is short-shriven without seeming to do so. That is done by substituting truth with opinions. Media-coverage of war, like prime-time news hour discussions, is a veritable kabadi of opinions. This is in sync with the spirit of the times. Since the Age of Enlightenment, the objectivity of truth is substituted with the subjectivity of opinions. It is intellectually fashionable to be sceptical of objective truth.
Spirituality, being predicated on truth, involves the discipline, as Soren Kierkegaard argued, of renouncing subjectivity in favour of objectivity, especially in respect of oneself. It implies the duty to balance the subjective and the objective as in treating others as we would be treated. Would it occur to the protagonists of the Jewish state or of Hamas to be disciplined in this fashion? Would they remain popular, and in control, if they did? The pathos of leadership is that leaders get caught in nets of their own making. A leader who refuses to be bound by prevailing opinions will be hated and eliminated by his own. That sounds familiar, right? Well, we commemorate it as the martyrdom of the Mahatma.
No worldly system can be different to the CNN-Al Jazeera mode. Think, for a moment, of the impassable gulf between Christian denominations. Formidable walls of opinions -sanctified as dogmatic truths- stand like the Great Wall of China between them. Unity, as Jesus implied in his high priestly prayer (St. John 17), is a function of truth. Where there is truth, there will be unity. Jesus, the Truth, we say, is the foundation of the Church. But what is the Church? Each one of us feels obliged to believe that it is only our respective denominations. Is that valid? Well, here too it is my opinion against yours. Interrogate this, and at once the stage is set for a spirited confrontation. Every theological controversy, every parochial skirmish is no more than a clash of opinions. They are low-grade variants of the Palestine fever. We subscribe to our partial views as zealously as Hamas holds on to its views, and as menacingly as the Jews hold on to theirs. The renunciation of objectivity and the deification of subjectivity seems, especially when religion is invoked, a pious duty.
While a hot war rages in Palestine, a cold war simmers in Christendom. The Jews and Palestinians fight each other in the name of God for the possession of land. The cold war of Christendom remains an unhealing sore, sustained in the name of God for the proprietorship of believers. Jesus was the sword of truth against the man-invented truth of sword -the purblind clash or partisan interests- which the denizens of Christendom have not been able to outgrow in centuries.