The odd couple of global spirituality
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Miguel d'Escoto, the current president of the United Nations General Assembly,
stole the torch from the world leaders attending the UN gathering in New York
last week by single-handedly infusing a new and much-needed energy and
importance into his role. It was a moment rarely seen before in the
organization's history.
Reform of the UN, particularly in regards to empowering the General Assembly,
may have stalled, but the real engine for such changes are bold, outspoken
figures like d'Escoto, a former Sandanista-sympathetic priest. Such leaders can
instill passion and enthusiasm in a UN bureaucracy at present run by veteran
bureaucrat secretary general Ban Ki-moon, who after two years is finally
beginning to shed his intolerable reticence and bring out the
fire within him. In all, the UN has made a minor leap forward.
But, while the secretary general still remains on a steep learning curve,
d'Escoto is riding high on a wave of popularity. He has boldly criticized the
"shameful and deplorable" world conditions of today, attacked the failed
"neo-liberal economic policies" and the Wall Street culture of "greed" and
"selfishness" that has left "more than half the world's people" to "languish in
hunger and destitution."
At a time of mounting global economic problems, when the US government is on
the verge of rescuing Wall Street moguls at taxpayers' expense without slapping
even one corporate CEO on the wrist, there is a large audience around the world
for the powerful voice of d'Escoto. People want to hear his scathing assessment
that the root cause of the current global crisis is the fact that "a small
group of global corporations and financial institutions" control the world.
D'Escoto wants to democratize the UN by restructuring the Security Council, and
he aspires to see a real democratization of global capitalism.
Equally important, d'Escoto wants to pioneer a genuine spiritualization of the
UN and, indeed, world politics. This is not so much because the priest in him
dictates a perpetual evangelization, but because he is convinced that a
cultural change, away from excessive materialism and insufficient spirituality,
is a sine qua non for changing world politics in the direction of a more
just and egalitarian system.
Indeed, this much was clear in d'Escoto's remarks at an interfaith gathering on
the sideline of UN meetings where Iran's president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, was a
keynote speaker.
Both men echoed each other in their respective monotheistic beliefs, the
prioritization of justice and the need for solidarity with the destitute and
the needy. Ahmadinejad professes his own version of Islamic liberation theology
that resonates with d'Escoto's liberation theology. This parallel is stronger
than in the past given Ahmadinejad's new accent on the compatibility of Islamic
and Christian messianism and in light of his UN speech in which he predicted
the rise of the Hidden Imam "accompanied by Jesus".
The narrowing of gaps between Shi'ite and Christian apocalypticism was in full
display that night as the Iranian president and the president of the UN General
Assembly spoke in unison regarding the need for spirit in the spiritless world.
Although d'Escoto's discourse, however, seemed a full embrace of Marcuse's
lament of the "one-dimensional man", that is, a critique of capitalism's
reification of social relations that harkens back to the young Karl Marx.
Interestingly, the former leftist priest from Nicaragua and the former Basij
(civilian militia) volunteer in the Iran-Iraq war seemed to share a great deal
in their use of leftist-socialistic vocabulary. In fact, Ahmadinejad invoked
the term "hegemony" a half dozen times in his speech before the General
Assembly.
A Gramscian, anti-hegemonic bloc of Iran and Nicaragua, and other Latin and
Central American states opposed to US domination, was thus put on plain display
at an inter-religious forum that was supposed to promote the cause of dialogue
across religious divides. Yet it was clearly a dual dialogue in which the
anti-hegemonic subtext of Ahmadinejad and d'Escoto lurked behind their overtly
religious pronunciations, although in contextualizing their thoughts it appears
that Latin-left populism, also discernible in the behavior of Brazil's
president, Luis Inacio Lula de Silva, has left an indelible mark on the mindset
of Iran's Shi'ite leadership.
Of course, this is not to overlook certain dissimilarities, as d'Escoto avoids
a fundamentalist diagnosis of global problems as rooted in "forgetting God".
Rather, he manifests a pluralistic approach that respects atheistic and
agnostic groups and avoids labeling them, while simultaneously stating his own
personal predilections and belief system rooted in Christianity.
Such spirited attempts to "bring faith" back on the world stage as an essential
element of struggle for justice naturally have their own detractors. This is
reflected in a new film, Religulous, by US comedian Bill Maher that
mocks world religions basically as irrational and superstitious. Historically,
however, hard times have as a rule represented a booming time for religion, as
prayer and faith in God act as palliative remedies, prompting greater empathy
for the poor and the hungry. This recalls Marx's wisdom that religion brings
heart to a 'heartless world". The trick is, of course, how to tap into
religion's positive avowal and solidaristic epistemology without at the same
time embracing their not-so-enviable dark side that is associated with
dogmatism and absolutism.
This is an open-ended question that, perhaps, can be tackled better via
in-depth and on-going dialogue among religions. What die-hard secularists in
the West, and other parts of the world, fail to understand is that
"world-historical religions" are the byproducts of human civilizations that
bring harmony as well as discord and division.
This dual role and impact of religion notwithstanding, there are obvious pros
and cons to any new wave of "religionization" of world politics. Yet d'Escoto
and other like-minded thinkers are on the right track when they place the
emphasis on spirituality, and faith in god, as a wellspring of global
solidarity. "I was influenced by my father and he instilled this way of
thinking in me as a child," d'Escoto told his audience that night, reminding
them that the young generation lacks this dimension and has been indoctrinated
by an "I culture". The alternative "we culture" spearheaded by the UN, this is
what the world desperately needs today, otherwise we are "lost in the mania of
capitalist greed."
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of
"Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping
Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author
of
Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction. For his
Wikipedia entry, click here.
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