Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  They trust themselves. I read a wonderful book called Many Minds, One Heart by Wesley C. Hogan about how the civil rights movement and SNCC and others in the South, in Mississippi, the most treacherous, backward place you could go, brought the issue of racial equality there. And they said the organizers’ first goal was to learn to listen to these people, poor blacks in Mississippi. The second goal was to convince themselves and these poor people to act like citizens even though they knew they weren’t treated as citizens. And you think about that. That’s kind of the mystery of democracy. People get power if they believe they’re entitled to power.

  Young people are part of my optimism. Smart kids want to be engaged in their times, see the injustices of their society. And they don’t quite trust the great big existing organizations. And with some good reason, as you know. And particularly, they’re not totally sold on the Democratic Party as the vessel of reform. They’re telling Washington, “We’re on to your silly ideas that Wall Street wants you to do about reform. We see through them. And we have some ideas of our own. And we’re going to come talk to you, and if you decline to talk to us, we’re going to come after you.” That’s the voice of democracy speaking, when people say that.

  I hear that. But I also read your piece in The Washington Post in which you wrote, “Obama told us to speak out. But is he listening?” Well, is he?

  I’ve been very enthusiastic about his opening as president. He did the stimulus package and a number of other things that are fulfilling his promise. But on this, he does seem absolutely committed to the restoration of the old order. There’s no other way to say it. And the things Secretary Geithner is saying and others have been putting out all confirm that.

  I think that’s a huge mistake, financially, because I think their ideas are not going to work. And will, in fact, blow up in his face. Maybe a month from now. Or maybe six months, I don’t know. But the handing out of government guarantees and capital to hedge funds and private equity funds—financial institutions founded on secrecy, by the way. They don’t even pretend to be transparent. They’re closed shops. He hands out that money, and then somewhere down the road people are going to learn that the so-called investors are reaping double-digit returns on this money with almost no risk at all to themselves. And whether that works or not, people will be outraged. And I think they should be. Outrage right now might just get the Congress to slow down a bit, calm down. We want reform, but we want it done right, and we want it done for the public interest, not for the old order.

  The nature of democracy, authentically, is not simply supporting from the bleachers, and saying, “Gee, we hope you win the game.” It’s being on the field, engaged in whatever small or large way is possible, and expecting those elected representatives, including the president, to at least hear what you’re saying, and rightly responding to it in some ways. That’s the dynamic of a democratic society. Everybody knows in this country that this has been for some years, not exclusively but mainly, a top-down society. And you go into workplaces and hear the same things said as you hear about politics: “Well, I know what’s wrong here, but they won’t listen to me. I don’t have any voice in the matter.” Or investors, small investors, putting their money in mutual funds: “Well, they’re not listening to me. Look who they’re giving this money to.” You know, you can go on and on. And that’s what democracy would break.

  One of your deep concerns about turning so much power over to the Fed is that it is cozy with the big institutions. And that the smaller, entrepreneurial organizations and businesses that do not have access to the inner circle are excluded.

  President Obama, if the Democratic leaders in Congress follow along, will put the Democratic Party on the wrong side of history. What we ought to be seeking, the goal of reform and government aid, is creating a new financial and banking system of many more, thousands more, smaller, more diverse, regionally dispersed banks and investment firms. Not the other way around. What the administration’s approach may be doing is consecrating “too big to fail,” for starters, which, of course, everybody in government denied was the policy until the moment it arrived.

  And secondly—and this will sound extreme to some people, but I came to it reluctantly—I fear what they’re doing, not intentionally, but in their design, is ratifying the corporate state through the control of a rather small but powerful circle of financial institutions: the old, rather small, but very powerful circle of financial institutions. The old Wall Street banks, famous names, but also some industrial corporations that bought banks. Or General Electric, which is already half big financial capital, GE Capital. And that circle will be our new Wall Street club. Too big to fail. Yes, watched closely by the Federal Reserve and others in government, but also protected by them. And that’s a really insidious departure, to admit that and put it into law. Then think of all those thousands of smaller banks. How are they going to perform against these behemoths that have an inside track to the government spigot? And for just ordinary enterprise in general? Before you even get to the citizens. How are citizens supposed to feel about that? My point is, in this situation, with the leading banks and corporations sort of at the trough, ahead of everybody else in Washington, they will have the means to monopolize democracy.

  Some of my friends would say, “Hey, that already happened.” The fact is, if the Congress goes down the road I see them going down on financial reform, they will institutionalize the corporate state in a way that will severely damage any possibility of restoring democracy. And I want people to grab their pitchforks, yes, and be unruly. Get in the streets. Be as noisy and as nonviolently provocative as you can be. Stop the politicians from going down that road. And, let me add, a lot of politicians need that to be able to stand up. Our president needs that to be able to stand up.

  In your essay in The Washington Post you describe President Obama as trapped between “the governing elites who decide things and the people who are governed.” When does he finally have to choose sides?

  I think he has to choose as this story keeps unfolding, because I don’t think it’s going to change dramatically with these new plans announced. In fact, the anger will be stoked.

  He did walk into a burning house.

  That’s true.

  And his job is to put out the fire and rebuild the house.

  Here’s my take on the New Deal and the history of what actually happened. And it conveniently fits my deeper prejudices about the country and how progress is achieved in America. That is, people in the streets or churches or wherever found their voice and made it happen by agitating and informing the higher authorities. In the early ’30s, Franklin Roosevelt had a set of things he thought he could do to right the ship of the Depression. He tried some of them. They didn’t work very well. Meanwhile, organized labor and others were all over the country lighting bonfires for bigger changes. Social Security came out of that. Labor rights, the first attempt to give people the right to organize their own voices in a company, came out of that. A whole bunch of other reforms that we now take for granted. And Roosevelt didn’t stand athwart and try to stop them. But he let them roll him. That’s what I hope for now, that people of every stripe will stand up and say, “We love you, Mr. President, but you don’t have it right yet. And we’re going to bang on your door until you get it right.”

  KAREN ARMSTRONG

  Karen Armstrong’s great passion, as a self-described “monotheistic freelancer,” is to get the world’s three Abrahamic faiths—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—to unite in practicing faith, hope, and charity; especially charity. Good luck to her. That’s a tall order even here in the United States, just one province of her global mission, where there are enough spoilsports to rain on an ecumenical parade. Yet Armstrong is undeterred, as you might expect from a former nun who fled the convent and became a literary scholar, overcame epilepsy, fought depression, steeped herself in matters of religion, created television documentaries on the nature of faith, and published bestselling books, includi
ng A History of God, Islam, The Bible: A Biography, Buddha, and The Case for God.

  Equally comfortable in church, synagogue, or mosque, Karen Armstrong has concluded that religion “isn’t about believing things. It’s about what you do. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you.” The proof of religion is in compassion; it is the seed, she believes, for nurturing tolerance and peace among religions.

  In 2008, the annual gathering of leaders in technology, entertainment, and design gave her their prestigious TED Prize, which comes not only with a $100, 000 cash award but also, like the genie in Aladdin’s lamp, grants the recipient a wish. Go to www.ted.com, and you can hear the speech in which Armstrong made hers: “I wish that you would help with the creation, launch, and propagation of a Charter for Compassion—crafted by a group of in spirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule.”

  One year later it was done: The Charter for Compassion was adopted in ceremonies around the world (read it at www.charterforcompassion.org). Signatories include the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Prince Hassan of Jordan, Sir Richard Branson, and Rabbi David Saperstein, among many others, with and without rank.

  The Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Not as simple as it sounds. But as Karen Armstrong says, it’s a start.

  —Bill Moyers

  Tell us what you’re up to with this movement.

  My work has continually brought me back to the notion of compassion. Whichever religious tradition I study, I find that the heart of it is the idea of feeling with the other, experiencing with the other, compassion. And every single one of the major world religions has developed its own version of the Golden Rule. Don’t do to others what you would not like them to do to you.

  You see, the Greeks, too, may not have been religious in our sense, but they understood about compassion. The institution of tragedy put suffering onstage. And the leader of the chorus would ask the audience to weep for people, even like Heracles, who had been driven mad by a goddess and slew his own wife and children. And the Greeks did weep. They didn’t just, like modern Western men, wipe a tear from the corner of their eye and gulp hard. They cried aloud because they felt that weeping together created a bond between human beings. You were learning to put yourself in the position of another and reach out, not only to acceptable people, people in your own group, but to your enemies, to people you wouldn’t normally have any deep truck with at all.

  So this is not just another call for another round of interfaith dialogue?

  No, it’s nothing to do with interfaith dialogue. Look, I’m not expecting the whole world to fall into a daze of compassion.

  I don’t think you have to worry about that.

  But this is the beginning of something. We’re writing a charter which we hope will be like the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, two pages only, saying that compassion is far more important than belief. That it is the essence of religion. All the traditions teach that the practice of compassion and honoring the sacred in the other brings us into the presence of what we call God, Nirvana, or Tao. And people are remarkably uneducated about compassion these days. So we want to bring it back to the center of attention. But then, it’s got to be incarnated into practical action.

  Osama bin Laden and radical Islamists obviously won’t sign on to this.

  Of course not. But we have to understand that Osama bin Laden and the radical Islamists are largely motivated by politics. They may express themselves in a religious idiom.

  As many of those suicide bombers did when diving into the World Trade Center.

  They did. But their motivations, when you read Osama’s declarations and the suicide videos of our own London bombers, are all political. Their grievances are political.

  Were you there when London was bombed?

  I was right in the middle of it.

  What was your reaction?

  I thought that this was virtually inevitable. This is a political matter. Tony Blair had put us right on the front line by joining with former President Bush in the occupation of Iraq. And we were all expecting this in London. There was no great surprise. I was actually in the British Library, right next to the King’s Cross station, so it was a police zone. And we had to stay in there all day. We weren’t allowed out. We didn’t quite know what was happening.

  Did this diminish or strengthen your resolve about compassion?

  We’ve got to do better than this. Compassion doesn’t mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn’t mean pity. It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other. Learning what’s motivating the other, learning about their grievances. So the Charter for Compassion was to recall compassion from the sidelines, to which it’s often relegated in religious discourse.

  The scholar of religion Elaine Pagels told me many years ago, “There’s practically no religion I know of that sees people in a way that affirms the others’ choices.”

  Yes. And this is a great scandal. There used to be. Islam, for example—the Koran is a pluralistic document. It says that every rightly guided religion comes from God. And there must be no compulsion in religion. And it says that Muhammad has not come to cancel out the teachings of Jesus or Moses or Abraham. Now, Muslims have fallen into the trap that Jews, Christians, and others have done, of thinking that they are the one and only. This is ego. This is pure ego.

  But it’s inspired, is it not—even sanctified—by religion?

  Well, no. The idea that everyone has to be Muslim is actually going against the explicit teaching of the Koran, in which God says to Muhammad, if we—using the royal we—had wanted the whole of mankind to be in one single religious community, we would have made that happen. But we did not so wish. This is not our desire. So you, Muhammad, leave them alone. And everybody, says the Koran, has their own din, their own religious tradition, their own way of life.

  Now, this is getting lost to the modern world. But that was also Muslim practice for the first one hundred years after the death of the Prophet, when conversion to Islam was actually frowned upon, because Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians and, later, Buddhists, had their own din, their own religion. And that was to be respected.

  You’re putting your finger on a real fault line, it seems to me. Metaphorically, the language of violence, which goes all the way back in these old stories, often invokes God for the sanctification of violent acts. In your recent book The Bible: A Biography, you quote, for example, from Joshua: “When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai, in the open ground and where they followed them into the wilderness, and when all to a man had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and slaughtered all its people.... All the people of Ai.” And then in the Koran: “Allah hath sealed their hearing and their hearts, and on their eyes there is a covering. Theirs will be an awful doom.” When you talk about the positive and affirmative side of even these texts, there is also a contrary side.

  Yes. These scriptures all have these difficult passages. There’s far more of that kind of stuff in the Bible, both Old and New Testaments, than there is in the Koran. One of the things that I am going to call for in this Charter is for exegetes to look at these passages, see how they came into the tradition in the first place. What were the circumstances in which they appeared? What influence do they have on the tradition as a whole? And what do we do with them? How do we deal with them in this age? We need really to study them in depth.

  By exegetes, you mean the scholars and students and interpreters of every faith?

  Every faith. Yes. We must, first of all, study our own scriptures before we point a finger at other people.

  You ask, “What would it mean to interpret the whole of the Bible as a commentary on the Golden Rule?” What’s your answer to that question?

  Well, this is one of the things that really intrigued me when I was researching
this book. How frequently the early rabbis, for example, in the Talmudic period, shortly after the death of Jesus, insisted that any interpretation of scripture that read hatred or contempt for any single human being was illegitimate. Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that anyone, when asked to sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while standing on one leg, should answer, “The Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. And everything else is only commentary. Now, go and study it.” St. Augustine said that scripture teaches nothing but charity. And if you come to a passage like the one you just read, that seems to preach hatred, you’ve got to give it an allegorical or metaphorical interpretation. And make it speak of charity.

  But of course, what some people do is to read for their own purposes what they call allegorical. And then read literally what they want to apply in their—

  And of course, you have to understand that this tendency to read scripture in a literal manner is very recent. Nobody, for example, ever thought of interpreting the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the origins of life until the modern period. It’s our scientific mind-set that makes us want to sort of read these texts for accurate information.

  But as stories, they still have a very powerful effect. For example, the first murder in the oldest story grows out of a religious act. Cain and Abel are brothers. They’re also rivals for God’s favor. And out of jealousy, Cain kills Abel. And once that pattern is set, it is followed right through like a red thread from Ishmael and Isaac and Joseph and his brothers on down to Christians versus Muslims, Muslims versus Jews, Christians versus everybody.

  I think these are difficult texts. We read these texts as though they’re easy. Now, I see Genesis as deconstructing a neat idea of God.

  What do you mean, deconstructing?