Fields of Blood
G Gordon Steel is impressed by Karen Armstrong’s new book
There is much in Karen Armstrong’s new book Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence that is of importance to Quakers.
The author says that she embarked upon writing it in order to counteract the common misconception that wars and large-scale violence are caused by religion. In the space of 500 pages, she thoroughly demolishes this view.
Fields of Blood is an erudite and thoroughly researched tome. It consists of a masterly history of civilization from hunter-gatherers to the present day. Around 8,000 BC, when the first small communities began to form in the Levant and stockpile grains, some people were released from the drudgery of seeking food and shelter. They were thus able to take organisational roles and develop pursuits that were not essential to daily living. A social hierarchy, differences in wealth and the beginnings of civilization emerged. This led to the need to protect wealth, to rivalries between tribes and, eventually, to violence and wars. The rest of the book illustrates in great detail, and in studies of religions throughout the world, the fact that violence is and has always been ingrained in civilization.
The truth of this is clear at the present time. There is a perception that civilization is currently under threat from terrorist groups that operate under the name of Islam and carry out gruesome and inhumane acts.
At the start of the book Karen Armstrong addresses the question: ‘What is religion?’ She cogently argues that what we in the West call religion is, from a global perspective, idiosyncratic – a system of beliefs, institutions and rituals centring on a supernatural God, experienced by the individual. Words used in other ancient religions refer to ‘something larger, vaguer and more encompassing: din in Arabic signifies a whole way of life; dharma in Sanskrit is also a “total” concept… The idea of religion as a personal pursuit was absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China and India’.
Protestant Christianity separates the religious from the secular in a way that non-Westerners would find unnatural and incomprehensible. For them, warfare was and is a natural activity of the social group, conducted under some restraint by the scriptures.
For me, this was a powerful message. If, as this book maintains, armies and fighting are essential to the preservation of civilization, where does our testimony of 1660 stand? ‘All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever…’
There have been small sects down the ages that have sought to keep close to the message of the prophets, including Jesus – emphasising righteousness, humility and peacefulness – but these remained small. They are remembered by scholars but had little lasting impact. Karen Armstrong argues that this must always be so: civilisation requires force to defend it and pacifism can never be mainstream. Is that the future of Quakerism? A life-span of 360 years seems not too bad, but it is only a blink in the timescale that we read about here.
I suspect that for Armstrong the ideal world may be one in which the nations all have armies but never fight, diplomacy being king. If we Quakers were to accept that view, what is our honest and truthful advice to government and the electorate in a year of elections? To abolish the whole of the British military machine or to slim it down, and if so to what level? Perhaps we will have to duck that question, remain small and continue to uphold our historic Peace Testimony. Our distinctive role has been and should still be to constantly advocate peace, refuse to fight and to address the root causes of conflict.
This book is not for every Quaker. But it is an important work that should be available for study in Quaker libraries.
Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence by Karen Armstrong, Knopf Publishing Group, ISBN: 9781847921864, £25.
