Calgary, February 2020
Recently I read a book called The Sympathiser, written by the Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen. The protagonist is a North Vietnamese spy that infiltrates the South Vietnamese community and reports to his spy master during the Vietnam war. After the fall of Saigon, he followed the refugees to the United States and continued to spy on them. Therefore, the protagonist is familiar with the political systems of Vietnam and the United States and is deeply disappointed with both of them. The victorious North Vietnam denies to its population the very freedom for which they were fighting and for which so many young men died, while the only ideology of the United States is to worship the all-mighty Dollar. The novel ends with the spy master asking his agent if he believes in anything.
“I believe in nothing,” was the protagonist’s answer.
“So, there is nothing you would be willing to fight for?”
“I would be willing to fight for my right to believe in nothing.”
This conclusion got me thinking. Do we have the right to believe in nothing, or do we have a moral obligation to believe in some of those big, abstract ideas like God, freedom, patriotism, democracy, and so on? Are those ideas worth defending, in spite of the immense suffering that they have caused? The wars, the brutality, the terrorism, all that in the name of some kind of faith?
One way to look at this question is to examine the history of human civilization. Ever since the first written records, from ancient Egypt of 3500 BC until now, there is an indication that people always believed in some kind of supernatural force that controlled the world. The Egyptians had a large number of gods that they worshipped; for example Osiris, the god of the underworld; Horus, the god of war and hunting; Re, the god of sun, and many more. The records of the first Hindu gods date back to 1800 BC. The Greeks had the whole slew of Olympian gods with very human characteristics like cruelty, love, jealousy, deceit, and heroism. Then came Christianity and Islam, amongst many other religions. All those faiths had and still have one common purpose: to control human behaviour according to an idea in which the population can believe. There is no need for justification. Questions like “Why…?” are discouraged since they would interfere with the faith.
In the antiquity, that kind of faith certainly made sense. Our ancestors were just as curious as we are now. They wanted to know why there is a sunset and sunrise, why there are seasons, why we have thunderstorms, etc. Without any scientific knowledge, they needed gods to provide an explanation. Therefore, god Re of the old Egyptians was managing the movement of the sun, and Zeus was in charge of thunderstorms for the old Greeks. From those explanations there was only a small step to say:
“Those gods, who are all-powerful, are also watching you, and if you misbehave, they will punish you. God Ra will stop the sun to move or Zeus will strike you with a thunderbolt.”
Those were powerful incentives to control the population. Nowadays we know that the perceived movement of the sun is caused by the rotation of the earth, and that thunderstorms are just a discharge of static electricity between clouds. Therefore, nowadays our gods have to be more abstract, but the idea is the same. The all-powerful God is watching you and if you misbehave, He will punish you. The believers are supposed to love, respect, and fear their God.
How God relates to freedom, patriotism, democracy and similar? It is simple. God wants you to defend freedom, be patriotic, etc., and priests of a particular religion will specify their own version of freedom, patriotism, and democracy for you. Sometimes God does not have to be an abstract entity; He could be represented by a specific person. For many people Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, and others represented their own image of god. The problem is, Hitler, Stalin and Mao Zedong were not real gods, they were people, and their promises of the dreamland failed. Standard religions do not have that problem since they promise the dreamland only after death.
Returning to the main question of this essay: do we have a moral obligation to believe in any of those abstract ideas? Or, is it better to be a sceptic? This question is the theme of the novel The Quiet American by Graham Greene. The plot of the novel takes place in Saigon, Vietnam, in the early 1950s, when the French colonial troops were fighting the Viet Minh communist insurgency. The main character, Thomas Fowler is a middle-aged British journalist living in Saigon and covering the conflict for the British newspapers. He prides himself in not taking sides in the war; he is an impartial observer reporting only the facts. He does not believe in any of those big ideas like God, freedom, patriotism, or democracy; he just observes the destruction caused by the war. As a war correspondent, he goes up north to report on military activities. He sees villages that are burned by napalm, and bodies that are blown up by artillery fire and aerial bombings. On one particular trip his friend, captain Trouin, a French pilot, invites him to join him on one of the missions that he flies. Fowler sees how the pilot bombs and shoots the seemingly innocent locals just because he is ordered to do so. After the landing captain Trouin tells Thomas:
“I hate the war and I envy you for your way of escape.”
“You do not know from what I am escaping. It is not the war. I am not implicated.”
“You will be. One day.”
“Not me.”
“One day something will happen. You will take part.”
As it turns out, the pilot was right.
Two years into his assignment, Thomas Fowler meets Alden Pyle, an American intelligence operative working undercover in the Economic Aid Mission. Those two men could not be more different. Pyle, who is new to Southeast Asia, is a sincere idealist with a desire to foster political and social change. He believes in democracy and wants to free the locals from the French colonial system, whether they like it or not. Obviously, the communists are not the solution, so Pyle is looking for a third way. He gets in contact with the local militia leader, General Thé, and together they arrange for a big explosion at the Saigon marketplace, which kills scores of people, mostly women and children. The idea is to cause an outrage, blame it on the communists, and give an excuse for the Americans to invade. The irony is that a decade later Americans indeed invaded, with a disastrous result.
In the climax of the novel, Thomas Fowler finds out that Pyle was the initiator of the explosion, and this creates a big dilemma for Thomas. As an independent observer, as he prides himself to be, he should report the act of terrorism and nothing more. But he also knows that with Pyle in Saigon, those acts of terrorism will repeat. More blown up bodies, more blood spilled and more grief. Thomas remembers the words of his friend, the French pilot captain Trouin: “One day something will happen. You will take part.” For Thomas, that day came now. He contacts a communist party member, Mr. Heng, who insinuates that Pyle should be assassinated, and Thomas participates in Pyle’s murder.
Those two characters of the novel, Thomas Fowler and Pyle, suggest two different answers to the main question of this essay: Do we have a right to believe in nothing? Pyle was an idealist, he despised the French colonial system and believed in bringing the noble idea of democracy, American style, to the Vietnamese population. But noble ideas cannot be implemented by a mass murder. In doing so, they become an accessory to the crime. Also, the very people Pyle wanted to free from colonialism couldn’t care less about any political system. They wanted to be able to live their life in peace, with as little interference as possible. It certainly would be better if Pyle believed less in democracy and more in human life.
Thomas Fowler, on the other hand, believed in nothing and he was proud of it. But, in fact, he was wrong about himself. If he indeed believed in nothing, then he would not have contacted Mr. Heng and would not have participated in Pyle’s murder. What Thomas Fowler did believe in was that no noble, grand idea was worth a human life. He also believed that the lives of many unknown, and in Pyle’s view, unimportant people like local women shopping at the marketplace takes priority over the life of one American secret service officer. In other words, Thomas Fowler believed in human decency. This is also my answer to the question of this essay. We are not obliged to believe in anything except in human decency.