I'm back with my lunch and another load of laundry in the wash.
***
"There are, however, some elements of civilian ideology that can be used to support military social control. One is the diffuse patriotism with which many young men enter the Army. This can be tied to military objective in terms of loyally carrying out established government policies... young men join the Army just as they might join Guru Maharij Ji's tribe or some other highly disciplined, strictly ordered group, thus reflecting some elements of conservative, puritanical civilian culture." (p. 67)
Let's do a little elementary logic here: Can we all agree that if A=B and B=C than A=C? If so, then let's do a story problem:
If (some of) the Army's tactics are (more or less) the same as a "cult" group, and we've already shown that some of the "cult" tactics are the same as those of the Vienna mission, which of the following assumptions can we assume?
a) The military has bad tastes.
b) The cult should be insulted.
c) Some of the Vienna mission's tactics are the same as the Army's.
d) What goes around comes around.
e) The Vienna mission has good tastes.
If you guessed "C" you are correct. The others (A, B, D & E) cannot safely be deduced based on the information given.
***
The author continues, and after discussing another situation says:
"Interestingly, this characteristic of unquestioning obedience (duty) is encouraged simultaneously with an exhortation to display a great deal of initiative and confidence. This contradiction between initiative (or refusing unlawful orders) and obedience is one of the many built-in conflicts within military ideology." (p. 68)
My example of how I was sent on a teaching trip to Eastern Europe (coincidentally not long before my parents arrived to visit me) and then not long afterward (after my parents left) moving me to receptionist (both symbolically and literally a "demotion").
Me: Which is it, up or down?
Mission: Yes.
That's how I felt. So I tried to mostly ignore what I thought were less explicit meanings and just respond to the more literal. But even then, I tried to show that it didn't get under my skin, and just go with the flow, so to speak. I'm not sure that was always the best tactic on my part, but it's what I did. For example, I didn't react to the move to receptionist, but took it in stride and sort of owned the new position and looked for ways to develop it, which seemed to be okay with the leadership, at least on the surface.
In any rate, no matter what I didn't like there I hid those thoughts and feelings. They pretty much scared the bajeebers out of me early on, so that I was scared to let on what I was really thinking and feeling.
Getting back to our text, though, there were contradictions like this in Vienna, but I have a feeling that the more you got socialized into it the less you'd feel those contradictions. I think people probably learned to see such potential contradictions in a different light so that they made sense in the context of the group. It was as if the group had developed their own kind of logic or something.
***
"In addition to the officer's conception of honor and moral character, there are other agencies within the Army that can act as supports to the soldier's self-image when it is troubled by qualms over conformity, anxieties over killing and meaninglessness of destruction. One of these is the Army chaplain. The career chaplain, in his sermons and counseling sessions, can act as an adjunct to social control by justifying the military way to uncertain recruits.
Perhaps the most well-known social control function of the career chaplain is to help resolve conflicts over killing. Rivkin recounts the Army truism that the chaplain's first loyalty is to the Army; his second to God. Similarly, GIs, in interviews with me, criticized chaplains for their lack of a morally based opposition to the Vietnam War. One quoted his chaplain as saying that calling the Vietnam War immoral was a communist line.
Burchard surveyed military and ex-military chaplains in an effort to find out how they resolved the conflict between their role as ministers and as military officers. He argued that there are several Christian doctrines - love, universal brotherhood, peace, nonresistance to evil ('turn the other cheek'), and the commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' - that might be expected to conflict with military regulations. His interviews showed that the great majority of his sample responded to the role conflict by asserting the military claim and de-emphasizing the religious claim.
"In the instance where the conflict between the religious doctrine and the military was most unavoidable - 'Thou shalt not kill' - some chaplains resolved the conflict by arguing that the commandment was corrupted in translation from its original tribalistic meaning of 'Thou shalt not murder' that excluded war-time killing. Forty-five percent of his sample said that killing an enemy soldier was a righteous act, and the remainder called it a justifiable act. None said that the soldier had any other responsibility in that matter except to serve his country. But the most common way to deal with these dilemmas was not to rationalize the conflicts, as Buchard had expected of educated men, but to compartmentalize their behavior, allowing the military officer's role to take precedence. Most chaplains had never before bothered to argue out the dilemmas Burchard posed, and a few refused to do it even during his interview. Compartmentalization may be a more successful way of resolving the role conflicts than rationalization because in the former instance one could deny that there is any ideological conflict.
Burchard showed that chaplains were not likely to oppose military authority. the great majority of chaplains were careful to define themselves as officers, not as champions of enlisted men's causes. For example, they would prefer to do nothing to mitigate the harshness of military justice but rather attempt to rehabilitate the prisoner after the sentence was passed by persuading him that justice was done and that it was for his own good. In counseling and in interviews, the chaplain can back up the military by explaining to recalcitrant troops the personal and moral consequences of not conforming. The chaplain is, incidentally, one of the officials a dissident soldier is required to see and convince in order to get administratively discharged (for example, as a conscientious objector) from the Army.
... In his sermons, the chaplain can help the military define itself as honorable, dutiful, and self-denying by sanctifying and affirming the military virtues of cleanliness, self-restraint, reliability, and obedience. The time at which chaplains are likely to be influential is during basic training when they carry out a formal 'character guidance' program, which introduces recruits to these military virtues." (p. 70-72)
Okay, that's a long quote and I probably broke a copyright law or two by using such a long text here. I guess I'll find out soon enough if I did or not.
I don't know about you, but if I were drinking coffee now there are some potential points here that might result in my choking on it. It's going to be hard to know where to being here.
One thing that should be recognized here is how the chaplains dealt with the theology issues. In this case, it might not just be something that could be applied to the chaplains in Vienna, but all the other theologians there. Of course, our context didn't involve killing like in the Army, but it did have all those ethical issues that I've been bringing up as we go along here. It's possible that the ways these chaplains in this text dealt with the apparent ideological conflict could have been one way those in Vienna also dealt with ethical conflicts regarding how things were done there. That is, they could have just ignored the conflicting issues, like the chaplains who'd "never before bothered to argue out the dilemmas." Pardon me if I say it sounds a bit short-sighted for that to be the case, but it does strike me that way. It's like they just put their heads in the sand and pretended the conflict didn't exist. At least that's my reading of it.
The other thing that could be applied more broadly in Vienna (besides to the 2 military chaplains on staff) is how these "educated men" compartmentalized their behavior, "allowing the military officer's role to take precedence." This is one of those spots in the text where I might have spit out my coffee. Whoa! You mean a man of the cloth says there's someone more authoritative than God?!! Who gave these men their credentials anyway; I'd like to meet those people. I think, unfortunately, that it's hard for me to really see otherwise than this kind of thinking was probably in effect in Vienna too, but I can't speak for every single person, to know what their particular way of dealing with ideological conflicts was during my time with the mission in Vienna, but I'm pretty sure that at least some people used this approach to dealing with ethical dilemmas. And since questioning things actually, I think, made you more vulnerable to being sucked in (that's a loaded verb, I know,) as it could be something that was played upon to help lower any barriers, you might have to being assimilated, you practically had to put the mission's interpretations of things above anything else. Of course, these were theologians, and I think that when they had to socialize newcomers they did know how to use Scripture in that process. But then it has also been said that you can use Scripture to prove just about anything. That's not completely true, but you know what I mean.
Moving on now to the part in this lengthy quote to the chapter that begins "Burchard shows that chaplains were not likely to oppose the military"..., I saw this kind of thing done in Vienna, which I sort of alluded to in an earlier comment on this chapter about the chaplain in Vienna basically giving me a good wallop (figuratively speaking) and then saying it was for my own good. I think that throughout the socialization process any discomfort felt by the newcomer was looked upon this way, as being for their own good. But where chaplains may have in the army explicitly explained to soldiers "the personal and moral consequences of not conforming" in Vienna things were generally not done that straight forward, and this would have been one of those types of things what generally wouldn't have been spelled out like that. The thing is that if things were spelled out literally, then they could be held accountable... well, actually, not very accountable, they even treated me in ways that very explicitly was against their own written policies for no apparent reason except to teach me something (exactly what is not explicitly known, only that their infraction of the rules was very explicitly known). In that regard, they were rather like the Soviets, whom they so disdained. What I mean is that the Soviets were famous for having laws that weren't particularly followed or were even blatantly flaunted. Maybe the Vienna leadership thought that they were upholding the intent of the law while infringing on the letter of it. What exactly the "intent of the law" was, however, is somewhere in the ephemeral world of implicit abstractness. Or, alternately, it could be hidden away in the bowels of the secret cloak the mission was shrouded in.
But I'd also like to take this role of the chaplain's explaining to recalcitrant troops the "personal and moral consequences of not conforming" in another direction, and that is again regarding allegiance. We've already discussed the allegiance of God vs. institution (Army or Vienna mission, as the case may be), but here the chaplain is not only trying to reconcile potential conflicts within himself but also serves as an instrument of the institution in confirming the very issues he may have had to have conflict with himself to his parishioners, if you will. So he makes the leap of faith (apologies to Kierkegaard) personally into the ethical realm of the Army/Vienna mission and then proceeds to pass on that new found faith to his parishioners. He has so embodied whatever conflicts he may have had that he can now actually be an instrument of the institution he represents (not the sending denomination or supporters back home, but the Army or Vienna mission). This is a big step if you ask me, and I have a feeling that psychologists could probably break it down somehow into sub-parts or incremental steps to reach this point. Maybe after successfully making it through the initial socialization in to the Army/Vienna mission you can start to pass on what you learned.
Now my idea of a pastor (which I thought the chaplaincy was a subgroup of) is that they are sort of intermediaries between God and others. I don't mean intermediary, as you can't go to God directly, but I do mean that there shouldn't be another entity between God and the pastor, especially not a secular entity. But I'm sure how things are described in this text is the reality of the Army (and other military branches).
I'm wondering if the military chaplains might see it as a chance to minister to these soldiers, and there needs to be someone there to minister to them, so their willing to give in some to be able to do that. In other words, they might see the ends as justifying the means. But they also undoubtedly come into the military chaplaincy with some sort of acceptance of what the military does, so even if they weren't generally open to having that secular allegiance, at least it's one that they could accept and support. I mean, you're probably not going to have a Quaker, for example, try to get into the military chaplaincy, right?
I think it was similar in Vienna too, in that at least the missionaries would be enthusiastic about the work that was being done, the actual ministry, so if in the beginning of their tenure with the mission they had any qualms about how it operated at least they would be much more willing to trust it and perhaps concede some things in order to be allowed to succeed at that work.
One other thing, is that this relationship of Army-chaplain-soldier reminds me some of how I view the relationship of corporation-human resource development (HRD)instructor-employee. I mean, where the middle person in these chains embodies the first entity's (the Army's or corporation's)values and goals and has to pass them on to the third in the chain, the soldier or employee. "Corporation" can be substituted for other types of organizations with HRD positions.
In the adult education setting, I'm not comfortable with that role set up, because I'd rather attend more to the employee's/student's needs and interests. That is to say, not to completely ignore the corporation's needs and interests, necessarily, but not just to be a sort of stooge in their game. I don't think HRD people would see their role this way, and there are probably exceptions to this, but the very structure of the things makes it somewhat inevitable in most situations, I think. Maybe if you work for Ben & Jerry, for example, this kind of thing wouldn't be so strong.
And now just to wrap this up, the "character guidance" program chaplains lead during basic training smells fishily like "socialization" to me. I think this was part of the Vienna chaplain's HRD role, at least in relation to me it was.
***
It's 4:30 already and what have I done all day! I still need to look for those articles, for example. Or maybe say a eulogy over a plant or two outside.
~ Meg
