by Bill Moyers
I think, A, that’s not true. That conflict started as an essentially secular struggle over land. And B, it leads us to throw up our hands and say, “Well, what can you do? As long as people are religious, there’s no point in addressing any grievances or rearranging the facts on the ground to try to make things better.” I think there’s been a dangerous overemphasis on the negative effects of religious belief in the modern world, although it has many negative effects.
I don’t find any traces of cynicism in your book. In fact, I want to ask you about something you say toward the end: “Human beings are organic machines that are built by natural selection to deal with other organic machines. They can visualize other organic beings, understand other organic beings, and bestow love and gratitude on other organic beings. Understanding the divine, visualizing the divine, loving the divine—that would be a tall order for a mere human being.” But we’ve not given up trying, have we?
No. And I think, you know, in a way we shouldn’t. I mean I think if there is something out there called moral truth, we should continue to try to relate to it in a way that brings us closer to it.
Out there?
Did I say that?
Yeah, you’ve said it several times.
I should be careful. Transcendent is a very tricky word. And I get into trouble with hard-core materialists by using it because people think, “Oh, you mean spooky, mystical, ethereal stuff.” I don’t know exactly what I mean by transcendent . I may mean “beyond our comprehension.” I may mean “prior to the creation of the universe” or something. I don’t know. But I do think that the system on earth is such that humanity is repeatedly given the choice of either progressing morally in the sense of accepting more people into the moral circle or paying the price of social chaos.
We are approaching a global level of social organization, and if people do not get better at acknowledging the humanity of people around the world in very different circumstances, and even putting themselves in the shoes of those other people, then we may pay the price of social chaos.
After exploring thousands of years of how belligerent the great faiths can be, I expected to find you shrouded in pessimism. But at the end, you seem to put a light in the window. And a glow comes from it of some hope that these religions, these great faiths, can overcome millennia of belligerence and accommodate one another.
Well, they have shown the ability to do that. I think one of the more encouraging facts about the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is that if you ask, “When were they at their best? When did doctrines of tolerance emerge?” I answer that they were best in periods that were in some ways analogous to a modern globalized environment.
In the ancient world the closest analogue to the modern globalized world is an empire, a multinational platform. And I think all three religions have shown their ability to adapt constructively to that kind of environment. That doesn’t mean they’ll do it now. The moral progress that is needed is not assured. But all three of them have this adaptive capacity that’s been proven.
You say it’s going to take an extraordinary amount of smart thinking to deal with this world that’s on the verge of chaos. A world—and a chaos—to which the great faiths have contributed.
In a certain sense the prophets of all three Abrahamic faiths got one thing right that is applicable to this situation in the modern world. What all of them were saying was that salvation is possible so long as you align yourself with the moral axis of the universe.
Now, they meant different things by salvation. In the Hebrew Bible, they often meant social salvation. In Christianity and Islam they might be more inclined to mean individual salvation. And of course they didn’t say the moral axis of the universe. They said God. But to them God was the moral axis of the universe.
But I think when you put it abstractly like that, it applies to the modern world. In other words, if we want to secure the salvation of the global social system of the planet, if we want salvation in the Hebrew Bible sense of the term, we do have to move ourselves closer to what I would call the moral axis of the universe, which means drawing more of humanity into our frame of reference. Getting better at putting ourselves in their shoes. Expanding the realm of tolerance. And it has to happen symmetrically. It’s not enough for just the Muslim world or just the West to do it. But I do think it has to happen.
You make me think that perhaps, in your head, God is the reasoning principle through time.
Interestingly, there is this idea of the logos.
“In the beginning was the Word,” is how the New Testament, the book of John, translates it.
Yes, “the Word” in that passage is the translation of the Greek term logos. And in a way, the term reappears in the Koran when Muhammad says Jesus is the Word of God. But it also has an important place in Jewish thought. In fact, one of the thinkers I fastened onto in the book is an ancient thinker who I think is a pretty good candidate for modern theology. Philo of Alexandria was a Jew who lived around the time of Jesus except in a much more urban environment. And he had access to Greek philosophy. He had this idea that God is the logos, that this kind of logic is the animating spirit through history. And from a modern point of view, he said some things that look remarkable.
He said history was moving toward this world of tremendous interdependence and that part of God’s plan was to make it so that individual peoples and even individual species would need one another, would be dependent on one another. And that as history wore on, that would become truer and truer. As a result, the world would move toward this kind of unity.
I think, in terms of logic animating history, that’s a reasonably modern way to think of the divine. If you want to construct a theology that I would say can be rendered in a way that is compatible with modern science, I think Philo of Alexandria is a good place to start.
I keep coming back, though, to what you instructed us in this book when you talk about how everything we do and our response to it are affected by a brain which has not been prepared by natural evolution for the complexity of the social order today. And you say, “The way the human mind is built, antipathy can impede comprehension. Hating protesters, flag burners, and even terrorists makes it harder to understand them well enough to keep others from joining their ranks.”
It’s a tricky balance to strike because on the one hand, understanding terrorists and how they became terrorists, which is in our interests if we want to discourage the creation of more terrorists, tends to involve a kind of sympathy that in turn can lead you to say they are not to blame for what they did.
You don’t want to say that because, as a practical matter, you have to punish people when they do bad things. So you don’t want to let go of the idea of moral culpability, but you do need to put yourself in their heads. And that is really a great challenge in the modern world.
Are human beings likely to grow out of their need for God?
I think it’s going to be a long time before a whole lot of them do, if they do. Religion will be the medium by which people express their values for a long time to come, so it’s important to understand what brings out the best and the worst in it. And I think the answer to that question depends partly on how abstractly you define religion. You know, there is this William James quote that religion is the idea that there is an unseen order and our supreme interests lie in harmoniously adjusting ourselves to that order. It’s a good definition because it encompasses the great variety of things we’ve called religion, and not many definitions do. If you define religion that way, I think it’ll probably be with us forever. Because if you define religion that way, I’m religious, and if I qualify, that’s defining it pretty broadly.
DAVID SIMON
Watching movie and television versions of Charles Dickens’s novels, I often have imagined him back from the beyond, only this time living in America, putting his remarkable powers of observation to the dramatization of life in our inner cities. Then one day, while screening some episodes of HBO’s The Wire
, it hit me: Dickens is back and his pseudonym is David Simon.
What Charles Dickens learned walking the streets and alleys of Victorian London, Simon saw and heard over twelve years as a crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun. He turned his experiences first into a book and the NBC television series Homicide, then the HBO series The Corner. Next, with Ed Burns, a real-life cop turned teacher, he created The Wire. Their meticulous and brutally honest storytelling made Baltimore a metaphor for America’s urban tragedy. During its five seasons, The Wireheld up a mirror to an America many of us never see, where drugs, mayhem, and corruption routinely betray the promise of “ life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that is so ingrained in our political DNA.
For The Wireand his other work, David Simon recently received a MacArthur Fellowship, the half-million-dollar, no-strings-attached grant that honors singular creativity and innovation. In the last few years, Simon also has produced Generation Kill, a brutal and realistic depiction of combat in Iraq, and Treme, a series that dissects post-Katrina New Orleans much as The Wire did Baltimore. Yet “when television history is written,” one critic wrote, “little else will rival The Wire.” Nor, when historians come to tell the story of America in our time, will they be able to ignore this Dickensian portrayal of America’s expendable lives.
—Bill Moyers
There is a fellow in city government here in New York who’s a policy wonk and a die-hard Wire fan. He was hoping I would ask you the one question on his mind: “David Simon has painted the most vivid and compelling portrait of the modern American city. Has he walked away from that story? And if he has, will he come back to it?”
I’ve walked away from the Wire universe. It’s had its five years. Stories have a beginning, middle, and end. If you keep stuff open-ended and you keep trying to stretch character and plot, they eventually break or bend.
What is it about the crime scene that gives you a keyhole, the best keyhole perhaps, into how American society really works?
You see the equivocations. You see the stuff that doesn’t make it into the civics books, and you also see how interconnected things are. How connected the performance of the school system is to the culture of a street corner. Or where parenting comes in. The decline of industry suddenly interacts with the paucity and sort of fraud of public education in the inner city. Because The Wire was not a story about America, it’s about the America that got left behind.
I was struck by something that you said. You were wrestling with this one big existential question. You talked about drug addicts who would come out of detox and then try to steel-jaw themselves through their neighborhood. And then they’d come face-to-face with the question—which is ... ?
“What am I doing here?” You know, a guy coming out of addiction at thirty, thirty-five, because it often takes to that age, he often got into addiction with a string of problems, some of which were interpersonal and personal, and some of which were systemic. These really are the excess people in America. Our economy doesn’t need them—we don’t need 10 or 15 percent of our population. And certainly the ones who are undereducated, who have been ill-served by the inner-city school system, who have been unprepared for the technocracy of the modern economy, we pretend to need them. We pretend to educate the kids. We pretend that we’re actually including them in the American ideal, but we’re not. And they’re not foolish. They get it. They understand that the only viable economic base in their neighborhoods is this multibillion-dollar drug trade.
I did a documentary about the South Bronx called The Fire Next Door and what I learned very early is that the drug trade is an inverted form of capitalism.
Absolutely. In some ways it’s the most destructive form of welfare that we’ve established, the illegal drug trade in these neighborhoods. It’s basically like opening up a Bethlehem Steel in the middle of the South Bronx or in West Baltimore and saying, “You guys are all steelworkers.” Just say no? That’s our answer to that? And by the way, if it was chewing up white folk, it wouldn’t have gone on for as long as it did.
Can fiction tell us something about inequality that journalism can’t?
I’ve wondered about that, because I did a lot of journalism that I thought was pretty good. As a reporter, I was trying to explain how the drug war doesn’t work, and I would write these very careful and very well-researched pieces, and they would go into the ether and be gone. Whatever editorial writer was coming behind me would then write, “Let’s get tough on drugs,” as if I hadn’t said anything. Even my own newspaper. And I would think, “Man, it’s just such an uphill struggle to do this with facts.” When you tell a story with characters, people jump out of their seats, and part of that’s the delivery system of television.
Is it because we are tethered to the facts, we can’t go where the imagination can take us?
One of the themes of The Wire really was that statistics will always lie. Statistics can be made to say anything. You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America: school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on, and as soon as you invent that statistical category, fifty people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-backed securities were actually valuable, and they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning and that they’re solving crime. That was a front-row seat for me as a reporter, getting to figure out how once they got done with them the crime stats actually didn’t represent anything.
And you say statistics are driving the war on drugs, though.
Stats, you know, dope on the table. “We’ve made so many arrests.” I mean, under one administration they used to ride around Baltimore and say, “If we can make fifty-four arrests a day, we’ll have an all-time record for drug arrests.” Some of the arrests, it was people sitting on their stoops and, you know, loitering in a drug-free zone, meaning you were sitting on your own steps on a summer day. Anything that is a stat can be cheated, right down to journalism. And I was sort of party to that.
So I would be watching what the police department was doing, what the school system was doing, you know, looking outward. But if you looked inward you’d see that the same game is played everywhere, that nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution’s supposed to do.
Many people could see what you saw simply if we opened our eyes. And yet the drug war keeps getting crazier and crazier, from selling guns to Mexico’s drug cartel to cramming more people into prison even though they haven’t committed violent crimes. Why don’t the policies change?
Because there’s no political capital in it. There really isn’t. The fear of being called soft on crime, soft on drugs. The paranoia that’s been induced. Listen, if you could be draconian and reduce drug use by locking people up, you might have an argument. But we are the jailing-est country on the planet right now. Two million people in prison. We’re locking up less-violent people. More of them. The drugs are purer. They haven’t closed down a single drug corner that I know of in Baltimore for any length of time. It’s not working. And by the way, this is not a Republican-Democrat thing, because a lot of the most draconian stuff came out of the Clinton administration, this guy trying to maneuver to the center in order not to be perceived as leftist by a Republican Congress.
Mandatory sentences, three strikes—
Loss of parole. And again, not merely for violent offenders, because again, the rate of violent offenders is going down. Federal prisons are full of people who got caught muling drugs and got tarred
with the whole amount of the drugs. It’s not what you were involved in or what you profited from. It’s what they can tar you with. You know, a federal prosecutor, basically, when he decides what to charge you with and how much, he’s basically the sentencing judge at that point. And that’s, of course, corrupting. Again, it’s a stat.
It’s also clear from your work that you think the drug war has destroyed the police.
That’s the saddest thing in a way, again, because the stats mean nothing. Because a drug arrest in Baltimore means nothing. Real police work isn’t being done. In my city, the arrest rates for all major felonies have declined, precipitously, over the last twenty years. From murder to rape to robbery to assault.
Because to solve those crimes requires retroactive investigation. They have to be able to do a lot of things, in terms of gathering evidence, that are substantive and meaningful police work. All you have to do to make a drug arrest is go in a guy’s pocket. You don’t even need probable cause anymore in Baltimore. The guy who solves a rape or a robbery or a murder, he has one arrest stat. He’s going to court one day. The guy who has forty, fifty, sixty drug arrests, even though they’re meaningless arrests, even though there’s no place to put them in the Maryland prison system, he’s going to go to court forty, fifty, sixty times. Ultimately, when it comes time to promote somebody, they look at the police computer. They’ll look and they’ll say, “This guy made forty arrests last month. You only made one. He’s the sergeant” or “That’s the lieutenant.” The guys who basically play the stat game, they get promoted.
In the third season of The Wire, police major Bunny Colvin tells some people in the hood that he wishes he could tell them the fight against drugs will get better, but if he did, it would be a lie. Is it futile?