The garden where all loves end

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

wrote T. S. Eliot in 1930, accurately capturing the essence of private life in our modern western societies. At some point we seem to have decided that any dream of accomplishing something great together, in community, is in vain, and that the best we can do is to set up the conditions for each individual or family to most effectively mind their own business.

Sometime during the general process that we might call modernisation, there was,
according to Hannah Arendt, (see my previous post) a general rebellion against the idea that any aspect of human existence should be considered crude and unimportant to the eyes of the public. It was no longer enough that the activities necessary for upholding our bodily existence would be carried out in the smaller communities called homes or households. The fact that working to support human life was at the same time an immediately communal activity was no longer enough to make it meaningful. Instead, even the basic bodily labour, human life itself as an activity, demanded a visible presence on the public stage which  had previously been reserved for heroic or artistic deeds of excellence. The recognition previously reserved for the excellence of unique personalities was being claimed for the very activities that made man man.

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

Thus arose what Arendt terms the social or society. A new realm where the basic concerns of every household and, increasingly, every individual, were a matter of universal interest and responsibility. The socialisation of man came about, only not in the form intended by Karl Marx. Marx used this very term, the socialisation of man, to lay out his vision of a society where the aforementioned survival labour would determine not only the organisation of households, but the organisation of society as a whole. Living the active life of labour together was what made human existence meaningful, Marx reasoned, and, therefore, global human community could be given meaning by arranging it according to this aspect of life, instead of orienting everything towards the extraordinary deeds of unique individuals.

Instead of this Marxian form of the socialisation of man, we got a society where both the former excellence of the public realm and the immediate community of the private realm are gone. The basic bodily concerns of the individual are now national political matters, but they are no longer a basis for community. The production of food, for instance, no longer serves as the hub of any meaningful social interaction, because we strive to maintain a system where any individual can be sufficiently fed without necessarily coming into contact with any other human being. Pushed to the extreme, the current situation is one where anyone has (or ought, politically speaking, to have) the opportunity to realise any conceivable dream, but where there is no longer any social scene upon which the realisation of that dream will have any significance. No lasting significance, at least. Whatever I
accomplish will be noticed briefly by friends, but forgotten by the next generation.

Society zealously guards  the rights of the individual, and these rights generally have to do with individual life not being determined or conditioned in any way by anything larger than the individual. Society takes great care to defend the individual against society. We fight and die for the right of anybody to be left alone.

Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek has said that the most precise image of global society today is that of the so-called masturbatorium (which, apparently, is a real phenomenon), where numerous people gather in great big halls to have sexual “intercourse” each with him- or herself only, all the while being visible to everyone else. The most extreme sense of privacy, the inviolability of the individual body, is secured by turning the public into an omnipresent, passive, asocial gaze.

Or, in the words of Eliot:

Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
[...]
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Racism – the way of rationality

This clip is (hopefully) not very interesting for you non-speakers of Danish. Around 1.20, popular TV hostess Line Baun Danielsen (I think, isn’t it?), confronted with a photo of a Caribbean gentleman in a boat, blurts out: “Is it a monkey/ape?” A clear-cut fail at political correctness. Not much more than that, though, if you ask me.

Here’s a question:
What is it that makes political correctness seem so hypocritical?

If I’m not much mistaken, political correctness attempts to adress prejudice. It’s not politically correct to express prejudice concerning any group of people — especially not if the group (not) in question is defined by race, religion, gender, physical or mental capacities, or sexual orientation.

And of course we should do what we can to protect people from opposition, aggression, or limitation of opportunities due to such prejudice.

The trouble is that many of us can’t stop at not treating others in a prejudiced manner. We very quickly move on to the next stage, namely that of pretending not to harbour any prejudice at all — not even at a purely mental or emotional level. It becomes respectable, and indeed crucial for social acceptability, to be politically correct through and through, and, consequently, it would be catastrophic to ever be caught unawares and accidentally have one’s latent racism (for example) exposed in some sort of Freudian slip.

I think we’d do well to remember that politically uncorrect prejudice is often not without a rational basis. Or, to put it more bluntly, and in all political uncorrectness: racism, for instance, is a rational attitude. In many contexts, racial prejudice is an intuitive internalisation of statistic realities concerning race. So, as an example, racial prejudice might prompt me to avoid a group of young somali men in a Copenhagen street late at night — perhaps even if this would mean passing close by an equally large group of men with their ethnic roots in Denmark. Why? Because I, as well as the statistics, know that I am more likely to be assaulted by somebody whose ethnic roots are not in Denmark. This is racial prejudice. Most of us have it, we have it for a reason, and if we act upon it, it will (statistically speaking) protect us from unpleasant experiences. Racism is rational.

Does this mean that racism is also right? If rationality is an ethical stamp of approval, then the answer is yes.

Personally, I believe that racism and racial prejudice are wrong, even if they are factually accurate. The fundamental problem problem about prejudice is not whether or not it fits the facts of the world — i.e. the way people are. It often does, and too much time is spent running from the disillusionment of realising this. The problem, rather, is that whenever a particular person is treated according to prejudice against, for instance, the race to which he belongs, he is denied status as a free and responsible agent. In other words, if I treat someone from an arabic country according to my preconceptions concerning arabs in general (God knows I have them), I effectively deny him the option of acting in a different way than the one stipulated by my prejudiced viewpoint. For example, it is difficult to not assault someone in the street, if you are never effectively given the choice, because they assume that you are going to assault them and thus never come near you. It is also diffucult to prove the statistics wrong by not stealing from an employer who chooses, on account of statistics, not to employ you. At a more general level, the motivation is not strong to behave well towards someone who never believes in one’s capacity to do so.

The bottom line is that fighting racism means acting against one’s better judgment and assuming, in every particular case, that the statistics do not apply in this particular case. It means trusting someone who is statistically unworthy of trust. When statistics and personal experience combine to form one big slap on the cheek, we are still called to turn the other cheek. At bottom level, it means not treating human persons like dice which, if rolled a large enough number of times, will yield a predictable, even predetermined, outcome — or, in other words, it means treating persons as human.

(Of course, aspiring to this true anti-racist behaviour also has to imply training ourselves in an anti-racist mindset, but, again, at the level of political correctness, this type of training seems to take place at a petty level, far from the confrontations where it becomes relevant — and also at the impossible level of bidding the mind to create a non-racist attitude out of nothing. The question is whether non-racist thinking mustn’t simply come as an effect of the hard work of non-racist action).

In this case, I don’t know what to say:

No longer I

Thanks to Zach Weiner for yet another high-quality piece of humouristic cleverness posted at his Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal site. I’m not quite sure how he comes up with one of these every day, unless he’s more than one person, which may, of course, be the case.

It was one particular Jewish atheist who made me think of this cartoon, namely the 20th century German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt, whose work I’m looking at these days. Like so many other atheists, Arendt has done me the favour of pointing out certain peculiarities of the particular theism I subscribe to, namely Christianity. Atheism often fulfills this function, because things tend to stand out more readily as peculiar when viewed from the outside.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

I’m going to quote Arendt at length. The following is taken out of the context of a longer discourse, in her book The Human Condition, on the historical relationship between the public and the private. She looks at the Christian idea of goodness as an extreme example of something that does not belong in the public sphere.

The one activity taught by Jesus in word and deed is the activity of goodness, and goodness obviously harbors a tendency to hide from being seen or heard. Christian hostility toward the public realm, the tendency at least of early Christians to lead a life as far removed from the public realm as possible, can also be understood as a self-evident consequence of devotion to good works, independent of all beliefs and expectations. For it is manifest that the moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness’ sake.

When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness, though it may still be useful as organized charity or an act of solidarity. Therefore: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them”. Goodness can exist only when it is not percieved, not even by its author; whoever sees himself performing a good work is no longer good, but at best a useful member of society or a dutiful member of a church. Therefore: “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”

It may be this curious negative quality of goodness, the lack of outward phenomenal manifestation, that makes Jesus of Nazareth’s appearance in history such a profoundly paradoxical event; it certainly seems to be the reason why he thought and taught that no man can be good: “Why callest thou me good? none is good save one; that is, God.” [...T]he whole life story of Jesus seems to testify how love for goodness arises out of the insight that no man can be good. (The Human Condition, pp. 74-75)

One of my true teachers (as opposed to professors and supervisors and other such menaces), Andrew Fellows, says that the main characteristic of the fallen state of mankind is self-awareness. In the Genesis account, Adam and Eve, after disconnecting from goodness as flowing directly from divine intention, become aware that they are naked. They choose to make use of their capacity for independent action to gain knowledge of evil as well as of good, and thus their relationship to the good becomes complex. Why? Because it becomes also a relationship with themselves, or with the self. It becomes something they must face, as in a mirror, as opposed to simply working it out in blissful reliance on the pure intention of God Himself.

The biggest problem is that reflecting upon one’s own goodness is like looking at the back of one’s neck. It’s gone as soon as you look — by the very motion of turning to look. When looking for the realisation of goodness in our own behaviour, we are bound to either watch ourselves fail or start distorting the mirror. The range of distortions in human culture and history is beyond measure.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's illustrations for 'The Little Prince'

In Christianity we are called to choosing the former option: that of watching ourselves fail. Last week, at my friend Simon’s ecumenical project, the “Desert Eucharist“, we read from the third chapter of the Gospel according to John. Here, Jesus explains the significance of his own death at Calvary by pointing back to the Old Testament story where God unleashes a great number of snakes on the Israelites as punishment for their disobedience. The people beg Moses to take the snakes away, and God instructs Moses to fashion a large image of a snake from copper and raise it up on a pole. Whoever looks upon the copper snake is not killed by the snakes’ venom.

After the reading, somebody pointed out that, according to this story, it is the very image of the self-inflicted troubles of mankind that becomes the means for our liberation. We must look squarely at our failures and shortcomings, and their consequences (the snakes we bring upon ourselves), and realise fully that we cannot overcome them. As Arendt says, the Christian may realise what is good, but he cannot be good.

One of the paradoxes of God becoming flesh is the fact that the clearest image of our sin, the image that was raised up for all the world to behold and despise, was also the One that was without sin. None is good save One, and only One makes it perfectly clear to us how perfectly incapable we are of being good.

Because self-awareness has made it impossible for us to be good, we have instead been given the opportunity to look away from ourselves, not at goodnes, but at evil. Instead of the vicious circle of wathcing ourselves failing to be good, and thus becoming more miserably self-absorbed, which in turn makes us fail even more thoroughly, the very image of our failures is raised up in full view, in the same motion that destroys them for good.

We must let ourselves be drawn to Him, the true image of our sin (Him who became sin for us) and follow him into death — that is, death to ourselves. We look at Him and see the evil that we must utterly be to our own eyes, and we watch it perish with him in His death. Thus, to our own eyes, we no longer live. Self-awareness is obsolete, because the self is dead to the self. And then He rises again, so that He may live in us. To our eyes, then, it is no longer us, but Him, the only one who is good, who lives.

Self-awareness, then, should become Christ-awareness, that is, awareness of sin, of death, and of resurrection.