Two kinds of power

Postmoderns like me tend, almost as a rule, to be suspicious of power. I think this is right. After all, human history is littered with examples of just how badly wrong things go when power is the main point of attention.  This, I think, is the subtle implication of the old adage that says "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely": it is not just 'bad' power that is the problem (the power of the Hitlers and Maos of the world) but rather power itself. This is why every attempt in human history to build a utopia has ended in tears and why every power struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of culture end up in despair. Power itself is the problem.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it is too simple to say that power itself is the problem. After all, isn't such assertive language simply a symptom of an underlying power-struggle? To nuance the idea, then, I'm going to suggest that there are two kinds of power: the right hand of power, and the limp, weak left hand of power. The first is the kind of power that dominates, overthrows and imposes. The second is a more profound kind of power: it is the power that gives up power. The first kind of power sets us up for the ruin of Empires; the second sets us up for compassion and forgiveness. After all, forgiveness, etymologically speaking, carries the idea of "giving away" similar to the Koine Greek aphesis, meaning "send away".

Take, for instance, the end of apartheid in South Africa. Okay, I know that the "end of apartheid" is an optimistic way of putting it, for even though the politics of apartheid has ended, the reality of apartheid is still felt in every corner of South Africa. But, well, let's just assume the "end" for the sake of argument. Nelson Mandela really had two options when he set up his rule: the the dialectical right hand of power (the violent calculus of blood to pay back the white race for their (our) horrific crimes of intolerance) or the left hand of power (a deep desire to give up the right for vengeance or recompense in order to embrace the idea of reconciliation). Mandela, with Desmond Tutu, chose the latter when he embraced the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

This made political history. Instead of the Hegelian thesis (apartheid) / antithesis (new apartheid), we had a beautiful abandonment of power (the left hand of power). We seemed to skip the dialectic and move right on into synthesis. The point, however, is not that Mandela relinquished his position of power, or overthrew a capitalist system in order to establish a communist one, but rather assumed the position of power even while he gave his power away. You see, the left hand of power is paradoxical: it is strong precisely because it is weak. It conquers by losing. It succeeds by failing.

But the left hand of power, in order to perpetuate an ethic of reconciliation and forgiveness, needs to be continuous. The TRC was profound but it should have remained open, not just as a means for dealing with racial incongruity, but for dealing with all kinds of intolerance and misunderstanding. Forgiveness, as Jesus of Nazareth pointed out, is never a once-off act, but is a continuous, ongoing process. We forgive, not once, but all the time. And we don't just forgive people wrongs, we forgive them (send them away) by relinquishing our power over them at every moment of the day. Of course, I know the left hand of power is the more difficult route. It's always easier to go the eye-for-an-eye route until everyone is blind than raise a white flag to the power we have been given.

The good and bad of discrimination

A friend of mine ta few days ago asked me what my views on 'race' are. "You know," he said, "The whole issue of 'black versus white'". In South Africa, this is a touchy subject. We have a sordid history of racial intolerance, so talking about race is pretty much like juggling a conceptual atomic bomb. But, just because it's a dangerous subject doesn't mean it isn't worth talking about. Accordingly, at the risk of turning myself into the next Hiroshima, here's what I think:

To begin with, I'm a big supporter of difference. God, as GK Chesterton suggests, cut the world up into pieces because that is what love does: love is only possible because otherness is a reality. Love in the absence of otherness is just narcissism. So, well, instead of being one big ball of sameness and monotony, the universe is one big collection of differences. And, let's be honest, difference is what makes us who we are. Identity is not a singular event but collection of fragments; it is a drama of interactions between othernesses.

Consequently, insofar as the construct of 'race' is a means to affirm difference and the humanity of the other— that is, to celebrate his being different — I think we're on good, solid ground. Insofar as 'race' is the absolute negation of difference — the loudspeaker announcing the terror of otherness — I think it is of no use to anybody. And this, in short would be my view on race, except that even this is not that simple ...

Because the whole issue of 'black versus white', as my friend calls it, is a terrible simplification. It takes missing-the-point to a level that is difficult to even believe. It is never just an issue of black and white. More often than not, differences in opinion are cultural, religious and political rather than simply racial. And even then, such differences, or "styles of being" tend to operate on a complex dialogical continuum rather than in clear dialectical terms.

The main problem with confusing race with styles of living or with confusing the surface (skin-colour) with the substance (beliefs, identity and ideologies) is that discrimination on the whole is deemed evil. Sure, discriminating on the basis of race (and thus personhood) is wrong, but surely we are allowed to discriminate on the basis of ideas and ideologies? After all, your cup may be the same colour as mine, but yours may hold water while mine holds poison, and surely we should be able to speak up about such differences? And if someone, who has a different culture or skin colour from mine, is stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, then surely the issue is not race, but simply that he is doing what is wrong?

In the name of racial tolerance and acceptance, then, we should be careful not to discard the necessity of discriminating against bad ideas.

Labelling a straw man

When I get into an argument with someone, I've noticed that it's terribly easy to turn the person I'm arguing with into a straw man. I see myself, then, as this complex, three-dimensional being with intricate webs of thought and experience and my opponent (or friend) as a kind of mathematical equation that needs simply to be figured out rather than loved or understood.

Typically, the phrase "straw man" refers to an argument that has been misrepresented in some way so as to be easily defeated, but here I'm using it to refer to the misrepresentation of actual human beings. And typically "to attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of intellectual superiority over a particular proposition, idea or philosophy without actually ever taking that proposition, idea or philosophy on its own terms. Here I'm suggesting that "to attack a straw man" also refers to when we turn people into cardboard cut-outs like those you find at a shooting range in order to suggest that we are in some way better, more together and just generally more astute than the people we debate with.

How we turn multi-dimensional human beings into straw men is simple: we put a label onto the person in question, thereby substituting the label for the person. In other words, we take the idea being discussed, remove it from the context of the human being in front of us and then, at least on a conceptual level, discard the person in front of us. I remember watching a journalist do this to the philosopher Slavoj Zizek (See below for Part 1):

It's not that labels are avoidable, but they are merely words, not people. They are ideas, not people. They are just labels, nothing more really. I remember reading Anthony De Mello's 'Awareness' a few years ago. In that book, he talks about the necessity of dropping our labels. He says, if I remember this correctly, that the problem with labels is that sometimes they become a dirty lens through which we view everything. In other words, they can stop us from seeing. Even when we label ourselves as smart, empathetic, stupid, lazy, active or whatever, we are in danger of living in a kind of unreality.

What I'm trying to learn now is just to live: not to make judgments about people and their ideas, just to listen; not to decide that I know what I'm talking about, but to question; not to be so concerned with the destination that I forget the present moment. In short: to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch without worrying too much about how well any of my experiences fit into my theories. I don't want to be the kind of person who changes the facts to fit the theory, but rather the kind of person whose theory fits with my experience of reality. Yes, of course, we need to make decisions at some point, but even those decisions ought to be seen in the context of our whole human story, rather than as a destination that prevents us from ever going anywhere else ever again.

Thoughts at 12:13 pm

Behind the facade of these words is more than an idea. Behind this constructed veneer of pixels and binary code is a person who spills milk and laughs about it. So, when you consider your interaction with this world of idols and surfaces, remember that it is not me you’re looking at but rather an idea you have of me. Remember that I am not who you think I am, nor probably even who I think I am. I am not the words I attach to this fleeting digital expression of self. I am (not) what I profess to believe. I am (not) a pure expression of something deeper than a creed. I am (not) found in this or that label. And I really hope that my identity isn’t something I care too much to preserve, because I understand that I will only lose what I try desperately to keep, and that I can only keep what I do not own.

Virtual carbon footprints

The thing we've got to remember out here in cyberspace is that we may just be disconnecting signifiers from signifieds. The signs we set up may just be misty concepts pointing into a fog without any substance.

We're posting stuff onto Facebook and Twitter that some people read, endorse, like, get lost in and forget. We're stepping outside of our real lives to carve our names into a tree that doesn't even exist. We're graffiti-tagging the walls of the unreal to remind people that, here, there, somewhere, we are desperate to be heard. We're putting down signatures without the personality of our own handwritings. We're calling out words without the resonance of our own voices. We are, perhaps, dwelling in the domain of non-being. We are tenting in the campsite of disintegration.

Wonder

The word wonder means two things that are, I believe, intricately connected. In the first place, wonder means to question, to be curious, or to search. It implies a journey towards something more than it implies a sense of absolute certainty or clarity. But in the second place, wonder is a synonym for the word awe. It means a sense of joyful bewilderment experienced when standing before something that is both utterly true and yet also utterly inexplicable. It means accepting, with genuine humility, just how small and powerless we are in the face of all that we cannot or will not understand or control. This awe is not to prevent us from asking, seeking or searching, but is precisely what makes us want to know more. Awe propels us into deeper things. This is why it's fair to say that wonder is the beginning of wisdom.

Placebos and hypochondriacs

I've been thinking a bit lately about the idea of a placebo – an unreal cause that has a real effect. Obviously the idea of a placebo is central to medicine testing and to the treatment of hypochondriacs, but it is also a tremendous metaphor for how people may sometimes relate to the world. More specifically, for me, it describes how people may be manipulated by news media.

Naturally, news media carry what we would happily call 'true stories'; journalists are required to report on facts more than they are asked to report on speculations or their own imagineerings. At least, that's what we like to think. The main problem I've noticed in South African newspapers, as is probably true of most journalistic outputs worldwide, is that they provide bite-sized snippets of events or facts without necessarily explaining or unpacking the context or the full consequences of these events or facts for readers.

Moreover, because of the nature of journalism, the 'mere facts' often miss the nuances and complexities of social scenarios and cultural contexts. In other words, the rhetoric of (apparent) realism produces what may be called the unreal. In an attempt to reflect only reality, what tends to happen (and this generalisation is by no means flawless) is that reality gets lost somewhere. Even the most neutral, factual, truthful journalism is a placebo of some kind.

So whether journalists are reporting on mass tragedies like 9/11 or smaller but equally terrible tragedies like the crime in South Africa or teenage hooliganism in the UK, the removal of these stories from the wider contexts in which they are found leads to what I describe as cultural hypochondria. A climate of fear is perpetuated. People feel like victims in the face of the insurmountable. People live too reactively.

I'm not saying that I have this idea completely figured out or that this idea is without its faults, but it is, I believe, a notion worth exploring in relation to how we engage with the world we live in. Even if I'm taking the idea too far, it is certainly worth asking if our perception of reality is largely constructed through a second-hand, mediated, vicarious experience of the world. It's certainly worth asking if most of our actions are born out of what isn't even real.