The following was originally published way, way back, on March 13, 2013.
Jimmy Fallon, American late night TV host, had this to say on the ritual signification of choosing the new Pope: “With the Pope retiring, more than 100 cardinals will sequester themselves in the Sistine Chapel to choose the next Pope. They’ll send out white smoke if they’ve chosen somebody, black smoke if they haven’t chosen somebody, and a text message when they find out that it’s 2013.” Underlying this very simple, ableit mildly funny statement, which claims on some level that the papal conclave is an anachronism, is a very common assumption that I think is worth interrogating. It is the assumption that time itself should be a measure of appropriateness or success; that “it’s 2013″, which means that the Catholic Church should “get with the programme”.
This assumption is played out in a number of ways. At its most basic, it assumes that Friday is better simply because it isn’t Thursday, and also that Friday is better than Thursday simply because it is closer to Saturday (Saturday, of course, is better than Friday just because it’s Saturday). Being at university is thus assumed to be better than being at high school simply because it assumes that we are “further along” than we once were (Time, of course, is dealt with in terms of the metaphor of a journey or is often personified as a moving object — “time flies” or “the right time arrives”). But how do you get to University without some kind of preparation? If we keep this way of thinking in tact, we will end up with assuming that Saw 6 must be better than any play by Shakespeare simply because it is newer, or that getting a divorce is better than being married simply because it happened more recently than the wedding, or that being dead is way more progressive than being alive. Degeneration can also happen in the future.
Time itself cannot be a measure of goodness or wisdom or truth or beauty or anything else that is of genuine value. It is simply the framework or container within which we must figure these other more transcendent qualities out. So, yes, we have electronic texts now instead of smoke signals, and the assumption of Fallon’s joke is that this somehow makes the smoke signal ridiculous. But what makes the smoke signal seem ridiculous is not its inherent ridiculousness. It is our way of seeing that is truly ridiculous. We have become slaves to fashion — so obsessed with the new to the point that the question of whether something is really, genuinely better is hardly even asked. We use the word “outdated” as a derogatory term without understanding that mere speed or difference cannot be proof of something being better. So what if “it’s 2013″ — humanity doesn’t seem to be much better now than at any time before.
Of course, the misuse of the theory of evolution argues that time is the measure of improvement. We are somehow deemed better than monkeys simply because we happened to show up on the timeline a little later on. But I think we are better than monkeys for a host of other reasons that exclude time as a measurement, and worse than monkeys for even more reasons that also exclude the same. And my point is just this: time itself is not enough to improve things. If you leave your lawn unchecked, it will grow wild. If you leave milk out in the sun, it will become sour. The measure of the success of a lawn is its neatness and the measure of milk is its drinkability, not its place in a calendar.
Think of “planned obsolescence”. I have a cellphone contract that I sign that allows (or forces) me to change my phone for a newer one every 2 years. But the only reason I actually need to get the new phone, as far as I can tell, is that if I don’t I will soon be phone-less, because my old phone will soon explode or melt into oblivion. Why will it explode or melt? Because the manufacturers design it to do just that. Why? Because how else will they sell more phones and make more money? My good or wellbeing, or indeed the wellbeing of the culture, is never even considered as part of this imbalanced equation. I serve the machine, and the machine is made of time and money. I can now send a text about the election of the new Pope, but I may still be filled with all kinds of character flaws and corruptions. Just because I’m older doesn’t make me better than my past self.
But, anyway, the point here is that the Catholic Church has decided to set up some rituals that don’t change with the times. Some see this as anachronistic, but it seems to me that this is just good sense. Instead of spending the next five minutes worrying about how to keep up with the times in the following five minutes, the Catholic Church has tried (albeit with some hiccups) to not let something as arbitrary as time be the measure of its success. Some may not necessarily think that this is a good thing, but in order to convince me they will have to do better than quote Bob Dylan’s “The times, they are a-changin’”. My question will still be, what are they changing for? The mere unrolling of time is simply a means towards decay if there is no good reason for it.
Sunday, January 3, 2016
Living in a rut
The following was originally published on January 11, 2013.
I recently finished watching Roy Anderson’s astonishing film Songs from the second floor (2000). Anderson is clearly a philosopher, and has a keen eye for marrying absurdity to beauty. His characters, so completely enveloped in their own misery and lostness, simply fail to see the humour in what they are experiencing. There is a nihilistic edge in Anderson’s vision, but it is not entirely devoid of purpose. It therefore stands in stark contrast with two other films that I watched recently, the Coen brothers’ highly enjoyable meditation on the pointlessness of events in A serious man (2009) and David Lynch’s aimless Inland empire (2006).
While the Coens rob their characters of the possibility of finding any meaning outside of their own attempts to understand the world and while Lynch holds fast non-meaning and the non-logic of dreams in a bizarre conglomeration of non-sequiturs, Anderson presents a world that clearly makes sense, but with characters who fail to see any sense in it. His characters tend to reach conclusions about their own situations that are far from accurate. This reflects their own spiritual wasteland, but does not necessarily assume the complete absence of the transcendent. Most of the central characters, shown through a series of almost-but-not-quite connected vignettes, are often found repeating the same idea in different settings. An old man constantly complains that his business has “gone up in smoke” (He literally set fire to it) and that his son “went nuts” because he wrote too much poetry (It is clear that this is not the reason that he went mad). His other son keeps on reciting a line of poetry — “Beloved be the ones who sit down” — even though he is not quite certain of its significance. And a nurse keeps on asking the doctor she is having an affair with with when he is going to divorce his wife (His silence reveals that he has no such intention, but this does not stop the nurse from pestering him).
These repeated lines and scenarios are like many of the stories we tell ourselves to convince us that we understand the world. But, as theory on narrative fallacy goes, understanding the story about something is not the same as understanding the thing itself. Nevertheless, we keep repeating our stories, keep telling ourselves that this-is-how-it-works even when the truth might be utterly different. We hear people say, for example, that ‘Everything happens for a reason’ and even find repeated stories about the meaning of life in the way that people spend money on more stuff: shoes, better technology, bigger houses, smarter cars, et cetera, et cetera.
Another interesting symbol in Anderson’s movie is the presence of ghosts who seem to interact somewhat with the living. As is typical in folklore about ghosts, they exist in a loop, constantly repeating themselves even though such repetitions make no difference to any outcome. And, of course, this is precisely the point that Anderson is getting at. The people in his story are all ghosts. And perhaps we are potentially ghosts too. We all have a tendency to do what we have been doing for no other reason than that that’s what we have always been doing. This is the ontological structure of a rut.
One of my favourite scenes from the film shows a massive open floor at an airport as a very large crowd of people begins to fill the floor on their way to check in for their flights. But they are all carrying baggage that is very, very heavy — so heavy, in fact, that they can barely move it. The check-in counter seems miles away; perhaps it is unreachable. We don’t get to see what happens to the people when they reach the check-in counter, but I would guess the following possibility. In keeping with the absurdism of the film, let’s imagine that the people are allowed to check-in all that baggage. Even so, it’ll soon become obvious, in a strange dance between tragedy and comedy, that the plane is so overloaded that it is unable to get off the ground. In this imagined ending to this scene, the people are carrying too much stuff and stuck in too many ruts, and as a consequence the heavens have become totally unreachable. This is not to say that these folks will never get into the the kingdom of the sky at all, but it is saying something about the fact that it’s difficult to fly when we do not take ourselves lightly. Maybe it’s impossible to fly when you’re on autopilot.
I recently finished watching Roy Anderson’s astonishing film Songs from the second floor (2000). Anderson is clearly a philosopher, and has a keen eye for marrying absurdity to beauty. His characters, so completely enveloped in their own misery and lostness, simply fail to see the humour in what they are experiencing. There is a nihilistic edge in Anderson’s vision, but it is not entirely devoid of purpose. It therefore stands in stark contrast with two other films that I watched recently, the Coen brothers’ highly enjoyable meditation on the pointlessness of events in A serious man (2009) and David Lynch’s aimless Inland empire (2006).
While the Coens rob their characters of the possibility of finding any meaning outside of their own attempts to understand the world and while Lynch holds fast non-meaning and the non-logic of dreams in a bizarre conglomeration of non-sequiturs, Anderson presents a world that clearly makes sense, but with characters who fail to see any sense in it. His characters tend to reach conclusions about their own situations that are far from accurate. This reflects their own spiritual wasteland, but does not necessarily assume the complete absence of the transcendent. Most of the central characters, shown through a series of almost-but-not-quite connected vignettes, are often found repeating the same idea in different settings. An old man constantly complains that his business has “gone up in smoke” (He literally set fire to it) and that his son “went nuts” because he wrote too much poetry (It is clear that this is not the reason that he went mad). His other son keeps on reciting a line of poetry — “Beloved be the ones who sit down” — even though he is not quite certain of its significance. And a nurse keeps on asking the doctor she is having an affair with with when he is going to divorce his wife (His silence reveals that he has no such intention, but this does not stop the nurse from pestering him).
These repeated lines and scenarios are like many of the stories we tell ourselves to convince us that we understand the world. But, as theory on narrative fallacy goes, understanding the story about something is not the same as understanding the thing itself. Nevertheless, we keep repeating our stories, keep telling ourselves that this-is-how-it-works even when the truth might be utterly different. We hear people say, for example, that ‘Everything happens for a reason’ and even find repeated stories about the meaning of life in the way that people spend money on more stuff: shoes, better technology, bigger houses, smarter cars, et cetera, et cetera.
Another interesting symbol in Anderson’s movie is the presence of ghosts who seem to interact somewhat with the living. As is typical in folklore about ghosts, they exist in a loop, constantly repeating themselves even though such repetitions make no difference to any outcome. And, of course, this is precisely the point that Anderson is getting at. The people in his story are all ghosts. And perhaps we are potentially ghosts too. We all have a tendency to do what we have been doing for no other reason than that that’s what we have always been doing. This is the ontological structure of a rut.
One of my favourite scenes from the film shows a massive open floor at an airport as a very large crowd of people begins to fill the floor on their way to check in for their flights. But they are all carrying baggage that is very, very heavy — so heavy, in fact, that they can barely move it. The check-in counter seems miles away; perhaps it is unreachable. We don’t get to see what happens to the people when they reach the check-in counter, but I would guess the following possibility. In keeping with the absurdism of the film, let’s imagine that the people are allowed to check-in all that baggage. Even so, it’ll soon become obvious, in a strange dance between tragedy and comedy, that the plane is so overloaded that it is unable to get off the ground. In this imagined ending to this scene, the people are carrying too much stuff and stuck in too many ruts, and as a consequence the heavens have become totally unreachable. This is not to say that these folks will never get into the the kingdom of the sky at all, but it is saying something about the fact that it’s difficult to fly when we do not take ourselves lightly. Maybe it’s impossible to fly when you’re on autopilot.
Liminal Capital: Exhibition Opening
What follows is a rough approximation of a speech that I gave on 28 September 2014 to open an art exhibition — entitled ‘Liminal Capital’ — at the Tina Skukan Gallery in Pretoria. My friends Magdel van Rooyen and Maricke du Plessis have done an amazing job of curating the exhibition, and it was really lovely to be able to offer a short, highly incomplete reflection on the city I grew up in.
…
There’s an old joke from the communist era about a man who was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew that censors would read his mail, so he told his friends: “Let’s create a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, then what I’m saying is true. If it’s written in red ink, you can be sure that what I’m saying is false.” A short while later, the first letter from the man arrived and everything was written in blue. It read: “Everything is really wonderful here. There are movie theatres and playgrounds, and the apartments here are the epitome of luxury. The stores are full of good food. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”
I know that we’re not living in a communist era, even if many of our politicians have communist aspirations, but I love the ambiguity at the end of the joke because it reminds us that often our relationship with places and spaces is just that: ambiguous. But then there is an alternative view, as there always is. Robert Louis Stevenson has pointed out that “[s]ome places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks”.
So what is this place, Pretoria, saying to us? Is the message ambiguous or distinct? Is there a message at all?
Whenever I think of the idea of a city, I think of China Miéville’s novel The City and The City, which takes place in two cities that occupy exactly the same geographical space. And yet the two cities are perceived by the various denizens to be different places. Every resident must dutifully unsee the other city. This is to say that they must actively fail to acknowledge the existence of the other city. As a consequence, they learn to recognize things as belonging to the other city without actually seeing them. They acknowledge the unacknowledgeable and unacknowledge the acknowledgeable. If an individual ignores the imperative to unsee the other city, he or she is deemed guilty of a terrible crime calledbreaching — a crime that is considered worse than murder in Miéville’s tale.
Maybe this can be taken, at least partly, as a metaphor or parable about our own relationship with Pretoria. Are there spaces in Pretoria that we see, and are there spaces that we unsee?
The answer must, I think, be yes.
Clearly, a borderland between the two cities is real. There are two cities, or perhaps more than two cities. Each city within this one city is delineated by borders, thresholds, boundaries. I guess places are always understood in terms of liminality. There is a betweenness that we are always negotiating, fumbling towards, stumbling into. And this means that the simple idea of inhabiting a space or dwelling in a place is always far more complex than what we usually recognize.
When I think of Pretoria, I think of it as the place I grew up in, but I also think of it as the place I now live. There are two cities, both cities in constant flux: one in the past and one in the present. But the place I grew up in and the place I now live are two different places. Many thresholds have been crossed. Many new boundaries have been constructed and have fallen away, leaving me to question where the one city ends and the other begins.
Perhaps I can illustrate this sense of a constant becoming by referring to my experience of one place within this place. When I was a kid, my parents would often take my siblings and me to the Hatfield Bakery in Duncan Street to buy bread. It was the best bread in Pretoria — it tasted like cake. Of course, as an added bonus, the bakery also made actual cake. And what made this food even better was the fact that we as a family knew the Andrews family that owned and ran the bakery.
Back then Pretoria felt to me very much like a small town. The Duncan Street that the Hatfield Bakery was in was a narrow road with only two lanes, one going in either direction. But things changed, as they always do.
The boundaries shifted.
I’m not exactly sure of the order in which they changed, but a few things happened. At one point, the Hatfield Bakery, which I think had been in the same old building for over fifty or sixty years, had to move to another building, one right next door to the old building. At another point, at least as I have the story, a certain businessman discovered that the name of the Hatfield Bakery hadn’t been trademarked because such legalities weren’t necessary when the bakery had opened all those years ago. So he — whoever he was — decided to steal the name and the visual identity of the bakery for his own gain and trademark it for a bakery that he then opened in what was then the new Hatfield Mall.
This meant that the Andrews family were forced to change the name of their bakery — and this, despite the fact that the name was so intimately connected with their own family heritage. Then, things changed once more, and the newly named Five Loaves Bakery had to move again, this time across the road to what has got to be one of the ugliest buildings in the Hatfield Area, or possibly Pretoria.
Later, for various reasons, the bakery finally closed down. And even later, Duncan Street was expanded; and, finally, just a year or so ago, it too had its name changed to something else. The street that carried my name became something else. A friend of mine said that when you get a new house, you want to be able to put your own furniture into it and hang up your own curtains. Is that what all the renaming has been about — hanging up new curtains?
Now, in this present-day Pretoria, I don’t go to a bakery run by family friends. Instead, I go to one or more chain stores where bread is baked in a factory, packaged in plastic bags by people I have never met and distributed without any semblance of personality.
It’s hard not to let nostalgia take over, right?
I often think of my memories of Pretoria as more authentic. Sometimes the quaint Pretoria that I knew as a child feels more personal than the sprawling monster of traffic jams and road works and horrific malls that it seems to have become. There was a city and there is a city. And the message of this city remains both clear and ambiguous.
But I have recently come to understand something about this liminal capital — this ever-shifting, ever-evolving beast of a city. The liminality is not just about the place, but has always been primarily about my own subjective experience of the place. Pretoria has changed but I have changed too. Boundaries and borders have shifted inside me. Because that’s what happens in life. We all have to cross thresholds, every day.
Sometimes you just have to walk through a door.
And brings me to a second message of the parable located in China Miéville’s story. A place can only ever be properly understood from the inside. From the outside, it’s just a thing. But from the inside, understood from this internalized space within the self, it’s more like a human being — something complex and loaded with personality. There is a paradox here, of course: Pretoria is not located in Pretoria, but in an intermediation between people who live and breathe together in a shared environment defined and redefined by ever-shifting boundaries. Pretoria is located, I think, in a dialogue. It is located in the between, just as we are.
What we have here at this exhibition is an expression of this simple fact.
We have a selection of works by artists who have offered personal views of their own unique perspectives on the city. There are images of pigeons — an ocean of bubbling feathers indicating a city always in flux, set against a backdrop of seemingly immovable buildings. There are crumpled maps — signs of an era before GPSs and also of an era before various names were changed. There are images taken from fragments: a statue of our most recognizable national icon combined with images of actual places in this city. There are bridges and there are yellow beacons, sculptures and other images and abstractions too, all reminding us of the fact that we live in a city that we cannot and must not unsee.
We Pretorians should all find ourselves guilty of the crime of breaching that Miéville tells us about in his novel.We must acknowledge that there are different perspectives on Pretoria. It is one place but it is also more than one space. It is singular, but it is also multiple.
There is a message and the message is clear. There is a city. But I hope you will also get a sense from these images of the genuine ambiguity that we find ourselves forced to confront. There is a city. It’s a wonderful place, but it’s sometimes difficult to find the right ink — difficult to find just the right way to draw lines, offer words and create images. Although, having said that, the artists who have contributed to this exhibition seem to have done pretty well nonetheless.
…
There’s an old joke from the communist era about a man who was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew that censors would read his mail, so he told his friends: “Let’s create a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, then what I’m saying is true. If it’s written in red ink, you can be sure that what I’m saying is false.” A short while later, the first letter from the man arrived and everything was written in blue. It read: “Everything is really wonderful here. There are movie theatres and playgrounds, and the apartments here are the epitome of luxury. The stores are full of good food. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.”
I know that we’re not living in a communist era, even if many of our politicians have communist aspirations, but I love the ambiguity at the end of the joke because it reminds us that often our relationship with places and spaces is just that: ambiguous. But then there is an alternative view, as there always is. Robert Louis Stevenson has pointed out that “[s]ome places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks”.
So what is this place, Pretoria, saying to us? Is the message ambiguous or distinct? Is there a message at all?
Whenever I think of the idea of a city, I think of China Miéville’s novel The City and The City, which takes place in two cities that occupy exactly the same geographical space. And yet the two cities are perceived by the various denizens to be different places. Every resident must dutifully unsee the other city. This is to say that they must actively fail to acknowledge the existence of the other city. As a consequence, they learn to recognize things as belonging to the other city without actually seeing them. They acknowledge the unacknowledgeable and unacknowledge the acknowledgeable. If an individual ignores the imperative to unsee the other city, he or she is deemed guilty of a terrible crime calledbreaching — a crime that is considered worse than murder in Miéville’s tale.
Maybe this can be taken, at least partly, as a metaphor or parable about our own relationship with Pretoria. Are there spaces in Pretoria that we see, and are there spaces that we unsee?
The answer must, I think, be yes.
Clearly, a borderland between the two cities is real. There are two cities, or perhaps more than two cities. Each city within this one city is delineated by borders, thresholds, boundaries. I guess places are always understood in terms of liminality. There is a betweenness that we are always negotiating, fumbling towards, stumbling into. And this means that the simple idea of inhabiting a space or dwelling in a place is always far more complex than what we usually recognize.
When I think of Pretoria, I think of it as the place I grew up in, but I also think of it as the place I now live. There are two cities, both cities in constant flux: one in the past and one in the present. But the place I grew up in and the place I now live are two different places. Many thresholds have been crossed. Many new boundaries have been constructed and have fallen away, leaving me to question where the one city ends and the other begins.
Perhaps I can illustrate this sense of a constant becoming by referring to my experience of one place within this place. When I was a kid, my parents would often take my siblings and me to the Hatfield Bakery in Duncan Street to buy bread. It was the best bread in Pretoria — it tasted like cake. Of course, as an added bonus, the bakery also made actual cake. And what made this food even better was the fact that we as a family knew the Andrews family that owned and ran the bakery.
Back then Pretoria felt to me very much like a small town. The Duncan Street that the Hatfield Bakery was in was a narrow road with only two lanes, one going in either direction. But things changed, as they always do.
The boundaries shifted.
I’m not exactly sure of the order in which they changed, but a few things happened. At one point, the Hatfield Bakery, which I think had been in the same old building for over fifty or sixty years, had to move to another building, one right next door to the old building. At another point, at least as I have the story, a certain businessman discovered that the name of the Hatfield Bakery hadn’t been trademarked because such legalities weren’t necessary when the bakery had opened all those years ago. So he — whoever he was — decided to steal the name and the visual identity of the bakery for his own gain and trademark it for a bakery that he then opened in what was then the new Hatfield Mall.
This meant that the Andrews family were forced to change the name of their bakery — and this, despite the fact that the name was so intimately connected with their own family heritage. Then, things changed once more, and the newly named Five Loaves Bakery had to move again, this time across the road to what has got to be one of the ugliest buildings in the Hatfield Area, or possibly Pretoria.
Later, for various reasons, the bakery finally closed down. And even later, Duncan Street was expanded; and, finally, just a year or so ago, it too had its name changed to something else. The street that carried my name became something else. A friend of mine said that when you get a new house, you want to be able to put your own furniture into it and hang up your own curtains. Is that what all the renaming has been about — hanging up new curtains?
Now, in this present-day Pretoria, I don’t go to a bakery run by family friends. Instead, I go to one or more chain stores where bread is baked in a factory, packaged in plastic bags by people I have never met and distributed without any semblance of personality.
It’s hard not to let nostalgia take over, right?
I often think of my memories of Pretoria as more authentic. Sometimes the quaint Pretoria that I knew as a child feels more personal than the sprawling monster of traffic jams and road works and horrific malls that it seems to have become. There was a city and there is a city. And the message of this city remains both clear and ambiguous.
But I have recently come to understand something about this liminal capital — this ever-shifting, ever-evolving beast of a city. The liminality is not just about the place, but has always been primarily about my own subjective experience of the place. Pretoria has changed but I have changed too. Boundaries and borders have shifted inside me. Because that’s what happens in life. We all have to cross thresholds, every day.
Sometimes you just have to walk through a door.
And brings me to a second message of the parable located in China Miéville’s story. A place can only ever be properly understood from the inside. From the outside, it’s just a thing. But from the inside, understood from this internalized space within the self, it’s more like a human being — something complex and loaded with personality. There is a paradox here, of course: Pretoria is not located in Pretoria, but in an intermediation between people who live and breathe together in a shared environment defined and redefined by ever-shifting boundaries. Pretoria is located, I think, in a dialogue. It is located in the between, just as we are.
What we have here at this exhibition is an expression of this simple fact.
We have a selection of works by artists who have offered personal views of their own unique perspectives on the city. There are images of pigeons — an ocean of bubbling feathers indicating a city always in flux, set against a backdrop of seemingly immovable buildings. There are crumpled maps — signs of an era before GPSs and also of an era before various names were changed. There are images taken from fragments: a statue of our most recognizable national icon combined with images of actual places in this city. There are bridges and there are yellow beacons, sculptures and other images and abstractions too, all reminding us of the fact that we live in a city that we cannot and must not unsee.
We Pretorians should all find ourselves guilty of the crime of breaching that Miéville tells us about in his novel.We must acknowledge that there are different perspectives on Pretoria. It is one place but it is also more than one space. It is singular, but it is also multiple.
There is a message and the message is clear. There is a city. But I hope you will also get a sense from these images of the genuine ambiguity that we find ourselves forced to confront. There is a city. It’s a wonderful place, but it’s sometimes difficult to find the right ink — difficult to find just the right way to draw lines, offer words and create images. Although, having said that, the artists who have contributed to this exhibition seem to have done pretty well nonetheless.
Changing your mind: An impossibility?
What makes it so very difficult for people to change their minds (even when a truth that has been presented to them is overwhelmingly against their present convictions)?
Last year, after several weeks of teaching the work of Marshall McLuhan, I found myself somewhat disheartened by the answers that my students had given in their tests. At least half of them had managed to totally misunderstand McLuhan’s central thesis — The medium is the message — despite the fact that I had spent at least ten minutes at the beginning of every lecture reiterating its significance before moving on to further implications of the idea.
“It is not,” I would say, adopting an air of seriousness, “the content that is the main issue here, but the container.” Or, I would put it differently: “The TV may as well have cathode-ray snow on it rather than the news or pornography or anything else. It is the television itself that brings about the greatest change when it comes to how we relate to the world and each other.” Or, otherwise, “It is the medium that introduces a new scale into our interactions, not the content of that medium”.
And so on, etc, etc.
I would follow this simple (albeit novel) idea, expressed in various different ways, with countless examples of how this idea is true — how it plays out — and then provide the students with oodles of reading to help them to drill that simple idea into their heads. But then, in their test answers, more than half the class ended up saying something like this: “When McLuhan says that the medium is the message, he means that what matters most is what the medium says (the content), not how it says it (the medium itself).” That, in case you missed it, is the exact opposite of what I was trying to teach them.
I hope you will now understand me when you see me in my office throwing my hands up in exasperation. “Seriously?” I think “That’s what you thought I was saying!?” Despite hours in class and even more hours studying, many of my beloved students will tend to simply revert back to the belief they had before they began the course. Yes, I see, there is a kind of horrible truth here in that this very situation proves McLuhan to be right again: the content of a course is less important than the environment that convinces the students that they’re being educated (even when they’re not learning anything).
In any case, I recall this in the light of the fact that I was watching a debate recently where it became patently clear that the primary protagonist of the debate, who also happened to be the primary antagonist in the debate, was absolutely right about something — his arguments were well reasoned and well informed — and yet was being met with tremendous resistance and criticism from those whom he was criticising. The people resisting him never once dealt with him at the level of his argument, but resorted instead to using a whole range of creative ad hominems.
So I ask again: What makes it so very difficult for people to change their minds?
There are many reasons, of course, but I want to offer just one:
Pressure.
At the risk of providing yet another oversimplification, people operate, whether consciously or un/non-consciously in accordance with the pressure, whether perceived or real, that is exerted on them. Dubner and Levitt’s contention in Freakonomics, Super Freakonomics, and Think like a Freak that human beings work according to incentives — positive or negative; carrot or stick — gets at the same idea. The pressure may be the pressure to be happy or the pressure to get money or to keep a job. But I think that the two primary sources of pressure are pride (which consists of maintaining a picture that we have of ourselves as being somewhat better than we really are) or acceptance (by some Other — Heidegger’s The They, or Lacan’s big Other, etc.). Acceptance, though, always comes back to pride: who we want to be.
So pride is the main problem: the culprit is us.
We want to see ourselves positively; to have a sense of our own self-importance; to preserve our sense of identity.
Perhaps this is why people of various religions are so keen on the idea of hell: psychologically speaking, it puts the ego at a huge advantage and the pressure to stick to what you do believe as the absolutely right thing to believe is increased a hundredfold. Being wrong, at least according to these hellbent ideologies, has very severe consequences indeed. Anyway, isn’t a fundamentalist really just someone who feels the pressure to conform more severely than those who are less rigidly dogmatic? Maybe fundamentalism is just egotism disguised in the language of faith.
The fact that pride is the main problem means that we want to see ourselves as being right — changing our minds, then, would run counter to this incentive/pressure, because it would imply that we have been wrong and therefore less than perfect, and therefore less than worthy of our sense of self-importance. Studies have shown that narcissists are especially confident when it comes to believing the truth of their own assertions, no matter how obviously wrong they might be. And, it turns out, as studies especially in the field of self-deception have shown, that the best way to reinforce your own biases is through the derogation of others, hence the reason why people resort so quickly to the ad hominem. If you want to make sure you’re right, you have to invent an enemy for yourself (Girard’s mimetic realism has a lot to say about this process).
It’s the logic of hellfire again, and scapegoating, and victimisation: “We’re in, they’re out. Hooray for us!”
The solution to the problem of pride is, of course, humility/modesty — at least, some kind of epistemic humility that accepts that what we know and believe may not be absolute or ultimate. I wouldn’t take this to an extreme, though, since this would create a kind of perpetual mental paralysis, where nothing can be known except that nothing can be known, as Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy:
Who are the students that learn the best — that grow and change to the point of being willing to have their own minds changed? The answer is simple: Those who are confident in their ability to learn (confident, that is, in the organ of conviction that is the mind), but humble about what they have learned; those who know that they can expand their knowledge, but also that they will not ever know everything. People often wonder about the intelligent versus the unintelligent, and in my work I’ve wondered the same. I suppose we have tests of all kinds to measure the difference. But, to me, it has become absolutely clear that those who learn the most are also those who assume that they have not yet arrived — that they may not ever arrive — but who are certain that the pursuit of knowledge is worthy of their time and energy.
What makes it so very difficult for people to change their minds?
Simple: they are not humble enough.
They still believe a lie; that the content or message (the self) is deemed more important than the container or the medium (reality).
…
Some books that shaped my thinking on this stuff:
Dubner, S & Levitt, S. 2014. Think like a freak. London: Penguin.
Hallinan, Joseph. 2014. Kidding ourselves. New York: Crown.
Ten Elshof, Gregg A. 2009. I told me so. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Trivers, R. 2013. Deceit and self-deception. London: Penguin.
Last year, after several weeks of teaching the work of Marshall McLuhan, I found myself somewhat disheartened by the answers that my students had given in their tests. At least half of them had managed to totally misunderstand McLuhan’s central thesis — The medium is the message — despite the fact that I had spent at least ten minutes at the beginning of every lecture reiterating its significance before moving on to further implications of the idea.
“It is not,” I would say, adopting an air of seriousness, “the content that is the main issue here, but the container.” Or, I would put it differently: “The TV may as well have cathode-ray snow on it rather than the news or pornography or anything else. It is the television itself that brings about the greatest change when it comes to how we relate to the world and each other.” Or, otherwise, “It is the medium that introduces a new scale into our interactions, not the content of that medium”.
And so on, etc, etc.
I would follow this simple (albeit novel) idea, expressed in various different ways, with countless examples of how this idea is true — how it plays out — and then provide the students with oodles of reading to help them to drill that simple idea into their heads. But then, in their test answers, more than half the class ended up saying something like this: “When McLuhan says that the medium is the message, he means that what matters most is what the medium says (the content), not how it says it (the medium itself).” That, in case you missed it, is the exact opposite of what I was trying to teach them.
I hope you will now understand me when you see me in my office throwing my hands up in exasperation. “Seriously?” I think “That’s what you thought I was saying!?” Despite hours in class and even more hours studying, many of my beloved students will tend to simply revert back to the belief they had before they began the course. Yes, I see, there is a kind of horrible truth here in that this very situation proves McLuhan to be right again: the content of a course is less important than the environment that convinces the students that they’re being educated (even when they’re not learning anything).
In any case, I recall this in the light of the fact that I was watching a debate recently where it became patently clear that the primary protagonist of the debate, who also happened to be the primary antagonist in the debate, was absolutely right about something — his arguments were well reasoned and well informed — and yet was being met with tremendous resistance and criticism from those whom he was criticising. The people resisting him never once dealt with him at the level of his argument, but resorted instead to using a whole range of creative ad hominems.
So I ask again: What makes it so very difficult for people to change their minds?
There are many reasons, of course, but I want to offer just one:
Pressure.
At the risk of providing yet another oversimplification, people operate, whether consciously or un/non-consciously in accordance with the pressure, whether perceived or real, that is exerted on them. Dubner and Levitt’s contention in Freakonomics, Super Freakonomics, and Think like a Freak that human beings work according to incentives — positive or negative; carrot or stick — gets at the same idea. The pressure may be the pressure to be happy or the pressure to get money or to keep a job. But I think that the two primary sources of pressure are pride (which consists of maintaining a picture that we have of ourselves as being somewhat better than we really are) or acceptance (by some Other — Heidegger’s The They, or Lacan’s big Other, etc.). Acceptance, though, always comes back to pride: who we want to be.
So pride is the main problem: the culprit is us.
We want to see ourselves positively; to have a sense of our own self-importance; to preserve our sense of identity.
Perhaps this is why people of various religions are so keen on the idea of hell: psychologically speaking, it puts the ego at a huge advantage and the pressure to stick to what you do believe as the absolutely right thing to believe is increased a hundredfold. Being wrong, at least according to these hellbent ideologies, has very severe consequences indeed. Anyway, isn’t a fundamentalist really just someone who feels the pressure to conform more severely than those who are less rigidly dogmatic? Maybe fundamentalism is just egotism disguised in the language of faith.
The fact that pride is the main problem means that we want to see ourselves as being right — changing our minds, then, would run counter to this incentive/pressure, because it would imply that we have been wrong and therefore less than perfect, and therefore less than worthy of our sense of self-importance. Studies have shown that narcissists are especially confident when it comes to believing the truth of their own assertions, no matter how obviously wrong they might be. And, it turns out, as studies especially in the field of self-deception have shown, that the best way to reinforce your own biases is through the derogation of others, hence the reason why people resort so quickly to the ad hominem. If you want to make sure you’re right, you have to invent an enemy for yourself (Girard’s mimetic realism has a lot to say about this process).
It’s the logic of hellfire again, and scapegoating, and victimisation: “We’re in, they’re out. Hooray for us!”
The solution to the problem of pride is, of course, humility/modesty — at least, some kind of epistemic humility that accepts that what we know and believe may not be absolute or ultimate. I wouldn’t take this to an extreme, though, since this would create a kind of perpetual mental paralysis, where nothing can be known except that nothing can be known, as Chesterton notes in Orthodoxy:
“Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert-himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason… The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping: not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.”
What makes it so very difficult for people to change their minds?
Simple: they are not humble enough.
They still believe a lie; that the content or message (the self) is deemed more important than the container or the medium (reality).
…
Some books that shaped my thinking on this stuff:
Dubner, S & Levitt, S. 2014. Think like a freak. London: Penguin.
Hallinan, Joseph. 2014. Kidding ourselves. New York: Crown.
Ten Elshof, Gregg A. 2009. I told me so. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Trivers, R. 2013. Deceit and self-deception. London: Penguin.
The most disturbing day of the year
The following was originally published on Christmas day, 2014.
I’m not exactly sure how Christmas-time turned into what it has. A few weeks ago, when I found myself emerging from the London Tube at Regent Street to an explosion of neon lights and Boney M’s godawful rendition of Hark the herald, it struck me that this commercialist-kitsch fanfare is almost certainly the antithesis of what Christmas originally represented. Odd, I thought, how England, which has largely abandoned its religious traditions, seems more religious about Christmas than the land of my birth, which still has a fairly definite sense of its roots in Christianity.
Anyhow, the story, through familiarity and custom, has nonetheless become somewhat mild, but it once contained an idea that is no doubt beautiful, but also, no doubt, alarming. The idea is that the Ground of Being, the Logos (Λόγος) as the glue of reality, took on flesh and blood and moved into a very human neighbourhood, as a very actual (not just mythical) human being. Today, God is often thought of as an object — a bearded old man like Zeus — but he was once thought of as ‘Something’ quite different. God — the very“inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this supra-existent Being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech” which is “gathered by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name” and “is as no other being is” (“Cause of all existence, and therefore … transcending existence”), as Pseudo-Dionysius describes him — violated his own commandment not to make a graven image and stepped into skin like a walking blasphemy.
There in a cave, a baby boy — pissing, shitting, crying, sleeping — was (mis)taken by shepherds and philosophers for being the Originator of the Universe. Their claim, which most Christians still hold today, was that the One who is so unlike what is conceivable that he is more like nothing than like anything else and yet is not nothing — some Jewish Rabbinic traditions refer to God as the No-Thing — took on a name and a culture and became, of all things, finite and mortal; the Source of Life took on a form that is always in the process of dying. Life took on death, or so it is claimed.
To look at this from another angle, it’s helpful to read Chesterton’s reflection on Christmas in his The Everlasting Man (1925):
The idea is one of a revolution, of a world turned upside-down; of the most powerful becoming the most humble; of rich people stepping down to help the poor; of people who conform to the norm stepping out to welcome the outcasts. That which was before all things and atemporal stepped into a drama long ago established and destined to end, perhaps in blood (although there would also be cries of resurrection — or, as Peter Rollins suggests — insurrection: the Uprising of Christ). The Jesus-movement would shape history so profoundly that even the largely atheistic fall victim to his ethic. Whenever a victim is defended, or wherever the environment is cared for, we’re not looking at some evolutionary development, because (as Dawkins notes) evolution (encased in our genetic makeup) neither knows nor cares. Rather, we are looking at the morality of Jesus: something definite that upturned the complacency of those in charge and forced humanity to rethink its love of power.
So, yes, whatever you believe about this event — and it is an event in the catastrophic philosophic sense, meaning that which happens in such a way as to entirely disrupt our perspective — it does not take much to see that it is not about a God who is tame and cute. Rather, it is an event that calls people to see the baby Jesus as we see the presence of any new child (but with a twist): it is something terrifying; it is something to be marvelled at; it is something earth and life-shattering. This is something that parenthood has taught me. Images of cute smiling infants carry only half the truth: the other half is the bit that we miss about Christmas, namely the mindblowing, bewildering awe of the event.
That Jesus was born to a very poor family in first century Palestine is something easily forgotten amidst all the glitz of Christmas lights and the torment of endless shopping lists. If Christ had been born in America today, the event wouldn’t have been called the incarnation, but rather (maybe, if theologians had a sense of humour) the intarnation: God taking on the life of a hillbilly.
It’s not an easy one to get a handle on. And, really, I’m not sure it was ever meant to be an idea that we could get a handle on. The first Christians proclaimed the idea, not because they thought it would make a nice story, but because they (most disturbingly of all) believed it was actually true. This is certainly the most alarming thing. It seems so naive. And yet, the happening was so cataclysmic that it split time into two and forced generations to rethink the nature of God and Reality. It was an event that meant that maybe God is not so distant after all. Maybe Reality is actually personal. Maybe the divine is something we can find in a cave, in a place of very local limitations, where the hands that flung stars into space could not even reach the heads of animals around him.
May you have a very disturbing Christmas.
I’m not exactly sure how Christmas-time turned into what it has. A few weeks ago, when I found myself emerging from the London Tube at Regent Street to an explosion of neon lights and Boney M’s godawful rendition of Hark the herald, it struck me that this commercialist-kitsch fanfare is almost certainly the antithesis of what Christmas originally represented. Odd, I thought, how England, which has largely abandoned its religious traditions, seems more religious about Christmas than the land of my birth, which still has a fairly definite sense of its roots in Christianity.
Anyhow, the story, through familiarity and custom, has nonetheless become somewhat mild, but it once contained an idea that is no doubt beautiful, but also, no doubt, alarming. The idea is that the Ground of Being, the Logos (Λόγος) as the glue of reality, took on flesh and blood and moved into a very human neighbourhood, as a very actual (not just mythical) human being. Today, God is often thought of as an object — a bearded old man like Zeus — but he was once thought of as ‘Something’ quite different. God — the very“inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this supra-existent Being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech” which is “gathered by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name” and “is as no other being is” (“Cause of all existence, and therefore … transcending existence”), as Pseudo-Dionysius describes him — violated his own commandment not to make a graven image and stepped into skin like a walking blasphemy.
There in a cave, a baby boy — pissing, shitting, crying, sleeping — was (mis)taken by shepherds and philosophers for being the Originator of the Universe. Their claim, which most Christians still hold today, was that the One who is so unlike what is conceivable that he is more like nothing than like anything else and yet is not nothing — some Jewish Rabbinic traditions refer to God as the No-Thing — took on a name and a culture and became, of all things, finite and mortal; the Source of Life took on a form that is always in the process of dying. Life took on death, or so it is claimed.
To look at this from another angle, it’s helpful to read Chesterton’s reflection on Christmas in his The Everlasting Man (1925):
Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sightseer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight; and that is an idea very difficult to express in most modes of artistic expression. It is the idea of simultaneous happenings on different levels of life. Something like it might have been attempted in the more archaic and decorative medieval art. But the more the artists learned of realism and perspective, the less they could depict at once the angels in the heavens and the shepherds on the hills, and the glory in the darkness that was under the hills. Perhaps it could have been best conveyed by the characteristic expedient of some of the medieval guilds, when they wheeled about the streets a theatre with three stages one above the other, with heaven above the earth and hell under the earth. But in the riddle of Bethlehem it was heaven that was under the earth.
So, yes, whatever you believe about this event — and it is an event in the catastrophic philosophic sense, meaning that which happens in such a way as to entirely disrupt our perspective — it does not take much to see that it is not about a God who is tame and cute. Rather, it is an event that calls people to see the baby Jesus as we see the presence of any new child (but with a twist): it is something terrifying; it is something to be marvelled at; it is something earth and life-shattering. This is something that parenthood has taught me. Images of cute smiling infants carry only half the truth: the other half is the bit that we miss about Christmas, namely the mindblowing, bewildering awe of the event.
That Jesus was born to a very poor family in first century Palestine is something easily forgotten amidst all the glitz of Christmas lights and the torment of endless shopping lists. If Christ had been born in America today, the event wouldn’t have been called the incarnation, but rather (maybe, if theologians had a sense of humour) the intarnation: God taking on the life of a hillbilly.
It’s not an easy one to get a handle on. And, really, I’m not sure it was ever meant to be an idea that we could get a handle on. The first Christians proclaimed the idea, not because they thought it would make a nice story, but because they (most disturbingly of all) believed it was actually true. This is certainly the most alarming thing. It seems so naive. And yet, the happening was so cataclysmic that it split time into two and forced generations to rethink the nature of God and Reality. It was an event that meant that maybe God is not so distant after all. Maybe Reality is actually personal. Maybe the divine is something we can find in a cave, in a place of very local limitations, where the hands that flung stars into space could not even reach the heads of animals around him.
May you have a very disturbing Christmas.
Charlie Hebdo and Fundamentalism
The following was originally published on my old site on January 8, 2015.
When something truly terrible happens, the temptation is always to act on impulse. But the impulse that arises from a tragedy is usually not a good one. It is often hateful and fearful, and I think that the world could do without these things. A few years ago, America’s ‘War on Terror’ was precisely the result of acting too quickly in hatred and fear. It was all John Wayne, bombs, guns and even more tragedy. Turns out fighting fire with fire simply makes more fire. So, sometimes we need to override impulse and try to see the tragedy in the light of a new day.
The attacks in Paris yesterday, by Islamists on satirists, exposes the reality of fundamentalism in its purest (and therefore most frightening form). Some have suggested that those guns were targeting free speech, which I suppose is partially correct, but to suggest that this is the main issue at hand is to suggest that fundamentalism is primarily an issue of one ideology versus others. And it really isn’t. It’s not even an issue of religious exclusivity versus liberal inclusivity; nor is it an issue of religion versus irreligion for, after all, atheistic fundamentalism follows the same structure as religious fundamentalisms.
The primary issue is a conflict between the literal (the systematic) and the symbolic (the parabolic or dramatic), which is really a conflict between certainty and real faith. The fundamentalist doesn’t need faith, because he knows. This is why Slavoj Žižek writes in God in pain that “in the opposition between traditional secular humanists and religious fundamentalists, it is the humanists who stand for belief, while the fundamentalists stand for knowledge — in short, the true danger of fundamentalism does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself”.
With this in mind, fundamentalism is easily defined as a rabid refusal to understand what it means to dwell in language. Fundamentalism is, to use Lacanian terms, foreclosed from the symbolic.
Religion — that is, true religion or authentic belief — originates in the symbolic. The religious idea springs from something like an observation of a thing that is beautiful or awe-inspiring, like the sun, and then hopes that it — the sun in this case — has a meaning that is beyond its literal self. That meaning, the pagan might think, could be the sun god. “Very often,” GK Chesterton writes, in an early draft in his The Everlasting Man (1925), “one fancies, the god exists first and is given the sun for a crown. Anyhow, [the pagan] does not so much clothe the sun with godhead as clothe his god with the sun.” The idea is that the personality of the god perfects the sun with significance, not the other way around.
Of course, the three monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — of our day do not speak of gods, but of God: a singular source of all that is diverse. (I wish creationists would realise this instead of wasting their time arguing for what is in effect still just another demiurgic small-g god; creationism is atheism, but that’s another issue).
Anyway, even the revelation of that capital-G God began, historically speaking, precisely in the profound awareness of the limits of material reality and also in the limits of language when confronted even with that reality. Something in us hunkers after something more than us. This is not something we can help. Even the most committed atheist is still out there figuring out how it all fits together and what it all means, which is why Nietzsche connected the very grammar of language to the fact that we can’t seem to rid ourselves of God. God persists.
Nevertheless, if you follow the history of philosophy and religion, as Karen Armstrong for one has done in her book The Battle for God, you discover some very interesting twists and turns that have resulted, gradually, in the disintegration of the symbolic order, and the dis-integration of belief. Gradually, humanity moved away from the transcendent. The transcendent had, people thought, served its purpose, which was to spur us on to what Coldplay calls ‘questions of science, science and progress.’
The irony of this is that the world has become, not simpler, but far more complex. Our obsession with the literal and empirical has not brought greater clarity, but greater conflict and confusion. And the opinions around us breed like flies, proliferating in all directions, causing further rigidity and therefore also further conflict. Without the ability to think symbolically, we find it harder to navigate the world, not easier. Why? Because the symbolic allows for mystery and uncertainty, which (if you haven’t noticed) is what most of our human experience is comprised of. It allows one to “fit one’s head into the heavens” as Chesterton says, instead of trying to fit the heavens into one’s head, which will only cause one’s head to explode.
The result of this failure to access the symbolic is that people want more and more certainty. And so they pick sides, and doctrines — whether from their holy books or from Darwin — and find reasons why their side is right and why everyone else is wrong. And everything in the world is then painted in black and white, with neat in or out categories, even though we know that this just makes us look colourblind. From a psychoanalytic perspective, though, this failure to access the symbolic is the essential characteristic of psychosis: the inability to move from the signifier to the signified. It is, diagnostically speaking, insane.
And, if you’ll forgive the simplification, the only proper response to insanity is sanity. And so it seems appropriate to me that so many of the responses to the attack on Charlie Hebdo have been from cartoonists (like Ruben Oppenheimer, whose image I’ve included here), who are permanently living in the world of the symbolic. Their world, unlike the world of fundamentalists, allows for ambiguities and humour; and it is precisely the kind of world that we live in. It’s precisely the kind of world that religions have traditionally been so good at navigating, but which, under the spell of scientistic literalism, have started to falter.
It turns out that the symbolic is actually part of the very same mechanism that allows us to empathise with different perspectives (Mirror neurons have been connected to our ability to understand metaphors, as James Geary writes in I is an Other). If you, for instance, take a metaphor like Shakespeare’s famous “Juliet is the sun”, you are more profoundly confronted with Romeo’s perceptions of Juliet than if he had said “Juliet is about 5-foot-eight and has auburn hair”. The symbolic opens us up to another person’s perspective far more than the literal, and often in fewer words. The literal is a trap. It is a cage. And, yes, I’m speaking metaphorically.
Still, my basic argument, which is very poorly outlined above, is that we actually need more of the symbolic. We need more good stories and images. We need the stations of the cross more than we need the doctrines of St. Paul. We need parables more than systematic theology; more Catholicism and less Protestantism. We need, if you will, more fiction and fewer facts. Because facts, when torn away from the symbolic, are inevitably just violent.
When something truly terrible happens, the temptation is always to act on impulse. But the impulse that arises from a tragedy is usually not a good one. It is often hateful and fearful, and I think that the world could do without these things. A few years ago, America’s ‘War on Terror’ was precisely the result of acting too quickly in hatred and fear. It was all John Wayne, bombs, guns and even more tragedy. Turns out fighting fire with fire simply makes more fire. So, sometimes we need to override impulse and try to see the tragedy in the light of a new day.
The attacks in Paris yesterday, by Islamists on satirists, exposes the reality of fundamentalism in its purest (and therefore most frightening form). Some have suggested that those guns were targeting free speech, which I suppose is partially correct, but to suggest that this is the main issue at hand is to suggest that fundamentalism is primarily an issue of one ideology versus others. And it really isn’t. It’s not even an issue of religious exclusivity versus liberal inclusivity; nor is it an issue of religion versus irreligion for, after all, atheistic fundamentalism follows the same structure as religious fundamentalisms.
The primary issue is a conflict between the literal (the systematic) and the symbolic (the parabolic or dramatic), which is really a conflict between certainty and real faith. The fundamentalist doesn’t need faith, because he knows. This is why Slavoj Žižek writes in God in pain that “in the opposition between traditional secular humanists and religious fundamentalists, it is the humanists who stand for belief, while the fundamentalists stand for knowledge — in short, the true danger of fundamentalism does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself”.
With this in mind, fundamentalism is easily defined as a rabid refusal to understand what it means to dwell in language. Fundamentalism is, to use Lacanian terms, foreclosed from the symbolic.
Religion — that is, true religion or authentic belief — originates in the symbolic. The religious idea springs from something like an observation of a thing that is beautiful or awe-inspiring, like the sun, and then hopes that it — the sun in this case — has a meaning that is beyond its literal self. That meaning, the pagan might think, could be the sun god. “Very often,” GK Chesterton writes, in an early draft in his The Everlasting Man (1925), “one fancies, the god exists first and is given the sun for a crown. Anyhow, [the pagan] does not so much clothe the sun with godhead as clothe his god with the sun.” The idea is that the personality of the god perfects the sun with significance, not the other way around.
Of course, the three monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — of our day do not speak of gods, but of God: a singular source of all that is diverse. (I wish creationists would realise this instead of wasting their time arguing for what is in effect still just another demiurgic small-g god; creationism is atheism, but that’s another issue).
Anyway, even the revelation of that capital-G God began, historically speaking, precisely in the profound awareness of the limits of material reality and also in the limits of language when confronted even with that reality. Something in us hunkers after something more than us. This is not something we can help. Even the most committed atheist is still out there figuring out how it all fits together and what it all means, which is why Nietzsche connected the very grammar of language to the fact that we can’t seem to rid ourselves of God. God persists.
Nevertheless, if you follow the history of philosophy and religion, as Karen Armstrong for one has done in her book The Battle for God, you discover some very interesting twists and turns that have resulted, gradually, in the disintegration of the symbolic order, and the dis-integration of belief. Gradually, humanity moved away from the transcendent. The transcendent had, people thought, served its purpose, which was to spur us on to what Coldplay calls ‘questions of science, science and progress.’
The irony of this is that the world has become, not simpler, but far more complex. Our obsession with the literal and empirical has not brought greater clarity, but greater conflict and confusion. And the opinions around us breed like flies, proliferating in all directions, causing further rigidity and therefore also further conflict. Without the ability to think symbolically, we find it harder to navigate the world, not easier. Why? Because the symbolic allows for mystery and uncertainty, which (if you haven’t noticed) is what most of our human experience is comprised of. It allows one to “fit one’s head into the heavens” as Chesterton says, instead of trying to fit the heavens into one’s head, which will only cause one’s head to explode.
The result of this failure to access the symbolic is that people want more and more certainty. And so they pick sides, and doctrines — whether from their holy books or from Darwin — and find reasons why their side is right and why everyone else is wrong. And everything in the world is then painted in black and white, with neat in or out categories, even though we know that this just makes us look colourblind. From a psychoanalytic perspective, though, this failure to access the symbolic is the essential characteristic of psychosis: the inability to move from the signifier to the signified. It is, diagnostically speaking, insane.
And, if you’ll forgive the simplification, the only proper response to insanity is sanity. And so it seems appropriate to me that so many of the responses to the attack on Charlie Hebdo have been from cartoonists (like Ruben Oppenheimer, whose image I’ve included here), who are permanently living in the world of the symbolic. Their world, unlike the world of fundamentalists, allows for ambiguities and humour; and it is precisely the kind of world that we live in. It’s precisely the kind of world that religions have traditionally been so good at navigating, but which, under the spell of scientistic literalism, have started to falter.
It turns out that the symbolic is actually part of the very same mechanism that allows us to empathise with different perspectives (Mirror neurons have been connected to our ability to understand metaphors, as James Geary writes in I is an Other). If you, for instance, take a metaphor like Shakespeare’s famous “Juliet is the sun”, you are more profoundly confronted with Romeo’s perceptions of Juliet than if he had said “Juliet is about 5-foot-eight and has auburn hair”. The symbolic opens us up to another person’s perspective far more than the literal, and often in fewer words. The literal is a trap. It is a cage. And, yes, I’m speaking metaphorically.
Still, my basic argument, which is very poorly outlined above, is that we actually need more of the symbolic. We need more good stories and images. We need the stations of the cross more than we need the doctrines of St. Paul. We need parables more than systematic theology; more Catholicism and less Protestantism. We need, if you will, more fiction and fewer facts. Because facts, when torn away from the symbolic, are inevitably just violent.
The virtue of hypocrisy
There’s a joke about a guy — let’s call him Bill — who visits his local bar and, without fail, orders four pints of beer every night. He drinks in silence, pays, then leaves. One night he sits down and orders three pints of beer instead of four and the barman is curious.
“I have to ask,” says the barman, “why are you ordering only three pints when you usually order four?”
“Well,” says Bill, “I’ve always ordered four pints because one is for me and the other three are for my father and my two brothers. And, well, the sad truth is that my father passed away recently, so now I just drink for myself and my brothers.”
This answer satisfies the barman, and for months Bill’s ritual continues, only now with three pints instead of four. A while later, though, Bill walks into the bar, sits down, and orders two pints. The barman is saddened by this sight for obvious reasons.
“I’m very sorry. Did something happen to one of your brothers?” he asks Bill.
“Oh dear, no,” says Bill, laughing. “You don’t need to worry at all. My brothers are fine. I’ve just stopped drinking for me because I’ve just learned that I’m an alcoholic.”
And that is hypocrisy.
It’s probably the number one criticism levelled against the religiously inclined: they — who is this “they” anyway? — are hypocrites. It sounds like the worst possible thing you could say to anyone but I’m wondering if it’s not always as bad as it sounds. Surely it’s better to be accused of failing to do the right thing than to be accused of not even having a ‘right thing’ to be measured up against at all? It’s certainly better, in my view, to miss the mark than to have no idea of whether or not there is a mark to begin with. The virtue of hypocrisy is that it points so clearly towards the virtues that seem to be absent from speech and action.
Although I don’t like to preface what I say with disclaimers, I feel that it’s important to point out that what follows is, as usual, just a brief thought experiment, and should therefore be taken as such. I’m not planning to prove that black is white or that white is green, but I do want to suggest that maybe there’s more going on in accusations of hypocrisy than some may like to admit.
A simple idea guides the following, namely that there is a subtle benefit to the accusation of hypocrisy in that it always puts the accuser on the side of the virtues that the hypocrite claims to believe in.
When, for instance, the atheist accuses the Islamo-fascist of hypocrisy in their killing of the innocent (a fair accusation, as recent events have shown), she is automatically siding, among other things, with the Quran’s injunction to prioritise the inner struggle (which is what jihad really means) to submit to a kind and merciful God over any kind of vindictive conflict. Even if the atheist critic thinks that the violence committed by the Islamo-fascist is inherent in Islam, she will soon be confronted with the falsity of her beliefs (especially if she bothers to actually read the Quran properly).
It is not widely known by non-Muslims, but it’s worth pointing out that the Quran condemns aggression in the strongest terms (2:190), is clear that hostility towards others is deeply misguided, stresses that retaliation is only allowed in the form of defence and never in the form of outright attack (2:192-193), and is adamant that coercion in matters of belief is absolutely forbidden by God (2:256). Peace always remains the priority in the holy book of the Muslims. War is always a last resort and should stop when the ‘enemy’ ceases to attack.
And so, really, the Muslim hypocrite is being accused not for being a Muslim but for not being enough of a Muslim. And in the process the atheistic critic is unconsciously assuming allegiance with Islam over any allegiance with the Muslim’s hypocrisy. With atheism, of course, this kind of reversal of beliefs by means of actions is common, since it is by definition a belief without content; it is, in essence, discontent. So whereas the Islamist stands for a kind of atheism (as a rejection of all moral grounding), the atheist stands for Islam (the submission to a definite moral order and moral law-giver). The atheist becomes, therefore, a kind of virtuous hypocrite: a critic who acts and speaks like a Muslim, and on behalf of true Islam.
But what about those who do hold to a particular religion and who have stepped out to criticise those who have not adopted their own religion? Take, for instance, the Christian who judges the Muslim for his particular religious affiliation. Well, the Christian critic of Islam, by asserting his allegiance with Christianity and with the Christ of Christianity, puts his belief above his own words and actions, and thereby emphasises the truth of his beliefs albeit through a kind of warped via negativa.
He judges what he does not yet understand, and has not even bothered to question (contra Matthew 7:1-3); he treats his so-called enemy in a way that he himself would not want to be treated (contra Matthew 5:44 and 7:12); and, ultimately, he actually prizes his own identity over that of others, which is something strongly discouraged in the New Testament (contra Philippians 2:3, Matthew 16:25 and Galatians 3:28). This may seem like a simplification, but the general idea is that in criticising the other too quickly, the Christian critic who has conflated Islam with Islamism is automatically siding with a kind of egotism that is simply not Christian. He thereby only proves that he is wrong and that the object of his faith is right. He shows that not only is the Muslim not Muslim enough, but also that he is not Christian enough.
I could go on like this all day, proving by playing with words that atheists can be Muslims and that Christians can be anti-Christian, but by now the point I’m trying to make should be clear enough. The virtue of hypocrisy is that it argues, if only implicitly, that our actions and speech acts actually do matter; that they are often really the most potent summary of what we do actually believe, whether consciously or not. However, I would not absolutise action too much, owing that this is a tendency in postmodernism that I find unhelpful. I’m not saying that our actions are the sum total of what we believe. What they do, though, is tell us that maybe we have a way to go; that we should, perhaps, look at the enemy within us instead of just looking for the enemy out there in straw men and 2D cardboard cutouts of our own invention. Hypocrisy tells us that the truth is out there, in our speech and in our actions; it also tells us the truth about the lies we tell ourselves, which is that there are things we know that we don’t even want ourselves to know.
“I have to ask,” says the barman, “why are you ordering only three pints when you usually order four?”
“Well,” says Bill, “I’ve always ordered four pints because one is for me and the other three are for my father and my two brothers. And, well, the sad truth is that my father passed away recently, so now I just drink for myself and my brothers.”
This answer satisfies the barman, and for months Bill’s ritual continues, only now with three pints instead of four. A while later, though, Bill walks into the bar, sits down, and orders two pints. The barman is saddened by this sight for obvious reasons.
“I’m very sorry. Did something happen to one of your brothers?” he asks Bill.
“Oh dear, no,” says Bill, laughing. “You don’t need to worry at all. My brothers are fine. I’ve just stopped drinking for me because I’ve just learned that I’m an alcoholic.”
And that is hypocrisy.
It’s probably the number one criticism levelled against the religiously inclined: they — who is this “they” anyway? — are hypocrites. It sounds like the worst possible thing you could say to anyone but I’m wondering if it’s not always as bad as it sounds. Surely it’s better to be accused of failing to do the right thing than to be accused of not even having a ‘right thing’ to be measured up against at all? It’s certainly better, in my view, to miss the mark than to have no idea of whether or not there is a mark to begin with. The virtue of hypocrisy is that it points so clearly towards the virtues that seem to be absent from speech and action.
Although I don’t like to preface what I say with disclaimers, I feel that it’s important to point out that what follows is, as usual, just a brief thought experiment, and should therefore be taken as such. I’m not planning to prove that black is white or that white is green, but I do want to suggest that maybe there’s more going on in accusations of hypocrisy than some may like to admit.
A simple idea guides the following, namely that there is a subtle benefit to the accusation of hypocrisy in that it always puts the accuser on the side of the virtues that the hypocrite claims to believe in.
When, for instance, the atheist accuses the Islamo-fascist of hypocrisy in their killing of the innocent (a fair accusation, as recent events have shown), she is automatically siding, among other things, with the Quran’s injunction to prioritise the inner struggle (which is what jihad really means) to submit to a kind and merciful God over any kind of vindictive conflict. Even if the atheist critic thinks that the violence committed by the Islamo-fascist is inherent in Islam, she will soon be confronted with the falsity of her beliefs (especially if she bothers to actually read the Quran properly).
It is not widely known by non-Muslims, but it’s worth pointing out that the Quran condemns aggression in the strongest terms (2:190), is clear that hostility towards others is deeply misguided, stresses that retaliation is only allowed in the form of defence and never in the form of outright attack (2:192-193), and is adamant that coercion in matters of belief is absolutely forbidden by God (2:256). Peace always remains the priority in the holy book of the Muslims. War is always a last resort and should stop when the ‘enemy’ ceases to attack.
And so, really, the Muslim hypocrite is being accused not for being a Muslim but for not being enough of a Muslim. And in the process the atheistic critic is unconsciously assuming allegiance with Islam over any allegiance with the Muslim’s hypocrisy. With atheism, of course, this kind of reversal of beliefs by means of actions is common, since it is by definition a belief without content; it is, in essence, discontent. So whereas the Islamist stands for a kind of atheism (as a rejection of all moral grounding), the atheist stands for Islam (the submission to a definite moral order and moral law-giver). The atheist becomes, therefore, a kind of virtuous hypocrite: a critic who acts and speaks like a Muslim, and on behalf of true Islam.
But what about those who do hold to a particular religion and who have stepped out to criticise those who have not adopted their own religion? Take, for instance, the Christian who judges the Muslim for his particular religious affiliation. Well, the Christian critic of Islam, by asserting his allegiance with Christianity and with the Christ of Christianity, puts his belief above his own words and actions, and thereby emphasises the truth of his beliefs albeit through a kind of warped via negativa.
He judges what he does not yet understand, and has not even bothered to question (contra Matthew 7:1-3); he treats his so-called enemy in a way that he himself would not want to be treated (contra Matthew 5:44 and 7:12); and, ultimately, he actually prizes his own identity over that of others, which is something strongly discouraged in the New Testament (contra Philippians 2:3, Matthew 16:25 and Galatians 3:28). This may seem like a simplification, but the general idea is that in criticising the other too quickly, the Christian critic who has conflated Islam with Islamism is automatically siding with a kind of egotism that is simply not Christian. He thereby only proves that he is wrong and that the object of his faith is right. He shows that not only is the Muslim not Muslim enough, but also that he is not Christian enough.
I could go on like this all day, proving by playing with words that atheists can be Muslims and that Christians can be anti-Christian, but by now the point I’m trying to make should be clear enough. The virtue of hypocrisy is that it argues, if only implicitly, that our actions and speech acts actually do matter; that they are often really the most potent summary of what we do actually believe, whether consciously or not. However, I would not absolutise action too much, owing that this is a tendency in postmodernism that I find unhelpful. I’m not saying that our actions are the sum total of what we believe. What they do, though, is tell us that maybe we have a way to go; that we should, perhaps, look at the enemy within us instead of just looking for the enemy out there in straw men and 2D cardboard cutouts of our own invention. Hypocrisy tells us that the truth is out there, in our speech and in our actions; it also tells us the truth about the lies we tell ourselves, which is that there are things we know that we don’t even want ourselves to know.
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