If they say why, why....

Human nature is more observed in the breach than in the observance. It has always been like this - it's unnatural for people to act or think naturally. Unlike animals, volcanoes and planets, humans have to be taught how to be humans - although there is undoubtedly a natural basis to what we do and what we are, the question of how that plays out in history requires work. It requires culture.

So human nature is one of those peculiar things that denies binary logic. It is fixed and yet it is always being changed.  This is a recipe for catastrophe and/or for salvation. It's nearly Christmas so we might as well choose salvation.

Recently I have been thinking about Rousseau’s famous indictment of agriculture and metallurgy as the moment at which human nature was fatally corrupted:

Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts which produced this great revolution. The poets tell us it was gold and silver, but, for the philosophers, it was iron and corn, which first civilised men, and ruined humanity. 

For Rousseau, before this moment human beings lived in a state of nature, wearing animal skins, living in 'rustic huts', and, crucially, working in such a way that they did not have cause to seize control of land as property or people as slaves. They were happy:

So long as they undertook only what a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to such arts as did not require the joint labour of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest and happy

When it's described so explicitly, this account of the fall of humanity from a state of nature into the paradise lost of the Industrial and Agricultural age seems, historically speaking, absurdly naive. And yet Rousseau's central point that property is the source of a lot of evil (There can be no injury, where there is no property) still has a lot of validity.

There are a lot of reasons to be very suspicious of this point of view. "There can be no injury, where there is no property". Oh really? Tell that to the millions upon millions of Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin in the 1930s. Tell that to anyone who's ever lived in a police state. If property is an affront to human nature then perhaps we're better off being unnatural? 

But I still think the idea has a lot of validity. Stalinism did not do away with property. It forcibly redistributed property for the purposes of maximising the power of the state. The central point that I take from Rousseau's thinking is that innovations such as metallurgy and agriculture worsened the quality of life for the vast majority of the agricultural labourers and proletariat, both in the public and private spaces of life, caught up in these revolutions. 

Rousseau's pre-agricultural fantasy about a state of nature is unnatural. Which is not to say that it does not have a reality. Its reality is in the form of a promise, a figure of  how things could change for the better. It is a trope that can be used to cast light on  political reality; but as such it is a utopia that tends to self contradiction if it forgets that it is no more natural than the dystopian reality it seeks to displace and transform. 

There can be no doubt that the victims of political idealism in the centuries since Rousseau published the Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men number in the hundreds of millions. This does not mean that political idealism can be just jettisoned. 

For Rousseau, human nature is predominantly based on compassion and, all things being equal, a kind of self-love that is not manifested as a zero-sum game in relationships with others. These kinds of traits may not come naturally to many - however it is certain that they are 'in' human nature - otherwise they would not have a reality for people. 

The alternative to this version of human nature, as Rousseau well knew, was that advanced by Thomas Hobbes - it's natural for human beings to fear and suspect, fight and kill others. The same argument has to apply here, too. Hobbes has to be right - these things are 'in' human nature otherwise they would not have any more reality than the ability to communicate using sonar or breathe underwater.

The thing is, those traits that are in human nature are always subject to mediation, transformation, repression, exaggeration and so on. There is no human nature that is outside history. There is no human nature that is not cultural.

So on that note (culture), and returning to the opening, open question of catastrophe or salvation, I think it's time to paraphrase the Nazi 'poet laureate' Hans Johnst - "When I hear the word nature I reach for my Browning!"

Words, Words, Words

“Words, words, words” 

Sometimes I can’t see the wood for the trees. That idiom has always puzzled me. Does it mean that I can’t see the forest because I am looking at the individual parts of the forest (the trees) too closely? Or does it mean that I can’t see the actual material (the wood) because I am looking at the bigger picture of the trees? I suppose it can mean both: I can be blind to details or I can be blind to context. I am tempted to think that this is a duck/rabbit trick – I can see one or the other but not both at the same time. 

When it comes to language I have a similar experience. Through training I tend to look at language in different ways. There are many ways of looking at words, words, words.  Sometimes I think I am the butt of a joke being told endlessly, that I am Polonius on the wrong end of Hamlet’s sneering and I can feel the words “Very like a whale” forming on my lips. Maybe all this time I am looking at words, words, words, and the stuff that really happens is taking place behind my back, under my nose, over my head? It’s possible, indeed I think it’s inevitable. I think the most hopeful line ever written is at the end of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:

"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)"

This is the light at the end of the tunnel. But for now I am still in the tunnel, sorry on the ladder; keep climbing…

So, words, words, words. Recently, under the influence of structural and post structural linguistics, I have been thinking a lot about how meaning is supposed to be unstable. About how, when you look up close (at the wood, at the trees) what you see is not a word but rather, words, words, words. The ‘logocentrism’ of language is, for Jacques Derrida and others, is how words hide behind words, how meaning is passed off as stable, as fixed, as present. For Derrida and anyone else influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, language, words have meaning by virtue of their place in a chain of ‘signifiers’.

I understand the relationship between these possible signifiers as being a both neutral one – chair means chair because it is not cheer, hair, there, bear and so on – and a value laden one: ‘God’ means something good because it’s better than ‘Devil’.

Similarly, both ‘Derry’ and ‘Londonderry’ name a place, both ‘Islamic State’ and ‘Daesh’ name an organisation but the binary relationship is inverted depending of the affiliation of the speaker.  

Looking closely at how words work by showing/hiding, presencing/absencing can often lead me to forget how fixed certain meanings can be. Another cardinal notion of structural linguistics - that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary – can seem comically pedantic. This is where the wood (or the trees) of the bigger picture can disappear because with your eyes on the abstract it is easy miss the feelings, functions, resonances of context.

Of course, the opposite tendency – to miss the wood (or the trees) of detail – happens when context seduces. Ideas become dogma and words start to glow with a life of their own. Words themselves start to matter.

What happens when words matter? I have been thinking a lot about fundamentalism of different kinds recently. The first that comes to mind is Islamic fundamentalism.

At a fundamental level, Islam is fundamental. Words matter. Words have matter. Words are the matter of God. What is the status of language in the Qur'an? For believers it is certainly not representational. There is no separation of sign and thing - these words do not re-present God they, in a literal sense, present God; the word made flesh, the 'presencing' of God.

Neither do Muslims think of the words of the Qur'an as being the incarnation of God. For Islam, God is indissoluble (God "neither begets nor is begotten") and therefore, all of these - the words on the Guarded Tablet (al-lawḥ al-maḥfāẓ  the place where the Qur’an was written in heaven prior to their arrival on earth), the received, revealed words of the Qur'an in the mind and mouth of Mohammed, the words of the page of every (Arabic) Qur'an - are of one flesh.

So, the Qur’an is literally the word of God. Haven’t they read Structural Linguistics? When it comes to logocentrism, God is the daddy of them all. Nobody does it better. Is this a problem?

I don’t think it’s the biggest one. The problem with Islamic Fundamentalism is that some of its adherents have taken to killing on a mass scale. They’re not the only ones. There are Europeans and Americans drunk on a fundamentalism of their own – the axiomatic rightness of military intervention in the Middle East and the Capitalist system that it supports are ideas far more lethal and long standing than anything informing the actions of the Taliban, Al Queda or Daesh. When it comes to Islamic Fundamentalists their sense of rightness is on the surface; Jihad is being waged against infidels. European/American Fundamentalists engage in an obscene, venal double speak where ‘freedom’ is being brought to ‘stabilise’ the region. There are two seemingly opposed tendencies here. One seeks to arrest meaning, the other seeks its exile. In both cases – excessive logocentrism and excessive logo - ex - centrism - language seems to be to a victim; dogma and deceit are both ways of abusing language.

Of course I think that behind the lies spouted by politicians there is a language ‘behind’ the surface relativism. The discourse of ‘freedom’ versus ‘terror’ may be so much babble for public consumption, but in the background language is just as logocentric. Words have strict meanings at this latent, bottom line, not for public consumption level, too, make no mistake. The fundamentals of Western involvement in the Middle East - Oil, money, killing, stealing – are undeniable.  

Logocentrism is alive and well. By the way, in all of this I am not blind to the difference between interrogating a politician and interrogating God. The equivalence that I describe between the Western and Islamic fundamentalists is an ethical one, not a linguistic one. I have no fear of criticising a politician…

Now I am not going to say that logocentrism kills. Words don’t kill, steal or rape; people do. Words may hurt a lot but sticks and stones break your bones. It is tempting to isolate certain uses of language that do actually do things – J L Austin’s Speech Act Theory calls these ‘performative utterances’. Hamlet may have been playing around with words, words, words, but when he altered that letter to the King of England his words literally murdered Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But there are limits to what words can do. 

Before that point I like to think of words as weirdly cybernetic. They are human and yet they are not. They exist in our minds and in our mouths and yet they are outside us, in the air, on this screen. Is it any wonder that meaning tends to arrest or exile? Words matter and that’s fine. But they also do not matter. They are us and they are not us. The challenge is to keep this gap open – to stay true to the meanings of words and yet to allow for a space to interrogate and reimagine those words. Where there are words there is hope.  

The fact that logocentrism can be brought to see the wood when it tries to show us the trees or brought to see the trees when it tries to show us the wood, means that meaning can be allowed stability just as much as it can be destabilised. 

Beyond persuasion and seduction, promises and commands words are powerless. Sometimes, the talking has to stop. Even Hamlet acted in the end.

Missa Solmenis

Who's going to the sacrifice: The lamb of God or just more lambs?

I went to mass last night. Well, kind of: Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis  is far more enjoyable than any mass I have ever been to. Did I miss the point? Are you supposed to enjoy mass? I mean, isn’t enjoyment of mass idolatry? I went for the music; for the wall of voices, for the lead violin melody in the Sanctus, supposedly marking the ascent of the spirit of Jesus to heaven after  the resurrection. Perhaps it’s idolatry – I loved the music rather than the God it celebrates – but wasn’t it parasitism, too? I mean, Beethoven would never have written such beautiful music if he hadn’t actually believed that there was a God , would he? In going to this concert, taking pleasure from it without returning the faith that sustained the work that created it was I freeloading, stealing?

I don’t know, but taking that argument to its logical conclusion, I could just as easily argue that non-believers should be banned from attended concerts such as that one. Maybe there should be restrictions on who can and who can’t go to performances of Missa Solemnis because if you let atheists in the door then ,eventually, there may not be any more music like that.

As I listened I was reminded of that old cliché – the devil has all the best tunes – and I thought of how wrong that was. God has some pretty good stuff, too. If Beethoven had not intended his music to enjoyed as music, for it to appeal to infidels then why did he make it so beautiful? I have the dimmest memories of what it’s like to be at an actual mass but the one impression I have is of the mind numbing tedium of the experience. If God had ever wanted his message to be delivered directly he would never had invented Beethoven. I think He loves idolaters.

The last section of Missa Solemnis is the Agnes Dei. I suppose it’s a sacrifice for God to let Beethoven take the credit for what is, after all, His gig – mass. The sacrificial nature of language has been in my head a lot recently; how it is that in order for certain things to have meaning, to have presence,  to be in the centre, others things have to babble into meaninglessness, disappear and fly to edges. I guess what I find really puzzling about Christianity is this tendency to allow, to demand sacrifice. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, who grants us peace.

I struck me that this is exactly why the refugees from the Syrian and Iraq wars are going to Europe; because they know that at a fundamental level in the Christian tradition there is this openness to the stranger – that the most privileged will sacrifice their privilege in the interests of justice and of love. These people are going to Germany and not Saudi Arabia because they believe that the Christian God may just allow, or may even demand idolatrous devotion. I wouldn’t want to practise idolatry under Sharia law.

Then again even the most superficial view of history tells you that only a fool would look to Germany in hope, and so, this is a really partial view of European traditions. Christianity may preach love your enemy, but, in its relations with the Orient, with Africa, with Asia, Europe has more often than not sacrificed everything in its way. There has been very little Christianity in how Europe deals with non-Christians; there are people alive tonight who’ll probably be dead in a few hours thanks to the British, American, French or Russian air raids.

I don’t know, this part of the world (Europe) has a lot of blood on its hands, there are a lot of dead bodies in the foundations of the building of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. And yet, the message of the new testament – to love your enemy, to sacrifice the most powerful (the son of God!) to save the vast masses – is at odds with the facts. It must seem to outsiders that Europeans often do not practice what they preach. There’s an apparently forked tongued babble of love and hate that must infuriate those on the outside.

 

The killings in Paris last month show how that fury can manifest itself, and yet that obscenity reveals the limits of the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism. The very openness that allows an idolatrous experience such as my enjoyment of Beethoven, such as Beethoven’s plagiarism and indeed, improvement upon God, is the openness that makes it easy for a dozen killers to massacre over a hundred innocents in the streets. Ironically, it’s also the openness that people fleeing the Middle East seek.

It remains to be seen as to whether the barbarism that sustains European civilisation can be changed because that is the real threat to that civilisation. The military thuggishness and economic greed of America and Western Europe helped create the problem in the Middle East – jihadi fundamentalism is just a more technologically primitive version of the same viciousness.

Going to Beethoven last night reminded me of why non Europeans love and hate Europe. I suppose it also reminded me of the need for courage. Without courage, a morality of openness to the alien, to the enemy, a morality based on love and sacrifice of privilege and power can be a fatal weakness. But without that morality there can be no Beethoven, there can be no lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, to grant us peace.