The Mourning Cloak

transformation & rebirth

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The Rev. Joshua Gerhard Paetkau, M.Div, Rector of the Parishes of New Carlisle and Chaleur Bay in the Anglican Diocese of Quebec.

  • New Year’s Reflections: Sanctity and Sanity in 2018.

    In his Christmas address in 2016 the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople declared 2017 “The Year of Protection of the Sanctity of Childhood.” This statement was later incorporated, in February of 2017, into the joint declaration “Sins Before our Eyes: A Forum on Modern Slavery” issued in Istanbul by Patriarch Bartholomew and the Archbishop of Canterbury. These two addresses are landmarks which address the poverty of moral imagination in our world, and whose message deserves not to be relegated to the archives of church history, but to be heard as part of a call to re-imagine the world with a degree of sanity and compassion.

    These two declarations have formed a substantial part of my own reflections and meditations throughout the year. It was not an easy year to be a Canadian, as my government decided to take the Human Rights Tribunal to court over the compliance order issued by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal against the government of Canada over the latter’s failure to observe Jordan’s Principle. (Jordan’s Principle is a child-first principle declaring that where jurisdictional disputes between First Nations and other government departments arise with respect to care of First Nations children the department of first contact should pay for the services and sort out jurisdictional matters afterward. The intention of the principle is that timely and effective care will  be provided to all children. More information can be found here. ) Thankfully the litigation was later withdrawn, but not before we were treated to a display of litigious and bureaucratic behaviour of precisely the sort that Jordan’s Principle was intended to combat in the first place. The Toronto Star reported that $707,000 was spent in legal fees, an amount nearly twice that required by the Wapekeka First Nation for emergency mental health services. (Toronto Star, June 2, 2017)

    This display highlights the very real need for the Patriarch’s moral exhortation to be taken seriously, and not only by people who share his faith. Children are the most vulnerable demographic, and their well-being can be guaranteed only if we are all willing to do some hard work and ask difficult questions. Those who attend church services during the Christmas season are reminded each year that the beautiful and joyous occasion of the birth of the child Jesus is marred by the Massacre of the Holy Innocents, when King Herod murders all the children two years and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. The intel which leads to this activity is given by the magi, unwitting accomplices in this political conspiracy. There are lessons to be drawn here, one of which is that the Protection of the Sanctity of Childhood demands a certain level of creativity, involvement, and awareness. Bureaucratic structures will not deliver if those involved are conditioned by an atmosphere of paranoia and a spirit of litigation. Turf wars are destructive of those who are most vulnerable. This is true at the level of national and international response, just as it is at the level of family responsibility.

    A renewed moral imagination needs to become central to our actions with and on behalf of children. The phrase “Sanctity of Childhood” may conjure up images of a sentimental scene, a childhood protected from the hard truths of life. The intention of the Ecumenical Patriarch, though, was something quite different. Sanctity refers to the safeguarding of integrity. The sanctity of childhood is important, not because childhood is some special reserve of existence, it is important as a principle consonant with the dignity inherent in every human being. The global refugee crisis affects the rights of children, especially, because they are the most vulnerable demographic in terms  of their physical, experiential, and legal powers. Sanctity, moreover, is not only subject to physical violations and the brutality or indifference of structures of power. There is also the element of seduction, which Bartholomew refers to in a section describing the “altering of children’s souls through the uncontrolled exposure to electronic means of communication and their subjection to consumerism.”

    These, too, are part of an overall machinery leading to blindness and ignorance. Children, but not only children, need to be trained to process the social and moral meanings and relationships inherent in the events and objects they encounter. The access to a plethora of information, whose access is not so much uncontrolled as it is managed by commercial interest (some of it explicitly black-market), is not conducive to the time it takes to develop the capacity of discrimination – the  ability to judge between what is helpful and what is harmful. There are, naturally, some difficult questions here, as there is probably no figure of authority who can claim to have always acted in the best interests of those under their care. Nevertheless, readier access to information (which is never as unmediated as we might claim) does not necessarily translate into more democratic practices and or greater institutional representation.

    As we enter into 2018, then, the exhortation to safeguard the sanctity of childhood, along with the urgent plea for vigilance regarding the ways in which our society neglects or discriminates against vulnerable demographics within our midst needs to continue to be at the forefront. Something like Jordan’s Principle needs to enter into our cultural ethos; otherwise the predatory behaviour and neglect will remain as institutional hallmarks in our society. The principle, moreover, needs to be internalized and made manifest in imaginative and creative ways, which is not at all to say entertaining. The scandals that erupted in the entertainment industry in 2017 serve as a painful reminder that the factories of illusion, too, have a human cost – they take a physical, psychological, sexual, moral, and spiritual toll.

    This toll is not a necessary price; I have never been an advocate of bombing villages in order to save them. The mandate of this website, which takes its cue from Ben Okri’s Mental Fight, is to be constantly vigilant about the dreams and fantasies that shape our engagement with the world. Okri writes that, ” Illusions are useful only if we use them to help us get to our true reality. Initiations and rituals, if they are noble, Have this power, (They magnify the secret hour) They enable us to pass from. The illusion of our lesser selves. To the reality of our greatest selves.” (Ben Okri, Mental Fight). This is a sentiment with which I wholeheartedly concur, even as I express it more prosaically than does Okri. The transformation, even transfiguration, of our society and its expectations is necessary. William Blake, in the poem from which Okri derives the title of his own work, notes that the technological achievements of the modern world have not built Jerusalem – the City of Peace. The mental fight required to acquire justice in the world is a ceaseless requirement and demand placed upon each person, in view of building the city of peace, together.

  • Beyond Burning our World. A Review of Energy Dreams: Of Actuality.

    Works Reviewed. Marder, Michael. Energy Dreams: Of Actuality. New York: Columbia University Press. 2017

    .Energy Dreams

    One needs little convincing, these days, that our world is burning. While the concept of hell no longer plays a significant role in religious piety – at least in the North Atlantic world – the daily news tells a different story. From the images of North Korean missiles over Japan to tiki torch wielding protestors in the United States the state of our political realities, at least, seems to be threatened by the blaze of anger and revolt. Is it really the case, though, that the burning fires of hell have merely been transported from the realm of religion to the domain of politics? Michael Marder, in his book Energy Dreams: Of Actuality suggests that the problem is much deeper and comprehensive than a simple analysis of political space allows. His work begins in the sphere of political philosophy,  with a particular focus on the “existential energy boiling under or extinguished in the structures of state,” but quickly moves beyond to take up the task of coming up with a nonviolent and non-destructive way of thinking about and relating to energy. ‘It quickly became apparent that a fiery constitution of reality, rather being limited to a single sphere of human activity,  applied to our epoch as a whole.’ (ix)

    The challenge that Marder offers to his readers – his stated hope that they  will experience a ‘visceral need.. for another energy, irreconcilable with the destructive-extractive procurement of potentiality – is reminiscent of Ivan Illich’s distinction between Promethean and Epimethean man. Prometheus, who introduces the element of fire thereby furnishing the pyrological blueprint for our understanding of power and human develpment, warned his brother Epimetheus to stay away from Pandora. Instead he married her. Illich tells the story of a metal casket that he once saw in New York. Inside was a mechanical hand which would come out of the casket and close the lid. This toy, said Illich, was the exact opposite of Pandora’s box. It represents the Promethean ethos of expectation, of self-mastery and the eclipse of hope. The final overcoming of all that is wild and unexpected. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society.)

    The Greek name Epimetheus means hindsight. Like Illich, Marder draws on the valuable wisdom of hindsight and, particularly on the Greek origins of our metaphysical tradition and our conception of energy. He is attentive to the power of myth and dreaming in our thought and in our action. “Myths do not magically melt away immediately after they are spotted and named as what they are. As far as energy is concerned we cannot stop dreaming of it, and it cannot cease dreaming us.” The ambiguity of the phrase energy dreams provides the framework  for Marder’s engagement with energy – an engagement which invites the reader to  think alongside Marder, and to be energized by his consideration of the crisis of energy. This crisis of energy, which he finds to be  a theoretical framework underpinning  our own energy crises, is to be found in the equivocation in the very word energy between its form as a verb and a noun. Our habit, he argues, is to think of energy as a resource, as something to be extracted, to lay claim to, and as a substance to fight over. What this leads us to  ignore, however, is that energy is not merely an object to be appropriated. It alsso energizes us, and activates us. “The crisis of energy is that, though treated as a finite resource to be seized in a made race withh others  who also desire it, it seizes both ‘us’ and ‘them,’ taking, first and foremost, our fantasies and dreams hostage.”

    The fact that we blithely assume energy as a resource to be extracted, and ignore its grammatical and philosophical ambiguities, is at the heart of our present inability to escape the violent and destructive forms of energy procurement. Marder articulates a role that deconstrutive philosophy played in abdicating from energy, noting that Jacques Derrieda identied it as a fundamental  principle akin to God, man, telos, and so forth. In the wake of deconstruction, then, energy became a word that was too metaphysical or economist. “Such stigmatization is inexcusable,” writes Marder. “The desistance from energy at the theoretical level silentlyy sanctions the most ecologically detrimental means of procuring it.” (5) What is needed is to recover the ambiguity of energy, which Marder finds in its very Aristotelian origins of energeia. 

    Energeia, as a philosophical concept, is one that Aristotle purposely leaves with some ambiguity, but still manages to say a great deal about. Perhaps most saliently, for Marder’s purposes, Aristotle writes that energeia “means the presence of a thing, not in the sense which we mean by potentiality.” The Aristotelian definition of energeai, then sides with actuality, where our modern interpretations of energy seem to be almost the inverse – a potentiality waiting to be activated. Far from suggesting a boring, metaphysical presence, argues Marder, Aristotle’s definition allows for a broader consideration of energy which does not limit it to the form of dunamis, the dynamic extraction of energy through force. Marder introduces plants as a significant alternative example of energy engagement. They are an example of beings that do not need to devastate the interiority of another being in order to procure energy.

    Plant life thus become a primary, and fitting metaphor, for the consideration of energy in a way that is non-destructive, and not oriented toward productivist modes of thinking or working. Energeia, which could also mean enworkment, finds itself split between substantive and subjective modes. From Aristotelian energeia Marder moves to consider theological promise of Gregory Palamas’ defence of hesychasm. Hesychasm, a spiritual practice of stillness, is defended by Palamas on the basis of a theological distinction between the essence and energies of God. Palamas is led to defend a notion of uncreated works, and the practice of hesychasm as a way to receive the “energies of the divine surface.” The notion is, to be sure, at odds an understanding of energy in terms of a fuel or exhaustible resource. Marder finds a kinship between the Hesychastic practice of bodily stillness and the traditions of ashtanga yoga. The bodily conception of energy that occurs with Palamas, however, he views as threatened by the allegorical method of Augustine, wherein he perceives the dream of a purely spiritual energy that desires to be shed from its physical body.  (47)

    This dualism of body and mind, or spirit,is at the heart of much of Marder’s discussion as he moves through domains of theology, economics, politics, and physics. This dualism is reflected in the anti-theoretical attitude that Marder perceives as the root of the applied damage that energy extraction is doing to the world. “Scientists” for example, “are discouraged from dreaming, least of all about that which  deviates from the stipulations of ecnomic efficienty and profitability. The wings of their imagination are clipped, on the one hand, by the technocratic procedures that predetermine the outcomes of their research and, on the other , by their own disillusionment wth the distastrous consequences wrought by ‘applied sciences.’ (145) This failure to dream, however, is precisely what condemns us to the old nihilistic, death-ridden dreams of 19th century physics given their most terrifying expression in the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

    We are called, then, to move beyond our hellish fantasies, and not only in the realm of religion or politics. If energy is a subject that dreams, in and through us, and what it dreams about is actuality, then the way we think about energy matters. Thought and dreaming matter, because they are manifested in the world. Michael Marder offers his book as an invitation and encouragement to begin to dream and think about energy differently. In the midst of a world where we have come to expect the sacrificial burning of resources, the stifling politics of oppression or the blazing furnace of revolt, the incessant economic drive to consume and produce without end and without thought, it is a welcome invitation indeed.

  • Something went wrong: Enmity, friendship, and historical memory.

    I think it is a disaster that my students grow up in sheer ignorance of the Bible…  I should have devoted myself to this, but by vanity and fate I became a philosopher. I thought it wasn’t my calling. Today I see that a Bible lesson is more important than a lesson on Hegel. A little late.

    – Jacob Taubes The Political Theology of Paul 

    Works Reviewed: Jacob Taubes To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

    As I was attempting to find an image of the cover of this book online I received the following message; “Something went wrong.” Indeed. Something went wrong, so utterly an horribly wrong that we can identify a German jurist – who avowed his sympathies with the Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and aligned himself with National Socialism – as one of the most significant political thinkers of the last century. The claim made on the back jacket of the book is frightful in its banality:

    “Carl Schmitt is among the most important political thinkers of the century. His work has proven proven influential on the right and, more recently, on the left. His interchange with Jacob Taubes in this volume, another interesting thinker, is remarkably clear and provides a window into their relationship and a framework for broader discussion.”

    There is something altogether sadistic about the reduction of the terrifying enmity and physical and psychological violence which Jacob Taubes, a Jewish scholar, suffered in his exchange with the Nazi jurist into “interesting” fodder for the pastimes of the intellect. Naively one might assume that this “window into their relationship” might offer interesting and pleasurable insights, rather than the painful wrestling with history and hatred that is in fact the substance of the letters. It is, nevertheless, a book that is worth reading not in order to ascertain Schmitt’s influence in the regions of “left” and “right” political abstractions, but because -against the purified positions of either ideological position – we are confronted in Schmitt with someone who recognized the dangers of a pure theory and yet was drawn into its vortex. His friendship with Jacob Taubes justifies nothing, redeems nothing and remains only as a vague intimation of the humanity that had been buried in the excesses of ideological visions – whether fascist, communist, or liberal. The fact that liberalism itself could not offer a space for these two men to meet – that they met rather on grounds of opposition and hatred – is a testament to the weakness of the liberal position. The detente of liberalism promotes the economic uniformity of capitalism and the cultural uniformity promoted by an ever-increasing technological immediacy. It is in their rejection of this vision of one world. Mike Grimshaw, in his introduction to the book writes,

    “We may not necessarily like either Taubes or Schmitt, but in the face of claims of pure apocalypse from economic and technological reason we must continually statee our desire, our need, our willingness, and our necessity to remain impure, a claim that in a world increasingly governed by the instruments of pure apocalypse remains “a very rare thing.”

    The rarity of their relationship, indeed, is the remarkable thing, and to categorize it as impure is fitting. By all accounts they were enemies, and in reading it there is a sense that the friendship they share is illicit and morally wrong. It is impossible to like Schmitt, and it is even difficult to like Taubes, whose very engagement with Schmitt almost seems opposed to any innate sense of justice. Early on, in a preface to the Letters, written by Taubes himself, he relates the experience of drawing on Schmitt’s work in a seminar on “Religion and Politics in the Nineteenth Century” only to be told that Carl Schmitt was an “evil man” and the argument that Taubes had been making left in shambles on the basis of his professor’s authoritative statement on Schmitt’s character. This experience left Taubes disillusioned with the state of the university in which the visceral response to a particularly recent figure was enough to shut down intellectual debate and attempts to understand the movement of history.

    History, and the motivation to think historically is at the heart of Taubes’ letter to Carl Schmitt and the letters of both Taubes and Schmitt to Armin Mohler that are collected in this volume. Even more fundamentally, however, at the heart of Taubes’ challenge to Schmitt is his reading of the Apostle Paul and the Epistle to the Romans. This is important, because it allows Taubes’ a reference that is decidedly Christian (as opposed to liberal) and nevertheless articulates a precise though provisional separation of powers: “‘That Jesus is the Christ’ is no cliché but a recurring statement, And that is also why the machinery of state is no perpetuam mobile, a Thousand-Year Reich, without end, but mortal, a fragile equilibrium both within and without, always capable of failure. It was not the ‘first liberal Jew’ who discovered this point of rupture, but the Apostle Paul, to whom I turn in transitional times – he had distinguished inside from outside even for the political.Without such a distinction we  are at the mercy of throne and powers that, in a ‘monistic cosmos’ have no sense of a hereafter. One can argue over the boundary between the spiritual and the worldly, and this boundary will constantly be redrawn, but if this distinction is neglected we breathe our last.(29-30)

    Several themes are present in that highly charged passage. I would like to pick out two, related ones, that will give rise to a third. In the first place is the challenge of the historicism that would put an end to the possibility of failure. This, in Taubes’ estimation, is to read against the view of history presented by Paul. The second theme implicit and made explicit elsewhere is the problem of fascination, particularly fascination with the trappings of power, particularly Schmitt’s own fascination with the Nazi regime and the cult of the Fuhrer. This was incomprehensible to Taubes, who, as a Jew had no possibility of making that choice. “(I)n all the unspeakable horror we were spared one thing. We had no choice: Hitler made us into absolute enemies. And there was no choice in this, nor any judgement, certainly not about others.”(26) It was from this position, of being made into an absolute enemy, that Taubes was drawn to the Apostle Paul and to the pairing of enmity with love. This, says Taubes, is a most promising starting-point and it allows for the possibility of friendship and enmity, and friendship within a situation of enmity, to be practicable. (The wounds of a friend can be trusted).

    Naturally, this is a difficult lesson. It is far easier and, in a sense, more rational, to abdicate the tremendous difficulty – both moral and psychological – demanded in the paradoxical coupling of friend and enemy. The portmanteau frenemy, with characteristic liberal disdain, mocks even the possibility of such a relationship. Far easier, and more responsible, to fall into the lines where the enemy can be regarded strictly as an evil and criminal element. This, in fact, is at the heart of contemporary theories about warfare in which the other side is not simply an enemy in the traditional sense but an absolute and criminal monstrosity. One of the real dangers, not only of Carl Schmitt but of the entire global atmosphere prior to the Second World War, was its combination of “rational incisiveness” with “fevered, apocalyptic” elements. This is how Taubes describes Schmitt’s style, and it is a style that he finds inescapable even though he must draw different conclusions. Always, there is the element of fascination or, we might say, of interest. In a certain sense the entire discourse is entirely too intellectual, except that the intellectual intensity masks a real trauma, one which cannot be overcome merely on the basis of liberal or democratic rhetoric.

    There is more to be said about this short book, which, in many ways is altogether unsatisfying. Its treatment of the problems of liberal democracy is altogether too brief, though it may perhaps be successful in its claims to offer a ‘transformative hermeneutic event,’ in the sense that it allows the reader to see the plane upon which Schmitt and Taubes were able to engage at the same time as it reveals the tension and even revulsion present in such an encounter. It is precisely this, which I must stress does not appear to be a really redemptive encounter, that makes this book a valuable work in our own times. Our own times, which are seeing once again the wide-spread failures of global integration and reaping the harvest of perpetual economic and military intervention. That this unlikely friendship existed is something, though not something that resolves into an image, nor does it provide a clear window into anything. At best we might say that something went wrong, but nevertheless that something has to be remembered as truly and as carefully as possible.

  • Every Day

     

    A Meditation on Every Day. 

    Every Day

    War is no longer declared,

    but rather continued. The outrageous

    has become the everyday. The hero

    is absent from the battle. The weak

    are moved into the firing zone.

    The uniform of the day is patience,

    the order of merit is the wretched star

    of hope over the heart.

     

    It is awarded

    when nothing more happens,

    when the bombardment is silenced,

    when the enemy has become invisible

    and the shadow of eternal weapons

    covers the sky.

     

    It is awarded for deserting the flag, 

    for bravery before a friend,

    for the betrayal of shameful secrets

    and the disregard

    of every command.  – Ingeborg Bachmann.

    This poem struck me as a meditation suitable for our times. The sort of harsh prayer that can stand as a true human activity in the face of our inheritance of perpetual crises and terror. A hard hope; unflinching and wretched light that illuminates the human heart not with grandeur or illusion, but with the steadiness of a desperate love.

    What other love could brook the sea of despair but a desperate love? In this climate of war, the trickle of sanity that still holds forth the hope of a human act; an act become impossibly criminal and unreasonable in the day of unreason. We need name no names here, for it is well known that we struggle not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities. It is worth noting, though, that Bachmann composed these verses against the backdrop, not of Nazism or the Second World War, but in the days heading towards the Cold War, when global threat was elevated to the level of political dogma. What become of the everyday when every inclination of the world powers is towards violence, exclusion, threat, and the strategies of death? The classical hero is useless in such a situation, since he is motivated by the outbursts of bravery achieved only in the physical violence of struggle. The flag draped across the shoulders and caskets of these soldiers offers no comfort or redemption for the deeper betrayal which they have effected – that of friend, family, and fellow human. The spectre of rabid nationalism, that persistent ghost which haunts the human psyche always with more or less violence, did not disappear in 1945. As Bachmann herself acerbically observed fascism did not magically disappear in 1945 “just because murder is no longer distinguished, demanded, and supported by the awarding of medals.” It has not disappeared now.

    At the level of everyday ethics and politics, then, we need to have a distance from the powers of state and the violence of collective desire. In the face of perpetual war, peace appears as the transgressor. The emblem of the peaceful protester facing off against the armed forces, against the police in their neurotic riot shields is a familiar sight. The everyday warrior – the peaceful soldier – wears in place of all that gear only the threadbare uniform of patience. Struggle is constant, daily, and will continue unabated. There is no victory, no final and decisive battle. This new hero, who goes to the firing lines in utter weakness, will not be glorified in the form of a statue. Her praises will not be sung in the schools of the nation. She will be given no plaque, awarded no medal, offered no recognition.

    Yet, the tone of the poem is far from despairing. Despair, after all, is a creature of violence, a creature which doubts peace and disavows the uniform of patience. The wretched star of hope is to be the order of merit. The very wretchedness of this star forbids the exaltation of a false hope, the illusory hope of grand and final victory. It is awarded, rather, when nothing more happens. Our obsession with novelty, newsworthiness – with great and grand gestures – betrays the reality that for nothing to happen opens up a space for truly human activity. For the life that is beyond spectacle, that bears no desire for worldly fame.

    This reversal of the roles of importance, in which friendship takes precedence over national pride, and truth is valued above obedience, is a message which needs to be heard again and again. The flags have again begun to rally the great human mass to their message of division and hatred. Indeed, they have never stopped. The flag has always been there, as a symbol of unity by exclusion, as a symbol of inhuman loyalty. It is time, and past time, to reclaim our human birthright. To stand as brave, not in the eyes of the nation, but in the eyes of a friend. To disregard the commands and laws which elevate the basest impulses of the human soul to the level of executive power and juridical authority.

    We need accept no order of merit but that wretched star. That hope which springs eternal, not because we are foolish or optimistic, but because we are caught in the grip of a wild and desperate love which never despairs.

  • PermaWar.

    PermaWar. 

    There it is; a succinct description of the current stage of globalisation in which we find ourselves. The obscene rejection of all the principles of a true permaculture. Rather than build and design for peace and for the  true flourishing of human and natural activity, we are subject to the perpetual drumbeat of war. The onward march of global capital and its discontents. War enters into our collective unconscious as the necessary backdrop to economic activity. Ceaselessly we are dehumanized, our souls subjected to the perpetual mocking of our consciences. David Swanson writes about the Arms Dealing as the subject of Hollywood comedy, here. Comedy, not in the tradition of the biting satire which unveils the pretentious illusions of empire and makes us more aware of our fragility, our humanity, and how our lives intersect and affect the lives of others. No, precisely not in that sense. Comedy in the sense of treating human life and meaning as trivial. Comedy that masks the fact that mass murder is big business. Swanson, writing about the movie War Dogs and the advertising surrounding  it has this to say:

    The cultural lesson, especially of the advertising, seems to be that joking about war profiteering is funny, cool, and edgy. Joking about cruelty to non-human animals would not be so acceptable in movie promotions. The industry of mass murder for human beings has become background noise in the era of permawar. All jokes about it will be labeled ironic, but the fact that it is an acceptable topic for joking says something very troubling about our culture.

    Something very troubling indeed. Students of history are aware, or should be aware, of the dangers present in this attitude. A culture that trivializes human life, a culture that is comfortable greeting death, especially the death  of others, as an amiable friend, is a culture in decline. It is a sign of decadence and moral decay. The apathetic laughter of the entertainment industry, as apathetic as it is banal, is symptomatic of a deeper underlying indifference. An indifference to life itself. The pulsating thrust of death, in the guises of economics or religion, have taken the driver’s seat. Agitated and fragmentary attempts to make sense of it all, or to deal with the aftermath follow, necessarily, for we are still human. There is still something, an instinct or value for life, that is preserved among us.

    But it needs to be stronger. The spectre of permanent war, the permanent and perpetual destruction and degradation, not only of our “enemies”, but of the very planet itself, cannot go on. We cannot continue to design for war and expect peace to ensue. That is a fool’s hope, an empty illusion which harbours no truth at all, only the scent of death.

    How do we, collectively, exorcise the demons of bloodlust,  apathy, indifference, inhumanity? I don’t know. There are small ways, small acts of caring, to be sure. There is welcome and hospitality. There is the refusal to laugh where others laugh. I can attempt to call the government of the country where I live to account. Elsewhere David Swanson, along with Roberto Fantina has challenged Canada not to follow the U.S. into the culture of permawar. Drawing on the wisdom of the late Robin Williams they say that he called us,  that is Canada, “a nice apartment over a meth lab for a reason.” Now, for some time, we have been bringing the drug upstairs. We have been imbibing the drug of war, and especially, its economic perks. Swanson and Fantina define war as the root problem which leads to the degradation of morality, the erosion of civil liberties, environmental degradation, and a tendency to oligarchic rule.

    And they are right. War is more than act of conflict declared between nations. It is, and is increasingly, a disease of the soul and mind. It is a systematic hatred, a posture which infects us all and blinds us to our fragility as well as our creative potential. When permawar is the incessant background of cultural development, then we stagnate as people as human beings. The horizons of our imagination, of our creativity, and of our involvement with others are hemmed in completely by death. Death as saviour.

    This, I  reject. I refuse to spend my short days on this earth locked in an embrace with destruction. I refuse to disavow beauty, gentleness, and humility. I refuse to laugh at the misfortune of others. The culture of war cannot endure, must not endure. And we must not let it.

  • Saudi Arms Deal: Canada has not done the right thing. A Reply to Professor Hansen

    It has been some time since I last attended to this space and, perhaps, a political rant is not the best re-introduction. Still, I was provoked. Irked, really, by the astounding lack of empathy and general good sense of a so-called “international security expert.” To be clear the personage in question, one Randall Hansen, is not some internet hack but a professor at the illustrious Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. For those not familiar this is one of Canada’s most prestigious institutions in the area of international relations. But enough preamble. The provocation: “Saudi arms deal: Canada has done the right thing, says Munk professor.” The reference is to Canada’s 15 billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia. The deal was made under the previous Conservative government, and has not been halted by the current Liberal administration. In the article Professor Hansen applauds the government for its refusal to bend to the “warm and fuzzy feelings” of ethical criticism.

    Hansen’s rationale for supporting the deal is simple. Saudi Arabia, no matter how repugnant the regime is, is our ally. Besides, if we didn’t sell to them, somebody else would, possibly a “state with laxer reviews and fewer conditions.” Basically it is good business and is in our interest. This is key for Hansen whose view of foreign policy is centred around states acting in their own self-interests. He has little time for “moral preening” and views ethical concerns in foreign policy as harmful. “Morality in foreign policy is a bit like religion; its often well intended but often toxic.” The Professor is entitled to his opinion, of course, but it is unfortunate that the “best and brightest” Canadian minds should be subjected to such a hodgepodge of utter nonsense. Hansen’s article reads like a weak-minded editorial against “bleeding heart liberals.” In its final crescendo he invokes De Gaulle against the Canadian public. No country should have friends. “If the people of Canada want to be morally unassailable then they should exit the foreign policy game.”

    But the question isn’t about being morally unassailable. It’s about having an ethical compass. Professor Hansen, who is unable to differentiate between the “warm fuzzy feeling” of a “selfie with the Prime minister” and objections to humans rights abuses and crimes against humanity, does not have such a compass. And yet he still speaks about “doing the right thing” and makes moral judgements between the bad and the worse. (Saddam Hussein was worse than Ayatollah Khomeini, Assad is worse than ISIS.) No clear reason is given, other than, presumably, Hansen’s own moral intuition. Is the point of public discourse around foreign policy that we should leave its moral dimension up to the private intuitions of “experts” like Hansen? This Ivory Tower kid who can’t even distinguish between arms deals and military interventions? Should a man who can say stuff  like “Most attempts to  create an ‘ethical’ foreign policy have failed for obvious reasons; the international system is made up of states and we have to deal with these states even when we don’t like them…” Does the learned Professor know the meaning of the word ethical? Ethics is very clearly involved in foreign policy, unless we are willing to say that it is a matter of purely arbitrary decisions. Ethics also exist because moral decisions are sometimes difficult. Does this mean we should dispense entirely with moral reason, in favour of… what exactly?

    National interest. National security. These are the terms Professor Hansen is banking on, and it seems to me that they are pretty much conceptually bankrupt. It is not obvious that selling weapons to a gross perpetrator of human rights abuses and the seedbed of Wahhabist extremism is in the interests of international and national security. It is also not clear, except in a sort of vague “it’s good for the ‘conomy, stupid” way that this deal is in the interest of Canadians.

    What is more clear is that Canada has violated its own laws and codes of ethical conduct in order to have this deal go through. This is probably why the Professor feels the need to downplay ethics and morality and pretend that it’s all namby-pamby feeling good stuff that doesn’t pan out in the cold hard world of pragmatic politics. Sorry, Professor, but you’re wrong. Ethics, in this case, is about the rule of law. It is about international standards of conduct and human rights. It is also about global public image, perhaps something even the Professor could understand. Canada cannot be a relevant and effective presence in the international scene if they are reviled by the international community as cynical cash-grabbers who are willing to violate their own code of integrity in order to make a buck. Ethics is not just about feeling good, it is about establishing reliable connections between nations.

    But what irks me most is the title of the essay, “Canada did the right thing.” Professor Hansen has jettisoned the language of ethics and morality, by what right does he speak about right? It would be one thing if he had made an argument establishing how the arms deal was ethically viable given the codes of conduct to which Canada holds itself responsible. This would be a hard argument to make, and would involve a lot of moral gymnastics. It wouldn’t convince me, but at least he could have made an ethical argument. The other option would be to simply say that the Canada-Saudi Arabia arms deal benefits certain weapons manufacturers, who may have industries based in Canada, and that the lives of Middle Eastern people aren’t worth much anyway. This is the argument Professor Hansen has made, but he has made it using weasel-words like “national interest” “the interest of Canada and Canadians” “unpalatable regimes” and “moral preening.” Debate and conversation is foreclosed, since the Professor really gives no indication of how we adjudicate between the bad and the worse. Nor does he offer insight into how ethically dubious deals make Canada or the world a safer place. Professor Hansen is a spokesman for the weapons manufacturing industry, hiding behind the veneer of academia and international affairs. His propaganda, there is no other word for it, is cynical and vile. Not only is it morally incoherent, it is incoherent period. The advice from this “international security expert” will not make the world a safer place. It is not conducive of peaceable affairs between nations. In his support of the Canada-Saudi arms deal Professor Hansen has consigned Canada to a diplomatic and international obsolescence, but he has done so on the side of moral vice.

    Who needs a teacher like that?

     

     

     

     

     

  • Red Rosa: On Economic Expansion and Militarism.

    Red Rosa:On Economic Expansion and Militarism.

    Works Reviewed: .  Luxemburg, Rosa. The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg. Volume 1: Economic Writings 1. Edited by Peter Hudis. Translated by David Fernbach, Jospeh Fraccia, and George Shriver. New York: Verso, 2013., 596 pages.

    Rosa Luxemburg appears to us today, in the gauzy film of hindsight, not so much as a figure from the past as the symbol of a world that lay within reach of historical possibility, but was violently arrested. A world that may yet inspire our longing and our work. The horizon of a world that was lost – lost before it was ever allowed to come into being – dawns under Red Rosa’s star. It was her communism, which uniquely brought the voice of dissent, of foreignness and of women to the foreground of social revolution, which brought out the most violent reactions of the fascist Freikorps troops. Barbara Ehrenreich describes the male fantasy of the “Red women” which preys upon the fascist imagination as it mingles a fear of women’s bodies with a fear of the dissolution of order:

    “Communism – and this is not the communism of Lenin and Stalin, but the communism off Rosa Luxemburg, the most potent and horrifying of the “Red women”… – represents a promiscuous mingling, a breaking down of old barriers, something wild and disorderly.”[1]

    The Freikorpsmen feared communism, but what this fear coded for them was a dread of women. Women as such constituted a threat to the fascist warrior’s sense of ordered reality; the stark tidiness of a freshly pressed military uniform. In this distorted view of reality the scene of domestic life became utterly desexualized, while warfare was glamorized and eroticized in extremely disturbing ways.[2]

    In a world where perpetual warfare had become engrained into the political and sexual economy of the nation, a woman of Rosa Luxemburg’s keen emotional intelligence was a threat. Her own comrades in Germany’s Social Democracy party turned against her as the nationalist frenzy of the First World War caught them in the grips of violent death-glorifying fantasy. Rosa remained, in Germany, a sole voice of sanity, a faithful witness against the fervor of war.

    Nationalisms, with their intense focus on racial, ethnic, and linguistic purities, name ways of coding violence against women, whose sexuality makes them possible sites of ethnic or racial contamination. Nationalist rhetoric fosters fear of foreigners, resident aliens, and those whose religious affiliations might be suspect. The world that Rosa Luxemburg lived in was not big enough for her internationalism. It was not big enough for the challenge of deep social democracy, because the minds of the rulers were small, rigid, and anxious. The people of Germany, and of all Europe, in failing to disown the war-hungry autocrats, failed Rosa Luxemburg.

    Rosa Luxemburg was a threat; a threat to a social order based on militarism and imperialism. The perpetual battle against true social democracy continues to manifest itself today. It is apparent in the increased economic disparity, in the overblown rhetoric of religious war, in the absurd escalation of the surveillance state, and in the deeply misogynistic, racist, and oligarchic political configurations of our time. The masters of war are still alive, still forcing their fantasies of a stilled, stolid deathly politics upon the living world. It is clear enough; Rosa is still a threat, and needs to remain one.

    Economic Writings

    The translation and publication of her complete works into English is, therefore, a timely event. Her voice is a necessary one, because it is original and untamed. In the introductory essay to The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg: Volume 1: Economic Writings 1, Peter Hudis provides a vignette of the breadth and depth of Luxemburg as an activist, a theoretician and an original personality. In her own words she expresses it this way:

    “I feel that within me there is maturing a completely new and original form which dispenses with the usual formulas and patterns and breaks them down… I feel with utter certainty that something is there, that something will be born.”[3]

    Her originality is revealed, not simply in her own sensibility of it, but through the depth of her active political commitment and relentless inquiry into the nature of capitalist expansion. Hudis describes the sum of her four major theoretical works – The Industrial Development of Poland; Introduction to Political Economy; The Accumulation of Capital: and The Accumulation of Capital, or what the Epigones Have Made of Marx’s Theory: An Anti-Critique – as “the most comprehensive study of capital’s inherent tendency towards global expansion ever written.” There is a great deal of truth to this claim, already in her dissertation piece, The Industrial Development of Poland, she observes:

    It is an inherent law of the capitalist method of production that it strives to materially bind together the most distant places, little by little, to make them economically dependent on each other, and eventually transform the entire world into one firmly joined productive mechanism. This tendency, of course, works most strongly within one and the same state, within the same political and tariff borders.[4]

    This essay, which opens the volume, gives an indication of her attention to particular political and economic configurations and her ability to, presciently, situate those situations with regard to the overall structure and inherent tendencies of global capitalism. In The Industrial Development of Poland, Rosa makes no mention of Marxist theory. Her work is clearly grounded in an internationalist perspective, and her keen awareness of the expansionist tendencies of capitalism alone, as seen in the quote above, make Rosa a figure worth reconsidering in our allegedly “global” age. What, she asks, are the barriers to prevent a continued expansion of global capitalism? If these barriers cannot be identified the objective necessity of socialism would remain wishful thinking. Marx, Rosa thought, lacked an adequate explanation of the limits of capitalist expansion.

    The boundless horizon of Rosa Luxemburg’s thought, then, is made manifest within the constraints of particular, determinate action. However she refuses the answer of nationalism as a legitimate way of resolving the double bind between the place of determinate action and the horizon of global responsibility. For example, unlike Marx and Engels, Rosa opposed calls for Polish national self-determination. As we see in the quote from her dissertation work, Rosa is far too aware of the complicity of national statist power in the work of capitalist expansion.

    Introduction to Political Economy

    Freedom is always the freedom to think differently, said Rosa Luxemburg, and her work powerfully embodies this mantra. It is not, however, that thinking differently is enshrined into a law that refuses any agreement. Rather, Rosa struggles to maintain the difficult space of critical thought. Certainly, there is often a polemical edge to her work, but it is equally clear that this polemic is felt as the necessary reaction to the work and words of people whose theoretical speculations have an obscure and oppressive quality. Thus, in Introduction to Political Economy, she takes the professors of political economy to task. This work, which was never fully completed, offers a biting critique of the illusory notion of a “national economy.” The national economy, she points out, is a myth that conveniently ignores the constant exchange between nations, and obscures the ever-increasing grip of capitalist economy on the world stage:

    In this way, the “commodity” capital spreads still more remarkable “commodities” on an ever more massive scale from various old countries to the whole world: modern means of transport and the destruction of whole indigenous populations, money economy and an indebted peasantry, riches and poverty, proletariat and exploitation, insecurity of existence and crises, anarchy and revolutions. The European “national economies” extend their polyp-like tentacles to all countries and people of the earth, strangling them in the great net of capitalist exploitation.”(116)

    Rosa is attentive to attentive to the myriad economic entanglements which global trade foists upon the world and, because she refuses to reduce history to national identity and economy to national economy, she is able to resist the facile definitions of economy proffered within the sphere of academic specialization. The definitions which, to our great detriment, remain much in vogue today.

    The historical depth of Rosa Luxemburg’s work comes through strongly in Introduction to Political Economy as well as in other work included in this volume. In her work on Slavery the rise and fall of the Roman Empire is analysed through the lens of its slave economy. In this essay she develops the compelling, and still inadequately considered thesis that “the slave revolts were the first immense, world-historical class struggle against the exploiters. Not the free peasant, not the proletarians in Rome.” (327) Rosa’s work on slavery is not fully developed, indeed it has a more tenuous character even than the Introduction to Political Economy, but it is full of intriguing threads. Most notably this work, along with her comments on The Middle Ages, Feudalism, Development of Cities gives evidence of her sense of the importance of reading history in a way that is attentive to the dissolution of social structures.

    Her analysis of capitalism, therefore, is read against the backdrop of prior social dissolutions. Through her attentiveness to the dissolute, the hidden, to that which escapes the eyes of those complicit with the reigning authority Rosa perceives and elucidates the connections between militarism and industrial expansion with a keen and prescient gaze. If we are to move beyond the stagnation of our arrested history, hers will be a voice that is heard.

                   [1]Barbara Ehrenreich “Foreward” in Klaus Theweleit Male Fantasies Volume 1: Women, Floods, Bodies,           History. trans. Stephen Conway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. xiv.  

                    [2]Theweleit, Male Fantasies.

                    [3]Rosa Luxemburg,  The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg: Volume 1: Economic Writings 1, trans. Peter Hudis (New York: Verso, 2013)

                    [4]Ibid.,  73.

  • The Politics of the Image.

    Works Reviewed: Chiara Bottici Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.

    Nevertheless human life was thus image-graced and image-cursed; it could comprehend itself only through images, the images were not to be banished, they had been with us since the herd-beginning, they were anterior to and mightier than our thinking, they were timeless, containing past and future, they were a twofold dream-memory and they were more powerful than we. – Herman Broch, The Death of Virgil. 

    We live in an age where images permeate our awareness and practice of politics. At the same time the comment is often made that our politicians lack imagination, there is little capacity to imagine a world of new possibilities, a world that is not reduced to the governance of the neoliberal consensus. Those who do operate under the slogan of “another world is possible” are typically dismissed as fanatics well outside the viable political spectrum.

    Chiara Bottici’s Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary is therefore a timely book. Bottici begins with the hypothesis that `there is a link between the indiscriminate proliferation of images and the crisis of political imagination understood as the capacity to start something new.`(3) She critiques the notion that the imagination is simply the faculty to represent what does not exist, and goes on to show that this conception of the imagination began in the eighteenth-century, and has had some debilitating consequences in terms of our ability to navigate the use and presence of images as they shape our thought and  society. The definition of reality, she argues, changes from one context to another, and along with our changing definition of reality we find ourselves in need of new conceptual apparatuses to allow us to speak and act meaningfully into those contexts.

    Bottici proposes the imaginal as a conceptual apparatus to overcome our own impasse with regard to the faculty of the imagination, as the exercise of the singular mind, and the social imaginary. Her books proceeds along three broad strokes. First she develops the etymological and philosophical concept of the imagination beginning with Plato and Aristotle and moving up into the Enlightenment and beyond into psychoanalysis and critical theory. She identifies key moments of opposition, or ruptures, which affect and change the way the concept of imagination is used. She then traces the concept of the social imaginary, as a further rupture in the fate of the image, and the determination of its coordinates as more contextually based. This follows her argument that change in usage of language depicts a deeper change at the conceptual level of understanding. Finally she turns to the concept of the imaginal, as a way to focus on images themselves and not merely their production. Bottici is concerned that the typical focus on the imaginary/imagination as a source of alienation does not give sufficient attention to the way our thought is formed through images.

    The second section offers an etymology of politics, from Aristotle’s political animal up to present-day biopolitics. Bottici argues for a more positive reading of biopolitics which takes into account Hannah Arendt’s work on natality. We are, she maintains, not only beings-toward-death, but beings-after-birth, and it is the event of birth, rather than death, that is more fundamentally political because it is in birth that we become, biologically, a part of a common world. This recasting of the political tradition, with a keen eye to its historical male-blindness allows Bottici to bring together the imaginal, as an ambivalent presence and use of images, and the political,  as a sphere which entails much more than governance.

    In the final chapter Bottici offers a keen analysis of the  ways images are used in shaping current political mythology. Following Guy Debord she makes the case that the society of the spectacle has become even more entrenched than Debord foresaw. Their is no escape, and yet the commodification of the spectacle and its integration into global capitalist society as a constant relation between persons calls for the need to envision new conceptual breaks.

    She calls for a re-orientation of our image-making in way that positions the modern concern for freedom within an already socially defined space. Freedom is the freedom of equals. Bottici’s book is a worthwhile and excellent read.

  • B.R. Ambedkar: The Annihilation of Caste and the Future of Democracy.

    Works Reviewed: B.R. Ambedkar. Annihilation of Caste. New York: Verso, 2014.

    “Ambedkar was Gandhi’s most formidable adversary. He challenged him not just politically or intellectually, but also morally. To have excised Ambedkar from Gandhi’s story, which is the story we all grew up on, is a travesty. Equally, to ignore Gandhi while writing about Ambedkar is to do Ambedkar a disservice, because Gandhi loomed over Ambedkar’s world in myriad and un-wonderful ways.” -Arundhati Roy.

    In the popular consciousness of the Western world the story of India’s independence is a classic underdog story focused centrally on a single protagonist; Mohandas K. Gandhi. The pacifist Gandhi, with his indefatigable ascetic activism looms as a larger than life presence. He is more than a simple leader of a nationalist movement, he has become a spiritual hero on the world stage. Politics, social justice, and spirituality seem to cohere in Gandhi to such an extent that the political and social dynamics of post-colonial India are overwhelmed; they must live  in his shadow, even as Gandhi proves the ideal icon for marketing India’s spiritual  traditions to the West. His moral discipline place him beyond the ken of mortal politics. As a result of this lionization Western perception of India’s independence are severely clouded by the blind-spot of hero-worship.

    An article in the July 2015 issue of National Geographic illustrates this blind-spot quite well. Tom O’Neill, following “In the Footsteps of Gandhi’, purports to assess the Mahatma’s legacy in  modern India. O’Neill himself has nothing but praise for the saintly man describing him as an indomitable figure who “forced his countrymen to question their deepest prejudices about caste and religion and violence.” Waxing romantic the author describes himself sitting under the trees where Gandhi had spoken and telling the villagers he was meeting Gandhi: “They’d smile and hurry away convinced a madman had come to town.” The bustling and spiritually deficient denizens of modern India are held up to the idyllic, robust spiritual guru of their recent past. O’Neill’s tone is not one of contempt, rather it is lightly patronizing. The enlightened Western journalist is able to consume the spiritual commodity that is Gandhi in a way that he is inaccessible to many Indians.

    This kind of idyllic narrative serves a number of political purposes. In this case it shields the political and social dynamics of contemporary India by fixing a romantic and somewhat abstract spiritual icon as the absolute spiritual and moral guide of that country. Gandhi is described as the hero who stood up to British  imperialism and Hindu caste-society. He is a figure with followers and enemies, but no comrades, no colleagues. It is a very minimalist drama that fails to capture the real social and religious antagonisms of India, not only in the present, but during the first days of independence. The most glaring omission of this vignette can perhaps be summed up under the name B.R. Ambedkar.

    The republication, by Verso, of Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste, along with extensive annotations, a lengthy introduction by the activist and novelist Arundhati Roy, and Gandhi’s response to Ambedkar offers a perfect opportunity to reassess the legacy of Indian independence and those who helped shape it. This work looks deep into a muted side of Indian history, a part of that world that has been actively silenced and whose political agency has been and continues to be denied. The hard question of whether India’s Dalit population can actually depend on Gandhi’s legacy is confronted head-on. Perhaps the Mahatma never spoke for them, after all. This, in turn, confronts the Western ideals of political and moral greatness. Is it the benevolent and pastoral leader, who graciously extends his hands to the lower classes, while preserving the best of traditional culture and religion? Or should we relinquish this inspirational dream in favour of a more difficult and conflict-ridden one which strives towards the political determination of the oppressed?

    Ambedkar was India’s first Minister of Law after Independence in 1947. Born into the Untouchable, or Dalit, caste of Hindu society Ambedkar eventually converted to Buddhism. He found the caste system to be absolutely unbearable and opposed to the principles of justice and reason, and could not disassociate the caste system from the religious traditions out of which it arose. Ambedkar fought vigorously for the right to self-representation of India’s Dalit population. Profoundly aware of the social stigma, often manifesting as outright physical violence, which daily attended the Dalit population, Ambedkar knew that simply granting a right to vote to all Indians could not possibly result in actual social equality. Ambedkar  therefore proposed a double electorate in which Dalit’s would choose their own representatives. He also proposed that for a ten-year period the Dalits would be granted a second vote to have a say in which candidates were elected among caste Hindus. The idea behind this second electorate was to ensure that those representatives who were least inimical to Dalit interests would be elected to the legislative assembly. The Communal Award of 1932 awarded this double-vote to the Dalits for a twenty-year period, despite Gandhi’s protestations. It was in response to this defeat that Gandhi deployed his greatest and most effective weapon: the fast unto death. It was in response to this fast that Ambedkar, in a move he would later regret, rescinded the political gains he had made.

    Gandhi’s main concern was the unity of the Hindu religious community: “For me the question of these classes is predominantly moral and religious. The political aspect, important though it is, dwindles into insignificance compared to the moral and religious issue.” In her introductory essay, The Doctor and the Saint, Roy describes Gandhi as a great admirer of the caste system. It represented, for him, the genius of Indian society. That being said, Gandhi certainly objected, to varying degrees throughout his life, to hierarchy between the castes. He believed that the Untouchables, the outcasts of Hindu society could be brought into the varna system. Ambedkar’s response was that the “outcaste is a byproduct of the caste system. There will be outcastes as long as there are castes. Nothing can emancipate the outcaste except the destruction of the caste system.” (26) The contrast between the two could not be more clear, Gandhi’s statement all but completely disavows the social and political dimensions of moral and religious life, where for Ambedkar the social aspect is absolutely central to morality and to religion. His rejection of the caste and varna systems are based on the deeply felt experience that Hindu society is incoherent. Roy relates Ambedkar’s assessment of Hindu society with chilling aplomb: “To the Untouchables,” Ambedkar said, with the sort of nerve that present-day intellectuals in India find hard to summon, “Hinduism is a veritable chamber of horrors.”(20)

    The Doctor and the Saint.

    Roy’s essay, really a short book in itself, is not for those short on nerve, or for those who prefer political expediency to the difficulties of truth-telling. It is a hard book to read, it is brutal and heart-wrenching. Roy faces head-on the chamber of horrors that Indian society continues to be for its most marginalized and despised peoples. It is a story of murder, rape, of people being stripped and paraded naked, and literally forced to eat shit. To face these horrors, and not be driven to despair or callousness, requires a greater moral imagination than the one which simply encourages individuals to “be the change they want to see.” Roy confronts not only the conflicts within Indian society, but also the indifference, ignorance, and hypocrisy of the West. She begins her essay:

    If you have heard of Malala Yousef but not of Surekha Bhotmange, then do read Ambedkar.

    Malala Was only fifteen but had already committed several crimes. She was a girl, she lived in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, she was a BBC blogger, she was in a New York Times video, and she went to school…

    Surekha Bhotmange was forty years old and had committed several crimes too. She was a woman- an ‘Untouchable’ Dalit woman – who lived in India, and she wasn’t dirt poor. She was more educated than her husband, so she functioned as the head of her family. Dr. Ambedkar was her hero. (17-18)

    Surekha, like Ambedkar, was a convert to Buddhism. She had purchased a plot of land in the village of Khairlanji. She was refused connections to electricity and water. Eventually Surekha was gang-raped and murdered. Indian media reported the murder as a “morality” murder, and India’s legal system took no notice of the crime until they were forced to by mass protests of Dalit organizations. Even then caste prejudice was not taken into account as a motivating factor, and the judge dismissed the evidence that Surekha and her daughter had been raped. Writing of the world response to this crime Roy acerbically observes:

    Surekha Bhotmange and her children lived in a market-friendly democracy. So there were no “I am Surekha” petitions from the United Nations to the Indian government, nor any fiats or messages of outrage from heads of state. Which was just as well, because we don’t want daisy-cutters dropped on us just because we practice caste. (20)

    Roy’s unflinching presentation of the social ills of caste society do not stop at India’s borders. She describes, among other instances, how caste-Hindus lobbies in the UK have sabotaged the efforts of Dalit-led organizations to have caste discrimination recognized as a form of racial discrimination. “Democracy” writes Roy, “has not eradicated caste. It has entrenched and modernised it. This is why it’s time to read Ambedkar.” (37).

    Annihilation of Caste.

    Time to read Ambedkar, because Ambedkar was keenly aware of the social dimensions of democracy and the need for social and religious reform to accompany political reform. Without real transformation at the level of social relationships and religious and moral perspectives the political hand-off of power could only entrench the social deformation and injustice of Indian society. Ambedkar’s undelivered speech, Annihilation of Caste, begins by describing the Social Conference which began as the social reform side of the National Congress party, but eventually split into a separate party, and was met at first with indifference and then outright hostility by the politicians of the National Congress. Ambedkar quotes one of the founders of the National Congress, W.C. Bonnerjee: “I for one have no patience with those who say we shall not be fit for political reform until we reform our social system.”(213) Ambedkar takes up the challenge by drawing on the experience of the Untouchables as the weak point in the social organization of Indian society. The fact that a population of the society are routinely and ritually treated as subhuman, who were not allowed even to walk on the same ground, was evidence enough that Hindu society was an incoherent mess, incapable of any  unified experience of equality and fraternity upon which to base a national politics.

    Ambedkar goes on to defend his thesis, that religious and social reform must accompany political reform with numerous examples from history. His analysis is broad-ranging and his politics are thoughtful and nuanced. He is critical not only of the nationalist politicians who ignore the question of economic reform, he is equally critical of a narrow focus on economy that does not grapple with the question of social reform and the question of caste. If a socialist revolution does not take account of caste before the revolution, he writes, it will have to account for it after.

    This is only another way of saying that, turn in any direction you like, caste is the monster that crosses your path. You cannot have political reform, you cannot have economic reform, unless you kill this monster. (233)

    Annihilation of Caste was a speech prepared for a group of moderate Hindu reformers. It has, therefore, some very practical advice on how to go about the abolition of caste. After subjecting caste to a rigorous examination in terms of its origins, its effect on the economy, and on the social unity and ethics of Hindu society, Ambedkar turns to the question of how to defeat caste prejudice. Chief among the strategies advocated, though not employed were inter-dining between castes and inter-marriage. Ambedkar addresses the strengths and limitations of these strategies and this leads him to question the underlying religious values which serve as obstacles to pursuing these strategies. Inter-dining and intermarriage are viewed as objectionable, he argues, and the cause for social reform is unpopular because “inter-dining and intermarriage are repugnant to the beliefs and dogmas which the Hindus regard as sacred.”(121) The notion of caste comes from a deeply religious perspective, and it would persist, argued Ambedkar, as long as Hindu society continued to observe the authority of the shastras which taught them the religion of caste. Ambedkar therefore urged the would-be social reformers to be religious reformers as well, and not to shy away from confronting the deeply held religious values of their countrymen:

    You must take the stand that Buddha took. You must take the stand which Guru Nanak took. You must not only discard the shastras, you must deny their authority, as did Buddha and Nanak. You must have courage to tell the Hindus that what is wrong with them is their religion – the religion which has produced in them this notion of the sacredness of caste. Will you show that courage?

    Difficult words, particularly in an age of religious pluralism and political timidity. Gandhi took great offense at them, and his response to Ambedkar’s article is published in this edition of Annihilation of Caste. What emerges from this response is a Gandhi who is unwilling to face the gravity of the social ills of caste, and who looks to the Hindu religion to provide “warmth … to compensate for the shameful persecutions to which the vast majority of Harijans are exposed.” (324) Gandhi’s protestations are feeble, they do not do justice to the strength of the argument which Ambedkar poses. Gandhi, threatened by the argument, emerges as a defender of tradition and religious values over and above the dignity and self-determination of human beings. Ambedkar’s religious reform, Gandhi fears, would destroy Hindu society.

    For Ambedkar, however, there is no such thing. Hindu society, because it is a caste society, is already divided and devours itself and is therefore a completely vulnerable and defenseless society. He preaches and predicts, therefore, not the end of Hinduism but that through a relentless self-purging it might rid itself of the social and religious deformities which plague it:

    In my opinion it is only when Hindu society becomes a casteless society that it can hope to have strength enough to defend itself. Without such internal strength, swaraj (self-rule) for Hindus may turn out to be only a step towards slavery.(317

    Annihilation of Caste is an important, profound, and disturbing text. It is, in a sense, understandable that the moderate Hindu reformers cancelled Ambedkar’s speaking engagement and the speech was not delivered as intended. It is also understandable that Gandhi reacted with such vehemence, a challenge to religion, to dearly held tenets of faith and forms of social organization is never looked upon kindly. It is regrettable, however, that such a powerful voice for social transformation has been subject to such censure and silence for so long. Regrettable, too, that dreamy-eyed Western journalists prefer to pine after the legacy of commodified spiritual gurus, rather than facing the harsh realities of social evils and contradictions. Ambedkar’s rebuttal to Gandhi’s indictment of Annihilation of Caste provides fair warning to those who seek refuge in an idyllic and imagined past, just as much as to those who despair or accommodate themselves to the corruption of the present:

    The Hindus, in the words of Matthew Arnold, are `wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. What are they to do? The Mahatma to whom they appeal for guidance does not believe in thinking, and can therefore give no guidance which can be said to stand the test of experience. The intellectual classes to whome the masses look for guidance are either too dishonest or too indifferent to educate them in the right direction. We are indeed witnesses to a great tragedy. In the face of this tragedy all one can do is to lament and say – such are they leaders, O Hindus. (356)

    The pain in Ambedkar’s voice carries itself, through the written text, and into the eyes and ears of his contemporary readers. Democracy has not abolished caste, has not abolished ethnic and religious violence. The commodification of India’s spiritual traditions for Western consumption has not alleviated the suffering of India’s Dalit population. Streams of books about mindfulness, consciousness, and spirituality have not provided us with the moral fibre to face up to the horrors and brutalities entrenched within our own social systems. This is why it is time to read Ambedkar.

  • The Flight of Minerva: Hegel and the Haitian Revolution

    Works Reviewed: Susan Buck-Morss. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. 151 pages.

    “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” The twilight shade with which Hegel cast his work, at least here, lends an aura of sad nobility to the pursuit of philosophy. The pallor of grey in grey drapes like a banner over Western historical consciousness. The small consolations of philosophy are not really on offer to the living world; its aptitude and appetites lie with the contemplation of the ashes of history, of forms of life grown cold and dead. This philosophical mood, which cannot really be what Hegel intended, has received an exaggerated place in the public and academic conception of the practice and uses of philosophy. It has been further exacerbated, within the academic realm, by disciplinary entrenchment; philosophers are read in the context of other philosophers and history takes place elsewhere. Hegel’s symbolic choice of Minerva’s owl, which encapsulates nature and the Greek birth of philosophy, seems to consolidate this notion of a perennial, and ahistorical, wisdom.

    Minerva, however, has another resonance for Hegel, one which places him within the context of daily newspapers and world-historical events, rather than simply within the rarefied atmosphere of Aristotelian philosophy. Minerva was the name of a German newspaper, written with a Girondist cosmopolitan perspective. Throughout its run the paper included extensive coverage of the revolution on the island of Saint-Domingue. G.W.F. Hegel was known to be an avid reader of the news, and of this journal in particular. It is to this connection, this resonance, that Susan Buck-Morss points in her book, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. The picture of Hegel that emerges ifs one in which the philosopher is both the bold composer of a philosophical defense of history inspired by the Haitian revolution and yet, by virtue of the silence of metaphor which surrounds that philosophical development, also complicit in the silence around the role of racism as a tool of suppression at the foundation of the modern world.

    Buck-Morss central thesis is that Hegel draw his inspiration for the master-slave dialectic from the Haitian revolution and the uprising led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. This event, which should have shook the foundations of Western political philosophy, given that slavery had become the root metaphor in Western thought for “all that was evil about power relations,” was shunted into relative obscurity. There was, Buck-Morss notes, a glaring discrepancy between the rise of the economic practice of slavery, as the systematic capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labour force in the colonies, to the point where it came to form the basis of the entire economic system of the West, and the use of slavery as the political metaphor that formed the antithesis of the highest political value of Enlightenment thought; freedom. This discrepancy went unnoticed by rational, ‘enlightened’ thinkers and, Buck-Morss contends, continues to be ignored by present-day writers who unproblematically construct Western histories as ‘coherent narratives of human freedom.’ The persistence of these kinds of narratives, in face of all the evidence, stems in part from the rigidity of academic boundaries in which ‘national histories are considered as self-contained, or when separate aspects of history are treated in disciplinary isolation.’ Bringing together the conceptual and empirical aspects of history, as signalled by Hegel and Haiti respectively, form the strands of Buck-Morss project of decentering the legacy of Western modernity, while salvaging modernity’s universal intent.

    Buck-Morrs proves an adept guide at navigating the depths of suppressed history, and drawing lost, or nearly lost, strands into sharp relief. The picture of history that emerges is neither a tentative pastiche nor a dogmatic relief; the author is keenly aware that writing history, especially with its universal horizon in view, is an ongoing process that is and should be subject to constant correction and improvement. It is not, for that reason, a project to be despaired over, but one to be faced resolutely through conceptual development as well as gathering of facts. Facts,  for Buck-Morrs, become most useful when they shatter the boundaries of previously held conceptions or world-views: “Critical thought is empowered by the facts only by being pushed over the brink of the discursive worlds that contain those facts.”(139). The Haitian Revolution, she argues, is a site full of precisely these kinds of facts, not only with respect to the brutal fact of slavery in the modern world and the radical gesture of defiance offered against it, but also, in connection with that act, a breaking open of defined roles of race, religion, and gender. She examines the connections between sexuality, racialization and economic and political domination in brief, but fruitful sketches. The role of religion, and particularly of Islam, is also brought, somewhat more tentatively, back into the purview of a universal history of emancipation.

    Slavery is connected to sexuality, to the “boundary-disrupting potential of women’s sexual agency that was economically powerful and escaped political control.” This disrupting power was what prompted Napoleon to order Leclerc to expel from Saint-Domingue all white women who had slept with black men. The boundary-disrupting potential of women is not simply limited to the field of sexuality, however, but extends to the perceived disruption of the order of a narrative of Western progress. Buck-Morrs attends to these “historical anomalies”, that, for example of the women under Toussaint L’Ouverture’s system of “military agragrianism” making the unprecedented demand for equal pay. “Simply stated, the women saw themselves as individual and equal workers – and the men did not object.” This particular victory is short-lived, as the French representative to Haiti appeals to notions of gender inequality to convince them otherwise. The “historical anomaly” still stands, however, as an example that allows for an emancipation of the political horizon of the past, and subsequently of the present as well. In the field of religion Buck-Morrs makes a similar move, using as a starting point the stories surrounding the slave ceremony at Bois Caiman that initiated the insurrection. The evidence here is fragmentary; a speech by a black man named Boukman and a sacred ceremony by a priestess called Fatiman. “What if” conjectures Buck-Morrs – “you learn that Boukman…was named Boukman – Bookman- because he was literate and could read the Book, but that the Book was not the Bible?” She argues that evidence points to Boukman being a Muslim, and that this allows for a reading in which he is a preacher of jihad, but also, and more convincingly, for a reading that is framed in the context of a larger, messier, and more universal emancipation.

    This, after all, is her overarching project, to rescue history from the systems imposed upon it, even while learning to use the conceptual tools of those systems of thoughts with a greater degree of imagination and freedom. The Haitian Revolution is not a simple story of good vs evil, bu a history formed through “all the existential uncertainties and moral ambiguities of a struggle for liberation under conditions of civil war and foreign occupation.” At the heart of this struggle, however, a universal horizon can be definitively found, one which transcends the political imaginary of our own time as much as of the past; “Haiti’s political imaginary as liberated territory, a safe haven for all, was too grand for statist politics. Its absolutely new extension of both freedom and citizenship transracially and transnationally, does not lend itself to political appropriation as a definition of national identity.” It is, in short, a universal history, or, at least, a moment of historical rupture in which we can see with clarity that radical anti-slavery is a “human invention that belongs to everyone.” A political philosophy that results from authentic and sustained engagement with universal history, which extends the boundaries of moral and political imagination, because it helps us see more clearly. The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk,  but it flies towards the dawn.