These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. These worlds are not extraordinary worlds, and this is not science fiction. I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car-horns – who would have thought that Heaven could lie underneath? All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road, and the angels in the cemetery below me fly so low. The people here all seem to have gone to bed, even though it hasn’t even passed 8pm. Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news…

Realizing that I had stood at the exact point which the writer was describing felt very strange, but that was not what preoccupied me at that point. I was thinking about what I had read, and I thought that it made a lot of sense, especially if one compares this to another, more famous city, say Paris. Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And, he or she is not continually offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments – each fragment producing its own meaning – seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to “gateways to other worlds” so accurate). If one were to look at these from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe, like the architect/writer believed, that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.

Does the above constitute an insight into the enigmatic statement about Jackson Pollock’s paintings?

Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

I believe so. But, before we get to that, there is a distance to be walked, so to speak. What struck me most about the above description of the staircases was the sense of dread that I felt emanating from these words (was it the dread of being “sucked in” by the other worlds? The fear of the permanent state of non-control that was implied? I don’t know.) What was also remarkable was the fact that these words, and others in the notebook, absolutely, though unintentionally, destroyed all the foundations of the Vitruvian notions of beauty and order that we are so accustomed to, that are so ‘natural’, almost like a fatality. I remember hearing that the French magazine Paris-Match once voted Beirut ‘the ugliest city on the Mediterranean’, and I could imagine the French reporter walking around and brushing shoulders with the notebook’s author, each seeing the same things, and yet so differently. What I mean is that, while the eyes of the architect in question were opening issues up for scrutiny and questioning, the reporter of Paris-Match was forcing these issues to a closure, or what seemed to be a closure from his perspective.

At one point, for instance, the author wonders why the axis of symmetry in buildings, when it existed, was always a vertical axis (later on, I found out that he already knew, and that his question was only rhetorical). He then went on to talk about the visual ambivalence created by what was probably an involuntary horizontal axis of symmetry in some of Mies van der Rohe’s constructions. After that, he started a series that began with “what if?” One of them, for instance, was to ask what would happen if the axis of symmetry was tilted 20 degrees to the left or to the right. It was theoretically conceivable, of course, but would it still remain an axis of symmetry? And, more importantly, what would the resulting building be, what would it resemble? The question of resemblance is of central importance to this issue. The axis of symmetry had to be vertical because – at least in the humanist architectural tradition inherited from the Renaissance – architecture was analogous to the human body, to the perfect human body that was shaking of centuries of being put to shame by the system of thought prevailing in the Middle Ages. The theoretical writings of the Old Masters of the Renaissance, from Alberti to Palladio and Leonardo da Vinci, confirmed this analogy between body and architecture, and turned the human body into an authoritative foundation for architecture.  However, it seems that, since then, there has been a gradual loss of that body from architecture, until it became clear, in the modern architecture of our modern times, that the premises of architecture are to be found in a high degree of technology and specialization. So, why is our mysterious author preoccupied with the human body to such an extent?

If we think again about tilting the axis of symmetry a few degrees to the right or left, what kind of conclusions can we draw? The easiest and least interesting one would be a building that seems to be partly embedded in the earth on which it is built. But, that would be in sharp contradiction with the fact that the axis of symmetry’s main function is to give balance to the building. In that sense, the two parts created by the axis have to be not only identical, but of equal value. Clearly, the two parts of a partly-buried building are not, and cannot be, equal. That would leave us with the only logical conclusion possible for tilting the axis of symmetry: to remain balanced, the building itself has to be ‘dismembered’, opened up, and each mass, each detail, would find its balancing equivalent a little farther up or down. That is not a simple thing, and it introduces new problematics that architecture has to deal with – especially if the axes are, as it usually happens, multiplied in one building (a building with, say, two axes of symmetry, one in the plan and one in the façade).

The body as authoritative metaphor loses its centrality

it cannot fix or stabilize. Rather, its limits, interior or exterior, seem infinitely ambiguous and extensive; its forms, literal or metaphorical, are no longer confined to the recognizably human but embrace all biological existence from the embryonic to the monstrous; its power lies no longer in the model of unity, but in the intimation of the fragmentary, the morselated, the broken.

This body is not simply an inversion of the classical ideal body, not only the act of turning that body (and all the concepts that are based upon it) on its head, like at medieval carnivals, for instance. It carries with it an irrevocable loss – the loss not only of that holistic body, but also of what used to hold it together, and the world that had been built around it.

To be continued…

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Read Part I here.

In the first part of this discussion about the meaning of life I suggested that the recent absence of reflection on this question was due in large part to a general acceptance by European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries of “the secularisation thesis”. Writings taking up themes related to the significance of our lives were framed by an assumption that the historical movement of modernity was forging a transition from a society dominated by magic, myth, superstition and religion, into one with a cognitively superior outlook in which these things are disclosed as illusions and delusions which we shed in the name of reason, criticism and science. Classic questions concerning the meaning of life seemed to be wrapped up with ideas of providence that had no place in a rational and scientific age.

My central claim was that the historical narrative embedded in the secularisation thesis is both factually unconvincing and conceptually inadequate. Religion has simply not gone away and there are no signs of it doing so any time soon. Moreover, the movement of secularisation should be understood within rather than against a religiously – and specifically Christian – understanding of the world and the significance of our lives. It belongs to the Christianisation of the world.

How, then, might we begin to think about the question of the meaning of life if we forgo the secularisation thesis? First, we no longer need to regard the becoming-secular of the world as a radical loss of religious meaning, or as a movement into nihilism. On the other hand, in an age not given to mysticism or metaphysics, and in the light, I would add, of the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, it is clearly no longer so credible to conceive our lives in terms of some other grand historical narrative either. The (“cognitivist”) idea that the world or history or humanity has “an intrinsic meaning” (a logos of some kind) that is on the way to realisation is not, in my view, the lens through which the meaning of life should be assessed.

In this part of my discussion, I want to recommend that we make a change in the vocabulary of this debate, and propose rethinking questions concerning the meaning of life in terms of the idea of a life worth living or living a worthwhile life. This, I want to say, is not something that can be assessed except from the inside, and from the inside not just anything will count as living such a life, though nor will only one kind of life be regarded as such either. It is not, I want to suggest, a matter of finally knowing how to live but of creating a life that can be experienced as worthwhile.

This may be regarded as yet another secularisation of a religiously significant construal. However, I do not want to think of this in terms of that kind of contrast. One of the things I want to affirm is that a non-believer can accept that a religiously-informed attempt to understand the significance of our lives does not need to be regarded as something that prevents us making a step forward in that ambition. Someone who has no or little instinct for religiosity – like me – need no longer think, as the modern secularisation theorist still must, that he or she is, at bottom, an enemy of religion.

On the other hand, I am suggesting that someone today who is still interested in forming, say, a correct conception of spiritual advance, is going to have to do so without the old idea that what makes a life worth living is its alignment with a logos that precedes us and to which our thinking is answerable. We have to accept that the kinds of things that people say give their life meaning are not “discoveries about the moral universe” but belong to an effort to create a life worth living. I am, I hope, aware of the extent to which we have failed to achieve that.

However, given that we are no longer to be “cognitivists” about this, can we, today, give an account that would really allow us to make sense of this as a failure? To do so would seem to presupposes a standard against which to compare our life, a standard which could be regarded as capturing what is genuinely proper for human existence: an idea of the good life. In the first part of this discussion we saw that David Wiggins identifies one conspicuously objective conception of what is proper to the good life as no longer available to most of us: no longer available ‘unless we are Marxists’. He means, of course, unless we think of ourselves as committed Marxists. ‘Unless we are Marxists, we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit.’ The worry is, however, that unless we are Marxists – or at least unless we can frame an objective non-religious conception of what is proper to the good life – we have no basis on which to assess whether we are moving towards or away from the attainment of the good life. Any continued interest in emancipation and progress would be strictly nonsensical. Wiggins claims that our increased resistance to historico-messianic narratives does not imply that we have lost interest in ‘emancipation or progress themselves’. But can we retain that interest – and not be Marxist? We probably can’t.

This is not to invite yet another Marxist “revival”. Rather it is to acknowledge that we belong to societies with a history whose self-understanding cannot be radically dissociated from a Marxist heritage. As Derrida notes, ‘whether they wish it or know it or not, all men and women, all over the earth, are today to a certain extent the heirs of Marx and Marxism.’ There is a complication to every discourse that would say that our interest in emancipation or progress could be radically non-Marxist or can simply do without Marx. Especially if we think we are not Marxist. Here is Derrida again:

A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs.

Unless we are going to be naively unwitting Marxists, we had better attend to this inheritance. We need to attend to the spectres of Marx and Marxism. Especially today, when it is so often announced that Marxism is dead.I will come back to this, but first we need to acknowledge that Wiggins’ political naivety is coupled with a historical insight. It is, I think, plainly true that ‘we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit.’ It is as one of the last great attempts to elaborate a grand historico-messianic narrative of emancipation and progress of this cognitivist kind that Marxism has its place in Wiggins’ account. If I was a Marxist, or a Marxist through and through, I would have an understanding of the significance of our lives which showed our present condition as alienated and which pointed towards a historical movement of de-alienation – a historical movement in which it will all come right in the end, if we can only get our collective act together and build that revolution.

Would I be taking unjustified advantage of the “we” if I were to say we don’t believe that, we can’t fall back on a philosophy of the history of the alienation and de-alienation of man like that? I don’t think so. In our time, we need to shift decisively from thinking in (classical messianic) terms of a world with a coming end, to (but holding on to something of that messianism) making sense of the coming of a world without end. I mean the crucial questions for us today are about creating the conditions for long-term sustainability – not finality or eschatology.

But even if that is the long term ambition – the realisation of a sustainable society, one that can keep going and will not crash around our ears – still sustainability is not the goal at any price: we are aiming at realising conditions in which people (one can hope more and more people) can lead lives that are worth living. And my question is whether, if we are not Marxists, we can even make good sense of the idea that not every way of living a life will be a life worth living. I believe we can.

To explain why, I want to return once more to Wiggins’ discussion of the meaning of life, and to an example he gives of a contrast between two lives. It is a discussion in which he invites you as a reader to acknowledge that only one of these people is actually living a worthwhile life. For our purposes, the significant point is that this is something you are able to do (that is to say, you as someone who belongs to a particular society with a continuing history) without appealing to or claiming to possess a fundamental “truth of man” which devolves into a conception of a final “end of man”  His example is this:

There is a difference, which we as participants insist upon, between the life of a man who contributes something to society with a continuing history and a life lived on a plan of a southern pig-breeder who (in the economics textbooks, if not in real life) buys more land to grow more corn to feed more hogs, to buy more land to grow more corn to feed more hogs… The practical concerns of this man are regressive and circular. And we are keenly interested, on the inner view, in the difference between these concerns and non-circular practical reasoning or life plans.

The latter (a life lived on the basis of non-circular life plans), Wiggins suggests, “fans out into a whole arborescence of concerns”. This kind of image is important to us in considering our own lives and the lives of those with whom we live. If we live in a society in which, by our lights, such a life is increasingly unavailable to most of us, then we will have failed to create conditions in which we can think we are living a worthwhile life – and hence singularly failed to create the conditions of actually living such a life.

Within the limits in which any such judgement is possible, the lives that are most worth living will belong to those who do most, here and now, to “insist upon [this difference]”, those who keep it alive. That is to say, it will belong to those participants for whom the idea of finally having done with it is experienced most intensely or most keenly as something to resist.

What are we to resist, then? First and foremost: the rule of every doxa of messianic arrival. For example, the rule of any religious orthodoxy. The virtues of secularity, the virtues of a public space emancipated from domination by religious authority, do not fall with the collapse of the secularisation thesis. On the other hand, I also want to resist that secular variation which claims with equal evangelical fervour to possess the truth of man and which thus promises that we can learn, finally, how to live in a proper end of man. I mean Marxism.

In our time we certainly need to preserve – and preserve without naivety from Marxism – something of the classic interest in emancipation and progress. However, this inheritance can no longer be classical through and through. In particular it will have to do without the cognitivist idea of a final end of man, and everything associated with it. And that is a considerable qualification. As Derrida acknowledged in his summary of what he does not want to inherit from Marxism, what must be left behind is (his words): ‘almost everything.’

In Europe and America today, thinking on political questions is still surprisingly freighted by the spectre of extreme-left-wing politics. Whenever there is a call for the politicisation or re-politicisation of issues and questions, wherever, by our lights, there needs to be concerted political action, governmental or not, national or not, there is a sense of continuity (whether welcomed or opposed) with the radical political traditions of the past. And in virtue of its historic centrality to the struggles for equality this is an experience run through with a certain identitarian pathos for those who situate themselves on the left in politics. Those struggles really have changed the lives of many for the better and the landscape of thinking for all. The fight for women’s rights, for example, has fundamentally and I would think irreversibly challenged the classical conception in which the proper sphere of activity and devotion for women was almost exclusively domestic. Such struggles are clearly not over, and are sustained today, at least in part, by the memory of classic forms and formations of political agency (the party, the strike, the organisation of militant activists).

And yet it is far less clear (though I confess I feel at the limits of my already limited competence in pronouncing on this) whether the continuation of such struggles for emancipation and progress requires a repoliticisation of society, a “return of the political”, in the Marxist and neo-Marxist tradition. Indeed, in view of the historical legacy of Marxism, and in particularly the terrifying nightmare of Soviet Marxism, certain political struggles today might also take politically unusual or unexpected forms with respect to a tendency internal to that tradition. For example, they may include efforts to forge a limit to the extension of the political, not only in private life, but also in society more generally. There is a general right one might call for not to be monitored, and not to have informers, whether technological or human, everywhere. As Derrida noted in “The History of the Lie” with an obvious allusion to Hannah Arendt, the idea here concerns ‘the limits of the political’. What is called for is a right to resistance to the order of the political, resisting the limitless extension of political reason to the whole of life.

I put this emphasis on a right to limit the extension of the region of the political in sympathy with a central claim in Geoffrey Hawthorn’s early work on the history of Enlightenment social theory up to and including Marxism; the claim that such theories have been premised on what has turned out to have been the radically misguided idea that it is through the politicisation of every problem that we can make the kinds of changes to society that will forge a passage towards an ideally just social and individual condition. On this conception the task of politics will be to give the last word concerning the realisation of a good life. Today we understand better than before that we need to resist social power being dominated by this kind of classical political desire. Or again, the power of any political regime should always be limited since there just is, as Levinas said, no ‘regime without evil’. We know now that any political regime that thinks it canworst.

This is very difficult for us to come to terms with because we are strongly inclined to interpret resistance to the kind of economic neo-liberalism that dominates today – resistance, that is, to the kind of regime that seeks the limitless extension of economic reason to the whole of life – as the expression of a desire to see a return or revival as a force in power of what one might call the politicalforce that can bring changes in society – which we do not believe can be fulfilled by economic neo-liberalism. As Klein puts it, there is an encouraging sense that the election of Obama expresses ‘a longing in people for something more than shopping’. But this does not mean that there is a longing in people for a revival of the idea of mass active political participation in the classical sense either. For example, the idea that the election of Obama has shown there is a taste for the idea of participating in an active way in an ‘independent social movement’ which ‘build[s] the numbers and the organizational power to make muscular demands of their elites’ is not obviously right at all. If fingers are in the air, one could equally well argue that the election of Obama – electoral approval of his taking the highest political office in America – shows that there remains a stubborn hope among the electorate there that their electorally approved political elites will attempt to bring about, by the power they wield or by the force at their disposal, the changes they say they want to make, or the strengthening of fragile achievements already won, and that the political elite will do so in a way that enables the electorate to avoid having to get so personally involved themselves. neo-liberalism of Marxism. For example, sticking her finger in the air, writer Naomi Klein suggests that the election of Barack Obama ‘proved decisively’, among other things, ‘that many, many people’ very much ‘want to be part of a political project larger than themselves’. What is right here is that the resistance to economic neo-liberalism has expectations regarding the proper disposal of power – the proper deployment of

The ‘political project’ is already, quite obviously, ‘larger than themselves’ even when it does not call on them to become more publicly demonstrative. Some think that this is more or less the last word on participation: political activism has been outsourced. That is not a view I would like to endorse. Becoming more publicly demonstrative oneself may well be what is necessary if or when political elites do not deliver change you believe in or, when you are seized with an interest or concern off the current political agenda and attempt to politicise it. But this is not Klein’s view, and she admits that her conception is built on a significant ‘nostalgia’. My worry is that it is also built on a profound amnesia. The political project is not over. But like the religious neo-liberalism that preceded it and the economic neo-liberalism that has succeeded it, the effective power of political neo-liberalism should be limited.

Copyright © 2010 Simon Glendinning

Jackson Pollock’s paintings are really plans for imaginary cities.

I know that this statement hardly makes any sense, and, to be honest, I was as much surprised by it when I first read it as any reader would be. Still, I have to admit that it carries an eerie truth that one cannot shake off very easily – especially since the conditions of how I came across that statement may have reinforced the emotional charge encapsulated in it.

I was, in fact, taking a long, slow evening walk in the back streets of my neighbourhood, an activity which I used to practice regularly when I was younger. Now, I do it less often, since somehow, as life goes by, a regular activity becomes a burden. My walk took me from the Sioufi garden, up the hill to the region behind the Saint-Cœurs school, then from there to the Lazarus school, which I circled to get to Sassine Square, passing over the old Greek Orthodox cemetery of Mar Mitr. I once read somewhere that the cemetery and the church next to it were built on the site of the remains of an old Phoenician temple, and, almost dizzied by the strong scent of the cypress trees planted there, looking everywhere except ahead of me, I stumbled on an old black suitcase lying on the side of the road. In normal circumstances, I would have left the suitcase there and walked away, but I saw what looked like a small notebook sticking out of the case, and my curiosity led me to pick it up.

There is a reason, of course, for my long and boring digression – the small black notebook is precisely where I found the statement about Jackson Pollock’s paintings. The notebook was practically filled from cover to cover with writings, notes and drawings made by someone who was definitely an architect, judging by the nature of the texts and drawings, which all revolved around the city – Beirut, to be exact – or, more accurately, around the physical experiences of the writer in that city. I started flipping through the pages with anticipation and a sense of insecurity, because I thought that its owner would be waiting for me around the next corner to reclaim his property. I couldn’t make a lot of sense of what was written, since it was dark and all I had for light was a dim, yellowish street lamp that hardly illuminated anything at all. However, I could tell from the state of the texts and images that the writer had been in a state of urgency, especially towards the end. When I got home and finally examined the notebook closely, my original feeling was confirmed: The texts and drawings of the first few pages are deliberate and ordered – almost rehearsed – but then, further towards the end, this sense of deliberation subsides, and we are left with an almost haphazard collection of unrelated thoughts and drawings. Also, and in addition to the fact that the author was obviously in a hurry towards the end, the last few pages were extremely dense, as if no corner on the paper, no matter how small, had been intended to be left white. In fact, what started out as writing was ultimately transformed into unfathomable graffiti, which was made even more unintelligible by the fact that the drawings were entwined into what was written, to the point that both had become indistinguishable.

That said, after careful examination, it became very clear that there was no unity in the notebook. Of course, notebooks are not meant to have unified contents, but that’s not what I mean: it seemed as if the notebook was made of fragments, and, despite the coherence of these fragments, their condition made it very difficult for this coherence to come through. An idea would start on page 6, for instance, and then would be continued on page 19, while the pages 6 to 19 were permeated with other ideas that would start there and end a few pages later. Each of these fragments, I thought, produced its own meaning, while the general meaning of the whole thing would only unfold itself in relation not to the writer (as in, say, a diary), but to the city he was living in, experiencing with all his force. The notebook was a metaphor for Beirut.

I write “was” because there was something extremely ominous about the form of the notebook, a feeling that was later supported by the content of the ‘work’. It seemed as if the architect, the author, knew that his life would end, or let’s say would be radically changed, when the last white spot on the last page was filled with his ideas. That would probably explain why the last few pages were filled up almost to the point of explosion – or, if I wanted to use the metaphor of an old city within its walls, I would say that the inhabitants of such a city were certain that only void and death lay beyond their city walls, so their buildings became denser the farther one went from the centre to the periphery of the city. Didn’t sailors in ancient times believe that their ships would fall off the horizon if they ventured into the open sea? The architect had been an urban sailor from these ancient times.

My suspicions were, as I mentioned above, confirmed by some of the scattered ideas that I read in the notebook. Beirut was his whole universe, and there was no indication whatsoever of anything that might have existed beyond it. Here is, for instance, one of those fragments I spoke of (I made the effort to re-arrange it, so that it regains its unity, and becomes easier to read):

These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. These worlds are not extraordinary worlds, and this is not science fiction. I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car-horns – who would have thought that Heaven could lie underneath? All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road, and the angels in the cemetery below me fly so low. The people here all seem to have gone to bed, even though it hasn’t even passed 8pm. Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news…

Realizing that I had stood at the exact point which the writer was describing felt very strange, but that was not what preoccupied me at that point. I was thinking about what I had read, and I thought that it made a lot of sense, especially if one compares this to another, more famous city, say Paris. Over there, unity is achieved almost effortlessly, and the walker is not faced with the obscure feeling of crossing unseen boundaries at each turn, around every corner. And, he or she is not continually offered glimpses of other times and places while walking around. After reading that, the idea of Beirut being formed by heavily contrasting fragments – each fragment producing its own meaning – seemed so natural and true. Furthermore, every fragment was living in a time of its own, in a temporality that was entirely different from the one right next to it (which made the reference to “gateways to other worlds” so accurate). If one were to look at these from the outside, these fragments would make the city they belonged to completely unfathomable, even chaotic, and I started to believe, like the architect/writer believed, that the only way of producing sense and meaning, the only way that these fragments could be united, was through direct experience, through the movement of our bodies in and out of every fragment.

To be continued…

Copyright © Tony Chakar, 2003

Reprinted with kind permission of Tony Chakar. Tony Chakar is an architect based in Beirut, and will be speaking at the Liverpool Biennial on June 2nd 2010.

Newsletter 903 : April 2010 : At Large in Lebanon

Wake up everybody! Goethe’s on the loose in Lebanon and has already been hotfooting it north and south with various travelling companions, one of whom being the glorious Rami Zurayk whose From ` Akkar to ` Amel (co-authored with Sami Abdul Rahman, with photography by Tanya Traboulsi) is a joy and a wonder to behold. Rumours of a walk from Beirut to London are without foundation. As long as we have an act of God on our side, we’re staying here until forced to fly away like angels.

In post-war Britain academic philosophers did not talk about the meaning of life. Analytic philosophy dominated British philosophy, and this kind of philosophy was dominated in turn by philosophy of language and by epistemology. Moral philosophy, along with aesthetics, mostly hid in a corner.

But in 1976 a distinguished analytic philosopher, David Wiggins, delivered a paper called “Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life”:

Even now, in an age not given much to mysticism, there are people who ask “What is the meaning of life?” Not a few of them make the simple “un-philosophical” assumption that there is something to be known here. (One might say they are “cognitivists” with regard to this sort of question.) And most of these same people make the equally unguarded assumption that the whole issue of life’s meaning presupposes some positive answer to the question whether it can be plainly and straightforwardly true that this or that thing or activity or pursuit is good, or has value, or is worth something. Finally, something even harder, they suppose that questions like that of life’s meaning must be among the central questions of moral philosophy.

The question of life’s having a meaning and the question of truth are not at the centre of moral philosophy as we now have it.

Not at the centre of moral philosophy – and nowhere near the centre of philosophy in general. Not in 1976. Not in Britain. And while it is true that in Continental Europe philosophy was being done in ways that were at least more congenial to raising the question, still, there too, generally speaking, such ambitious efforts were rare.

They are still rare, but not so rare today and I know of a number of professional philosophers who are grateful that they can now write about the deepest questions of human life without embarrassment. Why has this happened at this time? Why has it become possible to discuss this kind of theme again?

Let us begin by asking why it might be that discussion about the meaning of life went off the radar in philosophy during the twentieth century – and also off the radar beyond academia too, off the radar in the West during the last hundred years or so.

At the risk of gross simplification, I want to suggest that the background to this state of affairs can be framed in terms of the acceptance by European intellectuals of what has been called “the secularisation thesis”. This thesis was developed by different thinkers in different ways, but social theorists like Weber, Durkheim and, in his own fashion, Marx, led the way in thinking we could describe the historical movement of modernity in Europe in terms of a transition from a society dominated by magic, myth, superstition and religion, into one with a cognitively superior outlook in which these things are disclosed as illusions and delusions which we shed in the name of reason, criticism and science.

This story belonged with an even more long-run picture: one which conceived the movement of the whole history of the world in terms of a transition from an origin that was primitive, barbarian, savage – and basically animal – moving slowly and in stages through developments in human society towards a modern, rational and scientific end. There is here the idea of History as Progress towards an ideal End of Man and towards an ideally civilised form of social life. The secularisation thesis dovetails with that wider discourse of modernity: it is the idea that the movement into a rational and scientific age is one which is likely to see primitive and traditional conceptions not only of the world but also of the significance of our lives increasingly give way to rational and scientific ones. The old illusions will, in all likelihood, wither away, and in the future, soon, we will have finally emancipated ourselves from myth, superstition and religion. We will have finally learned how to live.

The secularisation thesis became increasingly matter of course for European intellectuals in the late 19th and 20th centuries. So when people were writing at that time – in philosophy, in history, in politics and in sociology – there was this unquestioned background that, while there were still some foolish believers around, the proper methods were finally making their way; and the methods with a future were rational and scientific, and would have nothing to do with religion at all.

Before I explore this thesis – a thesis which concerns nothing less than the becoming-secular of the world – we should pause to acknowledge that for many people the claimed changeover in our thinking and believing that the secularisation thesis presents was a cause for considerable anxiety. For many, though they may have kept quiet about it, the sense of loss of a religiously articulated understanding of the significance of our lives was not the loss of an illusion or delusion at all, but rather the loss of a way, perhaps finally the only intelligible way, through which we could make sense of the idea that there is something to be known in this most important of domains. What seemed to be disappearing was the most profound, rich and satisfying (“cognitivist”) discourse through which we might hope to come to know what is to be known about the meaning of life. And when religion falls away or is eclipsed then all you are left with is an utterly mundane life in which it is totally unclear why, ultimately, we should think that there is anything more to life than shopping.

Of course, many of the proponents of the secularisation thesis thought there was a promised land ahead too; an end of history to come which would be some kind of ultimate realisation of human flourishing without illusion. So they wouldn’t have thought at all that the disappearance of religion was leading towards a life without the means to grasp the meaning of life. But for many people the apparent eclipse of religion was a profoundly worrying event for Western humanity; they felt that secularisation would leave us with a life deprived and devoid of meaning: a nihilistic post-modern condition, where “anything goes”.

Today, however, something else is swimming into view. Today, the question is not whether there is anything left to value in an increasingly secular world, but whether we should regard the secularisation thesis, independently of any optimistic conception of an end to come it may harbour for some, as in any sense worth giving credence to any more.

I mean: religion, religiosity, a sense of spirituality, has simply not gone away.

Nietzsche, looking at his fellow Europeans in the late nineteenth century, found in the self-professed atheism he increasingly saw around him nothing but a retreat from the idea of God as the “father” or the “judge”. That apart, the religious instinct seemed to him still vigorously alive and well. And this was in Europe, not in parts of the world where religion in various forms was more obviously still thriving and not withering.

I do not think that there have been any fundamental changes since Nietzsche was observing Europeans. It is becoming evident that in reality there has been little or no weakening in religiosity, even if there is a weakening of a certain difficult idea of God. The weakening of that difficult idea is leading, no doubt, to some weakening of ties to those ecclesiastical authorities which carry it. And as a result we see a decline in religious practices of certain kinds (church going, for example). But this is a decline in certain religious practices without a parallel decline in religiosity.

Europe, the supposed vanguard of world secularisation, is, we should now accept, simply not the exception in the world, not the vanguard of secular reason surrounded by great swathes of humanity still going on in its infantile ways as if nothing has happened. No, Europe, like everywhere else, has remained solidly religiously committed. Indeed, even in traditional terms the picture is not the one we might have been led to believe: self-identifying as a religious believer of some kind is still incredibly high among Europeans. In Britain in 2002, for example, over 70% of those responding to the census declared they were Christians – with about 45% or so still saying they believe in the more difficult idea of God too.

Instead of increasing atheism, we should perhaps talk instead of changes to patterns of religiosity in Europe. Rather than being part of a congregation or seeing oneself as being bound to a given ecclesiastical authority, we now have dominant  models of the pilgrim, who is on a personal religious search, and the convert who rather late in life comes to see their life in religious terms or in some kind of a spiritual light. What one “finds” along the way may or may not be construed a matter of finding God. Nevertheless, for most Europeans or those whose life is saturated with the European heritage, it is most likely that one finds oneself to be a Christian of sorts.

For me, then, the secularisation thesis has simply been blown away – and blown away both by the facts about continuing religiosity and by its own utterly dismal understanding of what religiosity actually is (namely, as akin to a belief in the existence of fairies). People today have turned around to see that this religion thing which was meant to be going away has not gone away at all, and it is not, in any case, what we thought it was.

On the other hand, there has been a change. It is a change that the secularisation thesis was an attempt to come to terms with and to which it itself belonged; a movement or mutation within the Christian world in Europe that it was itself within.

What we need now is a new way of thinking about the change that has taken place in Europe during the last two or three hundred years. Three hundred years ago God and God’s plan for man was at the centre of the self-understanding usual among Europeans; at the centre of the European understanding of the world and the significance of our lives. We now live in a time when that is no longer true. The secularisation thesis was one way of trying to grasp that change. But it was inadequate. I think David Wiggins began a helpful kind of re-writing of that inadequate idea in his essay on the meaning of life when, in the heat of the Cold War, and writing now of our time as a time after Darwin, he said this:

Unless we are Marxists, we are more resistant [today] than the eighteenth- or nineteenth-centuries knew how to be [to] attempts to locate the meaning of human life or human history in mystical or metaphysical conceptions – in the emancipation of mankind, or progress, or the onward advance of Absolute Spirit. It is not that we have lost interest in emancipation or progress themselves. But whether temporarily or permanently, we have more or less abandoned the idea that the importance of emancipation or progress (or a correct conception of spiritual advance) is that these are marks by which our minute speck in the universe can distinguish itself as the spiritual focus of the cosmos.

That’s a big ‘shift’, as he says. But the crucial point, it seems to me, is Wiggins’ insistence that we should not interpret this shift as a loss of interest in emancipation or progress – or indeed of spiritual advance. In short, whatever changes we are looking at in Europe in the last three hundred years, the mistake is to interpret these changes either along the lines of post-modern nihilism or along the lines of the classic secularisation thesis. For my own part, what I would propose is that we conceive the becoming-secular of Europe not as a movement of the becoming-atheist of humanity (a movement towards our becoming, one and all, rational humanists) but as a moment within the long run event of the becoming-Christian of the world: it is a mutation within that movement, an alteration within an event that we can call the Christianization of the world.

On this view one has to see the movement of becoming-secular of the world not as a movement away from Christianity but a movement within the unfolding history of the centuries of Christianity in the West. Secular norms of judgement and reasoning did not fall from the sky as some kind of ready-made alternative to a Christian world view – nor did they arrive from outside the West as an import of sorts. They grew from a Western cultural tree, which is Christian.

The missionary ambitions and messianic vision held within the outlook of the secularisation thesis are equally Christian. The picture of the long run of history that I introduced at the beginning – the discourse of modernity that tells of a transition from a primitive distant past, through ages which were given to magic, myths, superstition, and religion, breaking finally into an age which is not – that story runs profoundly parallel to the idea of providential history that belongs squarely within the Christian tradition. All the terrible things that we see going on in the world today and everyday – for the Christian we are to understand that there is compensation for all this, compensation for past and present suffering, in the idea that there is a redemptive end to come, that this is all part of God’s plan for man, and that there will be some final end of things in which believers find their just reward. If we can only spread this good news we can all learn, finally, how to live. That Christian religious idea of providence can be translated very rapidly into the sort of conception of history in which “modern” Europeans belong to an advance guard in the emancipation of the rational subject or the emancipation of the working subject, a revolutionary movement that will lead towards some triumphantly final end of history where all the terrible things that have happened will have worked themselves out. These are secularisations of Christian, distinctively Christian conceptions of providence.

So I think one of the most important points we need to learn today is quite how fundamentally Christian is this secular world in general – and its secularisation thesis in particular.

Indeed, Christianity carries within itself the decisive conceptual resources for the idea of a distribution between the secular and the sacred that we find everywhere in the West today. In the Bible we read, for example, Jesus saying “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark, 12:17). That idea of the possibility of some form of “separation of Church and State” – what one might also call the death of God in the world – is already inside the Christian understanding of the world and the significance of our lives.

We should not understand the secularity of Western society that we see today as a kind of external imposition onto a Christian conception which is basically alien to it. Again, the deep flaw in the secularization thesis is to conceive the movement of recent history – a movement in which, it is quite true, Christian ecclesiastical power has been waning – as a break from a religious and especially Christian epoch. On the contrary, it belongs to the movement of the Christian world…in deconstruction.

Copyright © 2010 Simon Glendinning

This is an edited transcript of some of Simon Glendinning’s contribution to a Forum for European Philosophy Dialogue with Edward Skidelsky on “Modernity and the Meaning of Life” held at the LSE on 18th January 2010. A more formal presentation of some of Glendinning’s claims can be found in his essay “Japheth’s World: The Rise of Secularism and the Revival of Religion Today” in The European Legacy, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp 409-426, 2009.

Newsletter 902 : February 2010 : Spring Awakening: Equinox on the Heath

Dear Walkers,

I am delighted to be able to let you know that the next physical communion of Goethe’s Elective Affinities Walking Group has been arranged for Sunday 21st March 2010 - and we’ll be meeting in Hampstead, don’t-you-know. If you’ve forgotten what GEAWG feels like, look at this:

We will meet, friends and strangers, at Burgh House at 2pm, to be led, via a poetic phenomenology, into the pagan prehistory of Hampstead Heath.

It’ll be like Time Team, only with a pay-off!

If you would like to join us please email shahidha.bari@htlblog.com for pre-walk reading matter.

Our PAY-OFF, walkers, comes in the form of the delectable Anglo-Argentine artist Eloise Fornieles who will perform for us our rite of Spring atop the Heath. She’ll be like Heathcliff, only swarthier.

I think we’ll walk past Keats House and also the Magdala pub, site of the crime passionel which led Ruth Ellis to assert “it’s obvious that when I pulled the trigger I intended to kill him” - thus securing her neck in Pierrepoint’s noose. We’ll check out the bullet-holes in the wall, Eloise will perform for us on the Heath, and then we’ll head to Dick Turpin’s hidey-hole The Spaniards Inn for a frenzy. Sound good? Children and animals welcome.

So you’ll need decent shoes and you’ll want to bring plenty of water and some sustenance (look after yourselves, for the love of Goethe). Bring some money in case you want to go into Keats House or have a port and lemon in the Magdala, or a more Turpin-esque beverage at the Inn. Oh, and be prepared to usher in the Spring.

It sounds so good I’m going to wait at Burgh House NOW in case I miss it. Meet me at 2pm Sunday 21st March 2010. And don’t forget: IT’S FREE!

Ever,

JWvG

NEWSFLASH

Goethe’s Elective Affinities Walking Group will be meeting again this year at How the Light Gets In, Hay-on-Wye. Keep an eye on their site for more details!

Press coverage of last year’s festival

How to Live ventured into the heart of darkness this week: to Bridgend. I had been called upon to give an account of myself to Colwinston Philosophy Society, which meets monthly at The Sycamore pub in that sleepy village. So I asked Nemonie to speak on my behalf, whilst I acquainted myself with the local talent in Cody’s and The Roof in Bridgend itself. “Oggy Oggy Oggy,” and, as that tap-dancing Swansea-lass C to the Z von J would no doubt chant, “Oi Oi Oi.”

Nemonie tells me that a wide-ranging discussion eventually turned to Mr T. Blair and Sir J. Chilcot, and all concerned agreed that Socrates’ unsurpassed if incomplete and humble account of the nature of knowledge, viz.

Knowledge = Justified True Belief + a Logos or Rationale of said belief

seems to have passed straight through the bowels of contemporary politics. Let the fool say what he likes in his heart, if his belief is to be carried politically in the form of a decision, let us have good reasons.

It was with a heavy heart, then, that we raised our greasy placard outside Queen Elizabeth II Conference Hall this Friday, with fellow protesters whose number is now so very diminished, and is predominated by the Zarathustra-like, almost medievally mad - including myself. Yet Saturday 30th January was witness to the second Progressive London Conference led by Ken Livingstone, and here our hearts lifted in appreciation of Ken’s persistence in the cause of justice and equality. In attendance was a rather curious Daily Mail journalist - an odd addition to an environment in which people were seeking to advance a political thinking to hold open a future for new and exciting ways of living. But, lo, said journalist had been sent to investigate the claim made by the quite malignant Andrew Gilligan that a participating speaker was in fact a supporter of terrorism. As with Gilligan’s various campaigns against Livingstone’s mayoral administration, which have been shown to be unfounded according to several independent, and independently verified inquiries, this slur was publicly refuted with reference to the logos or rationale that serves justified true belief. Mehdi Hasan, senior politics editor at the New Statesman enjoined us to be brave: to have courage in a form of thinking that proceeds according to what serves justice and equality, and thereby seeks always to refute the thinking that serves only the few. Then we will be able to say, with Socrates: “I have no regrets about defending myself as I did; I should far rather present such a defence and die, than live by defending myself in that other fashion.” Will TB be able to say as much?

As CZJ might put it, being Welsh, “willy fuck.”

Such is the fatal circuit of what Michel Foucault calls the Christian hermeneutics of desire opposed to the pagan aesthetics of existence. In a seminar at New York University in 1980, Foucault is reported to have said that the difference between late antiquity and early Christianity might be reduced to the following questions: the patrician pagan asks, “Given that I am who I am, who can I fuck?” The Christian asks, “Given that I can fuck no one, who am I?” Foucault’s insight is profound, but let me state categorically and without a trace of irony that, as a committed atheist, I side with the deep hermeneutics of Christian subjectivity against the superficial pagan aesthetics of existence. The question of the being of being human - who am I? - that begins with Paul and is profoundly deepened by Augustine arises in the sight of God. The problem is how that question survives God’s death. This is Rousseau’s question in his Confessions, it is Nietzsche’s question in Ecce Homo, and it is Heidegger’s question in Being and Time. In my less humble moments, I think of it as my question as well. Whether or not he exists, we are slaves to God.

Copyright © 2009 Simon Critchley

In September 2008, Simon Critchley inaugurated the How to Live project with a secular sermon on the theme of how to live. The above is an exclusive extract from a new project. In 2010 Simon will be touring the UK (with Shahidha and Nemonie) in the new How to Live Ambulance. An appointment register for the Open Heart Surgery will be available soon.

Simon Critchley is chair of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. He is currently at work on two new projects: one on the faith of the faithless, and one on being inauthentic.

On November 11th, in commemoration of the end of World War I and of those who have died in combat, many British and Commonwealth citizens will observe a minute of silence. This remembrance is accompanied by a visual prop of plastic poppies pinned to people’s chests for the weeks prior to the moment of silence at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month.

As a Canadian, thinking about the war is culturally inseparable from the poppy. In addition to using blunt scissors to cut red construction paper shapes, there is a poem that Canadian students are all obligated to recite:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

My memories remain strong of our red paper flowers hanging from the walls and how with rousing vigor we recited John McCrae’s heavy rhymed lines

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

The poem has a strange mix of pastoral memorializing of the dead and the reinvigorating call to continue the fight. Of course, it is fair to say that whatever the poem was meant to convey, it was lost on all of us in grade school. We learned simply to mouth the words of Vimy Ridge and to know that we, as Canadians, had done something really important to help win the war in Europe. Despite the poem’s own mixture of remembrance and war-making, the poppy endures for us as part of our own mythology as a nation of peacekeepers.

In my newly adopted home of the United Kingdom, poetry also has a closely knit relationship to the remembrance of war, particularly the Great War. In his introduction to an anthology of war poetry, the poet Andrew Motion notes that the work of poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg are ‘dripped into the bloodstream’ of the nation each year and ushered in ‘as state furniture’ each November. On a day of remembering the sacrifice of soldiers, the diverse poetry and experiences of these figures are nearly in dissonance with the purported purpose of commemorating the dead. Their work is seen, for the most part, as protest poetry and poetry that embodied the experience of warfare - most particularly the futility, madness and pity of war. Although there was a much more voluminous body of poetry produced by civilians (particularly women) alongside the pro-war poetry from soldiers and non-combatants, these particular poets’ works have an enormous resonance for the British public and have come to be synonymous with the act of memorializing World War I.

These poets have helped establish the understanding of the war as a tragedy and an outrage; the image of lion-like soldiers led by inept donkey Generals. Dan Todman has lamented the way that these writers’ poems are taught as history, particularly through their appearance on school history syllabi. Some historians such as Gary Sheffield have asked that the British people shrug off the mentality of the war as futile and instead embrace the war as a ‘forgotten victory’. These ideas are easily reconcilable, seemingly. We solemnize the contribution of soldiers, meanwhile looking to these individual poets as heroes with conscience. Their voices were strong enough and apparently beautiful enough to oppose the war and leave us with a sense of the tragedy of the war, alongside the possibility of understanding the conflict as necessary - as a war Britain wasn’t destined to win, but won as a result of the great sacrifice offered by its boys. Both opinions can be held at the same time within the mythology of the war. In a bizarre twist, we can now read that the poet Simon Armitage will be visiting Helmand province to find the new war poets. Anthologies of war poetry from American and British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are already printed. The poetry of war and the experience of soldier-poets are easily appropriated into the narrative of continued wars without pronouncing too explicitly the outrage with aggression and war.

This incorporation is made easier by a vast and nearly deafening silence in this country on the subject of Britain’s own colonial legacy. This history ranged from India to Ireland (wherein differing revolts and uprisings were savagely quashed), to the Commonwealth (protests in Australia, Quebec and South Africa) and to the Middle East, which was carved up, to be shared with France, in the wake of the war. What remains in the silence are crimes outside the ear and eye of European modernism, such as the American invasion and 19 year-occupation of Haiti beginning in 1915. When we commemorate our soldiers, we are told to remember their sacrifices, but we so rarely have the honesty to examine where our soldiers also acted as aggressors. To remember how we remain the aggressors.

Institutional and national commemoration helps generate the illusion of a collective memory. There is no such thing. Particular communities remember, and they remember in their different ways and towards their different ends. Moreover, these diverse and multiple acts of remembrance are not simply idle and unattached events. They are themselves intertwined in historical narratives that say as much about the present as they do about the past.

Certainly the greatest atrocities of World War I were perpetrated by the Ottomon Empire against the Armenians. Conservative estimates claim over a million Armenians were killed. Turkey does not acknowledge these figures and opposes them being described as genocide. Despite Britain’s own discussion of these atrocities in the past, and because of the modern geo-political importance of Turkey to British, American and Israeli interests, the leaders of these nations have colluded to refrain from censuring Turkey for their denial of the atrocities in Armenia and from employing the discourse of genocide in relation to Ottomon aggression during World War I. In a strange twist, Israel is reconsidering their position in light of Turkey’s criticism of Israel’s conduct in their assault on Gaza last year.

When we note these twisting attitudes and the selective memorializing of the past, we start to witness the way the memory of the war is simplified into symbols that fail to capture the struggle involved in remembering. Within the evocation of these symbols, contradictions are easily resolved. The poems of protesting soldiers are easily reified into the gross mystification of historical and political narratives that incorporate a conscious moral opposition to war alongside a narrative of the necessity and ultimate justness of British military conduct. This means the war poets provide an odd, though easily incorporated and acceptable counter-narrative to the memorializing of the war. This is not dissimilar to contemporary discussion of the enormous protests against the war in Iraq, in particular, as a sign of successful democracy, which nonetheless fails to deal with a word of what the protesters demand.

The pitied poetry of protest did not begin to address Britain’s wars, its occupation of nations or the vocal and sometimes militarized opposition to that occupation. Far from being moments to reflect on in the past, these wars of colonialism, particularly in the Middle East, continue - be they vestiges from Britain’s heyday or from the handing over of the reins of global dominance to America after World War II.

Much of the modern interest with World War I protest poetry emerged out of increased attention to student and soldier protest against the Vietnam war. Writing 25 years after the publication of his seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell explained that his hope was to persuade his readers that “even Gooks had feelings, that even they hated to die, and like us called for help or God or Mother when their agony became unbearable.” Ironically invoking racist language commonly used to refer to the Vietnamese, Fussell reveals his aspiration that the imaginative empathy he saw at work in some of the poetry of World War I might also aid readers to appreciate the inherent humanity of the Vietnamese (the enemy: in his study, the Germans; in his era, the Gooks).

Historicizing Fussell’s book and indeed taking his word for it, he hoped to parallel the suffering of British soldiers in France to the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam. Comparisons focusing on the suffering of soldiers flatten out how the American presence in Vietnam was not the result of chance or folly, but instead a result of planned response to anti-colonial struggle. However brutal the war seemed to the civilians unceremoniously drafted and the 58,000 American casualties that resulted from the conflict, focus on their suffering obfuscates the ecological and humanitarian tragedy that led to an estimated 3 - 4million Vietnamese deaths. (This kind of oversight is typical of Fussell, although rarely discussed. His sympathy for the misery of soldiers, and lack of consideration of Asian lives led him, elsewhere, into vociferous defence of the American nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Anglo-American imperialism continues. What we remember and the way that we remember the past has important and immediate consequences on how we understand our present.

Many of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam understood the horrors they participated in and chose plain speech, not poetry, as the means to convey it. Speaking at the 1971 ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings, Scott Camile laid plain some of the realities of warfare in Vietnam:

SCOTT CAMILE: The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC [Viet-Cong], VC had weapons and civilians didn’t, and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone, they said, “How do you know he’s a VC?” The general reply would be, “He’s dead,” and that was sufficient.

The cutting off of heads—on Operation Stone, there was a lieutenant colonel there, and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we were notified that there were press covering the operation and that we couldn’t do that anymore.

I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. And when we got up to her, she was asking for water. And the lieutenant said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread her eagle and shoved an E- tool up her vagina—an entrenching tool—and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out, and they used a tree limb, and then she was shot.

MODERATOR: Did the men in the—in your outfit, did they seem to think that it was alright to do anything to the Vietnamese?

SCOTT CAMILE: It wasn’t like they were humans, like we were—you know, we were conditioned to believe that, you know, this was for the good of the nation, the good of our country, and anything we did was OK. And like, when you shot someone, you didn’t think you were shooting a human. They were a gook or a Commie, and it was OK.

Camile’s sparse wording and the lack of any lyric turn highlights the horribly commonplace violence of the war. It is not the recognition of common humanity (Fussel’s hoped-for result of reading World War I poetry), but instead the institutionalized definitions of the enemy as inhuman and animal that are worth noting here. Reading these accounts, the surrealism of war emerges in ways that the war poetry of World War I does not approximate. The boy’s youth becomes evident from his repetitions of ‘you know’. He struggles to keep the needle on the record. Indeed, in reading this account, I understand with greater precision why the aesthetic transformation of brutality and suffering is almost perverse (at worst) or utterly inadequate (at best).

In 2008, inspired by the Vietnam veterans’ example, American veterans of the current invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan conducted their own ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings. Almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media, the accounts of the systematic violence that results from occupation are instructive and moving insights into the contemporary experiences of soldiers and their diverse expressions of outrage and protest. Jason Hurd was deployed to central Baghdad with Tennessee’s 278th Regimental Combat Team in 2004:

I want to tell you a very personal story, and I want you all to bear with me, because this is always difficult for me to tell. One day, we were on another dismounted patrol through the Kindi Street area. We were walking past an area we called “the garden center,” because it was literally a fenced-off garden. As is policy, we are to keep all cars and individuals away from our formation. And so, a car was approaching us from the front. I was at the rear of the formation, because I was the medic and the medics hang out at the back with the platoon sergeant in case anything happens up front so you can respond. They waved the car off down a side street, so that it would not come near our formation.

As I made it up to that side street, the car had turned around and was coming back towards us, because the street was blocked off by a concrete T barrier at the other end. So I began doing my levels of aggression. I held up my hand, trying to get the car to stop. The car sped up. And I thought to myself, oh, my god, this is it. This is someone who is trying to hurt us. And so, instead of doing what I should have done according to policy and raising my weapon, instead, I did what you should never do, and I took my hands off of my weapon altogether and began jumping up and down, waving my hands back and forth, trying to get this car to stop and see me. The car kept coming. And so, I raised my weapon, and the car kept coming. I pulled my selector switch off of safe, and the car kept coming.

I was applying pressure to my trigger, getting ready to fire on the vehicle, and out of nowhere, a man came off of the side of the road, flagged the car down and got it to pull over. He walked around to the driver’s side door, opened it up, and out popped an eighty-year-old woman. Come to find out, this woman was a highly respected figure in the community, and I don’t have a clue what would have happened had I opened fire on this woman. I would imagine a riot.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hate guns. I spent ten years in the military, and I carried two of them on my side in Iraq, but I think they should be melted down and turned into jewelry. To this day, that is the worst thing that I have ever done in my life. I am a peaceful person, but yet in Iraq I drew down on an eighty-year-old geriatric woman who could not see me, because I was in front of a desert-colored vehicle—or, excuse me, desert-colored building wearing desert-colored camouflage.

In speaking with and actually experiencing the lives of those suffering occupation, Hurd’s impression of their lives and their behavior started to make more sense.

You know, conservative statistics say that the majority of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces, the majority of Iraqis support us leaving immediately, and the majority of Iraqis see us as the main contributors to the violence in Iraq. This gives us a view at the prevailing sentiment in Iraq. And I’d like to explain it to everyone this way, especially in the South, because it rings with some semblance of truth to people down there. If a foreign occupying force came here to the United States, and regardless of what they told us, whether they told us they were here to free us, to liberate us and to give us democracy, do you not think that every person that owns a shotgun would not come out of the hills and fight for their right to self-determination?

It is commonplace to make fun of the American South, presuming that racism and cultural ignorance are their guiding lights. As a Southerner, Hurd presents another voice. His is a voice of dispossession, economic disenfranchisement and indeed honesty, gentility and decency. Hurd’s comments aren’t exhaustive by any means, but testimony from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are an important alternative narrative to the current justifications for the ongoing support for these wars. (As a side note, similar brave and momentous accounts are also emerging from Israeli soldiers through the ‘Breaking the Silence’ movement.)

Commenting on the contemporaneous New Yorker articles of John Hershey (later collected in his celebrated book Hiroshima (1946)), the journalist and critic Dwight MacDonald labelled the book an artistic failure and noted that this failure emerged from a moral deficiency: ‘the dead-pan, keyed-down approach is so detached from the persons Hershey is writing about that they become objects of clinical description; the author appears like a specialist lecturing on some disease, with ‘interesting’ cases on the platform.’ MacDonald was perplexed that others found the ‘antiseptic’ prose powerful enough to relate the experience of the Japanese and create empathy with their plight. He concluded that maybe ‘my feeling is simply that naturalism is no longer adequate, either esthetically or morally, to cope with the modern horrors.’ What, if anything, may we demand of poetry, of language lifted to the sound of music, in the light of the current wars?

Lyric protests to the war too easily carry us away from the harrowing reality that these conflicts perpetuate. Think of how some of Bob Dylan’s early music evokes the vaguest atmosphere of Vietnam without in any way engaging with or even informing us about the meaning of that invasion and occupation. Yes, British soldiers are dying. But we must see that Afghans and Iraqis are also dying. Real remembrance means pushing ourselves, to demand ourselves to ask why: why are soldiers and civilians dying and why are we, under the cover of NATO, waging these wars? Honest and rational engagement with memory means taking your finger and following it through the narrative of history to see how the past informs and collides with the present.

Why do our governments continue to engage in imperial wars of aggression?

What prevents them from them even being discussed as such?

Remembering this past changes our feelings of pride to feelings of shame. In the nudity of prose, our own responsibility in relation to these current wars is laid plain before us. These wars were not strategic mistakes; they weren’t examples of American hegemony pulling Britain along for the ride; they aren’t even strictly acts of revenge: they are open acts of aggression. For sixty-five years, Germany has had to carry out the work of looking into the past. When will we enact similar remembrance of own actions?

In reviewing the first volume of poems by the young T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster found Eliot’s poems a refreshing break from marches and parades; he found them innocent of any ‘public-spiritness.’ He lauded Eliot’s songs of private disgust and portraits of people ‘who seemed genuine because they were unattractive or weak.’ Forster praised Eliot’s feeble protests against tea parties as something that didn’t get swept into the spirit of the war, but instead ‘preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage’. Perhaps here art has the greatest potential: for preserving and expanding what it means for us to be human. Even as Eliot’s Prufrock anxiously stirs his coffee or Virginia Woolf politely contains the war between two small brackets in To the Lighthouse, the world of war is present. Art, in its frivolity and freedom, can be its own form of protest—of no use or utility to anyone. The abstract and unregimented art of some of the era’s greatest poets remains defiant, and to many ears, deviant.

We may scream and scream with Cassandra and no one will listen. We may sing and a few might feel comfort. But we have greater responsibilities. We have time and access to information. We must at least try to remember carefully and urge others to remember with the same care. We have language and a responsibility to connect to people and to find a way of digging our boots into the ground and declaring that we have had enough. We have the responsibility to lurch toward the silence—be it a minute of silence, or a generations’ worth. This prodding in the silence means discovering other voices and other traditions. People not meant to be remembered may come to haunt us, be they ghosts from the past or the ‘unpeople’ of the present (in the words of British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis).

I no longer wish that slim monument of silence on November 11th to be an isolated and appropriated moment of remembrance. Remembrance must always be multiple, cacophonous and ever present. It can be a radical act: an opportunity to envision a much larger set of possibilities in the world.

As for language—‘poetry’—it will always be here and its infinite possibilities may always prove me wrong. Perhaps the poet will emerge, who, influenced by McCrae’s words, creates a new masterpiece. As Eliot’s later ‘Note on War Poetry’ (1942) states ‘War is not life’ and, we may further infer, war is not poetry or poetry war; every experience has the potential of being transformed into verse.

Our emotions
Are only ‘incidents’

In the effort to keep day and night together.
It seems just possible that a poem might happen
To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry—
That is a life.

War is not life: it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored nor accepted,
A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,
Enveloped or scattered.

The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,
Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception
Of private experience at its greatest intensity
Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry’,
May be affirmed in verse.

Equally, poetry cannot offer enough food for us to shutter ourselves up for winter in our towers. In our own lives it might be worthwhile to let drop our tea cups and saucers, spoons and journals - to rip the hinges from their jambs and run into the streets, into life and launch ourselves daily into the silence so that we may begin the work of remembering.

I have to be careful here, because I could be overcome by emotion at any moment. Jamie Fraser and Debs Reeks, a.k.a. Super Mega Action Plus (and they are super), accompanied us on a walk to Hay Bluff earlier this year to celebrate How the Light Gets In. Unfortunately, I had sprained my ankle partying - and partying hard, mind you - to some Renaissance Trance by The Roots Union at this so-called ‘philosophy festival’ the night before I was due to lead our party to the Bluff, which duty then fell to a girl with an annoyingly high-pitched voice.

Fortunately, Jamie and Debs captured the soul of this walk in a light-sensitive box, and have now released it into the wild, in the form of a ‘film’. They did this with such love and care that I wished to share their illustration with my fellow walkers, and they have magically assisted me in this task. Here it is. When watching these images, I feel I was there on Hay Bluff, clipped by the gliders that soared close above these intrepid strangers, who are now friends. I will from now on, I assure you, fellow walkers, wear ankle stirrups when trancing out in the Renaissance style in my endeavour to remain,

Yours, ever,

JWvG

How To Live - Goethe’s Elective Affinities Walking Group @ Hay-on-Wye from Super Mega Action Plus on Vimeo.