1/ He went to bed, turned on the BBC World News and switched it off again. Half-truths. Quarter-truths. What the world really knows about itself, it doesn’t dare say. John le Carre, Our Kind of Traitor; 2011, p 241
2/ We live in very remarkable times. We find with astonishment that progress has concluded an alliance with barbarism. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism; 1938; Prefatory Note to Part Three; pp 89-90
3/ The Greek word enthousiasmos implies that a person is possessed by a god, the German word Begeisterung means that he is controlled by a spirit, a Geist, more or less holy. In reality, militant enthusiasm is a specialized form of communal aggression, clearly distinct from and yet functionally related to the more primitive forms of petty individual aggression. Every man of normally strong emotions knows, from his own experience, the subjective phenomena that go hand in hand with the response of militant enthusiasm. A shiver runs down the back, and, as more exact observation shows, along the outside of both arms. One soars elated above all the ties of everyday life, one is ready to abandon all for the call of what, in the moment of this specific emotion, seems to be a sacred duty.
All obstacles in its path become unimportant, the instinctive inhibitions against hurting or killing one’s fellows lose, unfortunately, much of their power. Rational considerations, criticism, and all reasonable arguments against the behaviour dictated by militant enthusiasm are silenced by an amazing reversal of all values, making them appear not only untenable but base and dishonourable. Men may enjoy the feeling of absolute righteousness even while they commit atrocities. Conceptual thought and moral responsibility are at their lowest ebb. As a Ukrainian proverb says: ‘When the banner is unfurled, all reason is in the trumpet.’ Konrad Lorenz; On Aggression; p 259-263
4/ Neither shame nor guilt, then, can solve the problem of violence; shame causes hate, which becomes violence (usually toward other people), and guilt merely redirects it (usually toward the self). But to simply say that we need more love, and less shame and guilt, is vacuous. What we really need is to be able to specify the conditions that can enable love to grow without being inhibited by either shame or guilt. And it is clear that shame and guilt do inhibit love… If we approach violence as a problem in public health and preventive medicine then we need to ask: What are the conditions that stimulate shame and guilt on a socially and epidemiologically significant scale?… James Gilligan; Violence: Reflections on Our Deadliest Epidemic; p 236
5/ Dionysus is the god of decisive mob action. Once stated, it should be easy to see why such a god is called for and why he is revered. He claims legitimacy” not from his ability to disturb the peace but from his ability to restore the peace he has himself disturbed – thereby justifying, a posteriori, having disturbed it in the first place. Divine intervention is transformed into legitimate anger against a blasphemous hubris, which, until the crucial display of unanimity, seemed to implicate the god himself….
Religion, then, is far from “useless”. It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor. Religious misinterpretation is a truly constructive force, for it purges man of the suspicions that would poison his existence if he were to remain conscious of the crisis as it actually took place. ..To think religiously is to envision the city’s destiny in terms of that violence whose mastery over man increases as man believes he has gained mastery over it. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred; pp 134-5
6/ The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.’ Niels Bohr on Subjective vs. Objective Reality
7/ Religion is the general theory of this world, it’s encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo: Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843)
8/ It is self-evident that a pious fraud cannot work if it is to be announced as a pious fraud: Ronald Beiner, Civil Religion, p 203
9/ The totalitarian element in Marxism is as little the concept of class or classless society as the concept of race or race society, as such, is what made Nazism totalitarian. In both instances, the decisive element is the belief that history can be made, which teaches certain procedures by which one can bring about its end-and of course never does. The breaking of eggs in action never leads to anything more interesting than the breaking of eggs. The result is identical with the activity itself: it is a breaking, not an omelet.. Hannah Arendt, The ex communists; in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954; p 396-7
10/ The will cannot will backwards… That time does not run backward, that is his wrath; ‘that which was’ is the name of the stone he cannot move. And so he moves stones out of wrath and displeasure, and he wreaks revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does. Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill will against time and its ‘it was.’“Verily, a great folly dwells in our will; and it has become a curse for everything human that this folly has acquired spirit: Friedrich Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Second Part, On Redemption; p 139-140
11/ Men, forever tempted to lift the veil of the future – with the aid of computers or horoscopes or the entrails of animals – have a worse record to show in these ”sciences” than in almost any other scientific endeavour: Hannah Arendt in The Life of the Mind; Part II, p 159
12/ Whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good… whenever we see this dawn, the blood of children and old people is always shed… Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.. Vassily Grossman: Life and Fate, (1960) 2011, pp 390-394
13/ The second consequence of the postponement of gratification is “the peculiar restlessness and dispersion of our modern consciousness,” noted by Hegel, or, as I would call it, the simultaneous stimulation and stupefaction of our spiritual faculties that is induced by the endless pursuit of happiness. In slightly different terms, the residents of modernity alternate between radical new proposals for the attainment of happiness and admissions of temporary failure. The result is that whereas we anticipate happiness, we experience sadness directly. This anticipation is easily confused with happiness, especially because of the intensity with which we throw ourselves into revolutionary enterprises. With apologies to the psychiatrists, I call this manic depression, and this, I suggest, is the peculiar feature of modern, and in particular of late-modern sadness. Stanley Rosen; Sad Reason, in Metaphysics in Ordinary Language; pp 136-7
14/ A nation, in the sense of the political and economic union of a people, is that aspect which a whole population assumes when organised for a mechanical purpose. Society as such has no ulterior purpose. It is an end in itself. Rabindranath Tagore; Nationalism; p 5
15/ It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners, because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness. It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgement at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention. The latest revelation – from no Mount Sinai, from no Mount of the Sermon, from no Bo (tree of Buddha) – is the outcry of mute things themselves that we must heed by curbing our powers over creation, lest we perish together on a wasteland of what was creation. Hans Jonas, The Outcry of Mute Things 1993; Mortality and Morality After Auschwitz, p 201-202
16/ He who believes in nothing, sees nothing. The trap of ‘seeing through’ things was best exposed by C.S. Lewis, at the conclusion of his memorable essay in defense of values, The Abolition of Man: “The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too. It is no use trying ‘to see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To see through all things is the same as not to see”: C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man, p 40; cited by Simon Leys on Learning
17/ Good is self-existent, evil is not. It is like a parasite living in and around good. It will die of itself when the support that good gives it is withdrawn: M. K. Gandhi, Discussion with friends: September 4, 1947; CWMG, GHP v 89: p. 149
18/ To reject the sacred is to reject our own limits. It is also to reject the idea of evil, for the sacred reveals itself through sin, imperfection, and evil; and evil, in turn, can be identified only through the sacred. To say that evil is contingent is to say that there is no evil, and therefore that we have no need of a sense that is already there, fixed and imposed on us whether we will it or not…If it is true that in order to make society more tolerable, we must believe that it can be improved, it is also true that there must always be people who think of the price paid for every step of what we call progress. The order of the sacred is also a sensitivity to evil.. Leszek Kolakowski; The revenge of the sacred in secular culture in Modernity on Endless trial.. p 73
19/ An ideology gives people the illusion of understanding more than they do: Mark Lilla; Afterword to The Reckless Mind
20/ The widespread thesis that the ethical is biological amounts to saying that, ultimately, the human is only the last stage of the evolution of the animal. I would say, on the contrary, that in relation to the animal, the human is a new phenomenon. And that leads me to your question. You ask at what moment one becomes a face. I do not know at what moment the human appears, but what I want to emphasize is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a persistence in being. This is my principal thesis. A being is something that is attached to being, to its own being. That is Darwin’s idea. The being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might.
Heidegger says at the beginning of Being and Time that Dasein is a being who in his being is concerned for this being itself. That’s Darwin’s idea: the living being struggles for life. The aim of being is being itself. However, with the appearance of the human – and this is my entire philosophy – there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other. That is unreasonable. Man is an unreasonable animal… Emmanuel Levinas; The Paradox of Morality; in Bernasconi & Wood; The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other; p 172
21/ The poet Tulsidas has said: “Of religion, pity, or love, is the root, as egotism of the body. Therefore, we should not abandon pity so long as we are alive.” This appears to me to be a scientific truth. I believe in it as much as I believe in two and two being four. The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. The universe would disappear without the existence of that force. But you ask for historical evidence.
It is, therefore, necessary to know what history means. The Gujarati equivalent means: “It so happened.” If that is the meaning of history, it is possible to give copious evidence. But, if it means the doings of kings and emperors, there can be no evidence of soul-force or passive resistance in such history, You cannot expect silver ore in a tin mine…. The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love. Therefore, the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars of the world, it still lives on.. M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, ch 17
22/… anthropologically, there is an immense difference between a society in which traditional criteria of good and evil remain valid, no matter how often they have been violated, and one in which these criteria have been abrogated and have fallen into oblivion. Leszek Kolakowski; Modernity on Endless trial.. p 47
23/ Those of us who live in a society where various political tendencies exist side by side and competing influences cancel or limit one another can manage more or less to escape the kitsch inquisition: the individual can preserve his individuality. The artist can create unusual works. But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch. When I say “totalitarian,” what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (be-cause anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously). Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Part 6.9; The Grand March )
24/ The magnetic power exerted by patently threadbare ideologies is to be explained, beyond psychology, by the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such. Things have come to a pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying. Each statement, each piece of news, each thought has been pre-formed by the centres of the culture industry. Whatever lacks the familiar trace of such preformation lacks credibility, the more so because the institutions of public opinion accompany what they send forth by a thousand factual proofs and all the plausibility that total power can lay hands on.
Truth that opposes these pressures not only appears improbable, but is in addition too feeble to make any headway in competition with their highly-concentrated machinery of dissemination. Theodor Adorno: Pseudomenos – Minima Moralia # 71
25/ My conclusion is that the goal of a total revolution against the dehumanizing spirit of modern society is self-contradictory. By providing a single focus for all of our dissatisfaction with the world, the longing for total revolution raises great hopes for the transfiguration, however defined, of the human condition. By uncovering the self-contradictory nature of such a total revolution, I have tried to uproot the foundations of these hopes… Does such a conclusion leave us helpless and hopeless in the face of the obstacles to our satisfaction posed by modern institutions?
I think not. It renders us passive and hopeless only to the extent that we continue to assume that the modern epoch represents a coherent ·and consistent whole, integrated by a single spirit of social interaction. This assumption makes social improvement an all-or-nothing venture. Either we uproot the underlying spirit of social interaction or we resign ourselves to the limitations of our institutions and practices. For as long as particular institutions and practices gain their character from the spirit of the whole, efforts to alter their character short of total revolution are bound to fail. Bernard Yack: The Longing for Total Revolution, p. 368
26/ The Right today likes to imagine that it is the voice of the past. In truth, its ranting radicalism and its decadent nostalgia tie it unmistakably and irrevocably to the chaos of the present… Few visions of the future have ever been so delusive as Herbert Marcuse’s or Michel Foucault’s perennially fashionable vision of perfected capitalist control of society. Late modern capitalism may incarcerate people in high-tech prisons and monitor them by video surveillance cameras at the work place… but it does not box them into an iron cage of bureaucracy or imprison them within a minute division of labour… It abandons them to a life of fragments and a proliferation of senseless choices…
American Psycho is a truer approximation to the late modern condition than Kafka’s The Castle…Free markets are the most potent solvents of tradition at work in the world today. They set a premium on novelty and a discount on the past. They make of the future an infinite re-run of the present. The society they engender is antinomian and proletarian – John Gray: False Dawn (2009), p 38
27/ I had no time to hate because / The grave would hinder me
And life was not so ample I / Could finish enmity
Nor had I time to love, but since / Some industry must be
The little toil of love, I thought / Was large enough for me – Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
28/ When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. Chernobyl series Finale
29/ Satan, in fact, is intelligible because he is not original at all in his views on liberty; he sees it as a good just as everybody else does, and uses the notion of its being good to praise it. That notion has not vanished into its opposite by some startling logical trick in the inversion of opposites. Opposites have not, indeed, been inverted; the war-cry merely exalts one good – liberty – over all others with which it may conflict. And the sense which liberty has here is that rather melancholy one which it has sometimes been found to have in human politics; namely, liberty to rule others, to have one’s own kingdom. Mary Midgley, Wickedness, p 141
30/ (The) work of the Unhappy Consciousness is a ritual flight from reality. It is a ritual submission to the prescribed world-view of an authoritarian order, regardless of one’s own experience of the truth: Andrew Shanks, Hegel’s Political Theology, p 188
31/ In a vibrant public culture founded on self-denial and collective revival, ethnic Germans were exhorted to expunge citizens deemed alien and to ally themselves only with people sanctioned as racially valuable. The road to Auschwitz was paved with righteousness. Claudia Koonz; The Nazi Conscience; Prologue
32/ The widespread thesis that the ethical is biological amounts to saying that, ultimately, the human is only the last stage of the evolution of the animal. I would say, on the contrary, that in relation to the animal, the human is a new phenomenon. And that leads me to your question. You ask at what moment one becomes a face. I do not know at what moment the human appears, but what I want to emphasize is that the human breaks with pure being, which is always a persistence in being. This is my principal thesis. A being is something that is attached to being, to its own being. That is Darwin’s idea. The being of animals is a struggle for life. A struggle for life without ethics. It is a question of might. Heidegger says at the beginning of Being and Time that Dasein is a being who in his being is concerned for this being itself. That’s Darwin’s idea: the living being struggles for life. The aim of being is being itself. However, with the appearance of the human – and this is my entire philosophy – there is something more important than my life, and that is the life of the other. That is unreasonable. Man is an unreasonable animal… Emmanuel Levinas; The Paradox of Morality; in Bernasconi & Wood; The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other; p 172
33/ ‘In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage and triumph: the sex instinct will be eradicated we shall abolish the orgasm, there will be no loyalty except to the party.. but always there will be the intoxication of power always at every moment there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless… If you want to imagine the future; imagine a boot stepping on a human face forever. The moral of this story is.. don’t let it happen.’ George Orwell: A Final warning (1950; see video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXm5hklbBsA
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Oceanic Circle: Talk on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 155th birthday
Unsolicited thoughts from an elder citizen
Orwellian nightmares: What I learned about today’s rage culture from rewriting 1984
George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)
After the truth-shower 