God Without The Sacred
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‘In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their own powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes toward a great avenger and liberator who someday will come and accomplish his mission.’ – Trotsky
Is not the act of the brutal killing in London an act of insecure utopian myopia? Meaning, the killer wants a world where no soldiers exist to the point that his/their version of reality is without a certain type of person present? Who does the victim represent? Is he not an image of British nationalism? Not that the soldier himself might have been a nationalist, but rather that he as a symbol represents something larger than himself that the killer did not resonate with. Adebolajo (the murder suspect) was attempting to demonstrate his disdain for the oppression that has been going in Iraq and Afghanistan. As one of his friends said in an interview: “I wasn’t surprised that it happened,” Barra said of Wednesday’s attack. “… Britain is only responsible, the government. And I believe all of us, as a public, we are responsible. We should condemn ourselves, why we did not do enough to stop these wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Is this then not an act of nationalistic fundamentalism? That each person presents us with two symbols that on the global stage are seemingly enemies over the course of the last few years? In one sense, this is to be expected, this is where the friend is correct. However, the act remains a blind one on the part of the murderer – a religious utopian.
Here is one apparent issue: Nationalism begets nationalism. Identity begets identity. Power begets power. Anger begets anger. I know, in a perfect world, A would not equal A, but that’s not the world we live in. And Utopia was a book written by Thomas More. Its not that I dont believe we can never have/sustain peace. I think its possibly. But not ever fully. For we all fragmented. That’s not a bad thing. The bad things happen when we’re not comfortable with being our fragmented selves and try to fit things to make us happy and give us the illusion of the whole. Paul said it this way: We see (our essence/ontology) through a glass darkly. This fragmentation is not sin. It is not wrong. But when we interpret race, utopia, heaven, love, nationalism and many other things as the promise of such a whole…then that’s like a drug that kicks in and we will do anything to keep that feeling going (Freud called it the pleasure principle/Jacques Lacan refers to it as: Jouissance). Here’s the thing, we can’t go on living like this. People are dying because of our ‘drug addiction’ to hope. We need something different.
Utopia promises peace. Promises wholeness. Promises some form of similarity – even if, in the simplest sense, that ends up being: universal happiness. But the main problem here then lies in that the fact that everyone of us defines utopia differently. Heaven isn’t the same for all of us. For some, to get there, to the end of the rainbow, means sacrificing anything and everything – or anyone. This isn’t only a religious concept. It has been too easy, as of late, to stereotypically point the finger toward one religion in particular (i.e., Islam) and scapegoat a whole religion for the heinous acts of a few. That would be unfair, and in my opinion, lazy. There is much more than meets the eye in acts of violence. Violence tends to do with metaphysics. Before I use this term, I want to explain what I mean. There is tendency to code reality into binaries (simple example: this or that, black or white, love or hate and etc.) – after such a tendency there is also the interpretation that an overall narrative structures these binaries.
That there is a grand story (meta-narrative) leading us to these two categories. But is this not reductive? Does it not cut-out all other possibilities? That maybe humanity can live without utopian violence? That maybe the whole notion of a ‘heaven’ out there is forcing to constantly impose that objective imaginary realm on everyone around us, rather than working out what that imperfect reality might look like here? I liken the possibility of a utopia (which I personally think in the sense of perfection cannot exist due to our inherent ‘lack’ as humans – but we can have moments of utopia) to ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – where it is an inversion of all of the things we think logical now. Where logic fails us in exchange for the odd relationships that become us. Where ‘Victorian sensibilities’ are the primitive elements to human experience that will keep us seeing the creativity that binds us all in a mystical post-logical world. Utopia is dangerous. Utopia will kill us all.
Right now, people are pissed off about this event, as am I. But to stop the events from happening is going to take a whole lot more than me writing this blog, and even moreso the ability to see that these injustices are systemic. These aren’t one off’s! The recent Boston bombings, the school shootings, the epidemic of bullying in the States, the racism still prevalent in Country Music. These are all pointing to the way in which we have come to define ourselves as humans. Hence, why for me, I claim we are not human at all – but trying to be human. These injustices are embedded in the way in which we have come to embrace identity as property. Meaning, we will defend the ‘who’ we are over anything. This is an extremely Western concept. Some ancient world religions saw that our identity was in flux. Is this not the place of the myth-story of Jacob wrestling with God? To remind us of the fragility of our identity. That to take our identity so seriously is a form of metaphorical suicide anyhow? When Jacob finally claims his name, God changes it. Identity is not who we are.
I think its important to understand that violence is measured against what it is not. The backdrop for violence is harmony. For us to have a measure of harmony, we must concede to a measure of violence. Freud called this kind of relationship, a sado-masochistic one. One where the very thing that is attempted to be eradicated is also defined by its opposite. If we want peace, then we must have war. For if we dont have war, then we don’t need peace. This is a simple example of the problem of metaphysics. That it reduces reality down to only two options. What about a third option, a fourth, or maybe a fifth? For Žižek, following Hegel, there is a certain violence that is inherent to discourse itself. The very process of naming an object is to shift the object into a domain of meaning external to it.
For me, the issue lies in consciousness (how we have come to see ourselves). How we have come to believe in the simple allure of dualism. That somehow to think we are connected or that we all exist beyond our categorical identities (i.e., mother, father, woman, man, black, white, muslim, christian and etc.) is somehow against ‘who’ we are. That is the greatest fabrication of democracy/capitalism/individualism (yes, they are all linked – even if minutely!). That we somehow can do it alone. This is why racist remarks can still happen in the Country Music scene! Very sad indeed. But its not enough for me to write this article. Its not enough for you to read this. To change our perspective is where we start, but even that’s not enough.
The easy way out is scapegoat another human. Is to forget we as humans are in a battle against the systems (‘Paul calls them, principalities’) – That we are being mediated for, believed for, this the hard thing to grasp, because the lie is that if we fight together, we will run out of enemies. And then what? People are afraid of boredom. Afraid of not having purpose. We create hell, so we then have an excuse to fight for heaven.
Resources:
Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence
Some
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