7/7

Where were you when? And who were you then?...

Your father, your Jew..Ubo, practical stock, old-world secularist; his views not derivative of anything as grandiose as an ideological perspective; instead, a reason-and why is there always a reason?-for this kind of outlook is understandable once you recognize that we come from a long line of clowns..which means you can't take anything too seriously, religion included..especially religion.

~
On a day like this there is no religion, no politics, just the stories of ordinary human beings caught up in..what, exactly? No-one quite knows. Having lived in the constant presence of bomb blasts and massacres-the recent Peshawar school one being the most traumatic-just confirms the barbarous nature of the times we're living in. the desire, above all, to cut through it all and speak plainly, as a human being might. As a witness, slightly removed, of the carnage,you realize there is no time left for all that posturing. 

In the time that remains. You think of the lives that could have been. I think that's been the most poignant thing to come across: young people who might have fallen in love, married, been inducted into the routines and monotony that is the world, yes, for sure; but they may also have strayed into the mystery of a life continuing, opening up..

And of course, there is the additional thought, no, perhaps its a necessary thought: 'we' -if you believe in that word any more- have been bombing people to smithereens for ages. There's no use saying that we instinctively think of 'our own', or that such a sensibility is only natural. Why should we think of the lives and deaths of others? But isn't part of our nature the ability (and desire) to escape from our nature: second spaces, re-vision, evaluation (there is an "up"; there is a "down") and judgement? There is no 'primal' self; there is no self without others. Everyone is born 'into the world' that is 'given'. 

Take a good look at yourself.

Law, reason, reflection, love: all these suggest a different kind of perspective, one that is more considerate. To look at others in the right way is to look at oneself in the correct fashion. To destroy and dominate others is to destroy oneself. The institutional mechanisms we've created to carry that out amazes you. The religious fanatics, today, have nothing on the state. The Gulags, the Camps, the firebombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima. To utter these words is understand that savagery and technological progress are not necessarily inversely related (far from it). 

One of the most interesting responses to 7/7 was from a woman who lost her 46 year old sister. She said: "I've lost my faith..not in religion..I was never really that religious in the first place but in something else..human beings. It surprises me that in the 21 st century there is still so much ignorance." 

I think Peter Brown is right in one respect. One of the great features- perhaps even its distinguishing feature- of modernity (or the modern west), is its fascination with other cultures. No doubt, much of that interest has been tarnished by the desire to colonize the other, to domesticate the exotic. At the heart of modernity there is, then, an opposite trend as well: the desire to starkly mark out all that is 'not I' and to dominate it ('I' vs the world, or vs nature; a war of all against all; the child against his father (Oedipus), reduce it to a system that is explained by our own terms of self-reference.

But this other spirit, the spirit that recognizes and relishes otherness, that wants to converse and not just appropriate, that understands that some distinctions are important. An equality, but an equality of unknowability, seems to me to be one of the hallmarks of any genuine (and therefore tentative) liberalism.

Red herrings and 17 contradictions.

Given that fundamentalism is intellectually, morally and spiritually bankrupt isn't it closer to the truth to say that the real enemies of genuine freedom are the internal ones generated by capitalism itself? 

Not 7/7, then, but 24/7. Capitalism will end up devouring nature, reducing everything and everyone to a commodity (though not all the way down: see Nancy Fraser). The very possibility of the social is undermined and what is lost here is not an overtly political worldview but something far deeper, more central to who we are-the astounding ability to think of, think for, and think with other people (the plurality of reason..the commons of the mind). 

~

The moment of recognition. Arthur Booth. The judge says-and this is something none of us can bear: someone with authority speaking to us- he was the best kid, "the nicest kid in middle school". This wasn't about race or power but, instead, about mirrors. 

If a mirror was held up to the west or to Muslims what would they see, how would they react? Would anyone ask: is this what we've become..how did we get here?