Today’s on-going horrors have been endlessly self-servingly obscured, rationalized, ritualized, and idealized.
Today’s on-going horrors have been occasionally humanely wisely, soberly, and empathetically analyzed.
Yet the horrors go on. Consider one.
An enraged IDF fighter or overseas Jewish supporter says what the hell? Hamas attacked. Hamas killed babies. Hamas traumatized us. We can’t abide what they did. We can’t back off. We must stand tall. We must shoot our big guns. We must lay waste to be secure. Destroy Gaza to save Israel. Hooray for our side.
An enraged Hamas fighter or overseas Palestinian supporter says what the hell? Israel locked us in. Israel took our land. Israel bulldozed our lives. Israel imposed periodic sudden massive murder for decades and now crushes us under unrelenting slow death. Should we crawl to our graves? Should we bend and bow? Should we kiss the killing hands of our jailers? We must stand tall. We must shoot our little guns. We must kill Israelis to be heard. Hooray for our side.
A sensitive advocate for Israel, perhaps a Jewish student at a New York university or a Palestinian musician in Los Angeles sees the carnage and says to Hamas and then also to Gaza, okay, sure, I get that to break out of your stifling jail was warranted. I get that you had reason to attack nearby Israeli military bases. But how could you willfully murder civilians? How could you shoot babies? How could you reject the immorality waged by Israel against you only to then justify the immorality waged by you against Israeli civilians? Your just cause didn’t warrant that choice.
A sensitive advocate for Palestinians, perhaps a Jewish student at a New York university or a Palestinian musician in Los Angeles sees the carnage and says to the IDF, and then also to Israel, okay, sure, I get that you feel assaulted. I get that gas chambers torment your dreams. I get that you want to guard against and to even subdue Hamas. But how could you be so grotesquely immoral and socially savage as to target an entire population’s schools and hospitals? How could you bomb fleeing exiles? How could you cancel our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, our medicines, electric lights, and our very existence? How could you unleash actual holocaust in the name of trying to prevent hypothetical holocaust? How could you wear the clothes and spew the bile of the Nazi monsters in your nightmares?
To try to understand not state behavior, not armed agents’ behavior, but the behavior of advocates way over there and right here on my block—I wonder how can any caring thinking person rightly assert that decades of unrelenting suffering don’t warrant misplaced violence against babies and then minutes later wrongly assert that that violence warrants unleashing unlimited holy hell on a whole population? Do you too wonder how any person can contain in his or her mind two such contradictory images of what is and what isn’t worthy behavior—one norm for they and their’s, an opposite norm for you and yours.
And lest one confuses this woefull query with mere ignorance, yes, I understand the impact of media. Yes, I understand the impact of manipulation. Yes, I understand the impact of material interests. And yes, I especially understand the impact of institutions, threats, and coercion. And yet still I wonder does even all that really fully explain the students who now clash with one another on many campuses? Does it explain the workers and professionals who now clash in neighborhoods in the USA, USA, USA. I wonder if maybe something additional is at work. I wonder if there is something else going on that is worth thinking about even as we also convey history, dissect media machinations, and reveal institutional pressures. I wonder if there is something more going on, not just in this case but in lots of cases. Perhaps it sounds like this: “Fuck your evidence, logic, and values. Hooray for my side. Fuck your side.”
Where might one look for additional insight about what’s going on in contending minds? For me, in 1964, I spent hours with Bob Dylan’s then fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. In those days, albums were big, physical, textured things that we took home. They were not mere cyber clickers. More, the back side of artistic album jackets sometimes even had what were called liner notes. Thus it was that Dylan’s fourth album had a long poem on its jacket that at not so sweet 16 I devoured. Here is one little piece of it, I hope worth a thought or two, as I return to it now.
first of all two people get
together an’ they want their doors
enlarged. second of all, more
people see what’s happenin’ an’
come t’ help with the door
enlargement. the ones that arrive
however have nothin’ more than
“let’s get these doors enlarged”
t’ say t’ the ones who were
there in the first place. it follows then that
the whole thing revolves around
nothing but this door enlargement idea.
third of all, there’s a group now existin’
an’ the only thing that keeps them friends
is that they all want the doors enlarged.
obviously, the doors’re then enlarged
fourth of all, after this enlargement
the group has t’ find
something else t’ keep
them together or
else the door enlargement
will prove t’ be
embarrass i g
So do you too ever wonder how it is that for individuals involved in face offs reason, logic, evidence and even values get trumped by “hooray for our side” team loyalty, and, in particular, trumped by fear of being ejected from one’s team and losing the sense of belonging, efficacy, and ally-ship that team membership somehow conveys. That same album has a couple of songs with relevant lyrics. Here is an excerpt from To Ramona:
I’ve heard you say many times
That you’re better than no one
And no one is better than you
If you really believe that
You know you have
Nothing to win and nothing to lose
From fixtures and forces and friends
Your sorrow does stem
That hype you and type you
Making you feel
That you gotta be exactly like them
Fixtures, forces, friends…but perhaps also teams? And lest you think I have gone so batshit inner directed I have lost the big picture, here is a whole song from the same album, Chimes of Freedom. Does it seem to you, like it seems to me, like it could have been written last night about the massacre now unfolding?
Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll
We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.In the city’s melted furnace, unexpectedly we watched
With faces hidden as the walls were tightening
As the echo of the wedding bells before the blowin’ rain
Dissolved into the bells of the lightning
Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder
Striking for the gentle, striking for the kind
Striking for the guardians and protectors of the mind
An’ the poet an the painter far behind his rightful time
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.In the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute
For the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.Even though a clouds’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmfull, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
So am I crazy to copy decades old lyrics into an article asking what’s going on now? Maybe, but we can analyze history and institutions. We can debate motives and means. We can describe sought solutions or feared apocalypses. Yet whatever we come up with about all of that, still the battle lines ain’t exactly clear. My point? If we want to hear and be heard, if we want to have effect, maybe we must now focus on how to effectively communicate when reason, evidence, logic, and even values have little to no weight for them, and let’s be honest, sometimes for us too. And perhaps a poet can help with that.
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2 Comments
thanks for this and for the comment below – it looks like Alexander’s book is worth a look. this is a fairly perfect example of your “fuck the evidence and logic” idea Michael – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/dear-world-i-dont-care/
Although this essay is about something else directly, the conclusion or suggestion feels very close to the reason why Samuel Alexander, Co-director of the Simplicity Institute here in Australia, activist for change and degrowth advocate, among other things, wrote this tome
SMPLCTY Ecological Civilisation and the Will to Art: Essays on the Aesthetics of Existence: Homo Aestheticus, The Artful Species: An Evolutionary Perspective. His reasons (you may see a familiar name in there) for writing this tome are,
“…over time I began to wonder whether I was approaching the transitional question in the wrong way. The scientific evidence for deep change is compelling, supported by basic moral principles of fairness, justice, and sustainability. Yet, these forces of evidence and theory aren’t having much practical, real-world impact. As I began contemplating the reasons for this civilisational inertia, I realised that I had been proceeding as if the primary problem was an information deficit, assuming that existing crises were mainly a result of intellectual or scientific failings of our species. I had assumed with typical academic bias that when more evidence and better theories were available, we would see the error of our ways and steer the ship of civilisation away from the cliff’s edge.
Having been struck too often by the ineffectiveness of evidence and argument, I now see that humanity’s primary obstacle is not an intellectual or evidential one but an aesthetic one, related to our sensibilities, felt needs, communication strategies, and imaginative capacities. I will suggest, consequently, that this obstacle also demands an engagement in aesthetic terms – an approach that will obviously require some explaining and defending. Defined further in the introduction, my use of the term ‘aesthetic’ will appeal both to the modern usage, pertaining to the philosophies of art, beauty, and taste, as well as to the earlier meaning, pertaining to the realm of sensuous experience. Inspired by and engaging with thinkers such as Fredrich Schiller, William Morris, Fredrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jane Bennett, I will be proposing that through art and the aesthetic dimensions of life we can move most coherently toward an ecological civilisation in which freedom, flourishing, and justice are open and unfolding realities.
Herein lies one of the points of departure in the following essays. Humanity’s fatal problem is not that we do not know we have to change in fundamental ways (although some still deny this); nor is there any shortage of assertions about how to change (although there are many false paths). My preliminary proposition – a premise of the project – is that to date very few people have acquired a taste for the profound changes that are needed. This is partly because so few have developed the imaginative or aesthetic capacities to envision those changes, and fewer still have shown the disposition to desire them. Taste, vision, imagination, desire – these can be understood as aesthetic categories, and this collection of essays emerged from the hypothesis that those categories would reward aesthetic analysis. For in an age increasingly called the Anthropocene – the age of ecological overshoot driven by human activity – what is needed more than anything is planned contraction of energy and resource demands by overgrown and overconsuming regions of the world. As I have suggested, the evidential case for embracing ‘degrowth’ is compelling.6 But there is no taste for degrowth, which can be understood as an aesthetic obstacle requiring an aesthetic intervention.
Strangely, this approach implies that if my arguments are ultimately accepted, readers will eventually find themselves needing to throw away the ladder after having climbed up it, given that I am presenting a rational case for an aesthetic response. In other words, reasoning can only take us so far, or rather, it may be that the intellectual shifts that are required may need to be preceded by an aesthetic engagement and transformation in the emotional and sensuous capacities of our species. This realisation points to the need for a new politics of art. To paraphrase poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge: we must create the taste by which we will be judged.
Accordingly, my starting point is this: that we know in our heads that there must be more humane, meaningful, and sustainable ways to live, but we do not yet feel this in our hearts. For if we did – if a new aesthetic sensibility had already arisen – the emotional energy would be at hand to bring new worlds into existence through creative and sustained collective action. The aesthetic revolution would have already done its work. And yet we wait, as if paralysed before the looming apocalypse. I believe this is due to an aesthetic deficit – a shortage of beauty, meaning, creativity, and pleasure in our lives. But I will argue that this deficit is within our creative hands and minds to resolve.” (Samuel Alexander)
Alexander is talking about something different but nevertheless just as dire. However his reasons for writing the book seem to me somewhat similar to those expressed here by Albert.
Maybe it’s got something to do with home. Feeling at home. Returning home. People, all people, finding a home, having a home. Music can do that. Bring you home. Perhaps art in general can. One retreats inside to something that makes them feel, really feel.