Waiting for Justice

03.06.2018 –

Christianity, Islam and Judaism share similar features as religions. In particular, they are all based on similar ideas of justice. In each religion, an all-powerful god occupies the position of a judge and there is a day of final judgement when good actions are rewarded and there is punishment for bad actions. The idea that the god of these religions is a judge is said to derive from the political and cultural context of the time when the bible was first written, where it was the prerogative of royalty to mete out judgement. Since god was likened to a king, it was natural that he should also be seen as a judge. The idea of a final day of judgement that comes in the afterlife is possibly derived from the ancient Egyptian beliefs where there is a similar concept.

Because their god is a judge, justice is therefore considered to be a foundation for Christianity, Islam and Judaism and notions of divine justice inform and influence ways of living for believers. But what is interesting in each religion is the fact that the believer has to wait an entire lifetime in order to receive their just desserts. Justice can only be achieved upon death in another time and space, not in the earthly realm and earthly time and space. It is apparent that waiting for justice is really what informs the believer’s actions and choices. Why is the wait for justice so important to these religions and their philosophies? Why is it necessary for their conceptualisation of justice?

From an atheist’s point of view, the requirement that justice can only be meted out by a god in the afterlife and one has to wait for it forever is a convenient mystification that disguises that fact that god doesn’t actually exist and can’t intervene in earthly affairs. However, let us consider the wait for justice in the believer’s own terms. How can each believer wait their entire existence for justice?

Science tells us that human beings are driven by reward-seeking behaviour. We do something because we get a reward out of it. The reason why we hunt for food is so that we can enjoy eating it. The reason why we have children is because we enjoy the process of making children and derive pleasure from it. The religions mentioned above, however, all defer the concept of reward. There is no immediate reward (or punishment) for action in this world. There is only a divine reward or punishment, not an earthly one. One reason why a believer has to wait for justice is therefore to destroy the reward-seeking motivations and behaviour of the individual. The believer is prevented from following human impulse and the instinctual drives of the body. They sacrifice such impulses and drives for a belief. Hence, the human body is being repressed in each religion in order to foster and support an imaginary belief. The human body is being sacrificed for a thought. One component of the wait for justice is therefore an illusion. My speculation is that this illusion is pleasure-inducing, since the reward system relies on pleasure (the pleasure of food or sex). The pleasure derived from this illusion that there is an absolute and final justice which transcends earthly considerations and the desires of the body occupies a prime place in the reward-seeking and reward-inducing components of the believer’s mind (I believe one can say that this would exist in the dopamine system in the brain).

What kind of a pleasure is induced by a wait? There are two things that one thinks of here, each with a sexual component. First of all, one thinks of frustration. Frustration can be enjoyed if one is a masochist. The pleasure in frustration relies on a simple idea, that the reality of a fantasy will not match the pleasure contained within the fantasy. If justice is considered important and foundational to each religion, it is because the fantasy of justice is considered to be more pleasure inducing than the reality of earthly justice. The second thing that one thinks about is foreplay. The prolonging of the beginning of the act can induce pleasure as a specific type of frustration and inform action. The wait for justice in each religion can therefore be conceptualised as a type of foreplay.

I think there is one further component of the wait for justice. Divine justice is seen as final, absolute and perfect and true in each religion. One can therefore wait for it patiently and hopefully. On the other hand, earthly justice is messy, limited, imperfect and frequently based on falsity and mistake. The ones that wait for justice can therefore be likened to a single person that keeps on waiting for the perfect mate to come along even though he or she knows that perfection does not exist. Such a person will not go on dates or consider any substitute or alternative.

The ideas of divine justice have been interpreted in radically different ways by different groups in each religion. I remember reading a pamphlet from the Jehovah’s Witnesses which stated that the devil owned the world and there was no such thing as earthly justice. What is interesting and perhaps most important about the wait for justice in each religion is the case of the Protestant. In Western countries, those people that are most likely to support the earthly system of justice and the laws of the land are conservative Christians. These people appear to believe that the divine system of justice has been translated into earthly form in the mundane and banal form of the English judge. There is therefore a big strand in Western thought in which divine conceptions of justice still play a big role in the conception of what justice is.

What are my own thoughts about the wait for justice? I believe that one should never wait for justice. I believe that the wait for justice is a mystification that favours the powerful in society. If one keeps on waiting for this justice, then one no longer takes affairs in one’s own hands to change and transform this unjust world of ours. I do not believe in any perfect, absolute and unlimited form of justice that is out there waiting for humankind. The very concept of justice is an illusion. I do not understand how people in this world of ours can believe in this illusion. There is merely the self-interest of the powerful which governs all things in this world of ours, including our laws and conceptions of law. And this self-interest forces those with little power to lose their voices and their will, to forsake their self-interest. There is no justice. Yet, even though there is not justice, there is still self-interest. I do not believe we should wait for justice. I believe that we should fight for our own self-interest and our own truths. That is what the idea of “justice”, to use the outdated and misleading term, means to me.

Jesus, The Man of Difference and the Revolution

25.12.2021

Today, the world celebrates the birthday of Jesus Christ. When we look back at thousands of years of Christianity, it is easy to reduce all the complexity of that system of thought and the identity of its founder. One almost automatically thinks of how the religion was tied to war, imperialism, racism and the state in modern times. One thinks of the immorality and authoritarianism of organised religion and the Church. The feminist arguments against patriarchal monotheistic religions come to mind too. In this view, Jesus becomes the origin of oppression and conservatism. Because of such ideas, and the relentless march of a scientific reason which denigrates religion, I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say the hostility to religion in general, and to Christianity and Christ in particular, has almost become insurmountable.

However, let us try to be just to Christ. Historically, Jesus was a revolutionary. In many ways, the early version of Christianity was the religion of resistance. Christ went against the Roman state, the biggest superpower in the Western world at the time. This was his achievement, his badge of valour and the reason he holds the place in the minds of men that he has today. Today, this is how I choose to remember him. In many ways, Jesus is the model for the revolutionary consciousness. Against the state, which held the monopoly of power, wealth and men, which monopolised thought and being, Jesus and his small band offered an alternative world. This was a world in which success did not mean territorial expansion, being rich and subjugating other populations. Christ’s world was not an empire. This was an independent and non-materialistic world, a completely different form of organisation which required a completely different identity and character.

Jesus was a model for the revolutionary because he had nothing to offer against a dominant power than an idea. The idea was of a different form of being, living and thinking. Jesus was a world-builder and a builder of the human mind. Throughout the ages, this is how resistance against the superpowers has played out. There is one man or a small group that has that precious, world breaking and making commodity, difference. Jesus was the origin of difference.

Indeed, what marks Jesus and his origin is difference. He was born out of wedlock, the standard model for conception. He went against not only the Roman state, but also the Jewish religion. He aimed to break free of power wherever he found it.

Today, when the state is ever more ascendant and has thoroughly co-opted Christianity for its iniquitous purposes, when the conservatives and blind conformism have taken over society, when a new form of cultural imperialism is at its height, the birthday of Jesus stands as a model for the revolutionary and for the transforming consciousness. Yes, I am not a Christian. Yes, I do not follow the teachings of the Bible. But I judge Christ not as a god, but as a man. The inspiring, pioneering, matchless Man of Difference. And like others, I wait, ever so patiently, to see another coming of this difference into the world.

The Lesson of Odysseus – The Essential Political Problem

11.02.2018

Today, I want to write a short note about a perennial political problem which I see as troubling every culture in history. Every culture has had to respond to this political problem which is why I see it as the essential one. This problem has catastrophic effects and has enabled every form of injustice, despotism and evil in the world of mankind. The problem is that of the individual that separates himself or herself from the political realm and fails to uphold their obligations to the rest of the human race. This individual retreats into the domestic realm, like a caterpillar in its cocoon, closed off from reality and society.

The issue is addressed in the story of the feigned madness of Odysseus, one of the episodes in the story of the Greek and Trojan war. The context of the madness is important. Helen was the most beautiful woman in the world and there was much rivalry between different suitors as to who would marry her:

The gathered Suitors of Helen represented all of the most powerful kingdoms of Ancient Greece and many were regarded as the best warriors of the day.

Each Suitor brought with them gifts, but Tyndareus quickly realised he was in an impossible position for choosing one suitor over the others would lead to bloodshed between them, and a great deal of animosity between the different Greek states. (http://www.greeklegendsandmyths.com/the-oath-of-tyndareus.h… )

The intense rivalry for Helen’s affections therefore transcended the domestic sphere of marriage and courtship and had entered the field of politics. It could lead to war between competing states.

The story goes on:

Odysseus told Tyndareus that the king should extract from each suitor an oath that they would protect and defend whichever Suitor of Helen was chosen. No hero of note would break such an oath, and even if someone did, then they would have to face the force of the other Suitors who were bound to protect Helen’s husband.

Tyndareus put forth Odysseus’ plan, and each Suitor took the Oath of Tyndareus, with the sacred promise, and the oath was bound when Tyndareus sacrificed a horse (http://www.greeklegendsandmyths.com/the-oath-of-tyndareus.h… ).

Odysseus, as one of the suitors, had promised himself politically to Menelaus. This was an obligation between political parties, not just individuals, as the suitors of Helen had to be suitably powerful. The reason that all had sworn the oath was to preserve peace and the honour and integrity of each of the suitors so that none would feel dishonoured.

The feigned madness of Odysseus is set against the background of this political promise and is presented as Odysseus’s dereliction of duty. As is outlined in Cambridge University’s Classical Tales on the internet:

The famous incident of the feigned madness of Odysseus is not mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey. Its fullest classical treatment is given by the Roman author Hyginus (1st-2nd century AD) in his mythological handbook Fabulae (ch.95):
“Odysseus had received an oracle warning him that if he went to Troy, he would return home after twenty years, alone, destitute and having lost his men. And so when he found out that an embassy was on the way to him, he pretended to be crazy by putting on a felt hat [i.e. looking like a peasant] and yoking a horse and a bull together to a plough…[their different strides would make ploughing almost impossible]. When Palamedes saw him, he sensed that he was faking it, so he took Odysseus’ son Telemachus from the cradle and put him in front of the plough, saying “Put aside your trickery and join the others…”. [Odysseus of course stopped the plough from cutting his son so revealing his sanity]. Odysseus promised he would go to Troy.” (http://classictales.educ.cam.ac.uk/…/ep…/weblinks/index.html )

One can note from this description of the madness how it symbolised a retreat into the domestic realm away from the political realm. Firstly, Odysseus puts on a felt hat to look like a peasant. A peasant seems like the radical alternative to a noble and honourable, prestigious and politically powerfully agent. The peasant is only involved in the agricultural economy, not in questions of politics. A peasant is not a warrior, but a worker. Indeed, the feigned madness of Odysseus emphasised that he was not even a fit peasant and a fit worker since he made ploughing impossible in coupling the two different animals to a plough.

While the details may differ, the story of Odysseus’s feigned madness shows the common strategy that all people have used since time immemorial to duck their obligations to society and others. They see themselves as “common people” that are unconcerned with politics even though we all have rights and responsibilities towards humanity and the planet. Odysseus’s actions are an attempt to slide out of the duty to maintain peace and to uphold the honour and integrity of each individual, as well as the sacred institution of marriage. Such people as Odysseus say that they are entitled to a “normal” existence and no obligations to others. They think and believe that the domestic sphere is not political, a realm removed, a realm that can never be infiltrated by politics. They know that fighting is hard and takes time and effort and they wish to have no part of it. They think that others can fight all the battles and wars of this existence. They don’t want to put their lives on the line for others or to contribute to the ideals of honour and justice which are the highest values of any society. These entitled individuals, like our contemporary Englishmen, who feed like voracious animals off the resources of the whole planet and the naked poor, while paying a small and contemptuous pittance for the pleasure of it, believe that they are immune from the claims and entitlements of society and others. They do not believe in self-denial and sacrifice, hardship and suffering. They believe that they are exempt from suffering and the chain of being.

In the story quoted above, Odysseus is brought to his senses by one thing and one thing only. He is confronted with the destruction of his son and his lineage who is put in front of the plough. And this is the response that every culture has given to the selfish individual who won’t upload the sacred ideals and values of his society, the selfish cocooned individual that won’t suffer to maintain honour and the peace. They are told what the future will be if they do not contribute: the extinction of their line and their way of life, the death of the future. For the political sphere insists that the domestic sphere is inseparable from it: this is why Odysseus is confronted by a political actor with the death and destruction of his baby. Odysseus’s duty as a parent is inseparable from his duty as a political actor.

In the Ancient Greek story, which is, after all, a work of the imagination, Odysseus heeds the response of his society and, indeed, his betters. However, the contemporary man or woman neither cares for the future nor for his line. This individual still believes in the separation of the domestic and the political sphere. This individual does not believe that politics is everywhere. One sees such individuals on social media. They proclaim that they are tired of politics and want to retreat into the fields of art and literature, film and music. They find politics boring without stopping to think that the world trade which supports their leech-like existence is premised on the domination of the strong over the weak, those that have over those that don’t. Such noxious individuals don’t care about global problems like climate change and pollution which are the direct result of their excessive consumption and their evil practices in relation to the earth’s resources or the effect that they will have on their children. Such individuals do not feign the madness of Odysseus: they are truly mad. How does one put the child in front of the plough for these people? This is the perennial and the essential political problem.

Blindness, Vision and Fury: The Trojan Horse, the Mahabharata and the Clash of Visual Cultures

28.01.2018

One day, after having arrived back to England and our home from a trip to India, my mother dressed me and my two brothers up in brown kurtas and pyjamas. She then adorned our foreheads with vermillion, put crowns upon our heads and handed us each a bow and an arrow. We sat there, waiting to strike our enemies with our keen eyes. There is a photograph in the family album which bears witness to the event. There were various motivations behind this re-enactment. We watched the Mahabharata religiously every week on the Indian morning on British TV. The characters in the epic were our heroes. It was the love of my Indian mother for her children that led her to see us as those inspirational warriors in the Mahabharata and as princes. It was the uncanny intuition of an Indian mother that we were in an invisible war and were to fight an invisible enemy. This intuition, compelled by instinct and knowledge beyond comprehension, was absolutely correct.

Let us not start with the Mahabharata, however, for we will return to this great work and I will explain why my Indian mother was correct in her intuition. Let us start with the Iliad by Homer, a work with which my Western audience will have much greater familiarity, I hope. The Iliad, it is somewhat apparent, is about beauty and its destructive force. The most obvious subject of the work is therefore beauty and its relationship to vision. The Trojans take off with the most beautiful woman in the world, called Helen (which means “Greek”). However, Helen belongs to the Greeks. They feel they have the monopoly on beauty. They punish what they call the abduction of Helen, although it is clear that Helen elopes with the supposed culprit of her own volition, to bring the greatest beauty in the world to Troy.

How do the Greeks beat the Trojans in the contest of beauty? Famously, it is the Trojan horse stratagem that wins the war for them. The Greeks hide inside the Trojan horse which is presented as a gift to the Trojans. Through hiding, they enter the city at night and then massacre all of the Trojans in an ancient genocide. But have you ever considered carefully how the Trojan horse is related to vision in this epic about beauty and the contest to possess it? Let us take a little time to do so now.

The Trojan horse stratagem works through concealment, invisibility and blindness. The Greeks hide inside the Trojan horse, concealing their identities. They are invisible. They present the Trojan horse as a gift when in fact it is more akin to a curse, the reverse of a gift. They thus conceal the meaning of what the Trojan horse is and do not allow it to be seen for what it literally is. The Greeks therefore institute blindness on several levels: the Trojans can neither see the horse for what it is nor can they detect that their enemies are concealed inside it. The Trojans become blind. However, it is not just the Trojans who are blind. Everyone is blind. The Greeks hiding inside the horse cannot see the outside world. They sit in darkness. They are abstracted from the outside world.

The Trojan horse is the product of a Greek and Western culture in which what is considered valuable is not external appearance, but what is conceived of as hidden deep inside things, their essences. The Trojans are considered foolish because they look at external appearance and do not go deeply into the essences of things, the inside. This is regarded as their fatal weakness. This simple idea, that external appearances are deceptive is the founding tenet of Western civilisation and its supposed truth. It is the mark of the Western visual culture in which our thinkers state that the externally visible world does not exist, just as the Greeks blindly sit in the belly of the horse, doing away with the vision of the world. It therefore becomes clear why Helen is castigated for her very beauty, our heaven on earth. The external beauty of persons and their visual appearance are at odds with the idea of essences and internal value. External appearance, which is associated with the body of Helen, the body of a female, in a particularly misogynistic manner, can only be destructive in this world view: it destroys both the Greeks who fight for Helen and the Trojans who are misled by the external appearance of Helen and the Trojan horse. Yet the Greeks are thought to surmount the external appearance of things and finally win. They are not the victims of a genocide.

The Iliad is from the 8^th Century B.C.E. The Mahabharata is written in roughly the same period and I contend that it responds to the visual culture of the Greeks. The Mahabharata is not about conquering a people and subsequent genocide. It is about a family reclaiming what is rightfully theirs. The people that dispossess the princes in the epic are the sons of a blind king that greedily wish to hold onto their power. They represent the blind. Let us focus on the way that the war is won in the Mahabharata and how it is related to vision. I believe that there are two important scenes.

The first scene is the killing of the implacable enemy Duryodhana. Duryodhana’s mother had blessed him so that he was invincible. She was living a blindfolded life so that she could be the same as her husband. However, she took off her blindfold to grant her son invincibility with her vision which had lain dormant all those years it had not been used. Duryodhana, however, was ashamed to reveal his body to his mother and wore a loin cloth so that he would not appear fully naked before her. His nether regions were therefore not protected by vision but were invisible to his mother’s gaze, concealed. He therefore insisted on his mother’s partial blindness. Bhima killed Duryodhana because of this very insistence on the blindness of a mother. Bhima struck Duryodhana below the waist at his weak point. Thus, Bhima destroyed the way of the blind, the way of invisibility and concealment. It was where the world was concealed in the genitals of his opponent that he knew he could gain the victory and deliver the death stroke. The concealing of the body, world and nature is always wrong.

A prior scene reveals the ethic of the Mahabharata and its idea of vision and power, which is that war is to be fought openly, without concealment. This scene also reveals why Duryodhana’s inflicting of blindness on his mother is seen as a terrible sin and why the misogynistic Iliad, which castigates female beauty, is so wrong. This is because the Mahabharata celebrates the vision of the woman’s body. One of the other prominently invincible foes of the dispossessed princes was Bhishma. Bishma had once caused a woman to lose her lover and she had vowed to be reincarnated so as to kill him. She came back as a man, but Bishma knew that she was a woman. The man/woman Sihandhi was used as a shield so that Bhishma could not attack as it was against his warrior code of honour to attack a woman. So long as the vision of woman was before him, Bhishma was powerless and could not fight for the sons of the blind king, the party of the blind. Blindness was defeated by the sight and the form of a woman. Instead of hiding and concealing themselves, therefore, and attacking by cowardly stealth, the princes won the battle by putting themselves behind woman and using her as their shield and weapon of utmost power. It was the form of a woman which won the battle for them. The form of a woman did not cause destruction, but gave them back their kingdom. They immersed themselves in the vision and feeling of a woman to revenge herself on the man who wronged her. The princes’ fight against the wrong that has been done to them is therefore in parallel with the wrong that has been done to women. Their invincible enemies fall because they have wronged women and those who have been put into the position of women: in the weaker position. This is a direct response to the misogyny of the blind who can only see a woman’s body and vision in negative terms. It is a response to a Western culture in which women, like Helen are to be won as objects of status. In the Mahabharata, woman is not to be won. Woman is to win.

The vision and intuition of an Indian mother puts me firmly in the grounds of the Mahabharata. Yet my location in this Western society has aimed terribly to seduce me into the path of misogyny, concealment and blindness. In the past, I have truly made errors of judgement and of feeling but I wish to free myself of that horrible past. I put before my eyes the beautiful vision of a woman’s body and I remember the goddess. As I have very briefly noted here, the clash of visual cultures is thousands upon thousands of years old and it is fighting in my breast today. I am continuing the fight because I remember the day when my mother saw me as one of the great warriors in the Mahabharata. It is not easy. There is a new challenge every day. My basic Ancient Greek and ignorance of Sanskrit stand in my way, certainly. However, I continue the war in my analysis of the relationship between law and photography in English fiction from the mid-nineteenth century because the language of my thought has been in English. I have no platform, no network, very little audience. I am one son of Mother India in a world of foreigners and strangers. Yet I ask those that do read my writing to question their own place in this great and invisible war with an invisible enemy and ask themselves whether they would be the children of India or the children of the Ancient Greeks. That, I argue, is the essential question.

Abstract Love vs. Situated and Local Love

25.09.2018

The choice between abstract love and situated and local love is evident in a quote by E. M. Forster –

“I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

Let us characterise abstract love. Abstract love is love of the country in the above quote or the supporting of “causes”, which are “public”, or, rather, “publicly accepted”. A “cause” can be defined as either a “charitable undertaking” or “a principle or movement militantly defended or supported” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary Online). Abstract love supports “principles” rather than human beings (the opposition is between friends and the abstract entities of country and cause). The country is an imaginary entity which is also largely publicly supported in the idea of abstract love. A country is largely an idea. It only has status as a piece of fiction. There is no such thing as a country. There is just a varied collection of people in a geographical space, who all live varied kinds of lives, not some kind of unchanging, abstract entity. Abstract love says that you should love all these people that you don’t know for whatever reason because of the abstract idea of a country and for abstract principles. Think about that in detail. There are no intimate human relationships required, no close contact with the recipients. In abstract love, the love that is most supported is the love of the stranger, of the anonymous. In abstract love, there is a morality which is that you should love a fictional idea more than you love those close to you: politicians tell you to love the country. This is felt like a compulsion by Forster who has to resist it strongly. What is the object of love in abstract love, the idea of the politicians? The country is seen as something larger than a single human being, as more universal. There is an idea of the larger versus the smaller, or the general versus the particular. The country is public, the individual is private. The country is emblematic of “good” group membership, community, etc. Love of the country is therefore contrasted to the love of the individual human being who just stands for personal love.

Let us now characterise situated and local love. In this form of love, you support individuals who you love. You know them. The reason that you love them is that you know them. You don’t love strangers and help them: it is those close to you that you love. This love is entirely intimate. It is situated because you just happened to be somehow connected to the person by complete chance. It is not about principles, it is about your own situated love. Biographical details are more important in this form of love than principles and sharing publicly accepted group affiliations. This love relies on an idea of the domestic sphere rather than the private sphere: you love those close to you, not those that political figures tell you to, as in the case of the country. It is about what you yourself choose to support as an individual. In situated and local love, you are not a removed and detached “objective” thinker with ideals of “universality” (abstract love pretends it is this – it is not, as you will know if you meet any nationalists). You are subjective. You favour the particular over the general, the smaller over the larger – the individual over the nation state. That is, you choose your own private group of membership (in friends) over what is publicly accepted as the main form of membership (nationality).

I have already said which love I choose. Why did I choose the smaller over the larger, the particularistic over the general? Because who else is going to help the poor members of my family in India? I have noted that they are systematically oppressed. Yet, for all the talk about altruism and abstract love, they have no support.

You might say that the abstract thinkers are in the minority and that is the problem with the world. After all, there is no one helping the people that are starving. But there is a morality to local and situated love. This is that you should tend to your own garden first before you start addressing other issues. First of all, my mother helps her family. Then, if she can, she helps people from our socially disadvantaged community on the basis of group identity. My mother is particularistic, not abstract and general. It is the same with the rest of our family. According to lovers of abstraction, this is seen as self-serving, selfish, etc. It is seen as a bad form of group identity and belonging (i.e. tribalism). It is seen as the inferior form of loving since it is situated. But the strength of situated and local love is that it is from insiders and local: who else is going to help anyone in that community that is outside that community? How many thousands of years of oppression have my people faced? No one helped us except our own. That is reality: people are selfish.

Internalising Stereotypes: Suggested Identities, Individuality and Free Choice

25.04.2018 –

Abstract: Oppressed groups in our society internalise negative constructions of identity and learned sets of behaviours transmitted in media which override personal responsibility and individuality. They do this because they are required to exhibit such identities and behaviours on the public stage because of the constraints imposed upon them by culture.

Keywords: Stereotypes, Cultural Brainwashing, Free Will, Personal Responsibility, Negative expectations

Elaboration. Clarification. Evidence.

Speculation, even that of the armchair theorist, has to be sustained by the holy trio I have just cited. The last time I wrote, the topic was how the justice of the oppressed has been constructed as inevitably having a violent and bodily conclusion. The argument that I made was that the identity of the violent individual and even the framework of action of this individual have been transmitted across Western culture and time as a model for the behaviour and personhood of oppressed groups in our society. This is a model which they turn to in order to construct ideas of justice and individuality and to deal with injustice in this society since it is conceived of as “their own justice”, a justice that is peculiar to them and in which constructions of personhood and difference are inherent. Another reason why they turn to these models for identity and action is because they have been systematically denied any other form of expression in this society so that they cannot become factors in public thought, politics and in the apportioning of power.

There is a big assumption in the argument that I made. Instead of talking about individual responsibility, consciousness and so on, I cited the phrase “cultural brainwashing” in the key terms at the start of the speculations. I argued that individuals take up the identity and framework of action evident in the plays of Shakespeare and such productions as the recent Black Panther movie because they have been insidiously insinuated to them from the time before they have even been born.

Why have I assumed that the identity of the violent avenger is suggested to oppressed individuals and can override conventional notions of individuality, free will, conscious choice and personhood? Is there any proof of this? Just because something is there in Shakespeare and the Black Panther movie, and a similar thing seems to happen in real life, does that prove that my speculations are correct?

While I was pondering whether fiction can be invoked to prove something that happens in real life, I thought I would make a few notes on the topic of suggested identity and the internalisation of stereotypes and how both relate to free will, choice and conscious thought. To introduce the topic, I want to write about a recent change in advertising standards which you can read about here – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40638343

As the BBC writes, the Advertising Standards Authority have set out a mission statement to “crack down on ads that feature stereotypical gender roles.” There were particularly aggravating examples that were cited:

One example was an advert for Aptamil baby milk formula that showed girls growing up to be ballerinas and boys becoming engineers.

Complaints had also been made about adverts for clothing retailer Gap that showed a boy becoming an academic, and a girl becoming a “social butterfly”.

What was the justification for cracking down on such adverts? As the BBC journalist writes:

The review suggested that new standards should consider whether the stereotypes shown would “reinforce assumptions that adversely limit how people see themselves and how others see them.”

“Portrayals which reinforce outdated and stereotypical views on gender roles in society can play their part in driving unfair outcomes for people,” said Guy Parker, chief executive of the ASA.

“While advertising is only one of many factors that contribute to unequal gender outcomes, tougher advertising standards can play an important role in tackling inequalities and improving outcomes for individuals, the economy and society as a whole.”

There is a simple idea at the heart of the justification of the advertising crackdown: media plays a role in constraining individuals to adopt certain identities and schemas of action. Media can determine and limit notions of personhood and action. Media can override ideas about free will and choice to produce certain types of individuals that act in a certain kind of way. Stereotypes in the media can be internalised and magnify and build on societal expectations to influence behaviour and identity. There is a qualification: media is just one factor in contributing to “unequal gender outcomes”.

The question remains, however, whether this justification is valid or not. The ASA suggests that media is just one aspect of an entire societal apparatus which is producing gender and gendered forms of identity and behaviour. They make the same claim about cultural brainwashing that I do, that such cultural brainwashing produces zombies that lack responsibility and free will. How exactly is this process of cultural brainwashing played out?

As I was thinking over this topic, trying to work out how individuals internalise expected identities and learned sets of behaviours, one persistent image kept on coming to mind. I am talking about the case of the athlete with the home crowd advantage. There is no need to focus on a particular example, since everyone knows exactly what I am talking about. Here is the typical scenario. There is a home crowd which is composed of people of the same nationality. The home crowd have one athlete in the final who is of the same nationality as them. If one looks at the past record of this athlete, there seems to be very little chance that they will win anything. The athlete’s ranking is not that good. However, the crowd expects the athlete to bring home a medal. Somehow, amazingly, the athlete performs better than he or she has ever performed in their life. They fulfil the crowd’s expectations and bring home a medal. It is the same with teams as it is with individuals.

Here, then, is the prime illustration of how a society’s expectations can be internalised in order to produce a certain identity, that of medal winner, and an expected set of behaviours, a medal winning performance. But what isn’t remarked on and what is brilliantly weird about this phenomenon is that it actually happens. How can someone whose body hasn’t ever and seemingly can’t perform at that level suddenly do what it does in the final? Why does their body and their behaviour change so radically? It is precisely because of the societal expectation that they act in a certain way and become medallists. And this societal expectation is based in nationalism and ideas of national identity. These athletes are drawing on notions of shared and constructed identities in order to behave in a certain way. All the training that they did in their life never allowed them access to a medal winning performance before. It required an internalisation of shared national identity and a meeting of the expectation and demand of the nationalist crowd in order to achieve that result.

One can see then, that individuals can internalise identities and behaviours which are expected of them by society and which themselves radically transform them and their actions in a way that is nothing short of miraculous. The expectations of a group can change the very fabric of reality. These expectations can override conscious thought – the athletes have always consciously tried to win but were never able to gain the victory, however much they trained and tried. It is the adoption of a shared cultural identity and set of behaviours by athletes which, although they are seemingly unrelated to the task in hand (after all, it is not a requisite qualification of being British that one is a gymnast or fast runner) completely changes performance and result and, indeed, alters the body at a fundamental level.

Well. Let us return to our ideas about how culturally shared negative expectations of oppressed individuals can transform their behaviour and override conscious thought, free will and choice. If the scenario in the athlete example can be seen as analogous to how a culture works, then we can see how and why negative expectations fundamentally change the character of individuals. Such expectations, transmitted though media, are internalised and are too powerful to resist. They do away with ideas about free choice, individual responsibility and individuality. Such ideas crush the very stuff that persons are made out of to reproduce stock types. They are too powerful. The group’s expectations completely overwhelm and defeat the individual. The individual can then only exhibit learned behaviour. The word exhibit is important. I think the athlete situation is analogous to the situation in culture because of one important point. Both the athlete and the oppressed individual are on display. They have to perform as though they were in a play to a society that is watching since their actions take place in public. This is why I think that the justice of the oppressed is a form of communication and perceived as the only way to express ideas about justice and the resistance to injustice.

Well, such are the speculations of the armchair theorist. What is the importance of such idle speculations and this short note on the matter? I think the significance is that in Western media, there are only really negative representations of oppressed peoples. They are always shown as violent, barbaric, backward and criminal. Where are the positive role models? When was the last time you saw a British Asian as a hero in western media? The fact is that it is negative expectations of us that are always channelled in the western imagination. If people then internalise and act on these negative expectations, which are not just in media, but everywhere around us in this society, are these people really to blame? If personal responsibility and individuality are really obliterated by group expectations, can we point the finger at perceived criminals? Surely our ideas about law and justice, which rely on notions of free will, choice and individual responsibility have to change?

Shakespeare and the Justice of the Oppressed

23.04.2018 –

Abstract: Violence and justice are linked. Our culture teaches oppressed groups in our society that violence is the only viable means available to them to resist injustice. These lessons are evident in Shakespeare’s plays in which oppressed characters always demand justice in bodily terms and in horrific acts against the bodies of oppressors. Hamlet is just one example.

Keywords: Violence, Justice, Law, Shakespeare, Hamlet, Nasim Aghdam, Cultural Brainwashing

A recent news item that caught my eye was the case of the YouTube Killer, Nasim Aghdam. The woman in question, now known as a killer, was someone that cared passionately about justice. As the Guardian stated, she “used social media to fight for justice on a planet ‘full of diseases’” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/04/youtube-shooting-suspect-nasim-aghdam-profile). Nasim had been a gentle person from her childhood. In an interview, her father reflected on how out of character her crime was. He told the Bay Area News Group that “his daughter was a vegan activist and animal lover who as a youngster would not even kill ants in the family home, instead using paper to move them to the back yard” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/04/youtube-shooting-suspect-nasim-aghdam-profile). What led a gentle woman that was committed to justice to such a violent conclusion?

Violence and justice. Violence and justice. Are these two things intimately connected? Or was Nasim’s final act just a random event? For the armchair theorist, a theorist who moreover has no time to pursue his many and diverse interests, everything has to remain at the level of speculation. My speculation is that Nasim was one of the oppressed. She was an Iranian immigrant in a country that is thoroughly and systematically afflicted with racism. She had seen how the human race treated our animal brothers and sisters who she felt an honest kinship with. What the immigrant suffers, what the lover of nature must suffer in this world of iniquity and injustice. Have you ever stayed up all night wondering where your justice is? Have you ever cried in your heart of hearts for justice, knowing that it will never come? As Nasim wrote, “I live on a planet that is full of injustice”. The justice that she was led to, in the form of violence, was the justice of the oppressed. Already, the reader is enraged. How can one call a random killing an act of justice, like the killer framed it? How can one speak of the justice of the oppressed as a form of justice, hence giving it some sort of validity and legitimacy? What evidence do I base this seemingly bizarre and arbitrary claim upon, that Nasim’s act was an act of the justice of the oppressed? The evidence is in Shakespeare’s plays.

There is a stock type character in the Shakespeare play, a Nasim, one of the oppressed that demands justice in the form of terrible violence. In the Merchant of Venice, the stock type is a Jew called Shylock. Because of the indignities and hate he has to face in a Christian country, Shylock demands his pound of flesh from one of his oppressors. Shylock is not alone. Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, who is captured in war as a trophy, also demands justice and exacts a systematic plan of revenge against her oppressors. Her wrath is terrible indeed and involves murder, rape and mutilation. This stock type, the immigrant, the oppressed that is out for a violent justice exists in the Western imagination even today. I have written at length about one such character in the recent Black Panther movie, who is called “Killmonger’ to emphasise his link with violence. The Killmonger, an immigrant, wishes to arm the oppressed against the oppressors and is therefore treated like a supervillain.

Why does the oppressed victim pursue a campaign of horrific violence against their oppressors? It may seem natural to link violence and revenge in ideas about “instincts” and “natural aggression” but this would be to obscure the cultural link of meaning between them. Moreover, such ideas obscure the fact that the oppressed have had to endure horrific suffering themselves to become what they have become. The reader of this piece has never seen the illusion of justice torn to pieces before their eyes and realized their awful impotency in this world of injustice. That illusion of justice, which gives meaning to the life of those that live in a thoroughly unjust world is what makes life bearable. When it is gone and replaced by harsh and punishing truth, how does one bear life? What illusion can give meaning and value to life again?

What gives meaning and value to the life of the oppressed is to be revenged. The brutal mental wounds that they have to bear are to be resolved in an act against the body of the oppressor. The oppressed know that they cannot attack the mind of the oppressor. The mind of the oppressor is blind to the justice of the oppressed and to their fury. This mind, the mind of the oppressor, is moreover, a mind shared by the entirety of culture and society. It sits there like an all-powerful Christian god at the heart of everything. It is in the so-called laws and justice of the time, the art of the time, in the literature of the time, in the music of the time, in the commercial transactions and economy of the time, in the international relations of the time and in every act and thought in this culture and society. For the oppressed, there is only one method to attack the oppressor. It is the body. And this is why the justice of the oppressed is inextricably tied to the body.

The greatest play of Shakespeare is about this same idea. Hamlet is one of the oppressed. He has to live as subject to someone who has killed his father. Hamlet knows that the only way that he can achieve justice is to kill his oppressor in a violent act. There is no other alternative. Hamlet doesn’t use poison or any subtle method against his oppressor, although he thinks of it. He doesn’t raise a revolution against Claudius, his uncle and usurper. The justice of the oppressed can only be expressed in violent form against the body of the oppressed. This is the ultimate lesson and finale of the play. Shakespeare has taught us that the justice of the oppressed can only take a certain form which allows no exceptions.

When the people judge someone like Nasim then, a woman who loved justice, and write their biased accounts about what led her to her act, when the culture that claims that Shakespeare is some sort of human god, I will always say the same thing. The oppressed have only acted according to the rules which this culture and society has put in place. They have aimed for the only justice which we have accorded them, which is the justice of the oppressed. These people are acting in a framework of thought and action which this culture and society have given them, a framework which is specially intended for them and which has been taught to them even before they were born. As immigrants and oppressed people, they have been taught that they can only express their rage in terms of the body and against bodies. They have not been allowed into the rules that govern thought, only the rules that govern the body and violence. It is this culture and this society that is ultimately at fault. It is Shakespeare that it is at fault. It is the oppressor that is at fault, not the oppressed. A woman that could not hurt an ant can become a cold blooded murderer because of a lifetime of suggestion and brainwashing in Western culture. And then, this victim, this same woman, can be shown as an example of what immigrants are like in this same culture, as just another example of the same thing. Such is the hypocrisy, malice and deviousness of the culture that we live in, and its ultimate injustice.

The Artistic Failures of a Mr. Nobody

02.02.2018

A little while back, I read an article in a newspaper, possibly the Guardian, about a writer who had never made it and had never been published. The novels that this man had dedicated his life to, forgoing employment and the material things of life, were described as “execrable”, or some such choice word. Here was a Mr. Nobody who produced “artistic failures”. No one wanted to publish his writing. No one wanted to read his writing. Yet, day after day, Mr. Nobody sat at his desk and pushed out the words.

Mr. Nobody could be anyone. There are thousands of people in the same position: writers, poets, artists, singers and musicians. Certainly, Mr. Nobody is myself. One wonders, though, how Mr. Nobody can bear his numerous disappointments and the miscarriages of his babies in the world. Today I want to write a little piece about this artistic failure and disappointment. I regard artistic failure as a lack of recognition. The reader will forgive this narcissistic exploration. Chekov wrote that it is only a mediocre novelist that goes on and on about writing a novel, not the successful writer. So be it, yet even the mediocre novelist must have an opinion and reflect upon his or her failures and successes.

The story is a common one. After years of publishing creative work in student newspapers and magazines as a young man, I thought, optimistically, that the next step would surely be publication with a serious publisher. I expected the wider world to take note of what I had published in the student publications. I sent off my poetry to magazines and publishing houses like Faber and Faber. I tried to get my short stories published in American magazines. I applied for book reviewing and journalistic positions. The result? Rejection after rejection. Gradually, I stopped sending my stuff out to companies and applying for work. I published online, thus cutting off any potential revenue from my work. Now, my poetry was up on my blog and I found out that poetry publishers wouldn’t publish work that had already featured online. The amount of readers that I had could be counted on one hand. It was the same thing with my short stories and book reviews. I put the music that I had composed and sang to online. When it was my own original music, perhaps twenty people would listen to my songs at most. I took up art about two years ago and post work on my Instagram account. The work has generated zero income and I have never managed to go over seventy likes on a picture.

Having reached middle age, it is clear that I am an artistic failure. Like Mr. Nobody, my creative work has never been published, has never generated any revenue and is read, listened to and seen by only a small handful of people. I have not received real recognition for my work. Producing this creative work, which costs money and takes up time when I could be earning money is therefore something of Sisyphean enterprise. Like the Ancient Greek character, I push the boulder up the mountain every time I sit at my desk to produce anything and it never gets anywhere. How does a person bear the constant disappointment and frustration? How does he or she bear the indifference and apathy of the general public which would tend to suggest that these cultural productions are worthless?

These questions have been considered by creative thinkers in the past. I recently read a short story about the issue called “Enoch Soames” by Max Beerbohm which was first published in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (May 1916). Enoch is a poet who does not get the attention that he feels he deserves. His belief in his work, however, is undying. He therefore makes a pact with the devil to travel into the future because he is convinced that his work is ahead of its time and will be revered by future readers. He thus stakes his soul on his belief in his work since this is the devil’s fee. However, on arriving into the future, Enoch finds that he is still a Mr. Nobody. Beerbohm’s story reflects a somewhat delusional belief which keeps a Mr. Nobody going. Mr. Nobody believes that, if not today, then maybe tomorrow there will be the attention and the notice. Mr. Nobody lives in a strange world of time, chance and happening, much like the lottery ticket buyer. After all, Mr. Nobody has read the rubbish which is published everywhere and which is popular. He’s seen the hacks claiming the prime place in the affections of people. Mr. Nobody knows that it is a just a question of luck and the capricious and fickle whims of the public. It is not what is of value that is valued. What is of value is frequently discarded to the rubbish pile of history while that which is worthless is heralded as brilliant and daring. The darlings of the public are not infrequently mountebanks and monsters. Mr. Nobody therefore, irresistibly, inevitably, sets himself at defiance to the world. He stands in contempt of this world. This contempt hardens Mr. Nobody’s strict belief in himself. Mr. Nobody says to himself each and every morning “It does not matter if none believe in me. For I am only to believe in myself and everything will follow”.

After all, Mr. Nobody does not just model himself on Sisyphus, but also models himself on Cassandra. Cassandra was cursed to speak words of truth that none would believe. If her words of prophecy had been listened to and followed, Troy would not have fallen to the Greeks. Mr. Nobody believes in the value of what he expresses. If, one day, Mr. Nobody is to be recognised as someone who was saying something of value, then he believes it is the misfortune of others not to have heard his voice. Mr. Nobody believes that in frustrating his expression and his voice, which is only fully expressed in the presence of an audience, the public is hurting itself.

Such is the ego and the arrogance of a Mr. Nobody. Ego is the apt word because one thinks of how Sigmund Freud divided up the work of the different components of subjectivity. Ego would produce and produce. It had a limitless creativity and spontaneity. However, the superego guarded the gates of expression. It would sit in judgement of what ego had written and censor the material, not allowing certain things past the gate. Mr. Nobody is the ultimate version of the ego while the public, as ever, is the superego. Mr. Nobody wants ego to prevail and burst through every attempt at resistance. Mr. Nobody does not believe in “compromise”, the word that Sigmund Freud picked out for the repressive mechanism of the superego. And, one wonders, without the arrogance of the ego, would creative work be possible? In the creative work, the human being says “I am and I am beautiful”. The creative human being is not just arrogant but a narcissist. And where the creative being does not assert that claim, then, says Mr. Nobody, that creative being has failed. If creative work is not the expression of self, it is nothing. But what of it? For, of course, Mr. Nobody is neither published, read, or listened to. Where Mr. Nobody is concerned, the world blind and deaf. And these are the artistic failures of a Mr. Nobody.