Beyond Rivalry

Nicholas Kristof's column in the NYT today -- "Extended Forecast: Bloodshed" -- connects the killing of witches with the environmental affects of climate change:

 

"Here’s a forecast for a particularly bizarre consequence of climate change: more executions of witches.  As we pump out greenhouse gases, most of the discussion focuses on direct consequences like rising seas or aggravated hurricanes. But the indirect social and political impact in poor countries may be even more far-reaching, including upheavals and civil wars -- and even more witches hacked to death with machetes.

 

"In rural Tanzania, murders of elderly women accused of witchcraft are a very common form of homicide. And when Tanzania suffers unusual rainfall -- either drought or flooding -- witch-killings double, according to research by Edward Miguel, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

"'In bad years, the killings explode,' Professor Miguel said. He believes that if climate change causes more drought years in Tanzania, the result will be more elderly women executed there and in other poor countries that still commonly attack supposed witches."

 

 

Kristof also looks at the strong relationship between economic hard times and lynchings, civil wars, and other forms of  violence against 'the other' who is judged to have caused the hardship.

 

 

 

I'm reading the journal and letters of a 27- to 29-year-old Jewish woman in Holland in 1941-43, called Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork (1996). Most of the journal is written while she's living in Amsterdam -- working, having love affairs, taking walks, socialising with friends, enjoying life, and at the same time "working on" herself, "rooting out" things she recognises as harmful or hateful in herself, with the help of a therapist/lover. A small part of the journal, and all the letters, are written after she is at Westerbork transit camp (from Aug. 1942 until Sept. 1943).


 

The book covers a lot of ground, many themes and ideas. What resonates for me most is this: "All disasters stem from us. Why is there a war? Perhaps because now and then I might be inclined to snap at my neighbor."

 

For today, though, I want to focus on Etty's views of suffering, in light of another, contemporary story.

 

Etty seems to me to make much of the meaning of suffering, what can be learned from it, what it teaches her, how to prepare for it. Those passages in the book uniformly feel forced to me, feel like someone trying to make meaning, to make it make sense. It feels to me, reading these passages, that making meaning is a way to exercise control, and Etty seems intermittently aware of this. She pre-enacts what she will do when her call-up card comes, what she will take with her, how she will feel and what her attitude will be. She repeatedly avers that she can bear what is in store for her, which to me reads as a charm to ward off fear and perhaps even 'what is in store.' Otherwise, why keep writing it down, unless to convince herself?  I'm speaking as someone who has done exactly this in my own journals. What she does seems perfectly natural, borne of raw fear of the unknown and a desire to master it, desire to maintain a detached and loving attitude in the face of destruction and cruelty. As I said, she sometimes seems aware that she's done this: "A few days ago I thought that nothing more could happen to me, that I had suffered everything in anticipation." (July 1942)

 

Before she volunteers in July 1942 to be deported, along with the other Jews --  Etty apparently could have been given an exemption or been hidden, either of which might have been a temporary or longer-lasting stay of execution; at one point she says she would take a medical exemption, but apparently she's not offered one -- she spends time preparing herself mentally for the challenge of suffering. She tells herself that she must persevere and be productive; "I shall have to adapt myself in advance, make incapacity part of my daily life, of my whole self, the better to control and then dismiss it."  She seeks to train herself "in more frugal habits," to pursue her secret appetites and "try to root them out." She speaks often about how external things (which she enumerates to us many times -- all her specific books, flowers, photographs) are just props, that it's what one carries inside oneself that counts. This seems to me to be making a virtue of necessity, since she knows she likely won't have any control over the externals. (Again, been there and done that!)

 

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Here are some of her thoughts on suffering. She rarely writes about it from March 1941-June 1942, except about her own physical suffering and her jealousy and desire relating to her therapist/lover. It's when it becomes apparent that suffering will come to her, one way or another (whether she 'chooses' it, acquiesces to it, or is conscripted), that she seems to take up the topic in earnest.

 

Her journal entries in July predate her time in the transit camp; there are no entries for August; those for Sept. and Oct. are the last of the journal entries and are written in Amsterdam when she is on leave from Westerbork for a month.

 

She recognises the universality of suffering
 

"Yesterday I suddenly thought: there will always be suffering, and whether one suffers from this or from that really doesn't make much difference. It is the same with love. One should be less and less concerned with the love object and more and more with love itself. ... People may grieve more for a cat that has been run over than for countless victims of a city that has been bombed out of existence. It is not the object but the suffering ..." (April 1942, right after they have begun to wear the yellow stars)

  

"Does it matter if it is the Inquisition that causes people to suffer in one century, and war and pogroms in another? To suffer senselessly, as the victims would put it? Suffering has always been with us, does it really matter in what form it comes? All that matters is how we bear it and how we fit it into our lives."  (July 1942)

 

"I am not alone in my tiredness or sickness or fears, but at one with millions of others from many centuries, and it is all part of life." (July 1942)

 

"Many people are being killed this very moment, all over the world, while I sit here writing beside my rose-red cyclamen under my steel office lamp." (Sept. 1942)

 

 

She does not blame God, or anyone but herself (all of us) for the suffering she sees

 

"I shall have to pray for this German soldier. Out of all those uniform one has been given a face now. There will be other faces, too, in which we shall be able to read something we understand: that German soldiers suffer as well. There are no frontiers between suffering people, and we must pray for them all" (July 1942)

 

She tells God that she knows "You cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard a little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well. Alas, there doesn't seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, our lives, Neither do I hold you responsible." (July 1942)

 

 

She believes that people suffer needlessly, when they could avoid it
 

"The greatest cause of suffering in so many of our people is their utter lack of inner preparation." (July 1942)

 

"The most depressing thing of all is that the mental horizon of all the people I work with [at the Jewish Council] is so narrow. They don't even suffer deep down. They just hate and blind themselves to their own pettiness, they intrigue, they are still ambitious to get on. ..." (July 1942)

 

 

She believes that suffering and death are meaningful, meant to teach us, and our response to them determines our worthiness as individuals and as a culture
 

"Most of us in the West don't understand the art of suffering and experience a thousand fears instead. We cease to be alive, being full of fear, bitterness, hatred and despair. God knows it's only too easy to understand why. But when we are deprived of our lives, are we really deprived of very much? We have to accept death as part of life, even the most horrible of deaths. And don't we live an entire life in each one of our days, and does it really matter if we live a few days more or less?  ... It is a question of living from minute to minute and taking suffering into the bargain." (June 1942)

 

"Whether or not I am a valuable human being will only become clear from my behavior in more arduous circumstances. And if I should not survive, how I die will show me who I really am." (July 1942)

 

"If all this suffering does not help us to broaden our horizon, to attain a greater humanity by shedding all trifling and irrelevant issues, then it will all have been for nothing."  (July 1942) 

 

"Man suffers most through his fears of suffering. ...  But the idea of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn life into a precious thing) must be destroyed. If you destroy the ideas behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars, then you liberate your true life, its real mainsprings, and then you will also have the strength to bear real suffering, your own and the world's." (Sept. 1942)

 

"These two months behind barbed wire have been the two richest and intense months of my life, in which my highest values were so deeply confirmed. I have learned to love Westerbork." (Sept. 1942)

 

"How is it that my spirit, far from being oppressed, seemed to grow lighter and brighter there? It is because I read the signs of the times and they did not seem meaningless to me. Surrounded by my writers and poets and the flowers on my desk, I loved life. And there among the barracks, full of hunted and persecuted people, I found confirmation of my love of life. Life in those drafty barracks was no other than life in this protected, peaceful room. Not for one moment was I cut off from the life I was said to have left behind. There was simply one great, meaningful whole." (Sept. 1942)

 

"What matters is not that we preserve our lives at any cost, but how we preserve them. ... [I]f we have nothing to offer a desolate postwar world but our bodies sved at any cost, if we fail to draw new meaning from the deep wells of our distress and despair, then it will not be enough." (Dec. 1942 letter)

 

Etty's great hope in going to the camp is that she will be the "thinking heart" for the camp: "I hope to be a center of peace in that madhouse," she writes in July 1942. In Oct., writing from Amsterdam on leave from Westerbork, she reflects that she was "sometimes filled with an infinite tenderness, and lay awake for hours letting all the many, too many impressions of a much-too-long day wash over me, and I prayed, 'Let me be the thinking heart of these barracks.' And that is what I want to be again. The thinking heart of the whole concentration camp."

 

She finds significance, identity and meaning in her role as the camp's "thinking heart."

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In her last entry, in Oct. 1942, she writes: "When I suffer for the vulnerable, is it not for my own vulnerability that I really suffer?"

This question seems to me one of her truest statements.

 

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With this in mind, I heard a story on BBC radio today (RAM file) about a Congolese woman named Zawadi, about age 30, who has suffered brutal horrors and torture wrought by other humans. (She is one of many who have suffered these things, as Etty recognised in her own time.) Last spring, her family and friends were killed with knives, bayonettes, and machettes by the Interahamwe, rebel Hutu militia. Her brother was decapitated when he refused to rape her. Two of her children were killed as she stood with them. She strangled her infant child with her own hands on the command of the rebel soldiers. She was gang raped, her pelvis damaged permanently from the force of the rapes, and now she is stigmatised because she's a rape victim. She wishes aloud that she had been killed along with the others.

 

She works now as a porter to make money but doesn't have enough for a place to live (she's living in a rented house courtesy of the church through this month) or enough food. She has one daughter surviving, a 5-year-old named Response, whom she cites as the reason she killed her infant child rather than be killed herself -- "I had to stay alive for her." She fears for Response's safety, having seen younger children raped.

 

Zawadi is listless, devastated, grieving. She says," I get nothing out of life. I can't see anything in the future." She wants the Interahamwe, the rebel soldiers, driven out of the Congo, but she does not want them killed: "I still feel that I don't want those people to be killed. I know that God will judge them."

 

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Etty's fervent belief was that the German soldiers deserved compassion, and that others' hatred and evil was inextricably tied to her own pettiness, her own rottenness, her own bitterness and hatred, which she continually worked to extricate from herself. She also says, very early on, that "the problem of our age" is that "hatred of Germans poisons everyone's mind," quite an astonishing assessment when you think about it.

 

(Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams, more recently, has said the same thing: "Much more importantly, the entire message of the Bible on this point is that the problem begins with us, not them. Jesus is killed because people who think they are good are in fact trapped in self-deception and unable to get out of the groove of their self-justifying behaviour. And the New Testament invites every reader to recognise this in himself or herself.")

 

I wonder whether Zawadi loved life and thought it was beautiful, as Etty did, before her brutal experience (and her continuing trauma and instability), and whether she can love it again.

 

Yes, to some extent we can choose our attitude, I guess, whether by working on it, making it a project, as Etty exhaustively seems to do; or by letting ourselves be graced (Etty seems to do this, too), allowing our own obstacles to grace to become transparent; and, yes, to some extent we can recognise our own rottenness, our own complicity and cooperation in war and other violence (see Why I Pay My Taxes by Ben Metcalfe in Harper's for more on this as it applies to us wealthy Americans), and we can seek to be peace-filled and to project peace; but these words -- grace, peace, complicity -- seem arrogant and naive in the face of such brutality, such cruelty, such inhumane treatment. The idea that Zawadi's snippyness with neighbors (perhaps), or mine, leads to this kind of brutality seems utterly ridiculous and beside the point.

 

And yet -- when I am aware at how angry, resentful, and bitter I can feel in the most ordinary and benign of circumstances, with so little provocation, and how I lash out, or come very close to lashing out, I do truly feel that these reactions are the stuff of war, writ so much larger and allowed to proliferate in an environment hospitable to growing this particular kind of poison.

 

What I don't feel is that suffering means much. Or that how we handle it means much. Zawadi's response to her suffering seems to me acceptable, just as Etty's response to hers seems to me acceptable, not that I am any judge of it. Is suffering really some kind of test? It's hard for me to see how the victim of brutality has much to prove to anyone.

 

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Sidenote:

 

Etty is a Jew who is told a few times that her ideas are Christian (she does read the New Testament regularly). She may also be a Buddhist! The Eightfold Noble Path, which is a path away from suffering, seems very much like Etty's plan of discipline throughout the book. It includes:

 

Correct thought, like avoiding the wish to harm others. Etty speaks of this often, her desire to love and not hate.

Correct speech. Etty several times rejects others' 'intriquing' about incidents and the future, and she several times refuses to thrust the burden of her anxieties on others.

Correct actions.

Correct livelihood. Etty questions her work continuously, wondering whether she is frivolous, too cerebral, etc., and considering how to best use her energies. 

Correct understanding (developing genuine wisdom).

Correct effort. Refers to joyful perseverence needed to continue in meditation. Etty strives for this.

Correct mindfulness. Trying in maintain awareness of the 'here and now.' Etty tries to do this but spends a lot of time, as one might do when keeping a journal, reflecting on past events and imagining future ones.

Correct concentration: Keeping a steady, calm and attentive state of mind. Etty repeats a sort of mantra several times: "Slowly, steadily, patiently."

 

 

I'm all for seeing reality (including suffering) as it is, for living compassionately, for living fully here and now. It feels to me, and has long felt to me, that less managing of my life is the pathway, if there is a pathway, for me. Attaching meaning -- having to work to give something meaning -- feels ... false ... somehow.  It feels, as it seems it was at least in part for Etty, an unchallenged way to achieve a more solid identity, a purpose, a reason for living; a way to pre-emptively reduce suffering by understanding it; a way to make my life and death matter and so take away the sting of suffering and mortality.

 

But do our lives really matter? When hundreds of thousands of people are killed in gas chambers, does each of their lives matter? When an infant dies, strangled by its mother or drowned with siblings in a hotel bathtub, does its life matter? Does it have meaning? Does that infant's suffering, or its mother's, have meaning? And can the suffering humans do to each other really be understood? It can be explained (Girard and others do a good job of this, I think) but that's not the same thing.

  

I referenced Ben Metcalfe's "Why I Pay My Taxes" earlier. In it, he says:

 

"I have killed. From the first day I paid taxes to the United States government (on April 15, 1985) my spree began, and it has expanded geometrically since. I do not remember a time when I mailed in a check or a money order without a clear understanding that some part of my donation would be put toward murder. ... [A] quick glance at the newspapers over the past quarter century will confirm my kills in Central and South America, in Northern and Central Africa, in the hills of lower Asia, and of course in the Middle East. ...

 

"I have, from the comfort of my couch, made the nations to cower before me. I have, during commercial-break trips to the bathroom, left whole continents behind me in ruin. I have watched through bored and sleepy eyes as the millions came begging for mercy, and I have, without ever lifting a finger, but only allowing one to descend upon a button of my remote, turned my plump and kingly thumb down.

 

"Still, what taxpayer today, current or former, could not say the same?"

 

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All of this reminds me of a book I haven't read, Chris Hodges' War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Part of a speech he gave in connection with the book reminds me of James Alison's comments after 9/11, quoted by me many times -- so obviously, they give me meaning, shore up my identity ...

 

Hodges says:

 

"The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it gives us what we all long for in life. It gives us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our news. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble." 

 

My inner cynic sees Etty's journals as testimony of her struggle to find purpose in living through suffering (first through her physical and emotional suffering, then through a greater, 'sacred,' ennobled suffering), to create an identity for herself as a noble and worthy person, one who could radiate peace and compassion to those who were ill-prepared for suffering, to those who found their own excitement and identity in 'intriguing' and feverishly forecasting how long the war would last and whether the British would save them.  

 

From Etty's letters, Dec. 1942: "Perhaps we have faculties other than reason in us, faculties that in the past we didn't know we had but that possess the ability to grapple with the incomprehensible." Then in June 1943, as she watches the 35 cattle cars filled with 3,000 Jews taking off for their final destination: "The sky is full of birds, the purple lupins stand up so regally and peacefully, two little old women have sat down on the box for a chat, the sun is shining on my face -- and right before our eyes, mass murder. The whole thing is simply beyond comprehension."

  

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Notes of an Anesthesiobist details Zawadi's story well. More details at BBC, too, including charities working in the Congo. War Victims Monitor collects these stories of civilian casualties from around the world.

Spring finally seems to be making headway here, with temps in the 50s and crocus blooming.

 

Photos below are crocus, taken last week in the rain; crocus and galanthus (snowdrops), taken yesterday; bleeding heart (dicentra) emerging from the soil, taken yesterday. Click on any to enlarge somewhat, or see larger versions at Flickr.

 

 

I wasn't sure how often I'd be posting stories of contemporary mob violence but it looks like there are enough incidents to post a list of them every two weeks or less. (If you want to know why I'm doing this, read the first posting.)

 

Be sure to read the last incident, which is different from the others.

 

Conformity: The accusation of 'witch' makes those accused seem to be outsiders. There are no details about how the accusation came about, what perceptions it was based on, whether the women had caused perceived harm to anyone. The group attacked the police station where the women were in protective custody because they felt the police were delaying 'justice' in this case. That there were more than 1,000 people in the mob indicates strong community unanimity in the accusation.

 

Conformity: Not much info here. This part of India sees a lot of lynchings, so obviously if there is a sense of peace and unity afterwards, it's very short-lived. The most interesting part of this report is the family's testimony that he is not an habitual thief. Remember that in the report on the man lynched on 26 March in Bihar it was said that "there seems to be no resentment as the man had criminal antecedents." In this new case, the family may be signalling that the man did not deserve this treatment and that there may well be "resentment." (Or they may just be upholding family honour.)

 

4. 3 April 2008, Sheffield, England, UK:

"Three Asian men were locked up this week for their part in the 'mob violence' that led to the death of an Iraqi Kurd on the streets of Sheffield. Ismail Rashid, aged 42, was the victim of an 'honour killing', beaten to death because he had been sleeping with a married Pakistani woman. A gang of up to 20 attacked him ... in June last year and he died in the Northern General Hospital eight days later, despite brain surgery.  Amjad Latif, aged 27, armed himself with part of a roof rack from his car and hit Mr Rashid around the head, knocking him to the ground, Sheffield Crown Court was told. A 'sustained attack' by others followed, with Ashraf Latif, 18, and Ishtiaq Ahmed, 19, both admitting kicking him as he lay on the ground. On Tuesday they were sentenced to a total of 20-and-a-half years in custody. ... The purposes of sentencing in a case like this are clear – to punish the individual offenders and to send a clear message that the use of mob violence in the streets cannot be tolerated in a civilised society." The catalyst for the attack had apparently been Rashid's spraypainting of his nickname 'Rambo' while he was drunk on the front of a shop owned the Latif brothers' cousin.

Conformity: The victim was seen as deserving violence, because he was breaking a cultural (and presumably religious) taboo. He further 'incited' his attackers by flaunting himself and defacing another's property.  In a 'civilised society' that places a cultural prohibition on extra-marital affairs, the victim probably would not be attacked or killed (though he might be, but probably only by one person, not a group) but would likely be scapegoated in more subtle ways, by economic and social exclusion, by ruining his reputation, and so on. The woman would probably be scapegoated as well. In some civilised societies, there is little or no prohibition on extra-marital affairs, perhaps because the role of religion is minimal in those areas. ? Are there 'civilised' countries where such things are handled by a civil legal system?

 

5. 1 April 2008, Waycross, GA, USA: Third-graders plot to harm teacher.

"A group of third-graders plotted to attack their teacher, bringing a broken steak knife, handcuffs, duct tape and other items for the job and assigning children tasks including covering the windows and cleaning up afterward, police said Tuesday.  The plot by as many as nine boys and girls at Center Elementary School in south Georgia was a serious threat, Waycross Police Chief Tony Tanner said. ... The scheme involved a division of roles, Tanner said. One child's job was to cover windows so no one could see outside, he said. Another was supposed to clean up after the attack."

"The children, ages 8 and 9, were apparently mad at the teacher because she had scolded one of them for standing on a chair."

 

Conformity: For 8- and 9-year-olds, the teacher is an outsider by virtue of both her exalted role and her advanced age. Justification for the attack was that one of their classmates was 'unjustly' scolded for what they probably considered a minor infraction. The unusual thing about this case is that the mob attack was heavily premeditated, not spontaneous. If it had actually occured, however, others might have joined spontaneously, sucked into the excitement of the moment.

 

 

6. A different kind of mob story.

J. Dunne at Through the Eyes of Faith: Holy Cross Ghana blogs about witnessing and transforming an incident of mob violence last month.

 

At around Noon that same day [Good Friday] I heard a loud ruckus outside the school library where I was working with a student. I turned to see a few students running across the assembly area towards the canteen just outside the campus grounds. As I walked out of the room I saw about a hundred of our boys gathered around the canteen outside the campus.

I knew what it was before I got there. It was what I feared… Ewee. In the Fante language Ewee means thief. Now why does that cause me to fear? Stealing in Ghana, or in Africa, for that matter is a pretty serious crime. The thing is thieves aren't turned over to the police, in fact, the police sometimes don't ever hear about the incidents. When a thief is caught he faces mob justice which usually ends up with the thief being beaten, humiliated and then lynched, drowned, or burned to death. The general justification for such brutal punishment is that to steal something that someone has worked their whole lives for is like taking that person's life; so you should be killed for doing such a thing.

Anyway, the story is this. A young man was caught trying to steal a TV antennae in Anaji, where our school is located. The small mob stripped the man naked and beat him severely. They walked him down the road humiliating him in front of all who were present until the thief ran toward our school for some vain hope of refuge. His accusers continued to beat and insult him outside our school grounds.

When I finally got to the scene I was overcome with anger. There were my own students laughing, insulting, and encouraging the other men to beat the thief. Once of the students ran up to me laughing like a jolly fool, 'Hey Bro…look look Eweeo!' I shoved him to the ground and started screaming at the tops of my lungs for the students to go inside. I don't think they ever saw me that angry because they all scattered and ran inside. One of the teachers came out behind me and helped me to get the rest of the boys back inside.

I turned back to see the thief crying and begging for his life whilst bleeding all over. His accusers stood over him holding big sticks and shovels. They were shouting insults in the vernacular and slapping him across the face.

 

They wanted to kill him. I felt sick. I couldn't stand it so I stepped up to the accusers and begged them to let him go. At first they didn't mind me at all. Almost as if I wasn't there, but eventually they began to move away from the thief until there was only one man left. He still stood there holding his stick threatening the thief by slamming it on the bench behind where the thief was sitting. I looked at the man and told him he was sick.

 

All of the students were still watching from inside the campus. I had to do something for the young man. I took off my undershirt and gave it to the poor naked criminal. We made eye contact for about one second before I turned and headed back inside the school.

 

As I walked back into the school all of my students with impatient tones demanded to know why I would do such a thing. 'Bro why would you give that man your shirt? He is a thief.'

 

I was so bewildered by my mixture of rage and discouragement that I could hardly speak, but I did manage to answer their question. 'Because I am a Christian.'

 

I don't think they understood me.

 

 

René Girard and others (particularly, and excellently, James Alison in this post-9/11 essay) talk a lot about how humans use the act of sacralising something or someone -- grief, death, a victim, violence, etc. -- to justify the thing or the one, to make it beyond reproach, to give meaning to a meaningless act, to create unanimity and excitement, and primarily and purposefully, to confer to ourselves by association with the transcendent a heightened sense of identity, stability, and worthiness.

 

Eric Gans explains the relatonships between sacrifice and 'making sacred': "The word sacrifice contains within itself the paradox of culture. Etymologically to make sacred (sacer + facio), it means both to renounce and to kill. Culture is about renouncing and making sacred, but it is also about killing in the service of these ends."

 

With this in mind, I was interested to read this in The Economist today, in an article about how science is seeking to explain religious belief as beneficial in an evolutionary framework (the entire article is chock full of intriguing studies and conclusions):

 

"Richard Sosis, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has already done some research which suggests that the long-term co-operative benefits of religion outweigh the short-term costs it imposes in the form of praying many times a day, avoiding certain foods, fasting and so on." [Non-Orthodox Christian or Jewish Americans might find it difficult to understand how practicising one's religion incurs short-term costs ... ]

"On the face of things, it is puzzling that such costly behaviour should persist. Some scholars, however, draw an analogy with sexual selection. The splendour of a peacock's tail and the throaty roar of a stag really do show which males are fittest, and thus help females choose. Similarly, signs of religious commitment that are hard to fake provide a costly and reliable signal to others in a group that anyone engaging in them is committed to that group. Free-riders, in other words, would not be able to gain the advantages of group membership.

 

"To test whether religion might have emerged as a way of improving group co-operation while reducing the need to keep an eye out for free-riders, Dr Sosis drew on a catalogue of 19th-century American communes published in 1988 by Yaacov Oved of Tel Aviv University. Dr Sosis picked 200 of these for his analysis; 88 were religious and 112 were secular. Dr Oved's data include the span of each commune's existence and Dr Sosis found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

 

"A follow-up study that Dr Sosis conducted in collaboration with Eric Bressler of McMaster University in Canada focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members. The two researchers examined things like food consumption, attitudes to material possessions, rules about communication, rituals and taboos, and rules about marriage and sexual relationships.

 

"As they expected, they found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, at the grand old age of 149). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40. Dr Sosis therefore concludes that ritual constraints are not by themselves enough to sustain co-operation in a community -- what is needed in addition is a belief that those constraints are sanctified."

 

 

Other studies mentioned in the article corroborate the idea that, perhaps, belief in a supernatural being (whether it's G-d or a ghost, as in some studies) creates coherence and a sense of security among group members, and leads to increased cooperation, collaboration, and sharing among members of the group. This seems to accord with the Girardian thought that 'making sacred' is a way to create unanimity, stability, shared identity. It says nothing of the possible cost, which Alison addresses in his essay, talking about the response of many to the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on 11 Sept. 2001:

 

"And immediately we began to respond, and our response is to create meaning. ... As we were sucked in, so we were fascinated. The 'tremendum et fascinosum,' as Otto described the old sacred, took hold of us. ... The old sacred worked its magic: we found ourselves being sucked in to a sacred center, one where a meaningless act had created a vacuum of meaning, and we found ourselves giving meaning to it. And immediately the sacrificial center began to generate the sort of reactions that sacrificial centers are supposed to generate: a feeling of unanimity and grief. ... Phrases began to appear to the effect that 'We're all Americans now' -- a purely fictitious feeling for most of us [in London]. It was staggering to watch the togetherness build up around the sacred center, quickly consecrated as Ground Zero....

 

"And there was the grief. How we enjoy grief. It makes us feel good, and innocent. This is what Aristotle meant by catharsis, and it has deeply sinister echoes of dramatic tragedy's roots in sacrifice. One of the effects of the violent sacred around the sacrificial center is to make those present feel justified, feel morally good. A counterfactual goodness which suddenly takes us out of our little betrayals, acts of cowardice, uneasy consciences. And very quickly of course the unanimity and the grief harden into the militant goodness of those who have a transcendent object to their lives. And then there are those who are with us and those who are against us, the beginnings of the suppression of dissent. Quickly people were saying things like 'to think that we used to spend our lives engaged in gossip about celebrities' and politicians' sexual peccadillos. Now we have been summoned into thinking about the things that really matter.'

 

"And there was fear. Fear of more to come. Fear that it could be me next time. ... Fear and disorientation in a new world order. Not an entirely uncomfortable fear, the fear that goes with a satanic show. Part of the glue which binds us into it. A fear not unrelated to excitement.

 

"What I want to suggest is that most of us fell for it, at some level. We were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity. What I want to suggest is that this, this delight in being given meaning, is satanic. ...

 

"When I say satanic, I mean this in two senses .... The first sense is the sense I have just described: the fantastic pomp and work of sacrificial violence leading to an impression of unanimity, the same lie from the one who was a murderer and liar from the beginning, the same lie behind all human sacrifices, all attempts to create social order and meaning out of a sacred space of victimization. But the second sense is more important: the satanic is a lie that has been undone. It has been undone by Jesus's going to death exploding from within the whole world of sacrifice, of religion and culture based on death, and showing it has no transcendence at all. ... The pomp has nothing to do with heaven. It has nothing to do with God."

 

 

Obviously, religious communes like those referenced in the Economist article are likely not overflowing with pomp and cathartic grief. A religious commune, or religious order, may well survive not by any contrived sense of unanimity and feverish excitement borne of co-opted tragic grief -- after all, that unanimity and excitement doesn't last, and to believe that they do is to believe the lie -- but perhaps they are characterised more often rather by true transcendence, true cooperation and compassion, a unity achieved through struggle rather than unanimity. The similarity I see between the religious communes, as briefly described in the article, and the response to 9/11 that Alison is talking about, is the simple action of making meaning by referencing the sacred and transcendent, and even by actually making sacrifices (or feeling that one is making them), in an effort to feel, by association, that one has value.

 

As Alison has said, and points out later again in his essay in examining a passage in Luke 13, it's so very easy to feel justified and morally good when we ally ourselves with the transcendent, to adopt a dualistic viewpoint, to see others who differ from us as bad, as 'them,' as 'other.' It's so easy to think that I am privileged and valuable, because of my experience with the transcendent, in a way that you are not. That my life has meaning in a way that yours doesn't.

 

Alison again:

 

[I]f we are caught up in the world of giving sacred meanings, then we will be caught up in the world of reciprocal violence, of good and bad measured over against other people, and we will likewise perish. Once again I stress: Jesus [in Luke 13:1-5, and in Mark 13:1ff] will not be drawn into adding to meaning. He merely asks those who come to him themselves to move out of the world of sacred-seeming meaning. What does it mean for us to learn to look at the world through those eyes? ... 

 

"Jesus not only taught us to look away, not to allow ourselves to be seduced by the satanic. He also acted out what the undoing of the satanic meant: he was so powerful that he was able to lose to its need to sacrifice so as to show that it was entirely unnecessary. We are so used to describing Jesus's cross and resurrection as a victory -- a description taken from the military hardware store of satanic meaning -- that we easily forget that what that victory looked like was a failure. So great is the power behind Jesus's teaching and self-giving that he was able to fail, thus showing once and for all that 'having to win,' the grasping on to meaning, success, reputation, life and so on is of no consequence at all. Death could not hold him in, because he was held in being by one for whom death does not exist, is not even the sort of rival who might be challenged to a duel which someone might win. But if death can only get meaning by having victory, if the order of sacred violence can only have meaning if it matters to us to survive, to be, to feel good, at the expense of someone, then someone for whom it doesn't matter to lose is someone who is playing its game on totally different terms, and its potential for giving meaning collapses.

 

"Here is where I am heading: We can imagine in the abstract something of the power which has nothing to do with death. What is much more difficult is imagining that power incarnated in a human heart and eyes looking at this world. Yet that is what we are talking about. A human heart and eyes so utterly held by the Creator that they speak the Creator's heart about this world. And not just in word, but by a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it, thus enabling creation to be unsnarled from our truncation of it into a violent perversion and trap.

 

"Now this is what I find difficult. The heart, the desire, that wants to do something like that. What does it want? Why should it do it? Why not leave us to get on with it, stuck in our charades, thinking the world of our meaning and our death? In other words, the very fact of distracting us, by word and deed from being involved in what Merton rightly called 'pseudo events' suggests a desire for us to be something else. The eye that is teaching us to look away from the lure of the sacred is powered by a heart that wants us to be something else. And we learn our desire through the eye of another. Our learning to see through Jesus' eyes will eventually result in us desiring with Jesus' heart -- which is to say, our receiving the mind of Christ. ...

 

"Jesus not only teaches us to look away, but models what living from utterly non-rivalistic creative power for which death is not, looks like. There is a desire in this. A desire for us not to be trapped in death. And this is where I think I'm going -- something apparently terribly banal, but I think, of earth shattering significance. The person who teaches us to look away and models for us another way of desiring actually likes us. It is only possible to imagine doing something like that for someone you actually like. And Jesus is doing it for all of us who are caught up in the sacred lie -- which is to say, all of us.

 

"The staggering thing that this means, for me, is that the most extraordinary fruit of contemplation in the shadow of the violence which we are experiencing is this: God likes us. All of us. God likes me and I like being liked. It has nothing to do with whether we are bad or good, indeed, he takes it for granted that we are all more or less strongly tied up in the sacred lie. In teaching after teaching he makes the same point: all are invited, bad and good. Those are our categories, part of the problem not part of the solution, not God's category. God's 'category' for us is 'created' and 'created' means 'liked spaciously, delighted in, wanted to give extension, fulfilment, fruition to, to share in just being.' We are missing out on something huge and powerful and serene and enjoyable and safe and meaningful by being caught up in something less than that, an ersatz perversion of each of those things. And because God likes us he wants us to get out of our addiction to the ersatz so as to become free and happy. "

 

Don't miss Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, talking about her stroke at TED. She's dynamic and what she has to say is fascinating for anyone with a brain, literally.

 

I love her distinctions between the left and right hemispheres, which are quite different from and more succinct than anything I had read or heard before about their differences. She describes the left hemisphere of the brain as working like a serial port, linear and methodical, and the right side as working like a parallel port, experiencing everything as a sort of sensory energy collage. Then (here's where it gets interesting), she says that the right side is 'in the moment' all the time, and thus in the flow of what is happening now, in flow with all other energy on the planet, so that there are no boundaries, no separation between things, and everything is present tense, sensory, elemental, energy. The left side takes this energy collage it's presented with and immediately begins a process of categorising and organising the data, relating it to the experience of the past and the potential of the future.

 

She also says that the left brain is where the sense of "I" originates, the ego, the idea that "I" am separate from other things: The left side is "that little voice that says to me, 'I am. I am.' And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me 'I am,' I become separate. I become a single solid individual separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you." From the right brain's perspective, 'I'm' in the flow with all other energy, not a separate entity with boundaries. 

 

(I can't help but consider this from a Girardian perspective, from the very basic rivalry/mimesis of self and other that Girard posits and which feels true to my experience and observation -- why does the left brain have so much authority for most of us, for culture? Her comments also make me think of G-d's "I am that I am" or "I shall be that I shall be" when Moses asks G-d's name -- is that a separation-making statement or is it an expansion of self into all things?)  

 

Jill's stroke affected her left side, shutting it down, so that even in the early minutes of it she couldn't see where her arm ended and the wall began, because there weren't boundaries between the two: "Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy."  She couldn't read her business card because she could only see the pixels that make up the lettering and numbers, and she couldn't make meaning of the pixels. She spent a lot of time trying to match the shape of the squiggles she could see on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the telephone dial (so she could call her office for help). This reminds me of dreams I've had, with episodes exactly like this.

 

Her description of finding nirvana in the hospital -- a huge feeling of expansiveness, an overwhelming sense of peace -- reminds me of how people sometimes talk about the psychosis that is mania; and it also reminds me of how I have felt  near the ocean, on the beach sifting sand through my hands, watching birds, in gardens, meditating, dreaming, writing (even though it's using language, that left-brain tool), looking at art (there was a modern painting on the lower level of the National Gallery's East Wing that affected me this way in February, and I don't know what it was called or who painted it), listening to music, watching movies, in conversation with someone, making love. It's how I almost always feel when travelling on the train, like I am big and don't know or care where I end.

 

Jill's talk ends this way:

 

"So who are we? We are the life force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere where we are -- I am -- the life force power of the universe, and the life force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form. At one with all that is. Or I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere. where I become a single individual, a solid, separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the 'we' inside of me.

 

"Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading."

  

A powerful message.

 

The transcript is here but the video is better. 

Jill's website is here. 

(For 'Six Feet Under' fans: Jill had the same kind of stroke that Nate Fisher had, due to an AVM)