On the Three Ways to Care

Image from a KiddiKraft blog post dated 30 July 2014

http://kiddikraft.com/blog/5-ways-instill-compassion-children/

There are at least three important ways in which one might offer care to others: 

(i) with compassion -

(ii) with indifference -

(iii) with resentment -

To care with compassion, or with sympathy, is to actively share in the suffering of others whilst at the same time maintaining the integrity of one's own soul. It is not motivated by a will to merger and it is not merely a mechanical feeling of pity for those one deems deserving of such. Compassion is a noble virtue of the heart free from moral judgement. 

To care with indifference sounds, at first, somewhat paradoxical. But, for me, whilst indifference is certainly not a form compassion, it doesn't mean that one is completely uncaring. Rather, it means that one does so with an ironic perspective and a healthy degree of insouciance. Indifference is an instinctive reaction to the suffering which would otherwise overwhelm us and compel us to tears; a form of self-protection against the mortal danger of becoming over-concerned and eaten up with caring. Indifference is a noble quality of mind.

To care with resentment is to poison the very concept of care. It is a feeling against rather than with or even for others and it ultimately causes the person who experiences it to fall out of touch not only with those who have (rightly or wrongly) caused such bitterness, but with their own good nature; they become trapped inside a bubble of hostile emotion created by their own humiliated ego. When resentment is felt towards someone to whom one is closely related, such as a parent or child, then it is particularly intense and can lead to extraordinary acts of spite.

To conclude: take care - and be caring; for the former, as a practice of the self, depends on how we interact with others.  

We Are All Hunchbacks

One must inevitably clash with those individuals - such as my sister - who are beyond reason and kindness; those who are fatally burdened with history and round shouldered with memories of the past, allowing this to deform and define who they are.

To be crippled and subjectified in this manner - to literally have too much behind one - is to suffer cruelly. But, as Zarathustra says, if you take away the hump from a hunchback you take away their soul.

Besides, are we not all of us to a greater or lesser extent hunchbacks? That is to say, are we not all of us made a little monstrous by our parents and our upbringing? 

As Philip Larkin so memorably pointed out in verse, the misery and resentment that we feel and spend a lifetime trying to overcome is passed down the generations just as surely as certain genetic conditions, including debilitating forms of kyphosis: 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.

If only my sister could be made to understand this, then she might learn not only to think a little more philosophically, but be a little happier - which, in turn, would make me a little happier and enable us to develop a connection of some kind.

Notes: 

For Zarathustra's encounter and discussion with a hunchback, see 'Of Redemption', in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse', from which I quote, can be found in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite, (Faber and Faber, 2003).

OMG! I Finally Agree With Julie Burchill

Julie Burchill by Phil Disley (2013)

I know that times of conflict and violent upheaval can lead to strange alliances and the sharing of space with some rather dubious bedfellows, but who would have guessed I'd finally want to cuddle up to Julie Burchill?

At the very least, I'm sympathetic to her recent piece in The Spectator in which she argues that, for some men, the misogyny of the Islamic State is a crucial part of their appeal; i.e. far from being problematic, the abominable manner in which they treat women and young girls is the perverse factor that makes otherwise impotent losers hard with sexual excitement. 

And this, shamefully, includes those far-left apologists in the West who defend the actions of the jihadis and fail to condemn their gynocidal gender politics. Self-hatred goes some way - perhaps a long way - towards explaining this. But so too does a suppressed feeling of resentment towards women and their emancipation in what was doubtless the most significant and successful of all modern revolutions. 

I think Burchill is right to touch on this and entirely justified to think about holy war within a wider context of desire. She's right also to link the violent abuse of women and the negation of their rights by Islamists to nice, middle-class white youths masturbating to misogynistic rap music and sharing rape jokes online. 

For feminists, there is therefore a far wider and far more disturbing problem to address here than one to do with beards and veils; one that is as much about pornographic models of masculinity within contemporary popular culture as it is religious fundamentalism.

    

Note: the Julie Burchill article to which I refer first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 22 November 2014. It can be found in the online edition by clicking here.  

 

On the Poetry and Politics of the Mushroom

Mushrooms - Sylvia Plath, by petropicto on deviantart.com

http://petropicto.deviantart.com/art/Mushrooms-Sylvia-Plath-417454440  

Whether D. H. Lawrence might fairly be described as a mycophobe is debatable, but it's certainly the case that all things fungal - including the beastly bourgeois parasitically flourishing amid decay - cause a violently hostile reaction, as we see, for example, in the following lines of verse:

How beastly the bourgeois is

especially the male of the species -

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable -

and like a fungus, living on the remains of bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

...

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

Contrast these lines in which Lawrence identifies male members of the English middle-class as members of the fungus family (a large group of eukaryotic organisms that include yeasts, moulds, and mushrooms and which are distinct from plants and animals, even though they often have a symbiotic relationship with these other life forms), with what Sylvia Plath writes in her very beautiful if slightly menacing poem 'Mushrooms':


Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.


What's immediately striking is how Plath has a much more positive view of fungus; she sees in it the revolutionary hope of the future and relates it not to a decadent ruling class, but, on the contrary, to a subversive underclass who will one day come to fruition and bear spores.

This image of a soft-body of people rising up, is said by feminist critics to refer to the emancipation and empowerment of women and I like this interpretation as it's one that offers great promise and is not merely threatening. There's also none of the hysteria that one finds in Lawrence's verse.  
        

References: 

D. H. Lawrence, 'How beastly the bourgeois is -', The Poems (Vol. I), ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (CUP, 2013). 
Sylvia Plath, 'Mushrooms', The Colossus and Other Poems, (William Heinemann, 1960).    

Screen Grab

Image from the award winning web series Perfect Girl by BananaMana Films (2014):

http://bananamanafilms.com/category/perfect-girl-series

The frozen image of a loved one at the termination of a video call, just before they vanish back into the void and the screen returns to the comforting neutrality of a homepage, is, for me at least, a moment of great digital poignancy. 

Hanging up a telephone was one thing; a quick goodbye and the simple click of a receiver. But there's something far-more heart-rending about disconnecting from a person one cannot only hear, but see, smiling and looking beautiful on a bed that one has perhaps shared with them (or dreamed of sharing). 

One cannot help putting fingers to the screen and trying to touch their face; to hold onto them for just a short while longer ...   

On Doing (and Not Doing) the White Thing

Having earlier this year evicted lesbians from their store in Brighton for kissing in the aisles and taken the decision to exploit the tragedy of the Great War for a Christmas ad in order to flog a few extra bars of chocolate, Sainsbury's seem eager to now demonstrate their racial insensitivity with a new poster campaign designed to promote its company values. Paying a marginally fairer price to British dairy farmers for their milk than some others in the retail sector, is just one way in which Sainsbury's are, apparently, doing the white thing.

Obviously, I get it: it's a pun that even has something of a history to it. One recalls, for example, a popular campaign launched several years ago by the National Dairy Council in which various celebrities encouraged us to drink more of the white stuff. However, speaking as a black man, I have to say I do find the Sainsbury's ad to be contentious at the very least - if not overtly offensive.

For unlike the Dairy Council slogan, the Sainsbury's one crosses a fine line and passes onto extremely unpleasant territory. One can't help thinking of skin colour and normative Aryan values, rather than a pint of semi-skimmed; can't help recalling a long and depressing history of racism in which all of the ancient virtues were associated with fairness of complexion. Nietzsche writes of this in the Genealogy (I. 5).

And so Sainsbury's should stop using this slogan and they should apologise to their non-white staff and customers. They should, in other words, do the right thing by all of us who reject entirely the false and pernicious equivalence made between skin colour, purity of blood, and nobility of spirit - all of us who have no wish to play the white man. 

Torpedo the Ark Means: I Hate Everything

 I Hate Everything bangle by Me and Zena

See website for full details: meandzena.com

I am often asked what the phrase torpedo the ark signifies, despite the fact that I have explicitly stated in several posts that, for me, it primarily means having done with the judgement of God; i.e. rejecting any notion of indebtedness to a deity and refusing to face a celestial tribunal where one will eternally be found guilty and sentenced to death and damnation.  

In taking up this critical project - one that Kant failed so miserably to accomplish - one hopes to continue and possibly develop or send spiraling off in a new direction, the work of the truly great artists and thinkers, including Spinoza, Nietzsche, D. H. Lawrence, and Deleuze.

For those, however, who like things expressed in less philosophical terms, then torpedo the ark might be said to simply mean this: I hate everything.

The concept of hate, of course, mustn't be understood in a purely reactive manner; hate is more than simply love on the recoil (as if love were the great primary term or essential prerequisite). And it's crucial not to simply fall back into metaphysical dualism, where love and hate are two fixed terms of opposition.

That said, I suppose we can provisionally agree that love is ultimately a will to merger and the dream of blissful union with all mankind, the heavenly host, and, ultimately, God himself, whilst hate is the desire to be separate and the ability to discriminate and distinguish between things. Thus whilst love makes us open up our arms and embrace the universe, hate teaches us to kick with our legs and stand on our own two feet as sovereign individuals, proud of our own singular nature and keen to discover and create new worlds. 

When Zarathustra encourages his listeners to become hard like diamonds, he means they should abandon love when it has become a morbid moral ideal exclusively tied to values born of sickness; he means they should become a little more independent and a little more hateful; that they should shatter the old law tables, tear down the Cross, and torpedo the ark.

This might seem to be an evil teaching, but, as Blake pointed out, evil is only the active or most vital power that flows into us from behind and below. And it is this power - or more precisely the feeling of this power - that causes delight and helps us give birth to what is best in us and to the future.     

We can conclude, therefore, that whilst kindness, kisses, and cuddles all have their place within a general economy of the heart, so to does cruelty, combat, and the determination to kick against the pricks and all that is rotten. As Lawrence writes, we must learn to accept all the subtle promptings of the incalculable soul; from the most passionate love, to the fiercest hate. Only this will keep us sane and beyond judgement.

At the Tail End of German Idealism

Nico Metten: Libertarian

Nico Metten is a young German sound designer with a ponytail. He is also someone with interesting views on the question of immigration and national border controls. In a nutshell, he wants to encourage and massively extend the former as a good thing per se, whilst completely dissolving the latter as a matter of principle.

For Nico is a libertarian. He also openly admits to being an idealist which, in his case, means he is someone who believes that everyone is just like him; namely, an abstract labour unit. Or, at least, they should be. Otherwise he's fully prepared to subject them to the law, thereby equating radical difference or any form of otherness that can't be subsumed within a universal humanism, with criminality and terrorism.  

Nico doesn't conceive of those who care nothing for freedom - understood primarily as the freedom of the market place - or bourgeois individualism. That some men and women might value fulfilment over freedom and find such collectively as members of a people, is not something he even stops to consider. 

Besides, a global economy will put an end to such social primitivism in favour of the systematic anarchy and triumphant philistinism which he, Nico, favours, but which, as Nietzsche points out, allows someone only as much culture as it is in the interest of commerce that they should possess. If old ways of being persist, they may do so only as lifestyles; i.e. as commodities that afford men and women the chance to dress-up and indulge in colourful games of nostalgic make-believe, but not to opt-out of the New World Order. 

Of course, Nico is right to argue that many people have been granted human rights within the above and we should not simply dismiss this fact. But, on the other hand, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, human rights ultimately fail to address or compensate for the "meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies ... The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered."

And so, sorry Nico, but I'm unconvinced by your attempts to politically theorize; one respectfully suggests that you don't give up the day job. And maybe think about a haircut.

                                                                                  
Note: Lines quoted from Deleuze and Guattari are in What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, (Verso, 1996), pp. 107-08.   

   

Falling in Love Again

 Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt

First we fall in love, then we fall into language, says Roland Barthes, referring us to the fact that even the most personal or private of emotions is inevitably articulated within a shared code and culture.

For some people, however, this raises a real concern; for if the language of love is entirely secondhand, then does it not lack authenticity and is the lover not, at some level, always insincere?

Perhaps: but I'm not convinced we should let this worry us too much (if at all). 

Besides, it would be absurd to expect individual lovers to be able to create unique ways of expressing how they feel. Even if it were possible, what would be the point? For we would no more be able to understand their sweet nothings whispered into our ears, than we could comprehend Wittgenstein's speaking lion. A private language - be it of love or anything else - would be essentially meaningless (i.e. a non-language). 

Ultimately, the words I love you delight and reassure us precisely because of their familiarity and the fact that we understand them as the repetition of an ancient litany; they invite us to participate in a game wherein we all have a vague idea of the rules, even if we cannot all expect to be winners. 

In the World of Addison Lee

addisonlee.com

The ad campaign I presently love to hate the most is for business-class car service Addison Lee (i.e. the world's most pretentious mini-cab operator).

Targeted towards executives and premium leisure users, the six-figure campaign entitled 'Cool, Calm and Collected' is meant to embody the Addison Lee vision of an unrivaled and super-efficient service that enables customers to move smoothly and conveniently around the capital in comfort and style. That's certainly the line being peddled by chief commercial officer Peter Boucher.

For me, however, it suggests something very different. When I look at the above picture or one of the related images from the campaign, I see a couple in a virtual bubble of money, smugness and false security being transported through the chaotic yet strangely empty and sanitized streets of London. Such elitism and fascist utopianism is offensive enough, but one can also detect the whiff of casual sexism and racism.

The woman, for example, with dark curly hair and wearing a red dress that shows off her dusky skin colour, has obviously been chosen to add a little spice; a vague hint of exotic otherness and wild sensuality. She smiles, but she's clearly not entirely happy to be trapped in the bubble alongside her white, male, fully-covered companion. She sits a little uncomfortably and somewhat nervously with her bare legs pressed together and turned as far away from him as possible, her bare arms crossed. She might reluctantly give him a blow job, but she really doesn't want to fuck him.

He could, of course, be her colleague, but probably he's her good-looking young boss; she's obliged, therefore, not only to look across at him, but up to him with a mixture of love and respect. He, on the other hand, can look at her any way he chooses; or, indeed, as here, he can choose not to look at her at all - to keep his eyes on the road, on the future, and doubtless on his own reflection like the narcissist he is.

Suited and booted, he nevertheless keeps it casual; no tie, open-neck shirt, designer stubble ... Only the expensive haircut and neatly-folded pocket handkerchief tells us he's still very much in control and obsessed with order and detail; still holding on to the power and the privilege of his class, his race, and his sex.


Note: The Addison Lee ad campaign was created by Albion; written by George Morgan and shot by Doug Fisher. Unique Digital handled the media strategy and buying.

Skinny Mannequin Sparks Outrage

The curious and often heated debate over the size and shape of shop-window dummies is raging once again, following the appearance of a new model in Topshop (second from left in the above image) and a tweet from outraged customer Betty Hopper.

Now, whilst I understand the issue here and can see how display units might (somewhat naively) be thought of as plastic versions of real women and thus, like fashion models, be caught up in the discussion around body image and eating disorders, are stores really promoting anorexia as an aspirational lifestyle by using skinny mannequins? I don't think so. 

In fact, I have more than a little sympathy with those who argue that solid fibreglass mannequins are not meant to be viewed as ideal role models and have more in common with clothes hangers than they do with flesh-and-blood women. Usually, any realistic elements are outweighed by the abstract and frequently headless nature of the design.

In a statement issued by Topshop with reference to the mannequin in question, it's calmly pointed out that "the form is a stylized one designed to have greater impact in store and create a visual focus". The statement continues by saying that the mannequin primarily exists to display clothes and its dimensions simply enable faster dressing and undressing; "it is therefore not meant to be a representation of the average female body".

That's a little disingenuous perhaps, but it's by no means false or an outright lie and I think those who get overexcited on social media and start speaking about 'impressionable teens', or body-shaming those girls who are happily waif-like with their offensive assertion that real women have curves, need to keep things in perspective and be careful what they say.

Not that it's just possibly envious members of the twitterati who make nasty remarks about those girls judged to be underweight; I was surprised and disappointed to read Pascal Bruckner's negative characterization of fashion models as "flat-chested beanpoles". Is the woman with a "fuller-figure" he appears to lust after really a taboo in our society? Again, I don't think so.

Finally, if "emaciated mannequins" (another of Bruckner's pet peeves) cause anorexia and represent the triumph of ascetic idealism's dream of disembodiment, then mightn't plus-size dummies promote obesity?

The Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, certainly thinks so and recently warned that the increasing use of larger mannequins (along with size inflation of labelling) were starting to normalize overweight. This might be a slightly absurd and simplistic claim, but no more so than the one made about the Topshop mannequin. 

Philosophy For Everyone and No One (Not For All)

Owl logo of Philosophy for All:  

pfalondon.org

Philosophy for All: a phrase and a London-based, non-profit organization designed to dismay or make laugh those perverts who value the fatal love of wisdom, just as it flatters those who subscribe to the moral ideal of equality and the notion that all souls might know Plato.

From the PFA Secretary I receive news of a masterclass [!] that teachers and would-be teachers of philosophy are strongly encouraged to attend; a class that promises to show how philosophy can be made accessible, inclusive and relevant to people of all ages and from all backgrounds.

Prospective students on the day-long course are also assured they will be taught how to deal with the tricky questions that often arise within philosophy and which can cause some students a great deal of difficulty. 

Now, as regular readers of this blog will know, as a post-Nietzschean philosopher I'm all for models of thought invested with an ironic, joyful element. But la gaya scienza doesn't mean dumbing-down in the name of democracy, nor attempting to make thinking fun in a manner that robs it of all seriousness, all challenge, all danger.  

When Zarathustra speaks, he speaks to everyone and no one, never simply to all. And he expects his listeners to have first grown new ears ...

Note: Readers might be interested in Anja Steinbauer's position on this question which can be found in an article published in Philosophy Now, issue 22. Click here. Dr Steinbauer is founder and president of Philosophy for All and co-founder of the London School of Philosophy.  

Vade Retro Satana: On the Priestly Nostalgia for Exorcism

Goya's depiction of an exorcism performed by St Francis Borgia 

on a dying impenitent (1788)

According to the Pope, demonic possession is a real and growing threat in the 21st century. In fact, since assuming his position as head of the Church, Pope Francis has repeatedly displayed a multidisciplinary yet fundamentally anti-modern or neo-medieval approach to the theoretical and practical question of Satan.

It was not a great surprise, therefore, to hear that he last month gave his papal blessing to the International Association of Exorcists; an organization formally recognized by the Vatican which argues - somewhat paradoxically one might have thought - that in a secular-material world of reason that deliberately disenchants and deadens faith, the window is thrown wide open to diabolical forces.

During a convention held in Rome, the Holy Father praised those priests who specialize in the difficult work of exorcising demons and stressed how it was important for the Church to offer its love and full support for those unfortunate souls possessed by evil. 

Over three-hundred experts in the field of what might be called sacramental health care, gathered to discuss, among other things, the perils of occultism and how dabbling in the dark arts can lead to eternal damnation. A spokesman for the association - Dr Walter Cascioli, a trained psychiatrist - blamed the recent dramatic rise in demonic activity on popular books, TV shows, and films aimed at impressionable young people. Such works, he explained, not only lead morally astray, but can cause great psychological damage.

Parents, teachers, and social workers thus need to display much greater vigilance and be constantly on guard against the Devil and all his works. Signs of demonic possession vary, but include: loss of appetite, self-mutilation, unnatural body postures, supernatural strength, knowledge of sacred mysteries, and a violent rejection of Jesus and his Gospel of Love.      

Please note: I am actually writing this at the beginning of November, not April, and in 2014 not 1420. I would fully understand if readers of this post feel the need to check the calender or seek evidence for some kind of shift in the space-time continuum. Why is it whenever one reports on the latest pronouncements of the Church one feels as if one has fallen either through a black hole, or, like Alice, down a rabbit hole?    

Les Zazous

Pretty much everyone has heard of the jazz-loving teens in Hitler's Germany known as the Swing Youth, who developed a subversive Anglo-American sensibility and style in diametric opposition to National Socialism. Likewise, those who are interested in this period and in subcultural and counter-cultural forms of resistance to the Third Reich are probably also familiar with the Edelweiss Pirates. But far less well known are the French equivalent of die Swingjugend, called les Zazous.

The Zazous were a group of mostly Parisian based hipsters living under German occupation during World War II who chose to defy their Nazi overlords and display their nonconformity by wearing outlandish clothes, carrying umbrellas, growing their hair long, and dancing to jazz, swing, and bebop.

Whilst boys favoured wearing oversized, often knee-length box jackets, peg leg trousers, and suede brothel creepers, the girls wore short pleated skirts, striped stockings and shoes with thick wooden soles. Often the girls would bleach their hair, worn in long curls, and paint their lips bright red. Both sexes also had a penchant for sunglasses, whatever the weather.

When not hanging about on the terrace of the Pam Pam café drinking cocktails, the Zazous often frequented vegetarian restaurants and ordered grated carrot salads. If there's a subtle political gesture in this choice of lunch, I have to confess it escapes me. But their decision to voluntarily wear the yellow star of David, in solidarity with French Jews, was certainly an overt and courageous sign of dissident behaviour in a country where anti-Semitism was widespread and silent complicity with the Nazis (if not active collaboration) was shamefully often the norm.  

And for this, one cannot help affording them great affection and respect. Perhaps they didn't risk their lives in the same manner as their German counterparts, but they were nevertheless detested and targeted by the Nazis and members of the Vichy government who saw them as a threat to the moral well-being of the nation.

Articles published by the authorities at the time, branded them as decadent, work-shy, anti-patriotic egoists and, after 1942, les Zazous were often attacked and beaten on the streets by pro-fascist groups, or arrested and sent to labour in the fields and farms of the French countryside. 

Disappointingly - though not surprisingly - members of the official French Resistance movement had little time for the Zazous either and afforded them no support or protection. In fact, the communists and other ultra-leftists dismissed the Zazous in much the same terms and for many of the same reasons as the fascists.

But, despite such hostility from both ends of the political spectrum, they still continued to dance, to dress-up, and make their daring and dandyish revolt into style.

I Care - But I'm Not Mother Teresa

I care - but I'm not Mother Teresa.

What do I mean by this? 

I mean that, for me, there is nothing remotely uplifting about looking after someone who is in need of care and I'm not about to sacrifice myself entirely to this tiring and depressing task in the mistaken belief that by so doing I demonstrate Christian virtue.

For unlike Mother T - a woman once described by Christopher Hitchens as a corrupt Albanian dwarf who exploited the poor and dying as extras in her own obscene morality play - I don't confuse or conflate excremental reality with transcendental fantasy. 

Indeed, I agree with Hitchens that it's deeply offensive to fetishize pain and poverty and develop a voracious appetite for human wretchedness; to literally feed off shit and gain personal salvation via the suffering of others.

We have to demoralize our idea of sympathy; i.e. free it from ideal notions of pity and charity which transport us to the foot of the Cross.

And, ultimately, all it takes to do the right thing is a little politeness of the heart or what Nietzsche terms benevolence; kindness, kisses and kuddlz have played a far greater role in building a libidinal culture of compassion or phallic tenderness, than those more celebrated values preached by the Good.