Evil is not extraneous to the order of the universe; rather, it is the result of this order. Not everything can have the same rank, and the further things are from the primal source which is the absolute Good, the more they are deprived of Goodness. Evil, therefore, is nothing other than the privation of Goodness. To accept the universal order is to accept the existence of degrees of goodness, and thus, indirectly, to accept evil. We must not criticize the order of the world just because there are consequences in it which seem bad to us.
Plotinus
Quid ergo malitia nisi boni indigentia? [Saint Ambrose, On Isaac VII, 60].
The world is a masquerade. Face, dress, and voice are all false. All wish to appear what they are not, all deceive and do not even know themselves. So says Goya in his merciless commentary on social, political and religious hypocrisy, Los Caprichos.
Again, I am impelled to pen this short analysis by the fate of one of my childhood friends who, I discovered (after trying to find him with a few key words on the appropriate search engine), had been arrested and convicted of child pornography charges and subsequently sentenced to a year in prison for the ‘exploitation of children’ having admitted viewing ‘indecent’ pictures of minors on the internet.
Immediately I was summoned to wonder if I myself should not be prosecuted too for the exploitation of children, having once upon a time, during my dark and ignorant days, purchased clothing (and other sundry items) at retail outlets which, through a more deviously concealed network, succeeded in taking advantage of minors also. Moreover, I wondered if revelling in the human form was comparable to my revelling the other day in the natural grace and innocence of the juvenile gadwalls and teals I had observed on Baron’s Haugh Wildlife Reserve just to the east of Glasgow. I wondered too if it was not hypocritical, if not dangerously short-sighted, for those complicit in the exploitation of children (through their perfunctory daily expenditures) to cast a stone at those who were not protected by the impenetrable armour of a dozen degrees of separation.
The very act of spending money includes a complex matrix of interconnections, many of which result in the manipulation, if not of children, then of people, animals, and the very earth herself. The term ‘ethical shopping’ has thus arisen to placate our consciences, and ease the guilt that otherwise might have bubbled forth at our (more often than not) unnecessary and frivolous purchases. This neat little phrase, however, does not solve the problem.
But it doesn’t simply end with shopping. Every day, I see and hear instances of children being used and exploited. On the radio and in magazines, for example, there are commercials, whether political or other, whose creators that should be utterly ashamed of themselves for their using children to further their (not the children, since children are happily aimless) aims. Likewise, in cinema and television, children are routinely ‘employed’ (another euphemism for exploited) to further the aim of its producer, director or screenwriter. That their parents consent to this exploitation (presumably at the presentation of a rather large cheque) makes matters even worse not better. I can think of several notable instances where children having thus been exposed to adulthood at such a tender and informative age, have gone on, unsurprisingly, to graduate into a world of self-abuse, and self-loathing, and finally, for the unfortunate few, the ultimate in self-criticism: suicide.
I wondered, then, if we should not all be incarcerated for a year, to give us time to think (deeply) of our hitherto concealed matriculation within a diabolical configuration in which our own capital actions and expenditures invariably, albeit some way down the line, support child exploitation, wars and terror, torture and barbarity. It is to this end that I believe consumers to be the true terrorists, who through their removal from the (admittedly often complex) process of consumption and their resulting blind acquiescence and action, expedite and cause terrifying things to happen. The terrorists we like to think ‘terrorists’ are simply severely disgruntled reactionaries reacting against our terrorism. Insofar as this is concerned, we westerners, in our irresponsible orgy of endless activity and consumption, are the prime movers, and they the secondary.
In allowing our very self to become product and not process (this commodification of life is the crux of the fall of the human and the emergence of the post-human), we have been removed from the process of living and of the process of processes. The process of commodification (of reverting life to death) and of what we refer to as 'shopping' is a very significant one amongst many. It is the basis for our civilization - spending money, making money - exploit-ure masquerading as culture. 'Do you think money grows on trees?' is a rethoric every child has heard more than once for his frivolous use of it. But people still don’t know where money comes from, and where it goes when they spend it; we are (self) afflicted with the absolutely moronic logic involved in say the gambling industry and by super-rich poker players that somehow 'we are doing good'; the logic however doesn't extend much further than this 'somehow'. This moronic self-delusion is indicative of how commodified people have allowed their selves to become, and of how far removed they are from the reality of the process.
The truth be told, and the truth is all very ugly in this area, modernity and ‘economic progress’ are simply operating under the same veneer of civilization in which the holocaust and other atrocities took place. It’s just that here, and this is presumably the mark of an advanced civilization (in the western sense) we have learned how to conceal it and bury it beneath so much falseness and ficiality that we, the consumers, are blind to it, (though not entirely ignorant of it).
I say that Auschwitz is an extreme manifestation of an idea that still thrives in our midst. It shows itself in minorirties in industrial democracies; in education, education to a humanitarian point of view included, which most of the time consists in turning wonderful young people into colourless and self-righteous copies of their teachers; it becomes manifest in the nuclear threat, the constant increase in the number and power of deadly weapons and the readiness of some so-called patriots to start a war compared with which the holocaust will shrink into insignificance. It shows itself in the killing of nature and 'primitive' cultures with never a thought spent on those thus deprived of meaning for their lives; in the colossal conceit of our intellectuals, their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their own, sorry image; in the infantile megalomania of some of our physicians who blackmail their patients with fear, mutilate them and then persecute them with large bills; in the lack of feeling of man so-called searchers for truth who systematically torture animals, study their discomfort and receive prizes for their cruelty.
In all this wondering then, I thought of Dostoevsky, the Russian writer (and elegant re-appraiser of things), who had himself been incarcerated in the bowels of Siberia (and then placed in exile up there in northern Kazakhstan) for simply revealing to the great masqueraders their inherent hypocrisies. (Goya, in spite of his capricious caricatures, never ripped any masks off). I wondered and I wondered and I felt sorry for my old friend whose life had now effectively been ruined, his name dragged through the mud, the ‘unclean’ badge tattooed on his arm, for simply reacting with an increasingly post-human society, a reaction, admittedly, that had mutated through the hidden repressions of a society which was not yet prepared to confess to its own. Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil-doer, Dostoevsky once said. And nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
'From the Hide' - Baron's Haugh Reserve near Motherwell, August 5th, 2011.
Plotinus
Quid ergo malitia nisi boni indigentia? [Saint Ambrose, On Isaac VII, 60].
The world is a masquerade. Face, dress, and voice are all false. All wish to appear what they are not, all deceive and do not even know themselves. So says Goya in his merciless commentary on social, political and religious hypocrisy, Los Caprichos.
Again, I am impelled to pen this short analysis by the fate of one of my childhood friends who, I discovered (after trying to find him with a few key words on the appropriate search engine), had been arrested and convicted of child pornography charges and subsequently sentenced to a year in prison for the ‘exploitation of children’ having admitted viewing ‘indecent’ pictures of minors on the internet.
Immediately I was summoned to wonder if I myself should not be prosecuted too for the exploitation of children, having once upon a time, during my dark and ignorant days, purchased clothing (and other sundry items) at retail outlets which, through a more deviously concealed network, succeeded in taking advantage of minors also. Moreover, I wondered if revelling in the human form was comparable to my revelling the other day in the natural grace and innocence of the juvenile gadwalls and teals I had observed on Baron’s Haugh Wildlife Reserve just to the east of Glasgow. I wondered too if it was not hypocritical, if not dangerously short-sighted, for those complicit in the exploitation of children (through their perfunctory daily expenditures) to cast a stone at those who were not protected by the impenetrable armour of a dozen degrees of separation.
The very act of spending money includes a complex matrix of interconnections, many of which result in the manipulation, if not of children, then of people, animals, and the very earth herself. The term ‘ethical shopping’ has thus arisen to placate our consciences, and ease the guilt that otherwise might have bubbled forth at our (more often than not) unnecessary and frivolous purchases. This neat little phrase, however, does not solve the problem.
But it doesn’t simply end with shopping. Every day, I see and hear instances of children being used and exploited. On the radio and in magazines, for example, there are commercials, whether political or other, whose creators that should be utterly ashamed of themselves for their using children to further their (not the children, since children are happily aimless) aims. Likewise, in cinema and television, children are routinely ‘employed’ (another euphemism for exploited) to further the aim of its producer, director or screenwriter. That their parents consent to this exploitation (presumably at the presentation of a rather large cheque) makes matters even worse not better. I can think of several notable instances where children having thus been exposed to adulthood at such a tender and informative age, have gone on, unsurprisingly, to graduate into a world of self-abuse, and self-loathing, and finally, for the unfortunate few, the ultimate in self-criticism: suicide.
I wondered, then, if we should not all be incarcerated for a year, to give us time to think (deeply) of our hitherto concealed matriculation within a diabolical configuration in which our own capital actions and expenditures invariably, albeit some way down the line, support child exploitation, wars and terror, torture and barbarity. It is to this end that I believe consumers to be the true terrorists, who through their removal from the (admittedly often complex) process of consumption and their resulting blind acquiescence and action, expedite and cause terrifying things to happen. The terrorists we like to think ‘terrorists’ are simply severely disgruntled reactionaries reacting against our terrorism. Insofar as this is concerned, we westerners, in our irresponsible orgy of endless activity and consumption, are the prime movers, and they the secondary.
In allowing our very self to become product and not process (this commodification of life is the crux of the fall of the human and the emergence of the post-human), we have been removed from the process of living and of the process of processes. The process of commodification (of reverting life to death) and of what we refer to as 'shopping' is a very significant one amongst many. It is the basis for our civilization - spending money, making money - exploit-ure masquerading as culture. 'Do you think money grows on trees?' is a rethoric every child has heard more than once for his frivolous use of it. But people still don’t know where money comes from, and where it goes when they spend it; we are (self) afflicted with the absolutely moronic logic involved in say the gambling industry and by super-rich poker players that somehow 'we are doing good'; the logic however doesn't extend much further than this 'somehow'. This moronic self-delusion is indicative of how commodified people have allowed their selves to become, and of how far removed they are from the reality of the process.
The truth be told, and the truth is all very ugly in this area, modernity and ‘economic progress’ are simply operating under the same veneer of civilization in which the holocaust and other atrocities took place. It’s just that here, and this is presumably the mark of an advanced civilization (in the western sense) we have learned how to conceal it and bury it beneath so much falseness and ficiality that we, the consumers, are blind to it, (though not entirely ignorant of it).
I say that Auschwitz is an extreme manifestation of an idea that still thrives in our midst. It shows itself in minorirties in industrial democracies; in education, education to a humanitarian point of view included, which most of the time consists in turning wonderful young people into colourless and self-righteous copies of their teachers; it becomes manifest in the nuclear threat, the constant increase in the number and power of deadly weapons and the readiness of some so-called patriots to start a war compared with which the holocaust will shrink into insignificance. It shows itself in the killing of nature and 'primitive' cultures with never a thought spent on those thus deprived of meaning for their lives; in the colossal conceit of our intellectuals, their belief that they know precisely what humanity needs and their relentless efforts to recreate people in their own, sorry image; in the infantile megalomania of some of our physicians who blackmail their patients with fear, mutilate them and then persecute them with large bills; in the lack of feeling of man so-called searchers for truth who systematically torture animals, study their discomfort and receive prizes for their cruelty.
In all this wondering then, I thought of Dostoevsky, the Russian writer (and elegant re-appraiser of things), who had himself been incarcerated in the bowels of Siberia (and then placed in exile up there in northern Kazakhstan) for simply revealing to the great masqueraders their inherent hypocrisies. (Goya, in spite of his capricious caricatures, never ripped any masks off). I wondered and I wondered and I felt sorry for my old friend whose life had now effectively been ruined, his name dragged through the mud, the ‘unclean’ badge tattooed on his arm, for simply reacting with an increasingly post-human society, a reaction, admittedly, that had mutated through the hidden repressions of a society which was not yet prepared to confess to its own. Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil-doer, Dostoevsky once said. And nothing is more difficult than to understand him.
'From the Hide' - Baron's Haugh Reserve near Motherwell, August 5th, 2011.
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