Today, we watched The Colbert Report, the episode where Edwards comes out and does the “edWords” of the day. Putting aside the frequent comments on Jetskis, Edwards rather crudely paraphrased Martin Luther King Jr., stating that he would like to see the day when his children could wake up in a world where economic equality was more than just a fantasy.
It’s a nice thought. But one that – I’m afraid – is an impossibility.
This is not to say that I believe poverty is a necessity. I don’t. I cheered as loud as anybody when feudalism fell. I even think that it is possible to functionally eradicate poverty, at least within the Western World. But I do not think that economic equality is feasible in any way.
We’ve reached the point in the historical timeline when the Cold War has become history. When college students were no longer alive at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and rapidly approaching the time when they won’t have been alive for the fall of the USSR. I remember both. My parents remember Vietnam, my grandparents World War II.
Equality in any sense is a utopian pipe dream. It’s a nice dream, yes. But only a dream. Like Willy Loman’s “well-known.”
I believe that, inherently, people are equal. No skin color or gender or genetics or ethnicity or sexual preference is inherently better or worse than any other. People are equal.
Society is not. Class, status, education, employment. All these are divisive and discordant. They rank us by our grades, by our height, our weight, our standardized test performance, our salaries. They look at the industries in which we choose to work – entertainment, education, business, service, public service – and at the communities in which we live – urban, suburban, rural – as barometers of our worth as people. They rank us by the degrees written upon pieces of paper and upon the university or college seal that adorns the top.
We are divided by religion. Each religious organization, sect, and denomination privileging one another differently. It is the same with regionalism and nationality.
We tout the value of equality and then conspire against ourselves by applying false labels and hierarchies, undermining our own proclamations with hypocrisy.
Communism is a nice theory. But in practice, people are not designed, not engineered, not bred to quietly acquiesce to our own diminishment. And that, ultimately, is what pure equality would do. Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984. There can be no true equality without the complete annihilation of everything that makes us truly human.
We are not all equal. We never will be. But let us define our inequalities by things other than skin color or national origin or gender or sexual preference. Define our inequalities not as “good” and “better,” or “bad” and “worse,” but by “this” and “that.” Let us define our inequalities as what we do and what we believe in, rather than our genetics or the happenstance of our birth. Let us choose how we wish to differ, and respect the fact that we are not equals, nor should we be. I am smarter than many people. But there are many people more skilled than I am in many ways. Stronger or faster or more dexterous or more graceful or more mathematically minded or musically talented. We are both greater and lesser than one another. This is not equality. It is diversity.
Let us be content with our inequality, let us celebrate our inequality, and accept that, ultimately, we are as high above others as others are above us.
"Words fly up, my thoughts remain below."
black and white, Angels and demons.
We aren't two sides of the same coin.
We're the gold into which those sides are imprinted."
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
History of Violence
Our society, as I have mentioned before, is preoccupied with violence. With watching it, with committing it, and - yes - with censuring it. We go to movies slathered with more gore than eloquence, we watch murder and war on the news, we save Darfur (as well we should), and we enter into the cybernetic domain of exploded pixels on our computers, Xboxes, and PS-whatevers. And then we click our tongues at the violence of today's children.
Please, don't think that I'm censuring violence in the media and in video games. I'm not. But I am recognizing the hypocrisy inherent in a society that both glorifies and vilifies violence. A society that cannot teach itself about appropriate and inappropriate violence. A society that likes to pretend it isn't violent, when it really is.
I've talked before about the productive and sacrificial nature of violence. I've cited Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred, but that's not going to stop me from doing it again. He writes,
Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons, however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand. (2)
We are a nation at war. No one doubts, no one questions this. But for what purpose? To what end? For freedom? Justice? The American Way? The sheer plethora of abstract concepts that have led our nation to war are staggering. The "War on Terror." I understand what that means, but I cannot help but conjure up images of fully armed marines rushing into a child's bedroom at night to make war on the monster that turns out to be nothing more than a clothes-rack when the lights are turned on. How many of our boogeymen are just as real?
Girard's point is that violence deferred will find an outlet. When you can't find the object of your hatred, then you take it out on someone else. Who hasn't? Bad day at work, you come home and yell at your husband, your wife, your kids, the dog... Minor violence, yes. But violence nonetheless.
So what happens when a country seeks its enemy and doesn't find it? Violence deferred. Whole nations have gone to war and reduced one another to rubble over a lost traitor, a lost object, a lost ideal. Because whatever it was that was lost is gone, and we seek to replace it with something else, a surrogate, a scapegoat, "chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand."
It is not a nice thing to contemplate the truth of human nature. When we are enraged at something we cannot reach, something we cannot find, something we know we cannot defeat, we lash out at something "vulnerable and close at hand." Our neighbors. Pets. Children. We make them - in our minds - the surrogate cause of our violence. We substitute them for whatever it is that has provoked us.
But violence, as Girard says, begets violence. And when the sacrifice is an unworthy substitute - when it does not, as we intend, diffuse the violence directed at it because it is not a close enough analog to the original source - it becomes a further source of violence. A vicious cycle.
This is not to say that we should go about killing our bosses or destroying the computer out of sheer frustration. We should find outlets. But positive ones. Ones whose role is to be surrogate - a movie, a video game, a literal punching bag at the gym.
But that is not my point here. My point is that we make war in the name of peace, commit violence in the name of ending it, but we do not commit our violence upon the right victims. We choose abstract concepts that are by nature untouchable because they are not tangible. One cannot kill a concept. We set ourselves up for sacrificial failure because we choose to make our target something that cannot be reified.
And then we try to kill it. Collateral damage. Civilian casualties. Genocide.
There is no uplifting message at the end of all this. No platitude to warm the heart and make us believe it will all be okay. It won't. It can't. We have begun to walk a path that leads only to death, and until we realize what it is we are fighting against, we will only find further violence.
Please, don't think that I'm censuring violence in the media and in video games. I'm not. But I am recognizing the hypocrisy inherent in a society that both glorifies and vilifies violence. A society that cannot teach itself about appropriate and inappropriate violence. A society that likes to pretend it isn't violent, when it really is.
I've talked before about the productive and sacrificial nature of violence. I've cited Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred, but that's not going to stop me from doing it again. He writes,
Violence is frequently called irrational. It has its reasons, however, and can marshal some rather convincing ones when the need arises. Yet these reasons cannot be taken seriously, no matter how valid they may appear. Violence itself will discard them if the initial object remains persistently out of reach and continues to provoke hostility. When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand. (2)
We are a nation at war. No one doubts, no one questions this. But for what purpose? To what end? For freedom? Justice? The American Way? The sheer plethora of abstract concepts that have led our nation to war are staggering. The "War on Terror." I understand what that means, but I cannot help but conjure up images of fully armed marines rushing into a child's bedroom at night to make war on the monster that turns out to be nothing more than a clothes-rack when the lights are turned on. How many of our boogeymen are just as real?
Girard's point is that violence deferred will find an outlet. When you can't find the object of your hatred, then you take it out on someone else. Who hasn't? Bad day at work, you come home and yell at your husband, your wife, your kids, the dog... Minor violence, yes. But violence nonetheless.
So what happens when a country seeks its enemy and doesn't find it? Violence deferred. Whole nations have gone to war and reduced one another to rubble over a lost traitor, a lost object, a lost ideal. Because whatever it was that was lost is gone, and we seek to replace it with something else, a surrogate, a scapegoat, "chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand."
It is not a nice thing to contemplate the truth of human nature. When we are enraged at something we cannot reach, something we cannot find, something we know we cannot defeat, we lash out at something "vulnerable and close at hand." Our neighbors. Pets. Children. We make them - in our minds - the surrogate cause of our violence. We substitute them for whatever it is that has provoked us.
But violence, as Girard says, begets violence. And when the sacrifice is an unworthy substitute - when it does not, as we intend, diffuse the violence directed at it because it is not a close enough analog to the original source - it becomes a further source of violence. A vicious cycle.
This is not to say that we should go about killing our bosses or destroying the computer out of sheer frustration. We should find outlets. But positive ones. Ones whose role is to be surrogate - a movie, a video game, a literal punching bag at the gym.
But that is not my point here. My point is that we make war in the name of peace, commit violence in the name of ending it, but we do not commit our violence upon the right victims. We choose abstract concepts that are by nature untouchable because they are not tangible. One cannot kill a concept. We set ourselves up for sacrificial failure because we choose to make our target something that cannot be reified.
And then we try to kill it. Collateral damage. Civilian casualties. Genocide.
There is no uplifting message at the end of all this. No platitude to warm the heart and make us believe it will all be okay. It won't. It can't. We have begun to walk a path that leads only to death, and until we realize what it is we are fighting against, we will only find further violence.
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
How Inversion Wrote my Dissertation
As I work through the impossible process of producing a book-length (and hopefully book-worthy) academic work, I find that much of what I have to say all boils down to the same basic point and the same basic elements.
On the one hand, this is A Good Thing. This means that my organizing thesis isn't insane. It means that I am on to Something. It also means that each of my plays ends up proving the same thing in ways that are only very subtly different. Trying to wrap my head around how to articulate why, for instance, Richard II isn't exactly like 3 Henry VI is fascinating. In the "oh, look, bone poking through my skin" kind of way.
You'll forgive me for being paranoid and not posting it here. Suffice it to say, it involves dying and Jesus. Of course, so do many things in our Christian-centered nation. But that's another bone to chew.
The main point here is that I've discovered that inversion and opposition are a very useful way to make the same point. Now, you wouldn't think that saying the opposite of what I just said would in fact prove it all over again, but that's just how screwed up academics are sometimes. For example, "Bob is a tree, and therefore we can cut him down," is astonishingly the same thing as "We cut down Jimmy, and therefore he is a tree."
Now before the philosophers and logicians out there all have heart attacks, I realize that this appears to fail. But in the dissertation, it doesn't. There are magical categories in the world for which the above formulation actually follows.
Unfortunately, sometimes they appear in the real world, too. And they get used even when they fail. Miserably. (Choose to apply that modifier to whatever you wish.)
For instance, in supporting the government and being a terrorist. It may be true that if you are a terrorist, you do not support the government. No objections from me. However, if you do not support the government, there is no law in logic or even in creation that says you are automatically a terrorist. Not even in Shakespeare. Hell, especially not in Shakespeare. But that's another rant.
The world, as I am often fond of saying, is not a set of dichotomies. We are not all either one thing or another. In the most platitudinous of phrases: the world is not black and white.
Come on, people. Shakespeare got it. Even Beaumont and Fletcher got it, and I'm convinced they got the shorter end of the smart-stick. Even - and this is the big one - even Elizabeth I got it, and let me tell you, she was not a merciful lady. That woman was brutal, but very politically savvy.
She said (supposedly), "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" She chopped off the head of the Earl of Essex when he rebelled... even though he was one of her favorites. But she didn't order the execution, imprisonment, or even the censure of the players who put on Richard II, performed on the eve of the rebellion and commissioned by Essex.
And why not?
Because she understood the difference between terrorism and political commentary. Amazing. In 1601. Four-hundred and seven years ago. She didn't even send any of the actors to Guantanamo... er... the Tower.
Was Elizabethan England a veritable paradise? No. Not in the least. Between the plague rats and the smell, I much prefer the twenty-first century, thank you. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from the ghosts of our own history. They were not idiots, our social and political predecessors. They were not barbarians, at least not any more so than we are today.
Sure, they enjoyed violent entertainment... but then, so do we. They unjustly imprisoned traitors... but so do we. They censured dissidents... but so do we. Did they like a little more poetry with their gore? Sure. But they didn't have CGI.
On the one hand, this is A Good Thing. This means that my organizing thesis isn't insane. It means that I am on to Something. It also means that each of my plays ends up proving the same thing in ways that are only very subtly different. Trying to wrap my head around how to articulate why, for instance, Richard II isn't exactly like 3 Henry VI is fascinating. In the "oh, look, bone poking through my skin" kind of way.
You'll forgive me for being paranoid and not posting it here. Suffice it to say, it involves dying and Jesus. Of course, so do many things in our Christian-centered nation. But that's another bone to chew.
The main point here is that I've discovered that inversion and opposition are a very useful way to make the same point. Now, you wouldn't think that saying the opposite of what I just said would in fact prove it all over again, but that's just how screwed up academics are sometimes. For example, "Bob is a tree, and therefore we can cut him down," is astonishingly the same thing as "We cut down Jimmy, and therefore he is a tree."
Now before the philosophers and logicians out there all have heart attacks, I realize that this appears to fail. But in the dissertation, it doesn't. There are magical categories in the world for which the above formulation actually follows.
Unfortunately, sometimes they appear in the real world, too. And they get used even when they fail. Miserably. (Choose to apply that modifier to whatever you wish.)
For instance, in supporting the government and being a terrorist. It may be true that if you are a terrorist, you do not support the government. No objections from me. However, if you do not support the government, there is no law in logic or even in creation that says you are automatically a terrorist. Not even in Shakespeare. Hell, especially not in Shakespeare. But that's another rant.
The world, as I am often fond of saying, is not a set of dichotomies. We are not all either one thing or another. In the most platitudinous of phrases: the world is not black and white.
Come on, people. Shakespeare got it. Even Beaumont and Fletcher got it, and I'm convinced they got the shorter end of the smart-stick. Even - and this is the big one - even Elizabeth I got it, and let me tell you, she was not a merciful lady. That woman was brutal, but very politically savvy.
She said (supposedly), "I am Richard II, know ye not that?" She chopped off the head of the Earl of Essex when he rebelled... even though he was one of her favorites. But she didn't order the execution, imprisonment, or even the censure of the players who put on Richard II, performed on the eve of the rebellion and commissioned by Essex.
And why not?
Because she understood the difference between terrorism and political commentary. Amazing. In 1601. Four-hundred and seven years ago. She didn't even send any of the actors to Guantanamo... er... the Tower.
Was Elizabethan England a veritable paradise? No. Not in the least. Between the plague rats and the smell, I much prefer the twenty-first century, thank you. But that doesn't mean we can't learn from the ghosts of our own history. They were not idiots, our social and political predecessors. They were not barbarians, at least not any more so than we are today.
Sure, they enjoyed violent entertainment... but then, so do we. They unjustly imprisoned traitors... but so do we. They censured dissidents... but so do we. Did they like a little more poetry with their gore? Sure. But they didn't have CGI.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Why Celebrity?
An interesting question, in this day and age. What causes us to valorize, to deify particular people within our culture? Why these people? Particularly - if one considers the Brittany Spears and Lindsay Lohan type - why these people? What is it about them that attracts our attention, draws our collective eye, makes us want to worship not only them, but the proverbial ground they walk on?
I often find myself mostly exempt from this tendency. Mostly. I do have authors whose blogs I read or whose books I check up on. I have musicians whose work I enjoy and listen to with frequency. There are academic speakers I would happily listen to or discuss issues with. But for the most part... I must confess I just don't get it.
I understand the principle. It's one that I deal with on a fairly regular basis, if only in a histo-literary context. But that's how I often relate to the world these days.
In Shakespeare's time, people believed that physical proximity to the monarch somehow let something kingly "rub off" on you. It why "gentleman of the privy chamber" was actually a desired title. You got to be the honored man who got to wipe the kingly ass. How fortunate for you. It's also why we know so much about kingly stools. Not the kind with legs, either. David Starkey - who has several very interesting books on Henry VIII and Elizabeth - wrote an article entitled "Representation Though Intimacy" that details the way in which physical contact and proximity to the king (here, Henry VIII) endowed an individual with an element of the sacred supposedly possessed by the king:
the vehicle [the body] was itself a symbol, with two distinct sets of meanings: one sacred, the other profane... The literalism is transparent: the king’s hands had been annointed at his coronation and hence were holy; they then rubbed off their benediction onto the metal. Thus, though there is no formal contemporary evidence on the point, there can be little doubt that in the intimate physical contact of body service the royal charisma was felt to rub off onto the servant, who thereby became himself endowed with part of the royal virtue. (Starkey 208)
Is that really what celebrity is all about? Do we have the sense (however subconscious) that some of their "greatness," their "sacredness" will rub off on us? Will somehow make us better or more interesting or more something?
I get being impressed by great artists/writers/musicians/actors/etc. I get that. What I don't get is the fanatic desire to touch them. Or to touch something they've touched. (To say nothing about getting body parts signed.)
For centuries, people went to kings because they could cure the "king's evil" (aka Scrofula). People made pilgrimages to holy sites, carried relics or bottles of holy water from a particular church, and visited the graves of saints. All because of this fascination with touching the ding an sich. The thing itself.
Touch is one of those things, those tactile, visceral, human things. Basic human contact. It's vital to not only our emotional health, but - some say - our very survival. Certainly, if you can't tell whether you're about to put your hand in a fire, you've got survival issues, but that's not what I mean. We get starved for touch, for contact. After a long day, we come home to our loved ones and hug them, kiss them, touch them. We use our bodies as a way to reassure ourselves that we're not alone, but also to convince ourselves that we're real.
Is that the importance behind - excuse the expression - touching Victoria Kahn? To determine that genius, that greatness, is, in fact, real?
If I can put my hand on it, then that must mean it's not a figment of my imagination. And if it's real, then I can share it. Even if only some tiny part of it. It can be mine, too. If it's real. If I can touch it.
Our eyes can deceive us, our ears can lie to us, our noses be fooled by oils and perfumes. But our hands... We can't yet convince them that something is real when it's not. So touching celebrity is nothing more or less than that basic human affirmation of reality. It's here. It's real.
I'm real.
I often find myself mostly exempt from this tendency. Mostly. I do have authors whose blogs I read or whose books I check up on. I have musicians whose work I enjoy and listen to with frequency. There are academic speakers I would happily listen to or discuss issues with. But for the most part... I must confess I just don't get it.
I understand the principle. It's one that I deal with on a fairly regular basis, if only in a histo-literary context. But that's how I often relate to the world these days.
In Shakespeare's time, people believed that physical proximity to the monarch somehow let something kingly "rub off" on you. It why "gentleman of the privy chamber" was actually a desired title. You got to be the honored man who got to wipe the kingly ass. How fortunate for you. It's also why we know so much about kingly stools. Not the kind with legs, either. David Starkey - who has several very interesting books on Henry VIII and Elizabeth - wrote an article entitled "Representation Though Intimacy" that details the way in which physical contact and proximity to the king (here, Henry VIII) endowed an individual with an element of the sacred supposedly possessed by the king:
the vehicle [the body] was itself a symbol, with two distinct sets of meanings: one sacred, the other profane... The literalism is transparent: the king’s hands had been annointed at his coronation and hence were holy; they then rubbed off their benediction onto the metal. Thus, though there is no formal contemporary evidence on the point, there can be little doubt that in the intimate physical contact of body service the royal charisma was felt to rub off onto the servant, who thereby became himself endowed with part of the royal virtue. (Starkey 208)
Is that really what celebrity is all about? Do we have the sense (however subconscious) that some of their "greatness," their "sacredness" will rub off on us? Will somehow make us better or more interesting or more something?
I get being impressed by great artists/writers/musicians/actors/etc. I get that. What I don't get is the fanatic desire to touch them. Or to touch something they've touched. (To say nothing about getting body parts signed.)
For centuries, people went to kings because they could cure the "king's evil" (aka Scrofula). People made pilgrimages to holy sites, carried relics or bottles of holy water from a particular church, and visited the graves of saints. All because of this fascination with touching the ding an sich. The thing itself.
Touch is one of those things, those tactile, visceral, human things. Basic human contact. It's vital to not only our emotional health, but - some say - our very survival. Certainly, if you can't tell whether you're about to put your hand in a fire, you've got survival issues, but that's not what I mean. We get starved for touch, for contact. After a long day, we come home to our loved ones and hug them, kiss them, touch them. We use our bodies as a way to reassure ourselves that we're not alone, but also to convince ourselves that we're real.
Is that the importance behind - excuse the expression - touching Victoria Kahn? To determine that genius, that greatness, is, in fact, real?
If I can put my hand on it, then that must mean it's not a figment of my imagination. And if it's real, then I can share it. Even if only some tiny part of it. It can be mine, too. If it's real. If I can touch it.
Our eyes can deceive us, our ears can lie to us, our noses be fooled by oils and perfumes. But our hands... We can't yet convince them that something is real when it's not. So touching celebrity is nothing more or less than that basic human affirmation of reality. It's here. It's real.
I'm real.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Sacrificial Violence
Violence is something with which today's society is eminently familiar. Something that has become so much a part of our everyday lives, that we no longer cringe to see it on the news. That we go to movies that valorize the violent hero. That we dismiss it as "terrorism" or "patriotism" without bothering to realize that they are often one and the same.
And yet, when we look back over the centuries, we condemn cultures who embrace their violence. The Aztecs, the ancient Celts, the Spartans... any society who understood the human impulse toward violence, we label as "barbaric."
As Rene Girard notes in Violence and the Sacred, violent sacrifice is simply an alternative outlet for natural human violent tendencies. He also notes that violence is inextricably intertwined with sanctity: "Violence and the sacred are inseparable" (19), and, further, "Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred" (31).
The "secret soul."
Violence, then, is the core, the essence, the fundamental root of all that we have determined to be sacred. It is the lifeblood - and the deathblood - of our society. The foundational stone for every belief system and governmental institution we have managed to construct in our time as self-aware entities on this planet. For all our claims of modernity, all that we term "civilized" is just as anchored in violence as the human sacrifice flayed on the altar of the sun-god. And all of them are designed to curb the very thing they emblematize.
The procedures that keep men's violence in bounds have one thing in common: they are no strangers to the ways of violence. There is reason to believe that they are all rooted in religion. As we have seen, the various forms of prevention go hand in hand with religious practices. The curative procedures are also imbued with religious concepts - both the rudimentary sacrificial rites and the more advanced judicial forms. Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds men's efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means against his own violence. It is that enigmatic quality that pervades the judicial system when that system replaces sacrifice. This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate.
We are a nation, a civilization, a world, of sacrifice. Whether we view it as barbarity, symbolism, or justice, sacrifice pervades every level of our conscious and subconscious.
For example. The dominant religion in our country symbolically sacrifices human flesh and then passes it around for its worshipers to eat. Sometimes every day. They wear images of human torture - for that's what a cross was for, folks - around their necks. They worship at the nailed and bleeding feet of a man nailed to a piece of wood and left to drown in his own blood. Disgusting when you think about it that way, yes? But it's symbolic. It isn't real.
Our justice system is designed to use violence to mitigate violence. Death penalty, people. And if not that, then imprisonment, which Foucault will tell you is its own kind of violence. It doesn't much matter (for the sake of my argument, anyway) if the violence is corporeal or psychological. It's still using violence to curb violence. To - Girard argues - stifle the cyclic perpetuation of vengeance with sanctioned violence. Whatever. It's still violence.
Do I even need to say anything about our entertainment? I didn't think so.
This is not to say - at all - that I'm against violence. I'm against beating the crap out of your neighbor for no good reason, but I'm not against the symbolic, and even occasional literal, violence in which our lives are steeped. No, I don't worship a dead man on a cross. But I find the idea of lauding self-sacrifice and respecting the kind of will it takes to die in a horrible, painful way worth attention. Perhaps not to the degree it is given... but, then, what irritates me about that is that the people who hold it in the highest regard don't seem to understand precisely what it is they are doing. If they acknowledged their veneration of violence, great. But they don't. They claim for it "peace" and "mercy" and "love," all the while behaving like boorish and ignorant yahoos.
But that's a rant for another day. Or two. Or twelve.
I think violence - particularly the kind we see in video games - is good for us. Gets the blood and the juices flowing. Reminds us that we are, fundamentally, animals. Higher animals, certainly, but still animals. Predators.
We are what we are. We are violent beings. Rather than pretend that we are not, we should do as our ancestors did. No, not rip people's beating hearts out of their chests and offer them up to the parrot-god of the moon. Though that does sound like fun...
Sacrifice. Sacrifice to ourselves and for ourselves.
So go ahead. Pick up the mouse and keyboard, the controller, the wiimote. Shoot the electronic and pixelated zombies, the splicers, the vampires and ghouls and ghosties and three-legged beasties. Sacrifice the ball. Sacrifice the pain as you push yourself another mile, another foot. Commit violence, but make it constructive. Make it count. Make it sacrificial.
And yet, when we look back over the centuries, we condemn cultures who embrace their violence. The Aztecs, the ancient Celts, the Spartans... any society who understood the human impulse toward violence, we label as "barbaric."
As Rene Girard notes in Violence and the Sacred, violent sacrifice is simply an alternative outlet for natural human violent tendencies. He also notes that violence is inextricably intertwined with sanctity: "Violence and the sacred are inseparable" (19), and, further, "Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred" (31).
The "secret soul."
Violence, then, is the core, the essence, the fundamental root of all that we have determined to be sacred. It is the lifeblood - and the deathblood - of our society. The foundational stone for every belief system and governmental institution we have managed to construct in our time as self-aware entities on this planet. For all our claims of modernity, all that we term "civilized" is just as anchored in violence as the human sacrifice flayed on the altar of the sun-god. And all of them are designed to curb the very thing they emblematize.
The procedures that keep men's violence in bounds have one thing in common: they are no strangers to the ways of violence. There is reason to believe that they are all rooted in religion. As we have seen, the various forms of prevention go hand in hand with religious practices. The curative procedures are also imbued with religious concepts - both the rudimentary sacrificial rites and the more advanced judicial forms. Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds men's efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means against his own violence. It is that enigmatic quality that pervades the judicial system when that system replaces sacrifice. This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate.
We are a nation, a civilization, a world, of sacrifice. Whether we view it as barbarity, symbolism, or justice, sacrifice pervades every level of our conscious and subconscious.
For example. The dominant religion in our country symbolically sacrifices human flesh and then passes it around for its worshipers to eat. Sometimes every day. They wear images of human torture - for that's what a cross was for, folks - around their necks. They worship at the nailed and bleeding feet of a man nailed to a piece of wood and left to drown in his own blood. Disgusting when you think about it that way, yes? But it's symbolic. It isn't real.
Our justice system is designed to use violence to mitigate violence. Death penalty, people. And if not that, then imprisonment, which Foucault will tell you is its own kind of violence. It doesn't much matter (for the sake of my argument, anyway) if the violence is corporeal or psychological. It's still using violence to curb violence. To - Girard argues - stifle the cyclic perpetuation of vengeance with sanctioned violence. Whatever. It's still violence.
Do I even need to say anything about our entertainment? I didn't think so.
This is not to say - at all - that I'm against violence. I'm against beating the crap out of your neighbor for no good reason, but I'm not against the symbolic, and even occasional literal, violence in which our lives are steeped. No, I don't worship a dead man on a cross. But I find the idea of lauding self-sacrifice and respecting the kind of will it takes to die in a horrible, painful way worth attention. Perhaps not to the degree it is given... but, then, what irritates me about that is that the people who hold it in the highest regard don't seem to understand precisely what it is they are doing. If they acknowledged their veneration of violence, great. But they don't. They claim for it "peace" and "mercy" and "love," all the while behaving like boorish and ignorant yahoos.
But that's a rant for another day. Or two. Or twelve.
I think violence - particularly the kind we see in video games - is good for us. Gets the blood and the juices flowing. Reminds us that we are, fundamentally, animals. Higher animals, certainly, but still animals. Predators.
We are what we are. We are violent beings. Rather than pretend that we are not, we should do as our ancestors did. No, not rip people's beating hearts out of their chests and offer them up to the parrot-god of the moon. Though that does sound like fun...
Sacrifice. Sacrifice to ourselves and for ourselves.
So go ahead. Pick up the mouse and keyboard, the controller, the wiimote. Shoot the electronic and pixelated zombies, the splicers, the vampires and ghouls and ghosties and three-legged beasties. Sacrifice the ball. Sacrifice the pain as you push yourself another mile, another foot. Commit violence, but make it constructive. Make it count. Make it sacrificial.
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