Tag: The Other

Solitude

On By phulsrojIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

‘This is a lonely time’ is a statement that rolls off the tongue easily at the Christmas of a corona-ravaged year.

We reach out by Zoom and see loved ones, yet we are more alone than we ever were since humankind’s early days. Not even village life or the office offer proximity. The plague, arguably, and cataclysmic wars did not bring physical distance in the way we experience it now. War encompassed the gravest horrors, camps, trenches, yet alone was not the problem.

What we forget at our peril is the difference between solitude and loneliness. You can be abjectly lonely in a crowd, and you can be alone and feel companionship. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote movingly about a nearness to his fiancee and his loved ones although he was waiting for death alone in his cell during Nazism.

There is no denying that the face-to-face with the Other is essential for understanding the Other, and that most of our personal treasures are those that we have laughed about, cried about, lived through, together with other human beings. And evidently there is currently a hiatus on much of this joint experiencing. Yet, that does not mean that loneliness must be the result!

Now is a time for appreciating those already collected treasures of life with others; for feeling the nearness of the spirit of togetherness that is imprinted in our hearts. Ibsen said: eternally owned is but what’s lost. That sounds depressing but is not. We own forever that which has happened in our lives, and Kierkegaard was wrong when he suggested that the past is of no relevance. Our past is also our present and the nearness to others that you can and should feel even when they are not present is made possible by a shared past. So let this Yuletide be the time when you are near your loved ones, not only by technical means, but because your mind and feeling let you travel to them with an intensity that only heart can bring!

The Other

On By phulsrojIn American elections, poetry, UncategorizedLeave a comment

When tragedy is big enough

the numbers numb.

A million dead cannot be mourned

– in singularity   –

My God! there were so many.

 

‘It is what it is’ makes no allowance

for reflection or regret;

it adds indignity to ignorance,

and gives the lie to a most basic truth:

that other lives have value – same as yours!

 

Such statement from the one who took a sacred oath

is wrapped in our failure

to pierce the veil of the preposterous;

gains credibility because we see one tear, but not the many.

So our heads, with all their calculation, must tell us that a million deaths are each a tragedy,

and that the anger and demands must capture that which our hearts can never hold – the suffering of multitudes, each Other being one like us.

Tenderness on Life Support

On By phulsrojIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Our times are raw and rough. This is a commonplace, and implies that the period before was less so. This is also true, albeit not in the mushy sense it is often understood. Earlier times were kinder in subtler ways.

First of all there was a cultural recognition particularly in the hippie era that tenderness was a moral imperative, despite the many violent protests. Ronald Reagan chipped away at this perspective with his adoration of wealth and trickle-down economics, yet the personality of Reagan reduced the sharp edge of his philosophy. The Contract with America and neo-cons put kindness as a self-standing goal into question and opened the door for the wholesale introduction of the cold-heartedness of the Trump era. That is perplexing, though, given that the intervening Obama presidency very deliberately (and tragically in vain) championed positivity and embraced kindness even towards political enemies bent on frustrating its policy goals. Just contrast the considerate fashion in which health care reform was introduced by Obama and the immoral and brutal steps taken during the Trump presidency to seek to discontinue it.

That tenderness is on life support today is to a large extent the fault of populism. Populism sees only black-and-white, where tenderness presupposes recognition of nuance, diversity and individuality. The binary truth perception of populism also makes it antithetical to democracy, as we have experienced all too clearly lately.

But inequality, the close relative of populism, also carries significant guilt for the retreat of tenderness. Inequality is premised on a perception that all rewards are accrued by own effort – that they are inherently just deserts. The flipside of this argument is that misfortune is equally just deserts. The self-righteousness involved largely precludes empathy, let alone tenderness. It represents the rough world of Hobbes. And the idea that all is ‘deserved’ is obviously fundamentally flawed. It is impossible to seriously dispute the effect of one’s environment and the lottery of genetics.

The corona crisis has given us object lessons in how tenderness does and does not function. The deliberate culling of segments of the population by governments refusing safety in putative favour of the economy is showing not just a lack of tenderness, but a complete absence of humanity, particularly in societies that can well afford proper lockdowns. What is happening is making social Darwinism look good!

On the personal level, the lockdowns have taught many of us the virtues of tenderness. Living claustrophobically closely in a successful manner requires acknowledgement of The Other and a subtlety of approach that we often sought to avoid when we had the possibility of fleeing to the office, travelling incessantly, and leading a butterfly’s social life. It is hard not to get the impression that President Trump is so emotionally averse to lockdown measures partly because they mean that he cannot entirely escape a closeness he is constitutionally unable to cope with and has spent a lifetime trying to avoid.

All is not lost, though. Corona has highlighted human fragility, and understanding fragility is a first step on the road back to tenderness. Joe Biden, for all his flaws, understands the preciousness and precariousness of human life – and thus is a poster person for tenderness, as was his boss, Barack Obama.

Yet, it is for each of us individually to use this time of multiple crises to pursue new beginnings in our lives and in society. Any meaningful endeavour in this respect must first and foremost get tenderness off life support!