Essays by Wallace Shawn. (1/2)
Title: Essays.
Author: Wallace Shawn.
Genre: Non-fiction, essays, philosophy, ethics, politics, theatre.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1985, 1991, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2008 (this edition 2010).
Summary: A collection of 16 essays divided into two parts. PART ONE: REALITY: In The Quest for Superiority (2008), with remarkable honesty and self-criticism of his own privileged life and upbringing, the author looks at what makes people, particularly in the U.S., feel superior and apathetic to suffering, and how that feeling can be replaced with compassion and love with the help of the arts. After the Destruction of the World Trade Center (2001), written a couple months after the attacks in the form of letters between America and "The Foreign Policy Therapist," the essay empathetically but critically takes a look at what America must honestly come to terms with about its place and reputation in the world. In Morality (1985), the author looks at the way morality functions in the world and individual lives, and both the temptation and the folly of giving up on the concept by accepting the faulty logic that all humans are vile anyway. An "American" Publishes a Magazine (2004), published in a one-issue magazine in response to the Abu Ghraib tortures, discusses Americans' apathy to and in fact dependence on the despicable actions overseas, and the concept of United States in general. Patriotism (1991) discusses what the concept should and should not mean, and how America does not need it. In Interview with Noam Chomsky (2004), the two men discuss a variety of subjects, including political personal responsibility, consumerism, the relationship between people and those who rule them, and the perception of social freedom where there is none. In Bush Proposes Preemptive War (2002), the author discusses how irrational fear of Iraq is, and how both illogical and unethical it would be to go to war with it. The Invasion of Iraq Is Moments Away (2003) are excerpts from a diary that discuss the imminent invasion of Iraq, and the United States' relationship with its leaders, as well as its attachments to its privilege. (Only PART 1 in this post, refer to PART 2 for the rest of the quotes).
My rating: 8/10.
My review:
♥ The human community is carved up into "individuals." Why? Presumably because it's helped us to survive, because a sleeping dog can easily be kicked, but it's hard to damage a large group of flies. I honestly don't know. At any rate, I didn't ask to be an individual, but I find I am one, and by definition I occupy a space that no other individual occupies, or in other words, for what it's worth, I have my own point of view. I'm not proud to be me, I'm not excited to be me, but I find that I am me, and like most other individuals, I send out little signals, I tell everyone else how everything looks from where I am. I have more free time than a lot of individuals, so, instead of talking, I sometimes write. My friends Anthony and Brenda find my signals interesting, so Anthony asked me to collect them into a book.
♥ My congenital inability to take the concept of the inviolable "self" seriously-my lack of certainty about who I am, where I am, and what my "characteristics" are-has led me to a certain skepticism, a certain detachment, when people in my vicinity are reviling the evil and alien Other, because I feel that very easily I could become that Other, and so could the reviler. And this has had an effect on my view of the world.
♥ But my earliest essay, "Morality," from 1985 (I was just over forty years old when I wrote it) shows me slowly seeing, as it appeared out of the mist, the outline of my own figure as a character in their story. It turned out that my role was sinister, dreadful, but for my first forty years I hadn't realized that. My ignorance about my own involvement in the story of the children allowed me to think, Yes, the conditions in the world are terrible, certainly-but I still could feel that the topic could be discussed in a leisurely manner. When one hasn't noticed that it's one's own boot that's standing on the suffering person's neck, one can be calmly sympathetic to the suffering person and hope that over time things will work out well for them.
♥ The schizophrenic nature of this book (essays on war and death and essays on the windowless miniature world of theatre) gives a pretty good picture of my own mind. Born by most definitions into the ruling class, I was destined to live a comfortable life. And to spend one's life as a so-called "creative artist" is probably the most comfortable, cozy, and privileged life that a human being can live on this earth-the most "bourgeois" life, if one uses that phrase to describe a life that is so comfortable that no one living it would want to give it up. To lie in bed and watch words bump together until they become sentences is a form of hedonism, whether the words and sentences glorify society and the status quo or denounce them. It's very agreeable to live like that, even if people don't like your work, criticize you, whatever. So I've always been tempted to turn off the radio and forget the world, but I'm not quite enough of a hedonist to forget it entirely and forever. I'm unable to totally forget the world-but I still haven't (yet) become a compassionate enough person to leave my bed for more than a moment in order to devote myself to changing the world or alleviating the suffering of my fellow human beings.
♥ Not surprisingly, my own ambivalence leaves me totally in awe of those amazing people whose concerns and passions have stayed constant and undimmed throughout their lives. I find I do need models or heroes to guide me on my journey through the world, and this need, combined with my shaky grasp on who I find "myself" to be, led me not merely to seek out and interview the poet Mark Strand and the political philosopher Noam Chomsky, but to believe, against the evidence, that they were me, and so I insisted that these interviews were essays of mine and had to be included as part of this book. Of courser one could say that no one person could be both Noam Chomsky and Mark Strand, not merely because it's miraculous that anyone ever was remarkable enough to be either of them at the same time, and it doesn't seem to stop me from refusing to accept that their lives are contradictory. Somehow poetry and the search for a more just order on earth are not contradictory, and rational thought and dreams are not contradictory, and there may be something necessary, as well as ridiculous, in the odd activity of racing back and forth on the bridge between reality and the world of dreams.
~~from Introduction.
♥ In fact I'd never met anyone who worked in a factory or on a farm. I'd frequently met people who owned factories and farms, because they lived all around us in the huge houses I could see from my window, although I wasn't aware then that the houses were huge because the people who lived in them paid very low salaries to their employees, while paying themselves enormous sums. Our wealthy neighbors were really like the giants in a fantastic tale, giants who were superior to others because they could spin gold put of human suffering.
♥ But you see, some of the people who don't live in the neighborhood-the ones our neighbors don't pay well, or treat well?-some of those people are out of control, they're so miserable, so desperate, they're out of their minds, they're very threatening, so it turns out we need more than cops. We actually have a large army as well, and a navy and an air force, plus the F.B.I., Coast Guard, Central Intelligence Agency, and marines-oy. It turned out that simply in order to be secure and protect our neighborhood, we needed an empire.
♥ And so I was thinking about the fact that in more expensive restaurants, the staff is usually trained to focus their attention on the pleasure of the diners, not on their own problems. In fact, the waiters in more expensive restaurants are invited to be friendly, amusing, to make funny remarks about their lives, to let us diners get to know them a little. But in the most expensive restaurants, the really fancy ones, we don't get to know the waiters at all. The waiters in those restaurants don't make funny remarks. They do their work with such discretion that they're barely noticed. And people compliment them by saying that they're unobtrusive.
Actually that's quite a good word for all those people whom we don't know and don't think about much about who serve us and make the things we need and whose lives we actually dominate: "the unobtrusives." And the interesting thing I've noticed is that in those very expensive restaurants, we don't talk with the waiter, but we enjoy their presence enormously. We certainly wouldn't want them to be replaced by robots or by conveyer belts that would carry our food to us while we sat in the dining room completely alone. No, we want them there, these silent waiters, these-"unobtrusives."
It's obviously a characteristic of human beings that we like to feel superior to others. But out problem is that we're not superior. We like the sensation of being served by others and feeling superior to them, but if we're forced to get to know the people who serve us, we quickly see that they're in fact just like us. And then we become uncomfortable-uncomfortable and scared, because if we can see that we're just the same, well, they might too, and if they did, they might become terribly, terribly angry, because why should they be serving us? So that's why we prefer not to talk to waiters.
A king feels the very same way, I'd have to imagine. He doesn't really want to get to know his subjects, but he nonetheless enjoys the fact that he has them. ..The subjects are in the background of his life. They're in the background of his life, and yet they provide the meaning of his life. Without his subjects, he wouldn't be king.
♥ Some people like to feel superior because once they were made to feel inferior. Others, including myself, were told constantly in their early days that they were superior and now find themselves to be hopelessly addicted. So, if I get into a conversation, for example, with a person who knows nothing about me, I immediately start to experience a sort of horrible tension, as if my head were being squashed, because the person I'm talking to is unaware of my superiority.
♥ Incidentally, one unmistakable way to know you're superior to someone is to beat them up. And just as I feel rather distinguished if a writer from the United States wins the Nobel Prize, I also feel stronger and more important because my country's army happens to dominate the world. The king doesn't need to meet his subjects in order to enjoy his dominion over them, and I don't need to go to Iraq to know that there are people all over the world, a great number of quiet "unobtrusives," who experience a feeling of stomach-turning terror when they see soldiers wearing the uniform of my country approaching their door in the middle of the night.
♥ But what bothers me more is that although I have nothing but contempt for imperial adventures, I've marched in the streets to demonstrate for peace, and I don't make it a practice to wink or joke about the brutal actions of brutal men, I can't deny that in spite of myself I derive some sense of superiority from being a citizen of a country that an act brutality with impunity and can't be stopped. I feel quite different from the way I know I would feel if I were a citizen of Grenada, Mauritius, or the Tongan Islands.
My feeling of superiority, and the sense of well-being that comes from that, increases with the number of poor people on the planet whose lives are dominated by me or my proxies and whom I nonetheless can completely ignore. I like to be reminded of these poor people, the unobtrusives, and then I like to be reminded of my lack of interest in them. For example, while I eat my breakfast each morning, I absolutely love to read my morning newspaper, because in the first few pages the newspaper tells me how my country treated all the obtrusives on the day before-deaths, beatings, torture, what have you-and then, as I keep turning the pages, the newspaper reminds me how important the unobtrusives are to me, and it tries to tempt me in its articles on shirts to consider different shirts that I might want to wear, and then it goes on, as I turn the pages, to try to coax me into sampling different forms of cooking, and ten to experience different plays on films, different types of vacation...
♥ Because it's valuable to remember that the feeling of superiority is not the only source of human satisfaction. Imperial dreams are not the only dreams. I've known people, for example, who've derived satisfaction from collecting seashells. And sometimes I think of a woman I knew a long time ago who seemed to be terribly happy, although her life consisted of not much more than getting up each day, playing with the cat, reading a mystery, eating an agreeable sandwich for lunch, then taking a walk in the afternoon. No wealthy giant eating dishes costing hundreds of dollars could ever have enjoyed a meal more than this woman seemed to enjoy her simple sandwiches-so what was her secret? And what about Edgar, who gets such pleasure out of working as a nurse, or Tom, who finds such nourishment teaching children in school? Jane's need for superiority seems fully satisfied if a friend admires one of her drawings. And Edna's overjoyed if she wins at cards. People can make a life, it seems, out of love-out of gardening, out of sex, friendship, the company of animals, the search for enlightenment, the enjoyment of beauty. Wait-isn't that our particular province?
Beauty can be important in a person's life. And people beguiled by the beautiful are less dangerous to others than those obsessed by the thought of supremacy. If an afternoon of reading poetry has given me a feeling of profound well-being, I don't then need to go out into the street and seek satisfaction by strangling prostitutes. Art can be central in a person's life. If the art we create is beautiful enough, will people be so drawn to looking at it that they'll leave behind their quest for power? Beauty really is more enjoyable than power. A poem really is more enjoyable than an empire, because a poem doesn't hate you. The defense of privilege, the center of our lives for such a long time, is grim, exhausting. We're exhausted from holding on to things, exhausted from trying not to see those unobtrusive people we're kicking away, whose suffering is actually unbearable to us.
In the mansion of arts and letters, we live like children, running and playing up and down the hallways all day and all night. We fill room after room with the things we make. After our deaths, we'll leave behind our poems, drawings, and songs, made of our own pleasure, and we won't know if they'll be allowed to help in the making of a better world.
~~The Quest for Superiority.
♥ And the older I get, the more I long to feel really comfortable. But I've also come to realize that an awful lot of preparatory work must be undertaken before that particular feeling can begin to exist, and I've learned, too, how all that effort can count for nothing if even one tiny element of the world around me refuses to fit into its necessary place. Yes, I'm at home in my lovely apartment, I'm sitting in my cozy rocking chair, there are flowers on the table, tranquil colors of paint on the walls. But if I've caught a fever and I'm feeling sick, or if a nearby faucet has developed a leak, or if a dog in the courtyard six floors below me is barking, the unity of my peaceful scene is spoiled, and comfort flies out the window. And unfortunately, what in fact prevents me more than anything else from feeling really comfortable-whether I'm leaning back against a soft banquette in a pleasant restaurant or spending a drowsy morning in bed propped up on three or four pillows-is actually the well-intentioned ethical training I received as a child.
My parents brought me up to believe in "morality"-an approach toward life that was based on the paradoxical concept of "self-restraint." "Morality" essentially described how a person would behave if he believed all human beings to be equally real, if he cared equally about all human beings, even though one of them happened, in fact, to be himself. And undoubtedly there were certain individuals who had a special gift for morality, the way some people had a gift for music or pleasure. But we, for the most part, lacked that gift, so we were taught principles about how to behave.
And at the same time, we were taught that in order to live morally, it was necessary to seek out accurate knowledge about things. Maybe it could sometimes be "right," for example, to kill another person. But if I acted impulsively and killed another person because of misperceived facts or erroneous suspicions, that would be "wrong."
But I realize now that this entire training in morality is a jarring element in the life I'm leading, and in my struggle to feel comfortable, to feel at ease, it functions rather like a dog whose barking never stops, a dog whose barking persists through the day and then continues regularly all night long. It is a perpetual irritation. Everything visible around me may be perfect and serene, but inside, there is this voice that never stops denouncing me. It does not fit in. Of course I'd be pleased if I could claim that all my relations with other people were in perfect harmony with the laws of morality-and as a matter of fact, in my daily interactions with my friends and colleagues and loved ones, I usually try to follow ethical precepts. But when I draw the curtain of perception a little bit wider and consider the fact that there are thousands and millions of people out there in the world, all quite real, as real as me, and that I have some sort of relation to every one of them, I have to admit that it would be hard to insist that all these relations of mine are truly obedient to those solemn laws.
♥ As I write these words, in New York City in 1985, more and more people who grew up around me are making this decision; they are throwing away their moral chains and learning to enjoy their true situation: Yes, they are admitting loudly and bravely, We live in beautiful homes, we're surrounded by beautiful gardens, our children are playing with wonderful toys, and our kitchen shelves are filled with wonderful food. And if there are people out there who are envious of us and who might even be tempted to break into our homes and take what we have, well then, part of our good fortune is that we can afford to pay guards to protect us. And if those who protect us need to hit people in the face with the butts of their rifles, or if they need perhaps even to turn around and shoot, they have our permission, and we only hope they'll do what they do with diligence and skill.
The amazing thing I've noticed about those friends of mine who've made that choice is that as soon as they've made it, they begin to blossom, to flower, because they are no longer hiding, from themselves or anyone else, the true facts about their own lives. They become very frank about human nature. They freely admit that man is a predatory creature, a hunter and a fighter, and they admit that it can warm a human's heart to trick an enemy, to make him cry, to make him do what he doesn't want to do, and even to make him crawl in the mud and die in agony. They admit that to manipulate people can be an art, and that to deceive people can be entertaining. They admit that there's a skill involved in playing life's game, and they admit that it's exciting to bully and threaten and outwit and defeat all the other people who are playing against you. And as they learn to admit these things, and they lose the habit of looking over their shoulders in fear at the disapproving ghosts of their parents and teachers, they develop the charm and grace that shine out from all people whoa are truly comfortable with themselves, who are not worried, who are not ashamed of their own actions. These are people whoa are free to love life exuberantly. They can enjoy a bottle of wine or a walk in the garden with unmixed pleasure, because they feel justified in having the bottle of wine, in having the garden. And if, by chance, they run into the laundress who takes care of their clothes, they can chat with her happily and easily, because they accept the fact that some people, themselves, happen to wear beautiful clothes, and others are paid to keep them clean. And, in fact, these people who accept themselves are people whose company everyone enjoys.
So there are those who live gracelessly in a state of discomfort because they allow themselves to be whipped on an hourly basis by morality's lash, and then there's another group of cheerful, self-confident people who've put morality aside for now, and they're feeling great, and it's fun to be with them. But if we decide that we don't need to see all people as equally real, and we come to believe that we ourselves and the groups we belong to are more real, we of course are making a factual mistake.
I was born during World War II, and somehow I've spent a lot of time over the course of my life thinking about the character of Adolf Hitler, and one amazing thing about Hitler was the way his extraordinary self-confidence enabled him to expound his theories of the world to his aides and orderlies and secretaries at the dining room table night after night with no sense that he needed to keep checking to see if his theories were soundly grounded in facts. Hitler's boundless self-confidence enabled him to live each day as a tireless murderer; no weakness, no flagging energy, kept his knife from plunging into his victims hour after hour with mechanical ease.
♥ How could a person break his attachment to morality without noticing it, without feeling it, without remembering it? Could a perfectly decent person just turn into a cold-hearted beast, a monster, and still feel pretty much the same?
Of course. A perfectly decent person can turn into a monster perfectly easily. And there's no reason why he would feel any different. Because the difference between a perfectly decent person and a monster is just a few thoughts. The perfectly decent person who follows a certain chain of reasoning, ever so slightly and subtly incorrect, becomes a perfect monster at the end of the chain.
Thoughts have extraordinary power in the human world, and yet they can behave so unpredictably. Familiar thoughts can lead us by the hand to very strange thoughts. And in a way, we're not as clever as our own thoughts, which have a peculiar habit of developing on their own and taking us to conclusions we never particularly wanted to reach. Within each thought, it seems, other thoughts are hidden, waiting to crawl out.
♥ And so every day we encounter the numberless insidious intellectual ploys by which the principle of immorality makes a plausible case for itself, and for every ploy there is a corresponding weakness in our own thinking that causes us not to notice where we're being led until we've already fallen into the trap. Unfortunately, these small intellectual infirmities of ours-our brief lapses of concentration, our susceptibility to slightly inappropriate analogies, the way we tend to forget in what particular contexts the ideas in our heads first made their appearance there, the way our attention can be drawn at the wrong moment by the magician's patter to the hand that does not contain the mysterious coin-just happen to have the power to send history racing off on a path of horror. Morality, if it survived, could protect us from horror, but very little protects morality. And morality, besides, is hard to protect, because morality is only a few thoughts inside our heads. And just as we quickly grow accustomed to brutal deeds and make way before them, so we are quickly stunned into foggy submission by the brutal thoughts which, in our striving for comfort, we have allowed into our minds. And all the time we are operating under the illusion that we, mere individuals, have no power at all over the course of history, when that is in fact (for better or worse) the very opposite of the case.
The shocking truth is that history, too, is at the mercy of my thoughts, and the political leaders of the world sit by their radios waiting to hear whether morality has sickened or died inside my skull. The process is simple. I speak with you, and then I turn out the light, and I go to sleep, but, while I sleep, you talk on the telephone to a man you met last year in Ohio, and you tell him what I said, and then he calls up a neighbor of his, and what I said keeps traveling, farther and farther. And just as a fly can quite blithely and indifferently land on the nose of a queen, so the thought that you mentioned to the man in Ohio can make its way with unimaginable speed into the mind of a president. Because a society, among other things, is a network of brains, and a president is no less involved in his society's network than anyone else, and there is almost nothing that he thinks that doesn't come right from that network. In fact, he is virtually incapable of coming up with an attitude to any problem or to any event that has not been nurtured and developed in that network of brains. When it sooner or later becomes necessary for any of us, whether president or ordinary citizen, to come up with thoughts about political affairs, the only raw materials that we have to draw on are the thoughts we've previously formed-many of them simply thoughts about the conflicts and drama of our daily lives. Our thoughts may be ones we've acquired from our parents, from our lovers, or from the man in Ohio. But wherever we've found them, they are all we have to work with. Our political attitudes can only come out of what we are-what we learned in school, at the playground, at the office, on the streets, at the party, at the beach, at the dinner table, in bed. And as all of our attitudes flow into action, flow into history, the bedroom and the battlefield soon seem to be one.
♥ Everything you are affects me, and everything I am, all my thoughts-the behavior I admire or criticize, the way I choose to spend an hour of my time, the things I like to talk about, the stories I like to hear, the jokes I like to tell-affect the course of history whether I like it or not, whether I know about it or not, whether I care or not. My power over history is inescapable except through death. Privacy is an illusion. What I do is public, and what I think is public. The fragility of my own thoughts becomes the fragility of the world. The ease with which I could become a swine is the ease with which the world could fall apart, like something rotten.
♥ Morality happens to be a protection that we need in order to avoid total historical disaster, and so, unfortunately, we can't afford to turn our eyes away when our acquaintances, our friends, or we ourselves, drop down a few degrees on the scale of obedience to moral principles. It's obviously foolish and absurd to judge some small decline on the moral scale as if it were a precipitous, lengthy slide, but the temptation is great to be easy on ourselves, and we've all discovered that it's easier to be easy on ourselves if we're all easy on each other too, and so we are. So when a precipitous slide really does take place, a particular effort is required in order to see it. Sophistries, false chains of reasoning, deception, and self-deception all rush in to conceal the fact that any change has occurred at all.
♥ All right then, we may say in response to the mirror, we are vile, we know it. Everyone is. That's the way people are.
This self-pitying response to the unflattering news that we're not quite good means that we've decided, if that's how things are, that we'll accept immorality, and we'll no longer make any effort to oppose it.
But it's utterly ridiculous to say that people are vile. If we step outside and pay a brief visit to the nearest supermarket or the nearest café, we'll find ourselves in a position to see, scattered perhaps among scenes of ugliness and greed, examples of behavior that is thoughtful or kind, moments when someone could easily have been cold or cruel but in fact was not. Perhaps we will see the very same person do something harsh and a moment later something gentle. Everyone knows that this element of goodness exists, that it can grow, or that it can die, and there's something particularly disingenuous about extricating oneself from the human struggle with the whispered excuse that it's already over.
~~Morality.
♥ A few months ago, the American public, who in political theory and to some extent even in reality are "sovereign" in the United States, were given a group of pictures showing American soldiers tormenting desperate, naked, extremely thin people in chains-degrading them, mocking them, and physically torturing them. And the question arose, How would the American public react to that? And the answer was that in their capacity as individuals, certain people definitely suffered or were shocked when they saw the pictures. But in their capacity as the sovereign public, they did not react. A great public cry of lamentation and outrage did not rise up across the land. The president and his highest officials were not compelled to abase themselves publicly, apologize, and resign, not did they find themselves thrown out of office, nor did the political candidates from the party out of power grow hoarse with denouncing the astounding crimes that were witnessed by almost everyone alive all over the world. As far as one could tell, over a period of weeks, the atrocities shown in the pictures had been assimilated into the list of things that the American public was willing to consider normal and that they could accept. And so now one has to ask, Well, what does that portend? And so we have to think about being Americans and living in the United States.
♥ Life is shockingly short even for those lucky enough to live to be a hundred, and I'd rather fill my brain with, for example, the gorgeous songs called "Book of the Hanging Gardens" by Arnold Schoenberg than with thoughts about men in Washington, D.C., who have a sick need to set fire to cities, wear enormous crowns, and march across crowds of prostrate people. In a way I find those men very, very boring, but the problem is that they would say that all of the marching and trampling they're doing is actually for the benefit of me and everyone I know, and unfortunately I have to admit that that actually is true. It's simply true, certainly in regard to me. I lead a very nice, very easy life, thanks to the oil and other supplies that these boring and unappealing men have collected and delivered to my apartment. So I'm up to my neck in being an American, whether I like it or not.
♥ In confusing times and bad times, it seems natural to collect around oneself a group of friends and people one trusts, to try to figure things out. So that's what this is. It's not going to be an institution, because I don't understand institutions or usually enjoy them, and in general they might be part of the grandiosity that is part of our problem. So that's why this magazine is going out of business after its first issue and has therefore been given the name Final Edition.
~~An "American" Publishes a Magazine.
♥ In July 1991, the Nation asked various people to submit brief reflections on "patriotism."
"Patriotism" can seem to be as harmless as the love of certain musical instruments, food, a landscape. Certain personalities from one's own country can seem so charming, so delightful. But "patriotism" always seems to mean: If you feel a fondness for your country, then it ought to be worth it to you to do "x."
Patriotism is considered to be an emotion a person ought to feel. But why? Why is it nobler to love your own country than to love someone else's? Why is it particularly wonderful to think that the place you're from is the greatest in the world? Why should individuals speak in the first person plural about "our ideals" and "the things we believe"?
If certain great figures from our country's past have had valuable insights, by all means let's be inspired by them. But let's not make a fetish out of it. The United States is a monster that must be stopped, controlled. It's too elaborate to say (again and again), "We must change our current behavior because it violates our noble traditions." The historical point is probably untrue, and anyway, it doesn't matter. What's necessary is to change the behavior. We don't need to be flattered while we're doing it, and in any case, even if we have some noble ancestors, that wouldn't mean that we have any particular merit.
For citizens of small, weak countries, patriotism might be connected to a yearning for justice. For people who are despised, who despise themselves, more self-esteem might be a good thing. But for people who already are in love with themselves, who worship themselves, who consider themselves more important than others, more self-esteem is not needed. Self-knowledge would be considerably more helpful.
~~Patriotism.
♥ Noam Chomsky: It's simply very easy to subordinate oneself to a worldview that's supportive of one's own interests. Most of us don't go around murdering people or stealing food from children. There are a lot of activities that we just regard as pathological when we do them individually. On the other hand, when they're done collectively, they're considered necessary and appropriate. Clinton, Kennedy: they all carried out mass murder, but they didn't think that that was what they were doing-nor does Bush. You know, they were defending justice and democracy from greater evils. And in fact I think you'd find it hard to discover a mass murderer in history who didn't think that... It's kind of interesting to read the Russian archives, which are coming out now. They're being sold, like everything in Russia, and so we're learning something about the internal discussions of the Russian leaders, and they talked to each other the same way they talked publicly. I mean, these gangsters, you know, who were taking over Eastern Europe in the late '40s and early '50s-they were talking to each other soberly about how we have to defend Eastern European democracy from the fascists who are trying to undermine it. It's pretty much the public rhetoric, and I don't doubt that they believed it.
♥ NC: Take Heidegger, one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. I mean, just read his straight philosophical work, An Introduction to Metaphysics. A few pages in, it starts off with the Greeks, as the origins of civilization, and the Germans as the inheritor of the Greeks, and we have to protect the Greek heritage... This was written in 1935. The most civilized people in the West, namely the Germans-the Germans were coming under the delusion that their existence, and in fact the existence of Western civilization since the Greeks, was threatened by fierce enemies against whom they had to protect themselves.
I mean, it was deeply imbued in the general culture-in part including German Jews. There's a book by a major humanistic figure of modern Jewish life, Joachim Prinz. He was in Germany in the '30s, and he wrote a book called Wir Juden (We Jews), in which he said, Look, we don't like the anti-Semitic undertones of what the Nazis are doing, but we should bear in mind that much of what they're saying is right, and we agree with it. In particular their emphasis on blood and land-blut und boden. Basically we agree with that. We think that the identity of blood is very important and the emphasis on the land is very important. And the tie between blood and land is important. And in fact as late as 1941, influential figures in the Jewish Palestinian community, the pre-state community, including the group that included Yitzhak Shamir, who later became prime minister, sent a delegation to try to reach the German government, to tell them that they would like to make an arrangement with the Germans, and they would be the outpost for Germany in the Middle East, because they basically agreed with them on a lot of things. Now, no one would suggest this was the mainstream, by any means, but it also wasn't a pathological fringe. Or take Roosevelt. Roosevelt was always quite pro-Fascist, thought Mussolini was "that admirable Italian gentleman," as he called him. As late as 1939, he was saying that Fascism was an important experiment that they were carrying out, until it was distorted by the relation to Hitler. And this was almost twenty years after they destroyed the Parliament, broke up the labor movement, raided Ethiopia with all the atrocities...
♥ NC: Moral codes... you can find things in the traditional religions that are very benign and decent and wonderful and so on, but I mean, the Bible is probably the most genocidal book in the literary canon. The God of the Bible-not only did he order His chosen people to carry out literal genocide-I mean, wipe out every Amalekite to the last man, woman, child, and, you know, donkey and so on, because hundreds of years ago they got in your way when you were trying to cross the desert-not only did He do things like that, but, after all, the God of the Bible was ready to destroy every living creature on earth because some humans irritated Him. That's the story of Noah. I mean, that's beyond genocide-you don't know how to describe this creature; Somebody offended Him, and He was going to destroy every living being on earth? And then He was talked into allowing two of each species to stay alive-that's supposed to be gentle and wonderful.
♥ WS: In a way, it seems to be simply our obsessive need to have a high opinion of ourselves that leads us repeatedly into idiotic thinking. If our vestigial rationality detects a conflict between our actions and our principles-well, we don't want to change our actions and it's embarrassing to change our principles, so we wield the blowtorch against our rationality, bending it till it's willing to say that our principles and action are well-aligned. We're prisoners of self-love.
♥ NC: You know, Czeslaw Milosz was a courageous, good person. And when he died there were huge stories. But he and his associates faced nothing in Eastern Europe like what intellectuals faced in our domains. I mean, Havel was put in jail. He didn't have his brains blown out by elite battalions trained by the Russians. In Rwanda, for about a hudred days they were killing about eight thousand people a day. And we just went through the tenth anniversary. There was a lot of lamentation about how we didn't do anything about it, and how awful, and we ought to do something about other people's crimes, and so on. That's an easy one-to do something about other people's crimes. But you know, every single day, about the same number of people-children-are dying in Southern Africa from easily treatable diseases. Are we doing anything about it? I mean, that's Rwanda-level killing, just children, just Southern Africa, every day-not a hundred days but all the time. It doesn't take military intervention. We don't need to worry about who's going to protect our forces. What it takes is bribing totalitarian institutions to produce drugs. It costs pennies. Do we think about it? Do we do it? Do we ask what kind of a civilization is it were we have to bribe totalitarian institutions in order to get them to produce drugs to stop Rwanda-level killing every day? It's just easier not to think about it.
WC: Totalitarian institutions-you mean the drug companies?
NC: What are they? The drug companies are just totalitarian institutions which are subsidized: most of the basic research is funded by the public, there are huge profits, and of course from a business point of view it not only makes sense, but it's legally required for them to produce lifestyle drugs for rich Westerners to get rid of wrinkles, instead of malaria treatments for dying children in Africa. It's required. It's legally required.
♥ NC: I was involved particularly with the resisters, who were refusing to serve in the army. They're now called "draft evaders" and so on, but that's bullshit. I mean, almost all of them could have gotten out of the draft easily. A lot of them were theology students, and others-you'd go to your doctor, and he'd say you were a homosexual or something. It was nothing for a privileged kid to get out of the army if he wanted to. They were choosing to resist. And facing serious penalties. For an eighteen-year-old kid to go to jail for years or live their life in exile was not an easy choice-especially when, of course, if you conformed, you would just shoot up there and be part of the elite. But they chose it, and it was a courageous decision, and they were denounced for it and condemned for it and so on...
♥ NC: In the early stages of the resistance, the women were supposed to be supportive, you know, to these resisters. And at some stage these young women began to ask, Why are we doing this shit work? I mean, why are we the ones who are supposed to look up in awe at them, when we're doing most of the work? And they began to regard themselves as being oppressed. Now that caused a rather serious psychological problem for the boys. Because they thought, and rightly, that they were doing something courageous and noble, and here suddenly they had to face up to the fact that they were oppressors, and that was hard. I mean, I know people who committed suicide. Literally. Because they couldn't face it.
♥ NC: I was in England a couple of months ago at the time of the Cannes Festival, when Michael Moore won, and one of the papers had a long interview with him, and the interviewer was suggesting that Michael Moore wasn't telling the truth when he said he came from a working-class background. He said he came from a working-class background, but his father had a car and owned a house, so, you know, what's this crap about coming from a working-class background? Well, his father was an auto worker! I mean, the whole concept of class in any meaningful sense has just been driven out of people's heads. The fact that there are some people who give the orders and others who follow them-that is gone. And the only question is, How many goods do you have?-as if, if you have goods, you have to be middle class, even if you're just following orders.
WS: What you possess determines how people see you and how you see yourself. That defines you-your role in the social structure does not.
NC: People are trained-and massive efforts go into this-people are trained to perceive their identity and their aspirations and their value as people in terms of the things they amass. Nothing else. And in terms of yourself, not anyone else...
♥ NC: Yes, bit people are very deluded about this, including professionals. Take professional economists. Most of them literally believe what Alan Greenspan and others talk about-that the economy flourishes because of entrepreneurial initiative and consumer choice and so on and so forth. You know, that's total bullshit. The economy flourishes because we have a dynamic state sector.
WS: You mean, the motor driving it all is the taxpayer's money being spent-or given away to private companies-by the state. The motor is not the individual consumer spending his money in the free market.
NC: Just about everything in the new economy comes out of state initiatives. I mean, what's M.I.T.? M.I.T. is overwhelmingly a taxpayer-funded institution, in which research and development is carried out at public cost and risk, and if anything comes out of it, some private corporation, like the guys who endowed this building, will get the profit from it. And almost everything works like that-from computers, the Internet, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals-you run through the dynamic parts of the economy, that's where they come from. I mean, with things like, say, computers and the Internet, for example, consumer choice had no role at all! Consumers didn't even know these things existed until they'd been developed for years at public expense. But we live in a world of illusion.
♥ WS: To say that people may not even be aware that their lives consist of following orders-that's terrifying. It's as if people don't acknowledge that their ability to make choices about their lives, their degree of power over their own environment, is an important issue.
NC: No, what you're taught from infancy is that the only choices you're supposed to make are choices of commodities. It's none of your business how the government works or what government policies are or how the community's organized or anything else. Your job is to purchase commodities.
A lot of it's conscious. There's a conscious strain in sort of liberal, intellectual thought, it goes way back, that the people really don't have any right to participate in the political system. They are supposed to choose among the responsible men.
WS: But it's funny that the people themselves go along with it, because it seems insulting. Why aren't people more insulted? They're not even insulted when they're blatantly lied to! They seem to laugh it off. But in their own lives, in daily life, people would resent it a lot-you know, being lied to.
NC: No-not when people in power lie to you. Somehow there's some law that that's the way it works.
WS: Yes... I feel like saying that your approach to discussing these things is a bit like the approach of a sculptor-with hammer and chisel you attack the big block of marble, and from a certain point of view, all your gestures could be seen as rather hostile or aggressive as you pursue the somewhat negative activity of cutting down the stone, but in the end something rather glorious is revealed. I think you're suggesting that to live in illusion, to be a slave to the worldview of your time and place, or to be all your life a follower of orders-these are all in a way different forms of oppression. But I think you're suggesting that all human beings have the capacity to collaborate in the task of guiding their own lives-and the life of the place where they work, the life of their community, the life of the world. It would be so amazing if people could take that possibility seriously.
~~Interview with Noam Chomsky.
♥ For all their snarling at one another, nations have so much in common. All of them want to amass weapons. And one way or another, they will come up with some ruler to be on top of them, some boss of some kind who always believes himself to be a reliable custodian of the amassed weapons. Meanwhile, every nation is tortured by its fear of the weapons and the rulers of the other nations. The system is awful! We're all so frightened that we even tell our children frightening stories in school about terrifying rulers, all the "madmen" throughout history who've tried to "take over the world." Is there no escape from this?
♥ Bush indeed recognizes the danger inherent in a world divided up into armed fiefdoms. His proposed solution is that one of those fiefdoms, his own, should become more powerful than any of the others and should preserve peace, order, and stability by attacking any fiefdom whose ruler is potentially hostile.
The flaw in this proposed solution is that Bush's fiefdom, the United States, will inevitably face many hostile rulers. This is not just a possibility-it's a certainty, because in the world as it is, most people are degraded for the benefit of the few, and the few happen to include Bush, his friends, and the privileged elite of the United States. The stability Bush hopes to enforce, personally, is known by everyone to benefit him, personally, and the more the identifies himself as the enforcer, the more hostility will be focused on him and on the United States.
If he responds to this hostility by attacking what by definition will be under his proposal much weaker nations, his use of violence, his sowing of destruction and death among the less powerful, will arouse even greater hostility, and more and more fiefdoms around the world will come to be headed by rulers who hate our nation. In other words, Bush's proposed plan for preventing any possible threats against us, a plan that amounts in practice to an attempt to "take over the world," can only end in greater and greater isolation for the United States-and ultimately, in the long term, in some sort of military defeat.
~~Bush Proposes Preemptive War.
♥ In the cold weather, in New York, in January of 2003, everyone is frozen.
We're passengers. We're waiting. We're sitting very quietly in our seats in the car, waiting patiently for the driver to arrive. We're nervous, of course, looking out the window at the gray landscape. Soon the driver will open the door, sit down in his seat, and take us on a trip. We're going to Iraq. We don't want to go. We know we'll be driving straight into the flames, straight ahead into the flames of hell. It's crazy. It's insane. We know that. But we're paralyzed, numb, can't seem to move. Don't seem to know how to reason with the driver. Don't seem to know how to stop the car from going. Don't seem to know how to get out of the car.
♥ How fascinated people are-in every country!-by the special little men they call their "leaders." What a terrible way to live.
Here, we think about our leaders all the time. We dream about them. It wasn't so many centuries ago that kings and emperors were remote from their subjects. Their subjects didn't even know what their faces looked like. But I'm as familiar with the face of Richard Cheney or of Donald Rumsfeld as I am with the faces of my closest friends.
♥ Every morning we're given our New York Times, which teaches us to see our leaders "as people." Our newspaper helps us to get to know our leaders, their quirks, their personalities, helps us really to identify with them. I understand their problems, what they're trying to do, how difficult it is. And I share a lit with them-at least I share the essential things: a climate sweetened by electricity, warm in winter, cool in summer; armchairs, bathrobes, well-made boots, peasant restaurants. Just like our readers, I like the old songs of Frank Sinatra, I like to watch Julia Roberts in the movies, I like driving quietly through the fall foliage in New England, I like lemon meringue pie and banana splits. Our leaders share my life, and they've made my life. I have my life because of them. Can that be denied? Is my life of pasta and pastries and books and concerts not based on the United States being the mighty nation they insist it should be?
♥ The price of the fossils must stay cheap. The boys are going to be fighting this war with money from my taxes, and they're going to bring me back the prize-my own life. Yes, I'm involved, to put it mildly.
♥ Bush himself is not thinking about the weapons held (or not held) by this destroyed country, Iraq, nor is he actually shocked by the probability that Iraq, like all the other nations on earth (because of the nature of "nations"), wants to be as well armed as it possibly can be. But he's managed to convince the governments of the world that, just as he will never say why he actually wants to invade Iraq but will only talk about Iraq's weapons, they must never say why they oppose the invasion, except by talking about Iraq's weapons. Bush will say Iraq has a lot of weapons, the opponents of war will say Iraq has few. This discussion will go on until the troops are ready and the weather's right for war, and at that moment Bush will declare he's "lost patience" with the laborious pace of the discussion of weapons, and he'll go to war.
♥ What is our system? No term for it exists. To call it a democracy seems so wrong. How can you call it a democracy when, for example, still today the public is not aware that in 1991 the first President Bush circumvented quite plausible opportunities to avoid war with Iraq? Yes, we're allowed to vote for our leaders, but we're not allowed to know what they're like, because we're not allowed to know what they do. The enormous enterprises of the government are conducted sometimes for the benefit of certain citizens, maybe even sometimes for the benefit of all of them, but the citizens don't even know what the government is doing, much less who the beneficiaries are. The citizens can hardly be expected to have intelligent opinions on the government's decisions, because the citizens don't know what's actually going on, and they can't find out. At the appropriate moments, we're brought in to cheer, but we've never been told what actually happened.
♥ Why are we being so ridiculously polite? It's as if there were some sort of gentleman's agreement that prevents people from stating the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated and thrilled by the thought of war, by the thought of the incredible power they will have over so many other people, by the thought of the immensity of what they will do, by the scale, the massiveness of the bombing they're planning, the violence, the killing, the blood, the deaths, the horror.
The love of killing is inside each one of us, and we can never be sure that it won't come out. We have to be grateful if it doesn't come out. In fact, it is utterly wrong for me to imagine that Bush is violent and I am not, that Bush is cruel and I am not. I am potentially just as much of a killer as he is, and I need the help of all the sages and poets and musicians and saints to guide me onto a better path, and I can only hope that the circumstances of my life will continue to be ones that help me to stay on that path. But we can't deny that Bush and his men, for whatever reason, are under the sway of the less peaceful side of their natures. From the first days after the World Trade Center fell, you could see in their faces that, however scary it might be to be holding the jobs they held, however heavy the responsibility might be for steering the ship of state in such troubled times, they in fact were loving it. Those faces glowed. You could see that special look that people always have when they've just been seized by that most purposeless of all things, a sense of purpose. This, combined with a lust for blood, makes for particularly dangerous leaders, so totally driven by their desire for the violence to start that they're incapable of hearing any voices around them to plead for compromise or peace.
Why do they want this war so much? Maybe we can never fully know the answer to that question. Why do some people want to be whipped by a dominatrix? Why do some people want so desperately to have sex with children that they can't prevent themselves from raping them, even though they know that what they're doing is wrong? Why did Hitler want to kill the Jews? Why do some people collect coins? Why do some people collect stamps?
We can't fully understand it.
♥ In fact, the dispassionate tone of the "debate" about Iraq in the New York Times and on every television screen seems psychotically remote from the reality of what will happen if war actually occurs. We are talking about raining death down on human beings, about thousands and thousands of howling wounded human beings, dismembered corpses in pools of blood. Is this one of the "lessons of Vietnam" that people have learned-that the immorality of this unspeakable murdering must never be mentioned? That the discussion of murder must never mention murder and that even the critics of murder must always criticize it because it is not in the end in our own best interest? Must the critics always say that the murders would come at too high a price for us, would be too expensive, would unbalance our budget, hurt our economy, cause us to spend less on domestic priorities; that it would lose us our friends, create enemies for us? Can we never say that this butchering of human beings is horrifying and wrong?
♥ I could survive some lousiness, some uncomfortableness, some decline. Back on the street, I kept walking for a while and wondered what would happen if we allowed some of the fossils to simply lie there under the sand, if we decided not to try to dominate the world. We'd have no control over what would happen. We'd let go and fall. How far would we sink? How far? How far? Sure, it's been great, the life of comfort, good lunches, predictability. But imagine how it would feel if we could be on a path of increasing compassion, diminishing brutality, diminishing greed-I think it might actually feel wonderful to be alive.
~~The Invasion of Iraq is Moments Away.