"You are a beautiful magickal special person
from a long line of sacred beings."
from a long line of sacred beings."
Well, that may be true of the few pneumatics among us, but as a blanket statement it is, of course, ridiculous.
Case in point, note the behavior of these "beautiful magical special persons from a long line of sacred beings":
Israeli doctors and others band together to save the life of a dying Palestinian infant, only to have the child's mother explain that she hopes he will grow up to be a suicide bomber. It's all here, in all its splendor.
You can read it and weep, or you can read it and realize what it means on this planet to be at war and to have enemies.
It is a commonplace that for war to succeed, you have to "dehumanize" your enemy, make them Other. Well, even the language used for that nostrum shows its bias. You don't have to dehumanize your enemy, you simply have to make them "not us". Only Western liberals think that "common humanity" is a powerful category, when in fact it is very thin. It is our least common denominator and consequently only appealing to those who have lost touch with real humanity, which is local and tribal, and whose "civilized" layer of behavior is thin and temporary, at best.
And I would make the case that seeing your enemy as an implacable fiend actually humanizes them. Because that kind of more-than-animal savage is what we, uniquely, can be. There are enmities in the natural world. Lions and hyenas. Different species. Lion prides against one another. Intra-species territoriality. But take the behavior of primates like chimps. Predatory war. And we, too, are primates. No more savage species exists.
The words "human" and "inhuman" are by necessity deeply ambiguous. We can, in fact, show astonishing compassion and self-sacrifice. But we can just as well rip the child out of pregnant woman's belly after raping her sisters and beating her husband to death and then celebrate it with a festive lunch. As the great philosopher Ann Coulter put it, "The natural state of the world is Darfur." What is more natural to humankind than inhumanity?
What is most troubling to me about the Israel story is not the cold and implacable enmity of the mother, but the incomprehension of the Israeli doctor. She is a far more representative case of humanity: to save a child from death so he can grow up to be a warrior and die for her tribe and her god. Hardly new. Because for her, and for him, this life is a blink in eternity. Her world is vast, with a meaning determined by an all-powerful God and an infallible prophet (whose own history with Jews was very bloody), and can accomodate this behavior, so scandalous and puzzling to the doctor and his passionately sentimental and fearfully tiny view of life. If he does not wake up, she will indeed have Jerusalem. And not feel the slightest twinge of shame that she helped destroy the Jew who saved her child.
One of the great contributions to psychotherapy comes from Melanie Klein. From her observations of infants with their mothers, she developed this idea: babies instinctively split their mothers into the good mother who meets their needs and the bad mother who frustrates them. This she calls "the paranoid-schizoid" position. Eventually, if all goes well, the growing baby realizes that the good and the bad mother are the same person. This shocking infantile insight into the deep ambiguity of mother herself produces what Klein calls "the depressive position." It is a sad loss to realize that there is no perfect mommy. All you have is a mix. But that is real life. She is mom and she is --usually-- loveable and loves you, but in an inescapeable mix of, shall we say, "both good and evil"? How many adults seem to have forgotten this truth?
I sometimes think that liberals have never met an actual human being.
Israeli doctors and others band together to save the life of a dying Palestinian infant, only to have the child's mother explain that she hopes he will grow up to be a suicide bomber. It's all here, in all its splendor.
You can read it and weep, or you can read it and realize what it means on this planet to be at war and to have enemies.
It is a commonplace that for war to succeed, you have to "dehumanize" your enemy, make them Other. Well, even the language used for that nostrum shows its bias. You don't have to dehumanize your enemy, you simply have to make them "not us". Only Western liberals think that "common humanity" is a powerful category, when in fact it is very thin. It is our least common denominator and consequently only appealing to those who have lost touch with real humanity, which is local and tribal, and whose "civilized" layer of behavior is thin and temporary, at best.
And I would make the case that seeing your enemy as an implacable fiend actually humanizes them. Because that kind of more-than-animal savage is what we, uniquely, can be. There are enmities in the natural world. Lions and hyenas. Different species. Lion prides against one another. Intra-species territoriality. But take the behavior of primates like chimps. Predatory war. And we, too, are primates. No more savage species exists.
The words "human" and "inhuman" are by necessity deeply ambiguous. We can, in fact, show astonishing compassion and self-sacrifice. But we can just as well rip the child out of pregnant woman's belly after raping her sisters and beating her husband to death and then celebrate it with a festive lunch. As the great philosopher Ann Coulter put it, "The natural state of the world is Darfur." What is more natural to humankind than inhumanity?
What is most troubling to me about the Israel story is not the cold and implacable enmity of the mother, but the incomprehension of the Israeli doctor. She is a far more representative case of humanity: to save a child from death so he can grow up to be a warrior and die for her tribe and her god. Hardly new. Because for her, and for him, this life is a blink in eternity. Her world is vast, with a meaning determined by an all-powerful God and an infallible prophet (whose own history with Jews was very bloody), and can accomodate this behavior, so scandalous and puzzling to the doctor and his passionately sentimental and fearfully tiny view of life. If he does not wake up, she will indeed have Jerusalem. And not feel the slightest twinge of shame that she helped destroy the Jew who saved her child.
One of the great contributions to psychotherapy comes from Melanie Klein. From her observations of infants with their mothers, she developed this idea: babies instinctively split their mothers into the good mother who meets their needs and the bad mother who frustrates them. This she calls "the paranoid-schizoid" position. Eventually, if all goes well, the growing baby realizes that the good and the bad mother are the same person. This shocking infantile insight into the deep ambiguity of mother herself produces what Klein calls "the depressive position." It is a sad loss to realize that there is no perfect mommy. All you have is a mix. But that is real life. She is mom and she is --usually-- loveable and loves you, but in an inescapeable mix of, shall we say, "both good and evil"? How many adults seem to have forgotten this truth?
I sometimes think that liberals have never met an actual human being.
No comments:
Post a Comment