The Slaughter of Innocence
[Lucian]
Blaga... makes a cognitive rehabilitation of magic thinking in close connection
with the pragmatic function and then underlines its functional versatility,
listing the ontological function, the vital-spiritual function, the political
function, and the religious function of the idea of magic.[1]
A
commonplace of much modern thinking about myth and violence stems from René
Girard’s studies in violence and the sacred:[2]
the notion that the psychic impasse between magical and practical thinking can
be broken by an act of physical violence, this action occurring within symbolic
space and time, so that the contours and duration of normal society can be
preserved.[3]
The ritual act of killing, disfigurement or radical expulsion of some chosen
person or small group of scapegoats releases the unbearable tensions built up
over time and seemingly about to burst the boundaries of legal rule.[4]
The problematic transition from archaic rituals of this kind, wherein the
pre-emptive act of murder, cutting off of a limb or ostracism may be enacted in
a playful manner through substitution, displacement or disguise, often exposes
itself when unregulated threats emerge from outside or within the universe of
recognizable symbols. Individual players in the game of the preventative
release of tensions may be carried away, for eccentric reasons—personality
defects, domestic or communal contentions, natural disasters, foreign invasion
and occupation. How so? by their
enthusiasm to inflict real rather than figurative acts of terror either on
their own persons or those of fellow actors whose roles are experienced as
real, historical or existentially dangerous. Another reason can be seen when
the normal determinants of the tradition themselves breakdown, the authorities
who usually control the mis-en-scène vanish or are inadequate, so that
the clues that trigger the communal need for pre-emptive violence are misread
or are misapplied.[5]
Now take this historical event reported
by Bat Ye’or as having occurred in 1997 at a place in Israel called Har Homa,
“a stony hillside in the Judean desert overlooking Jerusalem, three Arabs had
themselves bound to crosses to protest the building of houses on land owned by
a Jew”. Following this event, the only protest by Christians—or Europeans, most
of whom simply accepted as legitimate and logical for Muslims to mock Jews and
Judaism through Christian iconography—came from Patrick and Nicola Goodenough,
residents of Jerusalem, who wrote a letter to the editor of The Jerusalem
Post to condemn
...the
continued and blasphemous abuse of symbols of our faith by the followers of
another [...] Not only did it denigrate our Lord, it was also an unsubtle
attempt to resurrect, in the minds of viewers worldwide, the libel of deicide
which prompted centuries of Jewish suffering.[6]
Aside
from the interesting use of the term “resurrect” here, the problem with what
the Goodenough says is that they assume a deliberate, conscious attempt to mock
Jews—not to their face, of course, because the little Christmas play was staged
for a “worldwide” audience of Christians who would respond from their own
tradition to this “unsubtle” ritual—whereas the grotesque performance embodies
deep pains of the Palestinians’ own neglect and abuse by their culture, as well
as by Christians. This is much more than Bat Ye’or’s “banalization and...false
symmetries”.[7] Unlike Filipino self-crucifiers in public or Southwest Hispanic Penitentes
who whip themselves and have themselves lashed to crosses in private, where
there are theological reasons for identifying oneself through pain and
humiliation to the sufferings of Jesus[8]—these
three performers become caught up in a delirious play of self-mocking mirrors,
a vicious circle of misunderstood and incomprehensible delusions. As in the
other examples shown in this essay, both in fact and in fiction, the celebrants
in a festival of blood become objects of mockery (a festival of laughter) and
agents in what they hope will be retribution through purgation and punishment
of the other (a festival of justice).[9]
[2] La Violence et le Sacré and Le Bouc émissaire (Girard 1977, 1982).
[3] These are
points developed at length in Norman Simms, Festivals
of Laughter, Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classical Literature (London, Ont.: Sussco, 2008).
[4] On the other hand, see Matthias
Küntzel, “The Roots of Antisemitism in the Middle east: new Debates” trans.
Colin Meade, from `Alivin H. Rosenfeldt, ed., Ressurgent Antisemitism: Global Persepectives (Indiana
University Press, 2013) online at
http://www.matthiaskubtzel.de/
contents/the-roots-of-anti-semitism0n-the-middle-east-new-debates.
[5] For a general overview of
Girard’s theories, see Jeremy Townsley, “Rene Girard’s Theory of Violence,
Religion and the Scapegoat” (2003)
online at www.jeremyt.org/papers/girard.
As will be seen, my own views are quite different, and I find my sources
in earlier writers such as Gabriel Tarde, Max Nordau, Thomas Mann, and Elias
Canetti, in this way circumventing the pitfalls of so-called post-modernism.
[8] I have
discussed this at great length in Simms, Marranos on the
Moradas: Secret Jews and
Penitentes in the Southwestern United States, 1590-1890 (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008). Further background on the physiological
and neurological shifts may be found in Norman Simms, Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York:
Peter Lang, 2005).
[9] It is not just, as
nineteenth-century anthropologists—not fully separated from moral
philosophy—said that “primitive peoples” could not distinguish fully between
real events and fantasies in their minds, but that the nature of festival is by
definition a trance-like occasion where masks, disguises, and mythical events
are experienced at the same time as the historical events the participants seek
to influence by purification or deflection of inherent powers. In times of crisis when normal actions and
words seem inadequate to allay fear, anxiety and a profound sense of
humiliation, the traditional rituals are almost spontaneously triggered into
action, especially when promoted by ideological appeals to perform symbolic
acts. Those most susceptible to these
suggestions and promptings are the immature, the traumatized and what we can
call the brain-washed. They are drawn
into the festival partly ware of the theatricality of the occasion but then are
overwhelmed by the group to which they become a part of and the crowd of
supporters they can see or feel egging them on.
As we shall soon have to note, the little festivals of blood not only
distort the concepts of justice, but soon rise in a crescendo of madness to
major political events, massacre and eventually genocide. Such violence soon exceeds myth and madness.
No comments:
Post a Comment