The beauty of offense

You've heard it said that the best offense is a defense, but I'm going to suggest that the best offense is an offense. The thing that a sleeping world in love with the status quo needs is not another tolerant dismissal of the beautiful violence caused by difference in opinion, for that kind of tolerance is really just indifference; instead, a sleeping world needs a frying pan against the head, the clanging outrage of a provocation and the subversive voice of a carefully configured opinion. Such provocations force us to consider where we are, how we see the world, and where we think we ought to be going. They offer a dialectical solidity against which we can process both our ignorance and our wisdom. They give us the concrete in order to suggest that the absolutisation of the concrete has its shortcomings.

I'm very grateful for those in the world whose opinions differ from my own, since it is often by this kind of conflict that I am able to sharpen my wits and reconsider the stability of my own perspectives on things. If you want to test how good your arguments are, it's not going to help you to hand them on a silver platter to someone who is only going to agree with you. The best way to sharpen a blade, after all, is to have it grind against something solid: a stone or a piece of metal. If you want to dull a blade, keep using it on things that are softer than the blade. Eventually, it'll stop being a blade and start being, well, just a little boring.

Homer Simpson, Coke and consumerism

In one of the earlier Simpson's episodes, Marge, who is desperately trying to make a case for the glory of love, tells her family to "ask what your heart what its fondest desire is". This gets Homer started on one of his usual reveries: a lengthy musing upon all the things his heart desires, and love doesn't seem to be one of them. Finally, bewildered by the list of things he desires, he simply concludes, "Mmmm — something". This, as Chris Turner in his book Planet Simpson explains, is "one of the most succinct summations anywhere of the insatiable desire lodged in the sclerotic aorta of the consumer ethos".

Homer — the quintessential, contradictory, blue-collar everyman — has never had enough. At any all-you-can-eat special, he's the one with a bottomless stomach. In another episode of the Simpsons, the devil tries to feed Homer doughnuts in the hope that he will, at some point, beg for mercy. But he never does. Despite swelling up well beyond his usual size, he keeps demanding more. Mmmm — doughnuts. Of course, one way to see this consumerist exercise is to assume that the consumer is never satisfied: he or she is greedy beyond belief. And, while this makes some sense, another way of seeing it is that consumers aren't satisfied precisely because 'consumer goods' (a name loaded with mocking irony) can never satisfy.

Take Coke Zero for example, not just as a drink but as a symbol. There are a few reasons why you'd want to drink anything: for its taste, for its thirst-quenching properties, for its nutritional value and perhaps (like beer) for its mind-numbing side-effects. But Coke Zero doesn't taste that great, it makes you thirstier the more you drink, has no real nutritional value, and provides very few pleasant side-effects. Sure, there's caffeine in it, but there really are more pleasant, more nutritious sources of caffeine out there. Coke Zero, then, promises Coke (The real thing, apparently, because 'Coke is it') but delivers nothing: that is, it is an idea without the proper substance. It promises satisfaction and delivers dissatisfaction.

If Coke Zero is taken as a symbol of what consumerism is, one may argue that it is simply another name for nihilism. Consumerism never satisfies because it is simply another name for the Big Nothing — it is a philosophy without doctrines, mist and thin air disguised as a materialist essentialism. The more you eat, the hungrier you get; the more you drink, the thirstier you get; the more you consume, the more you are consumed. Consumerism is Rene Magritte's C'est ne pas une pipe: semblance without substance.When asked for bread, it offers a stone.

Two kinds of power

Postmoderns like me tend, almost as a rule, to be suspicious of power. I think this is right. After all, human history is littered with examples of just how badly wrong things go when power is the main point of attention.  This, I think, is the subtle implication of the old adage that says "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely": it is not just 'bad' power that is the problem (the power of the Hitlers and Maos of the world) but rather power itself. This is why every attempt in human history to build a utopia has ended in tears and why every power struggle between the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of culture end up in despair. Power itself is the problem.

But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. Perhaps it is too simple to say that power itself is the problem. After all, isn't such assertive language simply a symptom of an underlying power-struggle? To nuance the idea, then, I'm going to suggest that there are two kinds of power: the right hand of power, and the limp, weak left hand of power. The first is the kind of power that dominates, overthrows and imposes. The second is a more profound kind of power: it is the power that gives up power. The first kind of power sets us up for the ruin of Empires; the second sets us up for compassion and forgiveness. After all, forgiveness, etymologically speaking, carries the idea of "giving away" similar to the Koine Greek aphesis, meaning "send away".

Take, for instance, the end of apartheid in South Africa. Okay, I know that the "end of apartheid" is an optimistic way of putting it, for even though the politics of apartheid has ended, the reality of apartheid is still felt in every corner of South Africa. But, well, let's just assume the "end" for the sake of argument. Nelson Mandela really had two options when he set up his rule: the the dialectical right hand of power (the violent calculus of blood to pay back the white race for their (our) horrific crimes of intolerance) or the left hand of power (a deep desire to give up the right for vengeance or recompense in order to embrace the idea of reconciliation). Mandela, with Desmond Tutu, chose the latter when he embraced the idea of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

This made political history. Instead of the Hegelian thesis (apartheid) / antithesis (new apartheid), we had a beautiful abandonment of power (the left hand of power). We seemed to skip the dialectic and move right on into synthesis. The point, however, is not that Mandela relinquished his position of power, or overthrew a capitalist system in order to establish a communist one, but rather assumed the position of power even while he gave his power away. You see, the left hand of power is paradoxical: it is strong precisely because it is weak. It conquers by losing. It succeeds by failing.

But the left hand of power, in order to perpetuate an ethic of reconciliation and forgiveness, needs to be continuous. The TRC was profound but it should have remained open, not just as a means for dealing with racial incongruity, but for dealing with all kinds of intolerance and misunderstanding. Forgiveness, as Jesus of Nazareth pointed out, is never a once-off act, but is a continuous, ongoing process. We forgive, not once, but all the time. And we don't just forgive people wrongs, we forgive them (send them away) by relinquishing our power over them at every moment of the day. Of course, I know the left hand of power is the more difficult route. It's always easier to go the eye-for-an-eye route until everyone is blind than raise a white flag to the power we have been given.

The good and bad of discrimination

A friend of mine ta few days ago asked me what my views on 'race' are. "You know," he said, "The whole issue of 'black versus white'". In South Africa, this is a touchy subject. We have a sordid history of racial intolerance, so talking about race is pretty much like juggling a conceptual atomic bomb. But, just because it's a dangerous subject doesn't mean it isn't worth talking about. Accordingly, at the risk of turning myself into the next Hiroshima, here's what I think:

To begin with, I'm a big supporter of difference. God, as GK Chesterton suggests, cut the world up into pieces because that is what love does: love is only possible because otherness is a reality. Love in the absence of otherness is just narcissism. So, well, instead of being one big ball of sameness and monotony, the universe is one big collection of differences. And, let's be honest, difference is what makes us who we are. Identity is not a singular event but collection of fragments; it is a drama of interactions between othernesses.

Consequently, insofar as the construct of 'race' is a means to affirm difference and the humanity of the other— that is, to celebrate his being different — I think we're on good, solid ground. Insofar as 'race' is the absolute negation of difference — the loudspeaker announcing the terror of otherness — I think it is of no use to anybody. And this, in short would be my view on race, except that even this is not that simple ...

Because the whole issue of 'black versus white', as my friend calls it, is a terrible simplification. It takes missing-the-point to a level that is difficult to even believe. It is never just an issue of black and white. More often than not, differences in opinion are cultural, religious and political rather than simply racial. And even then, such differences, or "styles of being" tend to operate on a complex dialogical continuum rather than in clear dialectical terms.

The main problem with confusing race with styles of living or with confusing the surface (skin-colour) with the substance (beliefs, identity and ideologies) is that discrimination on the whole is deemed evil. Sure, discriminating on the basis of race (and thus personhood) is wrong, but surely we are allowed to discriminate on the basis of ideas and ideologies? After all, your cup may be the same colour as mine, but yours may hold water while mine holds poison, and surely we should be able to speak up about such differences? And if someone, who has a different culture or skin colour from mine, is stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, then surely the issue is not race, but simply that he is doing what is wrong?

In the name of racial tolerance and acceptance, then, we should be careful not to discard the necessity of discriminating against bad ideas.

Labelling a straw man

When I get into an argument with someone, I've noticed that it's terribly easy to turn the person I'm arguing with into a straw man. I see myself, then, as this complex, three-dimensional being with intricate webs of thought and experience and my opponent (or friend) as a kind of mathematical equation that needs simply to be figured out rather than loved or understood.

Typically, the phrase "straw man" refers to an argument that has been misrepresented in some way so as to be easily defeated, but here I'm using it to refer to the misrepresentation of actual human beings. And typically "to attack a straw man" is to create the illusion of intellectual superiority over a particular proposition, idea or philosophy without actually ever taking that proposition, idea or philosophy on its own terms. Here I'm suggesting that "to attack a straw man" also refers to when we turn people into cardboard cut-outs like those you find at a shooting range in order to suggest that we are in some way better, more together and just generally more astute than the people we debate with.

How we turn multi-dimensional human beings into straw men is simple: we put a label onto the person in question, thereby substituting the label for the person. In other words, we take the idea being discussed, remove it from the context of the human being in front of us and then, at least on a conceptual level, discard the person in front of us. I remember watching a journalist do this to the philosopher Slavoj Zizek (See below for Part 1):

It's not that labels are avoidable, but they are merely words, not people. They are ideas, not people. They are just labels, nothing more really. I remember reading Anthony De Mello's 'Awareness' a few years ago. In that book, he talks about the necessity of dropping our labels. He says, if I remember this correctly, that the problem with labels is that sometimes they become a dirty lens through which we view everything. In other words, they can stop us from seeing. Even when we label ourselves as smart, empathetic, stupid, lazy, active or whatever, we are in danger of living in a kind of unreality.

What I'm trying to learn now is just to live: not to make judgments about people and their ideas, just to listen; not to decide that I know what I'm talking about, but to question; not to be so concerned with the destination that I forget the present moment. In short: to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch without worrying too much about how well any of my experiences fit into my theories. I don't want to be the kind of person who changes the facts to fit the theory, but rather the kind of person whose theory fits with my experience of reality. Yes, of course, we need to make decisions at some point, but even those decisions ought to be seen in the context of our whole human story, rather than as a destination that prevents us from ever going anywhere else ever again.