Tag: realism

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HELL IS POLITICAL

Many of the early Christians were very cheerful, very good, very fearless.  There was a real danger they might have no fear of death; and this would never do.  Christ came to defeat sin and death, and death is a much reduced master if he is not feared.  Fortunately, there was an answer: the Christians’ faith in the resurrection could not be easily shaken; but it could be more easily twisted.

Enter hell.  The solution was simple.  If people do not fear anything in this life because their deepest faith is in the life to come, make that life to come uncertain: not by denying its reality, but by making that reality potentially terrifying.  Tell them that they very well will live forever after they die, but that they must step very carefully in this life or end up in perpetual torment.

And so death, the retreating ancien regime, poisoned the wells for the advancing revolutionaries who were overthrowing him; he re-established his foothold on Earth in the very midst of a church that was to lead the revolution against him.  For now, Christians again lived in fear.  And their fear of the next world gave them all the vices and weaknesses people experience when their fears are only of this one.

The pagan world of the Middle East had believed in a dark and shadowy afterlife, a world of shades and shadows, of ghostly spirits who had forgotten their Earthly lives and wandered forever in gloom.  This miserable fate had been thought to await all but a few privileged ones favoured by the gods for whatever reason.  But now, after the victory of Christ, this shadowy underworld was superseded in its misery and terror by the Christian hell.

Thus it is that in wars and revolutions, the enemy puts up such resistance that one looks back longingly, like the Hebrews in the desert after leaving Pharoah, upon a time that was miserable, but less miserable than now.  Would it not have been better to make bricks without straw under a tyrant than be where we are now?   Would it not have been better to submit to death, its power and propaganda, to be “realistic” and bow to his “natural” reign, than rebel and find ourselves cast into the flames?

But not so fast.  For death never had power to make a hell, only the fear of it.  Death never cast us into the flames but only into the fear of them.  Death has enlisted us against ourselves in his war against us, and we need not commit this self-betrayal.  Nor need we believe that the rise of hell as a propaganda pinion of the Church was ever inevitable, or, even if inevitable, need we see it as anything other than a tremendous bluff, which itself is doomed inevitably to fall.

Hell is decidedly political.

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ACCEPTANCE AND “REALISM”

A Buddhistic or Tollean acceptance of what is is worlds apart from “realism.”  “Realism”–an ideological word if ever there was one–is idolatry towards all negativity in what is.  Realism sneakily and in a cowardly manner (all the while swaggering about—it is impossible to use the word “realism” without at least a hint of swagger) conflates that which simply is with that which is not as we would like it.  To be “real,” something must be opposed to us, thwarting us, and the “realist” therefore is a tough guy who can “face” all this.  Realism is not the honest knowledge or acceptance of something negative, but the denial that anything that is not negative could be entirely real.  Realism is the worship of a dark god, the modern version of a now quaint and rather annoying Satanism.  The stupid vulgarity of pentagrams, animal-headed people, and bloody sacrifice is replaced with an equally vulgar and stupid salute to despair.  Realism is active, arrogant, worshipful failure, and hates or despises all who do not get on board.  The realist, like many who are intimidated and dominated by a bully, is humiliated by the very existence of those who are not, and is compelled to discount them as “naïve.”

One needs to learn how to say, “so it is” with neither swagger nor self-abasement.

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ON “REALISM”

In the prologue to The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism became the Religion of Modernity, Eugene McCarraher says,

Words such as “paradise” or “love” or “communion” are certainly absent from our political vernacular, exluded on account of their “utopian” connotations or their lack of steely-eyed “realism.”  Although this is a book about the past, I have always kept before me its larger contemporary religious, philosophical, and political implications.  The book should make these clear enough; I will only say here that one of my broader intentions is to challenge the canons of “realism,” especially as defined in the “science” of economics.  As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs.

“Realism” is a deeply ideological word, and in a very negative sense.  “Realism,” in other words, says more and other than what it pretends to say.

“Realism” pretends that it refers simply to “that which simply is, or that which is possible.”  But we all know, given the countless times we have heard the word used and in its usual contexts, that what is or what is possible as designated by “realism” always has to do with what we wish were not real, that which thwarts our desires, or that which simply can’t live up to them.

“Realism” is invariably linked to some reality (present or possible) that cannot be what we wish of it.  “Realism” has to do with telling us we cannot get what we want, and that we may as well accept this fact.

What are we saying if we tell someone to “be realistic”?  We are almost certainly not telling him or her to see that the situation is or will become much better than he or she imagines.  Almost certainly we are trying to say that things are worse than this person has imagined, or will be worse than our addressee hopes.

So what am I saying?  Simply this: that “realism” is a subtle, powerful, and very commonly used ideological battleaxe deployed not only to diminish hope in a given context—indeed, in the name of honesty, one might well be justified in doing this sometimes—but to assault hope in principle.  The sinister and dishonest ideology of “realism” is that it equates reality with thwarted needs or desires; it subtly curses the positive, the good things in life, with the label of unreality: if something is good, even if it is undeniably extant (and “realism” is always very reluctant to see the good, literally blinds itself in its presence) that good is somehow not real.

In effect, we have what might be described as a kind of dystopic Platonism.  Only the negative, the regrettable, is entirely real in this rhetoric.

And what could be more useful to a society that wants to destroy hope at every turn?  What could be more useful to a society that wants millionaires and billionaires to be in charge and desires that no one will ever question this self-evidently absurd and unjust situation?

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AGAINST “REALISM”

“Realism” is one of those intractably ideological words that have a tendency to speak the speaker rather than being spoken by him or her.  People have a tendency to use this word with a lot of swagger, little realizing they are sitting on the ventriloquist’s knees, speaking his words, without even knowing he exists.  This has happened so often that the swagger is actually built in now.  You cannot say “be realistic” without swaggering any more than you can say “fuck off” politely.

In short, “realistic” and “realism” are ideological words.

One usually says, “be realistic” to people whose perceptions of a situation are seen as too optimistic.  Very seldom is exaggerated pessimism told to “be realistic.”  Why is this?  Isn’t exaggerated fearfulness as far from reality as exaggerated hope?  Somehow the word “realism” has become loaded with pessimism, with a belief that what is most real is somehow necessarily not how we would like it to be.  In other words, the good can never be as “real” as the bad.  A bad situation is very real, but a good one is somehow imaginary, ephemeral, wishful thinking.  We are going beyond the statement that there is more bad than good in life, and towards a view that says the good can only ever be, in some vague sense, ghostly—unreal.  Something like an inverted Platonism has crept into our language and thought.

Strictly speaking, “real” simply means that which is–good, bad, or indifferent.  So linking this neutral word with connotations of a darker, more pessimistic (even cynical) sort implies a darker and cynical approach to the world generally: an approach that says that which is not the way we want it to be is somehow more “real” than things we like or love.  All that is good or deeply desirable is looked upon in a patronizing manner.  To be “realistic,” therefor, is to pretend to be neutral while promoting a very non-neutral view about the nature of reality.

From a Christian perspective (but not only from that perspective) “realism” is not pessimism, but defeatism, even collaboration with the darker angels of the world.  (Simple pessimism is more honest, and even justifiable at times.  It does not amount to a sneaky, cosmological/ideological move like “realism” does.)  The news, after all, is good, according to the gospels.  If there is anything that is less than real, it is evil, not good, despite the power and pervasiveness of the former.  In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis, hardly a man to underestimate the power and extent of evil, likens heaven to a kind of hyper-reality where waterfalls are too loud for ordinary human ears, and the grass is too hard to walk on comfortably until one gets used to it.  Those in hell (or maybe it was purgatory?  I do not remember) when given a holiday in heaven, find the light hurts their eyes and themselves to be barely visible, like shadows or heat waves on the horizon.

Pilate was a “realist” when he murdered Jesus.  “What is truth?” he asks.  This might seem like a fine and thoughtful philosophical question, one which comes to mind only for sensitive and thoughtful souls, or tragic figures trying to understand their fate: the faithful servants of emperors “only trying to do their job” and trapped in unpalatable situations that “unrealistic” people do not understand.  Some commentators have seen the Bible’s portrayal of Pilate here as antisemitic in its attempt to show Pilate in as positive a light as possible, thereby blaming the death of Christ as much as possible on the Jews.  I do not know if this criticism of the Bible is true or not, but I do remember years ago seeing Pilate in this same light: that is, as a man trying to do the right thing, but somehow “tragically flawed”: less a sinner than his reputation paints him.

But now I see him, in his question about truth, as performing a standard politician’s gambit:  when you are about to do a rotten and clearly unjustifiable thing, a thing you haven’t been forced to do either, play the role of the figure so exalted and wise that he sees reasons for his misdeeds that are beyond the comprehension of the vulgar and judgemental masses.  “What is truth?” asks Pilate, as if he has an excuse for crucifying the truth because of his rectitude in admitting he is too scrupulous to pretend he knows it.  The irony of Pilate’s “what is truth” is not that a sensitive and thoughtful man will now do a bad thing quite contrary to his noble intentions, but that the truth he is asking for is standing before him, about to be crucified by him, and he cannot or will not see him.

Maybe Pilate was putting truth on hold because he was a man of “reality.”  There is a profound difference in having “reality” as the master referent, as opposed to “truth.”  For reality is simply about what IS.  Truth includes that, but is also about what OUGHT to be.  In that sense, reality is only a subset of truth.  Those who swagger and tell us to “get back to reality” are really trying to blind us to truth.

Perhaps the difference between a religious and a secular view is this: in the former, what OUGHT to be is as much a reality as what IS, however much painfully unmanifested in the realm of IS.  For secularity, there is only what is.