On Violence: Another New York Minute
Walter A. Davis

“Complacencies of the peignoir and late coffee And oranges in a sunny chair”
Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning 
 
I want to thank Mr. Andrew Partsch and Mr Jonathan Partsch for their thoughtful responses to my essay of 9-11.  (See: MWCNEWS) I think it could be shown that they have misunderstood some of the essential planks of my argument.  But a careful rereading can take care of that.  What I want to offer here are some further comments on the important questions these two readers raise, especially those that bear on the ethical responsibilities of our historical situation.  (My hope is that this essay will simply be step two in a dialogue that we will all have on these issues, thanks to your comments on what I offer here.)

Over half a century ago Albert Camus began a memorable book with the assertion: “there is only one serious philosophic question; the question of suicide.”  Were Camus writing today he’d perhaps change the last word of that sentence to “violence.” 

Many questions can be raised about violence.  Those that are philosophic and ethical require a special act of discipline—a willingness on our part to think in new and often dangerous ways and to sustain questions and problems against the desire for new, easy, or comforting solutions.  The purpose of my 9-11 essay—and I should reiterate here the hypothetical nature of parts of it—was to get us thinking in new ways about the question of violence.  And moreover to make that question personal and painful by asking each reader to consider the circumstances under which they would or would not resort to violence.  My hope is that what follows will take us deeper into the problems I posed in that essay.  That is, that further clarifications of what I there argued will depend the problems and the anxiety that the essay attempt to share with the reader.

(1)What is the relationship between ethical responsibility and knowledge?  Does our ethical responsibility alter as our knowledge changes? Does a yes to this question imply the need to be willing to question our deepest ethical beliefs?  The allusion to Bonhoeffer was made to broaden the dimensions of this question so that theological beliefs are also implicated.  For those who don’t know Bonhoeffer was a German pastor—and a major theologian—who was part of an almost successful plot to murder Adolf Hitler.  (Bonhoeffer was executed for this.)

(2)What is the nature and degree of  our responsibility as citizens for the policies and practices of our government in the world?   What is the nature and degree of our responsibility for the economic system to which we belong—and in many cases benefit greatly?  For citizens of the United States these questions can be made concrete by the following example.  We are 6 to 8 %f the world’s population.  We consume 35% of its resources.  We are responsible for over 32% of its pollution.  To say the least, facts such as this should find some place in our consciousness the next time we think about buying a Hummer, shopping at Wal-Mart, etc.  But that part is easy.  What about globalization itself—what it has cost and will continue to cost the rest of the world so that we can maintain that “American way of life” that Bush I proclaimed was not negotiable.  

(3)Alexander Pope cautioned that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  I assume that most of us since 9-11 have bitten into that apple.  To do so is to lose ones innocence.  Before 9-11 it was perhaps possible to remain ignorant of America’s actions in the world.  But now to do so is ethically untenable.  That is, to maintain one’s ignorance about (say) the Middle East—or, what amounts to the same thing, to accept the simplistic alternatives that the mainstream media and our political parties offer us as a way of understanding the Middle East—is not “innocence.”  It is a willful denial of responsibility grounded in the search for ideological attitudes as a way to gain deliverance from a state of anxiety with respect to ourselves and our way of life.

4)That anxiety is the thing we must learn to sustain as the driving principle of a thinking that will raise radical questions.  (Such as the ones about violence.)  Let me formulate this in terms of something that we all need to think about, a situation rich with implications.  Where do we receive the news?  Where did we receive, for example, the images of 9-11? Or to  chose a more mundane but perhaps more revealing example:  what was your response and what did you “know” the first time you saw a video of JonBenét Ramsey performing a “number” in a child beauty pageant?  Were you perhaps seared with a terrible pain that found you close to tears saying to yourself “how could anyone do that to a child?”   Too quickly we all assent to the idea that our emotions are sources of confusion that we must overcome in order to know.  Often they are the very sources of a knowledge that we flee by shifting to concepts all the better to put aside the claim that emotional experience has placed on us. 

(5)There is another way of developing this last point.  Is it possible that often our “theoretical” debates really turn on emotional necessities?  That is, that often we just absolutely (ab-so-fucking-lutely) must believe certain things both in order to escape anxiety and to have the comfort of ideological certitude.  We try to play it out as if our position is a matter of the purest “rationality” when really it is a creature of the most abject desire.  With all due respect, I think that the comments offered by Andrew and Jonathan present many examples of this proposition.  I think the degree of Clinton and Albright’s responsibility with respect to the number of death’s of Iraqi children as a result of the sanctions imposed by the Clinton Administration can be measured, even quantified.  As can the responsibility of Saddam in the matter.  But because we don’t want to face the former, we use the latter in order to justify or sanitize it.  As a result we escape painful questions of conscience about the blood that may already be on our own hands.   Now guilt is not a pleasant thing and most people will do just about anything to deny or escape blame.  But, to return to the starting point, and thus draw a provisional close to the reflections I hope this essay will begin to activate in all of you, isn’t that precisely the ethical problem we now face as historical beings who can no longer claim innocence about what our government and our economic system are doing globally?  And nor can we avoid the question of the kind of action we may have to take in response to that situation.  Joyce and Marx yoked offer perhaps the appropriate aphorism: history is a nightmare that weighs on the brains of the living.  Today that weight finds its gravity in the question of violence.

Editor note: Later this week I will apply the line of thought developed here to the Pope's recent remarks.

Biographical:  Walter A Davis,  Editor in Chief at MWC News

 Contact Dr. Davis

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