Eleven thinkers help us rethink what it might mean to
be human in the 21st century
Writing in the late 1960s, Hannah Arendt conjured the term “dark times” to address the legacies of war and human suffering.
Arendt
was not simply concerned with mapping out the totalitarian conditions into
which humanity had descended. She was also acutely aware of the importance of
individuals who challenge with integrity the abuses of power in all their
oppressive forms. Countering violence, she understood, demands sustained
intellectual engagement: We are all watchpersons, guided by the lessons and
cautions of centuries of unnecessary devastation.
Over
the past year, we have engaged in a series of discussions with prominent and
committed intellectuals who are all concerned in various ways with developing a
critique of violence adequate to our times.
Sadly,
many of the warnings offered have become more pressing than ever. Across the
world, it is possible to witness the liberation of prejudice, galvanized by the
emergence of a politics of hate and division that plays directly into the
everyday fears of those seduced by new forms of fascism.
The
mission of The Stone is to explore issues both timely and timeless. Violence is
evidently such a phenomenon, demanding purposeful and considered historical
reflection. But here we immediately encounter a problem: If fighting violence
demands new forms of ethical thinking that can be developed only with the
luxury of time, what does this mean for the present moment when history is
being steered in a more dangerous direction and seems to move more quickly
every day?
Perhaps
one answer is that any viable critique of violence will not arrive from any
singular, sovereign academic who might offer reductive explanations of its
causes and propose orthodox solutions. Such a stance leads to the domestication
of thought, often in the politicized service of a select few. Instead, we need
to have a serious conversation among thinkers, advocates, artists and others
that leads to a new textual borderland of open inquiry, where poetry slips into
the demands for human dignity and the importance of transdisciplinary
conversations are not simply focused on revealing the crises of contemporary political
thought but encourage a rethinking of what it might mean to be human in the
21st century.
With
this in mind, it is useful to revisit the articles in this series to draw out
some of the more important common threads, insights and shared concerns. While
not in any way exhaustive, the various conversations we have already undertaken
present us with a possible framework in which to begin a better discussion of
the problem of violence and to imagine more peaceful relations among the
world’s people. So here are 11 lessons worth considering:
1. All
violence has a history. Simon Critchley began this series with a
powerful call to recognize our shared histories of violence and how we can
still make use of the past to better understand the present moment.
Understanding the cyclical nature of violence is crucial if we are to gain a
tangible grip on its contemporary manifestations and look to engage in the
difficult and fraught process of breaking the cycle. Violence in this regard
should never be thought about in the abstract. It is “a lived reality,” as
Critchley writes, with a very “concrete history” that is wedded to that
tradition we call human tragedy. Indeed, it is precisely by projecting a tragic
light on history that we humans are able to imagine a world beyond suffering
and neglect. This is why the arts are crucial to developing a civic response to
violence.
2. Violence
is all about the violation of bodies and the destruction of human lives. For
that reason, violence should never be studied in an objective and unimpassioned
way. It points to a politics of the visceral that cannot be divorced from our
ethical and political concerns. We encountered this head on in the personal testimony provided by George Yancy. In
direct response to Yancy’s previous column on race], he received a
number of violent threats, which revealed how the politics of racial
persecution is tied to the psychic life of violence. Violence concerns the
anti-intellectual conditions in which the persecution of “the Other” can be
normalized and become part of the everyday fabric of existence. Words in this
regard can literally wound a person.
3. For
violence to take hold, there is a need to suppress the memory of historical
persecution. This weaponization of ignorance, as Henry Giroux explains, points to the violence of organized forgetting. We
see this being played out in the contemporary moment. Demands for a return to
“greatness” represent what Walter Benjamin would have identified in his
“Critique of Violence” as being a naked appeal to mythical violence, born of
the desire to create a false unity among people by actually creating the most
pernicious divisions. Education in this setting, as Giroux argues, is precisely
where effective counterterror strategies begin. Education is always a form of
political intervention, which at its best produces critically minded
individuals who have the courage to speak truth to power and stand alongside
the globally oppressed, because they remember violence that the oppressors
would prefer to forget.
Please continue this article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/opinion/humans-in-dark-times.html?smid=fb-share
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