Escape

Stultifying and oppressive, these are since the nineteenth century rather common characterizations of the straitjacket into which our regulated bourgeois culture constrains us. We control our affairs fairly well, but that straitjacket constricts us and sometimes threatens our joy of living, energy and creativity. The gray veil of a tough labour rhytm and mirroring office buildings would sometimes suffocate our soul.

This explains why, also since at least the nineteenth century, there were so many deliberate efforts to escape the constriction and boredom. Romantic music could serve that goal and compelling novels played a major role. It is not accidental that the novel as a genre from that time experienced an unprecedented boom, while frequently the regulated life and boredom themselves were the subjects (think of Madame Bovary or Oblomov). But also the rise of the sports may be related to it and maybe even the incidentally occurring enthusiasm for war and violence.

In our family we used to have our own kinds of escape. One was the large supply of money. That gave us a big house and a big garden, containing even a "paradise" with a pond and feasants and peacocks. And it permitted us an exuberant lifestyle that could keep the greyness at some distance.

A second form of escape was through religious transcendence. However well cared for our material life might be, the spirituality of ‘another, deeper reality’ never was far away. There were ascetically living reverend uncles and pious aunts and my mother loved meditation and study. Also in the table conversations the 'higher' world got attention regularly, usually contrasted against the 'lower' material world. Very dualistic and pulled apart indeed, but it was there.

And then there were the "soldiers", a table ritual which was carried out at the end of festive meals for birthdays and such. It was a question of hammering with your hands and fists on the table in order to produce as much noise as possible. For maximum effect first the glasses, serving spoons and cutlery were placed on the plate edges so they could well rattle. My father then announced the coming of the soldiers who had decided to convey their birthday congratulations. If you listened well, you could hear them coming in the distance, and so it was because he hit his hands gently on the table in a regular rhythm and everyone followed him in that. You could hear them coming closer, the hand slaps became stronger. Until at once they were there, then you could get loose banging your fists on the table, with maximal noise, for a few minutes. Then it had to still be finished, the soldiers went back, hand strokes became softer again, until the soldiers were back in the barracks.

This ritual was carried out family-wide, and not just for the kids. Generations back someone in the family must have experienced the irresistible urge to break out from the formal, regulated atmosphere to which at that time dinners were subjected. The ceremonious rigidity must have felt like a straitjacket, and the soldiers as an escape from it. Is it strange that finally I end up with a philosopher whose first really original book was titled: "On escape"?

See also Il-y a

Emergency Shelter

Fugitives of whom the appeal for asylum has been declined by Dutch courts can not always be removed from the country. They then often land up, right from the Centre for Asylum seekers, in the Dutch streets. Municipalities feel themselves called upon to provide them emergency shelter. The Minister of Justice, charged with the task of implementing the Aliens Act, prohibits them to do so. Judges on the contrary oblige local authorities to indeed provide shelter.

Is not this a perfect subject on which one, on the basis of Levinas, should be able to say something sensible? Because this is exactly about the Other, if not in the shape of the Widow and the Orphan, at least then in the guise of the Alien?

But what, based on Levinas, should one say then?

Some, including the British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, believe that taking seriously Levinas can mean but one thing. Namely, that our legislation actually is immoral, that our bureaucracy through the adage ‘rules are rules’ is amoral and that true justice can be found only on one side: that of the victim, in this case the asylum seeker. The absoluteness of the appeal of the stranger rids our law and its practice of all ethical quality. Justice in this case relies on rebellious councils and on aldermen who keep their back straight.

Others point out that the absoluteness of the appeal of the Other in Levinas is accompanied by another motive: that of the third person, which in its turn is the other of the other. And that third person refers to the totality of all thirds, the whole of society with its institutions, jurisdiction, immigration laws and deportation centers. So here Levinas’ thinking establishes an actually impossible connection: that between the absoluteness of the individual appeal and the importance of good institutions.

Personally I think that this latter, complex interpretation of Levinas does most justice to his thinking, as well as to the complex reality in which we live. On the one hand there is the demand for help from the Other, of which Levinas does not stop stressing its absoluteness. On the other hand there are the dangers of an attracting effect and of unequal treatment of asylum seekers, in short, the interests of an ordered society of all third parties which according to Levinas must be taken into account as well.

In concrete terms this position means the following: the authorities should do what they have been appointed for to do, but whoever - spurred on by the encounter with an applicant – feels he has to, must diverge from the lines the authorities have set out. And the authorities may very well take notice of that resistance.

For those who want one hundred percent ethical purity, like Bauman, such a position cannot be but unsatisfactory. I for myself however do sympathize with it. I roughly end up at the position the newspaper Trouw held in its commentary. "Sometimes there are individual emergencies (...) The occasional provision of emergency shelter really does not jeapardize the whole edifice".

It is striking how important in this commentary is the role of relativizing words such as 'occasional' and 'sometimes'. This is eminently pragmatic vocabulary and it raises the question to the position of Levinas among fellow philosophers. Because these in general are fond of unequivocality and universal validity of statements, and not of contingency. See for a discussion of that question my website.

See also A Real Shame and Levinas and egoism

Enthusiasm

The Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan once coined the term 'anti-Israelian enthusiasm'. This term aptly reflects the phenomenon that activism for the Palestinian cause in some cases is accompanied by lashing out at Israel in a hardly disguised lascivious way.

This phenomenon recently appeared in a number of news items. There was for instance the report about the Kairos document, a cry for help from Palestinian church leaders. This originally Arabic document was recently translated into Dutch and one of the translators made the text sharper than the original was, especially when it comes to punishing Israel. In his reflection on this, he says explicitly that he might have been too enthusiastic, too involved.

Further two Dutch politicians are allowed, in the newspaper Trouw, without any objection to assent fully to the experience of freedom of a suicide bomber at the moment he blows up himself along with a number of Jews. Because "in a situation of total absence of freedom suicide attacks can be an expression of freedom". It was not clear, incidentally, whether this experience of freedom had to do specifically with blowing up Jews or whether an Iraqi in Baghdad who takes ten compatriots with him to death reaches the same level of self-realization.

And Gretta Duisenberg, the widow of Europe’s former central banker, said in a recent interview she thinks ‘anti-Semite’ is becoming almost an honorary title. In the same interview she also tells when she started to focus on Israel. "I was occupied with all kinds of conflicts: Bangladesh, Nicaragua, South Africa, Argentina. But when the second Palestinian intifada (uprising) against Israel started in 2000, I said to my husband, Wim Duisenberg: Now it's over, now I go work for the Palestinians".

Such a sentence is interesting. For how is this kind of choices being made? I don’t mind anybody calling Israel a rogue state, but it should be coupled with the annotation that there exist in the world fifty or hundred of such states. With casualties, both internally and externally, that are a factor of ten or more higher. What then makes someone to wholly, and with a kind of obvious pleasure, sink one’s teeth into precisely the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

Of course, I understand that, if you care about the fate of all those people who are less fortunate than you are, you still cannot get involved in everything. One needs to focus, so apart from people who will focus on Sudan or Nicaragua or the Western Sahara, there will be people who focus on Israel. But that does not make the question less interesting how such a choice comes about. And especially why it is often accompanied by a furtive kind of pleasure. Where does that special passion come from?

Perhaps it has to do with the feeling of breaking a taboo.

See also Irritating

Truly together

It is fairly popular with companies to present themselves in commercials as top performing symphony orchestras. With employees who are fully tuned in to one another, a perfect collective timing, a visionary conductor and of course resounding (financial) results. The orchestra as a metaphor for excellent corporate performance.

I always find that annoying. Not because I don’t enjoy the artistic creations that are to be heard through the symphony orchestra. Indeed, most of them are great monuments of culture. I almost die in the beauty of a well performed symphony of Beethoven or Mahler.

What’s annoying about those ads is that in them the orchestral playing together is presented as something special and exalted. While I think the orchestra as a model of cooperation is entirely outdated. It is in fact a military organization, dating from the eighteenth century. With a leader who can visibly fully express himself and gets one hundred percent space for initiative and flow, along with a number of sometimes solo-performing key players and finally a lot of bowing foot-soldiers.

In the world of music this situation has, according to the violinist Gordan Nikolic, led to collections of excellently performing artists of consistent quality, who nevertheless produce mediocre or boring music. In his view that has to do with a shortage of space for reflection and imagination with those musicians. And this in its turn is, I think, all about the hierarchical and rigid structure of a traditional symphony orchestra.

I infer this from an interview in which Nikolic states his preference for a certain democratic dynamics within groups of musicians. Nikolic is the artistic director of the Dutch Chamber Orchestra, but he leads that from the concertmaster chair. He emphatically does not want to be a conductor, because he values "the collective conscience of a group he belongs to" as much more important. "Have fun" Nikolic calls out to his orchestra at the beginning of a rehearsal. He even proposes to someday give a concert without any rehearsal beforehand because that would release an unimaginable amount of energy. Of course this includes the risk that at a time such a concert may completely founder.

Instead of a working situation where orchestra members ask him "What do you want from us" he managed to create an atmosphere in which all together tell a story. To have something like that in an ordinary labor organization seems to be very nice to me, but the reality in most cases looks more like a traditional symphony orchestra. In this respect, the metaphor of the commercials is still not that wrong at all. The only thing is: don’t present it as an ideal model.

Alcohol

Happy Hour in London Docklands, a first spring-like Friday. In front of the pubs and on the terraces along the Thames groups and couples of men and women stand drinking and chatting. They seem busy with evaluating the past day or week, or perhaps themselves.

This kind of finishing the week looks like a purely British affair. While earlier that day - at the university, on the bus, in West End – I found myself in the midst of a fairly representative reflection of the population, at this happy hour there may be some Indian and African types around, but certainly no Muslims. Of course not.

But what does this mean? This means that the integration between Muslims and non-Muslims may advance quite well but that it will stop where the consumption of alcohol comes into play. Whether you assess the latter as positive or negative, it plays an important social role.

This observation certainly applies to the Netherlands too, yet in London it foists itself more forcefully on me because there everything is more pronounced. The Muslim community in London is much bigger and more publicly present than it is in the Netherlands. And the sizes of the beer and wine glasses are two or three times as large as ours. And therewith the exuberance associated with the consumption of alcohol as well as with its abuse and its socially disruptive impact.

Maybe a good outcome of increasing Muslim integration is going to consist in a more moderate alcohol consumption.

But to completely eliminate alcohol does not seem desirable to me. That would be a shame of that exuberant atmosphere along the Thames. And frankly, I myself benefit from a couple of drinks for getting my thoughts a bit smoother, and for promoting my self-evaluation. I fancy.

Blowing Bubbles

For too long I have let the idea be foisted on me that thoughtfulness or philosophy is something unworldly, a sort of noncommittal blowing bubbles. Only the quantity and speed of delivered action would testify of maturity. But this is not true, I know now.

Of course, unworldly philosophers exist. But it is only in respect of their playing field that they differ from the financial whizkids who saddled us with billions of debt. Or from busy executives who hardly can be said to live normal lifes. Those bankers and managers easily measure up to unworldly philosophers, when it comes to unworldliness.

Yet common perception tends to assign to groups such as bankers and managers more effectiveness than to the group of philosophers. That has to do with the mixing up in common language of the word ‘action’, however unfocused it may be, with effectiveness. And that is no longer sustainable. Because we may perhaps perish in the amount of thoughtless action. To this area apparently applies that things are not always what they seem to be. Words and their meanings are not always adequate to reality. In particular, the words 'effective' and 'unworldly' are ripe to be detached from their usual associations.

Perhaps we knew that already for some time, but the new thing is that even within management it has become more difficult to maintain the old dichotomy in common language. What I note, for example, is that good managers are dealing nowadays with something philosophical like semantics. The use of ICT is forcing them to be very precise in the meaning of words, or at least to be able to value that kind of exactness. Because if you neglect that, any logistics and control system that you order to be build will make the confusion still bigger than it already was. So, deliberate reflection in this area is clearly more effective than display of decisiveness.

The same applies to reflection by managers about what it means for their employees to work in an organization. This kind of reflection appears to pay off in the sense that people often respond well to it and perform and innovate better. So these reflexive managers are simply more effective.

Therefore, what makes a person unworldly or not is not attributable any longer to the difference between action and lack of action, decisiveness and shyness. Rather it is the difference between meaningful action and senseless action.

Maybe it's the difference between Obama, who knows to await his time, and Sarkozy. The latter thought himself to be rather resolute when by presidential decree he prohibited French aid airplanes to take off from Haïti’s airport when they were not completely loaded with victims of the earthquake. The airport got completely blocked up.

So, who is blowing bubbles after all?

Also see Go with the flow

The End of Times

One may wonder, in response to the previous blog post, whether there I perhaps apply double standards. Why do I find it interesting that Herman Philipse qualifies the Christian reinterpretation of the end of times as cheating, while I appreciate the revision by professional historians, for example concerning the history of Israel, as a sign of a scientific attitude? What is the difference between the two revisions? Don’t they both testify of advancing understanding and therewith of an open and actually modern approach to reality?

About the latter I'm not so sure. For me, in making revisions and changing images, it is very important to know by which motive that is inspired. Is it in order to rescue an Idea or an Ideology (which I think is dubious) or only because the existing image is in conflict with certain empirical findings and hence with experiences of people (which I think is nicely empirical).

The abandoning by Christianity of the expectation of a soon end of times is, in my view, an example of the first mentioned kind of reinterpretation. In it the original central notion is maintained: that of a divine Plan which, after the salvation work of Christ, provides a logical plan-completion in the guise of the end of the world, that’s to say of Doomsday. In itself keeping that idea intact may be quite harmless, but it gets complicated if meanwhile empirical reality retains its function of supporting that idea. Because to the extent Doomsday fails to occur, one has to do more and more violence to empirical reality to ensure that the latter remains consistent with the Plan.

The historian Hugenholtz expresses this in response to the sixth century bishop and historywriter Gregory of Tours as follows: "The past and also the often lovingly described present is subservient to the future, also proves the correctness of expectations of the future. The past and the writing of history are at the service of the expected youngest day, they seem to determine that youngest day, seem to open possibilities for calculating the exact time of the youngest day”.

So, reality here has the function of providing proof. And that role was not kept limited in the Christian tradition to historical reality, also physical nature began to be examined for signs of evidence, with a view on the positioning of man in the divine Plan.

If faith stimulates the empirical sciences but at the same time assigns to the empirical the function of providing proofs for its theology, then two things happen. In the first instance, the sciences will come to flourish because of that stimulus. But in the second instance the specific dynamics of science, with the critical cognitive attitude that belongs to it, leads to resistance against its position of subordination to faith. Science then may revolt against truth claims of faith in the empirical field and dissociate itself from it. In this phase, I believe, the Western Christian world finds itself since the Enlightenment.

For a comparison it is interesting to iuxtapose to the Christian scheme the relationship between faith and the empirical in Judaism. In the Jewish tradition, empirical science never expanded as enormly as in Christianity. Reality in Judaism has never had to the same extent the function to provide evidence for the correctness of a revealed Plan. The fact that contemporary Israeli settlers interpret their annexation successes as proof of God’s will in accordance with his Plan is therefore a relatively new, and in my opinion not welcome development in Judaism.

It is decidedly not the case that in Judaism traditionally there was no Plan. It was and is very present there indeed, and may even be called the Mother of All Plans. But, as to the content of the Plan, one could not do much more than speculate about it. Therefore new thoughts about the Plan could relatively easily develop when events gave cause for that. And there was no lack of occasions or crises. Thus, history is a form of digesting and coming to terms with the past. For this purpose history needs not to be practiced in an exact way. The faith did not depend on empirical vicissitudes, however difficult it was to interpret them. It just was the way it was, it was identity.

Thus in the above the distance has become clear which separates both Christianity and Judaism from scientific historiography. Reinterpretations in the historical sciences are ideally only about empirical reality. Unlike in Christianity in the historical sciences the core of your beliefs may change because that core ís the image of empirical reality, nothing more and nothing less. And unlike Judaism scientific historiography attaches big value to exactness of research with no other purpose than making a credible reconstruction of the past.

Large differences therefore, all in all.

See also Mission completed