Death March: On the Via Dolorosa
Classic Gin
Thursday, 2005-01-06 | Classic Gin
| "Hardly are the words out / When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert / A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, / Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it / Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds." |
In our last installment, we affirmed that our position, our doctrine, our 'death march,' insists on majesty and mystery--while it would be inaccurate to say that it insists that certain things are ineffable, it would be completely accurate to say that it insists that certain things are sacred. We argued (implicitly) that there is and will always be a rigid boundary between the sacred and the profane; continuing in the same spirit as the first installment (which posited that contingency, due to its ubiquity, does nothing to cheapen or mitigate the importance or significance of contingent events), we went on to argue that inevitability is not to be conjectured at if the goal of the conjecture is to understand or to explain.
Now we must set ourselves to the unenviable task of relating these arguments to practice. As Kant is famed to have said, 'there is nothing more practical than a good theory,' or, if you prefer, as a certain colleague of mine once remarked, 'there is nothing more theoretically contested than practice.'
I've been told on numerous occasions that no one--not a single person--in the history of humanity has been capable of producing an air-tight, sound and universally convincing argument against cruelty. The best anyone has been able to do is to adapt the 'golden rule' to a substantive and comprehensive doctrine (e.g. a given doctrine of Jesus Christ or of secular Morality).
Many men with talent to match and greatly surpass mine have set themselves to arguing against cruelty and each has failed; contemporaries like Rorty, seminal Enlighteners like Hobbes--even the revered ancients, Aristotle and Plato could not come up with a sound argument against cruelty (more sound than, say, 'well, would you want it done to you?').
I therefore don't imagine that I'll ever succeed where they have failed (though I have been working day and night for years now). I want--and obviously many, many other people want this as much if not more--to be able to convince myself that there is a reason not to engage in cruelty or abusive conduct. Towards that end, I find myself drawn to cruelty both in real life and in art.
It seems ghoulish, but there is, in our 'death march' the idea of the forced march--it is the central image around which this whirling maelstrom of arguments rages. There seems to be, in the natural order of things, a certain ineluctable cruelty. I'm not talking about something arbitrary or normal, but something calculated and normative. I'm also not talking about some half-baked Malthusian proposition regarding the necessities of animal populations.
There is, in and of human life, a profound and disturbing cruelty that, in its malevolent necessity, cannot be ignored or argued against.
I am reminded of Yeats' The Second Coming and the sheer malevolence of the automatic and reflexive cruelty of life.