April 9, 2004
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS:
The dry eyes of deep grief (Giles Fraser, The Guardian, 09/04/04)
In 1990 the sociologist Gillian Rose became a consultant for the Polish Commission for the Future of Auschwitz. From then until her death in 1995, she argued that the Holocaust was being narrated in such a way as to protect the present generation from the thought that they too might have something in common with the perpetrators. For Rose, the story of the Holocaust is typically told so as to place the audience alongside the victim. The crisis of glimpsing our own reflection in the face of the Nazi camp guard is a horror too far.Thus the closing scene of the film Schindler's List leaves us, in her words, "piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler's grave in Israel". Despite the experience of overwhelming repulsion at the horror of Nazi genocide, too often a fundamental complacency is left unexamined. "Instead of emerging with sentimental tears, which leave us emotionally and politically intact," Rose said, "we [ought to] emerge with the dry eyes of a deep grief which belongs to the recognition of our ineluctable grounding in the norms of the emotional and political culture represented."...
During the liturgy of Holy Week, people who shout "Hosanna" on Palm Sunday are the same people who shout "Crucify" on Good Friday. The fact that the crucifixion has been the basis for centuries of anti-semitic propaganda must remind Christians - and Palestinian Christians no less so - of their own capacity for violence and brutality. The dangers of imagining oneself a weeping onlooker again leaves a fundamental complacency fully intact.
A meditation upon the shamefulness of Christian history allows Christians their most valuable insight: that there is no safe or comfortable perspective from which to stand aloof from any complicity with the horrors of the world. In my darker moments I am ashamed to be a Christian. As a Jewish Christian, I often fear that in converting to Christianity I sided with the persecutors against the persecuted. But this shame at complicity with a culture of oppression allows for a more general sensitivity to the ways we are all compromised by the endemic violence of the world. The desire to inhabit a cultural space that is unblemished is a dangerous fantasy that cooperates with the desire to avoid facing one's own capacity for brutality.
Dr Jekyll's fundamental flaw is his refusal to acknowledge the existence of Mr Hyde. Hyde can only operate in the dark, in the unexamined spaces brought about by Jekyll's pious avoidance of his own darker motivations. Rose's attack upon those narratives which place us tearfully alongside the victim is an attack upon the refusal of Jekyll to admit to Hyde. For Jekyll and Hyde are not two people but one. Tenderness, intelligence and brutality easily co-exist in the same person. Our own cruelties and prejudices are given ideal conditions to grow when we refuse to admit to them.
This is not simply a meditation for the religious. For the cultural space that often has little sense of its own complicity in the horrors of the world is that of secular modernity. The new Jekyll and Hyde is the Jekyll of democratic liberalism and the Hyde of religious fanaticism. Martin Rowson's Guardian cartoons show those with religious belief as crazed and vicious. Good Friday is a day to admit that Christians are often guilty as charged.
But does the attack upon religious fanaticism also work in a dangerous way to excuse the secular imagination an insight into its own capacity for violence? What secular liturgies are there to reveal that those who shout "Hosanna" are the same people who shout "Crucify"? For the Holocaust may have taken place in a country shaped by the values of Christianity. But it took place in a country no less shaped by the values of the Enlightenment and modernity as well.
The refusal of both Islam and modern secularism to admit to any complicity in the world’s evil is the common source of their contemporary menace.