The thought that child abuse, rape, ritual murder are forbidden because they are wrong is not at all a fishy thought. sof 73 September 2005 12 ‘With regard to human affairs, not to laugh, not to cry, not to become indignant, but to understand.’ – SPINOZA When I was about nine or ten I had a part-time job as message boy for the local Co-Op grocer’s shop at the top of our street. It was a big store with a workforce of eight, both women and men, though I can’t remember the exact proportion of each. One morning when the shop was quiet an incident occurred which has stayed in my memory. There was a big store room at the back of the shop, with a long table in the middle, used for measuring and bagging, slicing and sorting. On the morning in question there was a conspiratorial buzz among the male members of the staff, who were all drifting towards the store room. I joined them, wondering what was up. It was obvious that, whatever was afoot, the ring leader was the oldest man in the staff, a self-important person who seemed to think himself a cut above the rest of us.
When we had all gathered he hushed us to silence, and a few seconds later one of the women workers came into the room, presumably to pick up something for a customer. As soon as she entered, the door was closed, then locked, and the men surrounded her. The atmosphere, as I remember it, was jokey rather than menacing, and the woman giggled nervously as though she knew what was coming. Mr Self-important gave the signal and the men grabbed the woman and lifted her onto her back on the table. Though she struggled a bit, it still seemed to be more of a lark than a lynching, and she didn’t call out for help. I didn’t exactly know what was going on, but I played a significant part in what happened, because, though she was being held down on her back on the table, her legs were still hanging over the side. Entering the fun, I took hold of her ankles and lifted her legs onto the table, provoking the congratulations of Mr Self-important for my assistance. He then shoved his hand under her skirt and groped her.
And it was all over. They let her up, she collected whatever it was she had come for, and the men all went back to work. Nothing was ever said about the incident, and no reference was ever made to it.
Feeling unclean and complicit, I stopped working there soon afterwards. Sometimes I would bump into Mr Self-important in the town, out with his family, and I used to wonder what went on in his mind about the incident. I also wondered what got into me, why I did what I did, where it came from, what it was that took over in the store room in that long-gone grocer’s shop in Mitchell Street, Alexandria.
Those were the kind of questions that Blake Morrison also asked himself in his book As If, which explored the murder of little Jamie Bulger and its aftermath. Appalled by the witch hunt of Jamie’s killers, themselves children, he tried to imagine himself into their shoes. And he remembered a teenage party he attended where most of the middleclass boys present queued up to shag – the appropriate word here – an unprotesting girl who was so drunk she could hardly stand up. Where did that come from? What got into them?
In both of these examples a force of some sort has taken over a group of men, with irreversible consequences for them all. What is it? What is the nature of the force that impelled those incidents? In attempting to answer that question I shall make use of a remarkable essay by Simone Weil on The Iliad or Poem of Force. In her essay, through the tragic sensibility of Homer, Weil describes humans in the grip of an energy or force that plays with them the way a cat toys with a helpless mouse it has caught, before killing it more from boredom than need.
Here’s her definition of force: ‘To define force – it is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.
Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us.’1 May The Force Be With You Not In his talk on Force, Richard Holloway focused on the insights of Simone Weil and studies of the two Nazis, Stangl and Speer. ‘Force is that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing.’ sof 73 September 2005 This is the theme of the Iliad, a poem she describes as a miracle. She writes: ‘Its bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjection of the human spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter. This subjection is the common lot, although each spirit will bear it differently, in proportion to its own virtue. No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is. No one who succumbs to it is by virtue of this fact regarded with contempt. Whoever, within his own soul and in human relations, escapes the dominion of force is loved but loved sorrowfully, because of the threat of destruction that constantly hangs over him.’2 Here’s Simone Weil again: ‘This property of force achieves its maximum effectiveness during the clash of arms, in battle, when the tide of the day has turned, and everything is rushing toward a decision.
It is not the planning man, the man of strategy, the man acting on the resolution taken, who wins or loses a battle; battles are fought and decided by men deprived of these faculties, men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert matter, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum…The art of war is simply the art of producing such transformations, and its equipment, its processes, even the casualties it inflicts on the enemy, are only means directed towards this end…Yet these transformations are always a mystery; the gods are their authors, the gods who kindle men’s imagination. But however caused, this petrifactive quality of force, twofold always, is essential to its nature… Its power of converting a man into a thing is a double one, and in its application double-edged. To the same degree, though in different fashions, those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone.’3 In the current diagnostics of force, especially in its abusive sexual forms, we usually focus our attention on the passive victim who is turned by it into a thing; but Simone Weil wants us to recognise that everyone is petrified by force, everyone is turned to stone by it, especially those who become its active agents.
She goes on: ‘He who does not recognise to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.’4 Later in this lecture, when I turn to Gitta Sereny’s analysis of the character of the men who followed Hitler, I shall return to the kind of sympathy towards our fellowcreatures that can help us, sometimes, withstand the inexorability of force; but I want to turn immediately to another group, always few in number, who, alone among humans, never show any respect to force.
In a letter she wrote to her parents a couple of weeks before her death in 1943, Simone Weil discussed the fools in Shakespeare. She said: ‘When I saw Lear here, I asked myself how it was possible that the unbearably tragic character of these fools had not been obvious long ago to everyone, including myself.
The tragedy is not the sentimental one it is sometimes thought to be; it is this. There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion, of the specific human dignity, reason itself – and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All the others lie. In Lear it is striking. Even Kent and Cordelia attenuate, mitigate, soften, and veil the truth; and unless they are forced to choose between telling it and telling a downright lie, they manoeuvre to evade it.
What makes the tragedy extreme is the fact that because the fools possess no academic titles or episcopal dignities and because no one is aware that their sayings deserve the slightest attention – everybody being convinced a priori of the contrary, since they are fools – their expression of the truth is not even listened to. Everybody, including Shakespeare’s readers and audiences for four centuries, is unaware that what they say is true. And not satirically or humorously true, but simply the truth. Pure unadulterated truth – luminous, profound, and essential.’5 She does not explicitly apply this insight – that only fools speak the truth and everyone else lies – to the problem of force, but when we bring the insight into play in that context it is illuminating. Most people are bent out of shape by force in its various manifestations. Look at photographs in the papers of people meeting the royals; observe junior cabinet ministers in the presence of the Prime Minister; watch the faithful in the presence of the Pope: their skeletons melt, they become smilingly soft and goofylooking, they lose moral definition. The force of the sof 73 September 2005 visiting presence turns them into things. It is very difficult to resist this effect. Even if you are one of those puritans who are selfrighteously resistant to being overawed, the fact that you are having to put energy into being unimpressed shows that you too have been bent out of shape by force. Only the innocent, only the fool, is unaffected and acts with unselfconscious truthfulness in such situations.
Speaking specifically about Jesus, Simone Weil said, in her essay on the Iliad, that even the man who does not wear the armour of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul.
While grace can prevent this touch from corrupting him, it cannot spare him the wound. There is no escape for any of us from force, but Jesus belonged to that tiny group of humans who refuse ever to be impressed by it. Though she does not spell it out, the implication is that this kind of foolishness or innocence is an original endowment of being, part of the mysterious grace of the genetic lottery, not something humans can acquire by their own effort.
However, there is something we can acquire that may help us to modify the effects of force on our own being; and here I want to turn to the writings of Gitta Sereny, before coming back to Simone Weil in conclusion.
As well as a celebrated study of the child murderer May Bell, Sereny wrote two remarkable books on the impact of Hitler on individual members of his circle. The first of the Nazi books was about Franz Stangl, who had been Kommandant of Treblinka, one of the four extermination camps in German-occupied Poland. Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment for co-responsibility in the murder of 900,000 people in Treblinka. Her other remarkable book was a study of Albert Speer, the architect of Nazi Germany and Hitler’s right-hand man. In the preface to Into that Darkness, the book about Stangl, she wrote: ‘Over the months of the Nuremberg trials…I felt more and more that we needed to find someone capable of explaining to us how presumably normal human beings had been brought to do what he had done…If it could be achieved, an evaluation of such a person’s background, his childhood, and eventually his adult motivation and reactions, as he saw them, rather than as we wished or prejudged them to be, might teach us to understand better to what extent evil in human beings is created by their genes, and to what extent by their society and environment.’6 In her studies of Stangl and Speer she discovers in both cases a denial of love in childhood. Unlike Speer, Stangl was an unremarkable man. Diana Athill worked with Sereny on the book about Stangl, and this is what she said about him in her memoirs: ‘I still think – and often – of how that unremarkable man became a monster as the result of a chain of choices between right and wrong – some of the early ones quite trivial – and the way in which no one he respected intervened in favour of the right, while a number of people he respected (senior officers, a priest, a doctor – his idea of respectability was conventional) behaved as though wrong were right.
Chief among them, of course, the Führer. Stangl did not have a strong centre – had probably been deprived of it by a dreary childhood – so he became a creature of the regime. Other people without much centre didn’t – or not to the same extent – so some quality inherent in him (perhaps lack of imagination combined with ambition) must have been evident to those who picked him for his appalling jobs. But it was surely environment rather than genes which made him what he became.’7 Yes, environment certainly, but the more significant factor, I think, lies in that tell-tale phrase ‘lack of imagination.’ Sereny was allowed to visit Stangl in prison for many hours over six weeks, at the end of which his imagination finally kicked in, he touched the core of his guilt and admitted that he ought not still to be alive. When she next came to the prison to see him she was told he was dead – from heart failure not suicide, though the story persists that he killed himself, having finally understood the depth of his guilt.
When we turn to Speer the picture is more complex. Though he was the only senior Nazi at Nuremberg to plead guilty, and went on to write about what it was like inside the horrors of the Third Reich, her portrait of him is devastating. Speer himself killed no one and felt no enmity, hatred or even dislike for the millions in Eastern Europe, Christians and Jews, who were systematically slaughtered. Sereny says he felt nothing, because there was a dimension in him that was missing, a capacity to feel which his childhood had blotted out, allowing him to experience not love, but only romanticised substitutes for it. (Incidentally, she says there was a strong erotic bond between Speer and Hitler – never sexualised, of course, but hypnotically present all the same). Pity, compassion, sympathy, empathy weren’t part of Speer’s emotional vocabulary. He could feel deeply, but only indirectly – through music or landscape or art. She points out that Simone Weil sof 73 September 2005 his feelings could also be aroused through what she calls visual hyperbole. He was the begetter of the great Nazi set pieces, such as the Cathedral of Light, with its flags and thousands of men at attention, motionless like pillars, as well as the rows of blond children, eyes shining, arms stiffly raised. This became beauty to him and – another substitute for love – allowed him to feel.
But the conclusion of his story is that he did finally learn to feel with real authenticity, and to enter, for the first time, the experience of others. He acknowledged his part in Hitler’s madness, and with that honesty came a horrifying realisation of what had been done. With that came an overwhelming guilt and a wish for death, yet a fear of execution. In a final, generous paragraph Sereny summed him up: ‘This, I feel, had become the real Speer. This was a very serious man who knew more about that bane of our century, Hitler, than anyone else. This was an erudite and solitary man who, recognising his deficiencies in human relations, had read five thousand books in prison to try to understand the universe and human beings, an effort he succeeded in with his mind but failed in with his heart. Empathy is finally a gift, and cannot be learned, so, essentially, returning into the world after twenty years (in prison), he remained alone. Unforgiven by so many for having served Hitler, he elected to spend the rest of his life in confrontation with this past, unforgiving of himself for having so nearly loved a monster.’8 Let me pause before those daunting words: ‘Empathy is finally a gift and cannot be learned,’ and compare them to words we heard earlier from Simone Weil: ‘He who does not recognise to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.’ What can save us from despair or political immobilism is the recognition that we can, after all, measure the dominion of force, especially in its impact on our own lives, and learn not to respect it.
We can, by an act of constant radical selfinterrogation, measure the way in which force has both acted upon us and acted upon others through us.
More profoundly, in an act of sympathetic communion, we can recognise that shifting fortune and necessity hold us all in subjection, and with that understanding can come a passionate identification with others and a refusal, ever, to turn them, either by word or deed, into things. This sympathy, this ability to feel ourselves into the lives of others, is the root of a passionate morality that would rather die than become the instrument of force. And part of that revolt against force is a refusal to hate the enemy, because hatred is yet another manifestation of the petrifactive power of force.
Though it may kill us, we can resist force. If we withstand the momentum of force that drives us to vengeance, punishment, redress, suffering; and move, instead, to an ethic of transformation, astonishing things can happen to both the victims and offenders force has turned to stone. In spite of the cruel chorus that derides the movement towards restorative and transformative justice, we have to show them that it is a costly not a cheap alternative to the vicious circularity of punishment. It calls for a radical understanding of the force that impels us against each other, and the way we make ourselves complicit in its devastating momentum.
When practised with sufficient commitment, the ethic of transformative justice can melt the petrifactive impact of force into a communion that opens us to the humanity of the other: no longer a thing; now a creature suffering the same blows of fate as the rest of us. We can refuse to let force divide us against each other. Above all, we can refuse to hate.
And we don’t even need an organisation to do it through. All we need to do is make a start. 1. Simone Weil, ‘The Iliad or The Poem of Force’ from Simone Weil:
An Anthology. (Grove Press, New York 1986) p.163. 2. Simone Weil, op.cit., p.191. 3. Simone Weil, pp.184, 185. 4. Simone Weil, p.192. 5. Simone Weil, op.cit. pp.1-2. 6. Quoted in Diana Athill, Stet, (Granta, London 2001) pp.70-71. 7. Athill p.75. 8. Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer, (MacMillan, 1995) p.719.
This is an abbreviated version of Richard Holloway’s talk.
This is an abbreviated version of Richard Holloway's talk at the SoF 2005 Conference.