Stephen Mitchell All Saints Vicarage The Street Gazeley Newmarket CB8 8RB sof 72 July 2005 12 The authorities at my 1940’s boarding school had a crude and blinkered vision. Their raison d’être was ‘to make a man of you.’ This involved a two-pronged destructuring process affecting body and mind. First came a physical toughening up engineered by a regime of bullying, corporal punishment, sexual abuse and social isolation. There followed a spiritual denuding in which aesthetic sensibilities were extinguished. My love of wild flowers, incompetence at games, appreciation of poetry, search for rare butterflies and times of silent reflection smacked of effeminacy or worse. They had to be eliminated.
The theory was that when fully de-personalised we could be rebuilt, refashioned into fearless, stiff-lipped rugby enthusiasts with a due respect for King, country and the established church. At that point we were ready to enter the paternalistic, male-orientated world outside.
A few of the tough-minded fought back. Some succumbed.
Schoolboys of the 1940’s aren’t the only ones to have suffered a restructuring process. The same fate has befallen God. The urge to create super-gods with fire and bite has proved overwhelming throughout history.
These man-made gods have been localised and turned into territorial despots. They have been painted as vengeful, possessive, all powerful and punitive, dishing out carrots in the shape of heaven and punishments via a roasting in hell.
Harmless enough surely? After all, it’s just playing theological word games. Unfortunately it doesn’t stop at that. Hand in hand with our man-made gods comes the claim to exclusivism. ‘The god I’ve knocked up at my work bench is superior to yours’. And that sets us all fair and square on the road to bigotry, arrogance, hatred and war. It reorientates our perception of those whose gods are other than our own, compelling us to view them with derogatory language as infidels, non-Christians, heretics, sinners, papists or atheists. The more we adapt our gods to our preferred image, the more entrenched and embattled we become. Nietzsche wasn’t joking when he said, ‘The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.’ The sociological kickback from all this can be savage.
Take the chilling photographs of Iraqis being tortured in Abu Ghraib prison, issued by The Washington Post on June 11th 2004. The sheer brutality, violence, crudity and sadism are enough to shock one to the core.
No less chilling is the depersonalising language surrounding the event. One Pentagon official commented, ‘We’re not going to read more people than necessary into our heart of darkness. The rules are grab whom you must. Do what you want.’ One soldier interviewed by The New Yorker had this to say, ‘I questioned some of the things I saw, such as leaving inmates in their cell with no clothes or in female underpants, handcuffing them to the cell door. The answer I got was, “This is how military intelligence wants it done.” A subordinate who complained of torturers sodomising prisoners with chemical lights and savaging them with military dogs was given the official reply, “Don’t worry about it.” This is sterile language, bleached of even a trace of humanity and if it doesn’t raise more than a prickle of unease it should.
What of the alleged more than 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the outbreak of war? One onlooker had this to say: ‘In every war it is important – no, imperative – that the people believe that the enemy is inhuman. They are all monsters. Therefore we are all justified in making sushi out of their children. They started it. They are evil.’ This ‘dampening down’ of humanity and the categorisation of torture, death and injury as ‘collateral damage’ are the sine qua non of war. Give people personality, a name, a shape and a reference point in society and bombing them becomes impossible. Killing or mangling somebody’s daughter, mother, girlfriend or baby cuts too near the quick.
It isn’t just these headline-grabbers that smack of depersonalisation We see it all around us in society’s nomenclature for minority groups. Refugees, alcoholics, teenage mothers, abortion-seekers, drug addicts and homosexuals are viewed as statistics not people, case studies not individuals. They are hounded by the press, The Demons of Depersonalisation David Bryant looks at the way depersonalising and distancing ourselves from others enable us to kill, torture, abuse and discount them.
US soldier with prisoner in Abu Ghraib, Iraq In every war it is important – no, imperative – that the people believe the enemy is inhuman. sof 72 July 2005 railed against by the church and belittled by society. It is a bleak and terrifying picture, an indication that our ‘civilised’ society is cracking at the seams.
Can we put into place any damage limitation? The answer is a guarded yes. Take our man-made gods with their moral absolutes, religious certainties and divisive imperatives. I believe that behind them all lies an allembracing, burgeoning creativity, described in the Genesis creation story (1:3) as a benign ruach (‘spirit’, ‘wind’) brooding over the universe. Rudolf Otto in his Idea of the Holy referred to it as ‘the numinous’, ‘the mysterium tremendum’, before which we feel an instinctive sense of thrill and awe. But that is not all. The ‘numinous’ leads to the ethical. ‘On the rational side of this non-rational element, (the numinous) are love, mercy, pity, comfort.’ But how do we go about restoring those who have been marginalised and maligned in society? We could start by turning to Martin Buber’s enduring classic, I and Thou. His vision is both profound and compelling. For the most part, we observe other people keeping a part of ourselves withheld. We maintain a distance, a gulf, a coolness. The essence of this impersonal relationship is IIt. But it is possible to transform and enrich it so that we throw ourselves wholly into it, ‘without masks, pretences, sometimes even without words.’ The relationship has now burgeoned into one of deep respect and heightened perception. As Martin Buber puts it:
Love ranges in its effect through the whole world. If we take our stand on love and look with its eyes, we see people released from their entanglement in bustling activity. Good people, and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, become successively real to us; that is, they are released to step forth in their particularity and meet us as Thou.
But don’t let’s leave it at that. The vision is worthless without dynamic action. We need radically to shift our perception of the ostracised and marginalised in society and to view them as an invaluable and integral part of the sum of things. They too are entitled to their place in the quantum universe. And our military structures, welfare agencies and government departments have to be purged and stripped of anonymity, facelessness, the ‘pigeon-hole’ mentality and sheer indifference. Not only that. Our towns, villages and housing estates need to be re-personalised so that the demons of gang warfare, violent muggings, shop-lifting and anti-social behaviour are starved of the impersonality on which they feed.
Christopher Hampton One Pentagon official commented,‘The rules are grab whom you must. Do what you want.’ We have to re-attune ourselves to the world so that we see its people in a transfigured light. The surly market stall-holder has a wife suffering from cancer. The checkout girl has just lost her mother. The elderly pensioner with baked beans in his trolley is dying of loneliness. The lad delivering newspapers has just experienced his first kiss.
In a re-personalised society such as this, the sick horrors of Abu Ghraib, the cold heart of organised religion and the slaughter of innocents in Iraq would be unthinkable.
David Bryant is a member of the Society of Friends and an occasional contributor to the Guardian ‘Face to Faith’ column. sof 72 July 2005 Grand Inquisitor Becomes Pope Benedict XVI Brazilian writer and priest Frei Betto fears the consequences of Joseph Ratzinger’s election to the papacy.