Monday, March 26, 2007
Saying Sorry for the Slave Trade
For an insightful and perturbing thesis on the human condition you could do worse than read John Gray’s book, ‘Straw Dogs’. His views about our species are not very complimentary for those believing in human progress. We are the most pernicious animal that ever spawned itself across the face of the earth. Our cruelty knows no bounds. We destroy at far greater levels than we create, whether it be other animals, plants, the atmosphere, the oceans, or ourselves.
Yet, moving on from Gray’s exposition, through it all we are also capable of such acts of beauty, compassion, heroism and self-sacrifice that our dark side must, we feel, become diffused by the light of goodness as time goes on. We thrash around in painful self-flagellation at our inability to eradicate the beast within us – and erase the sheer obscenities of our historical acts.
Should we, the present day white adults in our society, say sorry for our part in the Slave Trade?
It seems to me to hinge upon the following. If today we lived in an inspirational, cultured, compassionate society with no racism, no demeaning exploitation, no bigotry, then, whatever the colour of our skin, there would be no demand for an apology to history. The fact of our sense of having actualised as a benign and humane species would render an apology unimaginable. We could place it in our species’ evolutionary progress towards what we have become.
The very fact that it is the subject of such emotive debate today is that, in extreme discomfort, we are conscious of the depths of depravity for which, as a species, we continue to be capable.
To say sorry is to admit this in absolute terms. We would prefer to talk about those people centuries years ago, their culture, attitudes and beliefs as though they belonged to a ‘foreign country’. If we construct history in that way, then it becomes very easy to apologise.
But, if we are, as is intimated in ‘Straw Dogs’, incapable of rising above the thoughtless cruelty of our genetic make-up, then what have we to apologise for? It has always been thus.
It is still thus.
For an insightful and perturbing thesis on the human condition you could do worse than read John Gray’s book, ‘Straw Dogs’. His views about our species are not very complimentary for those believing in human progress. We are the most pernicious animal that ever spawned itself across the face of the earth. Our cruelty knows no bounds. We destroy at far greater levels than we create, whether it be other animals, plants, the atmosphere, the oceans, or ourselves.
Yet, moving on from Gray’s exposition, through it all we are also capable of such acts of beauty, compassion, heroism and self-sacrifice that our dark side must, we feel, become diffused by the light of goodness as time goes on. We thrash around in painful self-flagellation at our inability to eradicate the beast within us – and erase the sheer obscenities of our historical acts.
Should we, the present day white adults in our society, say sorry for our part in the Slave Trade?
It seems to me to hinge upon the following. If today we lived in an inspirational, cultured, compassionate society with no racism, no demeaning exploitation, no bigotry, then, whatever the colour of our skin, there would be no demand for an apology to history. The fact of our sense of having actualised as a benign and humane species would render an apology unimaginable. We could place it in our species’ evolutionary progress towards what we have become.
The very fact that it is the subject of such emotive debate today is that, in extreme discomfort, we are conscious of the depths of depravity for which, as a species, we continue to be capable.
To say sorry is to admit this in absolute terms. We would prefer to talk about those people centuries years ago, their culture, attitudes and beliefs as though they belonged to a ‘foreign country’. If we construct history in that way, then it becomes very easy to apologise.
But, if we are, as is intimated in ‘Straw Dogs’, incapable of rising above the thoughtless cruelty of our genetic make-up, then what have we to apologise for? It has always been thus.
It is still thus.
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Trap (BBC 2 Sunday 9.00)
I watched the second of this three-parter, last night. It is an analysis of how the US and British governments have slavishly followed a doctrine of hands-off government, when it comes to the shape and direction of society. By reducing Big Government and tossing the stubborn infrastructures of bureaucracy and class into the liberalising air of free market economics, our leaderships assumed that the space created would be filled with millions of human butterflies, intoxicated by choice and motivated by consensual priorities. This would lead to an invigorated society of upwardly mobile citizens.
Instead it has produced a partial maggot heap with constituent features such as corporate Enron type greed, Hospital Executives twisting data to increase funding, greater divides in schooling and an increasing overall acquisitiveness and self-serving cruelty. When Government reneges on its role to lead on moral accountability, there can be no public service ideology. The public sector and private sector meld into a force that rigidifies social strata. Meritocracy feeds greedily on the vulnerable and disadvantaged, wearing wealth as a badge of cold disdain. The poor are poorer, their choices ever more limited.
Running vast computer programmes that create targets for a homogenised society, covering everything from waiting lists to birdsong in an urban garden, the government then leave the means of meeting those targets to public and private agencies. They do not have the wit to see that this laissez faire capitalism unleashes the disease of self-interest, not least in their own high ranks where sleaze, deliberate trampling on moral imperatives and arrogant careerism is a feature of a leadership that conjoins New Labour with recent Conservatism.
In their arrogance they have reneged on their duty to see that humane and compassionate behaviour needs constant nurturing and protection or they will choked by the vigorous growth of burgeoning self-interest.
I switched over to watch the end of the 100 greatest stand up comics. Here I found hope and despair. Hope in the bravery of comedians to take on tyranny in all its forms and despair that Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson draw crowds with their virulent and degrading effluence towards anyone they do not perceive as like them. On comparing his wealth to the poverty of the Third World, Davidson smiled and said, “Fuck them”.
Well, fuck you and your ilk, Jim, whether on stage or in government. It is our greatest quality, human tolerance, that allows you all to continue to vandalise the delicate filigree of public service and moral sentiment. What an irony.
I watched the second of this three-parter, last night. It is an analysis of how the US and British governments have slavishly followed a doctrine of hands-off government, when it comes to the shape and direction of society. By reducing Big Government and tossing the stubborn infrastructures of bureaucracy and class into the liberalising air of free market economics, our leaderships assumed that the space created would be filled with millions of human butterflies, intoxicated by choice and motivated by consensual priorities. This would lead to an invigorated society of upwardly mobile citizens.
Instead it has produced a partial maggot heap with constituent features such as corporate Enron type greed, Hospital Executives twisting data to increase funding, greater divides in schooling and an increasing overall acquisitiveness and self-serving cruelty. When Government reneges on its role to lead on moral accountability, there can be no public service ideology. The public sector and private sector meld into a force that rigidifies social strata. Meritocracy feeds greedily on the vulnerable and disadvantaged, wearing wealth as a badge of cold disdain. The poor are poorer, their choices ever more limited.
Running vast computer programmes that create targets for a homogenised society, covering everything from waiting lists to birdsong in an urban garden, the government then leave the means of meeting those targets to public and private agencies. They do not have the wit to see that this laissez faire capitalism unleashes the disease of self-interest, not least in their own high ranks where sleaze, deliberate trampling on moral imperatives and arrogant careerism is a feature of a leadership that conjoins New Labour with recent Conservatism.
In their arrogance they have reneged on their duty to see that humane and compassionate behaviour needs constant nurturing and protection or they will choked by the vigorous growth of burgeoning self-interest.
I switched over to watch the end of the 100 greatest stand up comics. Here I found hope and despair. Hope in the bravery of comedians to take on tyranny in all its forms and despair that Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson draw crowds with their virulent and degrading effluence towards anyone they do not perceive as like them. On comparing his wealth to the poverty of the Third World, Davidson smiled and said, “Fuck them”.
Well, fuck you and your ilk, Jim, whether on stage or in government. It is our greatest quality, human tolerance, that allows you all to continue to vandalise the delicate filigree of public service and moral sentiment. What an irony.
Labels: About compassion for others...
Monday, March 12, 2007
The Secrets of Suicide
In my role as a Panel member at the British Board of Film Classification, I occasionally see films that have caused the viewing public some disquiet. The Panel’s role is to debate whether such films have been given the most appropriate classification. I enjoy Panel meetings. The debate is penetrating and represents a wide range of value positions. In real terms, the experience brings home to its members how well the BBFC does its job. It rarely errs on the side of reckless tolerance for it operates powerful checks and balances, cross referencing decisions among its regulators and, as I intimated, its panels. Then again, it is hardly ever castigated for being too protective or censorious in its decisions.
The film we discussed most recently was called The Bridge, directed by Eric Steel and released last month. It won’t have much distribution. It is a documentary based on a year’s observation of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. In all 24 suicides take place. Some are graphically captured. There are interviews with families and friends of the dead. A central motif follows one suicide, Gene, in recurring images throughout the film, as he prepares himself for his plunge, walking, throwing back his long black hair, rubbing his forehead, being passed by tourists and finally climbing over the railings. He dies as though he knows he is being watched, in a graceful backwards arc, crucified in the camera lens. We see others, less elaborate, clumsier, as though they had not prepared themselves for this final event. The Golden Gate Bridge is an organic element of the whole; mythic, sometimes brooding, sometimes resplendent in the light and shade of sun, fog, storm or eerie darkness. As though anthropomorphised by John Carpenter, it draws suicides to it more than any other single location.
The debate in the Panel centred at one point on the ethics of making the film. Was it a terrible intrusion? Should films feature actual deaths? How could a director record dispassionately such moments of intense human despair? How could an audience be asked to watch it? Would it lead to imitation among those viewers who could feel their own lives peeling and fraying from what may have once been a comforting solidity?
A doctor friend said to me recently that suicide is statistically near the top of the list of ways of dying but is rarely part of the public debate on mortality. Try Googling it. He was right. Watching this film is both harrowing and educative. We are brought up close to something we might prefer to have been locked away in unscanned data. We might resent these suicides in that their perpetrators have rejected us, our friendship, our religious beliefs, our own fear of dying, our preoccupations with staying alive and finding meaning in our daily existence. For them there is one last foray into emotions at which we can only guess. Bleakness? Glory? Erasure? Fulfilment?
Who knows what goes on in the minds of others at the self-imposed culmination of their lives? Try to see this film. It has an emotionless, research-like quality that gives you maximum room to develop your own attitudes and judgments towards a taboo subject that hitherto has remained largely hidden.
Labels: The orchestration of death?