Rabbits, up and at em!

 

Consider a person who had every reason to be happy but who saw continually enacted before him tragedies full of disastrous events, and who spent all his time in consideration of sad and pitiful things. Let us suppose that he knew they are imaginary fables so that though they drew tears from his eyes and moved his imagination they did not touch his intellect at all. I think that this alone would be enough to gradually close up his heart and to make him sigh in such a way that the circulation of his blood would be delayed and slowed down…”

Thus Descartes, quoted in Stephen Gaukroger’s  Descartes: an intellectual biography. Descartes imaginary person has become the man in the street, whose moments are taken up by flash ads on the telephone, cable tv, porno, and the garden of earthly delights that is the internet. We know, now, or think we do, what is fabulous and what is intellectually objective. Yet with such constant parallel networking between the two, the happy – the comfortable, the housed, the fed, the educated – have the imagination of catastrophe constantly before their eyes, while the conditions of catastrophe, the actual loss of dwelling, food, children, clean water, security and all the rest of it is for other people. So much “only connect”, so much “what can you do?”

 I am exhausted by catastrophes like Gaza. I’m exhausted by the gradual shutdown of all the institutions and values that made for social democracy, once, and the substitution of competition – read Hobbesian anarchy – and powerlessness, which we are led to think is the very summit of democracy. But my exhaustion is no argument at all. It is simply a condition.

No good can come from the exhaustion we feel as political agents.

Brecht said that humans learn as much from catastrophe as laboratory rabbits learn about biology. This phrase is rich in implications, one of which might be that just as there is a science that registers the rabbit in a certain order that is beyond the rabbit’s capacity to understand, so, too, there is a science, or at least an art, to catastrophe. Biology isn’t expressed in any one biologist, and catastrophe isn’t expressed in any one powerbroker. Rather, the artists of catastrophe exist in a community that works to make sure that the conditions of catastrophe bear down with a crushing weight on its victims. The members of that community don’t recognize themselves as artists of catastrophe at all, perhaps, but only in terms of the individual roles. They support. They oppose. And so instead of the rabbits pondering the experimenters, you hear, for instance, the X “supports” Hamas because X – in this case, me, but many others – supports a ceasefire. Support doesn’t mean, as it does among the experimenters – as it does for Netanyahu, for instance – material support, a system of arranging money and favors to keep Hamas in business. That type of support is beyond our rabbit-y remit. No, support means you open your moth and say something.

We, as rabbits, have to get out of the cage and bite the experimenters. Enough with “supporting”..