“Take physic, pomp”; Terry Eagleton on materialism and solidarity with the poor
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.
King Lear. Act 3, scene 4If power had a body, it would be forced to abdicate. It is because it is fleshless that it fails to feel the misery it inflicts. What blunts its senses is a surplus of material prosperity. If it has no body of its own, it nevertheless has a kind of surrogate flesh, a thick, fat-like swaddling of material possessions, which insulate it against compassion…
Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man
That slaves your ordinance, that does not see
Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly;
So distribution should undo excess,
And each man have enough. (Act 4, scene 1)
If our sympathy for others were not so sensuously depleted, we would be moved by their deprivation to share with them the very goods which prevent us from feeling their wretchedness. The problem could thus become the solution. The renewal of the body and the radical redistribution of wealth are closely linked. To perceive accurately, we must feel; and to feel we need to free the body from the anaesthesia which too much property imposes on it.
Terry Eagleton. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003. 183-84
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I just want to be the first to say it… because you know it’s coming Mark… “How dare you quote a Marxist literary theorist to us!!!”
Personally… I love it…
David
Mark,
And then what? Is Justice enough? Is that all there is?
The danger I see is that liberation from material poverty occasions an attendant spiritual impoverishment of the liberated. Look at the urban areas. They have no leaders. The leaders have been liberated and now celebrate their liberty in the wealthy suburbs. Before long they Will a forced amnesia about their roots.
I wonder: Is this a step forward? Or is it circular history?
My suspicion is that something beyond redistribution is necessary. It seems Power is always fleshless unless consumed by Love.
The liberated secretly know this irony. They have only a tinge of belonging where they chose to celebrate liberty. Yet, belonging is the sine qua non of liberation.
Ah yes, it goes back to that ancient dream of the Brotherhood of Man!
Gerald,
Of course justice is not enough, especially if it consists only in a more equitable redistribution of material wealth.
I guess I try to understand more so with this quote just one main contributing factor to man’s callousness towards his brothers and sisters, especially those who are in such dire straits.
What makes it so easy for us not to “see feelingly’ anymore…not only about material poverty but also about the fundamental lack of relationship which impoverishes so many of our fellow humans?
Mark,
We agree. There is a high degree of callousness in the U.S. that undermines every effort to strike down inequities and move our society forward. It never seems to diminish.
My sense is we have not made clear the causal linkages between the material poverty of the poor and the spiritual poverty of the wealthy. The wealthy and the poor are related as cause and effect.
Yet Calvinism claims poverty to stem from an a priori condition of unworthiness before God. This is a form of theological fascism deeply rooted in our society. Today it bubbles to the surface unlike any time since the Gilded Age.
What is appalling to me is that we have let this falsehood stand during my entire lifetime. To my knowledge, it has never been challenged in policy circles.
In recent years, matters have gotten worse, as you say. Not only do we claim the poor to be unworthy, they are now unneeded. Why? Because there is a more profitable pool of human resources overseas.
Callousness has become an art form in America. We no longer have to speak of “taming the savages” or “manifest destiny”. We have moved on. Now we use the more acceptable “code language” of economic “productivity” and “efficiency”.
Of course, our reward for this callousness is cheaper goods. Hooray for Walmart!
“My sense is we have not made clear the causal linkages between the material poverty of the poor and the spiritual poverty of the wealthy. The wealthy and the poor are related as cause and effect.”
I don’t understand this comment. Could you elaborate?
It’s always been my belief that a person can be spiritually poor or spiritually rich regardless of his/her economic status. How does the economic poverty of one cause the spiritual poverty of another (or vice versa)? At face value, this seems like a very silly comment, but perhaps I’m missing something (?).
In our economic system, the poor are those who, for one reason or another, fail to meet the wants and needs of others sufficiently.
In our exxhange or market economy, generally how wealthy you are depends on the value of what you have to exchange or sell–the value being what someone is willing to pay you for it.
The way we live in this system, we give very little without getting something back for it, and what is more we want to win every exchange we make, too, in order to get back more than we have given, and that is called profit.
I don’t see how this system is going to fundamentally change until the Lord returns. The poor will always be with us. But inside the Church, perhaps we should be acting differently toward one another than our economic system dictates (see the Book of Acts)–showing the world a better way while also reaching out to the world with charity and social action.
As an example of the Church not distinguishing itself much from the world, take a look at Catholic health care in the US–a system that basically fits in with and operates no differently than the rest of the health system, although perhaps Catholic hospitals give more “charity” care than other hospitals.
Actually, I don’t know all that much about Catholic health care in the US, so someone out there may have to correct me if I am wrong.
And on that powerful rhetorical flourish, I end.