Thoughts Based Upon a Reading of a Speech by Badshah Khan.
In a different time, and a different place, a peace maker saw the rise of violence in his homeland. He understood the cause of the violence, and found that those in government, with their policies were collectively at fault. What he said, though based upon a particular situation, nonetheless has some universal value. How would you adapt these words to fit the violence which we have seen rising in various parts of the world?
I now take up the ticklish question of the riots in East Pakistan. It is extremely embarrassing to speak out one’s mind while dealing with this subject. I am a believer in non-violence and hold that violence never pays. It only serves to evoke hatred and makes the confusion more confounded. Nevertheless, I cannot help remarking that the said happenings in East Pakistan are the direct outcome of the policy you had been following in that part of the country for the last seven years. You gagged public opinion and imprisoned people without trial. You did not care to fill the vacant seats in the provincial legislature and proceeded with the governance of the province in an arbitrary manner without paying any heed to the aspirations of the people, whose goodwill you took for granted. The masses were ruthlessly persecuted and oppressed. Their needs were overlooked and they were subjected to extreme hardships and oppressions. The cumulative effect of all these factors was that a Muslim League could secure no more than a mere nine percent of the seats in a provincial election and the people of East Pakistan returned a decisive verdict of no-confidence in the Muslim League and its government. But then even this lesson seems to have fallen flat on you, and you are still pursuing the policies calculated to embitter the feelings of the people and creating conditions which are sure to engender mutual suspicion and bickering amongst the various classes. You suppress the legitimate aspirations of the people in general and play off one section against another, and when the matters come to a head, a scapegoat is readily seized and declared responsible for all the troubles. I am afraid the direction in which the events are now drifting in West Pakistan too, points to the results not much happier than what we have recently experienced in the eastern wing of the country…
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, “After Riots in East Pakistan: Speech in Constituent Assembly. 8 April, 1954” in Words of Freedom: Ideas of a Nation. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2010), 89-91.
In reading this speech, I can see partisans in the United States looking at how their opponents meet what Badshah Khan points as the problem in the Pakistan of his day. All sides of the political landscape can bring out examples of what their opponents have done to make things worse. Certainly this is true, but we must look more deeply to the changes happening in our society, and the desperation which we see forming in the American people. Fear and confusion rules the landscape, and it is easy to create enough fear, that even good plans and policies are dismissed by the people who need them. Those who have helped to create such fear, those who have helped make people feel like there is no value left to living, from whatever side of the political debate they find themselves in, have been helping to build the culture of death, a culture which is about far more than abortion. As long as the human person is not seen as dignified in their own right, no matter how bad the moral character of the person, the culture of death will be allowed to continue.
At the basis of our current culture is the depersonalization of the person, turning them into objects: they are turned to mere ciphers, objectified examples of virtues or vices we like or despise, while the person as a whole is rejected – the person is no longer seen as necessary or valuable, and so easily dismissed. It is easy to create automatons, it is more difficult to accept persons, persons with real imperfections, and to let them come to realize themselves in the midst of their imperfections instead of as an object to control, an object we see must suit some universal social norm. We treat people according to the dictates of economics, not the dictates of the heart.
As an example of what I mean, all we need to do is look at how some people in the United States feel about those who are jobless; about the homeless living on the streets: such people are described with all kinds of negative characterizations: they are lazy, worthless, not deserving social help. They are criminals who would rather steal than work. They have no concerns about morality and something must be done to stop them. Are there no prisons, no work camps? They are, in the end, no longer considered as people worthy of respect. They are no longer seen as humans striving to find themselves and improve themselves in situations which often are beyond their control. More often than not, they need not only help to live day to day, but also people to befriend them: without such friends, most of them end up lost and incapable of raising themselves out of the mire they have found themselves in (whether or not it was their fault for the situation). This, of course, is not new. All one has to do is look at the way vagabonds were seen in medieval Europe, and the kinds of stigma placed on them. Various medieval saints tried to help change that situation, some doing so more than others, but despite their efforts, in the end, social stigma more often won out and the impoverished were not understood. They were every bit the outcast as we outcastes in India; many were seen to be punished by their sins, and so deserved their horrible state in life.
We must remember that the poor are not tools which we need in order to prove how charitable we are. Those who look to charity in this fashion show they have no sense of charity: they don’t understand charity is to be an act of love. To them, it is an act of self- justification, where the poor are their tools for salvation. I cannot but feel that many people who contend that social justice must be accomplished merely by personal charity do so because they have no real heart for charity, rather, they look to keep the poor, poor, so they can feel good about the pittance they do for the sake of the poor. If they truly cared, they would seek to find the causes for poverty and change them. Social justice seeks out those structures, and aims to remove them, or put in new structures when necessary. There is no way society can live without structures, the question is, which structures. Those who have a heart for the people will care, and will seek such changes, even if it causes them to not be so well off in the end of their work. It doesn’t have to mean people will lose out on their social status, nor that everyone has to be equal: what it means is people have to respect each other, and work for the common good, so that no one is left without basic human needs. These needs are far more than food, shelter and clothing. These needs are spiritual, these needs are emotional, these needs are social needs, where someone is respected as a person who has something to offer others by their mere existence. This is why, even if the social structures are changed, and the basic material needs are met, there will not be an end to charity: rather, even if the material needs are met, emotional and spiritual needs will always be needs, and true charity seeks to give them as much as the material needs. Everyone needs to feel as if they have a place in the world, and accepted for who they are. As long as people see the poor as impersonal tools to make oneself righteous, true charity will never be understood. How can one deem themselves as caring for their neighbor if they ridicule them for being “welfare moms?” How can one be pro-life and ridicule those who have kept their children. Despising them and demeaning them demonstrates that the human person is not valuable; are you surprised they end up believing it and take the life of a person? But whose fault is it, since you have, in many respects, taken their life away first?
This gets back to our national situation. The poor are desperate, but their desperation tends to be limited and their actions limited in dealing with it. But their crimes cause more desperation. Desperation leads to more desperation, like violence leads to more violence. The cycle of desperation is all before us. Rhetoric, from all sides of the culture of death, has helped inspire desperation and acts of violence. All who add to the rhetoric are guilty. Politicians speak words because they want to influence people by them; do not let them convince you that their words have no impact. Even if their desire is to have people act one way with their rhetoric, this is not to say they are not responsible for other actions which can follow through with that same rhetoric, either directly, or indirectly. Violent rhetoric, like desperation, corrupts many in its path, until at last, somewhere down the chain of succession, someone, someone who has been made desperate, hears the words and responds. Those who are in control, those who have been in charge of society, are, collectively, to blame. We must, like Badshah Khan, keep speaking out against violence, but we must, like him do more than that; we must accept the collective, cultural responsibility, and have, as a society, a change of heart before it is too late.
Just because we were raised to believe some things were good because they are what our founding fathers thought were good does not mean they are; we cannot just go masking our own violence, our own desires for manipulation and control and justify it on the founding fathers. We are alive now; it is our duty to fix the social climate, even if it means repudiating the mistakes of the past. The law should be for man, not man for the law. The time is now. Let us receive the violence which have come before us as a sign of where our society is heading. We must change before it is too late.
Comments are closed.
Excellent Henry. All of us are responsible for this violence. Each one of us contributes to the culture of death but, like you said most are blind to their contribution.
I doubt that very many people will understand what you are saying here and that is a tragedy.
I see abortion, as I have said before, as the end result of the suffering and violence in the world that is directly traumatizing women into a deep seated fear of bringing children into the world. In addition, women have always been objectified and since that is the case how can a woman without grace have an understanding that the developing child in the womb is a real human being?
An object can only see other objects and if the other object cannot be seen it then becomes less human than the viewing object.
Thank you Henry for the very thought provoking piece. This is one quotation that interests me:
At the basis of our current culture is the depersonalization of the person, turning them into objects: they are turned to mere ciphers, objectified examples of virtues or vices we like or despise, while the person as a whole is rejected – the person is no longer seen as necessary or valuable, and so easily dismissed.
This is the heart of the fascism that the United States could fall into if it remains unaware of creeping dehumanization. The rhetoric from both the left and right can emulate the adulation of a Leader, Ideology, or Creed over humanity and personhood. This is true both for abortion and the various attempts to defeat same-sex marriage through the defamation of gay people. Your excellent example of the treatment of the poor and destitude in the US could mirror the dehumanization of many different groups of people.
Whenever I see a religious ideologue quote 1st Corinthians or Leviticus to condemn the subhuman-du-jour, I always wonder: to whom will the preacher appeal when he or she is demonized?
Thank you Jordan.
When writing this, I was not sure if I would be clear or not, since I wrote it as a stream of consciousness piece. But I am glad to see you and Ron appreciate what I wrote and said. And yes, I think the whole depersonalization, on all levels, from all sides, in different ways is contributing to the overall destruction around us. It is quite sad. We become cut up pieces of persons, not persons. And, I admit, the example of the poor came in part through my reading of a couple books on medieval society and its treatment of the poor — the good and the bad of it. I saw so much which is similar to the present society and it made me sad to see how we have come full circle.
I think that THIS makes a great deal of sense:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/before-hatred-comes-fear/?hp
And I think we should ALL examine our consciences in reading it.
According to Mr. Wright, the fault isn’t in the “crosshairs,” the violent metaphors, the vitriolic speech, but, instead, in the attempts to read others out of the community, to declare them the subversive “other.”
I think that that also goes on here, at Vox Nova, in terms of attempts to “read others out” of the Church, on a variety of issues, particularly abortion, birth control and homosexuality. This demonization has got to stop, and I trust that Obama in Tucson will take more responsibility than Palin has, thus far, in making it stop. (Though I’m not giving up on her, either, because I think she has the smarts to know that she hasn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell in 2012, if she doesn’t own up to SOME of the responsibility.)
I am not sure what you mean by “reading others out.”
Telling them that they don’t “belong” for this or that reason of non-conformity or disagreement. It works with Churches and it works with national identities.
I would like to refer you to this post:
http://vox-nova.com/2009/05/05/because-the-law-forbids-everything-becomes-permitted/
It’s because I fear, if you start saying there can be no structures which define who is or is not X, there ends up being no X. Those structures are needed. What those structures are one can debate, but to think things would be better without any definitions only ends up a mess.
What’s not transient, unfortunately, is the technological trend that drives much of this. It isn’t just that people can now build a cocoon of cable channels and Web sites that insulates them from inconvenient facts. It’s also that this cocoon insulates them from other Americans — including the groups of Americans who, inside the cocoon, are being depicted as evil aliens. It’s easy to buy into the demonization of people you never communicate with, and whose views you never see depicted by anyone other than their adversaries.
This is the passage that I see as most powerful in the post by DigbyDolben. I agree with Henry that we need to be clear on “not X” in order to preserve “X”. But at the same time, we must remember that those who hold “not X”—in the Church, in the public sphere—are equally loved by God, and we are commanded, prior to any other duty as Christians, to love them as God loves them. That is missing in so much of our discourse. You only need to review the thread that Morning’s Minion just shut down to see this in action on our own blog.
I have always favored geographical parishes over “affinity” parishes because they forced me to deal with real people, rather than ideas. I don’t drive across town to the local Francican parish (even though I am a Franciscan) precisely because it draws people from 60+ zip codes based on its “liberal” identity. I’ve met many of the parishoners—a nice bunch. But they are now in a position to treat their conservative brothers and sisters as an impersonal “other” and this tendency seems irresistible.
The internet and cable TV now creates virtual affinity parishes: do you read dotcommonweal and NCR, or do you watch EWTN? We no longer love one another as people because we never meet them as people: they have become an intellectual other. My Franciscan fraternity suffers from this and it strains the bonds of community in a group called to a life as brothers and sisters of penance.
David,
I agree, there is a difference between finding out and knowing what the Church is, and indeed, as I said, there is room to discuss those structures, and then saying what is not the Church is not to be loved. Rather, the Church’s mission is to be servants to the non-Church, not to hide from them but to love them as they need the love, to be Christ to them, so to speak. So I fully agree with what you said to add to what I said — it is the problem, though, that people forget what it means to be in the Church, and that is why they take it the wrong way, showing, imo, many of them have through their own sin, fallen out of the Church (as the parable of the Last Judgment shows, many who think they are within might find they fell out, and many who didn’t know they were, find out they are).
But, Henry, doesn’t it then follow that we actually DON’T KNOW, in this life, who’s “in” and who’s “out,” and that, therefore, we can’t really “read” ANYBODY “out” permanently?
True, we can’t and should not read people our permanently; however, that too is a different question. Remember St Paul in Corinthians.
Well, I guess I was wrong:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-01-12/sarah-palin-says-media-guilty-of-blood-libel-why-her-speech-was-wrong/?cid=hp:mainpromo1