It Only Hurts When I Laugh!

There is an old tragicomic character, whom Iranians know as Mullah Nasr-e-Din. He is a kind of buffoon that the ordinary people can immediately identify with, and is therefore perhaps the best loved character in Iranian literature and folklore. Thousands of stories are attached to him. (Incidentally he is also claimed by the Turks as their own. They call him by a slightly different name which I don't recall right now. I believe the Arabs also lay claim to him, and god only knows maybe the Afghans and Indians too.)

He is the quintessential Muslim idiot. He is mock-pious, he is the eternal cuckold, he's the perennial butt of everyone's jokes, and pranks. He is supposed to be a simple man, as I said, to the point of idiocy. He is in fact, at heart a good man, but through his gullibility and simplicity, his entire life is made up of anecdotal episodes of personal failure and humiliation. He invites his best friend to make himself at home, only to have him sleep with his wife as soon as his back is turned, or offers another a helping hand, only to be robbed blind, and so on.

In all the countries that lay claim to his invention they see him as the comical face of the tragedy of everyday life. Whenever some misfortune befalls you, someone will have a comforting anecdote (antidote?) of Nasr-e-Din Khan for you, to let you know that there are worse things in life.

Anyway, enough preamble, one of my favourites goes something like this:

"A friend comes to visit the Mullah, and on reaching his door he hears screams of agony issue from his house. Worried he bangs on the door, and enters the house. Reaching the room where the screams are coming from he sees Nasr-e-Din sitting in the corner, on the floor with his trousers down. The Mullah is in the process of piercing his balls, viciously with a needle. as his screams subside his worried friend says "In God's name man, what are doing?" Nasr-e-din looks up through tearful, bloodshot eyes to his friend and says "Ah, but it feels so good when I stop!"

Perhaps that resonates with you too!

In the Playing Fields of the Lord

"Our Democracy is better than yours. Our Freedom is Freer than yours. 'Coz we started it. We thought of it first. NAH NAH NAH."

That is the attitude that we seem to bring to many otherwise sensible and 'grown-up' discussions.

Playing the game of "we did it first", it gets tiresome and very old very quickly. We seem to forget, on an awe inspiringly regular basis, that ideas, wherever they originated, become public property once they hit the public arena. Yet, still we persist in using this vapidly childish argument as a means of shutting down argument.

This, sadly is a classic method used by many blog invaders. It takes many forms, if it is not about politics, it's about civilisation, or art, or philosophy, or literature or ice cream (need I go on?). It doesn't matter much what the subject of the argument is, the form remains the same annoying, finger-pointing piece of utter nonsense.

I remember an interesting discussion, some twenty years ago now, between an Italian friend, a Greek friend and myself. Already it sounds like one of those dubious jokes. The Italian friend, let's call him Umberto, was waxing lyrical about the achievements of the Roman Empire, while Alex, the Greek friend, was shouting him down with the Glories of Ancient Greece. The discussion deteriorated to the point that Alex told Umberto that basically all positive things in civilisation are the products of Greek culture, while all the negative stuff is the legacy of the bastard Romans. At this point, having kept my mouth comprehensively shut so far, I put in that we mustn't forget the contribution of say the Phoenicians, or the great and ancient cultures of the Chinese, the kingdoms of Benin, Ur, Assyria, Egypt...to name but a few. Whereupon Alex turned to me angrily and told me I shouldn't speak since 'my lot' were roundly smashed at Marathon and Salamina.

Great argument, don't you think? I just laughed and told him my lot, as such weren't there at the time, and even if they were, it would be no skin off my nose. And as you'll notice I didn't even include the Persians in my examples of other great cultures.

This form of argument would be harmless banter, though annoying, were it not for the tragic fact that we conduct our global politics in the same way. As if all history has to teach us is who was the highest scorer in a game of sports.

Oh the fun we have.

A Delicate Distinction

It would perhaps be futile to try and explain this.

There is a fine distinction between Democracy and the concept of Liberty.

Whereas Democracy is a freewheeling ideology of structured freedoms (the usual press, religion, so on and so forth), it tends very often to be limited in scope when it comes to the mass of the people.

Let me explain.

The Democratic model is deeply choked by the fact that it relies greatly on the mass to be qualified to choose their leadership. In turn, it also needs a leadership made up of those who would have the best intentions and, also, have the least self interest. In other words in order to have a genuinely worthy leadership based on the Democratic model we need men and women who are truly, deeply and steadfastly altruistic. While we also need a well educated, balanced and reasoning mass to carefully choose and vote for them. Tragically, neither of these precepts apply to our societies as they stand. I don't want to get into the chicken and egg situation of this. I have no easy answers as to who's fault it is that we are not interested or educated, or indeed informed enough to choose the right leaders. Nor do I wish to get into the conspiracy theories of how the ruling classes keep us ignorant precisely for this purpose. What stands is that we're neither qualified nor informed enough to choose the right leadership. Meanwhile, to our politicians it would be pure poison to have a well educated and aware voting public. So in fact the balance at present serves only bad government.

Liberty on the other hand is an ideal of pure freedom (or should that be pure ideal of freedom). Not that this does not carry its own share of problems, but in essence it is about the rights, dare I say inalienable rights, of every individual to live free from fear (as much as that is possible), to live as he/she sees fit, without restriction by any overseeing power, to do right by others through a liberal and well rounded education, and an absolute commitment to protecting and nurturing the freedom and equality of others.

Now where is the fine line?

Well for a start, we are not all evenly well educated. Secondly our sources of education are dubious to say the least. Thirdly our history and our national prejudices, our clan loyalties and our natural baseness tie us down to a lopsided view of our own importance and of others' shortcomings. We tend to take easily to exaggerations of our own greatness and the shortfalls of others. The upshot of this is that we buy the cheap propaganda of warlords, while questioning their validity only when their adventures turn belly up. We tend to only demand change for things when they've already failed.

In a society truly infused with the idea of real liberty, we would foresee that a venture is bound to fail, or be wrong once we get wind of it, not after it has failed. Why did America or England consent to send their young to kill and die in Iraq, and then shift opinion once it was revealed that the leaders lied? Because instead of believing that war is bad, that aggression is wrong, we thought, well this is going to be easy. We'll beat them and then our children will come home safe and sound. And we'll be non the worse for it. We did not care that all the weight of history teaches us that in war, innocents suffer and die. We did not allow that a war demeans the victor as much as it denigrates the loser. We did not draw on our, surely, unavoidable knowledge that any war, any act of violence on the part of a portion of humanity, soils all our hands with blood.

And this is the nub of the argument. An enlightened society is able to prevent this kind of abuse, and has the power to block it before it starts, and not only as an afterthought.

Global Enema

I think that we are going through a phase. The world of our species is a strange little terrarium. Many countless attempts have been made to describe and encompass its sense and its meaning. One that springs to mind is ancient in origin. It attempts to liken the world to a wheel (an apt image). It describes the affairs of the world as being a wheel, and that at any given point some on this wheel are on the ascent and others are on the descent. But there are myriad wheels within wheels, that is, not only the world but all its individual components are also trapped within a cyclic pattern. So that an individual, say you, will experience in your lifetime ups and downs by the motion of the wheel. In narrow terms this describes how in your say daily wheel, you may awake sad and lacking in energy, but as that day travels to its night, you may suddenly find your mood building up to a burst of energy or joy, or something else positive. Well that is as simply as the idea can be described.

But this wheel also has another application. If we look at our collective history, I think another perhaps more ominous pattern can also be discerned. One that I think may well fit the troubles we're witnessing today.

If you were to look back on our recorded history, you will find periodic, let's for argument's sake say once in every Century (although many smaller wheels of the same sort are turning within the big world wheel, always) attempts at curing our societal ills by means of a purgative. These purges normally coincide with time on the downside of the wheel. They almost invariably take the form of baptisms of fire, be that war, witch burning, Communist hunting, Jew baiting, racism or whatever.

When things are not going well for us, we tend to look to outside elements for something or someone to blame for our ills.

Take the classic times of the Inquisition. The 12th through to the 18th centuries were rife with a raging in-house struggle for supremacy, which, it may be argued, continues into our times. The Church and the Secular arm were at odds over who would take charge of the masses. But the Church was also fighting a battle within its own corpus. The countless cults of saints, from the followers of Francis or Dominic, to the various brotherhoods of the so called heretics, to the larger power struggle between the popes of the Eastern and Western arms of the Church, and in turn their disputes with various European Emperors over control of the hearts and minds, not to mention souls, of the mass of the population. The Church stigmatised those it wished to rid itself of, as witches, Devil worshippers, heretics and followers of the Antichrist. Those who disputed the legitimacy of the Popes were put before the Inquisition, and could make no defence that would absolve them, since the method of Inquisition was such that no matter what proof the accused brought forth to prove his innocence, it was seized upon and presented as, in fact more proof of his guilt. (The classic Monty Python trick that was used again and again on those accused of witchcraft, for example, was that the test for discovering a witch was to drop them in a body of water, since witches had the same quality as wood. If the accused floated, they were then burned since it was irrefutable proof of their sin, if they drowned and died then they were not a witch and their soul was dispatched to heaven forthwith. A lose-lose situation, and ingenious in that if you want to get rid of someone, the best strategy for keeping your hands clean, and avoiding accusations of bias is to say they had a fair trial as outlined by the law.) You may ask what possible interest could it serve the Church to falsely accuse ordinary people, and offing them, since these same had no power to begin with. The motive force behind these purges was multiple in aim. One was to apply pressure within the body of the church to kill all resistance to the status quo, as determined by the Pope, and secondly to strike fear amongst the uneducated public, to quell any rebellion that may be brewing against the monopoly of power that the Church exercised, but also to alleviate the tensions that may have been building up amongst the flock due to the depravations of their daily oppression by the Church and by the lords of the land. Not to mention earn a tidy income from those accused.

"The persecution of witchcraft enabled the Church to prolong the profitability of the Inquisition. The Inquisition had left regions so economically destitute that the inquisitor Eymeric complained, "In our days there are no more rich heretics ... it is a pity that so salutary an institution as ours should be so uncertain of its future." By adding witchcraft to the crimes it persecuted, however, the Inquisition exposed a whole new group of people from whom to collect money. It took every advantage of this opportunity." (An extract from the article 'The Witch Hunts: The End of Magic and Miracles 1450-1750 C.E.', by Helen Ellerbe.) The accused were even charged for the cost of their torture, the ropes that tied them to the stake and the woodpile that burned them.

So what did we have. On the one hand an uneducated, terminally poor, population, paying a huge chunk of their meagre annual income (be that in money or in livestock or harvest) as tithes to the Church, working the land as surfs for the rich land owners, for just enough of the fruits of their toil to keep body and soul together, and having no other source of information than the Church and the state. On the other two hugely powerful forces, rich, educated and in deadly combat over supremacy, each jealous of the other's power, influence and wealth. Meanwhile, the populace was not only hit with the propaganda of the Antichrist, witches and so on, but also variously by the Black Death, and other less devastating epidemics. And these in themselves helped fuel the need for scapegoats. All in all a multinational advertising agency could not have handled the campaign better.

What am I leading to with all this? Well for a start I think to most readers it must also be ringing some similarity bells. Think Nazism, think Stalinist purges, the McCarthy witch hunts, think in general of all the demonisation that takes place regularly in everyday propaganda of one or other faction in our society. Always behind the purges that we cyclically witness or are involved in, a greater and perhaps more sinister struggle for power at the top. From the simple ambitions of the few in power, to the more sweeping ideological battles, always the scapegoat is something of a useful tool. It is mostly a way of keeping the majority frightened and distracted while those in power and those with what they call vested interest, carry on building toward their goals. It is what we do to a screaming child, distract and obfuscate, turn their attention away from what they want by offering them a placebo, and therefore shut them up.

It seems we are happy to do anything to avoid or side-step looking to ourselves and finding solutions from within. We are willing to accept that whole populations around the world are daily, actively going about hating 'OUR WAY OF LIFE', we are willing to accept this as a reasonable explanation for our disappearing health, education, civil rights, and other social systems. We are willing to allow ourselves to hate foreigners, to look out for the barbarian just beyond the gate, to the underbelly of our social structure, anywhere to find something to purge that doesn't involve our looking in the mirror and seeing the faults and mistakes in ourselves. Those who wish to have power are very well versed with this tendency, and use it as a cudgel to beat us down with, to keep us quiet, to gain our consent, to legitimise their license to do what they need to achieve and retain their power, their own aggrandisation, to justify themselves to history and to reconcile themselves with what shred of conscience they may still have. As Pilate washed his hands so can they.

Today we have the spectre of Islam, terrorism and immigration, before that it was Communism, in Germany not so long ago the Jews, in Russia Capitalism...

You fill in the rest.