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2009
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The Creative Balance, Part Two"Balance" in terms of competing world views does not and cannot mean "a plague on both your houses."
Well what do I propose that it does mean?
What it means is, that we retain confidence in the possibility of creative adaptation. It is obviously misguided to declare war on a country that had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. It is equally misguided to somehow pursue the war, an aggressive war and a violation of the United Nations Charter, now that the election of a new President makes possible an immediate repudiation of the previous President's crimes. But that's only a statement about the immediate avoidance of crime. How do we maintain a balance between the competing world views of the globalizing capitalist democracies and those of the fervid sectarian Islamicists?
Yes, it is true that the participants in the Green movement do not acquiesce in the rapacious capitalist looting of the natural and human resources of the planet, for the benefit of the few wielders of massive amounts of capital. Nor do we share the view that the followers of Mohammed have found the one true Way to truth. Nor, as I am at some pains to say already, is it sufficient simply to repudiate both competing ways of thought.
There is not now a Third Way. We generate our own. It is how we make the world a better place, by not resting content with a choice between opposing world views.
As an example of how I propose this can be done, let me draw from a creative, pioneering, highly interesting study of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian missionary literature by Isabel Hofmeyr, Professor of African Literature at the University of Witwaterstrand in South Africa. Her topic is how the Christian missionaries, and their converts, made use of the inspirational seventeenth-century work of John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress. She reproduces a passage from the Xhosa newspaper, Isigidimi samaXhosa, dating from the 1880s, when the African elite yet again had to decide how to cast their vote for the Cape Legislative Assembly. Since 1853 franchise in the Cape Colony was determined by gender, age, property, and literacy, and a fair proportion of the African elite qualified for the vote. At each election, there was considerable in the Cape African press on which candidates (who were almost invariably white) to support. [Archibald Campbell] Jordan provides a translation of one such instance where a columnist uses an episode from Bunyan to explore the options facing the enfranchised Africans.
Readers of [Tiyo Soga's translation of Pilgrim's Progress into Xhosa] will remember the story of Christian and Hopeful, the day they were found by Giant Despair. It is said that the giant put them into his castle, into a very dark dungeon, nasty and stinking to the spirits of those two men. Here, then, they lay from Wednesday morning until Saturday night without one bit of bread or drop of drink, or light, or any to ask them how they did.
Now the giant had a wife, and her name was Diffidence: who, when she heard about the prisoners, told her husband 'to beat them without mercy.' True enough, on the following morning they were beaten fearfully. The next night she, understanding that they were still alive, 'did advise him to counsel them to make away with themselves.' Truly then, the giant did give them this advice, and again he beat them. But they, though tempted by his counsel, finally resolved not to accept it. If they must die, it must not be by their own hands.
The columnist then goes on to draw out the lessons of this episode:
We are reminded of this story by a number of men who are at present scattered among us black folk, counseling us how to get out of this slough, this dungeon of suffering into which our community has been cast these past years. We have complained of laws that oppress the black man alone: the branding of cattle, pass laws, disarmament without even adequate compensation for our guns. We have complained of the imprisonment of our ministers of religion, their being arrested by the police while carrying out their duties to the Word of the Lord. We have been pushed around by so-called location regulations. These and other things have been heavy on our necks, and many of them remain so, and we do not know what to do about them. And now the time has come to elect men to go to parliament. Among the men who are going to parliament there are those who are going there to add to the burdens we aloready have. Thses men make no secret of the fact that they still regard the black man as an enemy, a thing to be treated as an enemy, a thing to be deprived of education grants.
Today, it is those same men who have come to our people and expect that it must be we ourselves who send them to parliament. Hence, they say that they have come to counsel us to do away with our own selves. Giant Despair said, 'I bring you counsel that will help you when I say that you had better kill yourselves.' In like manner these men come smiling up to us, and say, 'It is our ardent love for you that makes us say that you had better elect us, the people who will truly destroy you.' Diffidence was enthusiastic about her counsel. In like manner these men are enthusiastic about the counsel they bring to us.
It will be well fro us to confer on this matter. The two men we have used an as example [Christian and Hopeful -- MM] conferred before they resolved what to do. The day is very near when we must resolve what to do, hence our suggestion that there must be unanimity among those who have the right to vote. For our part, we say we must not accept the counsel to do away with our own selves. If we must die, it must not be by our own hands.
The columnist addresses a situation of straitened choice and raises questions of how to pursue political objectives in an oppressive context. He employs two techniques in this task. First, he shifts the allegorical field of the book. In this account, the text loses its "original" meaning and is de-allegorized. It becomes instead a story about colonial rule in the Cape Colony -- the burdens and trials represented in the plot become the burdens and trials of life under colonial oppression. Within this framework, the writer introduces his second technique, that of re-allegorizing the text by reconfiguring the story to render it amenable to alocal interpretation. In this account, the story of Giant Despair and his insidious wife is refocused so that it pivots around her attempts to get the two prisoners to kill themselves.
Hofmeyr's focus on literary technique is only tangential to my own. What is most striking about this column from the 1880s in an African-language newspaper is the adoption by the African author of European Christian literature, and its adaptation to the needs of the community.
We have smiling oppressors who come to us and tell us to elect them to parliament as well, telling us quite plainly that they are the representatives of international capital, and that they are the best we can get, even though they are going to continue the rule of the rich. We have politicians who said that they were going to restore constitutional limits on detention, and who have reversed themselves completely within a month of taking office. How can we respond?
In one sense, we should not despair. We should bear up, and have confidence in the ability of intelligent human beings to adapt, as the intelligent Xhosa-speaking South Africans communicated one with another in terms of the very teachings the colonizers had used to legitimize colonial oppression. When in 1865 the translator of Pilgrim's Progress into Xhosa, Tiyo Soga, wrote to defend the actions of Christian Africans; Hofmeyr comments [W]hile Soga calls up a familiar landscape of Pilgrim's Progress, the projected destination lies in the direction of a distinctly African Christianized modernity defined in Soga's thinking by the idea (current in much mission writing by Africans) that African converts make better Christians than Europeans.
-- Hofmeyr, op. cit., pp. 128-129. 131.
It is not necessarily that Green Party members are called upon to use the categories of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in order to combat the corrupt Republican and Democratic parties of our declining empire; personally, I'd rather learn to adapt the Koran or the philosophic teachings of the Sufis to speak to the subversion of the American imperium, than point to the failings of bean-counting in promoting happiness.
We ought to do what we can with what we have where we are. There is no limit to the adaptability of our creativity to the needs of our time and place.
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