Courtney McGrailWe can’t allow different agendas to deflect from the deeper questions about violence, writes Dr Con Casey
Dr Con Casey
Events like those in Paris or the September 11 attacks in New York in 2001, act like a strike of lightning upon our communal narrative. People ask: “What led up to this?” There is a kind of moment of truth; we look back, we look forward. People ask themselves – what brought us here? What about the long history of colonial domination of Islamic peoples? What about the shaky moral foundations of modern affluence? What about the story of oil?
By a kind of intuition people hunt for a more systematic understanding. Do we not behold, perhaps, an interlocking complexity of violence, of evil, which if only we could bring it to the surface and give it articulation, we might have a better view of how to respond? This kind of quest comes up with great urgency for a while, but rarely with great sticking power. At the outset we might have an expectation that this is the certain beginning from which all things must flow for the better. But the fact is they rarely do.
Agendas
What does occur is that different agendas begin to seize the main chance. We read that Donald Rumsfeld, Defence Secretary in the US at the time of 9/11 had long before developed a view that the American people were surrounded by violent terrorists, and that he saw the events as an opportune catalyst to take the terrorists out.
There followed two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq. In recent days Marion Le Pen in France has been using the occasion to push her anti-Islam agenda, alongside her presidential ambitions, a ‘send them home’ policy if they don’t want to be really French: ‘France and the French people are no longer safe’. Deeply rooted fears are nurtured; historically engrained anti-Islam prejudice surfaces and speaks again.
The analysis, and the re-reading of the history brought on by the moment of truth eventually comes down to ‘take out the baddies and their ideology’, then things can get back to normal. Some Muslim commentators (and others) say that we must also, for instance, seriously rethink foreign policies.
Mostly that approach doesn’t get too far. We draw back. Fear draws us back. We don’t want to know about dire straits. Don’t go there. It’s too frightening. It is Karl Marx who speaks of the whole of past history as weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living. We rarely achieve the kind of moral realism that the situation requires, a moral realism which is so difficult to sustain.
Other voices need to be brought to the table. With this in mind an interdisciplinary seminar was organised in the Loyola Institute in Trinity College Dublin on Saturday (November 21).
There were contributions from a social scientist working in peace studies, a poet, a musicologist, and from an expert in the work of the French American culture critic, René Girard (his very influential theory of the origins of human violence), and from theology.
From a theological point of view it is most remarkable that the earliest piece of Christian writing – that is the First letter to the Thessalonians, written in 50AD, speaks powerfully of hope: “We remember how active is the faith, how unsparing the love, how persevering the hope you have from our Lord Jesus Christ” (I Thess. 1:2,3).
Here in the third sentence, of very earliest piece of Christian writing there is the emphasis: “How persevering is the hope you have”.
We need to make this point with great care. Paul says the Thessalonians are persevering and acting out of a deep-founded hope. It is not mere optimism. It is hope in the shadow of the agony and desolation of the Cross. Catastrophe has come to pass.
The New Testament accounts emphasise the reality of this desolation. When Jesus appears on Easter day, “he shows the disciples his hands and his side”.
The marks of his death are emblazoned on his body. The best picture of the Resurrection is the Cross. And then he says, “Peace be with you, as the Father sent me so I send you”. He breathed on them saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20: 20-22).
Terry Eagleton, literary critic, in a newly-published book titled Hope Without Optimism, observes that there is one kind of long-term despair which Christianity ranks as sinful.
This is a matter of rejecting the long-term possibility of redemption. It is not the same as making the judgement that this or that particular effort is clearly doomed. One reason why despair of this longer-term is considered a moral defect is that it can be seen as betraying the effort of others whose efforts to change things can lead as often to failure as to success.
That Christian hope should bear witness, is no reason to capitulate. There is something deeper than failure. This is the kind of hope that Christian liturgical communities enact and nourish.
It is this kind of hope that we must seek to bring to the table that we share with all humankind.
The title for the interdisciplinary seminar were words of Samuel Beckett. In 1944, observing the bombed-out ruins of the beautiful city of Saint Lô in Normandy, he said: “Saint Lô. Now the Capital of Ruins: we must rethink the human condition.”
His words echo as we behold the human destruction outside the Stade de France, inside the Bataclan theatre, and throughout the four other locations across Paris. It is important to strive to do our re-thinking together.
This is one of the contributions that the university community can offer. It is an approach that we in the Loyola Institute in Trinity College are trying to cultivate. If interested in our work check out our website https://www.tcd.ie/loyola-institute/, visit us on Trinity Open Day (Saturday December 5), or come to our special event for mature students on Monday January 18 (6-7.30pm).
Dr Cornelius Casey is the Associate Director of the Loyola Institute, Trinity College Dublin.