The Silent Scream




Last night I dreamt
That I was on that black train again
Trundling towards the ovens of Auschwitz
And I felt the cold burrowing into my bones
Like a ravenous mole digging
Into layers of petrified earth
And this morning I woke up
Into the freshness of a new day
And my wife said over coffee:
"Oh Joel, you have been reading
Just too many detective stories"
And my psychiatrist said on the phone :
"That was an epiphenomenon
Of your unresolved conflicts"
And my professor at the University said :
"You have to face the facts, Joel
It was all over in 1945"
And my grandson at the BBC said :
"Grandpa, you have been watching
Too much of reality TV"
And my rabbi at the synagogue said :
"Trust in the holy Lord of Abraham
He shall breathe new life into the valley of bones"
And my grand-daughter at her lunch said :
"Granddad, is Auschwitz
A red bird like an ostrich?"
And the new kids on the block said :
"Auschwitz? Give us a break,
Auschwitz never happened!"
And my nephew at film school said :
"Perhaps I could put that dream
Into my next film, The Ghosts of Auschwitz"
And my dentist down the road said :
"The world does not yet know
That we Arabs have suffered much more than you"
And my post-modern niece at tea said :
"There is nothing objective in history
It is just what you put into the past"
But as for myself,
Well, I think I shall just shut up
Perhaps I am too scared of hearing
What these tattered lips of mine
Are still capable of screaming out.

On Parabolic Thinking

An important feature of much of our daily conversation is that it is filled with what might be called linear patterns of thought. We start from a premise A, and try to argue to a conclusion Z through a series of intermediate steps. In most cases, however, we do not really try to establish the validity of A itself. That latter attempt would be a case of parabolic thinking.

Here is one example. You can ask a question such as : ‘Are ‘John will be a boy’ and ‘It was rain now’ grammatically correct?’ However, you cannot meaningfully ask : ‘Is English grammatically correct?’. Though within the framework of the English language, you can ask whether a certain sequence of words is grammatically correct or not, it makes no sense to ask whether this framework itself is ‘grammatical’. Here is another somewhat controversial example. Strictly speaking, you cannot prove that you are rational, for if you were to attempt to prove your rationality by putting forward some arguments, you have already pre-supposed what you have to prove, for ‘proving a point’ is itself usually regarded as a supremely ‘rational’ exercise. This in itself does not establish, of course, that you are irrational or that rationality does not have its uses, only that there is no non-question-begging (or non-circular) method for proving your rationality.

Must You See To Believe?

One is taught in school (and elsewhere) the importance of the dictum Seeing is Believing, and quite rightly so, for that dictum acts as a protective shield against the wiles and the treacheries of swindlers, sophists, punsters, and ironists. However, does it imply that if you cannot see something with your own physical eyes you should disbelieve in its existence? Consider the following list of ‘things’ : the moons of Jupiter, the thyroid gland in your own body, the duodenum of your friend, a positron, Stockholm, a string of DNA, and a neutrino. I take it that you, the reader of this blog, have not seen at least one of these entities --- I myself have not seen any of them. Why do we nevertheless believe that they exist? Perhaps we have an astronomer friend who has told us that Jupiter does have moons; or a geneticist cousin who has seen the structure of DNA with her own eyes; or a friend who spent the last summer in Stockholm; or a physicist flat-mate who has given us arguments in favour of the existence of the positron. In all these cases, we implicitly trust these people, we trust that they are not deliberately trying to mislead us, and that they have indeed seen one or the other of the above things with their own eyes.

Therefore, if we were to accept the claim Do not believe in what you have not seen with your own eyes and follow it in a rigorous and consistent manner in our lives, we would very soon pile up a list of hundreds of things in whose existence we must either disbelieve or about whose existence we must exercise a complete suspension of judgement.

At this stage of the argument, however, an interesting question comes up : how shall we know in whom to place our implicit (or even explicit) trust?

Back to Adam and Eve, God and Lucifer

Here is a short parable to explain precisely what it is about Christianity, Islam and Judaism (not to mention the other big names around) that certain feminists keep on screaming against. Once upon a time, God wrote a letter to His great Apostate, Lucifer, the Angel of Light : 'Dear Lucifer, I hear from Archangel Gabriel that you have been going around with fanciful notions about the extent of your powers. Just who do you think you are? Since it is quite clear that you have never been to the School of Angels and, consequently, never learnt the rudiments of theological algebra, I set down the two fundamental equations on which all Reality is based : (A) God + God = 0, and (B) God - God = God. Therefore, it is impossible (= 0) for Me, God, to have an Equal, and even if you take away everything from Me, I still remain undiminished in power as your God. Yours divinely, God.'

Lucifer was quite amused to read this letter, and try hard as he did, he was unable to divine the meaning of those two equations. One morning, he came down to earth where he saw Adam sitting down under an apple tree. Lucifer decided to create some rumble in God's sweet paradise, and went up to young man Adam. 'Dear Adam', he exclaimed, 'Do you not want to be like your Master, the great God who rules over all things with nothing and nobody to challenge His suzerainty? You can become like your own Master, only you must first plead with Him to create a new being, whom you shall name Eve, and whom you shall rule over just the way your Master rules over you and me'.

So Eve was born. And God gave Adam a commandment to rule the earth, multiply and prosper. Soon Adam started schools to teach his own children, grand-children, great-grand-children and so on. The following seven equations were now inscribed onto the first page of every text-book of every descendant of Adam. (1) God + God = 0, (2) God - God = God, (3) God - Adam = Eve, (4) God - Eve = God, (5) Adam + Adam = 0, (6) Adam - Adam = Adam, (7) Adam + Eve = Free dinner and Free laundry for Adam.

To which some feminists said : 'Whew! Out with all that mess. Here are two simple equations : (1) Eve - Adam = Eve and (2) Eve + Adam = Nonsense.'

Four Types of Sailors

Suppose that you are sailing on a cruise-ship in the High Seas to Madeira, and this ship suddenly springs a leak. What would you do? Well, it probably depends on what type of a sailor you are.

(A) A sailor who belongs to this category has a ready-made dictum for all such circumstances : you cannot completely repair a ship while it is out at sea. That is, if one part of a ship is damaged, you can repair that bit by taking off some pieces from its other parts. What you cannot do is to repair the whole of the ship at once, for you can only repair it piece-meal as long as it remains floating on the water. This type of a sailor hopes, nevertheless, that she shall soon reach the port that is marked out on the official maps, and that when the ship is taken into the safe harbour, it can be repaired there right from scratch, from keel to mast, from bow to stern.

(B) A second type of a sailor agrees that the problem has been correctly identified, but professes a complete lack of faith in the map that others around her are so fonding of navigating by. She says that it is true that the total repairing of a ship while it is at sea is impossible, but also declares that she has no confidence at all that the ship will ever reach any of the ports. It might be possible, she says, that these ports never existed, and are simply the hallucinatory products of some sailors from ancient times.

(C) Now a third type of a sailor joins the conversation. Yes, she says, the first sailor is right; and yes, she says again, the second sailor is too. That is, one cannot repair a damaged ship completely when it is out in the seas, and moreover, it might very well be possible that none of the ports marked out on the maps are existent or that the maps are too outdated and misleading. But, and this is where the third sailor has something unique to say, she has found out (through a stroke of genius, a patient calculation, a prophetic vision, or all of these) that a certain port lies in a specific direction, and urges those around her that if they sail into that direction they are sure to reach safe haven.

(D) A fourth type says that the ship is going to sink anyway very soon, and that you might as well go down sinking with it putting up a brave face, or jump straightaway into the wide sea.

So, then, which type of a sailor are you? Or, perhaps, there are more types than I have been able to 'isolate' here?

How Popular Are You?

Are you a 'populist' or an 'elitist'? Many people who ask that question seem to think that there are two distinct and clearly identifiable patterns of thought and behaviour which can be neatly labelled as either one of the two, and that these patterns have been timelessly fixed and are universally accepted as such. On the one hand, there are people who will go to all possible lengths to distance themselves from any possible accusation of being 'elitist', to the extent that they have even raised populism to the status of a philosophical perspective which says that the rights of the 'people' must be supported against those of the 'privileged'. This is a motley group comprising of 'rebellious' teenagers, poets, ethnologists, political activists, 'hippies', and ecologists. On the other, there are those who not only delight in being labelled as 'elitist' but who also leave no stone unturned in ensuring that their 'elitism' becomes more widely known to those around them. Various types of people can belong to this group and it often comprises of academics, writers, painters, 'reformers', music composers, thinkers, and educationists.

The reason, however, why this distinction is such an unstable one is because of this paradox : the harder you try to be popular, the closer you move to becoming unpopular. That is, the point is not whether you are an 'elitist' or a 'populist' but how concerned you are to keep on wearing either of these labels. If you are too concerned, you will soon become unpopular in the eyes of those around you, and this irrespective of whether you are otherwise known as an 'elitist' or as a 'populist'.

Take the history of western music, for example. Once classical music was labelled as 'elitist' or 'high-brow', the road was cleared for all sorts of non-classical music to be branded as 'populist'. But the tide seems to have turned in recent times. Today you can buy a Mozart or a Beethoven CD for as little as GBP 4.99 on a Naxos label, and many people have at least heard the names of these two composers. On the other hand, most rock, reggae, RNB, garage, hip-hop, alternative, trance, jazz, soul, and pop music labels start from a minimum of GBP 8.99, so that you shall be able to be 'populist' in your choice of music only if you have a reasonable fortune to spend on the above types of music. Moreover, you can get away with a smattering of knowledge regarding the biographies of some of the great classical composers, and flaunt this knowledge on various social occasions. To have the same level of information concerning rock, jazz, and pop music, however, you shall need to read the charts every morning, and survey the ups and downs of singers and stars every week.

In short, my basic point in this context is not whether western classical music is superior or inferior to rock and pop music, but that the latter forms of music have themselves sometimes become a new 'elitism' which will allow into its fold only those people who are well-enough to buy the latest label every week, and patient enough to keep up to date with the fortunes of singers every next morning. Incidentally, the same applies if you wish to become a devoted fan of western classical music : it will then not be enough to listen to an assorted collection of some of Beethoven's catchy tunes, you must also pick up one specific symphony of his and listen to all the important conductors who have performed it over the last fifty years. In short, then, both western classical and rock music appear to be equally 'elitist' from such a perspective.

The same goes, of course, in art, theatre, academics, and literature. Try too hard to become a populist in art or in literature, and you shall soon be overtaken by others who will declare your populism itself to be a hidden form of 'elitism'. Everyone, it seems, is trying to outdo everyone else in their populism by exposing their allegedly 'elitist' roots.

So don't really worry whether your choices, inclinations, professions, or tastes in life are currently labelled as 'populist' or 'elitist' : just wait and watch, for in another two years the labels are most likely to have interchanged their positions. The elitism of one generation is the most popular thing to do in the next, and the populism of the present generation will soon be elevated (or demeaned) to the status of an elitism by our descendants.