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Universal Stranger

~ on Alienation, Being and Belonging

Universal Stranger

Search results for: Gloves Off

Gloves Off: Simon Hits Back at Lizard’s “Socially Useful Aliens” Idea

11 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by Simon Jones in Correspondence

≈ Comments Off on Gloves Off: Simon Hits Back at Lizard’s “Socially Useful Aliens” Idea

Hi, Lizard – sorry, mate, this just won’t do. I’m referring to your “goats and aliens” piece in which you flag the notion that alienated people “might have a positive function as the existential scapegoats of society”. I think this notion is self-contradictory and that your argument makes a logical—or, rather, illogical—leap when you switch from a subjective perspective to that of a hypothetical “disinterested observer”. You gloss over fundamental ambiguities, such as whether alienation is a psychological or philosophical condition, and you end up proposing a synthetic answer to an empirical question (which is rather suspect, if it’s meant to be the result of disinterested observation).

I’ll reference your points and make observations about each one.

  1. “What has occurred to me…is that people like us—alienated people—might have a positive function as the existential scapegoats of society.

The whole point of being alienated is that you’re on the margins of society or completely outside it. You have no relationship with society and no function within it, other than to submit to its demands—which, being alienated, you can’t in all conscience do.

  1. The idea came to me during a weekend spent struggling with some familiar demons…. So, let’s take a step back and look at this from a broader perspective—not my subjective point of view alone, but that of a disinterested observer assessing society in the round.

This seems very convenient. How can you simply switch perspective like that? There is an emotional cost to being alienated, and it usually involves being anxious, isolated, angry and depressed. These are chronic ailments, not a temporary excursion such as a “weekend struggling with some familiar demons”.

leloir_-_jacob_wrestling_with_the_angel

Weekends at The Lizard’s

This is a structural shift in your argument from the psychological to the philosophical, which you fail to acknowledge. More importantly, there is a much wider question as to whether alienation is a psychological or philosophical condition, or both, but you ignore it. I don’t necessarily expect you to answer the question (has anyone, yet?) but you could at least point to it and note the ambiguity it creates.

  1. Let’s assume that this observer subscribes to your Alienation Theory of History and sees our society and its existential discontents as the consequence, ultimately, of the human crisis that occurred when the hunter-gatherer lifestyle gradually gave way to settled, urban life.… In real time, with the toing and froing between these opposite poles possibly resembling a sort of Hegelian dialectic, this society might even appear to be (from the outside) a self-compensating system.

This is another structural shift, in which you evoke an external construct (the Alienation Theory of History) arbitrarily, adding a synthetic dimension to what you have otherwise presented as an empirical proposition. You’re now discussing alienation, or purporting to do so, while drawing on knowledge acquired through relationships. Hardly a purist’s position, and one that is surely fundamentally self-contradictory!

I’ll quote the rest of your piece from this point in full.

  1. I find this idea rather interesting. What if our agonising and writing about the human condition is not just the private malady we’ve always considered it to be, but also the way in which society makes up for its materialistic excesses, even if this arrangement isn’t officially recognised and those who are perpetrating the excesses don’t give a fig about us.   [ Perhaps, like the scapegoats of the Old Testament, our role is to atone for the sins of others? We suffer to make up for the fact that they don’t.  [There are dangers implicit in this idea, of course: we should be wary of developing a Messiah complex. But it’s positive in the sense that it gives us some social context and provides a link between us and those who, in their preoccupation with material concerns, are oblivious to us and the wider meaning of their lives.

The contradiction is blatant here: you’ve squared the circle, inserted a round peg into a square hole; you’ve imagined the alienated as having a place in society. Worse than that, you’ve assigned them a subservient role. Have you considered the political implications of this? Very often it’s the outsiders who initiate change and progress; what you’re proposing here is an essentially conservative model in which the alienated, whether they’re being critical of the status quo or collaborative with it, are basically serving it. Your conversation has morphed miraculously from being about the individual and the human condition to being about institutions, and the relationship between them. You’re no longer talking about alienation, for Christ’s sake—you’re talking about Church and State!!!

I mean, SERIOUSLY???

Love,

Simon.

Pic: Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, Alexandre Louis Leloir (1865)

The Clash of Minds Continues: Lizard Replies to Simon

21 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by Departure Lounge Lizard in Correspondence

≈ Comments Off on The Clash of Minds Continues: Lizard Replies to Simon

Dear Simon – thanks for your robust reply way back when, in August 2018. I think you know why it’s taken me so long to come back to you: work, massive hailstorm in December 2018, then a year of hassling with the insurer to repair the damage, more work, then bush fires, work, floods, work, and now…coronavirus. Climate change and globalisation: the perfect storm. At least self-isolation is giving me some time to write. I hope you and yours are staying well.

You are quite right to refer to the alacrity with which I switched perspective from the subjective to the objective, the empirical to the synthetic, and to the fact that I paid no heed to the psychological-or-philosophical question. If I’m at fault, it’s not (I would argue) because I made a category mistake, but because I failed to acknowledge that I was switching from one mode to another, and to explain why I was doing so.

Let me rectify that now: I did so as a matter of creativity.

Perhaps…creativity is the key difference between a free mind and an imprisoned one

I make no apology for this. The Stranger, as you know, is fond of explaining, and defending, religion as a branch of human creativity. Creativity―and its most vital organ, imagination―can explain things that reason can’t and, crucially, it can help us solve problems or find answers when reason and logic appear to have run out of road. The core question is whether we, as individuals and as a society, are prepared to accord imagination the same status and respect that we give to reason. I am, of course, and I think society would function much better if it did so, too.

On that basis, I think it was perfectly legitimate for me to shift perspective to gain a rounded view of the question I was trying to discuss. You appear to object to the resulting synthesis―or, indeed, to any form of synthesis―as being somehow artificial. That’s fine in my book, where “artificial”, “synthetic” and “creative” are pretty much synonymous. It’s of a piece with Keats’ line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty…” (Eliot was surely being disingenuous when he claimed not to understand it).

The clincher, for me, is that I felt, when writing my piece, that I had gained some sort of insight. When I read your retort, all I could see was the complaint of someone bound by ideology to argue from a single, narrow perspective that seemed to deny all potential for growth or change. Perhaps, in the last analysis, creativity is the key difference between a free mind and an imprisoned one.

Pip-pip,

Lizard.

Celebrating NAIDOC Week – an excerpt from “Rody and The Stranger”

05 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by Simon Jones in National

≈ Comments Off on Celebrating NAIDOC Week – an excerpt from “Rody and The Stranger”

This week (July 5-12) Australia celebrates its indigenous people, and does so against a background of continuing controversy over the constitutional status of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. In recognition of the event and the complexities that continuously challenge our original inhabitants, I’m offering below an excerpt from my novel-in-progress, “Rody and The Stranger”, which touches (in an admittedly fleeting and indirect way) on some of these issues.

We were just about to turn up the hill that leads to the village when our next-door neighbour, Colin, wearing overalls and gloves, appeared from among the trees. Sophie beeped at him and waved. When he recognized us, he flagged us down; he seemed excited.
“Oh God, we’re going to be late,” murmured Sophie as she pulled over and lowered the window, leaving the engine running.
“Come and have a look at this,” said Colin.
“What is it?” I asked, but he had already turned and was walking briskly back to the bush, waving at us to follow him. “I’d better go see.”
“Christ,” said Sophie, slapping the top of the steering wheel with both hands.
“He might need help.”
“If you’re not back in two minutes I’m going without you.”
I jumped out of the car and followed Colin across the road.
“Can we come?” asked Rory.
“No!” roared the thundercloud.
A narrow, twisting and very uneven path led through eucalypts and she-oaks to a clearing where Colin and half a dozen others were standing in a semicircle around a large, flat expanse of rock surrounded by piles of freshly cut lantana.
“We just cleared this,” said Colin. “Look what we found.”
I made my way to the front of the group, nodding and smiling at Colin’s wife Brigette and others I knew, all volunteers on the community bush regeneration programme. It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at and then a shape emerged.
Down the centre of the rock and taking up most of the space was a long, straggly outline of a man with a melon-shaped head that was far too large for his body. His eyes were like twin full moons and his lower half seemed to morph into a sort of tripod. The penny dropped and, not for the first time, I cursed the naivety that my sheltered Welsh Methodist upbringing had ingrained in me.
“Impressive middle wicket,” I said.
“The girls have told us to order more Viagra,” said Tony the plumber. Everyone laughed.
“Probably some kind of fertility symbol,” observed David, a schoolteacher.
“How old do you think it is?”
“Who knows?” said Colin. “Aborigines have been here more than 40,000 years.”
“Well, the other one can only be a couple of hundred years old at most,” said Brigette, pointing above and to the right of the figure’s head.
Again, it took me a moment to discern the shape. It was smaller and less impressive than the man-figure in terms of artistic conception, but it made my heart skip a beat: a three-master, complete with bowsprit and a few lines to suggest rigging, riding at anchor in the Sydney sandstone. To say I felt time stand still would be a cliché, but so what? It was as though someone had frozen a moment in history, thawed it and served it up to me on the spot: an Aborigine’s first encounter with European civilisation. For him (her?) the wooden floating object would have appeared strange, perhaps unearthly, while the medium in which he recorded it was natural and familiar; for me the object I was looking at was familiar from movies and illustrated history books, but I was seeing it in a new and alien way. I imagined the artist and me to be two observers at different points in time momentarily sharing a sense of being jarred out of our respective contexts.
And then there was the contrast between the subject matter of the two engravings, and the clash it could be said to represent between modern and ancient, dreamtime and real time, one culture and another. Oh, don’t get me started….

I was still thinking of the engraving of the ship. I fantasized that the original might have been the mother vessel of Captain Phillip’s expedition, witnessed by some Durag people from the banks of the Hawkesbury. I further fantasized that the process of engraving would have been a way for the artist to come to terms with this extraordinary encounter, by re-ordering his personal experience into something which, aesthetically at least, was definitive and, therefore, something he could own and control. I knew, of course, that I was imposing my own conceptions and assumptions—if not my own psychological needs—on experiences and processes that I could only imagine and not fully understand. No doubt the reality, as usual, was infinitely more prosaic and complex.
“Watch your speed, darling.”
“We’re late.”
“Let’s just make sure we get there in one piece, yeah?”
I remembered from my reading of local history how a party of Aborigines had attempted to board a settler’s boat on the Hawkesbury in 1873. The passage quoted a contemporary account from The Sydney Morning Herald which said the settler had aimed a pistol at the leader and “dispatched him to the shades”; the other raiders fell back, discouraged. It was only later that I learned the phrase was from Ovid. To the writer and his readers the allusion was probably no more than a stroke of rhetorical colour in a report that was fair and balanced, about an incident of which the rights and wrongs were clear-cut.

© Simon Jones 2015

It might be appropriate here to mention “Shadows in a Landscape”, Rody’s song about Albert Namatjira, which he wrote about on January 26, Australia Day (scroll down for article and link to song).

 

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