I have started to notice when a few weeks go by without a
plane crash or terrorist attack taking place somewhere in the world. Perhaps this is because we are now so conditioned
to expect the unexpected that we are permanently braced for the worst. Being
permanently on red alert is also a way of telling ourselves that we are not
really afraid, that we are ready for whatever life throws at us, including
random acts of murder. Various levels of ‘terror alert’ help us to do this.
Those who commit acts of terror aim to exercise power by
generating a climate of fear. Terrorism is terrorism, after all. Generating
fear is the way people who crave attention, recognition, or even worship, get
their megalomaniac ‘fix’. In the case of Jihadism in its current manifestations,
megalomania is delusion dressed up as religion. It is not true religion.
True religion is about having a deep relationship with a
loving God, both individually and as God’s people, in the sure knowledge that
all people are God’s and that all are equally valued and loved by him. False
religion is ultimately about the worship of oneself and forcing others to worship
the person I call ‘me’, often because the false ‘me’ is driven by self hatred
of one kind or another. False religion, and the megalomania it engenders, often
appears in personality driven worshiping contexts pertaining to any one of a
number of religions, just as it does on the global political stage. It becomes
dangerous and violent when driven by lust for power and the desire for control
over the lives of others, even if this is not recognised by the person or
persons concerned. True religion begins with renouncing power and control over
other people.
Truth exposes delusion and so does true religion. But
this exposing can work both ways, like a double edged knife. Insofar as true
religion, and the truth through which it speaks, exposes dangerous delusion, it
also exposes our own fears and ourselves for what we are, both privately and
publicly. The truth does this by naming and shaming those who threaten us and,
in so doing, by naming and shaming our own fears, hatreds and delusions. Once we have faced these inner wild
beasts, we can lay hold of them, understand them and deal with them. We can
even laugh at them. We can understand and laugh at our fear of being attacked
by crazed religious extremists. Political satire, whether or not we always like
or agree with it, helps to make this possible.
Cartoons are really drawings in the sand. For some, they
can be powerful solvents of toxic fear. But while they may come across
as temporary things, quickly forgotten and easily erased by the artist, they
also leave an indelible mark on the collective inner consciousness, the place
where hatred is engendered through fear, the one feeding continuously on the
other until they erupt in violence. The artist who draws in the sand deals in powerful subtleties. He or she reveals both truth and delusion.
There is an occasion in the life of Jesus of Nazareth
when a woman is brought to him who has been caught committing
adultery, a flagrant breach of Jewish law and of the bounds of respectability.
When asked who should throw the first stone, he responds with a question and
with a drawing in the sand. The question and the drawing clearly belong together. The question pertains to a collective and private fear of judgment
and to the delusions of power and of being beyond reproach cherished by those
who believe they have the right to judge and condemn others. “Which of you is
without sin?” he asks. “Let him throw the first stone.” Jesus knew the truth
and saw the delusions which come so easily to those who wish for power, or who
perhaps already have it.
What did each person see written in the sand as he
dropped his stone and turned away from the woman? It was probably no more than
a single word, or a quick line drawing unmasking a delusion about the kind of
person he was, or about what he secretly wished he was. The delusion and the
desire had made him single minded, even fanatical, in the practice of his
religion. False fanatical religion expressed itself in a desire
to punish someone else for his own self hatred.
We are seeing something like this being worked out
through the language of religious violence today. The criminal so called
Jihadists who act out their fantasies in Paris streets and supermarkets are really no more than
disillusioned people who are full of self hatred. They must be stopped,
wherever they are, both there and further afield. But simply stopping them, with force
if necessary, will not diminish their hatred or their fear and it will not
diminish ours either.
In order to finally rid ourselves of the fear and the
hatred which feeds violence, we have other work to do. We have to use the other
side of the double edged knife to exorcise the sins of injustice committed against
Arab people in the past century and in which we have all played a part. Violence
and hatred will only be fully quelled when we have taken away the deeper and
perhaps only partly recognised ‘drivers’ of the current violent episode. This is the wider
and far more significant truth which cartoonists need to be drawing in the
sand.
No comments:
Post a Comment