From Word To Word

Dave Humphrey’s comment on my most recent post gives me an opportunity to make a terminological distinction that I recognized myself last night as I was lying in bed: that is, the distinction between what is industrial and what is manufactured. Dave expressed a concern that the logic of my last post was so extreme as to leave no room for humanity in the natural landscape at all, since I seemed to represent all manufactured landscapes as necessarily deformative and since humanity cannot live within the landscape without altering it to provide food and shelter at the very least. It was not my intent, however, to argue that all human alteration of the landscape is deformative and unnatural, only that a certain industrial alteration functions in this way. I would propose, therefore, though I have not had the opportunity to think through these categories in any detail, to distinguish between a manufactured landscape, which is any landscape that has been altered by humanity, and an industrially manufactured landscape, which is a landscape that industrial humanity has altered according to its own deformative logic.

A manufactured landscape, then, is not necessarily deformed. While it will certainly be an alteration of the landscape, it is possible that it may be a natural alteration, in the same mode as ant hills, beaver dams, and bird nests. While it is will certainly be an alteration of human relations, it is possible that it may be a natural alteration, in the same mode as birds migrating or carnivores marking a new territory. In this sense, a manufactured landscape avoids being deformative to the extent that it does not destroy the natural landscape, and to the extent that it does not destroy natural human relations.

Now, I am all too aware of the problems that beset a distinction that depends upon the highly suspicious idea of what is natural, particularly when this idea is applied to the human. I do not even propose to define or defend this idea, for the simple reason that it is probably beyond definition and defense. Nevertheless, despite these problems, I do not think that we can do without the idea of the natural, not if we want to speak usefully about humanity’s relation to the landscape. Though we may not be able definitively to determine what is in fact humanity’s natural relationship to the landscape, it is certainly possible for us to recognize instances that are not natural, that are, in short, deformative.

An industrial landscape is one form of deformed landscape, one form of landscape that is, or should be, clearly unnatural. TIndustrial landscapes are those that are created by production and consumption on an industrial scale according to an industrial logic, whether this appears as the factory floor or the office cubicle farm or the suburban subdivision or the mega-mall or the parking garage. These landscape forms are not even concerned with humanity’s relation to its landscape. They are concerned only with humanity’s relationship to its commodities. They are deformed by the industrial logic that produces them, and this is why I think Ivan Illich’s phrase is so apt in describing them. They are industrially deformed. They deform our natural landscape and our human relations.

There is no mode of manufactured landscape that is entirely deformative, of course, and there is no mode of manufactured landscape that is entirely natural. As I said earlier, I do not even think that it possible to define what an entirely natural manufactured landscape would be. Even if this mode of landscape was definable, it would remain impossible, at least within the current trajectory of our social systems and institutions. My argument, therefore, is not that we need to somehow displace the industrial logic that deforms or landscapes and our relations. This is now and will remain forever impossible. My argument is that we need to displace the illusion that this industrial logic and the landscape that it produces are normal and natural, so that we can resist their effects on the scale of our own lives. We need to defamiliarize ourselves with our industrially deformed lives so that we can reform them to the extent, however limited, that we are able.

There can be no program for this defamiliarization and no program for the lived resistance that it should effect. Each instance of normalized deformation will require its own intervention of estrangement, and each will require of us a response that is unique to it and to us and to our time and to our place. The goal is not to change the logic of industrial humanity as a whole. This is impossible. The goal is to change ourselves, in relation with ourselves and with our intimate landscapes. This just may be, here and there, in the cracks and the fissures of our lives, perhaps, at one moment or another, within the limits of our social structures, possibly possible.

I changed the location of the Dinner and a Doc event last night.  We had been meeting in a local church space, but I decided to try hosting the meal and screening at my own place.  I really enjoyed the change.  Some friends brought their young daughter with them, much to the delight of my eldest son, and the kids circulated freely through the house during the meal and the film, their parents following dutifully behind.  My mother brought a crisp of freshly picked sakatoon berries, which beautifully finished the meal after the homemade potato soup.  The atmosphere felt less constrained and more intimate.  I think that I will repeat the experiment in August.

The film this month was Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, which introduces the photography of Edward Burtynsky, famous for his images of industrial, fabricated landscapes.  The film follows Burtynsky as he visits various sites, mostly in China, and photographs the disturbing and yet somehow beautiful landscapes that are the by-product of industrial humanity.  The images are often vivid: a slow tracking shot that moves down a seemingly endless factory floor; derelict ships half-dismantled on a beach; mountains of hand-sorted recycling; people demolishing their own cities, brick by brick, to make way for ships in what will be the reservoir of a new dam.  There are no descriptions that can do these visuals justice.  They need to be seen and experienced.

The effect of the documentary footage and of Burtynsky’s own stills, especially when they are layered over each other in succession like they are in the film, is to defamiliarize industrial humanity, to make strange the economic and social systems that have become normalized for most of us.  There is an overwhelming sense of estrangement from the photographic subjects, as if they have been discovered on an alien planet or the set of some fantastic film.  The film constantly forces the viewer to confront the strange, unnatural, inhuman ways that industrial humanity transforms its own landscape.

The phrase that kept ocurring to me throughout the film is from Ivan Illich.  In several of his books, Illich talks about how social relatations and institutions have become “industrially deformed”, and though he does not explicitly use this phrase in relation to the modern manufactured landscape, I do not think he would object to my using the idea in this way, because the industrial landscape is inextricably linked to other industrial relations and institutions.  It is not that one produces the other, but that they both produce each other, reinforce each other, construct each other as normal and natural ways of being.

By forcing us to confront the strange and unnatural landscapes of industrial humanity, therefore, Baichwal’s film and Burtynsky’s images should also force us to confront the strange and unnatural relationships, institutions, and systems that produce these landscapes.  I am not simply making the obvious argument that our consumption causes us to manufacture landscapes that are unnatural.  I am making the less obvious argument that the defamilarizing function that Manufactured Landscapes plays should force us to see how our own immediate landscapes have become industrially deformed also, to see how the suburban housing development, the strip mall, the parking lot, the gated community, and much more of our own landscape is as deformed in its way as the strip mine and the interminable factory floor.

To make industrial humanity strange for us at the distance of China or even of a local mine is certainly a necessary and useful function, but it falls short  if we do not recognize the implication that our own landscapes and relations and institutions need to be made strange as well.  Burtynsky makes this connection to himself more than once, commenting on the industrial implications of his photography and supposing that he had perhaps used fuel from one of the oil tankers rusting on a beach.  There is no point, however, when the film challenges its viewers to make this connection for themselves.  In the end, it is still possible to finish the film with the sense that our office jobs and tidy homes and ordered towns somehow escape the deformation that industrial humanity has imposed upon its landscapes.  It is still possible to avoid the fact that our own landscapes, though perhaps cleaner, safer, and healthier, are often just as unnatural, abnormal, and inhuman.

This possibility need to be eliminated for us.  We need to be confronted with the strangeness of what we have created ourselves to be.  We need to have our lives made alien to us so that we can see what they have become.

As I was preparing to write this final instalment in the history of my engagement with the problem of ethical response, I reread my previous post on the subject, and I was disappointed to see how narrow and inadequate it now seems to me just a few weeks later. I still agree essentially with what I wrote at that time, but I am displeased with how it represents my interaction with Illich’s writing as if the idea of the movement in the belly was the only thing I took from Rivers North of the Future, as if I was reading his work primarily in search of solutions to the problem of ethical responsibility. The reality is that I rarely have a predetermined purpose when I begin reading a book of any sort. I was not thinking about ethical responsibility when I took the book from my shelf, at least, not any more than I was thinking about several other subjects that preoccupy me, and I found far more in it than just the sections that were related to ethical responsibility, as significant as these sections were to me. My reading and thinking practises are far more promiscuous, intuitive, and fortuitous than my writing sometimes makes them appear. This misrepresentation does Illich, and myself, and the subject as well, I think, a gross injustice.

Unfortunately, the likelihood that I will write in similarly misrepresentative ways is even greater when I begin discussing Jean-Luc Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity. Not only does this particular collection of essays have much more of value to say on the subject of ethical responsibility than I will be able to discuss in this single post, but Marion’s broader work means much more to me than I will ever be able to communicate in any way, no matter how much space I am given. Whatever approach I might take to describing how his thought has influenced my understanding of responsibility for the other will be hopelessly reductive of his true influence on me. I can do nothing more than signal this inadequacy in advance.

While Marion is certainly a significant philosopher for many reasons, it was none of these reasons that drew me to him. I discovered him first when I was working on my MA thesis. I had found a book entitled God, The Gift, and Postmodernism, edited by John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon. I was interested in it because it contained a discussion on the nature of the gift between Jacques Derrida and some guy named Jean-Luc Marion. Because the discussion followed Marion’s presentation on the name of God and negative theology, I read this paper also, and I was intrigued enough by Marion’s approach that I immediately bought his most famous book, God Without Being, which, without any hyperbole, shattered my theology irrevocably. I have since read Being Given, The Crossing of the Visible, and Prolegomena to Charity, all of which have been very influential on me, though they exceed my understanding in many respects.

Marion’s contribution to the problem of ethical responsibility, at least in the formulation of this problem that I have been tracing in my own history, begins where Ivan Illich’s Rivers North of the Future ends. If, as Illich argues, I can only know my responsibility as a neighbour to the other, not by a law, but by a spiritual movement in the belly, it resolves the question of how I can know what I owe the other, but it does so only at a cost. While the movement in the belly justifies the Samaritan of our example, and while it calls us to act in similar ways, to be open and responsive to the movement of the belly, it will always be possible that there will be no such movement, that everyone will pass the beaten man by the side of the road and feel nothing. This possibility is not just that nobody will pass the victim, not just that someone will pass and turn away from the victim, not even that someone will turn toward the victim and find that he is not the victim he believes himself to be. This possibility is that someone might pass the victim and neither turn toward him or away from him, but walk on in perfect conscience because there was no movement in the belly.

To put this problem differently, Illich’s approach permits the possibility that my concern might be diverted from the other to myself. This diversion, when functioning correctly, is not wrong, because it is a diversion, not to myself as myself, but to a spiritual movement provoked by the other in myself, a movement that should culminate in a return of my concern to the other, even if this concern is one that is not necessarily able to give what the other requests. In this way, the Samaritan acts rightly. Though he responds to the spiritual movement in his belly rather than to the other directly, this movement returns him to the other and impels him to relieve the other’s suffering. The priest and the Levite, however, feel no such movement. Making the entirely unjustified assumption that they were actually looking for such a movement, they could in good conscience continue on their way, because they had not been moved. Their ethical movement, to look into their own bellies, had diverted them from the other to themselves. In this way, Illich’s approach permits the possibility that my ethical response to the other may fail even to encounter the other at all. Though I may be open to the movement in my belly, I am open to this movement apart from any real encounter with the other. I may be responding ethically, but I am not responding ethically to the encounter with the other, only to a movement in myself.

Marion does not speak directly to this problem in Prolegomena to Charity, at least not in relation to the function of the neighbour, but he does describe a similar structure in his own terminology that opens up a possible resolution to the problem in Illich’s approach. Marion refers to the responsibility that I owe to the other as the injunction of the other, and he argues that this injunction does not come to me from the other, but that “it actually arises in me, like one of my lived experiences.” In this sense, he affirms Illich, because this injunction functions similarly to the movement in the belly, coming neither from myself nor from the other, but from beyond us both, as a movement that can only be understood in spiritual or theological terms. Marion is clear on this point. “The obligation toward the other,” he says, “is born in me, though it is not born of me; it is born for the other, though it is not born through the other.”

Marion too, however, confronts the problem that we find in Illich, that is, if the injunction does not arise from the other, then a response to the injunction is not a response to the other at all. This sort of response leads only to the injunction as law, he argues, but can never have a relation to the other in particular. “If we want to secure responsibility all the way to the point of love,” he says, “then the injunction must designate not only the other as such, but just such an other as the invisible gaze that crosses my own.” In other words, though the ethical response must not arise from the other, it must designate the other in particular, or it fails to be a response in any meaningful way.

The only thing that can accomplish this designation of the other, according to Marion, is love or charity. “In order for the other to appear to me,” he argues, “I must first love him,” because “only love opens up knowledge of the other as such.” Yet, love only “becomes a means of knowledge when my concern is with the other,” when I accept the face of the other precisely as other. Put differently, the ethical obligation that comes neither from me nor from the other is given particularity by the knowledge that I have of the other, that is opened by the love I have for the other, that is enabled by the concern that I have for the other.

This seemingly complex relation has a very simple implication: the ethical movement begins precisely in my willing to be concerned for the other. I must will to be concerned for the other, so that I can love the other, so that I can know the other, so that I become fully open to the obligation, the injunction, the movement in the belly as it bears upon me and the particularity of the other. In Marion’s own words, “To accept the other’s face, or better, to accept that I am dealing with an other, a face, a counter-gaze, depends uniquely on my willing it so.” As he says later, “The other appears only if I gratuitously give him the space in which to appear.” For this reason, ethical responsibility in its particularity depends on my will, despite the fact that it does not come from either me or from the other, but merely arises in me. My will does not produce ethical responsibility in particularity, but only opens me to concern, and love, and knowledge of the other, which opens me to the possibility of ethical responsibility.

All of this implies that the movement in the belly arises, not randomly, but whenever I will myself to be concerned with the other, whenever I will myself to accept the face of the other. If I accept that I am dealing with an other, if I will this to be so, I will necessarily feel the movement in the belly, in every case, without exception. This does not at all imply that I will be moved to respond to the other in the way that the other desires or expects, or in the way that I desire or expect. It does not even imply that I will be moved to respond in any way at all. It implies only that, if I am willing to accept the face of the other, I will find myself moved in some way. There will be a movement in me, a spiritual movement, a movement that it will be in every case wrong to ignore, even if this movement is to do precisely nothing.

The neighbour, therefore, is the one who wills to accept the other, the one who does not pass by a victim on the side of the road without willing to accept this victim as the other, without willing to experience responsibility for the other, whatever it might be, without willing to experience a movement in the belly, whatever it might be. The neighbour may not always be moved to help as the Samaritan was, but the neighbour will always will to be moved in whatever way the injunction appears in relation to the particularity of the other. The neighbour will always be prepared to be concerned for the other, to love the other, to know the other, to be moved by the injunction toward the other. No act, therefore, and no law, can ever guarantee what is proper to the neighbour, only a continual will, a continual willing, a continual willingness.

There is still the logical possibility, certainly, that I might will myself to accept the face of the other, that I might be open to the movement that this acceptance will permit in me, but that I will nevertheless find myself unmoved to help the victim by the side of the road. It is still possible, certainly, that everyone might will, that everyone might be open, and that everyone might nevertheless be unmoved. Yet, this possibility is permissible only according to the perversity of logic, not according to the movement of charity. If the priest and the Levite had willed to accept the beaten man as an other, if they had been open to the responsibility that they bore for him as neighbours, is it conceivable that they would not be moved to pity? If, in other words, they willed themselves to be open to the other and the spiritual movement that the other founded in them, is it conceivable that this spiritual movement would not be a movement to pity? The logical possibility exists, but the spirit of charity knows better, knows that the kind of movement that moves the belly will not leave the bleeding man beside the road unaided.

The fault of the priest and the Levite, therefore, is not that they passed the victim without turning to him, because they had no legal responsibility for him. It is not that they refused the movement to pity in their bellies, because they felt no such movement. It is that they refused to will an acceptance of the other, refused thereby the movement of the belly that they could not foreknow but that they knew even still must almost certainly be to pity. Their fault was that they refused to be concerned for the other, refused to love the other, refused to know the other, and therefore refused to be open to the particularity of their ethical responsibility to the other.

None of this, I want to emphasize, means that I must do everything for all people. None of this even means that I need to do anything for anyone. All it means is that I must will myself to accept the face of the other and to accept the movement that will arise in me, and to act according to this movement, even if the act is to do nothing at all. The act itself will always be nothing. The will to accept the face of the other will always be everything, because all of ethical responsibility flows from it.

I want to begin replying to TC’s comments on Social Holocaust by expressing how significant these kinds of responses are to me, whether they are received through this present medium, or through conversation, or through my classes. In each case I feel myself honoured beyond what I deserve, indebted in ways that I do not know how to repay. The responses of others continually recall me to humility, and I am always grateful for them.

TC suggests that eliminating the encounter with the other is also an elimination of the self, and that the decision to refuse the encounter with the other is perhaps the result of a decision, even if only a subconscious one, to refuse the self. Now, I think that TC is speaking psychologically here, and I am not at all qualified to respond in those terms, but I would agree that in ethical and philosophical terms this is precisely the case. The refusal of the other is always a refusal of the other in me. The more radically I refuse to encounter the other, the more completely I refuse to encounter myself. The refusal to encounter the other, therefore, is often an expression of my unwillingness to encounter myself.

I am aware that I have introduced some terminological confusion here, and in previous posts also, when I refer to encountering the self as other, and I think an explanation of my terminology in this respect might be useful to clarifying exactly why I think TC’s observation is both accurate and significant. In making reference to the self as other, I am following Emmanuel Levinas in his idea of “the third”, though I am using different terminology. Levinas argues that a pure ethics is never possible because, among other reasons, it requires my self and the other to be the only ones concerned. The introduction of a third person makes ethics impossible, because there are now two others, and my responsibility to each of them is infinite. Any fulfillment of my responsibility to the one will necessarily come at the expense of my responsibility to the other. The third, therefore, is a recognition of the practical limits of an ideal ethics.

Levinas goes on to argue that it is never possible to find a pure ethics by escaping the third, because if I were alone with the other I would not have escaped myself. The self who appears to me as myself always plays the role of the third for me, always introduces impossibility into the ethical responsibility that a bear to the other.  In this sense, I bear for myself an ethical responsibility also, just as much as I bear responsibility for the other, and even as a condition for the responsibility I bear for the other. I can love the other only as I love myself. I can bear responsibility for the other only as I bear responsibility for myself. This is to say that I necessarily love and bear responsibility for the other and for myself as an impossibility, because I must love and bear responsibility infinitely and must do so more than once.

Returning to TC’s comments, the implication for me here is that the rejection of the other cannot be separated from a rejection from the self, even on the most fundamental philosophical level. The desire or the need to refuse the self, whether or not it is subconscious, will always be also a desire and a need to refuse the other. Because I fear to encounter myself, I refuse to encounter the other. The logic of holocaust, then, proceeds from myself, from a fear of myself as other, and from a fear of encountering my self as other. I eliminate the other because I must eliminate my self as other.

Jean-Luc Marion, in an essay entitled “Evil in Person” (see Prolegomena to Charity), traces a similar logic in his description of evil. He argues that the logical end of all evil is suicide. Though suicide is not necessarily the worst of all evils, it is the end where all evil logically terminates, and for some of the reasons that I have been discussing. All evil, he argues, is evil because it separates us from the other, because it places the logic of revenge between us. This logic appears to affirm the self, insofar as it eliminates what is not the self, but in fact it is also a negation of the self, since it also eliminates the other in the self, to the point where self is nothing. The evil that I perpetrate on others, even and especially when this evil is revenge for the evil done to me, is thus always also an evil that I perpetrate on myself, and its result is always separation and isolation. The final end of this logic, of course, is suicide, the ultimate act of separation and isolation, the act in which is shown most essentially that the separation of the self from others is always accompanied and perhaps motivated by a desire to separate the self from the self.

It is for this reason, Marion argues, that “Hell is the moment when the soul finds itself alone.” Discovering itself apart from everything, even its self, the soul discovers itself absolutely alone, definitively imprisoned in its isolation, solely responsible for its isolation. The movement that I have been describing, therefore, and that TC has refined for me, the movement of holocaust, always ends up including the self in its destruction and perhaps even secretly originates in the desire for this self destruction. Social holocaust, in this sense, becomes the outworking of social suicide, the ultimate and essential act of separation.

I have had several conversations in the past few weeks about my understanding of encountering the other, an idea that I have written about several times, most recently in a post on the idea of Social Holocaust. There are two sorts of objections that people are making to this idea: first, that it privileges a sort of extroversion and gregariousness and fails to value solitude; and second, that it sets up an ideal of the encounter that real encounter always fails to achieve, an argument that resembles very closely the concern of TC’s comments on Being at Home. Both of these objections are valid to a degree, and I would like to nuance my argument in order to account for them.

To the first objection, that my privilege of encounter fails to recognize the value of solitude, I would suggest a distinction between the word ’solitude’ and the word ‘isolation’, arguing that encounter requires the first but is absolutely opposed to the second. In order that I encounter the other truly and properly, in order that I be able to respond to this encounter truly and properly, I must be prepared to listen and watch for the other, must be prepared to open myself to encounter with the other, and this preparedness requires of me not less solitude but more. Solitude, in this sense, is a deliberate and practised aloneness in which I encounter myself as other so that I may be prepared to encounter the other as other also. This solitude is a practice of aloneness that consists precisely in turning me outward toward openness.

Solitude is therefore absolutely distinct from isolation, which turns not to openness but to closedness, both to the self and the other. Whereas solitude is practised in a disciplined aloneness, isolation can be and often is practised in the crowd, where the sheer amount of superficial contact with everyone functions to shield me from really encountering anyone, where the crowd permits me to be so shallowly acquainted as to be virtually anonymous. This kind of isolation prevents both real encounter and real solitude. It is the practise of distraction from encounter and from solitude, through mere social stimulus, through the use of technological apparatus, through the acceptance of certain social institutions and infrastructures, and through acquiescence to certain cultural pressures. It is the kind of isolation that occurs when spouses read in bed to avoid speaking to one another, when friends spend their time together talking to others on their cellphones to avoid having to look each other in the eye, when people refuse to allow others into their homes for fear that their real lives will be exposed. It is a practise that says, “We will talk later when others are around, so that we will have an excuse not to mention what we are really feeling and thinking,” that says, “We can talk later on the phone when I am with someone else, so that I will not have to look into your eyes or anyone else’s,” and that says, “We will have you over later, when the house is clean, and when we are having a party, so you will see us at our best and we will not really have to share with one another.” It is what Derrida describes as “lethal isolation.”

It is just as difficult, therefore, for the extrovert as for the introvert to be open to the other, for the extrovert’s socialization can isolate as easily as the introvert’s separation. Encountering the other is not a matter of having more acquaintances, or going to more clubs, or holding more dinner parties, it is a matter of holding oneself open to the possibility that, at any moment and in any manner, I may be encountered by the other. I will not know who this other is. No activity of mine will discover this other to me. I can only make myself open, before I know who this other will be, and wait to be encountered. The practise of this discipline is not simple, either for the introvert or the extrovert.

All of this brings me to the second objection, that this ideal of encounter with the other will not always or ever be discovered in a real encounter with the other. TC expresses something like this in the observation that not everyone’s home matches the ideal home for which I am constantly advocating. In both cases, however, in the encounter and the home, which are inextricably linked for me, I would argue that this inadequacy is the essential and constitutive risk. There is no openness to encounter and no hospitality of the home that is not an openness and a hospitality to the possibility of hostility, violence, and death. To a certain degree, every openness will always be an openness to this violence, because there can never be pure encounter, can never be encounter with the other that is not immediately reduced to a relationship with another. In other words, all encounter, all hospitality, is inadequate to what it desires to be, which introduces an unavoidable violence into the act of encounter. As Emmanuel Levinas says, playing on a double meaning in the French, the host is always also the hostage to the one who is invited. The host always invites the one who will make him a hostage. There is no avoiding this violence.

In this sense TC is absolutely right. Every home fails to be a home in some respects, and some fail in almost every respect. Yet, the failure of the home, even at its worst, should by no means render the ideal of the home less desirable. What it should do, what it does do, is ask of us at least two things. First, it asks that we never confuse what is of the home and of the encounter and what is not, that we always distinguish clearly between what belongs to these ideals. Second, it asks that we always strive to approach the ideal of the home and the encounter, even and especially because we recognize that this ideal is not some concrete object that can ever be realised.

Those who are concerned with the home need to be willing to say, “Yes, you were beaten or neglected or abused, but that was not of the home; that was a violence done to you in the place where a home should have been. Come, let me invite you into my home. It also falls short of the ideal. It also admits that it does not wholly know what this ideal might be. Even so, it strives to be a home as best it can. Come strive with us, and when you go from us, to wherever it is that you will go, strive to make it a home also, as best you can, because there are many who looked for a home and found none, because there are many who need your home to be their home as well.”

In the same way, those who are concerned with encounter need to be willing to say, “Yes, you were hurt, and abandoned, and rejected, but that was not of the encounter; that was a violence done to you in the place where the encounter should have been. Come, now that we have encountered one another, let us strive to bear the responsibility of one another as best we can, though we admit that we will never be adequate to our ideal, and though we admit that we do not wholly know what this ideal might be. Though we must always be parting, let us go from one another, striving to be open to the other also, because there are many who have been hurt and many who have been abandoned, and they need those who will bear with them as well.”

We who are concerned with home and with encounter need to be willing to say and to do these things, even though they are a terrible risk, because we ask others and ourselves to be open to being neglected and abused again, hurt and abandoned again, because we can never guarantee that we will be adequate to the ideals of the home and of the responsibility of the encounter, because we will certainly and in every case fall short of these ideals. What we say and do always bears this risk, and those we ask to join us will always bear this risk as well. There is nothing more terrible than this, which is why it is always easier for me to isolate myself, even if I know that it will be lethal. It is always easier to allow myself to be distracted from the other, to guard the thresholds of the home. I cannot mitigate this risk and this terror, and I would not do so if I could.

As of today, I have almost finished ripping out the jungle that the previous owners of our house had allowed to grow where you might expect a garden to be. Last fall, I cut down something like forty treesl, not counting the hundreds of little suckers that I pulled out by hand. I removed a dumpster full of broken cement slabs, bits of metal grating, dilapidated fencing, and other random garbage, like several pounds of engine grease, cat litter, oil filters, and bags of horrifyingly unidentifiable substances. I also planted garlic, to give me hope that I would be able to plant something again someday.

This spring, I dug out the roots of all those trees I had cut down. I also sent more than twenty brown yard waste bags and two wagons of brush to the recycling facility. Only a few hours ago, a woman who had responded to our internet ad came and removed the five trees that were small enough and healthy enough to be transplanted but had no place in our yard. I have only two stumps remaining. Then I will be able to plant things rather than tear them out.

That is, I have two stumps remaining and more gout weed than anyone should have to see in a lifetime. Those of you who are unfamiliar with gout weed should pray that you remain so blessed. Though it is not an entirely unattractive plant, just a leafy green groundcover, it is incredibly fast growing, incredibly aggressive, and incredibly difficult to remove. Organic gardening sites do offer some methods for eliminating it, but they are all virtually impossible on a scale as large as my yard, and none of them offer any sort of guarantee of success. A neighbour of mine, who happens to do professional landscaping, looked at the problem and told me, “Luke, I hardly ever recommend herbicide, but I am recommending herbicide, several applications.”

This puts me in an ethical predicament, because it puts into conflict two ethical principles about which I feel very strongly: one, that gardening should be organic, for reasons having to do with the environment, with sustainability, with health, and with the maintenance of traditional skills; and two, that a garden should be edible as well as ornamental, for many of the same reasons. However, it appears that unless I use chemical means, I will not be able to eliminate the gout weed, and if I cannot eliminate the gout weed, it will choke out any of the edible plants that I introduce. I do not like either of my choices.

Now, because this is a singular and unique case, and because I can see no other way to have a productive garden, and also because this neighbour of mine had offered to apply the chemicles in exchange for a case of beer, I have decided to spray the gout weed, but I am unhappy with this neccessity, as I always am when following one ethical principle necessitates that I break another. Yet, this seems to happen far more often than not. I am almost prepared to say that every ethical choice requires this kind of decision, that it requires a choice, not only between what is ethical and what is unethical, but between two or more ethical principles. The choice I make is therefore always wrong, will always be wrong, and yet I am required to make it nevertheless. In this sense, living ethically may simply have to do with making these choices even as we recognize the impossibility of making them rightly, or, put differently, it may have to do, not with the rightness of the choice we make, which will always escape us in any case, but with our concern for the rightness of the choice and the will to make this choice despite its impossibility.

I appreciate TC’s comments on Walking Suburbia and On Being at Home. I hope to address some of these comments more generally in later posts, but I thought that I would at least do TC the immediate courtesy of responding to the question of what exactly I mean by a social holocaust.

The phrase does not only serve my penchant for rhetorical excess, though it certainly does this too. It names accurately, at least in my opinion, what is happening to social relations in the cultures I inhabit; that is, it describes the systematic and systemic elimination of relational encounter in favour of technical connectivity. The symptoms of this displacement are everywhere. They can be seen in the replacement of cooking and eating together with the consumption of fastfood and preprocessed dinners, often in isolation; the replacement of walkable neighbourhoods with suburbs that can only be driven, usually in isolation; the replacement of mixed housing with mass produced developments that reinforce class distinction, sometimes gated for protection, and for isolation. This list could be made almost endless, and it would include everything from how we are employed, educated, entertained, medicated, and buried.

The impetus for this annihilation of encounter with the other is a fear of the other as such, a fear of anything that I cannot reduce to my self, a suspicion of anything that is not in my own image. It is not the logic of a genocide, which would eliminate only others of a particular race or culture. It is not the logic of a crusade, which would eliminate only others of a particular religion. It is not the logic of a political pogrom, which would eliminate only others of a particular politics. It is the logic of a holocaust, which eliminates anyone who is other to my idealized self, on whatever basis whatsoever.

The Nazi atrocities were a holocaust for precisely this reason. The final solution was not just a genocide directed at the Jews. It was several genocides, directed at Jews, and Slavs, and Gypsies. It was also a moral pogrom, directed at the mentally disabled, the physically disabled, homosexuals, and others deemed socially unacceptable. It was also a religious crusade, directed at Judaism and Islam. It was, in short, the means by which Nazi Germany defined and eliminated what was other to its ideal self: a final solution: a holocaust. This is precisely the logic of our culture’s elimination of relational encounter, only we have taken it much nearer to its limits, where anyone who is other, for any reason, is to be feared, where the other as such is to be feared, and where encounter with the other is always to be avoided.

Our holocaust is social rather than physical, obviously. We understand ourselves to be too civilized for the physical extinction of others. We are, in fact, quite proud of the tolerance that we show to others in the ideal, regardless of their race or gender or sexuality or whatever. What we fail to realize, however, is that our increasing tolerance for others in the abstract is being accompanied by a decreasing openness to encounter with the particular persons around us. We refuse to discriminate on the basis of age or religion, but we also refuse to actually know anyone, whatever their age and religion. The fabric of social relation, and therefore of ethics also, which is based upon encounter with the other, is annihilated. We kill no one, but treat everyone as if they are dead. This is our holocaust. This is our final solution.

Now, it could be objected that I go too far here, that we do still encounter others, sharing our homes with family, our cubicles with coworkers, our pubs with friends. This is undoubtedly true. It is never possible entirely to eliminate encounter with others, not on this side of death and sanity. Even so, long work hours, full schedules, job turnover, cubicle farms, technical gadgetry, frequent moves, all produce estrangement among families, coworkers, and friends, all permit us to be among each other without really encountering each other. This is partly why, in an era where connectivity is easier than ever before, counsellors and psychologists are treating ever growing numbers of patients who describe themselves as lonely, depressed, and disconnected. They have become isolated by a fear of encountering the other, by a refusal to be open to the possibility of encountering the other, by a rejection of the intimacy that is only possible through encounter with the other. This is our social holocaust.

The reasons for this fear of the other in our culture are complex, and I do not have the space here to discuss them adequately. I would suggest, however, that they have to do with a certain political expediency and with a certain economic efficiency, not to mention the various individualisms, religious, political, philosophical, economic, and otherwise, that have characterized modernism and those of us who are its heirs. There is much that could be said in this direction, but it must wait for another occasion.

This third Sunday of every month is “With the Grain day”, which means that I take the Senior High class to a local coffee shop called With the Grain during what is normally Sunday School time. This gives me the chance to teach important lessons about good coffee and fresh baking, leading by example, of course.

This past Sunday, we were discussing some of the things that I raised in a recent post on Energy, Equity, and Encounter, issues related to walking and the opportunity to encounter those who live around us. I added to this some of the ideas that Jacques Derrida formulates in Echographies of Television, about being at-home, raising the possibility that one of the reasons we do not walk through our neighbourhoods is precisely because we are afraid to encounter our neighbours. Perhaps, I suggested, it is more comfortable for us to have images of our international, national, and communal neighbours broadcast to us through the television and the internet than it is for us to meet them on the street. Perhaps we prefer to stay in our own, home, in our own cars, in our own workplaces, precisely because we fear what an encounter with the other might mean.

One of my students then interjected something that I had never considered in this context before, but that nevertheless bears profoundly on the problem. He pointed out that, even when we are pedestrians in our neighbourhoods, as highschool students often are, we still find ways to prevent us from having to encounter those we meet: the cell phone, the ipod, the blackberry, or whatever, and I agree with this absolutely. I have always been critical of the ways in which these technical devices remove us from others, but I had never interpreted their use as a defence mechanism against the possibility of encountering others as such.

I am not arguing, of course, that all these technical devices necessarily prevent us from encountering others, and I even affirm the ways that they allow us to remain connected to others, though I intentionally contrast the idea of encounter with connection here. I am arguing, however, that the increase of mobile technology allows us to export beyond the walls of the home and the office the ability to isolate ourselves from possible encounter with the other. It extends our ability to replace encounter with connectivity. The ethical implications of this concern me greatly.

In the fifth chapter of Echographies of Television, a section entitled, “The ‘Cultural Exception’:The States of the State, the Exception”, Jacques Derrida talks about the desire to be “at-home” in ways that are intriguing to me because of my own preoccupations with what it means to be at home.

Derrida argues that the desire to be at-home is being intensified by the increase of teletechnologies. These technologies increasingly open us to images and discourses from beyond the boundaries of our nation and city and neighbourhood and family and home, and the effect is that our sense of “anchordness, rootedness, and the at-home becomes radically contested.” Because these technologies open us to a sense of dislocation and dissociation, our reaction becomes, “I want to be at home; I want finally to be at home, close to my friends and family.”

This desire for the at-home, according to Derrida, is not confined to the literal houses in which we live, but is extended more broadly to the various places where we feel a sense of identity. The desire to be at home is therefore also the desire to be part of a nation, of a neighbourhood, of a religion, of a party, or of a society. The problem for Derrida is that the desire for the at-home, contrary to the ways that I have been constructing it, can “project an image of closedness, of selfish and impoverishing and even lethal isolation.” Being at-home in this sense involves closing the borders to foreigners, gating the community to outsiders, restricting the membership in the party or the society or even the family to eliminate those who are not like us. It is the desire to make myself at home by eliminating from the home all those who might introduce something that is unlike myself.

Even though it bears this danger, Derrida affirms the desire to be at-home, saying that there would be no possibility of hospitality without out it. This desire, in his own words, “is the condition of openness, of hospitality, and of the door,” because it will always be impossible to welcome an other, to offer hospitality to an other, without a place in which to offer the other welcome and hospitality, even if this place be only a park bench. In order for me to host the other, I must first make myself at-home somewhere.

The desire to be at-home, therefore, is one that must be continually both affirmed for its openness and distrusted for its closedness. I must always be both finding ways to make myself at-home and ensuring that these ways do not exclude the other from the home. In a formulation that Derrida does not use but that I hope he would not reject, I must find ways to be at-home that also make others at-home, or, perhaps better, I must find ways to be at home precisely through making others at-home, whether as a member of a nation, a church, or profession, a neighbourhood, or a family.

Those who have read Ivan Illich, or who have at least read my recent post on Ivan Illich, will perhaps recognize that the title of this post plays with the title of one of Illich’s books, Energy and Equity (London: Marion Boyars Publishing, 1976). The central thesis of this book is that “High quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu,” or, in plainer language, dependence on tools that require energy not only destroys the physical environment but also the social environment. For this reason, Illich argues that any increase in energy usage, even environmentally responsible energy, will still result in increased “inequality, inefficiency, and personal impotence,” and that “Only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity.”

In the section of the book that is dedicated particularly to transportation, Illich focuses this argument still more, making the startling assertion that people in an equitable society should not travel any faster than the speed of a bicycle or a horse. “Free people,” he says, “must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle,” because the capacity to increase speed always comes at a broader social cost, both economically, in terms of the infrastructure that is becoming an increasing problem for governments of developed nations, but also relationally, in terms of how transportation prevents the formation of communities.

Illich suggests that what the transportation system actually accomplishes is the production of a new sort of person: the passenger. He describes the passenger in detail, and I will quote this description at length, because I think it is still true of most of us today: “The habitual passenger’s inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal space have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that lie in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them.”

I mention all of this because I am most often a pedestrian, both by choice and by necessity, because our family owns one car, which is mostly used to convey my wife to work. Our intention is to have her transfer her job to Guelph when she can and to have the family go without a car entirely, but I am usually carless even now. This choice is mostly an economic and environmental one. Cars cost me and the environment in ways that I find increasingly unacceptable. Even so, I have lately been experiencing a heightened sense of the social cost that cars impose as a mode of transportation.

This past Thursday I set out with my two sons to meet some other parents in a park across town, a walk that takes us through the neighbourhood where we lived until this past fall. The walk would normally have taken about half an hour, only I had not gone even a block before I encountered some of my neighbours working on a new flagstone path. My eldest son was intrigued by this operation, so we stopped and talked for several minutes, during which time I realized how disconnected they were from their neighbourhood. Not only were they unaware that we had moved in just a few doors from them, but they had never met the woman who had lived in the house before us, not in the eight or ten years that they had driven past each other’s homes on a more than daily basis.

When we finally reached our old neighbourhood, I had a similar experience. There, a street or two from our old house, I encountered the mother of a friend of ours who was working in her garden. We stopped to talk again for several minutes, catching up on each others lives. This woman and I am only acquaintances. She has never visited my home, though I have visited hers occasionally. We have very little obviously in common. She is not a person that I would ever encounter if I did not walk through her neighbourhood. If I had driven to the park, the possibility of my encountering her, or someone else, would never have been opened.

This, to me, is the social cost of the car. It is the cost of letting ourselves become passengers who see the houses next to ours as so much untouchable landscape and who lack the confidence even to share space with their inhabitants. If we only drive through our neighbourhoods, it will never be possible to encounter our neighbours in the way that we can if we are on foot. In fact, in many ways, driving though our neighbourhoods essentially erases our neighbourhoods altogether, because it prevents those neighbourhoods from ever forming.

This is not to say that we cannot drive, of course, though I think that this is a more viable alternative than many people believe. It is to say that we cannot only drive, that we cannot primarily drive, not if we want to encounter those around us in ways that create neighbourhood, that foster hospitality, that enable ethical responsibility. The choice to walk is the choice to be open to encountering others, to share consciously with them the space in which we both live. It is a choice that implies an ethics far beyond economic and environmental concerns, because it implies an ethics of the neighbour.