I've been doing an independent study with my advisor this semester on Kierkegaard, and finally I'm realizing why I've always loved him--in some weird way, kind of atemporal if you think about it, the truth of my love is finally reaching its original form. Thus I want to speak very briefly about faith and risk.
Kierkegaard says, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, that without risk, there is no faith. Abraham, for example, risked everything--literally everything--in taking Isaac up the mountain (alone): his future nations, whose number would rival that of the stars and sands, his beloved only ("legitimate") son whom he loved, his image and respect among his community for such a barbarous and obscene act, perhaps Sarah would've left him, etc. Another example, of course, is Paul, who lost and gained so much, in turn, for his faith.
So it strikes me today to begin to think of our risks, our relation to risks, and our subsequent faith. We live in a risk-evasive society--all except for Wall Street; we do everything to avoid risk: we budget and count and climb and crave, we grow our Facebook friend lists and make sure everyone knows what we're doing on this day or that day; we wear safety belts and leave an escape hatch in our hearts in every relationship, just in case it turns sour, that way we can get out without being too hurt for too long; we childproof everything. Christianly speaking, we learn all our arguments for why Christ literally rose from the dead, how a Prime Mover is necessary for the existence of the world (ergo, God!), we find out right doctrine and how to align our lives with Scripture in order not to go to hell or be misled; we fortress our faith against the "world" and teach our kids that evolution is evil, otherwise they'll also be misled and think contingency created everything (Though one must ask à la Zizek: What is the Incarnation but contingency, the contingency of a particular individual being the God of the Universe, an individual embodying the Universal?).
Thus our risk is diminished. We learn nowadays how to be tube-fed life, we feed our online personas and lavish affection on the virtual lives of TV show characters and the actors who play them, up to including president's and philosophers among this grouping. Recently I saw Surrogates with Bruce Willis. It wasn't a great movie, with its plot holes and all, but it nevertheless demonstrated if not the literal outcome then at least the metaphorical corrolary of how we increasingly substitute a digital/surrogate us for the life we should be living, thereby eradicating risk and danger, not least the danger and risk of the interpersonal, as I've already mentioned. As difficult as it was, Bruce Willis destroyed all the surrogates and their world a lot easier than we will be able to pull ourselves out of ours.
Thus our risk is diminished. Thus our faith is diminished. What is faith if it is not the risk of being an absurd, obscene, disgusting primordial remainder in a world that no longer needs faith or risk? A little piece of shit in the world? Even us good ole existentialists can prop our faith upon the certainty of absurdity, or that our choices in the world have to be oriented to changing the world, that we are useless if without "concrete results": we increase our "community," our presence in the "community," we weep for social justice and what we can and cannot do to be among the beautiful souls of the world-historical. Thus we latch on to the world-historical enthusiasm of Bono's recent NYTimes guest op-ed in desiring to "rebrand America" as the "virtual that is the real"--that is, that we must fit ourselves within the world's wildly unrealistic, equally narcissistic image of us. Be the savior because everybody believes you are now that Obama is (conservative) king.
Thus we pad all of our actions with the certainty that an African child will not die from diphtheria. Thus we pad our actions knowing that we have "done good," despite the irrevocable fact that our good intentions can lead to evil results. We have faith in our actions, faith in what we can do - does this ring a 500-year-old bell?
Kierkegaard rather insists that we seek to replace God with ourselves, that we help him and lift up ourselves by obsessing over the world-historical, the big moves of history that effectively should be called "accidents," according to SK. If you don't believe me, you should consider the fact that Obama now opposes one of the key pieces of his healthcare platform during and shortly after his election: a public option. Perhaps one of my friends was right to ask, "Why do I even vote?" Not to mention that he's leaving in place very much of the executive privilege/power that the Bush administration gun-slingingly put into place (see "The Imperial Presidency"). I'm embarrassed now for my youthful and stupid enthusiasm of my messianism. I really thought things could or would change. We live and learn - at least, I might argue, I took a risk! But I'm not here to lament the world-historical, just to admonish us to forget about it. The accidental of the world-historical could be summed up with this: Health-care reform will pass, something new will come, whether you or I oppose or propose; in 50 years it will most likely be a joke that we ever fought so much about it; the poor will starve and be saved from starvation; disease will proliferate and be cured, only to evolve and morph into something more potent and dangerous. This is the world moving as it does (not necessarily progressing), with me now, and just as it will without me someday. Living in this lighted darkness, it's easy to conclude with Kevin Spacey's character in a good movie I just watched, called Shrink: "It's all bullshit and then you die." What matters then has to be something "eternal," not accidental. Is the world-historical also not the impotence of emergent? By obsessing over the empirical reality of life - poverty, depression, etc - we stalemate in the impotency of both too many choices - and that's exactly what our proliferation of "global causes/virtual causes" is causing - and neglecting the faith, the risk, of our choices without any assurance of their validity or conclusion or goals as acts - we "cast a covetous eye on the outcome" (135), become fetishists of the outcome, products and results, and forget that "the external is not in [our] power and therefore means nothing." We become only "observer" because we cannot be central parts of the "accidental":
Spoiled by constant association with world history, people want the momentous and only that, are concerned only with the accidental, the world-historical outcome, instead of being concerned with the essential, the innermost, freedom, the ethical (Kierkegaard, Concluding Unsceintific Postscript, 135)
Rather we must insist on our radical subjectivity and its "ethical relation to God." "You and I are alone in this" (137). As Carl Raschke recently told me, "You still go up the mountain alone; no one goes with you." We must choose the risk of faith and what that means in every relationship, which seems to mean, apropos Matthew 25, in the language of Levinas, infinite responsibility in the face of every other.
So, you will say, we are to neglect our neighbor (who is a real neighbor based on the conundrum of globalization) in Africa for some inward selfishness? It is a little more difficult than that, although I would like to work more on it. But, in part, yes. It's true that global warming and other globalized threats makes us all sisters in brothers against a shared threat that threatens every human life, and that we must work in faithfulness to each other in regards to it, work for each other (In his newest book trying to relieve and revive communism, Zizek explains that we are all now as a race the "proletariat" and have to muster arms against this threat to the commons). But these virtual causes proliferate so much today that I as someone who wants to be responsible not only spin at the "options" but fail to attend to the real people who confront me everyday for the sake of these "purposes."
This is precisely why, it seems to me, the
“loving” liberal—who stereotypically cares or loves too much at the sake of
responsibility—can be more cruel and evil than the four-issue-voting,
“bigoted,” anti-gay marriage, capitalist conservative: they can forsake the
ethical for the call and cause of the world-historical. They will love the animals and the
environment but destroy their lives and the lives of others due to their
absentmindedness when it comes to real people. The virtual causes take precedence over real existences. This same process is not only exhibited
in the greed of the billionaire CEO who will most likely start a war when his
wages are garnished by the new Obama injunction that came last week….Here is
where the conservative has got it right.
Due no doubt to myopia, they have staked their claim in what they
foresee as the real and cannot convince themselves of the urgency of a million
virtual causes. The liberal on the
other hand, today is threatened by an overabundance of causes – real and
otherwise – that all his causes are threatened with virtuality. If one has too many friends, one can
have no friends, cites Derrida, citing another.
Zizek, I fear, is completely
right when he says that the only access to larger reality that the filthy rich
and celebrities have is through humanitarianism. Therefore, what suffering of the small man and woman, the
one who is still so large in the world, can we ignore if we accept so
thoughtlessly the thoughtless kitsch “rich ethic”?
“Instead of such
impotent acting, we should control our fury and transform it into an icy
determination to think—to think things through in a really radical way, and to
ask what kind of a society it is that renders such blackmail possible” (First as Tragedy).
Let's think about where we're headed and what Christ calls us to. Is it a semblance of changing the world or the risk of faith, even if it resembles impotence in the eyes of the world:
How blessed to be able to fulfill God's requirements while smiling at the demands of the times. How blessed to despair over not being able to do it as long as one does not let go of God!"
A truly great ethical individuality would consummate his life as follows: he would develop himself to the utmost of his capability; in the process he perhaps would produce a great effect in the external world, but this would not occupy him at all, because he would know that the external is not in his ower and therefore means nothing either pro or contra....He would, then, remain in ignorance about it through a resolution of the will, and even in death he would will not to know that his life had had any significance other than that of having ethically prepared the development of his soul. Then if the power governing all things would want to dispose circumstances so that he became a world-historical figure---well, that is something that he would first inquire about jestingly in eternity, for not until then is there time for the light-minded questions of carelessness.
Alright, I need to get back to reading....
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