Talk about racism moves like a veld fire. It flares up, is spread by strong winds, then hunkers down until the next spark ignites. It would be best to stop feeding it, but mostly we keep on producing more wind. Why?

It feels like intransigence, as if people have dug in their heels, refusing to yield unless the other side meets some impossible demand. A deadlock. Couldn’t that indicate a secret longing for something alive, and open? Something unconditional, something that could surrender itself without shame. Something fearless. Something like love, or ubuntu, although these words grow more unusable by the day.

This intransigence locks us inside our skins (our culture, our side), like they were our very essence. In some sense, of course they are. But if this is the only truth, or the highest truth, then we have nothing ahead of us but the endless war of all against all.

We try to manage these conflicts of interest, but that only damps the fire down. It doesn’t bring peace. What is needed is a counter-logic, another understanding of our humanness.

It’s not going to be simply what we have in common. Finding commonality with others is lovely, but our differences are not going to disappear. This is not a bad thing – quite the contrary. Blaming difference for our troubles leads directly to dreams of totality, of “one big happy us”. If there is anything we should know from history, it is that this is a seriously bad idea. Our differences matter.

It’s not going to come from willpower, as if we could (and should) simply decide to get over ourselves, as if we could (and should) shed our own skins, if only we had the right intention. Nevertheless, intention – like identity and community – matters.

It can’t be through idealism. We must find this logic already operating in our lives, equally as evident and imperative as the logic of our desire for self-preservation and identification with self-same others – and yet contradicting it entirely.

And of course it exists. Two millennia ago, Rabbi Hillel framed it as elegantly as anyone has: If I am not for myself, who will be for me? When I am for myself alone, what am I? The first appeals to the reason of self-interest. The second is to the reason of ethics and justice, of finding oneself responsible for the lives of others.

It’s difficult to speak of this. One can’t praise one’s own humbleness or preach it to others without running into what philosophers like to call a “performative contradiction”. Nevertheless, it’s all around us. Even something as simple as letting a stranger go ahead of you in traffic can refute the myth of almighty self-centredness.

If we started to notice this essential goodness of human being, if we didn’t dismiss it, but accepted its reality as unquestioningly as we accept our instinct for striving and self-defence, what then would become possible?

And if not now, then when?

From the Cape Times, 1 December 2009, in their series on “The Next Economy”

No wonder they can’t fix it: it doesn’t exist

Helen Douglas

It’s another day in the global financial crisis and I’m looking at the front page of Business Report: “Worse still to come, says economist”. The article offers three expert opinions. One says that the global economy could face a second dip as a result of recent massive injections of liquidity. Another sees a threat in South Africa’s reliance on exports. The third is hopeful the current recovery will be sustained.

On SAfm’s Market Update, they speak confidently of corrections, profit taking, sideways adjustments and – my favourite – the dead cat bounce. Yesterday the analyst said that prices had fallen because “traders were nervous”. Why were they nervous? “No, it’s a herd thing,” he laughs. “They’ll sell first and make up a reason later.” He’s equally frank today why the market has rallied. He doesn’t know – but he’ll “take it”.

Such are the specialists who report on the performance of the economy. They have two things in common. First, their analysis is not very reliable. Second, they all work primarily in the financial sector. This is the sector that, internationally, has caused all the trouble. Can somebody tell me why we’re still listening almost exclusively to them? Why share prices are the measure of everything?

Look. See. This emperor is stark naked. His counsellors are blinkered or blind. These economists (and financial journalists) didn’t see the crisis coming and they don’t know the way out. The empire’s treasury has been stripped by bandits who are laughing all the way to the bailed-out bank. Even Joseph Stiglitz says so.
If the roof of your house fell in, you would have a pretty good idea of why and what to do about it. If you consulted three builders, they would likely offer similar advice. Why is there no such common sense around the economy?

Answer: The economy does not exist. It’s just a way of talking, a story we tell.
Language is tricky. Because we give names to things that are real, we sometimes believe that a thing is real just because it has a name. This is one of those times. There is no “the economy”.

Think about it. What is real is people participating in a range of activities – producing, consuming, buying, selling and trading. These activities are naturally interrelated and interdependent. By bringing them together in a conceptual framework we are able to look at those relationships within a system. This is a good thing. We can generate useful knowledge. We can find patterns, look at trends and rates of change, measure costs and benefits, and regulate our economic activities accordingly.

So the theories get theorised and the numbers get crunched until it all gets so complex that those who dedicate themselves to this work have to tell the rest of us what’s going on. And soon these established economists start to think that their beliefs about “self-regulating markets” and such are the actual facts of the matter. This makes everyone happy, because now all that’s needed is disciplined management and technical precision to hold the ever-expanding economy on course. It’s just a matter of getting the fundamentals right.

But what happens when it all goes wrong? That’s where we’re at now. We don’t know what to believe. The orthodoxy tries to prevail. They’re manning the pumps, striving to get the ship of global market capitalism back on keel and on course. Pointing to “green shoots” in the distance, like Noah on his ark. Trying to restore our confidence.

At the same time, a lot of contrary voices are coming in from the wilderness. Interestingly, we’re more likely to find them on the newspaper’s general leader page than in the dedicated business pages. If you’ve always trusted the conventional economic wisdom, then you’re used to thinking of these people as cranks, fools and ideologues. But maybe now they’re not so easy to dismiss.

Here is the underlying philosophical question. As non-expert members of the general public faced with these conflicting views, what are we to believe? Should we continue to accept what mainstream economists tell us? How do we gauge the alternatives presented? How do we make up our minds?

I’d suggest a return to the fundamentals: that is, to all of us real people trying to make a living, and to how this is understood by conventional economics.
Three related issues come up. First, the range of activities our current economic account includes is rather arbitrary. Not every act of production or trade is counted by the gross domestic product – for instance, unpaid domestic work. Second, inclusion comes without regard to social or environmental costs. A coastal oil spill is good for this economy, and war can be a windfall.

Moreover, the objective of “restoring the system” is not a matter of quantitative technical measures. We have to wonder whose cost and whose benefit is considered. And, as the saying goes, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. Alternative economics books carry titles like Economics As If People Mattered, or Economics As If the Earth Really Mattered or If Women Counted. For free market capitalism, these are really big ifs.

However we may respond to these questions, the act of raising them shows that our perspective of “the economy” is indeed the result of choices and not objective observation. We are therefore responsible for the consequences of the perspective we endorse. And we are free to choose differently. Getting the fundamentals right is first of all a matter of values, not value, of ethics before economics.

A very readable new book by Cambridge economist Jonathan Aldred, The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics (Earthscan, 2009), unpacks a lot of the dubious ethical assumptions made by mainstream economics. For instance, the belief that people are motivated solely by self-interest suggests that employees will perform better when competing for financial incentives. Aldred shows how, in practice, this only serves to diminish trust, undermine morale and encourage selfishness.

The truth is that we simply are not the self-serving dishonourable creatures that neo-liberal economists believe us to be. We’re better than that. (Perhaps the company they keep has skewed their judgement.)

What is the way forward? Since the crisis emerged, many economists and political leaders have been pushing for certain reforms, improved checks and balances and other technical programmes to get the pre-crisis system back on course. Is that the best we can do?

Consider this. The word “economy” carries a sense of prudence, thrift and harmony. Its Greek root means “household management”. How are we doing in those terms? When we imagined our democratic rainbow nation, did we imagine that red, orange, green, blue and indigo would suffer terrible poverty while violet did quite nicely and ultraviolet was right off the scale? Please.

I’m just a skeptical philosopher. I don’t know what comes next. But as I study the different opinions, I know what I’m listening for. Economists and policy-makers who know that their job is to ensure everyone eats. Alternative thinking that takes our local, national and global “households” as seriously as it takes “management”. A fundamental combination of urgency, honesty, practicality, vision and courage.

Douglas is a philosopher with a counselling practice in Kalk Bay.

Scene 1. Walking along Vancouver’s False Creek, two joggers stride past me just as one remarks to the other: Entitlement is a terrible thing. Well. I couldn’t agree more.

Scene 2. A friend sends pictures of her island cottage. Lucky you! I reply warmly.
What the #$% is luck?! she flames back. I mean, I get it, but ‘lucky’ can be used to express envy [hatred] at someone else’s good fortune… I’ve always railed at it because I have always worked my ass off and pushed all the edges and risked losing everything.

What entitlement and luck have in common is the role they play when we try to understand circumstances as consequences.

Philosophy began with the problem of explaining change, its hows and wherefores. In the physical world, these have been scientific questions of means and mechanics, conditions, causes and effects. Think of Newton’s laws of motion.

In the subjective world, we like to think that stuff happens in a similar, predictable one-thing-leads-to-another way. This is not unreasonable. We are, after all, able to learn from past experience, and we can see things coming. We get the sense of a universal moral order. Maybe we believe that virtue will be rewarded. Or that dogs will eat dogs. Whatever the content, the world now makes some sense. (I say “the world” makes sense, but it’s actually us doing the work while the world worlds merrily on.)

The bad news is that this feeling of comprehension – in its root sense of grasping or laying hold of – leads to problems. The first is the contradictory evidence that must be ignored, denied, twisted, or dismissed as luck. Another is that we start to take the universe personally, interpreting everything in terms of what we think is meant to happen, what we deserve or are entitled to. Prize or punishment. And we start making hateful comparisons, looking around to see if we’re getting a fair deal, and setting ourselves up for envy, resentment or complacency. Even nastier, we begin to read other people’s situations as signs of their “true” character or history. Is somebody suffering? Must be their fault, their karma. Or, in cases of the clearly undeserving wretched (including ourselves), we put it down to bad luck or hard times.

Is any of this folderol necessary? I don’t think so. Return to the original observation: events arise from causes and conditions in a manner which appears orderly. That still seems true. We can – and should – learn to work more skilfully with this. But outside of controlled experiments (which life isn’t), it’s hard to be definite about causal chains. We also can’t be so sure about the goodness or badness of our present situation. And we’re not so sharp about predicting the future either.

So I think a little humbleness is in order. By all means, develop a worldview, but try not to let it block out the world. Build with flexibility and grace. Inhabit it lightly. Less scorekeeping. More play.

What a mess we make when a person’s worth is measured by their perceived intelligence. The “smart” ones strive to distinguish themselves and the “stupid” ones struggle to get by. It’s precisely a stupid mess, both cruel and irrational. How could anything thrive in such bitter soil?

We have begun to realise that there is more to intelligence than was believed back in the glory days of phrenology, eugenics and IQ tests. Now we recognise different kinds of intelligence and tend to accept a more open-ended concept of human potential. This is well and good: our ability to appreciate others increases as our understanding of intelligence becomes more complex. But it doesn’t go far enough to break the “smart-is-good/stupid-is-rubbish” bind. While the fundamental mistake is to think that there is a quality by which some people can safely be deemed more worthwhile than others, I am here today to praise stupidity.

I became a philosopher because I’m stupid. Really and truly. As a kid, I never had a clue and gobbled down books frantically just trying to figure things out. This resulted in schoolwork coming fairly easily to me and so I was mislabelled as “bright”. (One can only be grateful not to have been saddled with “gifted”.)

I’m talking about a particular kind of stupidity, where there is something you should know, but you don’t, and you want to. Borrowing an image from the US philosopher John D Caputo, it’s the stupidity of the guy who runs around in the middle of whatever’s happening, shouting What’s happening? The Latin root of “stupid” is stupere, to be stunned or amazed. It’s like that. Not yet burdened by shame or despair, there’s a sense of innocence to it. It can be difficult, but it’s workable. It’s good soil. Being stupid is nothing grand; it’s not the Christian mystic’s “cloud of unknowing”. Nor is it technical, like the not-knowing found in Eastern philosophy or Greek scepticism. It isn’t a question of suspending belief – one simply doesn’t know what to believe!

This path isn’t for everyone. Some people really do know what’s going on and what to do about it, and some of those who don’t know aren’t terribly fussed about it. That’s all fine. Problems tend to crop up when we think we know and we don’t, or when we respond to ignorance (our own and others’) with fear and loathing. These are the roots of terrible stupidities, characterised by close-mindedness, rigidity, envy and arrogance, and fuelled precisely by the fear engendered when so much rides on being seen as “smart”.

When I was almost 40, I went back to university to study philosophy. The first course I signed up for – with great relief – was called “Learning how to learn. On becoming less stupid”. Sometimes, when it’s given its due and neither denied nor clung to, stupidity is the gift by which we can become a little less stupid. And sometimes a pit can become a well.

What do you do when someone says something to you that you don’t understand?

It happens all the time. The someone may be someone we know or a stranger. The event might be inconsequential or it might be important. It is always unsettling. The usual, easy choice is to let it go by, hoping that the miscommunication will either become clear or fade away in time. The safe choice is to dismiss the other as incomprehensible, or to interpret the misunderstanding away.

The difficult and risky choice is to walk into the confusion and ambiguity of not knowing quite where we stand with this person who is speaking to us. There was this Goat: Investigating the Truth Commission Testimony of Notrose Nobomvu Konile is the story of such an adventure.

Notrose Nobomvu Konile testified before the TRC in 1996 as one of the mothers of the Gugulethu Seven, seven young men who had died together ten tears earlier. Shot and killed by apartheid police, their bodies were later dragged away by ropes for the benefit of the evening television news.

For Antjie Krog, who covered that hearing as a journalist and for whom questions of truth and reconciliation remain open and pressing, this particular testimony and the problem of representing it stayed with her. In 2004, now at the University of the Western Cape, she invited two colleagues – Nosisi Mpolweni from the Xhosa department and Kopano Ratele from psychology and women and gender studies – to help her come to terms with Mrs Konile’s testimony.

Unlike the others who testified at that hearing, Mrs Konile is somehow all wrong: her words are indistinct in several places, her narrative is fractured, some elements seem purely fantastical. For the mother of a fallen hero, she appears crassly concerned with herself and the getting of a house. And then there’s this goat.

What are we to make of this? More specifically, what are we black and white South Africans to make of this presence, on the national sacramental stage of the TRC, of an incoherent poor rural black mother? It is a sensitive issue. We could easily turn away, dismiss her out of hand, but no one here will do that. It’s just not good enough. Perhaps we could go a little further and accept her impenetrability in order to explain it, folding it in with what we already know and believe.

Krog and Kopane imagine two “possible conversations” about Mrs Konile and her testimony, one between two white friends, the other between two blacks. In these significantly different conversations, the usual painful issues are raised and explored – thoughtfully and sincerely, with passion and compassion – but nothing finally happens.

Another response is to go even further and wonder if maybe the problem lies not with the one who speaks but with those who have failed to hear. It is this proposition that leads Krog, Mpolweni and Ratele back to Mrs Konile’s testimony, to listen again.

Their adventure begins with all the elements of an academic thriller: the mysterious woman, the three detectives with their different backgrounds and specialities, some clues to be followed, and the occasional red herring to lead them astray.

Their first task is one encountered by most TRC researchers – to retrieve audio and video cassettes from the tangled web of the SABC and the National Archives. Clearing that hurdle, Mpolweni re-transcribes the original Xhosa and, with Ratele, translates it again into English. Wonderfully, all three versions – including the Commission’s official record (and also their later interview with Mrs Konile and its translation) – are presented in the book, allowing readers to see what is really entailed in the complex work of translation and interpretation, and to follow along as best we can.

They discover that much of the incomprehension was created from both ordinary errors and omissions on the part of interpreters and transcribers and the elision of cultural references that didn’t survive the passage of translation. With every linguistic discovery, fresh light begins to dawn on many aspects of Mrs Konile’s story. Is she beginning to make more sense? No, let’s be clear: it is we, through these detectives, who begin to understand her better.

New interpretations and explorations in turn raise broader issues of cross-cultural communication, with each author contributing from her or his own background and discipline. Among the many fine pieces here on the social contingency of language, on ways of knowing and textual analyses, Ratele’s crackling two-page aside on the cultural confusion that black students must face in white schools is worth the price of admission all by itself. A complex mosaic gradually comes into focus, with an editorial adroitness that keeps the pages almost turning by themselves.

Provocative as all of this indeed is, it is still only an elaboration of the strategy of understanding through objective interpretation and truth-seeking. It’s what the friends in the “imagined conversations” do.
And then, the detective story somehow transforms into a quest – a hero’s journey for three – toward that other mystical grail of the TRC: reconciliation. The change happens as it becomes clear that they must go to Mrs Konile, to her home in the Eastern Cape, to speak with her face to face, in her own setting.

Early in the book, Ratele has referred to the notion of reconciliation as an ongoing cycle of care for ourselves and others that begins with a new expression of identity (as in Thabo Mbeki’s “I am an African” speech) and performing “acts of trust” with each other: “learning to trust and to be”. When this trust and space is – or appears to be – betrayed, the recognition that reconciliation is a cyclical rather than a linear process allows us to dust ourselves off and begin again without despair, maybe just a bit further along than when we started.

As the story unfolds and their working relationship becomes stronger, we can sense a kind of subtle alchemy taking place between the three authors. Eventually, it is this earned base of mutual trust and a shared dedication to Mrs Konile and her testimony that sends them out of the safety of academic equality and impartiality into the unruly and unfamiliar conditions of Indle in the Eastern Cape.

In an extraordinary climax, they discover both “truth”, in finally restoring the meanings of Mrs Konile’s testimony and recognising her dignity and fortitude, and a “reconciliation” of themselves. It is as if meeting her forces (or allows) them also to finally meet each other, stripping them of their academic robes and racially defined identities. Something happens. For an evening, “Suddenly we were out of our skins. The world was lovely.”

I don’t believe that you get to such moments unless you’re willing to expose yourself. And there is no guarantee you’ll get there at all. Such moments are fleeting. Our robes and skins are soon back in place, and that’s just as it is (although hopefully we’re less hooked into them). And what we do find together can be painfully and shockingly put in question, even through something as simple as a missed sms.

But if we are to find each other, this is what is called for. To notice when someone says something we don’t understand. To do the work that is called for in order to understand, and to follow its call as far as it takes, farther than we dared to imagine we could. Is truth and reconciliation anything other than this? Is the world not suddenly lovely?

I have been explaining, exploring and writing about my philosophical counselling practice since I began in 2002. I’ve presented papers at conferences here in South Africa and in Canada and the US, which are available on my website along with other published articles. But recently a couple of friends challenged me to cut to the chase, and get down to the bare bones: what is this thing you do with people? And so here it is, in less than 300 words! – the essence of philosophical practice.

Who should come to a philosophical counsellor? Basically, anyone who finds the idea appealing – but likely candidates include those who are regularly told that they “think too much” (and get really, really annoyed by that), or those who feel blocked by worries or confusion. It’s not about being intellectual or having high language skills or being able already to clearly express yourself and your troubles. It also isn’t about studying philosophical traditions, although these provide useful resources. Philosophical practice goes back to philosophy’s roots of love (philo) and wisdom (sophia).

I start with a couple of basic premises. One is that, at the root of every person’s suffering or discontent, there is some mistaken belief. Such mistakes and misperceptions aren’t signs of stupidity or a cause for shame, but the inevitable consequence of how humans learn. And we can always understand better. (This is the love of wisdom.)

Secondly, the context in which we experience and understand the world is always relational. For better or worse, a person is a person through other people. But, now or in the past, our relationships may fail to support – or forcefully undermine – our ability to find our way in the world. And what has been harmed in relationship can be healed in relationship. (This is the wisdom of love.)

Accordingly, philosophical counselling takes place within an extended conversation. Together, we explore your understanding of the world, your self and your situation. Each counselling relationship is fluid, ranging as wide and digging as deep as we are both willing and able to go. Philosophical counselling holds no assumptions, agendas or ambitions for the client (or “guest”). The goal is nothing other than to discover the confidence and clarity that allows you to go on.

© 2009

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What should be the single priority for the new South African government? In his Sunday Times column (3 May 2009), Mac Maharaj invited readers to answer this question, following Peter Bruce’s observation that a government that tries to fix everything achieves nothing. “Let us… find some common purpose, which is the first step to success.”

But because any choice refers to a prior and more fundamental commitment – to the criteria by which we choose – it seems to me that clarity of purpose is at least as necessary as common purpose. What we believe the government’s priority should be depends on how we understand its purpose, and this in turn will shape the way it functions and is evaluated.

So here’s my response: the top priority for the new government, and all who sail in her, should be to keep one question in mind from the time they get up in the morning until the time they go to bed: what is the fundamental purpose of our government here and now – and what is my role within it?

This is not an abstract or technical question but an ethical one, whose shifting answer will always be reflected in the way we live. And it seems to me that present social conditions indicate an insufficient clarity of purpose in previous governments that has led to contradictory policies and administration.

I don’t believe the fundamental purpose of South Africa’s democratic government is to advance the interests of any group over another. I don’t think it exists to create personal fiefdoms for politicians and officials, nor to serve narrow private interests above the public good – although, clearly, there are many throughout the public and private sectors who believe differently. But none of these foundations could have motivated the broad social benefits that have been created since 1994. None can account for our aspirations and the decency of our democracy, which we witnessed again on voting day.

So let me whisper another possibility, one whose reflection can also be seen in the way we live: the purpose of this government, in this moment of South Africa’s democracy, is to respect and restore the dignity of people.

Dignity cannot directly be the state’s business; it’s not a technical, quantifiable matter. Our neighbours’ dignity is the responsibility of each one of us, and the state can’t take that over. But what our government can and should do – because this is the ethical origin of its power – is to put in place the conditions for a dignified life: work, health, shelter, education and the rest of it. This is the fundamental purpose that consequently calls for political choices, statecraft and the practical matters of governance. But getting these elements right must refer back to the quality of people’s lives. There is evidence that state services are more effective when “co-produced” with communities than simply “delivered”, but prior to this effectiveness is the dignity of people who are able to make meaningful decisions about their own lives.

© 2009

Michael the teacher was talking about what he says to new classes to disarm them. To disarm them? An ambiguous phrase. Did he mean to charm the children or to take away their weapons? Which reminded me of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s view that discourse (conversation, dialogue) is the way we can engage with each other without violence. Which started me thinking about how we use language to arm and disarm ourselves and each other.

We long to love, to know and be known, and we want good stuff for ourselves – more pleasure, less pain. This combination renders us in turn vulnerable and dangerous to those who come in contact with us, a situation that can be hard to tolerate. Especially if these others matter to us, if we also want good stuff for them. This goodwill we express in careful language and in the restraint of our aptitude for violence.

The word “war” comes from a root that means mixed up or confused. Whenever we mix it up together, the choice of violence or discourse is always at hand. This is not a simple dialectic. Discourse holds the possibility of peace, or at least the postponement of war. It is the rickety bridge that can carry us from conflict to resolution, but it is also conscripted into any war effort. Words as weapons, words that consolidate oppression. Words that lie. And so we say that truth is the first casualty of war.

In recent years, new industries have sprung up around the production of dialogue. We confer at conferences and disseminate at seminars. We have talks about talks to negotiate negotiation. Facilitators are on board to mediate the immediacies of human communication. Conversation and dialogue have been professionalised into a new form of managed care. Okay, that’s an oxymoron, but this is often a good and helpful thing. Yet I worry when the desire to avoid conflict traps us in increasingly sterile relations.

Diplomacy is better than war, but it’s not as good as friendship. Genuine dialogue is more dicey than diplomacy, but it’s a fine risk to run. Albertus Magnus, the 13th century theologian and scientist philosopher, said, “The greatest of all human pleasures is to seek truth in conversation.” To seek truth in conversation means to engage each other directly, each from our own lifeworld, to move together, keep talking, keep reaching. It calls for good will, open hearts and courage. This can’t be moderated or mediated by an outsider. We forgo war and get down to some serious wrestling. Eros takes the place of Ares as we incite each other to greater heights and deeper depths. We burst into laughter, into tears, and we keep on going. We play soft and easy or hard and fast, picking up some bruises no doubt, but we stay in contact until… Until we reach some climax or fall away in exhaustion or just find a good place to stop.

Until the next time.

© 2009

“Struggle is ego.”

“All ambition is vanity.”

“I’ve been meeting my ego a lot recently.”

These three comments came my way over the course of a few days. They all seem to express some nervousness, disapproval or dislike of “ego”. Is that fair? Is ego simply a problem?

I experience ego as a mediator, an interface between me and the world. Or like a skin that keeps my innards in and provides a (more or less) permeable barrier to the world. It is how I appear in the world, how I present myself or am presented to others. In its outward motion, ego expresses intentionality, personality or character. In its inward movement, it filters and interprets my world of experience. Temporally, it creates a continuity of self and world over time. I recognise myself (more or less) in my ego. When I feel self-conscious, ego is one term of that reflexivity. Ego is myself qua (in the capacity of) conscious subject. None of this is a bad thing. On the contrary! I would be in trouble without egoic defences, and ineffectual without ego’s drive to action. A lost soul in the world of deed.

So how does it go – and we know it does – so terribly wrong? Misuse, I think, whether through misunderstanding or impropriety.

Misunderstanding here is a case of mistaken identity. I may experience ego as my identity, I relate to it and relate through it, but I am not identical with it. It is an object of my subjectivity or consciousness. If I am living cleanly, if I’m getting it right, “I” and “ego” work together harmoniously and are virtually indistinguishable.

But ego is a worldly creature; it carries some weight or gravity. If I am lazy or unmindful, seduced or bewitched or otherwise asleep at the switch, ego can take on a life of its own. The world, as it must, takes egos seriously. How terribly pleasant it is to be stroked and praised, to achieve some measure of success. Caught in this dream, ego expands and inflates and would dance in the clouds forever. But how terrible it is to be shamed and rejected – trapped in this nightmare, ego thumps back to earth, shrivels up and longs to disappear. (If we are lucky, someone may be nearby who will help us wake up. Hush. It’s all right.)

And so I see that the virtue of ego is propriety, and the virtue of a self is careful vigilance. And when someone speaks of “meeting their ego” with a wry smile, I recognise that vigilance at work, bringing ego to order. But when I hear that “all ambition is vanity”, I have to disagree. Ambition that feeds, and is fed by, ego’s insatiable desire for illusive rewards is certainly vain, but that’s not the nature of every ambition. “Struggle is ego”? Sure. But where struggle is necessary, ego is the soul’s champion.

For David and Corinna, 21 February 2009

What does it mean, to marry?

Marriage is an event, both simple and extraordinary. Something will be accomplished, here, today. Something will end and something begin. To marry is “to unite intimately”. It is rite of passage in which two lives are transformed. Two singular people say I – I will, yes – and find themselves we, us. First person plural.

This event takes place through words that are spoken: a solemn vow, a promise made, carried on the breath “from your lips to God’s ear”. One pledges one’s troth, one’s truth. Whatever words are used are words of honour. I take you as my husband, my wife, and I give my life into your care. In this exchange, the two become as one.

A unity, to be sure, that is not a totality, not sameness, not a suppression of the one or the other, but a togetherness and wholeness in which difference and distance are still cherished. A Christopher Isherwood character insists that love does not begin with two people drawn together, but rather “when they suddenly know they’re utterly, utterly different… it’s almost unbearable… Like the north and south poles, you couldn’t possibly be farther apart… and yet you’re more connected than any other two points on earth… because there’s this axis between you. And everything else turns round it.”

Marriage takes this axis, this love, as its base to support and cultivate it. The vow, the yes, I do isn’t done once and for all, but must be faithfully refreshed and renewed and remembered. It is for today, now, as you speak, and also for tomorrow. Yes and yes again for all the days and all the tomorrows that may come to pass between you – may they be abundant and profuse.

We all know this is a risky business, but anything less would be just a contract, a negotiated settlement, self-catering co-habitation. No adventure, nothing transcendent.

To marry truly is a deep act of faith. A leap of faith. Taking the plunge, as they say. Like trapeze acrobats, the only way for a marriage to fly is with perfect diligence, commitment and confidence. By all means, there should be careful thought in preparation, but the moment itself – the vow, the union, yes and yes again – must be a true leap into the unknown, holding nothing back, blind, reckless, voluntary, surrendered and direct. Delicate, exquisite flights of the heart to the heart’s desire. Yes, and yes again. In time, like acrobats, the routine grows sure and strong: this fidelity, this union, this axis. A familiarity and comfort with each other which will in turn allow for new daring possibilities and adventures to arise. This is marriage. This is what begins today for these two.

And we have all gathered together here because this intimate union also takes place in community. Friends and family are invited to witness these vows, these transformative words that will leave no tangible trace in the air, to dignify them with your own presence, say your own yes, here I am, so that no one could deny what is taking place here today. To say yes to their union, to admit no impediments to this marriage of true minds and true hearts. To welcome them together and to pledge your support. To celebrate and share in their joy. To give thanks for the day, and for all our relations, for the love of our lives.

“Go there where you cannot go, to the impossible, it is indeed the only way of coming or going.” – Jacques Derrida

© 2009