Archetypes of Fear
Scanning the media for news about what is going on in Britain this
summer in reaction to the subway bombings; I look for a trend. A trend
away from the one I saw earlier this summer. The dynamic is how a open
society will react to a continuous state of terrorist attack. Britain
holds a somewhat unique place being home to a middle east diaspora of
political refugees and also from its colonial days being the
destination of choice for those governed seeking to move closer to the
centers of finance authority and stability. Many of these are several
generations settled. There was a interesting piece in the Washington
Post Outlook section today
A Literary Guide to Britain's Terrorists
detailing how British literature has been documenting for nearly a
decade how the former are acting as a wedge to the youngest generation
of the latter.
Mostly I'm interested in narratives of the "incident." The
incident where British special police chased a man down entering the
subway and fired several bullets into his head. Termination with
extreme prejudice. I had a conversation about this the week end after
it happened. The person I talked to thought the police had clearly done
the correct and necessary thing. "Suppose they hadn't shot him and he
blew up a train." He could not see what a tremendous watershed
such an unqualified validation was. He was working from a narrative
which provided him with a scenario of near obvious guilt. Open and shut
really. It was not one, in its details, I had heard before. I had heard
plenty of versions in those few days (it was the one running on Fox
news). The first stories I brought up in my browser as the incident
came into the press were as different from each other as they were
vague in general.
It latter became known that Jean Charles de Menezes was not an al
qeada terrorist but an unfortunate young Brazilian man in the wrong
place at the wrong time:
Telegraph | News | More innocents could be shot.
Once that was established the police begin quietly backpedaling through
their statements and so did the press. Some of these corrected versions
were most similar to the very earliest eyewitness accounts. It
crystalized for me that an odd thing had occurred.
Narratives of the "incident" and of this story in general ad
been diverging from the facts that existed, But uniformly and
predictably diverging. They were merging instead, with a story of
innocents which intend nothing (but to live their peaceful and idyllic
lives) and have caused no harm, beset by mongering non-rational evil.
Which desires nothing, but terror and fear. It is a return to the
collective unconscious. a story of civilization attacked by barbarians,
order by chaos. It is a Transformational substitution. A substitution
with rules as sure as Grammar transformation, of linear history for
cyclic history. Historicity for
story.
The notion of cyclic history and archetypes is a powerful
human inclination, because of its apparent offer of explanation and
prediction. What is involved is less clear - that our nature contains
templates, perhaps, which contain only certain outplays and personality
types. That even as these appear to bestow individualities, that bring
fully realized persona and frisson of struggle against diversity they,
with a less seen hand, remove individuality. There are no true
individuals, there is no history, there is only the archetypes of a
mythic narrative endlessly repeated.
Most modern historians have resisted the notion of "life cycles"
of societies and cultures, have downplayed the need to mine the past
for morals and outcomes, just because of the perceived danger of being
pulled back in a cyclic view of the human condition. Talk of clashes of
civilizations strikes me (and undoubtedly many others) as treading
close to the edge of this abyss with its organizing principle of
contestation and triumph, downfall. Linear history is irreducible to
narrative. It is the sum of lives amid natural events. Decisions made
casually only to the extent that one can see them being made with a
reason that may resemble but never equals syllogistic logic.
Whether one calls it the War on Terror the Global Struggle
against Violent Extremism as it was called for a brief moment
President makes it clear: Phrase is War on Terror New York Times. It delievers Heroes and Villains and it does so in mirrored fashion. Our one is their other and conversely perfectly.
Let's consider Krauthammer's Grandmother for a moment.
Not his actual Grandmother who conceivably tossed Haymarket bombs into
Haymarket squares well beyond counting in her day. Rather Krauthammer's
pean to profiling
Give Grandma a Pass - Charles Krauthammer.
Profiling is an art with many rules, a bureaucratic art. Its task is to
accomplish its task of selecting before full judgement of all facts,
without prejudging. Without recourse to ethnicity, gender or race. This
drives men like Krauthammer beside themselves, who believe it should
only proceed along such lines - because we know who the enemy is and we
know what they "look" like. The only thing such men really know is that
they believe they have devised a sieve that will never be used against
them. Most law enforcement agents know that witnesses will often
describe their assailant as being who they expected an assailer to be.
The symbolic assailant is a direct projection of the state of some ones
current fears. Real assailants form a more diverse population;
moreover, any sophisticated terrorist operation will take care to work
against mere type. A behaviorally based profiling is more likely to
succeed even as portions that use randomness appear to be ineffective.
Looking at this pragmatically. To what degree is this a
phenomenon no more escapable than the pull of the moon on the tides. A
reaction to a set of a catastrophes seen as unavoidable, irreversible
and so calling for a narrative which supplies ultimate triumph. Against
this look at what it allows those who look with favor on a police
state, in terms of freedom of action in making policy, the efficacy of
which is only ameliorated by how well a given set of events can be kept
within a frame . Before it makes more sense when seen outside of any mythic dichotomy.
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(written with all due props to Mircea Eliade)
11:24:00 PM  ;;
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