May 13, 2009

A Defense of Death

How to Love Your Enemies Without Really Trying
We all know—or rather, know of—at least one way to love our enemies: that taught in both word and flesh by our moral superiors, most famously by Jesus, whose alarming capacity for desiring the good of those who sought to slaughter all his friends, crush his facial bones, pierce his skull with thorns, and pin Him like a beetle to a board, still stuns with ethical awe all but the morally stupid. Yet for those of us for whom this first love of enemies is simply too lofty, too high, there is a second way of loving one’s enemies which, though perhaps not a virtue in the strict sense, is not precisely immoral either, and, happily, is more within reach...
*
A few months ago a friend of mine received, second-hand, a threat to his physical well-being.
Look out, she warned him. He’s coming for you.
My friend, grown accustomed to a quieter life, was naturally startled at this. However, as the threat grew steady, more certain, more real, he told me he found himself...pleased. As the days passed, this sense of pleasure did not diminish; rather, it gathered, increased, eventually pooling into a private reserve of secret satisfaction. In short: he was (credibly) threatened; the consequence: delight.
How to explain this?
His growing sense of pleasure seemed to center on what we might call an increase in vividness. It was as though, seen through the lens of imminent threat, there emerged, of necessity, a new focus. His new situation prescribed a new outlook. Things came to him as crisper, clearer, all edges sharper. He moved differently, because given the new context, each move mattered differently. A sleepy shuffle was out. Staring straight ahead now seemed foolish. Significance in this way seeped into, saturated, redeemed the other-wise mindless minutiae of daily living. Rote was abolished; routes were altered; habits shattered; memory taxed; every anomaly examined. Events did not merely occur, they meant things (“Whose car is that?”, “A jogger, here, at this time of night?”). His increased awareness tracked a heightened sense of responsibility. Nothing perfunctory; all was purposeful. Because someone was laying for him, he constantly had to lay plans—and the world around him, formerly inert, was now much more—the alley, an ally, the crowd, a confederate; potential conscripts— virtually anything not nailed down. In short: he was, in the British phrase, switched on—and he found this heightened state of living bracing, the relentlessness of its requirements and responsibilities refreshing. He had not thought himself dreamy, but nonetheless felt like someone slapped from slumber. And so he became positively grateful for the threat—was delighted to have an enemy—and in this way and sense, came to love him.
**
Now it must be granted strait away that the ethical connection between this second, ‘lesser’ love of enemies and the greater sort with which we began is...tenuous. Bluntly put: this second ‘love’ of enemies is a long way from the Cross. Without a certain easygoing attitude towards equivocation (here with respect to ‘love’), it may seem fair to say this post is over-billed. For the lesser love, this enjoyment of opposition, this relish of readiness, seems less a love of the enemy than a love of having one; it is not that (as in Jesus’ case) one has an enemy whose good one desires, but that one desires an enemy so as to gain or retain certain goods—a certain level of living; and to love these amping effects of having an antagonist is hardly the same as loving the antagonist himself. Moreover, there seems nothing morally heroic—or even specifically moral at all— in this attitude towards/gratitude for our enemies. It may in some cases be nothing over and above a ruthless calculus or wicked delight which does not in any way seek the good of the enemy—quite the contrary—i.e. the delight may reside purely in plotting and/or perpetrating their downfall. Here Lermontov’s detached, cynical (though deeply perceptive) Pechorin is our paradigm:
“I love my enemies—although not in the Christian sense: they amuse me, they quicken my pulses. To be always on the lookout, to intercept every glance, to catch the meaning of every word, to guess intentions, to thwart plots, to pretend to be fooled, and suddenly, with one push, to upset the entire enormous and elaborate structure of cunning and scheming against me—this is what I call life!”
Yet the lesser love needn’t go this far—needn’t compete with or crowd out the greater. In fact, a steady cultivation of this lesser love may indirectly enhance the efficacy of one’s ethical life. That is, the lesser love of enemies might be put in harness to the greater—might train us to be more decisive and sharper-eyed ethicists (i.e. we need not plot his downfall)—and so might enjoy an excellence akin to one of the indispensable but morally neutral virtues like wisdom, cleverness, or courage—‘mercenary virtues’ famously indifferent to the ethical goodness of their employer. At the very least, it is not unreasonable to think that the innocent-as-doves would fare better in the world than they generally do if they stopped/stooped to master the shrewdness of serpents—a shrewdness the Pechorins of the world—the world’s natural serpents— are best able to teach.
Still, even considered apart from its instrumental ethical value—i.e. its value as an instrument to ethics— there seems something independently excellent about the lesser love of enemies—something resolutely optimistic in its focus upon life’s details as things suddenly ennobled, granted significance, swept up in a cause or conspiracy— something ingeniously alchemistic in its ability to weave together the silver linings from the dark clouds of another’s hate. And at the center of it all spins and whirs an exuberance, a cold fusion, an undeniable energy rushing up within us which nothing but an earnest enemy evokes. Again, it may be this optimism/alchemy/energy is amoral; its motives questionable, at times impure; but even so, the way it weaves a fresher world out of the most adamant opposition still seems an admirable art—or at least an art worth learning. Art need not (by itself) be Right to be (by itself) respectable, since Rightness is a separate, even extrinsic, excellence where art is concerned.
***
At any rate, it is an art independently loved—so much so some types of soul crave all forms of emergency that elicits from them this excellence. Like a certain kind of soldier, these persons, inverting the common understanding, seem to find the unthreatened life not worth living— seem not to enjoy safety so much as endure it, as though it were not something to be sought out, but positively avoided—as though, due to the consequent loss of this vividness entailed by the threatened life, the absence of threat itself were a source of spiritual suffering. This—this wariness of safety as suffering—is that measure of spiritual wisdom allotted to those we otherwise tend to put down as merely brash; it is the naturally restless soul’s sensible dread of that security which protects, blankets, and warms us, and, singing softly, soothes our souls towards a sweet and terrible sleep.
There thus appears nothing irrational in an intractable preference against safety in favor of a life of constant and vigorous risk. The threatened life is rationally loved as a crude but effective immunization against the aboriginal anxiety that we only imagine we live—only think we are awake but slumber—that our dreams and actions are only dreams of action, and we are yawning away our best years—the fear that suns are circling, wheeling, dropping, all is rushing by as we sleep and wrinkle and shrink and grey (“a little sleep/a little slumber...”). This fear we are not awake sometimes manifests itself as an epistemic worry—as an erudite/ philosophical worry of Western thinkers, whose proffered solutions were that we somehow all become unblinking sleepless sentinels—become unfailing knowers, whose eyes/I’s see all; but again, the skeptical worry gains its traction on our spirits by appealing to the insidious, ever-present, non-epistemic, and everyday suspicion that we are somehow not yet to the surface of real life—are drowsy, submerged, squandering our only moments, blinded by bias, chloroformed by caution—and will only and at last be shocked into full sentience by the cold of the coroner’s table—will first truly open our eyes only to see the sheet pulled over our faces—will draw our first full, deep breath just in time to expend it in a disbelieving gasp, in tribute to the one Threat that is never idle and is never escaped— the Threat who does not care that we have never really spoken—who will not hear us plead that we’ve much more to say.
And what would he say? Were he to argue, could he not simply point out, as though in his defense, that he has only woken us to threaten us with further sleep? Is this a paradox, or a perfectly good answer?—that only the perpetual threat of an undisturbed sleep is sufficient to keep us awake? As if the very prospect of unbounded, unthreatened eternity were a fatal soporific of soul... Is that why the mystics contemplating an Eastern eternity cannot keep their eyes open—are always pictured sleeping? (“They had lived too much in eternity...” i.e. they always had time to wake up, so they never did.) Is that why Western mystics, who grasp even eternity in terms of irreversible beginnings and ends, look like persons trying desperately, wildly, to keep awake?
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This last point leaves us with at least one unanticipated and counterintuitive consequent: If what we said earlier about my friend and the threat (“He is coming for you”) and its effects upon him is at all correct, it follows that the mutual Threat just alluded to (and yes, my friend, He is coming for you), is, by the same principles, also owed a sort of grudging gratitude—a gratitude not for offering us the opportunity of a submissive and sensible sleep (“I have been half in love with easeful death/called it sweet names...”)—that is the despair and blasphemy of the suicide—is to lay down rather than insist on being cut down—is to pre-emptively put out one’s eyes by closing them, in order not to see the enemy who is coming to put them out. Rather, gratitude is properly rendered to Threat as a kind of dark, dis-loyal opposition, the ‘indispensable minus’, a stark and ruthless source of imminent catastrophe which jolts us, induces vigor, and whose poison breath upon our backs breathes into us that careening pace or velocity, that exuberant, unsatisfiable restlessness of will and wide-eyed living, which, to those who above all want the end of all threats, safety, ease, is without attraction—looks to them like nothing over and above an exhausting and adamant insomnia.
All honor, then—or at least some-- to the merits of the threatened life; and, consequently, gratitude to the Threat to whom gratitude is due—to the Threat inducing in us that indispensable insomnia—to an undefeatable enemy to whom we might reasonably render—never the greater—but the lesser love.