The comfort I derive from this
realization about MacIntyre’s flaws is augmented by the fact that I have no
personal stake in exposing them. Were I at all interested in my own genealogy,
enough at least to warrant an investigation into my family history in search of
some “inherited sin”, I would have no reliable means by which to go about it,
and it would not take long to expose the absurdity of the venture.
Consider me as I stand now. As a
White American cis-gendered Male living in Suburbia, I might easily attract
hostility from those who underestimate the social difficulties inherent in such
a cloistered lifestyle. Yet none of this hostility would render me the rightful
inheritor of the sins of the Home Owners’ Association, members of whom I
routinely avoid out of a mutual enmity between us whose historical precedent
has markedly less to do with ancestry. Therefore, any attempt to implicate me in
a collective sin, perhaps to explain a run of bad luck by reference to group
karma or something like the Yelnats Family Curse, would have by necessity to
address my identity as a Russian Jew borne at the end of the Soviet Era. Immediately
this should entitle me, in theory, to the benefaction of my fellow Americans
who happen to be German, and the jury is still out upon whether or not such a
debt is equally binding upon my fellow Americans who happen to be Arabs, or
perhaps whether the opposite is the case. (Incidentally, the question of
whether we ought to be “pro-Jewish” or “pro-Arab” is in itself practically
insoluble owing to the same fallacious line of reasoning.) Furthermore, it
might be argued that the average American, especially the average Conservative
American, owes me the payment of certain reprations on behalf of the Cold War,
which, coldness notwithstanding, took the lives of many Soviet Spies during the
Red Scare, as well as, presumably, various Russian Americans who may or may not
have been subject to hate crimes. Yet if I should seek payment from any number
of these aforementioned cultural debtors, I might swiftly find I am out of luck
in collecting, either because my fellows have limited means or because they have
strong, individualistic ethics.
This would, of course, put me at a
disadvantage in paying my own debts to the Armenians, in theory. However,
already I can point out that one of the reasons for the Cold War, as well as
one of the evils of the Soviet Union, was precisely in how much separation
there was between the State and the People it represented; whereas democratic
society aspires to “Government by the People, for the People”, Soviet Society
was notorious for pursuing the latter by abolishing the former. In this sense,
I was as much a victim of the Soviet Union as a whole as the survivors of the
Armenian Genocide are its victims; our mutual creditor, dissolved within my year
of birth, is nowhere to be found. In another sense, I might only be considered
party to the Armenian Genocide insofar as I am a Communist, unless of course
one were to maintain that the Soviet Union of my birth was only TRULY incarnate
in the year 1922, since the Bolsheviks came to power two years AFTER the
Armenian Genocide. In this narrative, I can only collect from my Republican
(and some Democratic) sponsors for the Red Scare insofar as I pay my debt to
the Armenian Survivors, and my choice to identify as a Communist will be
entirely contingent upon which strategy is most economically lucrative.
Then we should have ample discussions
with my fellow Americans who happen to be Cubans, Spaniards, Koreans and
Chinese, in order to determine how best to split our growing debt to the
families of those innocent victims of radical Marxism. In the process, it might
very well be discovered that my ancestors had even less power under Tsar
Nicolas II than they did under Vladimir Lenin, and in the process of absolving
my own debt to the Armenians I should have finally to conclude that Communism
was never a mistake in my case, though my fellows might shoulder the debt.
In any case, it might just as
easily be argued that, if the Soviet Union was an attempt to settle all karmic
debts, and if it succeeded for some time in doing so, however painfully and
tragically the avenger became corrupted, then nothing in my ancestry prior to
the year 1917 would be binding in any way, and any lingering debts accrued by
Soviet officials thereafter will have died with them, for the State assumed
full responsibility for its People prior to its collapse, for which we might
blame Capitalism.
At any rate, the moral of the story
is obvious: that just as any other inheritance might be interrupted suddenly by
the end of a bloodline, (no morbid puns intended) so too could any karmic debt
be interrupted, and the reallocation of the inheritance as well as the debt
would be so arbitrary then that it might be called corrosive. At that point,
seeking to turn anyone who might otherwise have “rightfully inherited” either the
wealth or the debt of his predecessors into a debtor would be malicious and
unjust, especially because such a would-be debtor, never having received the
wealth, might have not the means to pay the debt. The Myth of White Privilege,
one which haunts me no less than my fellow Americans who happen to be Republicans,
is a prime example of this Absurdity in modern thought.
Worse still, we must consider that
assigning blame to any mass of people ensures that no one will accept
responsibility, so that blame will only be deferred further by reaching more
deeply into the murky well of history. Did Americans abuse the Africans, or did
Africans doom the World by inventing Slavery? If the Bible is to be believed,
then by being Jewish I should be collecting from the Africans!!
Not only do we lose all sense and
sensibility in abstracting away from the concrete individual in reducing him to
his national or family history; this abstraction also acts as a transparent
vehicle for only the most vicious of instincts. It is neither uncommon nor
surprising, however shocking its extent, that when men and women speak in terms
of such collective debt they often do so vengefully; I have heard a Debate
Coach say of one hate crime towards white Americans that it was justified
because “they did it” to African Americans.
Yet does any debt justify such an
offence? The reason that Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King are honoured
alongside Tenzin Gyatso is that they resisted this impulse. Gandhi uttered that
“an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind”, yet contemporary Leftism
turns a blind eye towards this, as if to say, “if you were Indian, this would
be more than merely an appropriated excuse”.
Yet I might just as easily expose
the hypocrisy intrinsic in the adage that “one ill turn deserves another”.
After all: what constitutes an “ill turn” is not MERELY that it disadvantages a
private interest but that it hurts Society. As such, far from justifying
further errors, the direct witnessing of one ill turn by its victims, while it
might require the aggressor to ATONE in some manner consistent with the needs
of the victims, in fact REQUIRES the victims and all other witnesses to AVOID
repeating the mistake, for only by so doing can we all learn collectively while
remaining free in taking whatever turns we will in exploring the available
possibilities, rather than simply taking turns repeating one another’s mistakes
and destroying one another, rendering the whole world blind in the process. One
ill turn requires no more, and he who repeats someone else’s mistake is more
foolish and evil than he who innovates the mistake in the pursuit of a Common
Knowledge.
It follows logically, therefore,
that vengeance is one of the furthest things from Justice, just as cocaine is
distinct in its effects upon the mind-body from flour, though one might
resemble the other in appearance. More often than not, holding someone to a
debt which that person cannot pay is nothing more than an attempt to assert one’s
power, yet any “unpredictable”, innovative Society, the likes of which
MacIntyre espouses, must always produce unpayable debts.
[({Dm.R.G.)}]
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