Actually I didn’t need to write a blog, this week.
Instead I could past Simone Weil’s essay “The power of words” here and then I
would have a clear political comment on the world events of today. For Weil’s criticism
of what was happening in the world around here is eternal. Or must I say,
following Nietzsche, that history repeats itself? For, when writing this essay,
Weil was not practising futurology but she was disclosing the hidden reality of
contemporary political conflicts.
What Simone Weil (1909-1943) saw in many conflicts of
her time (she wrote the essay on the eve of World War II) was that they were
empty in purpose or rather that they didn’t have a clear purpose at all: “… they
are conflicts with no definable objective” (p. 240). But just this kind of
conflicts, are the most dangerous, Weil goes on: “The whole of history bears
witness that it is precisely such conflicts that are the most bitter”. (ibid.) In a conflict where the stakes
are well-defined, each combatant can judge whether the efforts and pains are
worth the possible gains, Weil explains. “But when there is no objective there
is no longer any common measure or proportion; no balance or comparison of
alternatives is possible, and compromise is inconceivable” (241). Then only the
past costs, especially the number of victims, count and just this is often a
reason to continue. What we see then is that each combatant picks an object
from its gamut of possible purposes and writes it with capital letters. Then
the combatant says: THIS is our purpose. But often this purpose is empty. It’s
just a word. “But when empty words are given capital letters, then, on the
slightest pretext, men will begin shedding blood for them and piling up ruins
in their name, without effectively grasping anything to which they refer, since
what they refer to can never have any reality, for the simple reason that they
mean nothing.” (241). Then, the only measure of success is that you are able to
bash the brains of your “enemy” in.
The part of the essay I just summarized contains only
one aspect of Weil’s comments, but only this analysis is enough to make it a “brilliant
essay”, as Siân Miles, who wrote an introduction to it, calls it. Referring to Homer’s
Iliad and Early Rome, she wrote an
attack on French foreign policy of her time, and without a doubt she was also thinking
of the ideological conflicts of her days between nazism, communism and western
capitalism c.q. democracy. And she thought of the First World War, of course,
which was still fresh in the minds of many Europeans and which might have
finished earlier, if the politicians hadn’t been so stubborn. However, it is
not difficult to apply Weil’s words to the political events after the Second
World War as well. Although the Cold War remained cold between the countries immediately
concerned (the western countries versus Russia and Eastern Europe), because of
the emptiness of the conflict and its aimlessness it lasted more than forty
years. The consequences of this conflict about words, or ideological struggle
as it is usually called, were bigger in the regions where the ideological
differences led to hot war. Then one has to think of the Vietnam War in the
first place, where what was initially a war for independence dragged along so
long, because it was reinterpreted in ideological terms.
Weil’s analysis can also easily be applied today when
we think of what Samuel Huntington called a clash of civilizations and what can
also be seen as a clash of religions. For what is actually the “definable
objective” of the attack on the Twin Towers in the sense that if this or that
has been reached war is over? It’s also a war that is drags along since then
because of the vagueness of the aims of the terrorist attacks. And, by the way,
here, too, we see that history repeats itself, as becomes clear when we read Albert
Camus’s analysis of anarchistic terrorism around 1900 in his L’homme revolté (translated into English
as The Rebel). For although the
justifications for terrorism may have changed, its form and dynamics have
remained almost exactly the same more than hundred years later. But back to
Weil, her analysis is brilliant because she disclosed a phenomenon and laid her
finger on a problem that were not only important in her time but that apparently
are eternal. “That which has been is what
will be, That which is done
is what will be done, And there is nothing
new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes
1:9)
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