cell913blog.com #13

 Nelson Mandela was one of those black Africans who, while having the benefits of considerable support in his youth, including the opportunity to attend and to graduate from college, and to practice law, and eventually to attain his LLB degree from the University of London, nevertheless, also lived a life among his people, provided legal counsel for his people, profoundly understood the oppression of his people, and as fully engaged in helping his people to gain not only their human rights but also their respect, dignity and honour, not only from the government but from the psychic imprisonment of apartheid.

His perspective, attitude, conviction and determination did not stop at restoring human rights, in a legal sense. His person embodied the struggle and the eventual honour of removing the tumor of cancer that had infected the body politic in South Africa, long before his birth.
He knew every nock and cranny of the geography, history, governance, tribal traditions, social ethos of his nation and had links and allies throughout Africa and especially in Great Britain and the United States. He worked diligently, collegially, collaboratively and courageously to see the ‘good’ in all, including his enemies, and to listen to those opinions, within the ANC and even from those outside the organization, not merely for the purpose of exercising a specific strategy or tactic in the moment, but with a much longer view, for the ‘good of the cause’ and thereby for the long-term life-giving benefit to and for his people. Also, amid the darkest clouds in his personal as well as his professional and activist lives, he never lost both the hope and the vision of the demise of apartheid.

So much for the obvious, and some might say trite, eulogy of this one man.

It is not incidental or irrelevant to note the vast differences from the cause to which Mandela dedicated his life, to the kind of political, legal, institutional, economic, academic and cultural ethos of the contemporary globe. While real time communication brings the latest drone attack, wherever to our various screens, we are enclosed in what might be termed an epistemological loop, (not to mention how that loop also encircles public leaders, news outlets, public consciousness) and limits our openness, and perhaps even our capacity to connect the dots from the many ‘files’ of information from which we are being ‘fed’. Like a balkanized and nationalized piece of geography, we tend to regard borders, separations, alienations, and the inherent ‘protection’ of our ‘privilege’  (think white supremacy, removing fascism from Ukraine, eliminating all terrorist cells, installing barbed wire, floating barrels, and legal border enforcements) as not only our ‘right’ but our responsibility, in many quarters.

We have stifled not only the free flow of people whose lives have been so traumatized in their original homes. We have also stifled the free and respectful flow of ideas needing respectful and honourable contest. We have burned the notion of tolerance of political ideologies among their most virulent opponents to the ground, almost without a whimper of push-back. And we have come to a point where the metaphor of ‘war’ beyond any notion of respect for the rules of engagement in war and military conflict, now valued only as a zero-sum conflict. Insertion of the image of Ares (God of War), the spirit of battle, as a guiding voice and light into our public consciousness, into our public debate, and clearly into our children and youth as their inheritance, has become so welcomed as a model for our collective perceptions, that we can hardly be surprised, at the results. Britannica.com notes:

Ares’ worship was largely in the norther areas of Greece, and although devoid of the social, moral and theological associations usual with major deities, his cult had many interesting local features. ..He represented the distasteful aspects of brutal warfare and slaughter….his fellow gods and even his parents..were not fond of him. …Human sacrifices were made to him from the prisoners of war. In addition, nocturnal offering of dogs-an unusual sacrificial victim, which might indicates a chthonic (infernal) deity-was made to him.

Neither honourable nor heroic, Ares’ spirit of war is hardly a ‘crown’ of honour among the many potential images we might like to emulate. And while there is a panoply of gods and goddesses that emerge from any scanning of the mythology, Hercules (Heracles) in art and literature…was represented as an enormously strong man od moderate height, a huge eater and drinker, very amorous, and generally kindly but with occasional outbursts of brutal rage. In Italy he was worshipped as a god of merchants and traders, although others also prayed to him for his characteristic gifts of good luck or rescue from danger. (Britannica.com)

Attempting, metaphorically, to ‘cast’ an imaginary cast of voices that seem to be haunting the public stage, one cannot fail to note the ethereal, ephemeral and also toxic ‘ether’ of Loki, one of several trickster gods in the mythological pantheon. (Dolos in the Greek world). In Norse mythology, Loki, a cunning trickster who had the ability to change his shape and sex….He also appeared as the enemy of the god, entering their banquet uninvited and demanding their drink. Loki weas bound to a rock (by the entrails of one or more of his sons, according to some sources), as punishment, thus in many ways resembling the Greek figures, Prometheus and Tantalus. Also like Prometheus, Loki is considered a god of fire.

And, from the backstage, of our ‘theatre,’ comes the voice of  Themis, in Greek religion, personification of justice, goddess of wisdom and good counsel, and the interpreter of the gods’ will….On Olympus, Themis maintained order and supervised the ceremonial. She was a giver of oracles…In the lost epic, Cypria, she plans the Trojan War with Zeus to remedy over-population…The cult of Themis was widespread in Greece. She was often represented as a woman of sober appearance carrying a pair of scales. (Britainnica.com)

Attempting to imagine those voices that might have been inspiring, guiding and counseling Mandela, as compared with those whose voices have a volume and a ubiquity today, we might note that, Ares would not have been as welcome a voice as Hercules, nor would Loki have been as welcome as Themis. These references to mythology are not proferred as clinical diagnoses, merely as hints about the kind of strength of the multiple voices that are currently extant in the American, especially, and also more broadly in other locations.

Neil Postman wrote a book, as far back as 1985 entitled, Amusing ourselves to Death, in which he argued that entertainment had become the dominant pursuit of the American culture, with politics, the media and the culture generally preferring to be entertained as opposed to what he would have preferred, a deep and rational consideration of the complex issues then facing the nation. Based largely on the work of Marshall Mcluhan’s The Medium is the Message, Postman’s insights, while valid and honourable, seem to day like the layer of distortion quite above that of our plight these days.

No longer is entertainment on the throne of the culture. Dolos and her lies, trickery, propaganda, and deception, in the service of absolute power and control, by men whose personal needs far outstrip any pursuit of the ‘public good’. And that model of seduction, which just this week demonstrated its penetration into the psyche of the U.S. in Iowa, with the sliver of Republican caucus voters ceding 51+% of their vote to the former, twice impeached, and multiply indicted president. And, while the perceptions of those voters may well be that ‘he gets things done’ there is a blindness in their perspective that ignores, or minimizes or avoids confronting not only his dictatorial methods, but equally if not more importantly, his coziness with world dictators, wannabe autocrats and institutional anarchists. Think Putin, Erdogan, Xi Jinping, and more recently Netanyahu. Finally, in a public media broadcast only this morning, Jennifer Palmeri, former press secretary for Hillary Clinton and Obama, asked emeritus president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Hauss, if Netanyahu and Putin were conducting their respective wars in Ukraine and Gaza respectively with an eye on the presidential election of November 2024, a mere matter of months away. Hauss not only agreed, for reasons that included a lessening of pressure on the pursuit of democracy and human rights that would be welcome for autocratic leaders, but for wider implications including his conversations in South East Asia, where, he says, in South Korea a prime topic of conversation is their perception of a growing need for them to develop and secure nuclear weapons. This anxiety, Hauss notes, comes from a significant concern about not being able to rely on the United States as an ally and partner in their tensions with North Korea.

Decades ago, there was a popular epithet in the west, ‘think globally and act locally’ as an inspiring exhortation to engage in the fight to control global warming and climate change. Long faded, such epithets are mere memories today. And in their place, we, as in we all (everywhere) face global threats and dangers that cannot be contained in metaphors or images of global warming and climate change. Underneath that legitimate and existential tension lies the blatant, heinous, manipulation and sabotage of all vestiges of institutional, democratic and what we once knew as ‘liberal democracy’. Whether by criminal invasions of legitimate democratic elections through cyber technology, or by illegitimate invasions of national boundaries (Ukraine, Gaza and potentially Taiwan for example), or by the implicit and not-so-secret liaisons between anarchist leaders who seek, and likely need, absolute control, or by manipulating of constituency boundaries to serve highly parochial and racially motivated interests in support of the fringes of white supremacy, or by promoting the pseudo-intellectual deception, as Steve Bannon has done repeatedly, that we are in a civilizational war in the west against whomever, be it Muslims, or Arabs, or non-Christians or atheists, or terrorists.

What was once considered the natural order of things, at least from a western perspective, included the Vatican, the Pope, the Christian monotheism and its dogma, injected as a life-giving infusion of how ‘God wants things to be’, and foisted on the unsuspecting men and women as ‘protecting them from the hordes of invaders who are coming to take over the country. Effectively a ‘seige mentality’ that threatens to seduce even more millions, not only in the U.S. but much farther afield. Dependent on a ‘victim’ psychology, that believes and holds the conviction almost as a religious mantra, that ‘they’ the hordes (whoever and however they might be defined, pictured and invested with imaginative venom) are coming to ‘take your country away’. Dancing in the imagination that is aroused by much of the public rhetoric are images of a sexually abused Medusa seeking and taking revenge for her misfortune, in the spirit of Nemesis, the goddess and personified moral agent of retribution. She represented the punishments suffered by those who committed injustice, those who violated the established laws, or those guilty of hubris against the gods.

The voices of Nemesis, Medusa, Ares, Dolos seem to have found a platform for their chorus in the digital age that stretches around the world. They have garnered cash from unsuspecting donors like the Koch brothers and other corporate self-appointed titans, oligarchs, power-brokers, sycophants all, whose need for inclusion in the circle of power, dominance and ‘royalty’ overrides their public duty and responsibility. As a potential counterpoint to this choir of nefarious, heinous, anarchist and despotic dissonance, the voices of Eirene or Irene, the personification of peace in Greek mythology and ancient religion, seem to be eclipsed not only in melody and rhythm but more importantly in volume and range. (From theoi.com) ‘In classical art the goddess usually appears in the company of her two sister Horai (plural) bearing the fruit of the seasons. Statues of the goddess often depict her as a maiden holding the infant Ploutus (Plutus) (Wealth) in her arms. At Rome, too, where peace (Pax) was worshipped, she had a magnificent temple which was built by the emperor Vespasian. The figure of Eirene or Pax occurs only on coins, and she is there represented as a youthful female holding in her left arm a cornucopia and in her right hand an olive branch or the staff of Hermes. Sometimes, also she appears in the act of burning a pile of arms, or carrying corn-ears in her hand or upon her head.

With the image of ‘war’ as a dominant cultural archetype for youth exemplified in so many places and ‘theatres’ and the images of ‘being armed’ as a ‘protective’ lie, (we all know that the NRA has perpetrated one of the greatest lies every foisted on humanity), and that lie having consumed weak and desperate mostly men, what hope is there for the voice of Eirene (Pax) or even Sophrosyne, the personified spirit of moderation to be even engaged, never mind being listened. (Again from theoi.com) Sophrosyne was the personified spirit of moderation, self-control, temperance, restraint, and discretion. She was one of the good spirits to escape Pandora’s box and abandoned mankind in her flight back to Olympos. Elpis (Hope) is the only good god remaining among mankind; the others have left and gone to Olympos. Pistis (Trust) a might god has gone, Sophrosyne (Restraint) has gone from men, and the Karites (Charites, Graces), my friend, have abandoned the earth. Men’s judicial oaths are no longer to be trusted, nor does anyone revere the immortal gods; the race of pious me has perished and men no longer recognize the rules of conduct or acts of piety.

Are we wondering any longer about whether or not we are re-enacting ancient voices, stories, myths and are doing so in a primarily unconscious state?