In working through a very wide range of disparate material to write my book on the story in religion, I have been reading some of Michael Jackson’s work. He worked in West Africa, in Australia and elsewhere, as an anthropologist but much of his work, particularly his most recent work, draws on personal and individual reflections. In his very recent work, he has also been exploring the experience of migrants, especially those journeying from West Africa to London. One of his common themes is suffering, deriving in part from his experiences in Liberia and the impact of the civil war, and in part from elements of his own life and the lives of those around him.
Like many writers Jackson is interested in the way we talk about suffering, the way in which we try to express the inexpressible. No two people can know that they experience suffering in quite the same way and so the language of suffering is rarely precise. Story is the primary means of talking about suffering. Extremes of suffering, in the brutalities of war, in the pain of depression and cancer, in the experience of migration and dislocation, often makes even the telling of stories impossible. Drawing on the work of Hanah Arendt and others, Jackson asks how we can recall, live with, and talk about suffering.
This work is vitally important, especially given the events of the last few weeks, both in the experience of the young girls, their dance teachers and their families in Southport, and in our response to the rioting that followed, drawing on messages of hate and mob violence. How to talk about pain, about suffering, about loss, without giving in to despair and losing all hope.
The most recent work I have read is Richard Kearney’s book on Strangers, Gods and Monsters. This is the last of three volumes on philosophy at the limit (the middle volume is on the story). Here Kearney is asking not just about suffering, where language fails in the face of human cruelty, but also about the other and the impossibility of talking about the other, of our tendency to construct the other, particularly the stranger, as monster, and the narrowness of the boundary in our language of the sublime, whether of monsters or of gods. It is a highly complex argument that brings together many different ideas with threads of psychoanalysis, deconstruction and apophatic theology running through it.
What this work suggests is that we cannot begin to talk about suffering without also talking about those who inflict suffering, the perpetrators as well as the victims. While the enormity of the pain is often beyond words, so also is the enormity of the cruelty inflicted by other human persons, or of our existence. The Holocaust is, without doubt, the limit case in both these discourses and is often used to conduct the debate about what is sayable, what needs to be said, and what remains beyond saying, beyond comprehension, beyond words.
We have seen the cruelty that human beings can perpetrate on each other on our streets, both in the violent and incomprehensible act of an individual wielding a knife among a group of very young girls at a dance event, and in the mass hysteria of the mob, whipped up by reinforcing messages of hate on social media. Words fail us. We cannot comprehend the motives. We have nothing to say to those who suffer and to those who survive.
There is a discourse in the academic literature about those who are caught up in a collective culture of violence, whether that is the rage of the mob or what is called the banality of evil, a widespread acceptance of hate and of violence against specific populations. A particular place in this literature is given to those, like the children caught up in the many African wars, who are victims of the violence just as much as those they maim and kill. There is also a much larger literature on those who are considered truly evil, stressing their otherness and the inexplicable nature of their actions, whether political leaders or serial killers. Finally, there is also a literature on the bystander, the ones who look on, often feeling helpless but, perhaps, not as innocent as they might believe themselves to be.
What is missing, perhaps, is another group, and one that more of us might fit into than we at first imagine. These are the people who recognise the violence around them, would condemn it if asked, but ultimately bracket it out and proceed to profit from it. There are those, very close to the suffering and violence, who do this consciously. Many in the African civil wars, trying to make a living in impossible circumstances, end up in such a place, or one very similar. For most of us, however, it is the structures of society, or the distance between ourselves and the suffering (whether mediated through electronic media or not), that enable us to get on with our lives without recognising the way in which our everyday actions support, and certainly do not aim to engage with or challenge, this violence. There is an almost deliberate ignorance, even indifference, in such a position, but it is one that those writing about suffering, or about the explicitly violent few, often fail to recognise.
Martin Stringer Quartet 