It's the epitome of wickedness, but also the ultimate affirmation of life. Continuing our two-week series, John Walsh celebrates the joy of seduction and the cads and temptresses who practise it
Sunday, 14 September 2008
Eve was the first seducer. Not because she was naked and slinky and (as it turned out) fatale, but because she led Adam astray. That is unless you agree with Milton that Satan was the seducer in the Garden of Eden, steering Eve away from the straight and narrow. But that's the point of seduction. It's not about having casual sex with lots of people; it's about leading people astray (from the Latin, se- meaning aside, and duco meaning lead) and enticing them into doing something they weren't planning to do, and will probably live to regret.
Seduction is more than an action, it's an exulting in transgression, a promise of corruption. It's an attitude. It's the Compte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, taking the married-but-still-virtuous Madame de Tourvel to bed against her better judgement and murmuring: "Tonight, it is time to acquaint you with some Latin terminology." It's the moment in Joyce's Ulysses when Gerty McDowell, a young nanny sitting on Sandymount Beach, is attracted by the dark, buttoned-up figure of Leopold Bloom standing nearby and, linking both hands around her knee, leans back to watch the fireworks overhead in order to give him a flash of her silk knickers. It's the smirk on the face of the leather-trousered Lothario Michael Hutchence, as he posed beside his latest conquest, Kylie Minogue who seemed transformed by him from a bright-eyed Pollyanna-next-door into a dark-eyed vamp steeped in bedroom lore. It's that smirk on the face of Joey Tribbiani in Friends when he asks every new girl, "How you doin'?" with its unspoken secondary question: "How long will you pretend to hold out against my irresistible sex appeal?"
It's Mrs Robinson in The Graduate, disturbing Benjamin Braddock's 21-year-old self-absorption by throwing her car keys into his fish tank. It's Sergeant Troy in Far From the Madding Crowd performing the sword exercise upon Bathsheba Everdene, and finally slicing off a lock of her hair.
And could there be a more tempting image to lead impressionable Edwardian men astray than the sight of Margarethe Gertrude Zelle photographed in her finery her head, neck, breasts and upper arms festooned with Eastern diadems, in contrast to her white, naked rump? She led so many men to their peril and doom under her assumed name of Mata Hari, she had to be stopped by a French firing squad in 1917.
Seduction is courtship without the promise of marriage at the end. Seduction's only end is conquest, mainly sexual conquest, although for some seducers it's enough to have the victim in their power, enraptured and enslaved by love.
When Keats's haggard knight-at-arms describes how his wild-eyed fairy girlfriend sang to him on a horse, and fetched him roots and honey and manna dew, he seems to evoke a charming scene of innocent romance; but in a dream he learns that he's been seduced and is now, frankly, done for: "I saw pale kings and princes too, / Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; / They cried "La Belle Dame Sans Merci / Hath thee in thrall!"
It's an extraordinary image of love as imprisonment, as a fate from which you'll never be wakened or freed. But the knight is, of course, an exceptional figure: the victims of seductions are almost always women. They suffer "a fate worse than death" in agreeing to have ill-advised sex not because a law has been broken, but because their innocence or credulity has been exploited and betrayed.
Seduction actually was a crime in the middle ages. English common law defined it as "when a male person induced an unmarried female of previously chaste character to engage in an act of sexual intercourse on a promise of marriage". A father was permitted to bring an action for the seduction of his daughter because it deprived him of her "services or earnings", but that seems to take an excessively mercenary view of the value of a daughter.
Down the centuries, many people especially outraged fathers have confused seduction with rape, arguing that a woman who is naturally virtuous and true could not possibly be persuaded to have sex with a scoundrel. If it's impossible for her to have succumbed of her own volition, it follows that she must have been forced or so the thinking goes. But the possibility that the woman was a willing partner in the event, that she was actually a co-conspirator in the whole seduction process, fuelled a hundred plays in the Restoration era and beyond.
There's a wonderful scene in William Congreve's Love for Love, in which the effete townie Tattle is left alone with Mrs Foresight's young ward, Miss Prue. She appears to be a simple country girl, virginal and endangered by this silver-tongued fop, but the truth is quite different. When Tattle proposes making love to her, she readily agrees, saying: "Come, I long to have you begin. Must I make love too? You must tell me how." He, the supposedly vile seducer, is confounded by her directness and has to explain the rules by which men demand sex and women deny them, while gradually being persuaded and eventually complying. She picks up the rules very quickly, as demonstrated when Tattle says: "And won't you shew me, pretty Miss, where your bedchamber is?" To which she replies: "No indeed won't I. But I'll run there and hide myself from you behind the curtains."
The country girl, the maidservant, the innocent seamstress, the trusting pupil they've been the archetypal prey of seducers from time immemorial, the raw material of a thousand vivid dispatches from the sex war in poems, dramas and novels. They became known generically as Fallen Women girls who had dashed their chances of marriage and a happy life by having an inconvenient baby out of wedlock (something that seldom seemed to happen to the upper classes) or becoming the mistress of a blackguard.
The downfall of Tess in Tess of the d'Urbervilles is signalled by the chapter headings: chapter one is "The Maid", chapter two is "Maiden No More". Her fate is not just to be seduced by the bullying Alec d'Urberville, and abandoned by the moralistic Angel Clare, but to become the plaything of Fate.
Yet Thomas Hardy could also see the comic possibilities in a fallen woman becoming the plaything of a particular sort of man. His delicious poem, "The Ruined Maid" tells the story of a rough country girl meeting a former associate on the farm and learning about the better quality of life she led in her disgrace: "Your hands were like paws then, your face blue and bleak / But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek, / And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!" / "We never do work when we're ruined," said she."
So is seduction a matter of laughter or tears? Jenny Newman, the editor of The Faber Book of Seductions, writes in her introduction: "Traditionally there are two main ways of writing about the seduction scene. The first is comic in method. Its entertainment value springs from a display of tactics. Whether or not the seducer gets his or her own way, some kind of happy ending confirms a generally optimistic view of sex. This kind of seduction can be seen as a more adventurous counterpart to what happens in marriage, reaffirming the accepted order of society.
"The other view is tragic. People get hurt and, instead of being allowed to choose, they are drawn inevitably to betrayal. To succumb means the downfall of both seducer and seduced, and perhaps the whole of society too. Instead of co-existing with marriage, this sort of seduction tends to undermine it."
How strange, then, that fictional seducers tend to get a bad press, while real-life triflers with the innocent and virginal tend to win public approval. In his day, Lord Byron was reviled by high society after his divorce, but these days we regard him as a romantic hero. His casual swiving of chambermaids and servant girls all over Europe doesn't sound all that romantic, but still.
Possibly through some atavistic forelock-tugging, when confronted by upper-class misbehaviour, we greet stories of more modern seducers, such as Lord Snowdon and Lord Lichfield, as mere confirmation of their laddish incorrigibility.
Cleopatra's perfumed seductions of both Caesar and Mark Antony (and the spurious detail about her rolling herself in a carpet, to be unrolled before the former) strike us as winningly, charmingly exotic. Frank Sinatra was one of Hollywood's greatest seducers, but his sins of sexual corruption are mostly forgiven him, as they're forgiven those of his successor, Warren Beatty.
As for Alan Clark, the drawling aristocratic English lizard of love, who, over a period of years, gradually seduced a South African judge's wife and both of his daughters, we merely tut-tut at his disrespect for the venerable cuckolded judge, and murmur, "nice grouping".
Their fictional counterparts, however, rarely convince us of their appeal. Volpone, pretending to be mortally ill, so that he can inveigle Celia into his chamber, is a revolting old lecher. Humbert Humbert, the enraptured connoisseur of nymphet love in Lolita, makes us squirm with distaste. Porphyro in Keats's "The Eve of St Agnes," who sneakily watches the gorgeous Madeleine preparing to dream of her lover, then "melts into her dream," is the kind of chap who has sex with a woman while she's unconscious. Lady Booby, in Tom Jones, who tries to seduce Tom away from Sophie Weston, comes across as a disagreeable old boot. Eve and Satan have never had large fan clubs. The Sirens, the great seductresses from Greek mythology who lured sailors to their doom, have never seemed attractive figures. Even James Bond, debonair hero of 80-odd seductions on screen and page, became considered a boorish sexist dinosaur.
Nowadays, we tend to regard it as rather quaint that men and women once pursued and fled from each other, fenced and parried, told wicked lies and promised marriage, rather than talked to each other and explained their desires and intentions out in the open. We may be shocked that, throughout Restoration comedy, women who say "no" seldom mean it. We may think it quaint that men in previous centuries seemed to think women would have sex with them, provided they were sufficiently persuasive and vehement, and went on about it for long enough; not a word was said about whether the women fancied them or not.
But the idea of seduction remains itself rather seductive: the pursuit of love as a thrilling chase, a hunt, a push-me-pull-you quadrille of rejection and acceptance, scheming and flirting and (best-case scenario) a final, sweet acquiescence from the gracious lady.
Behind the best seduction poems and scenes in plays and novels lies a certain tone of voice. It's knowing and funny, logical and persuasive, and, in trying to persuade a woman to come across, it pays her the compliment of constructing fantastical reasoning. John Donne does this in "The Exstasie", where he explains that spiritual soul-mating is all very well, but at some point it must be expressed in physical terms or "else a great prince in prison lies". Very convincing, I'm sure you'll agree.
But the finest example of the seduction poem remains Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," in which the poet explains to his girlfriend that their time for loving is short, when it is compared to the wastes of eternity: "Thy beauty shall no more be found / Nor in thy marble vault shall sound / My echoing song; then worms shall try / That long-preserv'd virginity, / And thy quaint honour turn to dust, / And into ashes all my lust. / The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace."
Would any sensible woman be seduced by it for a moment? Probably not. But its tone of rational urgency, its playfulness and barefaced cheek, must have loosened a few corset hooks-and-eyes over the years. "Let's get it on," is the message. It's the message that seducers have been trying to insert, subliminally, in their victims' ears for centuries.
Showing posts with label seduction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label seduction. Show all posts
Sunday 14 September 2008
Thursday 7 February 2008
The best chat-up lines in the world
With Valentine's Day just a week away and Britain's single men honing their (usually drunken) chat-up lines, Times foreign correspondents reveal how bachelors in other countries do it. We can learn something from them all - except, perhaps, Australia . . .
German men see the conquest of German women as an extreme sport, a physical activity that is up there with bungee jumping and paragliding. It boils down to three essentials: stamina, technique and the right kit. The charm thing doesn't really come into it, any more than it does with mountaineering. One chat-up line suggested by the much-visited German site Flirt-mit-mir (Flirt with me) is: "Your eyes are the same colour as my Porsche." Apparently this works quite well, even better than, "Do you want to see my gun collection?"
There is a growing awareness though that this might not be quite enough. The fact that Germany's most celebrated beauties are falling for foreigners (Claudia Schiffer for Matthew Vaughn, Heidi Klum for Seal) is beginning to be seen as a national problem. The columnist, Jochen Siemens, views German men as suffering from Caligynephobia (also known as Venustraphobia) – the fear of chatting up beautiful women. "The fact is that a beautiful woman undermines the illusion that one is leading a happy life," he says, "doubts begin to gnaw at us." And, since there is no chat-up line in the German language that can overcome this kind of brittle masculine self-confidence, the country is now brimming with flirt academies and seminars. Here, German men are taught supposedly romantic lines such as "Life is a big jigsaw puzzle – and you are the missing piece". And that it is not absolutely necessary to line up your mobile phones on the restaurant table, or casually drop your car keyring (with Jaguar symbol), or to flash photographs of your villa in Spain.
Surveys usually find that German women prefer men who listen to them. For all the obvious reasons this message has yet to be taken on board. But part of the problem, of course, is that German women cannot quite distil what they want from a man into a text-book formula. The journalists Stephan and Andreas Lebert recently interviewed women on this subject for their book Instruction on How to be Manly. One typical response: "A man shouldn't be a fretter, someone who is always asking how you are, or who is checking whether the yoghurt in the fridge has passed its sell-by-date. He should be able to show feelings and weaknesses, but not be a wimp, that's the worst, not a gossip, no, no, but he should have the gift of the gab, that's the most important, oh yes, and a sense of humour and, he should be, you know, a bit of a cowboy." That's it, then. Back to the classroom, Hans
Roger Boyes
UNITED STATES
Strategy, planning, opportunism, execution – all feature in the American heterosexual male's pursuit of the opposite sex. Take, for example, my American friend Jim's recent flight to Spain. On the plane was a conspicuously attractive Spanish attendant, who was receiving a great deal of attention from the Brits at the back. The Brits had calculated that if they ordered as much booze as possible from her, then with every repeat order, they would get more confidence and therefore another opportunity to charm her with their self-deprecation.
Jim had also taken a fancy to this stewardess. He was polite, he smiled, he made eye contact. He also made sure to get her name and repeat it often. And then, when the plane landed, he went straight to the newsagents' to buy an envelope, a pen, and some notepaper. At a nearby caf� he composed a letter to the airline congratulating it on its excellent cabin service – in particular the helpfulness and professionalism of a certain Spanish flight attendant, whom he named as a tribute to the values of the organisation. He included his name, number, and e-mail address, and posted the letter right there. Two weeks later the woman called him to say that his letter had earned her a bonus and that could she please go out for a drink with him next time she was flying through LA. "The idea just came to me, as soon as we landed," Jim explainsto me. "I didn't expect it to actually work."
Hogwash. American men know very well that this kind of thing works. The very fact that I have two American male friends who have successfully charmed flight attendants – a career that surely represents the most fortified beachhead of womankind's defence against unwanted romantic advances – suggests that it was no accident. In a culture where the drunk'n'lunge method most definitely doesn't work (although it has been known to happen), it's a necessity.
In terms of romantic pursuit, the American male is simply a more evolved creature than his British counterpart. It's been this way for a while: take the plot of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, in which the quiet American in question arrives in Vietnam and uses a letter-writing campaign to steal the girlfriend of the hero, a foreign correspondent for The Times. The key to the American strategy is deferred gratification: what my Dad still calls "courting" and what the Americans call "dating". Essentially, the American seduction comes in three stages: a conversation, a phone number, and then a date. Strategy, planning and execution.
As for opportunism – look no farther than Jim's letter to the airline.
Chris Ayres
ITALY
It's lunchtime at a high school (Liceo) in Rome's historic centre, and older pupils are milling about discussing plans for the evening. I ask one of the girls, Francesca, if Italian boys are shy about asking her out. She looks at me fairly witheringly. "Nowadays we do the asking," she says.
My friend Fabio agrees. "It's not so much that we have lost the art of seduction as Italian women become more feminist and independent. It's more economic. Italian men tend to be old fashioned and think they should pay for everything. But times are hard, and we sometimes hesitate to make a date because it means asking the girl to go halves, even for a film and a pizza, which is not very romantic. So they take the initiative."
Changes in the law have also had an effect: Italy has caught up with the concept of sexual harassment, with the result, Fabio says, that Italian men have discovered "there is a fine line between making advances and molestation. Making what you think is an innocent gesture can nowadays land you in trouble."
The same evening, Rome's youngsters are gathered on the cobbled piazza of Campo de' Fiori, still in groups, though some will pair off later. In Italian socialising there is often little need to break the ice: going to a disco, club or pub is a group activity involving school or university friends, the extended family, friends of friends. Singles bars are thin on the ground in Rome, and speed-dating never really took off. Nor is there much binge drinking compared with Britain: Campo de' Fiori is lined with bars but the only people getting legless are foreigners.
In the end, though, someone has to make a play for his or her object of desire – and despite economic constraints and fear of harassment allegations, young Italian men can still cut it, according to Daniela, a blonde Alitalia stewardess. "Italian men are pretty forthright. They don't hesitate to compliment you in the street on your beauty, ciao bella and all that. They even whistle." Does she mind? "Don't be silly."
What Italian men do not do, Daniela says, is drink to work up courage. Francesca agrees. "If they did it would be counterproductive," she says, looking appalled. "If a boy came up to me and asked me out smelling of drink, I would tell him he was schifoso (disgusting)." And that would be that? "And that would be that."
Richard Owen
FRANCE
For younger Frenchmen, dalliance with the opposite sex is no longer the elegant dance of their fathers' days. A smile and a flash of wit used to go a long way, even between strangers in the street. "I used to prefer galleries and caf�s," remembers François, a lawyer in his late fifties whose recent divorce has put him back on the market. "Women were playful. There was time. Now everyone is in a rush and they are suspicious and don't flirt with strangers. You have to meet at a dinner party, and even then it can be hard work."
Nicolas, 24, an accountant in Montreuil, Paris, says that he is quite successful with women but the old pickup places such as the street or disco no longer work. "The disco is absolutely out these days. Everyone is with their mates," he says. "I have joined a salsa dance class and that's great. It's a super plan de drague (pickup method)." As for the approach, Nicolas sticks to the age-old one. "I improvise depending on the girl's personality. There's no set line. The thing is to try to make her laugh."
A common complaint from Frenchwomen young and d'un certain âge is that younger men no longer know how to make a delicate approach. "Too many guys come on heavy and they tell lies," says Mireille, a 34-year-old secretary in the posh 16th Arrondissement. Muriel, a recently divorced sales executive in her mid-forties, says: "Men nowadays don't have the old panache. They' re not romantic. They used to know how to make compliments and put you at ease.
Now they just come at you."
Christine, a publishing editor in her fifties, who has lived in London, says that there is still a big difference in the art of flirting on each side of the Channel. "Englishmen do not look at you in the street, perhaps because Englishwomen do not know what to do. Frenchwomen love being looked at. You miss it when you go abroad – those glances exchanged in the street, on public transport, the little smile of admiration," she says.
"Frenchmen still know that an admiring look flatters a woman and gives them pleasure. No more than that. It doesn't mean the man wants to put you in his bed."
Charles Bremner
AUSTRALIA
Six months ago a larrikin Australian mineworker woke after four hours' sleep, following eight at the bar, and saw a man in the mirror with a thousand-yard-glass stare.
Ian Green might finally have caught 40 winks, but none of those he gave to the girls the night before had got him a phone number. Ditto his mate, Brett – but they had a plan.
"We walked up to the shopping centre and we went, 'Righto, let's just approach 25 girls we don't know'," he says. "By the time we left we had phone numbers galore. We actually met up with two of them that night out in a club."
The 30-year-old health and safety adviser, in the macho state of Queensland, explains that the hangover has the same bracing effect as the brews that got him there – giving him that "what the hell" confidence.
Australian blokes may revel in a manly reputation and prefer – in the words of one comedian – to have their shirt ironed while it's on their back. But anecdotal evidence suggests that they would wilt in the presence of a wildflower if not for a little liquid courage.
"If you're sitting there at a barbecue, and you've got a beer, a girl's drinking the exact same drink, well then you've got something in common just to start up with," Ian says.
Jeff Cashen, of Sydney, says that most of his mates need a couple of drinks to up their swagger. But the singer-songwriter and emergency doctor says that now he's 35 years old, girls expect a more mature approach and he has studied the little black books of Neil Strauss, the American seduction artist.
"A couple of my friends have done a lot of reading on strategies. We've tried a lot of those strategies – in fact, more work than don't," he says.
One common strategy is noted by Katherine Feeney, an internet agony aunt. In this game plan, as one fella locks on to a female target, his "wingman" steps in to distract her friends with a little witty banter and, yes, a little more social lubrication. But there are some more redeeming features to the Australian – and British – male.
"There's a whole sort of larrikin spirit that you can't overlook and self-deprecating humour, which is fairly strong in Australian culture and it's accepted that that is a way to open up conversation," Katherine says. "In comparison with Poms, I have met a heap of English guys who are wittier, and that's a bit of a winner with Aussie girls, I think."
Sarah Miller, 22, of Mackay on the central coast of Queensland, agrees that confidence is the key to success in the dating game but that alcohol more often than not encourages a straight-up proposition – small talk not included.
Does she mind? "Not really, if they're hot it doesn't matter."
Paul Larter
Everything in one place… All new Windows Live!
Friday 21 December 2007
The Seduction Of Indifference, Again And Again And Again
By Gaither Stewart
20 December, 2007
Countercurrents.org
(Rome) Yesterday I ran into a poem I had read as a student in Germany written by the Luthern Pastor, Martin Niemöller, who broke with the Nazis in 1933 and became a symbol of the German resistance. His words prompted me to look more closely at the complex subject of indifference he speaks of. Niemöller wrote the following at war’s end in 1945:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
In my mind the subject of indifference is not a closed end affair. You don’t even need a password to enter this site. Most certainly I cannot relegate the matter to “oh, that, well, we’re all indifferent to many things in life.” If so it would imply “indifference to indifference,” which in my mind is located still another ring deeper in the Dantesque Inferno. In that respect; I hope that here, as Baudrillard writes, words will prove to be carriers of ideas and not the reverse.
Life Is Oh So Beautiful
Recently one-third of Italian TV viewers watched a 100-minute tour de force of a literary-political interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy delivered by comic philosopher Roberto Benigni (Remember the film, Life Is Beautiful!). At the point Benigni referred to the “indifference” of Dante’s characters in his Inferno, I ran for pen and paper.
Making notes on indifference, I have continued thinking about that grassroots activist in Asheville, North Carolina who warns that voting is just not enough to change things. As a growing number of others like her, she feels frustrated because of the widespread indifference to Power’s deviations. I have in mind the polls showing that over half of Americans oppose the war in Iraq, oppose how it is conducted and its costs to America, and some are even horrified by the slaughter of Iraqi people.
The other side of the coin is that, amazingly, nearly half the public either favors the war against Iraq or they just don’t care one way or the other. Those many millions of people display an inexplicable indifference to the reality of the suffering, indifference to war’s uselessness and to its criminal-terroristic nature.
Some writers have long dealt with that one aspect of indifference, the indifference that the strong feel toward the weak. In the end most concord that such indifference is frivolity and knavery and cowardice.
Categories of Indifference
It’s true that there are many kinds of indifference and many things to which we can be indifferent. Animals can be loving and attentive one moment and totally indifferent the next. Just watch a cat, after a few caresses it marches away triumphantly. Nature in general is indifferent. Medieval Europe was incredibly indifferent to the great Alpine chain—the magnificent geographical mountain divide of the continent. Especially the Papal State was indifferent to nature in general and to its former territories around Rome in particular.
Researching the word indifference I re-encountered Albert Camus’ notation of the universe’s “benign indifference” toward creation. Also my former professor Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz was fascinated by “the contradiction between man’s longing for good and the cold universe absolutely indifferent to any values. “If we put aside our humanity,” Milosz writes, “we realize that the world is neither good nor bad—it just is.”
The spark of human life in us differentiates us from nature, which, though neither good nor evil, doesn’t always seem neutral. But in human beings the battle between good and evil is eternal. From that point of view humanity is also in battle with nature, against its apparent meaninglessness. We humans instead search for meaning.
Therefore man is an alien creature in the universe because he cannot be genuinely indifferent to what is good and what is bad.
In that sense, the indifference of reasonable people to war seems inconceivable. In the same western generation that was obsessed enough with the Vietnam War to help bring it to an end, the indifference to the Middle East wars today seems impossible.
Back To Earth
This year Italy is marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alberto Moravia, a major novelist of the 20th century. Born to a family of the Rome bourgeoisie in 1907, Moravia published his most famous novel, The Age of Indifference, at age 22. That story shows the apathy of Rome bourgeois society during the same time that Fascism was taking root in the nation.
“All these people,” Moravia’s protagonist, Michele, thinks, “have something to live for, whereas I have nothing. If I don’t walk, I sit; it makes no difference.” Michele knows he should act but never succeeds in shaking off his inertia. All actions and situations are alike for him. He is indifferent to emerging Fascism as were the masses of Germans during the rise of Nazism.
Here one might shrug and say indifference today is so general that it is not worth reflection. What difference does it make? Nonetheless here are some examples.
Indifference means “no difference.” On a basic human level, the indifference of one person to the other in a dwindling love affair is emblematic of the terrible impact of indifference in any field at all. As French chansonnier Serge Gainsbourg sang of his love for Brigit Bardot: What does the weather matter, What matters the wind! Better your absence than your indifference. Or Gilbert Becaud’s words: Indifference kills with small blows.
For Indifference, as Martin Niemöller and most people of the murderous 20th century know, is the destroyer of whole societies. I have excerpted some lines from a speech on Indifference by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, delivered in the White House on April 12, 1999:
A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between … good and evil. Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue?
Of course, indifference can be tempting—more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims….In a way, to be indifferent to suffering is what makes the human being inhuman.
Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative.…Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor.
What Is the Alternative?
For me the opposite of indifference is involvement. It’s the search that leads to fulfillment, the extraordinary event we wait and hope for that interrupts the everyday flow of time. It is a kind of transcendence that points toward answers to questions like, ‘What am I as an individual?’ ‘What is my life all about?’ ‘Do I count?’
The answers to such questions however are forever misty and cloudy. We are aware—just barely aware—of that something hovering in the beyond, which at some rare times, for brief moments, seems within reach. It is something like longing for an impossible Utopia that we aspire to, most certainly the conviction that we are not neutral in the world.
However, that devil and prison of Indifference—and the indifference to indifference—excludes a priori the possibility of those high moments of existence that make life worth living.
Three Steps Back
So what, all these quotes and reflections about indifference! What does it mean today? What does it mean to me personally? Am I involved and committed just because I am aware of indifference? Does it even matter?
At this point I want to retrace my steps toward the heart of the subject at hand: indifference toward evil.
Late in life, the great Argentinean writer, Jorge Borges, denied he wrote for either an elite or the masses; he wrote for a circle of friends. This claim is familiar but suspect. His thesis that “there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition” is dangerous banter. Nobel Prize winner this year, Doris Lessing, said in an interview last October that she wrote for herself, for what interested her at the time. But her case is different from that of Borges, for she always dealt in ideas—anti-war for example.
Indifference toward evil! In 2002, I “covered” the G-8 conference in Genoa, a phony show, which ended with the murder of a real little man dressed in black. An Italian, from the suburbs of this port city, he called himself an Anarchist. The Big 8 labeled him an enemy of globalization, of the free market, an enemy of progress. While representatives of the rich world were barricaded inside the safe zone and served sumptuous meals by hordes of servants, they exchanged expensive gifts that were/are slaps in the face of the poverty they had gathered to combat.
Leaders of the world’s eight richest nations nonchalantly discussed poverty in Africa, issued casual sentences about the economies they do not control, imparted lessons they themselves do not observe, and finally budgeted the indifferent sum of 1.3 billion dollars to combat epidemics in Africa, a few pennies for each African dying of AIDS, a sum reportedly equal to one-eighth of the annual cost of only the tests for the US space shield project.
As inhuman as it is, indifference to suffering is bearable as long as it is invisible. We all experience that each day watching newscasts. Indifference to war is something else; were it not for the enthusiastic way humans participate in war we could call it inhuman.
Most people know of someone whose loved one died in US foreign wars for absurd reasons. But then time passes. Wounds heal. Indifference takes over.
Ignorant and deaf indifference is bad enough. But today, in Europe and the United States where information abounds, we have to call conscious indifference to war and injustice, and also its brother “indifference to indifference,” criminal and evil.
Here is an example of active indifference: the Chávez referendum in Venezuela. A former journalist acquaintance in Rome when he was the correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, today an editor and columnist of the New York Times, in his articles about Chávez on the eve of the referendum, was remarkably indifferent to what is really happening in Venezuela. A talented but overly ambitious journalist, he, like the newspaper he works for, is aware of but indifferent to the reasons that Venezuela and most of Latin America are striving for independence from the USA, whether its struggle is called “Socialism of the 21st Century” as in Venezuela, or “Agrarian Revolution” as in Bolivia.
Indifference! It doesn’t matter! Indifference appears in all places and at all times about every subject that has no direct, personal bearing on one’s own little life.
Indifference about global warming.
Indifference about national health care.
Indifference about poverty and the abyss between rich and poor.
Indifference to the value of labor and the working man.
Indifference about a society based on euphemisms and slogans.
Indifference about public corruption and crime.
Indifference about violence against women.
Indifference about arms controls.
Indifference about the government defrauding its citizens.
Indifference about the indifference granting the government license to defraud citizens.
Indifference about capital punishment.
Indifference about bombing civilians from the stratosphere.
Indifference about facts.
Indifference about a free press.
Indifference about indifference.
I made this list, sat back and examined it again and again, added one more indifference, deleted another, and turned a few words until I came to realize I had omitted the principle indifference: the indifference to evil itself that creates the things about which we are indifferent.
This rings complex but in fact it is not.
And I realized too that indifference is in fact often active indifference. It encourages indifference in others.
In a speech in 1908 Eugene Debs, the great Socialist trade unionist-activist, said more or less what Pastor Niemöller said in his poem a half century later: the indifferent ones do not see others. Theirs is a life of emptiness, devoid of any future. Debs recalled that thousands of years ago the question was asked: ''Am I my brother's keeper?''
Our society refuses to answer that question.
20 December, 2007
Countercurrents.org
(Rome) Yesterday I ran into a poem I had read as a student in Germany written by the Luthern Pastor, Martin Niemöller, who broke with the Nazis in 1933 and became a symbol of the German resistance. His words prompted me to look more closely at the complex subject of indifference he speaks of. Niemöller wrote the following at war’s end in 1945:
First they came for the Communists,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up,
because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time there was no one
left to speak up for me.
In my mind the subject of indifference is not a closed end affair. You don’t even need a password to enter this site. Most certainly I cannot relegate the matter to “oh, that, well, we’re all indifferent to many things in life.” If so it would imply “indifference to indifference,” which in my mind is located still another ring deeper in the Dantesque Inferno. In that respect; I hope that here, as Baudrillard writes, words will prove to be carriers of ideas and not the reverse.
Life Is Oh So Beautiful
Recently one-third of Italian TV viewers watched a 100-minute tour de force of a literary-political interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy delivered by comic philosopher Roberto Benigni (Remember the film, Life Is Beautiful!). At the point Benigni referred to the “indifference” of Dante’s characters in his Inferno, I ran for pen and paper.
Making notes on indifference, I have continued thinking about that grassroots activist in Asheville, North Carolina who warns that voting is just not enough to change things. As a growing number of others like her, she feels frustrated because of the widespread indifference to Power’s deviations. I have in mind the polls showing that over half of Americans oppose the war in Iraq, oppose how it is conducted and its costs to America, and some are even horrified by the slaughter of Iraqi people.
The other side of the coin is that, amazingly, nearly half the public either favors the war against Iraq or they just don’t care one way or the other. Those many millions of people display an inexplicable indifference to the reality of the suffering, indifference to war’s uselessness and to its criminal-terroristic nature.
Some writers have long dealt with that one aspect of indifference, the indifference that the strong feel toward the weak. In the end most concord that such indifference is frivolity and knavery and cowardice.
Categories of Indifference
It’s true that there are many kinds of indifference and many things to which we can be indifferent. Animals can be loving and attentive one moment and totally indifferent the next. Just watch a cat, after a few caresses it marches away triumphantly. Nature in general is indifferent. Medieval Europe was incredibly indifferent to the great Alpine chain—the magnificent geographical mountain divide of the continent. Especially the Papal State was indifferent to nature in general and to its former territories around Rome in particular.
Researching the word indifference I re-encountered Albert Camus’ notation of the universe’s “benign indifference” toward creation. Also my former professor Nobel poet Czeslaw Milosz was fascinated by “the contradiction between man’s longing for good and the cold universe absolutely indifferent to any values. “If we put aside our humanity,” Milosz writes, “we realize that the world is neither good nor bad—it just is.”
The spark of human life in us differentiates us from nature, which, though neither good nor evil, doesn’t always seem neutral. But in human beings the battle between good and evil is eternal. From that point of view humanity is also in battle with nature, against its apparent meaninglessness. We humans instead search for meaning.
Therefore man is an alien creature in the universe because he cannot be genuinely indifferent to what is good and what is bad.
In that sense, the indifference of reasonable people to war seems inconceivable. In the same western generation that was obsessed enough with the Vietnam War to help bring it to an end, the indifference to the Middle East wars today seems impossible.
Back To Earth
This year Italy is marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alberto Moravia, a major novelist of the 20th century. Born to a family of the Rome bourgeoisie in 1907, Moravia published his most famous novel, The Age of Indifference, at age 22. That story shows the apathy of Rome bourgeois society during the same time that Fascism was taking root in the nation.
“All these people,” Moravia’s protagonist, Michele, thinks, “have something to live for, whereas I have nothing. If I don’t walk, I sit; it makes no difference.” Michele knows he should act but never succeeds in shaking off his inertia. All actions and situations are alike for him. He is indifferent to emerging Fascism as were the masses of Germans during the rise of Nazism.
Here one might shrug and say indifference today is so general that it is not worth reflection. What difference does it make? Nonetheless here are some examples.
Indifference means “no difference.” On a basic human level, the indifference of one person to the other in a dwindling love affair is emblematic of the terrible impact of indifference in any field at all. As French chansonnier Serge Gainsbourg sang of his love for Brigit Bardot: What does the weather matter, What matters the wind! Better your absence than your indifference. Or Gilbert Becaud’s words: Indifference kills with small blows.
For Indifference, as Martin Niemöller and most people of the murderous 20th century know, is the destroyer of whole societies. I have excerpted some lines from a speech on Indifference by Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel, delivered in the White House on April 12, 1999:
A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between … good and evil. Is there a philosophy of indifference conceivable? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue?
Of course, indifference can be tempting—more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims….In a way, to be indifferent to suffering is what makes the human being inhuman.
Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative.…Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor.
What Is the Alternative?
For me the opposite of indifference is involvement. It’s the search that leads to fulfillment, the extraordinary event we wait and hope for that interrupts the everyday flow of time. It is a kind of transcendence that points toward answers to questions like, ‘What am I as an individual?’ ‘What is my life all about?’ ‘Do I count?’
The answers to such questions however are forever misty and cloudy. We are aware—just barely aware—of that something hovering in the beyond, which at some rare times, for brief moments, seems within reach. It is something like longing for an impossible Utopia that we aspire to, most certainly the conviction that we are not neutral in the world.
However, that devil and prison of Indifference—and the indifference to indifference—excludes a priori the possibility of those high moments of existence that make life worth living.
Three Steps Back
So what, all these quotes and reflections about indifference! What does it mean today? What does it mean to me personally? Am I involved and committed just because I am aware of indifference? Does it even matter?
At this point I want to retrace my steps toward the heart of the subject at hand: indifference toward evil.
Late in life, the great Argentinean writer, Jorge Borges, denied he wrote for either an elite or the masses; he wrote for a circle of friends. This claim is familiar but suspect. His thesis that “there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition” is dangerous banter. Nobel Prize winner this year, Doris Lessing, said in an interview last October that she wrote for herself, for what interested her at the time. But her case is different from that of Borges, for she always dealt in ideas—anti-war for example.
Indifference toward evil! In 2002, I “covered” the G-8 conference in Genoa, a phony show, which ended with the murder of a real little man dressed in black. An Italian, from the suburbs of this port city, he called himself an Anarchist. The Big 8 labeled him an enemy of globalization, of the free market, an enemy of progress. While representatives of the rich world were barricaded inside the safe zone and served sumptuous meals by hordes of servants, they exchanged expensive gifts that were/are slaps in the face of the poverty they had gathered to combat.
Leaders of the world’s eight richest nations nonchalantly discussed poverty in Africa, issued casual sentences about the economies they do not control, imparted lessons they themselves do not observe, and finally budgeted the indifferent sum of 1.3 billion dollars to combat epidemics in Africa, a few pennies for each African dying of AIDS, a sum reportedly equal to one-eighth of the annual cost of only the tests for the US space shield project.
As inhuman as it is, indifference to suffering is bearable as long as it is invisible. We all experience that each day watching newscasts. Indifference to war is something else; were it not for the enthusiastic way humans participate in war we could call it inhuman.
Most people know of someone whose loved one died in US foreign wars for absurd reasons. But then time passes. Wounds heal. Indifference takes over.
Ignorant and deaf indifference is bad enough. But today, in Europe and the United States where information abounds, we have to call conscious indifference to war and injustice, and also its brother “indifference to indifference,” criminal and evil.
Here is an example of active indifference: the Chávez referendum in Venezuela. A former journalist acquaintance in Rome when he was the correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, today an editor and columnist of the New York Times, in his articles about Chávez on the eve of the referendum, was remarkably indifferent to what is really happening in Venezuela. A talented but overly ambitious journalist, he, like the newspaper he works for, is aware of but indifferent to the reasons that Venezuela and most of Latin America are striving for independence from the USA, whether its struggle is called “Socialism of the 21st Century” as in Venezuela, or “Agrarian Revolution” as in Bolivia.
Indifference! It doesn’t matter! Indifference appears in all places and at all times about every subject that has no direct, personal bearing on one’s own little life.
Indifference about global warming.
Indifference about national health care.
Indifference about poverty and the abyss between rich and poor.
Indifference to the value of labor and the working man.
Indifference about a society based on euphemisms and slogans.
Indifference about public corruption and crime.
Indifference about violence against women.
Indifference about arms controls.
Indifference about the government defrauding its citizens.
Indifference about the indifference granting the government license to defraud citizens.
Indifference about capital punishment.
Indifference about bombing civilians from the stratosphere.
Indifference about facts.
Indifference about a free press.
Indifference about indifference.
I made this list, sat back and examined it again and again, added one more indifference, deleted another, and turned a few words until I came to realize I had omitted the principle indifference: the indifference to evil itself that creates the things about which we are indifferent.
This rings complex but in fact it is not.
And I realized too that indifference is in fact often active indifference. It encourages indifference in others.
In a speech in 1908 Eugene Debs, the great Socialist trade unionist-activist, said more or less what Pastor Niemöller said in his poem a half century later: the indifferent ones do not see others. Theirs is a life of emptiness, devoid of any future. Debs recalled that thousands of years ago the question was asked: ''Am I my brother's keeper?''
Our society refuses to answer that question.
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