<underfire> on compassion

[Michael H Goldhaber]

Bracha,

I am sure you mean well, but I'm sorry to say that what you say is  
nonsense, and in its context dangerously so.

Peace and compassion are two  entirely different things. They can  
come together, but often they don't. France and Germany have gone to  
war many times, yet for the past sixty years they have been at peace,  
and that peace shows every sign of holding a lot longer. Is that  
because of compassion? Hardly. It is much more because each side  
realizes peace is a much better way to live, for purely practical  
reasons. In that context, some compassionate bonds surely form, but  
they are not required.

You remind me of my kindly aunt in Israel. After about a decade of  
trying , I finally convinced her that Israel was treating  
Palestinians badly. That was thirty years ago. She since died, and  
now one of her sons constantly bombards me with anti-Palestinian  
propaganda. I am sure some on each side can learn to listen to the  
other side compassionately, but to see such efforts as a necessary  
means to bring an end to fighting seems to me very clearly a recipe  
for prolonging the conflict indefinitely.

Sometimes, too, compassion with victims of war, violence or  
injustice, actually leads people to sanction or adopt more violence  
on their behalf. Often this is done out of a sense of justice, it  
being forgotten that war itself is one of the worst injustices. A few  
saintly people might sacrifice their own lives in the cause of peace,  
but for most, peace only comes because they put such a high value on  
their own lives that they are unwilling to risk them for some  
symbolic cause.

To bring about peace,  we need to find ways to make life on both  
sides very much worth living. That is mostly not so hard. The vast  
majority everywhere will eagerly cling to life if they can, even  
under conditions that to us  in the west seem very bad. A few, with  
greater pride perhaps,  clearly require more. They can only be  
satisfied with living more fully. And those who want peace should  
strive to make that possible, and certainly not to deny the such  
opportunites at every turn. I think Wolfgang is right, in his earlier  
post, that peace is not an act. But there are acts that would serve.  
“Make love not war,” said demonstrators in the 60’s, pointing to a  
potent act that can replace violence. Other such possible acts are  
celebrating, making art, reconstructing or just plain constructing,  
conversing, playing games, dancing, curing, healing, exploring,  
researching, imagining, living with  all the richness that the world  
now makes possible etc.

While it is true, in other words, that caputring the hearts of allthe  
combatants via compassion would end war, am or elikely and feasible  
step is to capture their minds, intelligence, and self-interest. (We  
who observe from a greater distance are more easily captured by  
compassion, because we are not so fully invested in the anger and  
ambition that gives rise to violence. But we must translate our  
compassion into a different language if we expect to be successful  
with the combatants themselves, or at least with many of them.  
Sometimes, also, we must simply try to say, and mean, "we will not  
let you destroy the world for your petty fight.")

Finally, if some form of competition is required, it is perhaps worth  
recalling how the 1960’s “race” to the Moon was characterized: “The  
moral equivalent of war” — a somewhat strange notion, unless you take  
it to mean “the equivalent of war except that it is moral, which war  
is not.” That would include space races, and other kinds of  
international races, but if nations lose value through the decline of  
borders and the loss of power of nation-state governments, the  
competition must be other.


Best,


Michael H. Goldhaber


On Nov 11, 2006, at 3:50 PM, bracha L. Ettinger wrote:

>
> Kate, Sarah, Ryan, Wolfgang, Mary, Allan, Jordan, dear friends,
>
> The originary event of peace is compassion.
> Peace is a fragile encounter-eventing, an ever re-co-created and co- 
> re-created fragile and fragilizing encounter-event, which I can  
> articulate only in terms of what I have named the matrixial  
> borderspace, a paradigm engendered from, with and within particular  
> epistemological parameters that I have developed and elaborated  
> during some 21 years of constant theoretical writing intertwined  
> with-in psychoanalytic practice and artistic practice.
> In a matrixial sphere, the bending of the aesthetical toward the  
> ethical and of the ethical toward the aesthetical is awakened by  
> artworking and healing that resonate the originary aesthetical com- 
> passion, co-response-ability and wit(h)nessing in and by which pre- 
> subjective primary compassion is already manifested. The pre- 
> subject's compassion and fascinance informs its own emergence with- 
> in a co-birthing (co-naissance) of trans-subjective entities— 
> composed of I(s) and non-I(s)—by way of affective and trans-sensed  
> knowledge. Trans-subjective co-response-ability, inaugurated by and  
> in the primordial matrixial encounter-event—where pre-maternal  
> hospitality, empathy and responsibility encounters prenatal pre- 
> mature response-ability, compassion and fascinance—and inaugurated  
> at the same time also by and in interconnectedness in self- 
> relinquishment and wit(h)nessing in awe, is the primary psycho- 
> aesthetical and psycho-ethical basis upon which creativity and  
> ethical potentiality can evolve all throughout life with-in new  
> matrixial clusters. " (Gorge(l), pp.11-13. )
>
> I just came back from a Arabs/Jews/Palestinians/Israelis peaceful  
> demonstration at the Erez Crossing Gate between Israel and Gaza.  
> There will be a demonstration in Tel Aviv on the 2 of December.
> Bracha
>

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