On Olives and Sake

I have not written in a very long time. The only interruption in this long hiatus came as a result of a (very) short-lived resurgence of hope. And a very misguided one at that. But I am who I am, I cling to the straws in face of reason.

Since then, the popular movement for freedom in Syria has turned into a crisis. Its central theme is no longer freedom, or reform, nor is its conclusion guaranteed within these elements. It has turned into a crisis of a Watan (homeland), a crisis on every level that used to define this place. A crisis of the social, the political, and down to the very personal.

Despite the hope, it is plainly clear now that no one in the country or beyond has the kind, or form, of power needed to find, let alone, force, a solution. However, there should be no mistake of who is the sole and direct responsible party for this. After almost 3 months, the moral prerogative was/is clear to see, and I will not delve further into that discussion. The reality, though, hardly ever corresponds to our moral dispositions. Certainly never in the context of monumental, and traumatic changes.

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I told a dear friend yesterday that it is at times like this, not ones of personal tragedy, that I deeply wished there were a God. At least, I wished I believed in such a God. I wished, nay, longed, for a salvation from this cruel and devastating reality that is my own freedom. The freedom to make one’s own choices, and take absolute responsibility for them, and their consequences. But there isn’t such salvation, and I don’t believe in God.

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What we have in essence is the implosion of these last 40 years. 40 years of a process of systematic dismantlement of society as an entity formed by the positive dynamics of power (be it, progress, war, production, etc.), into smaller ones defined by a zero-sum of negative power (interdiction, staleness, silence, etc.). 40 years of enforced alienation over a society that was already, at its infancy, a very ill one.

Marxist thought holds that capitalist systems, by their very nature, rather than by design or intent, apply the proletariate to the forms of suffering and alienation that will bring about their demise. A similar analogy could be made here. The raison d’etre of the Baathist rule in Syria (Baathi, is no longer used in the ideological sense, but rather in the historical one, and to differentiate it from other forms of totalitarianism) was certainly not the destruction of the social dynamics of the state, rather the reshaping of these dynamics in order to preserve a favorable status quo in time and space. But nevertheless, the new dynamics that were established brought, within them, the demise and eventual implosion of this status quo. That much is clear.

While the implosion of a capitalist society under the slow (or explosive) advance of the proletariate, will bring about, in the short term, a sort of inversion within the same society, the implosion we’re witnessing now will only burn the once-fragile competing clay entities into hard stone. The fire raging in Syria is much like the fires that raged through the palace cultures of the Bronze Age, and left us with the fire-hardened clay tablets that provide the only historical evidence of that period.

Whether we (or anyone, really) can stop that fire, before society is completely ossified along its fault lines, or not, is a question I should leave to the better informed amongst us. But to venture a little into the realm of probabilities, I personally do not think so. Barring, of course, another traumatic implosion within the four active principles at this stage (namely, the regime, the protestors, the silent observant majority and the outside world). None of these elements seems vulnerable, at this stage, for such a possibility.

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Needless to say, I am not a historian, nor a political or a social scientist, and these are but my own personal readings on the situation. I do not write them here because I claim any objective quality to them, rather the exact opposite. They are here because they reflect the moral choices I have made, and how and why they came about. They can be interpreted, based on what will come about in the future, as either an admission or an escape.

Since March, I have asked myself many times, what is it that I have left in that place? Why is it that someone who has admitted many a time to his complete disillusionment, and alienation from that place and its people, why is it that he feels, so much more than any other time, as part of this present, and the future to come? How has this not completely burned down any dogmatic and childish residue of this place inside of me?

The only rational answer I could find (as of yet) is one of —dangerous, one has to say— curiosity. For better or for worse, I have a chance to be part of this history for the first time in my short life, and for all I know, that chance may never come again.

These are excerpts from a lecture by Michel Foucault titled, “The Art of Telling the Truth” (1983). In this lecture he discusses several themes appearing in Emanuel Kant’s texts, “What is Enlightenment?” (1784) and “The Conflict of the Faculties” (1798), including Kant’s ideas on the constant progress of mankind, and the signs that can prove such a disposition.

I chose these excerpts, because they might help us realize what an unmistakably historic moment we live in right now. The trauma of the Revolution, and the fear of what’s next, are so enormous as to completely blind us to this fact. These might be sad times, but they are great ones as well. Our collective memory as the post-Naksa generation is taking its first real shock and whatever the outcome may be, we will never be the same again, as people.

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… A sign of what? A sign of the existence of a cause, of a permanent cause, which, throughout history itself, has guided men on the way of progress. A constant cause that must be shown to have acted in the past, acts now, and will act in the future. Consequently, the event that will be a sign: rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. It must be a sign that shows that it has always been like that (the rememorative sign), a sign that shows that things are also taking place now (the demonstrative sign), and a sign that shows that it will always happen like that (the prognostic sign). In this way we can be sure that the cause that makes progress possible has not just acted at a particular moment, but that it guarantees a general tendency of mankind as a whole to move in the direction of progress. That is the question: “Is there around us an event that is rememorative, demonstrative, and prognostic of a permanent progress that affects mankind as a whole?”

You have probably guessed the answer that Kant gives; but I would like to read to you the passage in which he introduces the Revolution as an event that has the value of a sign. “Do not expect this event,” he writes at the beginning of paragraph VI, “to consist of noble gestures or great crimes committed by men, as a result of which that which was great among men is made small, or that which was small, made great, nor of gleaming ancient buildings that disappear as if by magic while others rise, in a sense, from the bowels of the earth to take their place. No, it is nothing like that.”

… One cannot carry out this analysis of our own present in those meaningful values without embarking on a decipherment that will allow us to give to what, apparently, is without meaning and value, the important meaning and value we are looking for. Now what is this event that is not a “great” event? There is obviously a paradox in saying that the Revolution is not a major event. Is this not the very example of an event that overthrows, that makes what was great small and what was small great, and which swallows up the apparently secure structures of society and states? Now, for Kant, it is not this aspect of the Revolution that is meaningful. What constitutes the event that possesses a rememorative, demonstrative, and prognostic value is not the revolutionary drama itself, not the revolutionary exploits, or the gesticulation that accompanies it. What is meaningful is the way in which it was welcomed all around by spectators who did not take part in it, but who observed it, attended it, and, for better or for worse, were carried away by it. It is not the revolutionary upheaval that constitutes the proof of progress; because, firstly, it merely inverts things, and secondly, because if one could carry out the Revolution again, one might not do so. … It is not then the revolutionary process that is important, it does not matter whether it succeeds or fails; this is nothing to do with progress, or at least with the sign of progress we are looking for.

… On the other hand, what is meaningful and what is to constitute the sign of progress is that, around the Revolution, there is, says Kant, “a sympathy of aspiration bordering on enthusiasm.” What is important in the Revolution is not the Revolution itself, but what takes place in the heads of those who do not make it or, in any case, who are not its principal actors; it is the relationship that they themselves have with that Revolution of which they are not the active agents. The enthusiasm for the Revolution is a sign, according to Kant, of a moral disposition in mankind. This disposition is permanently manifested in two ways: firstly, in the right possessed by all peoples to give themselves the political constitution that suits them and, secondly, in the principle, in accordance with law and morality, of a political constitution so framed that it avoids, by reason of its very principles, all offensive war.

Michel Foucault, “The Art of Telling the Truth” (1983)