The imperfections of man and the limits of reason

I had an attack of vertigo yesterday ~ you know, suddenly the room appears to spin around and you loose balance. It's disconcerting and potentially dangerous. I managed to drop down before I hit the floor and when I got up it happened again. Thankfully the episode didn't last long and the doctor told me that my blocked ears caused the vertigo. If I took Wilhelm Reich's approach I might say there was something I didn't want to hear. I think he advocated that the external body reflects an inner psychology, for instance, a man who is literally burdened by his life, tends to walk with a hunched back. Anyway, I'm totally unaware of what I may not want to hear, but am interested in the fact that the University of Leeds will launch the Histories of Violence website on 11 September, 2011 There are some amazing quotes on the site from some of the greatest thinkers of our time that give pause for thought:

The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting. This suffering demands the continued existence of art even as it prohibits it. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice

Theodore Adorno

The unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust is the gnawing suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration, more than a deviation from an otherwise straight path of progress

Zygmunt Bauman

The twentieth century, industrial scale killing has been practiced in the belief that the survivors will live in a better world than has ever existed

John Gray

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened – that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death

George Orwell

Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter

Michel Foucault

Make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason

Barack Obama

Together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible in-distinction

Giorgio Agamben

The worst, the cruelest, the most human violence has been unleashed against living beings, beasts or humans, and humans in particular who precisely were not accorded the dignity of being fellows

Jacques Derrida

The abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting. This suffering demands the continued existence of art even as it prohibits it. It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice

Theodore Adorno

We are a society vigilant about evil and that's probably because we agree in full or in part with the sentiments expressed by these thinkers. We know what humans have done in the past and will continue to do to each other. We understand the nature and extent of our depravity & cruelty and although we will not tolerate evil deeds by others we have to admit that on some level and given the right circumstances we might behave in exactly the same ways ourselves. I've written little about evil in my life and have difficulty in separating it from  its binary opposite. For evil in one instance may be perceived as good in another.  I feel, as many others might, that all we can do is observe. According to Agamben we are born as bare life (bodies) that are transformed by the State into good life - that is, we become inculcated into politics and morality. But some people whilst still living, are reduced to bare life - their rights removed from them and those who kill them have impunity, because as bare life these people are considered non-human and evil. I watch with horror at the thousands of people who have already died in the Libyan war and I consider the way we in Australia are treating refugees and asylum seekers, all appear to be reduced to this status of non-human, just bare life, without rights, without sovereignty. And, amidst this world which appears to be always spinning out of control we moved towards 11 September, and in Barack Obama's words to a 'recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason'.