The Sad Ghosts of Hispaniola, Part Two: The Haunting of Eros

Tory philosopher George Grant knew that there was only one way for the human heart to lift itself into the heights of Platonic Eros—that pure, disinterested, universal love. Grant insisted that, in order to start that long and often painful journey, we must always begin selfishly—by loving our own. Our own. That has always sounded so vicious to me, so cold. And I’ve always been slightly ashamed, on behalf of my species, of the undeniable truth of it.

The force of Grant’s certainty has bound my thoughts and dragged them into some of the foggier moor lands of the human experience lately. As I read the tragic accounts of the Haitian catastrophe, I wonder which kind of death touches us more painfully: incalculably massive losses suffered far away by strangers, or the single loss of someone close and dear?

The question asked, we feel the answer even before knowing it—an answer as horrifying as it is inexorable. We may even defer the dark admission by gently touching it from a distance with a question. Think of someone you love, someone whose breath and being have poured themselves into your blood, someone at the thought of whom you feel the air thinning and sweetening. How many Haitians would need to die before you felt their loss as heavily as you would feel the loss of that one person? A hundred? A thousand? Thousands of thousands? More than those, and then countless more. Let millions of strangers die—let their bloated bodies be piled in front of your very eyes—and, while your loved one lives, you shall feel no loss that you cannot negotiate, manage and eventually (perhaps immediately) forget.

Love is what attaches us to others and gives them significance, but love magnifies what it touches so absolutely that it makes us indifferent to those who languish outside its arbitrary jurisdiction. There is a cruel, capricious mystery in this. It isn’t fair; it isn’t right; it isn’t reasonable; it just happens. And no mortality statistic can ever be sufficiently cataclysmic to grieve us so long as that person whose smile we cannot live without is safe. Only by imaginatively placing that person in the midst of the tragedy can we turn it into something real. Only when we imagine that indispensable person staggering—bleeding, starving and weeping—through the streets of Port-au-Prince and feel the vertiginous sickness that comes of watching helplessly as a loved one suffers—only then is the weight of Haiti’s calamity made heavy for us. Only then are we with the Haitians, and only then do we feel with them (and savour the literal meaning of “compassion”).

To value human life as a whole, we must love strangers. To love strangers, we must seed our small, selfish loves with what we most keenly fear: we must put those we love most passionately at hypothetical risk and feel the sting of their imminent loss. The value of life cannot be comprehended in the abstract, as an inanimate concept. It requires a living incarnation, and that incarnation must be loved and must be vulnerable: that is the way in which “love is the law” of all healthy communities.

They who are unable or unwilling to place what they most cherish on the pyre (on the pyre of the spirit, at least) do not truly dwell within the communities to which they pretend to belong. They can barely claim to be human at all.

Some Improving Reading: George Grant on the Nihilism of "Values"

I came across the passage found below in David Cayley's George Grant In Conversation a few days ago. In it, Grant asserts that it was Nietzsche who inaugurated the use of "value" as an ethical concept, in a peculiarly modern evisceration of what had been the core of the Western ethos--the "Good".

Later, Grant goes on to explain how amusing it is that so many who believe themselves conservative (i.e. the defenders of "values") are utterly unaware that they are using an ethical grammar invented by an ideological arch-enemy--the man who stands most firmly (even more firmly than Marx) for everything they hate. As you know, I consider "conservatives" opposed, not just linguistically but philosophically, to most of what's been best in the Western tradition. I coined a term, "Steynian", to describe this phenomenon.

I confess that I simply fail to see how the ethical premises of anything that spews out of Ann Coulter's mouth can be extracted from the Sermon on the Mount, The Republic, or the Reflections of the Revolution in France. I will say, though, that, in the art of ingeniously employing shameless casuistry to contort arrant solecisms until they attain a marginal plausibility in the eyes of precocious undergraduates (and inattentive adults), free-market fundamentalists and utopian libertarians have no peer.

Anyways, I think Grant's explication of the concept of "values" is apposite to a society that builds its communities around Home Depots rather than churches. I am particularly interested in Grant's last sentence. It has never seemed coincidental to me that the post-war, U.S.-dominated world over which the grammar of "values" has triumphed has endured the most anti-intellectual era since the beginning of the Dark Ages (actually, that's not entirely fair: druids, scops and bards likely enjoyed the esteem of Celts, Angles, and Saxons on a scale far grander than our own thinkers have had cause to expect over the last few generations). Here goes:

It seems to me that Nietzsche is clearly saying there are no inherent purposes in the world. What people previously meant by "good" was what anything was fitted for: a horse as good if it could run fast or pull. "Good" was what we were fitted for, or what we are fitted for. That implies purpose...Nietzsche no longer believes that there are these purposes; the purposes have been destroyed. He wants a new language to express how we decide what we should do, and therefore he substitutes for the language of good (what we are fitted for), the language of "value".

Nobody has ever been able to tell me what a "value" is...It seems to me an obscuring language for morality once the idea of purpose has been destroyed, and that's why it is so widespread in North America--everybody talks about "our values"...Clergymen talk of values. Everybody talks about values, night and day, when they're trying to make pious, secular sermons; and yet it comes from the greatest enemy of all this, Nietzsche. The language of value is above all the language of Nietzsche. It is what is left once you have eliminated the idea that there are purposes that intrinsically belong to Being...The ancients called thinking a good because it belongs to human beings to think--that is their nature.