The Temptation Towards Punitive Asceticism

I don't know if I can demonstrate sufficiently that the lot of us come from some culture or community in force, or at least a recognizable subculture, that we emerge into our individual variations of adult social awareness in part by recognizing that greater culture to which we, like it or not, belong. We identify the experience of self because we experience others, others who came before us, who formed some aspects of us, and not always nicely.

I can state this premise, speak it, put it into print.

But I'm not sure that this medium provides the best venue for demonstration. Anyway, Donne wrote it far better than I, "No man is an island."

With that limitation in mind, and accepting the consequences of it, I recently engaged in a debate with someone whose goals I share but who promotes methods with frankly give me cause for concern. An unfriendly debate, in all honesty, and so I won't link directly to it, because I do not wish to tar the author's premise with my a priori judgment of it.

I don't wish to expose the author's argument by way of my biases.

What troubled me during the exchange, and what troubles me still, I can reduce for brevity to: the will to punish.

*

We come to awareness within the confines of society. As mammals, we need other people - if only in the most extraordinary case, to survive infancy and early childhood. To develop language, to understand the cues of facial and body comminication, to interact with others, to complete any number of tasks, we need other people.

We inherit the skills and techniques developed over time, and ages, from people who have lived and died before us. That inheritance does not occur passively, like eye color. Some one or many others must teach us. Must teach at us, at a minimum, how to learn.

I know shared memory and exosomatic learning started somewhere, anthropologically distant from this present moment, within the known and unknown datum of our shared history. Reduced to zero, culture might start again. It also might not, though I'd wager hard and often on the tendency towards shared memory.

Whatever the origins, nearly every person who has the capacity to read and understand these words on the screen has come to some awareness within the net of culture, within a community of shared premises and memory.

And yet, even as inheritors of it, still sharing the languages and structures of thought, some of us have come to assume an existence - a standing out - which opposes the culture in which we live.

We can with little effort identify a number of those internally contained but nonetheless opposed sets of positions: feminism, black power, socialism, anarchism, communism, mutualism, indigenous awareness, and the host of more personal, more immediate rejections of the community in force, or aspects of it (as well as the many I simply have not named).

Still members, by that inheritance, of the society at large, still shaped by its structures, its premises, its arrangements of exchange and power - we have come from varying perspectives and uncommon experiences to inhabit similar positions within or against that predominant social arrangment.

Shaped by it, we reject it.

Which brings me back to that original and hostile discussion, mentioned above.

The two of us* agreed that the existing social structure promoted oppression. We both agreed that the consequences of the normal operation of these social arrangements resulted in daily reprehensible abuses of power, producing violent pornography, rape, the vast superstructure of patriarchy and any number of (for the purposes of that debate) unnamed violations of life and flesh.

I don't want to suggest that I had the superior position, and he the inferior. I don't believe that, one bit.

I just want to note that his prescription seemed to embody the errors of the society which he himself had come to reject.

His solution, at least as I read it, depends upon the repression of repression, on the punishment of punishers, on the suppression of punitive and crippling social arrangements (or the symptoms of them) by the creation of crippling and punitive social arrangements, on the crippling of cripplers.

As another interlocutor remarked, by the construction of an "Incorruptible Censor Board" tasked with dealing with the problems and persons who currently benefit from violent pornography, the oppression of women, et cetera.

A position which I believe depends on a very specific reaction to power: revolutionary asceticism. In rejecting patriarchy, he has come to embrace a view of the world which depends on withdrawal from contact with the sin of its possessors, a sin which righteous people must expurgate from the world, by repression and punishment, or else condemn themselves and others to the continuation of degradation.

That this did not work for the Inquisition, did not work for the early Christian ascetics, did not work for Augustine or Bernard of Clairvaux, does not work for Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, does not work for Hindutva zealots in India, does not work for Christian terrorists in India, did not work for Bolsheviks or Maoists, did not work for fascists, falangists or conservative oppressors...

...well, perhaps you get my point.

A number of us have chosen, together and alone, to stand against the current social situation. Our reasons vary. Our objectives and goals differ. Our perspectives come and go.

But...

The moment we decide to embrace punishment, the will to punish and the purity of ascetic withdrawal** as the best way to oppose the totalizing effects of the current society, we set ourselves up (I believe) as future oppressors.

Our rejection of this destructive society, by heading down that path, becomes its latest validation. And a lasting one.

I don't know if the opposition to the abuse of power itself necessarily contains the seeds of future power. I don't know if the rejection of one society, to have any chance of success, requires the enforcement of another.

I don't know if the implied argument - that freedom requires the repression of repression - provides the best ground for opposing oppression.

I just don't know.

But, it seems to me that this will to punish, this temptation to use repression to address repression negates the very act of standing out against, in the first.

That by accepting as valid the urge to totalize society and one's opponents, believing that answering harm or the possibility of harm requires repression, it appears that those who do so undermine their original rejection of harmful society, itself.

I don't know. I might just not get it...








* - The debate involved more than one party. For the purposes of this post, I treat only with the exchange between he and I.

** - I don't intend a criticism of withdrawing from corrosive power arrangements.