not so delighted

One last post for today. I've also been thinking about what you said here:

At the end of the service, they have a tradition I like a lot: the preacher and deacons get into a receiving line, and the congregation goes down to the front, greets those already there, and then each person joins the line themselves, so that by the end, every single person has greeted every other. There were a couple of people in the congregation who greeted me only perfunctorily, perhaps not so delighted I was there, and it got me to thinking: if I were a black person, I’m not sure I would want to see my white self in my church. If I were a child of slavery and sharecropping and lynchings and all that, I’m not sure how much loving-kindness and openheartedness I would be ready to muster for every white stranger who walks in the door.

I've thought about this a lot too and, once again, it seems to me connected with Raymond Williams' idea of 'unlearning'. It is possible to listen to the criticism that we are 'determined to lay our hands on life and force it into our own image' but then think that the solution is to rush out and 'learn from the oppressed'. Part of the unlearning is, I think, to understand what it means not always to be welcome - not always to be seen as the 'nice person' that one is in one's own mind.

Now that's got me thinking about Mark Ravenhill's 'epic cycle of short plays', Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat, but I think that's enough for today.

unlearning

All right, maybe I *will* try to write something more substantive in response to what you said about the discussion at the B.B. King museum. Your comments reminded me strongly of something the great left-wing scholar and critic, Raymond Williams, wrote at the end of his book Culture and Society, which was first published in 1958. This is the passage I am thinking of:

A knot is tied, that has come near to strangling our whole common life, in this century. We live in almost overwhelming danger, at a peak of our apparent control. We react to the danger by attempting to take control, yet still we have to unlearn, as the price of survival, the inherent dominative mode. The struggle for democracy is the pattern of this revaluation, yet much that passes as democratic is allied, in spirit, with the practice of its open enemies. It is as if, in fear or vision, we are now all determined to lay our hands on life and force it into our own image and it is then no good to dispute on the merits of rival images. This is a real barrier in the mind, which at times it seems almost impossible to break down: a refusal to accept the creative capacities of life; a determination to limit and restrict the channels of growth; a habit of thinking, indeed, that the future has now to be determined by some ordinance in our own minds. We project our old images into the future, and take hold of ourselves and others to force energy toward that substantiation. We do this as conservatives, trying to prolong old forms; we do this as socialists, trying to prescribe the new man.

I think this relates quite closely to what you said in your post in the sense that the ideas circulating in liberal circles of influence - let's say 'liberal' rather than 'socialist' here - are not that different from the ideas circulating in conservative circles of influence to the extent that both are articulated with the goal of 'laying hands on life and forcing it into our own image'. Yet we - the privileged of this world - barely notice this fact. And this is why some 'unlearning' is called for. As you imply, the liberal intelligentsia often know remarkably little about the people whose interests are allegedly asserted in the drive to 'prescribe the new man', and the gesture of 'demanding an old man to change his vocabulary' risks being nothing more than an empty gesture. To recognise that important stuff is happening elsewhere requires an act of unlearning on our part. (I might as well come out and say 'our' not 'their'.) We have learned that we are at the centre of things. Somehow we need to learn that we are not.