Affliction
I am surrounded by what might be termed the consumer society, the convenience and throwaway society, in short, a wasteful society, a society of ever more polluted air, water and soil and ever larger landfills; for many, the scarcity and pollution of time, also. Meanwhile, amusements and distractions also increase; they are more sophisticated and subtle, more varied and inviting, something to appeal to every taste. People appear to be ever more anesthetized, bamboozled, blinded by the glitter, addicted to images and promises, the idols and fetishes provided by the hucksters. Many experience great difficulty in seeing what is at bottom an all-embracing technological milieu. Hence, they cannot recognize the pervasive grotesqueries and horrors on every side. How understand what happens in the affluent world? How strike through the seeming indifference and evident busyness to touch my heart, to touch someone else's heart? The seriousness of what all of us confront requires extreme action. Therefore, I turned to Simone Weil (+1943), a genius who denied self to the point of death when only thirty-four years old. But each time I pick up her writing or reflect on her life I hesitate: How dare approach this expression of truth? Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of her life and thought is her experience of affliction (le malheur). Thinking about it, however, I saw her notion of affliction anew. What did she say about the word?
She believed that all three elements are needed that genuine affliction devastate someone. Although her experiential insights into the accursed extremity of affliction appeared unintelligible to me personally, a phrase she wrote stopped me: ". . . in a time such as ours . . . affliction is hanging over us . . . " (Waiting, p. 121) The general milieu in which relatively affluent people live is worse today than when Simone Well wrote more than fifty years ago. True, the specific causes of any one person's experience of affliction are most probably unknowable. She believed that "Slavery as practiced by ancient Rome is only an extreme form of affliction. (Waiting, p. 117) Today slavery is rampant for, as Ivan Illich wrote: "In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy" (Tools for Conviviality, 1973). As I noted above, we live in a consumer society. Perhaps there are degrees of affliction, of addiction, of slavery. All of us may suffer some kind of affliction. Looking at myself and those around me, I can examine affliction to unravel what is going on. Perhaps I'll understand why we live in a time beyond politics, that politics has become, literally, irrelevant. Affliction is not an experience confined to persons living in the heights of sanctity, like Simone Weil. Rather, affliction may be a living metaphor that touches nearly all of us. But unrelieved misery is not the totality. Simone Well points out that:
She also says that:
Because I accept the above as true I cannot go along with the status quo; I cannot obey and will not conform; I must think of how to resist. Since consumption—of nature, of artifacts or things, of the other, of self -- is the prevailing societal plague, I can seek ways not to consume; I can reach the point where a paradox is true: I am Because I do not consume. Simone Weil speaks incisively. The supreme instance of affliction is Jesus Christ on the Cross. She points out:
And affliction is a good:
Entering further into the mystery, she says:
Each of us is affected by some degree of affliction. Perhaps there are even people in our midst, like Simone Weil, whose affliction is "perfectly pure and perfectly bitter." But everyone participates in this degradation in some way, to some extent; no one of us is free. I have no prescription for others, only for myself. I cannot judge, no matter how "evil" the other appears. Given what I believe to be the reality, I can only feel compassion -- for myself, the other, our society, the world. Perhaps I will thus be able to love. Lee Hoinacki |