Hello everyone! Welcome to this week’s blog post.
Today I wish to expand on the last post’s previous topic. Hopefully, you all remember that I talked about the post 9/11 world and how it has shaped our history for better or for worse. Well, now I wish to talk about the wars it produced or better yet, the reactions of the American people on them. The reason as to why I want to talk about this is due to a reading I had in my class some days ago, Judith Butler’s Frames of War. Now normally I would go ahead and recommend this for you guys to read, but not this time. Frames of War a very abstract book and requires complete focus in order to comprehend it. However, it does present some interesting points, and if you can handle having to question your own morality and sanity after reading it, then by all means knock yourselves out; but you have been warned.
In Butler’s book, on page 46, there is a sentence which really stood out for me:
“If guilt is linked to fears about survivability, then this suggests that, as a moral response, guilt references a premoral set of fears and impulsiveness tied up with destructiveness and its consequences.”
So what exactly does this mean, and how does it relate to war? Well, as you can probably tell, this quote talks about guilt; that gut-wrenching emotion we get when we act in a morally questionable way. Or is it? According to Butler, what we experience as guilt is in fact a response to a threat to our survivability; in other words, we feel guilty when we do something which may lead to our deaths (A bit dramatic but you get my point). So for example, if you cause a friend or family member to have an accident, you’ll probably feel bad and guilty about it; but not for the reason you think it’s for. You feel guilty because you just lowered your chances of survival; now you have to take care of this person and have a burden on your back until they recover. This is certainly a cynical way to view things, but it makes sense doesn’t it? Why is it that in war, many people are able to let go of their guilt? Why did the American public accept going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Because they felt they were necessary for their survival. In order to better protect themselves against another attack like 9/11, they had to strike fast and hard. No reason to feel guilty about declaring wars on other nations and innocent people because it’s us or them. This theory on guilt also helps explain torture; while a terrible thing, is just starting to get backlash from the American people. Places like Guantanamo Bay were known of, and while there was resistance to acts committed inside, people weren’t necessarily feeling guilty about their actions there as a whole: because it was necessary to their survival. Still, it’s hard to feel guilty about people we’ve never met before, because they don’t necessarily affect us is any way.
Now, I would like this issue of guilt with another topic I learned about from a different book, Juliana Spahr’s This connection of everyone with lungs. This book simply has two poems in it, but the message it carries is one I found important. As the name implies, it talks about the connection that is found amongst people after tragedy strikes, Spahr writes these poems shortly after 9/11. She reveals to the reader her desire to “connect” to the rest of the world after realizing how aloof she was to events occurring around her. This revelation came after she feared that the USA would go to war with Afghanistan. As she puts it in page 13:
“I felt I had to think about what I was connected with, and what I was complicit with…I had to think about my intimacy with things I would rather not be intimate with as…”
Herein lies how I wish to connect this with guilt; I believe we fear being connected with our world due to all the grief that occurs in it and feeling remorse for things that are out of our control. But as Spahr puts it after that quote, she felt happy with this connected with those she loved and the world from afar, even calling it useful. She sought a middle ground for this idea, one in which she could be conscious of the world around her without its burdens weighing down on her; and it seems she found this balance.
Sorry if this was a pretty heavy concept for you guys; but it’s one that really left me thinking for a while. Could guilt really just be linked to survival? Does morality play no role in it? Should we truly strive to connect to the world around us, or will the remorse be too much for one person to handle? I’ll leave you guys with these questions in mind so thanks for reading and I hope you all have a great weekend!
Sources:
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. Print.
Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs: Poems. Berkeley: U of California, 2005. Print.