Angelus Novus and The Better Angels of Our Nature

Watching the events in Libya unfold against the backdrop of other liberation struggles across the Middle East, the economic troughs of Western developed countries and other global issues of concern has me wondering about human conflict in general and it's inevitable bloody history, its reasons and our trajectory.

Everyone hopes Libya will be able to make good of its formidable success in overcoming a tyrant like Gadaffi who ruled with an iron grip over his people for 42 years.

Sometimes freedom is not always bought at a fair price and many in the West discuss the reasons for the sometime uneven choices our governments make in the backing of countries that seek freedom.

So it was interesting to come across some articles today that made me reflect on it further...

The author Walter Benjamin owned this painting by Paul Klee named Angelus Novus and interpreted it as follows :

"The painting shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. 

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. 

His face is turned toward the past. 

Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.

The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.

But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. 

The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. 

This storm is what we call progress."

Henry Giroux says :

"For Benjamin, the storm of progress was a mode of modernity gone askew and a deceit that made a claim on happiness rather than the horrors of destruction, constituting a set of conditions that unleashed a barrage of unimaginable carnage and suffering in the 1930s and 1940s. 

The utopian belief in technologically assisted social improvement had given way to a dystopian project of mad violence that would inevitably produce the context for Benjamin to take his own life in 1940. 

According to Benjamin, the horrors of the past made it difficult to believe in progress as a claim on and history as a narrative of the advancement of human civilization.

In fact, Zygmunt Bauman pointed out that  the overdetermined force of history was not just at stake in Benjamin's narrative, but also the notion that "we are pulled forward by future happiness - when in fact, as Benjamin noted we are pushed from behind by the horror of destruction we keep perpetrating on the way."

For one opinion on how this carries forward to out present day you can read more from this article by Henry Giroux here

If all this seems overly pessimistic then Steven Pinker's might new 800 page tome, "The Better Angels of Our Nature" which is thoroughly reviewed here in the NY Times gives a different view of where we are now : an extract from which is taken below:

The central thesis of “Better Angels” is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. 

The decline in violence holds for violence in the family, in neighborhoods, between tribes and between states. People living now are less likely to meet a violent death, or to suffer from violence or cruelty at the hands of others, than people living in any previous century.......

"Pinker (is he an evangelical atheist, or secular humanist ??), draws on recent research in history, psychology, cognitive science, economics and sociology. Nor is he afraid to venture into deep philosophical waters, like the role of reason in ethics and whether, without appealing to religion, some ethical views can be grounded in reason and others cannot be."

There are some other interesting critiques and analyses:  here 

 here and here  and here.

One reviewer says "there does not seem to be much in the book about the current environmental crisis. Yes, there may be less physical violence, but if we cannot manage to avoid ruining the Earth’s capacity to sustain human life well, that decline will not mean much.

What if the same Enlightenment thinking that has given us so much, is also at the heart of our inability to appreciate the common good that the earth represents? 

After all, the Enlightenment gave us, or helped give us, individualism and it is individualism that is hindering us from seeing this collective threat" 

This Sunday's scriptures outline simple directives that encompass what we need to activate our better angels that Steven Pinker's big book of statistical analysis might not cover but are truly prophetic of peace and far more encompassing than any human reason alone can attain.

 I've put this song on my sidebar and it is a good moment to post it again today.

English translation to Solo le pido dios 

All that I ask of God
is that I will not be indifferent to suffering,
that I will not come to the moment of my death
having failed to do what I could.

All that I ask of God
is that I will not be indifferent to injustice,
that I will not merely turn the other cheek
after the first has been clawed.

All that I ask of God
is that I will not be indifferent to war;
it is a terrible monster that tramples
the people’s innocence.

All that I ask of God
is that I will not be indifferent to deceit;
if a traitor cannot be stopped from having his way,
at least let it not be soon forgotten.

All that I ask of God
is that I will not be indifferent about the future,
not despairing like those who abandon their home
to make a new life in a foreign culture.

All that I ask of God
is that I will not be indifferent to war;
it is a terrible monster that tramples
the people’s innocence.

http://lyricstranslate.com

Spanish lyrics below if you want to follow the song 

Sólo le pido a Dios
que el dolor no me sea indiferente,
que la reseca muerte no me encuentre
vacío y solo, sin haber hecho lo suficiente.

Sólo le pido a Dios
que lo injusto no me sea indiferente,
que no me abofeteen la otra mejilla,
después que una garra me arañó esta suerte.

Sólo le pido a Dios
que la guerra no me sea indiferente,
es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte
toda la pobre inocencia de la gente.

Sólo le pido a Dios
que el engaño no me sea indiferente,
si un traidor puede más que unos cuantos,
que esos cuantos no lo olviden fácilmente.

Sólo le pido a Dios
que el futuro no me sea indiferente,
desahuciado está el que tiene que marchar
a vivir una cultura diferente.

Sólo le pido a Dios
que la guerra no me sea indiferente,
es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte
toda la pobre inocencia de la gente.

http://lyricstranslate.com