Who Is My Neighbor? - or Female Egotism, or the Sickness Beneath the Calm

It is hard to avoid the impression that the strange calm sinking into us and over everything hides a profound horror. It is not as though, when I walk outside, I see people sprawled upon the pavement writhing in pain from emotional trauma. injury, or leprosy. It’s not that I see, in this neighborhood, that many beggars, amputees, cripples, crazies, or rotting bodies. Around here in Bryn Mawr you don’t see that kind of thing, although you certainly hear about it, in other places – though more from the grapevine of the Internet than what is called "The News."

Certainly, people go to doctors, they can’t seem to get enough of Health. People gorge on Health nowadays. And certainly health care is a major subsidiary of USA, Inc., although it’s difficult to know what to do with the people who can’t afford to buy stock in the company. But aside from the question of health or social insurance, the kind of horror I feel leaking up from the ground is not really about health in that sense that you could insure yourself against it – or for it. There is no insurance plan devised to cover the absence of moral reason in society, the void of interchange, human exchange, or hearing and speaking on a personal level. It used to be called "communication," i.e., which used to mean "hearing what someone has to say and responding to it," although now, of course, it means whatever is being jabbered into us at the moment from the "communications media." There is no social insurance against the toxic build-up of egotism in what used to be called "society," though now the concept of "society" has become more or less merged into the more general and less human-personal nexus of "the environment."

In The Rivers North of the Future, the late priest and educator Ivan Illich proposed that our modern condition cannot be understood as Christian or even post-Christian, but rather as the perversion of Christianity – "the corruption of the best is the worst." The corruption of love, of neighborliness, is the institutionalization of it. He uses as an example the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which some Pharisees attempted to trap Jesus when they asked him, "Who is my neighbor?" Jesus tells the story of a man going from Jerusalem to Jericho who was beset by thieves and left lying in a ditch. A priest and a Levite passed him by, but a Samaritan – considered a member of an alien tribe – stopped to assist him.

Illich comments that this story has been overwhelmingly interpreted to mean how one ought to behave towards one’s neighbors – that is, that it teaches a rule of conduct. But, he says, this interpretation misses what is radical and shocking about this story: "I believe that this is, in fact, precisely the opposite of what Jesus wanted to point out. He had not been asked, how should one behave towards one’s neighbor, but rather, who is my neighbor?" The point is that the Samaritan made a free choice to act as a neighbor, he "was moved" to feel for the injured man not out of ethnic obligation or through moral rules, but purely out of. his own feeling, his own freedom. His act was a
"gratuity" in that sense, not dictated by necessity, or for a need to "feel good about himself," or as a reward for some kind of service (and that is the meaning of the word ‘gratuity’ today – a tip). The point is the significance of the "Christ in the other," true friendship, true neighborliness – the possibility "that a beautiful and good life is primarily a life of gratuity, and that gratuity is not something which can flow out of me unless it is opened and challenged through you." Mutuality and inner freedom are the two sides of the coin; their this-worldly counterfeit is "the attempt to use power, organization, management, manipulation, and the law to ensure the social presence of something which, by its very nature, cannot be anything else but the free choice of individuals who have accepted the invitation to see in everybody whom they choose the face of Christ."

Well, this is the age of counterfeit -- the age of globalization, which means, you don’t have to be a neighbor, which means you may avoid having to respond from your gut. The horrors, as it were, fail to penetrate the eyes, the ears, or the skin. Instead, we tread upon them. Certainly, in the ages of God-belief men did not cease from doing evil. But in this age without God the evil that we do is upon a treadmill. We do it by rote and so time stops. Which is to say it goes in a circle, it gets nowhere. This is a key to the fundamental apocalyptic idea, the suspension of time – so sinisterly mis-named, by some, the "Rapture."

I have had the occasion, this past month, or so, to reflect upon myself as a neighbor. Or let me correct myself and say that I have had the occasion to reflect upon the never-named topic of female egotism – never named because, of course, females have been declared not guilty by verdict of feminism. The epistemic contradiction of reflecting upon something not named I leave for another occasion. Let me just say I have had to name it.

In general the difference, as I see it, between male and female egotism is that a man will oppose you but a female will ignore you. A man’s egotism serves some purpose; a woman’s egotism tends toward the gratification of her own will. Our society has been tending toward the female egotism for some time now. If you confront someone with an unpleasant or inconvenient fact, you are more likely to be ignored than to be opposed. Thus the treadmill may continue smoothly turning and nobody need take responsibility for anything.

Beginning in early April, I commenced a vigorous campaign by letter expressing my misgivings about a highly pornographic and offensive play performed at Bryn Mawr College, considered a premier women’s college. I directed my first letter to the director of the theater department, with copies posted to the presidents of Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges – as students from both colleges performed in the play. I received no response, and about three or four weeks I e-mailed the theater professor, posting a copy to the president of Bryn Mawr College. Again, there was no response. I pointed out once again that the acts performed on the college stage resembled the acts reported to have occurred in the Abu Ghraib prison and other locales. It seemed to me that the line drawn from what was touted as sexual liberation in the former to that of sexual torture and sadism in the latter was all too clear.

My moral misgivings apparently failed to move my correspondents to action or passion. While pondering my next move – for I was determined to be heard – I researched the college web site and also the academic background of the lady who is the president of Bryn Mawr College. I found, perhaps to no surprise, that the lady president’s rise had been through the academic sexual swindle circuit. She had co-edited a book called Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, which combined "the insights of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction" in "re-examining the role of women and their relations with men during the Renaissance." Pardon me while I attempt to separate the herd from the mentality here. This lady president had also more recently co-authored another book called The Medusa Reader, which "brings together essential passages and commentary about Medusa through the ages." Medusa, as you may recall, was the mythological snake-coiffed female who turned anyone who beheld her to stone. I began to put two and two together and came up with three. Could the lack of response to my letter by this lady president have been perhaps predicted from her long submergence in this academic snake-pit?

A second research fruit dropped into my armoury of ammunition when I discovered a very high preponderance, at Bryn Mawr College, of artistic and cultural events advocating feminism, lesbianism, or something in between, which could be called in general a sour rejection of nature, culture, religion, and history, in favor of some undefined else, presumably the "right way of thinking" of "people like us." Some have called it cultural bolshevism, but given the state of illiteracy today, I doubt that most people even know what bolshevism is. Even the poor Bolsheviks found to their dismay that when they carried their revolution into the family, it wasn’t such a good idea.

Well, thus armed, I kept my knowledge of the lady president’s academic accolades to myself, and launched a four-page letter in which I introduced myself as a neighbor, made a few compliments about the beautiful campus, but remarked that "I have had to ask myself whether the College offers a liberal education or if it is in actual fact a feminist indoctrination training camp." In this vein I proceeded to demolish feminism piece by piece. It wouldn’t have amounted to a row of pins unless I had taken the precaution of sending copies of this letter to every student who had acted in the play, plus the incoming Chairman of the Trustees, plus another outstanding graduate of the College and member of the Trustees. Both of these latter ladies are with Harvard, which is another recent site of feminist discontent – but we will leave that aside.

About two weeks later the president of Bryn Mawr College finally condescended to send me an e-mail of two sentences in which she concluded that "I appreciate your willingness to share your reactions and concerns." It wasn’t much, but at least it was something. Or let us just say she went about as far to ignore something she was obliged to acknowledge, that she could.

Anyhow, such was my "neighborliness." I can’t do anything about Abu Ghraib. I can’t stop the fire of annihilation upon the children of Iraq, the blasted bodies, the ruined cities and the masses of the Dead I can’t stop the blind egotism of the Men in Black who strut in Washington, D.C., and their fanaticism of Empire and their final perversion of the religion of Christ into the reign of the Anti-Christ. My tears cannot stop the moral swinishness of the American people and especially our academic class, and I cannot stop the incessant whine of automobile traffic and the oil consumption and the passing of tyrannous laws by spineless men who think only of their own careers. I cannot make any of these things stop happening.

But I can be a neighbor, which in this turned-up world, may mean opposing what my neighbors do. It’s a new twist on the Good Samaritan, but one not likely to endear me to the neighbors who are the recipients of it.

Posted May 23, 2005

Related correspondence posted on alternative website, The Sword in the Mouth. See link.