‘Careless speech’, ἀργολογίας, and performative political lying.
I’m still fascinated with the four habits which St Ephrem the Syrian (lived c. 306–373) highlighted as the most important bad habits to try to get rid of-
πνεῦμα ἀργίας, περιεργίας,
φιλαρχίας, καὶ ἀργολογίας
A spirit of callous indifference, interfering with others,
love of power for its own sake, and careless speech.
(From St Ephrem’s prayer of repentance, which is widely used daily in Lent.)
It’s taken me about two months to figure out what ‘ἀργολογίας’ means — ἀργός means lazy in the sense of neglecting a duty to others, so ‘ἀργολογίας’ means carelessly harmful speech. (Strong’s Concordance word number 692.)
It’s not just ‘idle chatter’ in the trivial sense of talking about ‘wine, women and song’, or the ten topics of ‘bestial’ talk (tiracchāna-kathā, in Buddhism).
I think it means carelessly talking about others in ways which are indecent, objectifying, degrading or unjust, and which cause (albeit indirectly, in complex ways, so we may not be able to directly see the causal connection) unnecessary harm to others.
I think this is what Pope Francis means by ‘gossip’ or ‘slander’ and why he talks about it so much and as such a serious thing.
Reminds me of Prof. Martha Naussbaum’s definition of ‘objectification’ — i.e. treating a human being as an object, rather than as a person, which she says has seven defining qualities:
From ‘Objectification’ by Martha Naussbaum, 1995.
Which is an expanded version of or similar to Kant’s ‘Principle of Humanity’:
“Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.”
(Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, 1785)
I’m remembering this now because I’ve just finished editing the third part of my article from yesterday, now subdivided into three parts because it became far too long, on ‘Information warfare about ‘Syria’ and its global effects’-
My conclusions from that article:
When people are exposed daily to images of horrific suffering, mostly presented either stripped of their actual political context or in a deliberately false political context designed to enable the crimes to continue with impunity, there is always at least implicitly a context, albeit one without any recognizably human values in it, i.e. a nihilistic context. Nihilism is unrealistic; it’s a performance, and it’s probably always instrumental to a covert or an unconscious aim.
There are two generally problematic contexts which are commonly applied in representing Syria and Syrians now forced outside their country:
The ‘humanitarian’, ‘neutral’ register — artificially de-politicised and de-contextualised suffering, which normally prefaces reports with ‘alleged’ or ‘suspected’ when there is really no ground for any reasonable doubt anymore, presents ‘government’ official alternative versions of reality as if they were actually even plausibly factually true, thereby attributing them and the so-called ‘government’ with legitimacy which they manifestly do not deserve, and ‘balances’ them with victims’ accounts of what they suffered;
The right- and left-wing versions of old racist Orientalist projections about ‘Syria’ and using ‘Syria’ in their ideological narratives, and the display of Syrians’ suffering for their own political aims which have nothing to do with the actual Syrians’ who are suffering voices or needs. This typically occurs as part of a much more general political discourse habit of instrumentalizing, miscontextualised displays of others’ suffering, especially other groups of people, for aims which are not theirs and are not even relevant to their needs.
Both the artificially decontextualized and the instrumentalising miscontextualised representations share a common trait — lack of respect for the inherent dignity of other human beings, also known as indecency.
Avishai Margalit, another Jewish professor of moral philosophy, defines ‘indecency’ as intentionally, or carelessly neglectfully, humiliating or degrading other people. He argues, fairly I think, that ‘inherent human dignity’, though it may be ultimately true, is impossible to measure objectively and so it is hard or impossible to enforce as a basis of human rights laws.
[edited and added later:] Abounaddara Syrian anonymous artists collective —
“Dignity isn’t well regarded at the moment. It’s seen as a normative concept, difficult to gauge and even more difficult to reconcile with artistic practices that tend to strive for emancipation from norms. It’s also a political argument that has been made by reactionaries and enemies of artistic freedom. Finally, it is an ideal that goes against the tide of nihilism in this atmosphere of triumphant post-truth.
Unlike freedom, dignity isn’t sexy. This might perhaps be linked to what nasty Marx and Engels discuss in The Communist Manifesto when they accuse the bourgeoisie of having transformed dignity into a pure exchange-value. Even Bob Dylan doesn’t manage to restore the luster to the banner of dignity. The song he titled Dignity is relatively obscure. And it ends with words that sound almost like a challenge: Someone showed me a picture and I just laughed / Dignity never been photographed.
In fact, dignity is one of the pillars on which our shared world was constructed in the wake of the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis. They began by representing their victims as deprived of dignity, as subhuman. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948 begins with the following phrase: recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. Dignity, then, is not only universal; it underpins both freedom and justice.
We have no other choice but to accept the challenge of dignity — even if it can’t be photographed. No other choice but to take part in the struggle of representations in the world, and in doing so we must strive to represent the other as an end in herself or himself and not as a means.”
Some things don’t change, like mathematical relationships don’t change, although our understandings of them do change and may improve.
The four bad habits which St Ephrem highlighted as the most important to root out are still relevant and I think a very practical, “as simple as possible but no simpler” (Einstein) way of understanding the ethics of talking about other people, especially representing other people collectively, including writing about them, making photos of them, captions of videos, memes, etc.
Check — callous indifference, undue interference with others, love of power for its own sake, and careless speech — does a media representation of other people, especially as a group, have these qualities or not?
The image above is of St Ephrem the Syrian is from a mosaic in Nea Moni (the ‘New Monastery’, ‘new’ in the 11th century AD), on Chios island in Greece, where many Syrian refugees now wait a desperately long time in degrading living conditions for systematically unfairly practiced asylum procedures, partly because of our widespread, culturally normal habit of ἀργολογίας.
Here’s another image of St Ephrem, looking more typically Syrian than Greek, with a long, angular face, and wearing a prayer shawl like a keffiyeh —
The asylum procedures applied on the Greek islands now are systematically unfairly practiced essentially because the Admissibility procedure should not be applied in this situation at all. Applying it to refugees and other migrants arriving from Turkey is premised on a lie — that Turkey ever plausibly was or is a ‘Safe Third Country’ according to the criteria in Article 38 of the EU Asylum Procedures Directive or Article 56 of Greek Law 4375. The European Council, Commission, and the Greek government, particularly Minister Mouzalas, have constantly repeated their claim that Turkey is or could be generally considered to be a ‘Safe Third Country’, but they have never presented any evidence for their claim or attempted any reasonable argument against the mountain of evidence reports published by international and Turkish human rights organisations before the EU-Turkey Deal was contracted on 18 March 2016. By the standards of credibility assessment in European asylum law applied to individual asylum applicants, the governments’ claim that Turkey is a Safe Third Country should certainly be rejected as generally, manifestly incredible.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people [the citizens] from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
When policies are based on fundamentally dishonest premises, it necessarily has systemic consequences for the whole of our political system. It is not possible to separate the implied political discourse or decision making norm in one context from other contexts, because norms are inherently systematic. Normalizing performative political lying is inherently dangerous for everyone, not just for its direct victims. Compromises such as this can never be worth it.
European politicians and governments chose the EU-Turkey Deal because they perceived it as a necessary compromise to appease and slow the spread of populist nationalist and fascist movements in Europe. But like all choices for evil, they misunderstood that the partial or relative good they aimed for with it is not actually separate or separable from the common goods which it harms. They achieved what they aimed for, a massive reduction in arrivals rate of refugees and other migrants from Turkey, but they also fundamentally damaged the common goods of truth and justice which any decent society must be based on, and thereby undermined democratic values and principles.
Democracy is not just the majority voting procedure, nor is it absolutism of ‘the People’s will’, as in the recurring populist perversion of ‘democracy’. The difference is twofold: 1) genuine democracy recognizes that popular wills are always plural, so popular consent is not reducible to any totalizing narrative; and 2) the majority voting procedure is a good means of implementing the freedom and right of self-determination, but no majority can ever justify withdrawing that fundamental freedom and right from any scapegoated minority, or external, imagined ‘enemy’ group, or from any human person. Human rights are constitutionally prior to the majority voting procedure.
The Admissibility procedure cannot be applied fairly in individual cases when its application in general is premised on a performative, political, big lie, a große Lüge, to recall Goebbel’s term for this kind of political discourse tactic. It was never even plausibly factually true that Turkey is a ‘Safe Third Country’ —
No-one should be forced to wait for this procedure or rejected from international protection in a genuinely safe and free country (as much as anywhere is now) because of it. Performative political lying, however sincerely deluded the intention behind it may be, is objectively a habit which aids and abets the neo-fascist enemy in their information and psychological warfare.
As a Russian expert on Active Measures reportedly said: ‘all are idiot, some more useful than other’. All unjust men are ultimately useful idiots; useful for ‘him’ who is the original Slanderer and Father of Lies, the ultimate Enemy of humankind’s salvation. The fault of understanding always comes first (Aquinas, SCG III, ch.26). No-one ever perceives the object of their intention as evil at the moment when they choose it, even when it really objectively is.
The spirit of careless speech, πνεῦμα ἀργολογίας, has been very busy in our political community the last few years. It is a political habit which increases when a society is going through a populist or proto-totalitarian phase.
Compromising with the scapegoating of an imagined, projected, feared other group of people infects our whole society with that norm of scapegoating. It is impossible to fight populism or fascism by normalising its core assumptions.
St Ephrem’s prayer to the community of saints gone before him:
‘Remember me, oh heirs of God, brethren of Christ,
pray to the Saviour constantly for me,
that I may be freed though Christ
from him that fights against me day by day.’
(in De Timore Animi)
All of Europe deeply needs this kind of catharsis (κάθαρσις) now.
