Brad Evans: Reclaiming community and the power of silence (ep350)
“Being ‘connected’ doesn’t mean you have any sense of community. To have a community, you need something very visceral, you need to be in close proximity with people, to communicate on a day-to-day basis, to understand the flaws of people. It’s not about curated existences.”
In this episode, we welcome Brad Evans, a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes in the problem of violence. His work is particularly concerned with addressing the multiple forms violence takes in the world, while developing a more poetic critique that highlights the importance of the arts and the imaginary.
The author of nineteen books and edited volumes, along with over a hundred academic and media articles, he currently holds a Chair in Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath, United Kingdom.
Subscribe and listen to Green Dreamer in any podcast app or read on for the episode transcript.
If you feel inspired by this episode, please consider donating a gift of support of any amount today!
Transcript:
Note: *Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Brad Evans: My work is very much focused on the problem of violence and trying to interrogate the multiple ways that violence arrives in our lives and trying to rethink the very concept of what violence actually means beyond obviously just traditional men on battlefields.
It's only more recently that I have come to accept the multiple ways in which violence was also part of my life and growing up. When you grow up in conditions of poverty, as I did, you don't necessarily dwell upon them as being conditions of violence—almost as if it's too close for you to critically evaluate [it with] any meaningful purchase.
I grew up in the South Wales mining valleys in the United Kingdom. Now, this was an area that was once synonymous with being the most effective and profitable coal-mining region in the world. But gradually, like many mining communities, it underwent a rapid transformation and decline. I was born in 1974, when there was an official British government report which basically headlined that the valleys were dying.
I was born in a year when the valleys were officially declared as their own mortuary. Growing up in that condition was one in which you learn a great deal about everyday insecurities, everyday vulnerabilities: the lasting effects of toxic ecology. [You] also learn to live in the conditions of acute poverty, which [you] maybe didn't register as such. But when I look back upon them now, I certainly recognize how much poverty there was. This was a story that was very common to pretty much all the friends that I had and pretty much the entire community in which we grew up. So, through that, you start to have a very different sense of what insecurity meant.
You mentioned food insecurity. There's a great deal of discussion in the UK [even] today [that] people should eat healthy [and lead] healthy lifestyles. But when I was growing up, even eating fruit and vegetables wasn't really an option because they were beyond affordability. That affordability is something that is still denied to a lot of people today as well, especially in the United States or the United Kingdom.
Kamea Chayne: I'm sure all of this has helped to inspire you to look at violence with more holistic lenses, and Oxford defines violence, for example, as behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something. Or the other definition is the strength of emotion or “an unpleasant or destructive natural force.”
Just to set the stage for the rest of our conversation, I'm curious how you've come to define it and what common perspectives on it you've been called in to challenge.
Brad Evans: I don't have a catch-all definition for violence because violence takes so many different forms.
We have this common assumption, first of all, that for there to be violence, there needs to be physical harm. [But] we know that [there are multiple] types of harm that people can experience. Psychological violence can sometimes be just as devastating as physical violence. Although we need to be very mindful also that we don't just flatten all violence, so that it becomes meaningless. Or we say that somebody's been the victim of a small verbal assault is far worse than somebody who routinely suffers extreme physical violence because the two things are not comparable. But I do think that we need to recognize the multiple ways in which violence can be physical and nonphysical in our lives.
The other aspect of the other definition is almost violence as a “natural” force. Now, I think there are two things which can bring back to your question. First of all, if we understand questions around violence linked to ecology—and this is one of the big shifts in our understanding that we've had certainly over the past 20-30 years—is to understand ecologies of violence and ecologies of suffering. [We’ve come to] the recognition that when people suffer from what they believe to be natural disasters...
Most natural disasters are not natural at all. They are the outcome of sustained positions within structures of neglect and poverty.
Overwhelmingly, most of the victims of so-called natural disasters are poor people. That's not a coincidence. That's because of the structural conditions which give rise to conditions of vulnerability and insecurity.
Now, in terms of the way in which I've also tried to then challenge some of the prevailing assumptions around violence, [there’s also] this argument that humans are “naturally violent.” I don't believe that's the case at all. There's a history of the human condition, which is a history of violence, of course. But I don't think that humans are naturally violent. If that was the case, we'd be more violent than we actually are. Often, we find one of the questions we ask is not why are humans violent, but why are they not more violent given the conditions of desperation so many people face on a day-to-day basis? A lot of learned studies show that it actually takes a lot for a person to become violent.
[It takes] a lot of culture and education to [become] learned subjects who are willing to engage in violence.
Most violence that we experience in the world is seldom actually spontaneous or random attacks. Random attacks happen, but that's only a small percentage of violence. Most violence is rationalized, calculated, and a great deal of organization goes into it. That in itself then, I think, challenges this assertion that humans are just simply naturally violent.
If we accept that humans are actually not naturally violent, we can have far more optimism about the nature of the human condition, rather than just simply buying into the idea [that], “Oh well, violence is just something that we do to one another.”
Kamea Chayne: This really highlights how important the broader context is, because when we're forced to confront different crises or when we are placed in different environments or circumstances, that really ends up affecting how we show up. So it's really important to not take this really narrow view of what a person is, as this individual self, and [instead] to understand the broader picture.
If violence in one form is seen as a breakdown of someone or something, whether tangibly or intangibly, I wonder if we might even understand violence as something that is actually a constant. Because the creation and birth of anything in a literal sense almost always requires the decomposition and breakdown of something else. Even beyond the literal sense the birth and expansion of, say, a centralized economy often comes from the breakdown of decentralized and place-based systems and communities.
So, in other words, has the dominant simplistic perception of violence as “bad” prevented us from really seeing how it shows up in the world, and therefore how we might need to transform it into other forms, in order to reduce sickness and suffering?
Brad Evans: I absolutely agree with you. It's too easy to associate violence with something which is purely negative, or indeed aligned in its more extreme forms with something which Freud would have associated with the death drive, for instance.
We know the history of the modern period, from the 17th century onwards, has really been about a history of violence as progressive. I don't mean the violence is progressive, but it's presented in that way in the sense that violence becomes a condition of possibility for, as you mentioned, decomposing and recomposing subjectivities for reconstructing social orders.
In that sense, there is almost a natality and a rebirth to violence, where violence becomes this condition of possibility for remaking the world constantly and remaking ourselves constantly.
That's why one of the things about political violence, which is a distinctly modern phenomenon, really. When we think about it, if we try to separate it from all the religious kinds of violence, even though the modern condition has a great deal of religiosity to it, it's precisely this idea that in order for violence to happen, it needs to be justified. Political violence always needs its justification.
It always needs its moral armory and that moral armory is often done in the name of progress. It's often done in the name of “if we are going to commit violence upon a certain group of people, then our lives will progress as a result of it.” That was precisely the rationale that underwrote the wars on terror: the idea that if we bombed Afghanistan, the people would be liberated and therefore their future would be better.
This idea, then, of violence has been distinctly progressive. If we understand violence in that way, then, of course, we need a far more formidable critique of violence and the violence in which we actively invest in ourselves, the violence which is very much linked with our own discursive narratives. We believe that the progressive wheel of history is on our side. Frederick Richard argued that war was the motive of history, and what he meant by that was that [it was] the motor of progress. But we also know that technology is the motor of war.
We have to constantly keep ourselves in check around the types of violence that we are constantly recreating and remaking in a way that renders entire populations disposable to that violence.
Kamea Chayne: Also on political violence, you share that history teaches us time and time again that political violence is not carried out by irrational monsters. It is “rationalized, reasoned, and calculated.” You also shared that it is purely subjective in a way that goes beyond the idea that it's based on who is experiencing or perceiving the violence. I'd love if you could expand more on this, as well as maybe share some examples of political violence being justified that we might recognize in recent years.
Brad Evans: Starting with the second part of that, we can learn a great deal about violence by asking: who is the intended audience?
One of the things about violence is the way in which it plays out as a public spectacle. Again, we might, first of all, go back to one of the most brilliant books written in the late 1960s by Guy Debord, which was the book called The Society of the Spectacle. Debord argued that with the advent of global satellite communication systems and the emergence and the normalization of the television, the way in which societies are becoming far more image-conscious.
We live in an age today of the global media spectacle—the imminent global media spectacle. What defines our age, in particular, is that we're all imminently forced witness to violent events.
September 11th was a big shift in that. This idea about “all violence is justified”—that's the point. Even the attacks of 9/11 were “justified” in one way or another by the people committing the violence. In that sense, there's always that naked appeal to justification, which always has to connect the violence to some narrative of the greater good so we can dispose of a certain group of people because, in the long run, the ends justify the means around this.
The destruction becomes worthy of the act because it appeals to something greater than the self. Now, in the context of religious violence, that appeal is always to God because it's simply “God's will on Earth” that the violence takes place in the context of nations. The violence always appeals to the nation in the context of ideology that, [for example], the liberal violence becomes an appeal to liberalism because it will make the world a safer and more harmonious place and so on.
Now, in terms of the link back to the spectacle, as I said, we can tell so much about violence by who is the intended audience. This applies from a very micro-level to a broad macro-level. If you think of domestic abuse, when a husband is abusing a wife, for instance, often in the presence of children, it's all about a spectacle of violence. It's all about a certain patriarchal domination within the context of a house. There's always an audience. There's always a perpetrator, a victim, and a witness to the violence. That's where the violence has always been this type of triangulation. Sometimes the victim is the witness as well.
In the context, then, of much more global forms of violence... Again, we can think of the violence in 9/11 or the violence of ISIS. There's a very clear audience in mind, or at least multiple audiences in mind, where first of all, it's about getting populations to be very fearful of their own existence. The other aspect of that type of violence [is how it] also acts as a recruitment tool in a way to get people to buy into the idea that through violence, you can bring about worldwide transformation.
That's where the seduction of violence really enters the discussion. Because in order for violence to be mobilized, it has to be seductive. People have to desire violence. They have to feel like they will be emancipated through violence, that they can have their voices listened to, their subjectivity used, or at least that they can utilize violence in order to reinforce the desire for established forms of domination and control. In that sense, it operates very much at the level of desire, and that connects to ideas of a spectacle which allows us to triangulate, as I say, that question between perpetrator, victim, and witnesses.
Kamea Chayne: Does this speak to, if I interpret what you said before correctly, that a lot or maybe all violence is related to what you call sacred violence? I want to read a quote from you. You say, “let us recall that all violence, especially modern violence, is a violence of movement. There is no greater freedom than to deliver violence without mediation. This is the foundational principle of every colonial project and the defining characteristic of the U.S. today. The nation itself is a globally ambitious project whose entire history has been defined by migration, flights, and the nomadism of its killing machines.”
A lot of people have talked about these forms of violence on the show before, and I think a lot of people would interpret these forms of modern violence as being secular, being driven by political institutions or corporate powers. But I'm curious about how you see this relating to sacred violence and deeper faith and belief systems.
Brad Evans: First of all, in regards to the quote, there are two—maybe it's just for your audiences if they're interested in exploring some of these ideas more—references I would draw upon there.
First of all, is the phenomenal work that was done by Hannah Arendt—Hannah Arendt was a very famous scholar, obviously was became very renowned for her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann on behalf of the New Yorker Magazine. Now, Hannah Arendt, especially in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, understood that what defined Nazi-ism was precisely a commitment to total freedom, but total freedom for some, of course, against the complete lack of any freedom for others. What she said was that...
What we realized through the Holocaust was this idea [that] total freedom meant the total freedom to do anything—to the point of the total freedom to destroy entire worlds.
In that sense, violence becomes inextricably linked to a particular conception of freedom. The idea that without mediation, it comes into a violence which knows no limits.
Another reference from that then was by the late French philosopher called Paul Virilio, who wrote a fabulous book in the 1970s called Speed and Politics. Virilio’s point was that politics today is defined by speed, speed conquers—and actually conquered—space. Thinking about this in terms of instantaneous communication: speed is conquered space. We are in an age today, as Virgilio pointed out, where all wars are wars of movement.
This is a point which is also picked up by another French philosopher called Gilles Deleuze, who argued that if people have been oppressed, it's not that their rights are being denied, but [rather] their movements restricted. There's a lot in that that can be excavated now in terms of the second point then, around questions of the sacred.
This is something that I explore in a great deal of detail in my latest book called Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity. What I've really tried to deal with in this book is with this question: If we can say that violence is a continuum throughout human history, but we don't think that violence is natural, then how do we account for the ways in which violence can constantly reinvent itself and can be constantly smuggled back into the social system?
For me, the way in which that happens, as I said, is always this appeal to some type of greater good, that violence can always be rationalized by reason, and so forth. But just to say “the greater good” is not good enough to give us a sufficient explanation as to why we give ourselves over to violence.
What I realized was that the way in which violence operates is precisely through a distinct appeal to the sacred. What I mean by the sacred then, is that sacred is basically what we might call, without getting too theoretical, it is a metaphysical cloak that gives absolute value and meaning to a social order.
What I tried to do in the book is map out the change in narratives around violence, especially as they move from, for instance, earlier Christian forms of violence which are linked to the Crusades and ideas of “just war” that was always carried out in the name of the sacred object of Christ. So Jesus Christ becomes this ultimate sacrifice, this ultimate sacred object through which violence can be carried out, in the name of Christianity.
With the advent of modernity, the body of Christ gets very much replaced by the military hero. The hero now becomes the sacred object, almost [this] untouchable thing you're not allowed to criticize because they've died for our freedoms.
We all know those kinds of narratives that get presented to us. With the advent of modernity, the sacred object remains. Even though we enter into this age of so-called secularity, the religiosity of a nation-state is very clear and very prevalent, very dominant. This gets taken up further, I argue in the book, by liberalism. One of the things we notice in the 1990s, when [there was] a globally ambitious liberalism, what they ended up doing was turn victims into sacred objects. So you have, for instance, the oppressed woman or the young child for whom we must go to war to “save” because they are such precious, sacred, pure objects, so we can justify violence in their name.
We can then write about a particular continuity of the history of violence through these different appeals to almost sacrosanct objects: objects which we are not allowed to criticize, objects which become these sacred points of concentration, which constantly allows violence to happen. So, the body of Christ constantly justified violence in the name of Christianity. The body of the hero fallen in previous wars would allow us to continue to fight in their name. [Think about] how often we were told you can't desecrate the name of soldiers who fell in battle.
The same with the war on terror. It was very difficult to say, “Well, actually, I don't think we should bomb Afghanistan” because that was always done in the name of women and children who [had] become new sacred objects. That is where the violence needs that sacredness. My point, then, is that it's not that the sacred is almost a self-evident truth, it's manifest through violence.
It's the violence that allows the sacred to have such a hold over us.
That, to me, is where we need to break open. If we're going to think of politics beyond violence, to me, that means thinking of politics beyond the sacred and sacrifice, too.
Kamea Chayne: It's interesting. At the same time, it's a lot of people's spiritual connections to the land and to Earth that have been activating and motivating change or activism in order to undo the dominant violent system that has been justified by other belief systems. So maybe it invites the view that sacred violence and sacred activism aren't necessarily opposite sides and perhaps are both subjective and sometimes even two and the same because they are definitely related in that way.
To this point, a lot of people call these protests nonviolent protests. There have been a lot of transformational social movements and revolutions aiming to uproot the status quo, and instead of “nonviolent protests”, I think that perhaps could be even understood as “sacrificial violence” for a better world, because it's trying to take down the current existing system.
But I wonder, is there this underlying ongoing war on the idea of what the betterment and advancement of humanity even mean? Are these ideas what then manifest in the different types of violence that show up, whether they are rationalized and normalized by the system in order to justify the status quo to continue or otherwise what's seen as disruptive and what gets criminalized and named explicitly as violence that is to be condemned?
Brad Evans: Two points there. The first point, I understand, for instance, this constant need to appeal to the sacred. Because how does life have meaning without the sacred? It's been an important turn in activism that really happens, especially post-1994.
I spent a considerable amount of time in Chiapas with the Zapatistas. One thing which I found very interesting about the Zapatistas and the Indigenous Maya more generally were the ways in which they were really rethinking what resistance might mean in the latter part of the 20th and 21st century.
Now one thing we can say in the history of Indigenous groups in Latin America, almost pre-Spanish arrival, is they mastered sacrifice. They understood the power of the sacrificial in very literal and physical ways. What was interesting about the Zapatistas was a way in which they moved away from a very dogmatic idea of the sacred and the sacrificial and replaced it with something which seemed to be far more, yes, spiritual, but I don't know whether [it was] the sacred.
I think it plays to something that we might call the ancestral, which is already very much there. I find there are wonderful references to that, especially in the artwork of people such as Ana Mendieta, for instance. But the ancestral, I think, is something different from the sacred, if we understand the sacred as being something that is metaphysically determined and structured and an absolute truth.
The one thing which I thought was remarkable about the Zapatistas was actually to disrupt this notion of the absolute truth, [to say] that politics is not about truth, it's about intuition.
The way in which, particularly the writings of Subcommandante Marcos, [who] was almost like a conduit through history, and he would write in fables in a beautiful use of political fabrication to narrate these old ancestral tales. There was something very powerful about that, and there still is something very powerful about that need for a certain spirituality. I think it's Boughey who says the people who fear hell have religion and people who've been to hell need spirituality. That is something important, in recognition of the spiritual which doesn't have to collapse back into dogmatic visions of the sacred. I think that that's it, and that maybe the ancestral does something different to the sacred in that sense.
Now, in terms of the disruption of the status quo, I think it's such an important question in terms of the moment in which we're living right now because we're living in a profoundly disruptive moment where it seems strange when you think about the whole condition of the lockdown, where it almost seems like everything came to a standstill, we were all literally locked into our homes. But power and the way power has been transformed has been so disruptive and transformed to the point where we can barely recognize the operations of power pre-pandemic to where we are today.
What I am particularly talking about is the rapid acceleration of the power of technology over our lives now, in a way in which if we're talking about a crisis as being a condition of possibility for forms of governance and power, the UN—and this is another thing I wrote about in the book Ecce Humanitas… I paraphrased Nietzsche when I basically said that liberalism is dead, and I truly believe that the panic [of] the global pandemic has been the first crisis of a post-liberal world, and we're still trying to understand and make sense what that world looks like.
But what we do know is it's governed by technology, and the power that the big tech companies now have over the world is unrivaled.
This is ushering in and accelerating a new system of political control, which for people who are deeply concerned with the human condition and what it means to be human in the 21st century and have, as you mentioned, a profound relationship to the Earth and to life and to ecology, this idea that technology is going to save us, we know, is a misnomer. We need very different ethics to resolve the world's problems than a technological one. Therein lies a fundamental disruption to the status quo.
Now the question then becomes what kinds of violence we are allowed to talk about. If we genuinely believe that the technological system is the unrivaled source of power in the world, [that] it's the one that's mediating all conversation, it's the one that's mediating what we see, what we don't see, what we can discuss, what we can't discuss… therein lies the big challenge moving forward for activism, and for just a broader sense of what it means to be human in the 21st century.
Kamea Chayne: It really has felt like the ongoing and maybe accelerating centralization of control and power has been veiled by this justification, again, for the betterment of the world.
As you've said, the triumph of technological advancement makes violence more efficient. I found that to be extremely perceptive and also accurate, and I had been questioning, as the economic and various production and extractive systems are becoming globalized and centralized, in the name of efficiency, but efficiency for what? I think the efficiency of violence is exactly what that efficiency has been about. I just don't even know why we've oriented our society towards improving this form of efficiency as advancement.
Brad Evans: First of all, if we think about the promise of technology and the promise of the information and communications revolutions, you can see, on the one hand, it's enabling. It breaks down borders and barriers. It allows conversations precisely like this one to happen.
But then when I think about, for instance, the ability for humans to communicate, it is very different from having a viable sense of a political community. We've collapsed the idea of community with connectivity. So, to be “connected” sometimes just now means that we have a community, though we know from spending two minutes on social media that's just absolute nonsense. Just being connected doesn't mean you have any sense of community at all. To have a community, people need something very visceral. They need to be in close proximity to people. They need to communicate on a day-to-day basis. You need to understand the flaws of people. It's not about curated existences, which you have on social media.
We are meant to be living in this age of the mass proliferation of information. Most of my social feeds every single day are just repetitive. You think, well, what is the alternative story in all of this? People say, “Well, you're operating in these bubbles.” But even when you consciously try to find alternative news sources now, the world looks increasingly in terms of the disasters which are being spoken about and the crises, and so on. It looks remarkably homogenized and you think, well, there's something going on...
The question is, it's not about what's being spoken about, but what's not being spoken about, what's not being shown, what's not being represented. I think therein lies a distinct mediation on the types of spectacles of suffering, which we want to be at pay attention to and the ones which are being canceled out.
But there's another phenomenon that connects to a project which I've been developing over the past two years with my wife, who is a Mexican artist, based on the question of disappearance. One of the most harrowing forms of violence we can imagine is disappearance… to just simply vanish and disappear without a trace. Now, what we've noticed in with the advent of especially in countries such as Mexico. But globally...
The more connected we are, the more information we have, and the more surveillance there seems to be about the world, the more there has been an exponential rise in the disappearance of humans. How can we make sense of that seeming contradiction?
Maybe it's not a contradiction. There really is a real serious challenge for us to explain—how can we have so much technological surveillance about the world and yet people can simply vanish without a trace in tens of thousands? This is happening globally, and I think that it’s exposed one of the myths of technology… that actually it's much easier to dispose of life, the more technologized we become. That, to me, has to be a real challenge to those who will argue that technology will save us. Because I don't think it does.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, that really challenges the dominant beliefs I think many have about surveillance and security and who this all serves. It's interesting because we're at a time when I think a lot of people are turning to the online world in order to build digital communities in order to fill the void that a lot of us face from a lack of physical, place-based, and really grounded community. A lot of that, of course, has been ruptured or displaced through the forces of corporate monopolization and, of course, the centralization of power.
Yet often, these digital communities being detached from place and physicality are incapable of truly serving and feeding our sense of interdependence as living and breathing creatures. A lot of these communities online as well are built around shared interests and values, which might provide a sense of emotional comfort and security. But I don't know that they are enough to get to the heart of it all, to address how digitization has evolved, as you mentioned, how we even think about our needs for community and how that might relate to the less tangible forms of violence that have become normalized.
Brad Evans: Again, we can trace it back to 1994. The example of the Zapatistas is, I think, a good example here because the moment the Zapatistas arrived on the scene there was almost a bourgeois fetishization of “this is the first internet revolution”. [There was this idea that] this was the revolution that [was] going to change the way we understand digital capacities for instigating social transformation. But I remember when I went to Chiapas, none of the Indigenous people there had mobile phones. They weren't all on Twitter [nor] Facebook.
The uprising which they instigated took 10 years of planning. The revolution was very much local, based on Indigenous peoples trying to, in the most desperate conditions, eke out some local form of autonomy, which put them in deeply precarious situations, but they realized they had nobody else but themselves. It had nothing to do with digitalization.
Yes, the digitalization might have prevented the Mexican state from committing genocide because it resulted in international knowledge of the revolution that happened in Chiapas. But the actual sustaining of the so-called revolution and the quest for autonomy requires people to work together in a very local, committed way, which has nothing to do with the hyper-acceleration of digitalization.
There’s another good lesson from the Zapatistas, which I'm only starting to really understand more... If you think about the idea of digital activism today, most of it is completely predictable and dull because people feel like they have to say something profound every single goddamn day of the year. You see this on Twitter: you have these Twitter activists where you can go back through their stream over the past two years… they haven't said anything new. They’ve just been repeating the same process over and over again.
One of the brilliant things about the Zapatistas, and Subcommandante Marcos in particular, was that they understood the importance every now and again of just being silent.
There'll be times when they would just go back into their communities and you wouldn't hear from them for six months. Silence [then] becomes a weapon that you can actually use, to [eventually] say something meaningful. We confuse activism today with just constantly being present, or constantly saying something, and constantly having the need to be constantly active in whatever way. Rather than actually stepping back and saying maybe this takes a bit more time, maybe we need to ask deeper questions about the nature of the human condition.
Perhaps the most radical thing we can do in politics today is insist upon a new temporality.
What the world needs right now is to slow things down, not to speed things up because I think this has been the commitment to the hyper-acceleration of everything I think, as the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues, that we are living in a runaway world. The world has sped up so far now. Nobody knows whether we are even on the treadmill anymore. That's really dangerous for all of us.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I'm sure our listeners will really resonate with what you just said because a lot of people really loved our past conversation with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, when he talked about our crisis in form that is showing up in the ways that activism has taken shape—and also just his invitation for us to really slow down and tune in and to go deep. So, I think all of this will leave our audience with a lot more to think about.
Of course, social media and mass media have supposedly connected the world. One of the results of that is that it's increased a lot of our exposure to how we bear witness to violence at a much greater scale.
I'm thinking about whether this constant exposure actually desensitizes us and erodes our urge and abilities at a collective level to reject the normalization and perpetuity of violence. I also question if we even have the human capacity at an individual level to process the scale and forms of violence that are happening at the global level.
Brad Evans: I think it has desensitized us to a point, but I think what we need to understand, perhaps more broadly, [which] is [something] you talk[ed] about—[how] technology has connected us, but it's also divided us. One of the things is when people feel insecure and vulnerable about their very sense of subjectivity…
The collapse back into identity politics is very easily understandable.
Actually, what we've learned now very clearly from the analysis of the way organizations such as Facebook operate is they like nothing more than culture wars and the battles between identities. Because it's highly profitable, it becomes the surest way to commodify protest.
If we look at almost a digital anthropological approach to the way in which violence operates across social media, what we see is not just desensitization, but almost a devout refusal to recognize some forms of violence, [while simultaneously] there's a hyperarousal to other forms of violence. A great deal of what takes place on social media today is very violent.
[We also see] discursive violent campaigns around who is the greatest victim of history. So, you have these constant battles where people are saying, “No, we have this, we suffer from violence, you don't suffer from violence,” or “our violence is greater than your violence” as if victimhood is some competition. I find this divisive nature of technology to be completely counterintuitive to what the world needs right now.
We can all now engage on social media in such imminently violent ways while being completely unaware that this is even happening. If I wanted to, I could cut 500 people from [my] Facebook [feed]. You can orchestrate the digital cull without anybody knowing about it, just because you find these 500 people’s views profoundly disagreeable. So [what ends up happening is] the way in which I see or relate to the world and what I want on my social media grouping is all people who think and see the world as I do, and will every now and again tell me how brilliant my thoughts are.
If you would explain that to me when I was a 14-year-old kid on the playground, I would have just laughed back at you because that's not reality. Especially when you grow up in an area where I did, where you grow up in conditions where things are tense and you live politics every day, you learn about politics in the playground. You know that you can't just simply block someone or vanish them out of existence. You [had] to learn to tolerate people that you would disagree with, or even the kids you disliked would end up hanging around with you for a bit because you have to learn to tolerate them. They live in the streets, so you have you're working with that close proximity to people.
This is one of the things which social media has done: it's created these artificial universes of so-called community, that when you strip it back, then prevent us from having the real difficult questions that society needs to happen today.
I look at the United States of America right now, and it's sometimes deeply worrying to see what's happening there and the way in which social divides have been hyper-accelerated. I look there and I think I see the young Black kids who have been really affected by the Black Lives Matter movement. Then you see kids from so-called broken white communities who would go along with Donald Trump. But even though a large part of their communities are equally subjected to police brutality and get shot down by the police, I think, why are these communities not speaking to one another?
That, to me, is the conversation we need to have. Those are very difficult questions. They're not questions that you can resolve on Twitter. They require people to sit down in a room and say, “You know what? I'm going to listen to you. I might find your political views very difficult, but I need to.” If we're going to try to repair the world, we have to really engage with ideas and people that we find very difficult. I can spend the rest of my life talking to people who will profoundly agree with what I'm going to say about the world—that's easy.
The more difficult thing is to try to engage with somebody who sees and feels the world from an entirely different perspective. Social media doesn't provide us any answers to any of that at all. But I think if we're going to move forward as if there is anything we might call progressive… Again, [this is] something which I found remarkable with the Zapatistas. They were saying, we're not looking for any revenge. We want to break down the borders. We want to open up an ethical conversation with people we think might disagree with us.
The question of disagreement to me has to be a basis for how we might think about politics going forward.
Kamea Chayne: Yeah, I really resonate with a lot of what you just said, which is why I'm personally trying to move away from social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter because I've found the culture to be extremely reactive. For example, I've been criticized for even quoting or interviewing people who have some views that are disagreeable. I found that to be really reductive, and I just wrote this recently, but I said that I reject this idea of building a “responsible media ecosystem” because I really want to see the world for what it is. I want to see the complexity of people and not feed into these superficial bubbles and the simplification of the human experience because it's not real, as you said.
My last question for you is: I know you've called for our need to rethink how humanity is defined and to rethink the relationship between love, violence, and sacrifice, which you say “we will only achieve by appreciating, in more intimate and poetic detail, the wounds of history so we can journey into the depths of the void and still retain our love for humanity, regardless of the violence that continues to make its sacred calling.”
To these invitations, I want to ask... Is it possible to love without sacrifice and to build without taking apart? What have you been pondering on these subjects? And what final inquiries would you like to invite our listeners to keep thinking about after this conversation?
Brad Evans:
I think love is the most profound political category we know.
It's the original political category, because if we think about why do we want community, or why do we want security, or why do we want justice? It's often not just for ourselves, but it's done because we care about other people. Why do I want security for my family? Because I love them.
In that sense, love comes before security. Love comes before freedom. Love comes before the demand for rights and justice. Now, if we start from the proposition that love is the foundational or the original category in terms of the formation of political ideas, to me, we wouldn't need security if it wasn't for love. Why would I care if people I didn’t love were secured. So, to me, if we start with that starting point, the question then becomes what kind of love?
Now, in the first book that I talk about, Ecce Humanitas, I start with a very early episode in one of the very first books in Western literature, which is Achilles’ Aristeia. I think it's the first known recorded book of literature in the Western literary canon. Now, what's remarkable about the book is that the book begins with the story of King Agamemnon, who wants to become victorious in the Trojan War and in order for him to appease the gods so that the ships can sail and he can be victorious in the Trojan War, he sacrifices his Virgin daughter.
This is a profound moment in the history of politics, in the history of Western literature, and the history of Western societies as we know them. Because you have a father who appeals to the gods and will sacrifice the love of his daughter for the love of his people. Now, the first thing that you can say is that no person should ever have to carry such a sacrifice. No sacrifice is ever worth it. The sacrifice of the fathers, the innocent child should never be worth it for the love of these people. It's what I call in the book the violence of artificial love, because clearly there's no love in that.
But I also think if we strip this back further, to your question about love without sacrifice… I'm deeply in love with my wife, and it's not a sacrifice. I don't see love as a sacrifice at all. Love is not a contract, either. Love to me… and the love I feel for my wife and my daughter, there's no sacrifice involved in that. To me, the kind of love which I have in mind, which is personal and deeply political, is the love that gives everything and demands nothing back in return. That, to me, is what love means, is that you are willing to give everything and you demand nothing back in return. That's not a sacrifice. That's just love.
I think this has been one of the conceits that we've given to ourselves… that love is important for politics, but love only matters if it can evidence sacrifice such as Agamemnon sacrificing the daughter, God sacrificing Jesus, or the nation sacrificing soldiers to protect our freedoms or us having to sacrifice humanity now so we can save ourselves and some new technological dystopia.
[Can we] rethink love outside of that, and actually say that being human is more than enough? We don't need to turn humans into sacred objects.
We don't need to turn children into sacred objects. Being a child should be more than enough for us to recognize the beauty and wonder of a child. We don't need to make them into sacred objects. So for me then, the idea of love without sacrifice is not abstract. Well, it is an abstract idea, but it's an abstract idea in a way that appeals to the best of the abstract. It's an idea that has very real concrete meaning as well, and a concrete meaning which could allow us to maybe transform the idea of societies where we can love people, but we will not demand them to sacrifice themselves in order to save the future.
*** CLOSING ***
Kamea Chayne: What's an impactful publication you follow or a book that's been really profound for you?
Brad Evans: One of them, in particular, is phenomenal, the other one I think just stays with me. The first is Alice in Wonderland, which I think is actually the best book of political theory ever written. I think it's such a phenomenal story about the power of political imagination and also a wonderful critique of violence as well. The second is Dante's Inferno, which deals in a really deeply poetic way with precisely that triangulation between perpetrators, victims, and witnesses of violence.
Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?
Brad Evans: There's a brilliant quote by the late Russian film director, Andre Tarkovsky. He says a book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books. I think that's something that can keep you humble, particularly as an author, that you recognize that you have no idea how the book is going to be interpreted. But you should also recognize that's a beautiful thing as well. It doesn't become a dogma, and it's open to so many different journeys in other people's lives.
Kamea Chayne: And what is your biggest source of inspiration right now?
Brad Evans: My wife. She's a formidable artist, but also an exceptional human, and I think we need to keep hold of something of these exceptional human beings in this techno world we operate in.
Kamea Chayne: Brad, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a huge honor to have you, and I really appreciate all that you've left with us here to think more deeply about after this conversation. But for now, what final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?
Brad Evans: There's a beautiful quote by Franz Kafka, and he says that we should only read the books that wound us. A book should be like an ax, which breaks open the frozen sea within us. That would be my advice to people: seek out those kinds of books, or seek out that kind of artwork, or seek out that kind of engagement.
