In Praise of The Inner Life

This is rather a random, off-the-peg post that has just been inspired by my ongoing 'discussion' with Derek, over 'moral relativism', 'universal truths', 'universal values' and other such fancy-schmancy terms of which I vaguely have the outlines of an understanding. (Apologies Derek, I have been attempting to link to your blog, but Blogger gets rather unhappy about it and repeatedly refuses to let me... aha... HA! TAKE THAT! TAKE THAT! *metaphorically bounces up and down in TRIUMPH*).

Ridiculous and out-of-touch though it is going to sound (which is pretty bloody impressive considering that I am 21!), I am going to proceed to rip the shit out of the sort of people who commit honour killings. Not just those people either, but the other people who embody the various degrees leading up to the committing of such atrocities on the scale of fuckwittery.

Now, we all care what people think of us to some extent. That's part of the whole fucking deal of being yuman. We measure ourselves against other beings, and this has led to a lot of grief and schadenfreude, but it is also useful because it helps us set a (ideally) universal standard of What Is Not Acceptable. Unfortunately, this standard isn't really universal, which is why ancient taboos like incest and paedophilia still persist and why fucking honour killings happen in the first place.

Now, I know this is no solution and I'm perfectly aware that this will make me sound like an ivory-tower intellectual, but I don't care. It has to be said. I am going to speak in praise of the inner life.

The 'inner life' as I understand it, is the kind of thing championed by the likes of E.M Forster and Marcel Proust. Might I just take this opportunity to state that I have slagged off Forster here before, for which I apologise, but y'know, Howards End is pretty dense. It is also absolutely amazing. Mummy, when I grow up, I want to be E.M Forster! Er... without the homosexual upper/middle-class white male thing, of course. I've neither the money nor the time for that kind of operation ;-D.

So yeah, anyway, the 'inner life' basically involves the individual taking time to reflect on themselves and the world, maybe even seeking to make sense of a post-God world through art, and generally refusing to see and depict the world in a simple way, even if they lean towards a simplistic view themselves. Howards End is full of certain conservative leanings and idealistic tendencies that make me scoff 'Bullshit,' but it also recognises the inherent complexity of life. That, for me, makes it more than worthy of forgiveness and gives it its rightly-deserved masterpiece status. Proust and HE both acknowledge the vital importance of art and culture to life.

People sneer at these kinds of attitudes, especially in a world where there is so much poverty and studying medicine is much more likely to earn you cash than studying English. However, I feel that we are increasingly obsessed with material things these days. I'm not making a conservative value-judgement, I'm just saying how it seems to me. I can't - and wouldn't - speak for the past. When I say material, I don't just mean that we are hugely consumerist (we are!) but also that we're increasingly obsessed with the tangible.

No doubt people who've chatted with me before might have heard this from me already - I think that our culture is very visually-oriented. To give you an idea of what I'm on about, the culture of Elizabethan England was more orally-centred, being as it was a time of Shakespeare, mass-theatre and no TVs. Again, I am not exercising any judgements here - I wouldn't dare. I am simply chronicling what appears to me to be a cultural development.

This movement towards the visual is good in the sense that it demands that information be made more concise, clear and direct than ever before, which is no bad thing. However - ironically enough - this is also in some ways a downside. I often feel that because this demand comes alongside an ever-apparent awareness that there is so much going on out there that we don't know and don't understand, we end up in a dangerous position.

Overwhelmed by the sheer volume of knowledge out there, crying out for understanding, people bury themselves further in what they already know. And what they already know, subconsciously, is that visual images are quicker and easier to process than words. So, they whip out their gossip magazines (to provide one example...!) and lose themselves in the blown-up photos of unfortunate, mostly-female celebrities accompanied by tiny, almost incidental captions. I really do not think that that is an accident, btw. They know what people want, and they're going to give it to them.

Hence people bury themselves in the obvious, in the visible, and in doing so, they ostracise themselves from the 'inner life.' The inquisitivity of youth gives way to the fear and cynicism of age, and a feeling that the world is both a) moving faster than it used to and b) moving too fast for you to keep up with. DON'T LOSE YOURSELF TO IT!

Culture is the only way we can be saved from this. People need to be made to think - and I'm aware that sounds dictatorial, but I don't care. When people stop questioning, they start digging in firmly to their 'hand-me-down' beliefs (I know I've used that phrase already, and FYI, it isn't even my coinage!). They begin to vaunt tradition, and then we have a problem.

This is the problem with the sort of people who commit honour killings. They have no inner life at all. They simply inhale the bigotry of tradition handed to them, trying to create a viable identity for themselves out of the processes of fear and denial. These people take huge pride in their 'communities', as well they would. They are parasites! Separate them from their communities and they would perish, because all they are is a lower order of being, mere chimps who have programmed themselves with the guiding fist of tradition, to replicate, replicate, replicate.

These people's entire sense of self depends on how they are seen by others. They are paper beings, no real substance existing beyond the crumbs of meaning that their pathetic, trembling paws have grabbed from the mouths of others and crammed into the huge hole where a personality and a sense of self should be. Such cogs are they that they perceive the individuality of others, even of their own children as a shaming. It IS a shaming, it is a shaming of you BECAUSE YOU ARE NOTHING. You have no individuality, and this realisation of the whole mechanism, of all the other identikit cogs is your life. When you see somebody else who is threatening to escape the mechanism, who doesn't need to be a cog, your pathetic, pathetic rage and jealousy spills out until it consumes them.

I could have anyone try and justify these people to me - but wait! How dare I call them 'people'? They are murderers who have no humanity; mere automatons for whom the merest TOUCH of humanity will derail their sense of self. Snuff the spark! their Cyberman-instincts cry. It threatens me, so it must die! How DARE they try and use the excuse of 'honour'? How DARE they try and pass selfishness off as mere self-consciousness?

Then, just to rub the salt in that little bit further, they fucking well try and use religion to justify their deeds. FUCKOFF, you arrogant fucking hypocritical self-deluded bastards. It is God's right, and God's right only, to pass judgement on an individual's actions like that. Certainly not yours, and CERTAINLY not yours to choose to take the life. How fucking arrogant can you get?

The absolute worst thing for me is that many of the men who commit these atrocities do so without the knowledge or approval of their wives - so despite half the genetic material rightfully belonging to the wife (if we're going to be disgustingly crude), that being which is a part of both parents gets snuffed out regardless.

Murder is never acceptable, whatever the motive behind it, but the way these people try to bring a moral sanction to what they do means that honour killings leave a particularly bad taste in the moral mouth. Psychopaths who kill complete strangers for money are bad enough, but to add in that colossal betrayal of trust... Vah, vah. Bohat changa kita. Or, for those of you who don't speak Punjabi, 'Wow. Very well done.'

To quote (and possibly paraphrase?) one of my favourite Hindi songs ever: 'Insaan bano / Duniya se chale jayo' - 'Behave like men / Leave this world and be gone.'

(On a lighter note, how the hell did I end up with four followers and 880 profile views?!).