Uprootedness and national conflicts
The French philosopher and social activist Simone Weil identified the basic human need for roots as crucial. Uprootedness and disapora in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians have shaped the narratives about the past and the future on both sides. Jonathan Glover, a Professor of Philosophy at King's College London has been in Australia to deliver the annual Simone Weil lecture on human value and joins us.
Alan Saunders: 'We owe a cornfield respect, not because of itself but because it is food for mankind. In the say way we owe our respect to a collectivity of whatever kind, country, family, or any other, not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls'.
The words of the French philosopher, Simone Weil who died in 1943 at the age of 34, while working for the French Resistance in England. It was hard work and she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and instructed to rest and eat well. But she limited her food intake to what she believed was available to the citizens of Occupied France, and succumbed to cardiac failure.
Hello and welcome to The Philosopher's Zone, I'm Alan Saunders.
Every year since 2000 the Australian Catholic University has invited a distinguished international scholar to deliver the Simone Weil lecture on human value. This year it was the turn of Jonathan Glover, one of the world's most distinguished moral philosophers and currently Professor in the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King's College, London. His subject was one dear to Simone Weil: uprootedness, narratives and national conflict. And he turned his philosophical attention to the conflict in the Middle East.
But to begin with, who was Simone Weil?
Jonathan Glover: She was a French Catholic, she was a philosopher and she was a very unusual person in that she wasn't at all conventional. She took up for instance, the idea of worker-priests long before it was fashionable. She was passionately on the side of the Resistance, and worked for the Resistance during the war against the Nazis, and afterwards she was extremely interested in the idea of the spiritual rebirth of France, what sort of country should it be, and she was given the task of working out an account of what human beings need. She wrote a long thing called The Needs of the Soul, where she talked about how people need community, people need truthfulness, people need autonomy, and so on, and one of the things she said was 'a need of the soul was the need for roots, the need to be rooted to belong in a community to be recognised, to have a place and so on.
Alan Saunders: And she was one of those people, I've seen her compared to Wittgenstein in that she was one of those philosophers who have about them a sort of air of saintliness or purity of a lived live, wasn't she?
Jonathan Glover: Yes. I'm not sure if I think Wittgenstein had an air of purity so much as a kind of strange intensity and seriousness. But she certainly had both, because partly I think she was a very religious person, a deeply believing Catholic, but also she had a kind of saintliness and a kind of intellectual intensity, which is a bit like Wittgenstein.
Alan Saunders: Now your lecture applies her ideas to the conflict in Palestine, and you say that the conflict between the two peoples there is also a conflict between their rival narratives of their shared history. Tell us about that.
Jonathan Glover: Well the thing I was struck by is that every time there's a particular episode, in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians there are always these two rival accounts. And I was struck by the British newspaper The Guardian a couple of years ago when there was the conflict between the Israeli armed forces and Hezbollah in the Lebanon. The Guardian ran two articles, absolutely parallel. One was by someone who was in the Israeli Security Cabinet, and the other was a leading figure in Hezbollah. And they were given the same number of words and they were describing the same conflict, but their views were diametrically opposed about what happened, who started it, what the intentions of the other side were, what their own intentions were. And I think this is just one tiny slice of a narrative that goes back through the 1967 war through the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and far beyond. There's a kind of account according to which we only react defensively. On both sides they say we react defensively, they start the conflict, we only try to make peace, we only ask for justice. They are trying to wipe us out, they would like to be rid of us, they are liars and so on.
And I suppose what I worry about is that these narratives are self-supporting because each time we don't believe what the other side say, whichever side one's on, we don't believe what the other side's saying. Why not? Because they proven liars. How do we know they're proven liars? Well because of all the past episodes which we have interpreted in our story. And in this way these self-supporting narratives seem to me to be a real contributory factor in keeping the conflict going.
Alan Saunders: But presumably one of the problems here is not just that there are two self-supporting narratives but that as you say, there is a sort of symmetry to them. I mean in every conflict there are presumably two different narratives, 'it was ours and they took it from us', or 'we were here and they invaded us'. But here we have those elements too, but we also have a curious symmetry.
Jonathan Glover: Well very often I think there's a symmetry where each can represent the other as an aggressor and so on. I'm partly interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict for its own sake because it's obviously a tragic conflict and its poison spreads out to infect so much of international relations all over the world. So many people get killed, it's a terrible conflict. And I'm also interested in it in a way as a really well-documented example of a conflict of this kind where there are the rival stories. But the reason I link it up with Simone Weil's ideas about the need for roots, is that I think one of the things that's distinctive about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is that both sides feel they're victims and both sides feel they're victims partly because they feel they have lived a life of exile, diaspora, and their roots have been denied.
The Palestinians obviously many of them were driven out of Jerusalem and other parts of what are now Israel, lived in refugee camps, they now live under the Israeli occupation in the Occupied Territories. They feel that their roots have been torn up. But equally, why did the Israelis set up the State of Israel? Partly because of centuries of experience of the awfulness, the alienation, the humiliation of being always in someone else's country, always being seen as a stranger, always being the odd group who might be discriminated against or far worse as in Nazi Germany.
Alan Saunders: How then does Simone Weil address the issue of rootedness?
Jonathan Glover: Well she says that what one needs is the experience of participating actively and naturally, she says, in a certain kind of community. And she's a very interesting writer but she often writes in a way that's slightly hard to pin down. So I've in my lecture, I did a bit of attempt at kind of pinning down a bit, but I'm slightly diffident about whether she would utterly endorse what I say, because you can't put something precise where there's something not quite so precise and of course you may be getting it slightly wrong as far as her intentions go. But the way I unpack it is that you need the sense of belonging. They need somewhere which you say 'This is my village, this is my town, this my country', you don't have to legally own it, but you have to have a kind of emotional ownership of it. And people don't feel that if they're in exile. I quote the Palestinian poet who's lived many years in exile, Mourid Barghouti and he describes the life of moving from one hotel in another country to another boarding house somewhere, and so on, and he feels that there's nothing he actually possesses. So I think the sense of belonging in that sense, is very important.
Then the second thing I suggest as part of the idea of rootedness, is the sense of security, the feeling, 'I'm rooted here and in a sense this is why I feel comfortable, relaxed, I don't have to be always looking over my shoulder to see if someone's about to kill me.' But of course both Israelis and Palestinians have been denied that because of their conflict. Israelis when they send their children off to school in the school bus wonder if there'll be a suicide bomber on it. Palestinians wonder even if they're living in the Occupied Territories, whether Israeli soldiers will come and demolish their house, or shoot at them. So security is a very important thing, which again is missing in the condition of what Simone Weil calls 'uprootedness'. And there is also a side to it which I think has to do with the sense of our own identity. Again this comes out quite a lot in Mourid Barghouti's accounts of his own thoughts about being exiled from Palestine.
When we think about ourselves and our lives, we think we'd try and make some sense of our lives, people don't just want their life to be a heap of events one after another in a kind of chaos. People like to think that their lives add up to some kind of coherent story which makes some kind of sense, until they have an answer to the question What have you done with your life? And that involves to as it were keep in touch with your own narrative of the early years. It's good to be able to go back to the places where you were at school, or the place where you lived as a child. And there's a huge sense of being deprived of that. And then when Mourid Barghouti did eventually go back to the West Bank, to Ramallah, he went back as a famous poet and he gave a poetry reading, and it should have been one of the happiest moments of his life, the children in the school where he'd been at school, tore pages out of their exercise books and came up and asked him to give his autograph. But it was, in a way, a happy moment; he said it also wasn't, because he felt having been away, he'd got out of sync with the place, he didn't know what had happened while he was away. They didn't know what had been happening in his life. And he did feel a sense of a kind of disjoined identity.
The other part of I think of what's important to the idea of rootedness is the idea of self-respect, because I think the belonging somewhere being recognised to having a status, a position, a job, being a family member in a community where people know you, the sense of security not always being worried about your safety, and having the sense of a known and respected identity, that all contributes to self-respect. One of the things I'm struck by which is parallel between Israelis and Palestinians is that both Israelis talking about often their parents in their life in, say, Poland in the pre-Second World War period, describe humiliations, describe a lack of self-respect, which came from being alien Jews in an alien land.
Amos Oz for instance, the Israeli novelist, talks about the way in which his father and his grandfather were both humiliated when they lived in Poland. His father was a schoolboy in Poland and was bullied, teased and tortured for being a Jew. And when his father, Amos Oz's grandfather went to the school to complain about this, the bullies attacked him, tore his trousers off and humiliated him in the playground, sneered and talked about what a Jew he was. And Amos Oz recounts the night when he was a small boy himself, the night that the United Nations voted to set up the State of Israel, and he says that his father talked about this, and then said 'From tonight, now we have our own State, never again will people be treated like that just because you're a Jew'.
And you can see how the sense of humiliation and lack of self respect fed into the idea that you wanted the protection of your own nation-state. And this is very parallel to humiliations that the Palestinians now describe in the Occupied Territories, being taunted by Israeli soldiers, women being humiliated, treated at sex toys, forced to kiss Arab men and so on. And this kind of humiliation seems to me an enormously important ingredient in explaining why it is that people are so angry with each other and resort to so much violence in their conflict.
Alan Saunders: If I can return to the experience of Mourid Barghouti you quote a moving lament from Barghouti about how exile has created a generation of Palestinians who know nothing of the texture of their country's daily life, and he describes "generations that never saw our grandmothers squatting in front of the ovens to present us with a loaf of bread to dip in olive oil, never saw the village preacher in his head-dress and Azhari piety hiding in a cave to spy on the girls and the women of the village when they took off their clothes and bathed naked in the pool of Ein al-Deir. Well that's very sad, but you could say, couldn't you, about this experience and to some extent about the experience of all exiles that this life in the modern world, which is all about the fracturing of a sense of continuity. For the last century, life in the industrialised West has all been about constant change, perhaps not as keenly felt as this, but nonetheless a fact of life.
Jonathan Glover: Well I agree that it's a very plausible thing to say that the complex modern world with things like industrialisation, globalisation, travel, families disappearing to different parts of the earth, certainly it's true that there's a considerable loss of continuity, and perhaps it's, I mean Simone Weil might have said that one of the things wrong with the modern world is that all of us, to some extent, have the experience of a degree of uprootedness, perhaps not all of us, but many more people than, say a couple of hundred years ago.
But I suppose what I'm trying to say is that in the case of the Israelis and Palestinians it's these things are combined to an intense degree. People are actually not allowed to go back to the occupied territories in many cases. Mourid Barghouti describes his brother, who he believes died as a result of a kind of broken heart after endlessly trying to get back to the places where he felt he belonged, and being denied it. The history of the humiliations and horrors of Jewish life with anti-semitism in 1930s Europe are instantly familiar.
I agree that there may be uprootedness spreading a bit more in the world, but I think the whole thing is a matter of degree and the conflict which I'm talking about isn't as a result of just, as it were, the standard 'We haven't seen our daughter for five years because she's gone off to live in Texas' or wherever it is. It's that a whole community feels that they are uprooted, there isn't as it were a home base any more for them if they're driven out into exile. And also they feel the humiliations of this being imposed on them rather than being chosen by say, a son or a daughter who chooses to emigrate somewhere else.
Alan Saunders: That was the sound of conflict in the Middle East.
One place though where conflict is no longer quite so clamorous as it used to be is South Africa, and Jonathan Glover believes there is something to be learnt from the South African Truth and Reconciliation process.
Jonathan Glover: Well first let me say that I don't think there's any, you know, the whole struggle between Israelis and Palestinians has many causes, and there's no one magic formula for simply bringing about peace. I mean no doubt we'll need pressures from outside countries, peace proposals, attempts to run negotiations, attempts to broker deals, possibly economic subsidies so the Palestinians aren't so relatively poor compared to the Israelis. There are all sorts of political and economic moves we need. But what I'm concentrating on here, partly because I'm a philosopher and I'm no expert on the politics or the economics, but I'm concentrating in a way on the psychological, and I'm interested in the way these rival narratives about 'we're always in the right, and they always betrayed us and attacked us' and so on and 'you cant trust them.'
I'm interested in how those narratives trap the people who believe into them into conflicts, interviewing with each other. And the things I'm struck by is that of course you can't necessarily extrapolate from what happens after a conflict to what you can do within. But if you look at the South African conflict, in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission what they did afterwards, was first do everything they could to nail lying propaganda so that they nailed various lies which the old apartheid government had put about, saying that torture was only a few rotten apples, it wasn't a systematic policy and that kind of thing. They also nailed some lies which people in the liberation movement as they called it, had put about that they weren't actually responsible for any atrocities; they too were responsible for some atrocities.
So firstly they tried to establish the facts with the idea that the false propagandist narratives about the past, as happened in Yugoslavia where Serbs and Croats and people had these legends about each other as horrible tricksters, betrayers, aggressors and so on. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission said If we can get a true account, stripped of this lying propaganda, that means that the old enmities are less likely to focus around the propaganda and as a result the conflict is less likely to break out again.
But they also said that there are certain psychological needs for many victims of both sides in the South African conflict who've been injured, their families have been tortured or killed, or whatever it is, and if we're to make real peace, they argued, we have to bring out not only the facts of what happened, but also hear their accounts of what it meant for their lives, what it did as insults to their dignity, because it's only by giving victims the right to express what happened to them, that you make it likely that they're going to feel in a psychological state where they can forgive people.
And what I'm suggesting is that you can't run a Truth and Reconciliation Commission exactly as they did in South Africa while a conflict like the Israeli-Palestinian one is still going on, because people who testified would become victims, you know, they'd either be thought traitors to their own side and perhaps be killed by them, or they'd be thought enemies and killed by the other side. You can't run it exactly like that while the conflict is still going on. But what you can do is think out various educational projects which may help people see the limitations and the biases of their own narratives, and that's what I'd like to do. I'd like to help to set up various ways in which Palestinians and Israelis get together and teach each other about their versions of the history and talk to each other and try to understand each other's accounts.
Alan Saunders: Just finally it's only a generation or so since moral philosophy in the English-speaking world was really about rules and the justification for rules, and the obligation to obey rules. You have talked entirely in terms of narrative, rival narratives of events, so there is, is there, a sort of narrative turn in moral philosophy of which you are part?
Jonathan Glover: You could say that. I'm talking about narrative in the context of this particular kind of conflict. If I was talking about a different set of moral issues, I might well be talking in a rather different way. I'm not sure there's a sort of one-size-fits-all approach to moral philosophy. I think that I'm talking a lot about narratives; I agree that narratives wasn't a topic talked about at all 20 or 30 years ago in moral philosophy, so in a way that's a change, but it isn't as it were, sweeping movements as far as I'm concerned, that to be applied to absolutely any question that comes up.
Alan Saunders: Jonathan Glover, thank you very much indeed for joining us.
Jonathan Glover: Thank you.
Alan Saunders: Professor Jonathan Glover, who was in Australia to deliver this year's Simone Weil lecture on human value.
And if you were expecting to hear more of Jonathan le Coq on Enlightenment and music this week, well, don't worry, he will be turning up very soon in a future program.
The show is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production by Charlie McCune. I'm Alan Saunders and I'll be back next week with another Philosopher's Zone.
- Jonathan Glover
Centre of Medical Law and Ethics
King's College, London
Distinguished Research Fellow
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
- Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century
- Jonathan Glover
- Yale University Press (2000)
- Alan Saunders
- Kyla Slaven