Streamlining & the Culture of Death
If you would indulge me, what I have here is the putting together of some random notes for a thought bubble that, I hope, will gradually develop into a publication one day, which I am provisionally entitling “Streamlining and the Culture of Death”
It was prompted by reading a great article on The Elephant Man by Matthew Becklo, and one theme in that article looked at the distortion and disfigurement of a person, as well as the failure to see the other. What I got out of the latter half of that article is that this failure to acknowledge the other stems from the unwillingness to negotiate the mess that comes from human living, an outward expression of that being the unwillingness to see disagreement, even passionate disagreement, as healthy. Rather than go down this difficult path, we choose instead the relative ease of dismissing people, cataloguing them as abnormal or somehow less than human.
Following that, Becklo made a reference to Bishop Robert Barron’s Vibrant Paradoxes, in which Barron says that if we go down the path of the denial of this difficult path and in so doing denying one’s humanity will inevitably lead to a culture of death. What I found interesting is that Barron’s link between a denial of humanity and a culture of death was made in the context of a book affirming Catholicism’s embrace of paradox, the holding together of two seemingly opposing things. Put another way, my mind went that it is the denial of paradox - the word I used for that was “streamlining” - that ultimately leads to the culture of death.
Thinking of this made me revisit with fresh eyes an article from 2013 called The Rhizome of Life, which I wrote for The Other Journal. That article laid out two ways of thinking through life, especially our political life. The article drew on the philosopher William Connolly, who juxtaposed a very efficient “arborial” modality (think of trees with many branches fed by a single trunk) and the much messier “rhizomic” modality (think of a ginger with a neverending series of connections and comlexities that seem to defy centralisation).
The “arborial” which was efficient precisely because it “ensured harmony…by funneling all its constituents through a single criterion of belonging”, thereby locking out genuine and legitimate differences, and rendering political life a mere parody of real life, since real life has a vitality that exceeds any political ordering. By contrast, Connolly (and he is drawing on the vitalist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze in making this comment) thought that the “rhizomic” modality which he argued was more in keeping with real life, since this modality operated in the recognition of various complexities, tensions and, more importantly, oppositions that are part and parcel of real life. Rather than something to be suppressed in the name of a streamlined harmony, this modality is underpinned by the post-Nietzschean commitment that it is precisely these oppositions and struggles that give life its vitality.
Another point I argued in that article is that there are overlaps to be found between affirming this “rhizomic” modality, as well as the Catholic embrace of paradox. As was covered in my interview with the Clerically Speaking podcast, the reason for this embrace of paradox is due to the ancient idea of Christ as a paradox, or in more technical terms, a coincidence of opposites. Christ is the coincidence of a transcendent God and immanent man, a creator Father and generated Spirit, alpha and omega, beginning and end, and so on.
More importantly, it is precisely in this coincidence of opposites which we Christ promises us to “have life to the full” (John 10:10). The question then becomes, if life is synonymous with the embrace of paradox, what then happens outside of this embrace?
Although I have not yet fully fleshed out answer, I found a clue in Catherine Pickstock’s After Writing. While I need to read more deeply into the text, what she does track a progression between a modern drive to streamline, what she calls ensuring "internal consistency” as a metaphysical requirement, and what she would later term the “necrophilia of modernity”, in which the drive to deny death ironically ends up with having death become a precondition of life.
There are many gaping holes in the argumentation, to be sure, but I hope these scattered thoughts make sense. There seems to me a metaphysical continuum between streamlining and the culture of death that is worth exploring further.
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