Activism and Inwardness

Abstract

Activism and Inwardness Nathan Schneider The genre of testimony is one that a serious writer would do best to avoid. By testimony I mean a very particular subset of first‐person narrative—this isn't autobiography (of one's life as such), or reportage (of one's adventures), or confession (of one's misadventures), or testimonial (of one's experiences with certain products). Each of those genres can be adapted, free of cringing, to a modern, literary, secular voice. One can write in them, post the result on the Internet, then afterward live to write another genre. Testimony is different. That's because writers are supposed to be in control, aware of themselves and those around them. Supremely so—that's why we're the writers. But testimony doesn't permit this. Whether one testifies from the stand in a courtroom or the sanctuary of a church, testimony is about forces beyond one's control or comprehension. In court, testimony takes place in the midst of an imposing and perplexing and grinding process by which justice is purported to be done, and over which the witness has as little control as the lawyer class can make possible. Such a testimony can be only part of the story, and it will be heard only through a mysterious combination of performative and bureaucratic filters. Testimony coming from a Christian has similar features. This kind of testimony is a story about what God has done in one's life; the main character in such a story is supposed to be God, but since the testifier is a human being and not God, God's activities present themselves only through what the testifier claims God has done in her or his life. A writer conveying such experience has little opportunity to take credit for anything important that takes place, yet all the while implicitly asserting the fact of being a subject of God's particular concern. Testimony is thus both pious and submissive, two gigantic no‐nos of the modern writerly voice. Christian testimony is also typically evangelistic, which is to say propagandistic, and that is supposed to be even worse. The following is a testimony. It feels like testimony to me, anyway; by charting the progress of certain flighty, troublesome sensations upon which my sense of self seemed to depend, I mean to describe the nature and activity of Something Else. I hope it is also a little propagandistic. After that little preface, on to the introduction. It dwells on a passage from Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, a book that has been a consistent companion to me ever since I discovered it in a used bookstore while a student. The passage struck me with particular force as I was first formulating this essay in April 2013, when armored people and vehicles were rolling through the deserted streets of Cambridge hunting down, and eventually shooting, the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing. Murdoch considers some words from the Book of Romans: “The whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” And so it goes: The spectacle of the terrible suffering of others may prompt not only sympathy but also a sense of guilt which may be overwhelming. (This was felt by many people in relation to the Holocaust.) So it may be felt that not only “personal spirituality,” but also moral philosophy and traditional theology are out of place in a world tormented by poverty, misery and cruelty: that old‐fashioned generalisations, or calm reflections upon inwardness, are too abstract and dreamy and indeed selfish to be true for a post‐Hitler post‐Stalin overpopulated nuclear planet. Such an attitude may make benevolent social fanatics, or could lead to terrorism, where a particular cause, idolised as just, produces a callous indifference to other values. But one does not have to choose between activism and inwardness or feel that one is bound to swallow the other. A morality of axioms needs the intuitive control of a more widely reflective and general morality. In a good society these ways of thinking, while always in tension, know their roles and places, and when they have rights against each other. “Activism...