TAHAR BEN JELLOUN. AN UPHILL TASK

To make tolerance people's second nature is a duty that has to be done if the rule of law is to be established and consolidated. Without tolerance there is no democracy or, to put it another way, democracy and intolerance are irreconcilable opposites. Fanaticism is the fire surreptitiously lit by intolerance in the democratic fabric, it is a fixation, a deceptively pure-seeming obsession, an error that seeks to bring life anything that moves, changes and holds surprises to a standstill.

To tolerate fanaticism would be to tolerate the intolerable. How can fanaticism be allowed to monopolize the scene and make it a setting for tragedy? How is it possible to tolerate the enemies of freedom, those who would destroy intelligence and beauty, whose goal is a totalitarian order that imposes uniformity and proclaims that might is right, the law of the jungle? Where can one find the patience, courage and composure to refute this barbarity that prefers the use of the gun to that of the spoken or written word? How can one hold fast to one's principles, remain strictly respectful of beliefs different from, and even opposed to, one's own, and coexist with those who would wipe out anything that does not fit in with their crazed way of thinking?

Intolerance is only tolerable in art

Tolerance is an uphill task. It requires courage and strength, a robust aptitude for the cut and thrust of debate, and an ability to stand up to pressure. Who can claim to possess all these attributes? The answer is a combination of soldier and poet, policeman and philosopher, magistrate and artist for all great literature and all great painting have been the expression of intolerance of the intolerable. The writer's subject is not happiness, nor is peace that of the artist. Art is a clean break, a rejection, anger, provocation even. When beauty is laid waste, intelligence done to death, childhood violated and human beings humiliated, art cannot but be intolerant. It tolerates neither the ugliness of which people are capable nor the revulsion they arouse.

Fanaticism can be countered with humour; but this is sometimes a risky undertaking, since those who are fixated upon a certain order of things detest wit, subtlety and of course laughter. What they hold sacred is dogma, rigid and immutable. It is forbidden to make fun of it, whereas life, being short and beset with pitfalls, commends laughter as the best course. Laughter is often provocative, a way of distancing oneself a little from reality; but distance is something that has been totally banished from the world of intolerant people, who are so bound up in themselves they would like the rest of humanity to be identical clones of themselves.

Tolerance is something that has to be learned, a requirement that has to be lived with every day, a difficulty to be faced every moment of every day. It is hard work, but those who are attached to principles rather than prejudices or compromises do not seek the easy way out. They may not sleep soundly, it is true, but at least they do not relinquish that which makes us human, our dignity.

Tahar Ben Jelloun, An uphill task. The Unesco Courier, April 1995

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahar_Ben_Jelloun

 

 

ABRAXAS

Although life is an affair of light and shadows, we never accept it as such. We are always reaching towards the light and the high peaks. From childhood, through early religious and academic training, we are given values which correspond only to an ideal world. The shadowy side of real life is ignored, and Western Christianity provides us with nothing which can be used to interpret it. Thus the young men of the West are unable to deal with the mixture of light and shadow of which life really consists; they have no way of linking the facts of existence to their preconceived notions of absolutes. The links connecting life with universal symbols are therefore broken, and disintegration sets in. In the Orient, and especially in India, the situation is very different. There, an ancient civilization based on Nature accepts a cosmos of multifaceted gods; and thus the Easterner can realize the simultaneous existence of light and shadow and of good and evil. Absolutes do not exist, and if God is thus disarmed, so is the devil. But the price of such an understanding is a direct tribute to Nature itself. Consequently, the Hindu finds himself less individualized than the Westerner; he is little more than a part of nature, one element in the collective soul. The question which the Western Christian now has to face is whether, without losing his individuality, he can accept the coexistence of light and shadow and of God and the devil. To do so, he will have to discover the God who was Christian before the personalized Christ and who can continue in a viable form after him. Such a deity would be the Christ of Atlantis, who once existed publicly, and who still continues to exist - even though submerged under the deep waters of our present civilization. Such a god would also be Abraxas, who is God and the devil at the same time. The first time I heard of Abraxas by name was in Demian, but I had really known about him from my childhood days. I had sensed his existence in the heart of the Cordillera of the Andes and in the unfathomable depths of the Pacific Ocean which beats against our coasts. This ignis fatuus, the flames of heaven and hell which exist in him, flickered even in the foam of these waves. Abraxas is a Gnostic god who existed long before Christ. He may be equated, too, with the Christ of Atlantis, and is known by other names by the Aborigines of the Americas, amongst them the Indians who inhabited my country. Hermann Hesse speaks of him in this way: Contemplate the fire, contemplate the clouds, and when omens appear and voices begin to sound in your soul, abandon yourself to them without wondering beforehand whether it seems convenient or good to do so. If you hesitate, you will spoil your own being, you will become little more than the bourgeois façade which encloses you, and you will become a fossil. Our god is named Abraxas, and he is both god and the devil at the same time. You will find in him both the world of light and of shadows. Abraxas is not opposed to any of your thoughts nor to any of your dreams, but he will abandon you if you become normal and unapproachable. He will abandon you and look for another vessel in which to cook his thoughts. The modern Christian and the Western world as a whole have now reached a point of crisis, and the choices open seem less than attractive. We neither want one of those apocalyptic catastrophes which have so disfigured our past history, nor do we want the dehumanizing path of the Orient, which would result in an irremediable lowering of our standards. Perhaps, then, the only possibility that remains is Abraxas; that is to say, a projection of our souls both outwards and inwards, both to the light and to the deep shadows of our biographical roots, in hopes of finding in the combination of the two the pure archetype. This pure archetype would be the authentic image of the god which is within ourselves and which has been sunk for so long, like Atlantis, under the waters of our consciousness. Thus Abraxas would also come to mean Total Man. 

From C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse by Miguel Serrano