Sunday 1st February 2015 @ 12:00
And this is why...
I truly believe that submission, particularly of the ego, has a lot to offer those of us who think that the sacred right to freedom doesn’t come without the correlative duty to exercise it with restraint. My friends who tolerated my Ferrari/ Miami Beach years knows that I have sinned in this department probably more than most. Since then, in the face of the consequences of inconsiderate behaviour, I have been forced to reconsider. One of the main catalysts of this change centred around a chance encounter with Mohammed (pictured here), in God-forsaken Mauritania, Mohammed who stood stoic as bone-splinters were poking through his skin. At that time, my own existence was soaked in the sort of self-indulgence that can only come with the lifestyle of a CEO/ investment banker in New York. More on all that in a bit.
… dark, dark depressing France...
I’ve just spent a week in France with my ailing mother and then in Normandy.
Paris reminded me of my adolescent years when I would occasionally pick up ‘Hara Kiri’ which then became ‘Charlie Hebdo’. I almost always found the content just loathsome. I’ve no problem with satire: Private Eye has often been homophobic, misogynous, wildly disrespectful of the establishment, but even if I am offended at times (ostensibly not because I am a lesbian Baroness) Private Eye adds some very sharp journalism to well-thought research and deep sardonic insight into the darker sides of the British psyche. I hurt a bit but I feel soothed by the inner chuckling. ‘Charlie' has never had any of P.E.’s broad intelligence, or any its irresistible wit, yet carried all of the vulgarity and gratuitous disrespect. Glancing through it just made me feel slightly sick.
Normandy reminded me of that rather French national pastime : orgueil. There is no direct equivalent in English apparently but lets just translate it as ‘excessive, maybe self-destructive pride’. I’ve been working with our architect there for 20 years on various projecets. The architect and I had lunch. He’s complaining about his business levels being mediocre. I asked him how his English is. His answer ‘Froggy'. And there you have it. One of the most glaringly obvious trends of the past 15 to 20 years for anybody involved in the service business, especially in highly tourist-driven areas: you gotta speak International. And International is English. Not French. Not German. Not even the Queen’s English. It’s the English of the Poles and the Germans and the Californians who want to visit one of the most important historical battle-grounds of the twentieth century (that would be Normandy) and will pay you money to do things for them. But my mate the architect doesn’t see why HE would have to adjust to the world changing around him. He knows better than most (he’s very very good at what he does), so why don’t people just adjust to him?
So I’ve left the land of great food (sorry Mum), with my same old sense: France is being left behind, decade after decade, because of a culture so arrogant and so driven by its sense of entitlement that it simply refuses to accept the world’s glaringly obvious changes or that it might have to adjust to these. The idea that these changes may be beneficial and actually fun is not even considered. Come on, if even the English can learn a little modesty (a little submission?) and take a soft stab at multi-culturalism…
…meeting Mohammed in the desert (2002)…
Mauritania is where the Sahara goes to die in the mid-Atlantic. ‘Harsh’ doesn’t cover it. You leave the car for a few hours, you forgot your water bottle? You’re dead. The heat and the elements felt as brutal as anywhere on earth. So when a tire burst on the jeep we were taking through a part of the Sahara that is somewhat passable, we stopped off at the local garage to get a fix. The ‘local garage' was actually a tent. And when I write ‘local’ , I mean we drove 15 kms on a bone-jarring rocky treck to get to this tent, which was the only shelter from the flying sand, the heat and the wind for - well - 15 kms. Mohammed helped fix the tire. Except he put his thumb in the way of a sledge hammer coming down on the tire to get it off its rim. He howled. And then went quiet. When we departed for our next destination, he offered to serve as guide. As there was no room in the cabin, he held onto the roll bar of the jeep, standing on the rear platform for 3 hours as we darted through the evening to the ocean, and then, at night fall, rested quietly with the rest of us in the large tent. It was only in the morning that I saw him bathing his wound in the sea. I asked him to show me, and saw bloody bone shards poking through the skin. The hammer had shattered his thumb. I still shake my head as to how oblivious I had been up to that point.
- 'Well off to Nouakshott with you then.’ I said. 'Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it. You’ve got to get this seen to.’
- 'Hmmm… Let me think… No, I think I have to stay: Mum needs the money I make here.’ I’m summarising but that was his decision and the basis for his decision. And he did stay.
There I had it. A few days prior, pretty much anything I wanted in my Manhattan loft, at any time of day or night, was mine for cash. Even somebody to listen to me whine for 10 dollars a minute. And here was Mohammed, owner of nothing, with a life-expectancy of maybe 30, submitting his own needs, possibly his own entire self to - well - his understanding of right and wrong.
…1.3 billion potential friends and teachers...
So what? Well, this is so what: I know there are many cultures that promote submission of the ego to the greater good. Or God’s Will. Or art (Art?). Or whatever. But during another nice lunch (yeah, I know, I’m not half-French for nothing) with a food-loving Sheyk I met in Manchester recently, it occurred to be that Islam is the only belief system that has 1.3 billion followers who seem to have self-abnegation (I believe Muslims call it submission to God) as a central pillar to their lives. As Judeo-Christian westerners, we have alongside us 1.3 billion people, 1.3 billion potential friends, 1.3 billion people whose values overlap so much that the denominations themselves often seem absurd, 1.3 billion people who can teach us a thing or two about setting our own needs aside, taking a good hard look at our ‘me’ culture and maybe peering out to a less ego-driven and more peaceful life. And you know what? If these 1.3 billion potential friends don’t want me to draw cartoons of their Prophet (Peace be upon him - yes), then maybe, just maybe, I can take that into account. After all, if I don’t have to offend my friends, I can try not to: these 1.3 billion people and their belief system deserve my respect.
… so maybe a little less about me...
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one for forbidding much. Free speech? Legally speaking, have at it. You hold racist views? I don’t feel that the law should prevent you from expressing them. Same if you are anti-semitic, homophobic, or Islamophobic. I believe the community and the legal system should allow you that right, but I will not much support your use of those rights, definitely not your abuse of them. I will even share the responsibility and the consequences for your abuse of those freedoms but I will not hide that I think that you did wrong. I stand alongside the mourners. I know too well what it is to loose friends and close ones to a bloody massacre. But I think Hara Kiri and then Charlie Hebdo did wrong: If your friends and neighbours tell you they find something deeply offensive, which you can avoid doing, then why on earth do it?
I accept this: how my friends and neighbours feel may occasionally be more important than what I feel I have the right to do. So there, right there, I submit. I submit to the greater good. I submit with joy quite aware of the apparently abject nature of putting myself aside, and I will also point out that this submission is something I have learnt in part from sitting, and eating, and talking with my Muslim friends.