Attention and Justice

Thought Experiment 1: a situation in which I was the object of generosity; the giver could easily have done otherwise; and I was not made to feel that I had been collecting on a debt.

In 2017, when I moved back to my hometown after many years away, my brother informed me that one of his neighbors, an old classmate of mine named John, would like to see me. John greeted me at the door and then asked me if I remembered our 8th grade essay contest on Christopher Columbus, which had been sponsored by the Knights of Columbus.

I did remember it, somewhat bitterly, because I had always thought that my essay deserved to win, but John had actually won first place, and I had come in second. John now told me that his father, as head of the Knights of Columbus at that time, had been in charge of picking the best essay, and he chose John’s. John said he protested his father’s decision because he thought mine was better, but his father insisted on awarding him the $5 prize.

John then took a $5 bill out of his pocket, gave it to me, and said he had been feeling guilty for the last 60 years about accepting an award he didn’t deserve.

How did the situation feel?: I felt great admiration for John as well as gratitude; I suppose I could describe it in those words of our Experiment, “a feeling of miraculous harmony and equality”, as well as justice. Even though it seems like a small matter, it evoked a wonderful feeling of having my childhood disappointment being the subject of such attention.

I experienced Thucydides’ Melian Dialog last summer during a training for community organizers. None of the participants knew it as such, and it had be rewritten to involve an insurance company and a town devastated by wildfires. I can say that we consistently behaved as Simone Weil describes. Those of us from the town invoked justice and pity, while those on the insurance company side were confident of their power. Both sides remained rigid and struggled to come to “neither has the power to impose anything on the other…and [we] have to come to an understanding.”

Another thing which really grabbed me from the reading was the quote from the Book of the Dead, “I have never caused anyone to weep.” It was so arresting because I had recently watched a member of my family do that to another with no remorse or hesitation. I was especially horrified because I remember doing exactly the same thing and feeling–nothing. My lack of remorse was very much rooted in “I’m doing the ‘right’ thing.” The worst part is that I still think that. It makes it difficult to make a lovely amends as Mary’s classmate did. It’s reminiscent of the Melian dialog, as we negotiators for the town failed over and over again to get the town restored, and we couldn’t get to the thought that maybe there was something wrong with our approach.

Compelling reading from Weil this week, and great questions for prayer/meditation. Thank you. I am especially attending to Weil’s reflection on the relationship between justice, gratitude, and generosity, in particular within relationships with power differentials. Her injunction to “avoid both submission and revolt” (143) seems countercultural.

I’ll return to this:

“On God’s part creation is not an act of self-expansion but of restraint and renunciation. God and all his creatures are less than God alone. God accepted this diminution. He emptied a part of his being from himself…The religions which have a conception of this renunciation, this voluntary distance, this voluntary effacement of God, his apparent absence and his secret presence here below, these religions are true religion, the translation into different languages of the great Revelation. The religions which represent divinity as commanding wherever it has the power to do so seem false. Even though they are monotheistic they are idolatrous” (145-146). 

I have a story from Week 2 that I wasn’t going to share because I felt as if we had moved on. However, it has elements that can be related to the George Elliot reading and personal, relational attention. It is a long one, so apologies for that.

For my attention practice for the whole Experiment, I had picked attention to people–all people, all the time. In retrospect, that was overly ambitious.

Last Friday, I experienced a critical failure in attention when I was delivering some food to one of the tiny-house villages. One of the community members had just died, and I was so distracted and oblivious that the community had to spend a lot of time getting me to understand that a person had died and who that person was. Even when I intellectually grasped it, my emotions did not, so my responses were all dreadfully callous and inappropriate.

This was still nagging me after I finished all the food deliveries, so I went to a church that has evening Adoration. I had also struggled with the Weil reading week about looking at perfect purity, being unsure what constitutes perfect purity. The icon we used in the meeting had a strong effect on me, but perfect? Here at least with the Eucharist I could be sure I was looking at Perfect Purity. Yet I experienced nothing like the transference Weil described. Until I did.

One of the people in the church went forward, knelt directly in front of the altar, and touched the cloth that was wrapping the monstrance. Although I wasn’t feeling the transference and burning out of all evil, I could easily see that she was. And then I was by extension. And shortly, that we all were. And not just all of us here in this church, but also the tiny-house community and the friend who had died.

I then experienced a sort of inversion as I thought of the person who had died. His life had been a monumental struggle to find goodness in extreme poverty. Who is to say that his suffering does not make him a source of perfect purity? It felt as if I was sort of at the intersection of these two sources of purity. I am now wondering if I am even capable of seeing purity if it is not manifesting in a neighbor.

Attention and Sympathy

The examples of the characters in Middlemarch were a good entrance into our experiments with attention. Mr. Casaubon is an example of both too much attention to his own inner concerns, and too little attention to the needs of others. He and other characters in the book do not “have room” for others in their hearts, but expect to be paid attention according to their own high evaluation of themselves. However, the author inserts herself into the narrative to remind us not to dismiss Casaubon with disdain based on “outside estimates”, but instead “to wonder with keener interest” about his inner life and struggles.

Today’s Daily Exercise, “to imagine George Eliot is speaking to me”, provoked me to reexamine my attitude to attention in light of these readings. Growing up as the youngest in a large family, I always felt I had too much attention given to me; as a consequence, I developed the attitude that other people did not want attention either. Although I had inner imaginings about other people, I almost never asked them about themselves, or offered sympathy. I now realize I would not have asked the paralyzed king, the Guardian of the Grail in Weil’s story of the Legend of the Grail, the question he most wanted to hear: “What are you going through?”

Then I reread the story of the Samaritan Woman at the Well in John’s gospel. That is an example of perfect attention paid by Christ to the woman who had had both too much attention (5 husbands), and too little of the right kind (living water). That proper attention caused her to run into town and proclaim the Messiah.

Re-reading Weil’s definition of supernatural justice as behaving exactly as if there were equality in an unequal relationship of strength, flowing from the stronger’s refusal to impose their will despite knowing their power to dominate the weaker, reminded me, in its “experimental” form, of the liberal philosopher John Rawls’ difference principle, according to which inequalities ought to be arranged to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged. According to Rawls, we should imagine ourselves in an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing what place in society we will occupy when we are determining the rules of the game. I engaged Rawls’ thought experiment most recently in the context of Alasdair Macintyre’s critique in After Virtue, which I was very convinced by. His attack is two-pronged: dealing first with Rawls’ assumption of atomistic reasoning (in focusing on individual rights and liberties, neglecting that our moral understanding is socially embedded in our communities, traditions, and practices) and second with his reliance on abstract principles (the “original position” and “veil of ignorance” are subtractive mechanisms that supposedly lead us to a view from nowhere, from which we can develop universal concepts of equality, fairness, and justice, but this precludes conflicting obligations and is based on the Enlightenment error of decontextualizing reason).

So, actually, as I was recalling this debate, I realized how far Weil’s “experiment” —if we can call it that, in our original School Studies sense of believing in order that it may be true, practicing with a kind of expectant or anticipatory certainty—of imagining equality where it does not exist is from Rawls’. Where he assumes an excessively inward and individualistic anthropology, her challenge to us is motivated by a radically solidaristic impulse. When we attempt to make “What are you going through?” the animating question of our lives, we are also asking about our own particular role in unfolding the history of the world, and how we are to fulfill it. Weil’s call to take the other seriously is a demand for unconditional and uncompensated care, highlighted by the extreme example of the supernatural virtue of justice, in which the weaker also participates through their pure gratitude for the generosity of the stronger. Weil’s experiment is based on an idea of equality derived not from some overly idealized conception of yet-to-be determined subjectivity that has no relation to what really and truly is but rather, I suppose, from God, according to that paradoxical inversion of hierarchies Christ preached, where what is possible is denied for the sake of what is necessary, echoing the original creative act: abdication is a condition of allowing the other to exist.

This was just a sequence of thoughts I had regarding the experimental quality of our project. Where Rawl’s famous “experiment” depends on cool detachment and enlightened self-interest, Weil’s demands self-sacrificing, redemptive openness; it’s love in the void, and the experimental certainties she speaks of gain significance in the context of the dark, uncertain absence of god in which a flash between two beings occurs.