A reflection

on Sábado Santo…

The photograph shows an American congressman visiting a prison camp in El Salvador, to which a number of migrants living in the USA have been sent. Other foreign residents have been detained in the USA for protesting the mass murder and starvation of Palestinians by Israel. Some people have referred to Gaza as an ‘open air prison’ before it became a killing field. The president of El Salvador is the grandson of a Palestinian migrant. The concentration camp was an innovation of the Spanish in Cuba during the Cuban war for independence. It was then used by the British in South Africa during the Boer war. South Africa has led the case in the International Court of Justice against Israel for its crimes against the Palestinians. The two main ‘enablers’ of the trafficking of persons from the USA to El Salvador and other detention policies are, respectively, a Jewish-American and a son of Cuban migrants to the USA. History can be perverse sometimes.

I have looked through the Washington newspapers in season without finding any account of the arrival of ducks or the visitation of gulls, although they reported the visit of a French functionary and the return from her wintering grounds in the south of somebody’s wife. It was all news of the hive, with not a word of events in the outside world. The magazines for sale on the stands and the new books displayed in the shops reflect this preoccupation. Our civilization, apparently, has become divorced from the universe and is feeding on itself.

This is equally apparent when you listen to our talk. Our society is made up of workers, not men. We are obsessed with the inadequacies of the hive, which does not support us to our satisfaction, and attribute these inadequacies to the shortcomings of our fellow workers. We are possessed by a sort of panic at finding ourselves dependent on one another. We are tormented by the fear of what might happen to us if our fellow workers should be negligent or ill-willed or simply too smart for us. Consequently, we clamor all together for a new ordering of matters, for new rules and new regulations and new restraints to secure us against one another. We find ourselves fettered by the chains we have designed for our fellows, and threatened with destruction by the weapons we have invented to destroy them; yet we do not, on that account, cease our frantic search for more binding fetters and more terrible engines of destruction.

Under the circumstances it is proper to wonder why our entrapped multitudes do not seek escape from the hive, once more asserting their individual independence as men. The door stands open on the outside world. I conclude that we have lost our knowledge of the outside world, and fear of the unknown is greater than that of any accustomed horror. I have seen a bird cowering in its cage when the door was opened for its escape.

You will find that any reference to the times when we men were not altogether dependent on our hive organization arouses a general revulsion among us. It appears that before our swarm took refuge in the hive it lived in darkness, that the only light shining in the world is the artificial light of the hive. Obsessed with fear at our dependence on one another, we are even more fearful of being dependent once more on ourselves. It is the nature of slavery to render its victims so abject that at last, fearing to be free, they multiply their own chains. You can liberate a freeman, but you cannot liberate a slave.

It follows that the training of a worker for the hive is something distinct from the education of a freeman for the universe. The purpose of education in a free society of men is to gain knowledge of the universe in which they live and their relation to it. To realize our independence we must know what we can about ourselves and about our outer environment. The laws of the universe are more important than the laws of society, the limits that it puts to man’s action are the limits that count. Man learns to know the universe, and his place in it, from the accumulated experience and study of mankind, corroborated by his own observation. But the worker who has retreated into the hive can dispense with knowledge of it; all he needs is to master one of the technical skills required by the society. In return for performing one operation, the hive will feed him and shelter him for the duration of his life, and lay him away when he dies. The coal miner, the radio operator, and the file clerk need not understand the nature of a cow to consume their allotments of bottled milk. Because, in reading the newspapers, books, and magazines, I see that the majority favor the elimination of useless education and the provision, in its place, of more thorough training in the skills, I have come to the gloomy conclusion that most of us have abandoned all desire to be free. We shall continue to sell our birthright for what we take to be the security of the hive until we have destroyed ourselves and it. When that time comes, perhaps the remnant of us, thrown unwillingly on the resources of our own manhood, will be able to make a fresh start.

Meanwhile, it is not likely that the newspapers will carry news from outside.

— Louis J Halle, Spring in Washington (1947)