The Valley Below

Threads woven between pretenses. //

A test I give myself, as I consider interacting with anything at all, but especially on the internet. I ask myself, is this my business? Is it really my business? What really is my business? I originally borrowed the question from Plato’s Republic, where there’s an otw definition (a repeat Socratic suggestion) of justice as “minding one’s own business”. Perhaps better rendered as, to be just is to take care of the matters that are (truly) one’s own.

It’s easy to overlook because it sounds too simple or glib to be the answer to the big question. (“What is justice?” “Mind your own business, knucklehead.") It has a colloquial meaning of not sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong, not interfering with things that don’t involve you, that you don’t or couldn’t understand. And its simplicity is fecund, being the kind of definition that leads to further questions. There is the question most readily implied by its context. What is my role, what part do I play in a “just city”? Who am I as part of a political whole? And then, there are the introspections. What work truly belongs to me? What is my work? Ultimately, who (and/or what) am I?

This all became topical as a friend of ours (we recently learned) might be in a dangerous situation abroad (in a country in the Balkans). He might be, it’s hard to tell. For at least a month, the texts that are supposed to be from him, received by various members of his friend group, are not from him. (He normally would text pithily, in un-g–gle-translatable slang. Whereas his texts have been in too-formal g–gle-translated Indonesian.) The situation could be a dysfunctional relationship playing out over international borders, (i.e., his jealous partner has taken possession of his phone), or something more sinister. Sensitive to these possibilities, we are gathering information to figure out what’s happening (if we can) and what we can do to help (if there’s anything).

So we’ve had the opportunity to ask a few times. Is it my business? Is it our business?

Crucially, there is a lot of work to do, to understand whether it’s our business. (Or whether it’s their own private business, or the business of the embassy, etc.) We work to try to understand what’s going on, as well as we can. At the same time, we realize, there may be no such thing as perfect information. We are worried he might just disappear.

It’s a substantial project, worth undertaking and worth the various risks involved, I think, because this is a longtime friend in a vulnerable situation, the danger is real, and we are in certain ways equipped to help him out. There are things we could do. We are so powerful. And yet, everything still depends on having a clear and trustworthy line of communication. We need to hear him say certain things, for example whether he’s ok. Even then, things might still seem “off”. We will have to judge, on our end, whether he really seems “ok”.

We don’t want to be knuckleheads.

“Mind your own business” is an anti-democratic mantra. Well, it’s an anti-political mantra. The whole premise of politics is that minding one’s own business was insufficient for our pre-political selves. So politics is the business of democracy, after all of the business became everyone’s business. (There’s no politics in autocracy, politics requires embodied plurality.) We all vote on everything, are all responsible for everything. Even the things we have no business being responsible for. Of course, this makes functional organization impossible. No living being could survive in such a way, (with the hand judging the work of the ear, the liver meddling in the work of the pituitary), and neither can a political entity.

The genius of the Republic is (lol to start a setence with those words) that Socrates presents human politics with all of its dubious structural requirements on full display. The “beautiful lie”, the calculated-and-controlled sexuality and reproduction, the removal of infants from their parents' care. How everything relies on the counter-cultural initiation-education (it’s literally psychedelic) of a government of seers (“philosopher kings”). Not least, the inevitable decay into tyranny. These are not idiosyncratic features of Socrates' preferred utopia. (If only they were.) They are fixtures in any political composition, doing its best to imitate and thereby transcend nature. What Socrates' city-in-speech shows is that not even the most beautiful lies, in partnership with the most advanced technology, in the light of Truth Itself, can fix politics.

So it’s a warning for political animals.

“Mind your own business”, in context, was a non sequitur. Some other principle had already been supplied and was primary. This isn’t difficult to see, but it may be difficult to stomach. “Mind your own business, but always in service to the whole.” Always, always, always, in service to the whole. Even the thing that you held precious, your very identity (be it gold, silver, or bronze), was never yours alone. Yours alone is not a thing. It was just a story, (and not even a likely one), used as a tool to keep you in place. Privacy is an illusion, in politics.

Privacy is not (in truth) an illusion. It is something we’ve got and are stuck with. Does this make it a blessing? The most memorable image from the Republic is not the divided line, for me at least, but will always be this one (from Book VI). In the city in disarray, (as are all extant cities, according to Socrates), there is no reason to try to bear witness to justice, as such an effort could only lead to destruction and defeat. So one who loves wisdom acts prudently, as would a human being who has fallen in (oops) with wild beasts. They keep quiet and mind their own business. They take shelter as behind a wall, from the ravages of a storm. They strive to live a life pure of injustice and unholy action. Privacy becomes their saving grace.

Now that is difficult to stomach, coming from the famous meddler of Athens. Who always knew the gossip or was busy becoming the subject of it, concocting alternative political regimes with the young, making aristocrats squirm and getting himself executed on stupid charges. Who also happens to be the only one, if ever there was such a one, worthy of the name philosopher. He didn’t accept his own premise. He insisted on his own day-by-day empirical examination and diagnosis of Athens. “Are you wild beast, or what?” That was his life. His business was neither quiet nor private and it spoke to a different measure than the pure.

Socrates (in this context and elsewhere) considers himself an exception, and often excuses others from following in his footsteps (arguments in the Crito are full of deliberate holes). It was his daimon who made him do it, and his daimon belongs to him alone. Voices in dreams. Idio-socrates. Nonetheless, there is a constant temptation for any reader to consider Socrates as a standalone measure of the human. This is understandable. He gave birth to Western Civilization, and has been executed by it, again and again, ever since. His life story prophesies the whereto and the wherefrom, remaining somehow at the center of it all. At the center of us all. Anyone can more-or-less have a daimon. Well,

Have you been sentenced to death by your city? If not, you’re falling short.

In exasperation, I return to the question of “minding my own business”. Today, I used pointy scissors to dig a hornet’s stinger out of my husband’s big toe. It had gotten lodged in there, underneath a thick callus. Maybe six months ago. And it had been causing increased pain, or at least, increased complaining. In a way, it wasn’t my business, because I’m not a doctor. But it was my husband’s toe. He wouldn’t go to a doctor. It was like he might dig it out himself, but then he couldn’t reach it. I could tell he wanted me to do it. I put alcohol and then a flame on the scissors, not sure they were even made of steel. It felt like a lot of digging for such a tiny thing.

After I finally excised the black chit from his thickened toe, at the brink of where the callus started bleeding, seeming to cause a lot of discomfort (and I apologized a lot, causing pain is hard), apparently the worst of the pain quickly stopped. We were amazed at the relief. It’s wild to think that, again, such a tiny thing could cause such severe long-term reaction. I assumed that the body’s immune system would, you know, clean up a mess like that. I guess there was still some undigested venom, causing irritation.

Now back to hiding behind a wall. When the city seems made up of wild beasts, and you feel like a human, when you estimate yourself to be basically a different species of animal than they are, or if indeed there is unbroachable estrangement between you, this is the condition for privacy as grace. This is the requirement and the active presupposition of taking shelter from politics. They are wild beasts, inhuman. Socrates says it casually and imagines it being concluded, with cheerful optimism.

That’s not a little monstrous. It has been amply demonstrated that to live in such estrangement becomes its own trial. Not everybody is Socrates, that’s for sure. For example, I imagine Achilles withdrawn in his tent. Embracing alienation as he embraces the lyre. This is minding one’s own business as grief. Perpetual grief makes for uneasy grace, and occasionally, murderous fits of rage.

Knowing ourselves not quite as alien, we send exploratory feelers out from the grim sanctuary of our post-political, apo-calyptical selves. We dig out stingers and seek intel from abroad. Minding, making, or discovering our own business as we go. Yearning for reliable facts when we can never quite trust the voices on the other end of the line or the dismantling of a more-or-less abstract empire. Paying our taxes, more-or-less on-time. It helps to understand that it’s been going on since the beginning, this wobbly exercise of unfounded privacy. Protective alienation against a bestial world, savior of impotence, surrender as weapon against empire. But then, feeling along as by touch the limits of this work, which belongs to someone, and where it meets the limits of unreliable information. The limits of what one might (regardless of all that) understand.

(Or care for. Or love.) What really is my proper work?

There are people who consider the whole as their business. Others consider none of it (theirs) at all. The fools, the busybodies, knuckleheads all. Then there are days of being a balloon, floating over illegible landscapes. There are voices of saving and of being saved. There are the trees in the forest, books written about trees, on trees, and there are lumberjacks. The lumberjack’s daughter, up in the branches. The eagle whose nest she stumbled into, as if by accident. There are me and you. We are threads woven between pretenses of praeter-nature and of the praeter-political, as after amateur surgery. Unsteady in grace, as in laws and definitions.

There are some people who judge further questions to be a waste of time; at least we can be certain we’re not one of those.

Assalamu’alaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatu. 🌔

//