Missing in Action
Does what we believe line up with what we do?
BY BARBOD SALIMI, instructor of philosophical psychology, theological ethics & peace studies
In the 2005 film Batman Begins, the main character—Bruce Wayne— receives a sobering message from his love interest during a charged interaction. “It’s not who you are underneath, it’s what you do that defines you,”1 Rachel Dawes proclaims. For the audience, and for Bruce, this moment is marked with painful irony: Rachel does not realize his true identity and activity in Gotham City. She is later stunned to find out who Bruce is—or more importantly, what Bruce does as Batman.
The notion that what people do defines them contrasts with what we are used to hearing, both in pop culture and in academic circles—that identity is contained in some less concrete realm, independent of action in the world. This takes familiar forms such as, “It’s who you are on the inside that matters most,” or, in academics, what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called the “true self ”.2 These ways of thinking seem to locate the essence of personhood in a place thought to be “internal” and thus wholly independent of the external.
There are obvious ways that this works toward good. For example, one’s value and worth should not
be assigned based on a phenotypical externality such as skin color. (Think of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s emphasis on the “content of character” in his
“I Have a Dream” speech.3) Similarly, there is good reason to think that a person’s beauty is indeed more than skin deep. But Rachel was implicitly highlighting the cold, hard truth that gets overlooked when these other- wise good messages lose nuance and are applied too heavy-handedly: what one does speaks volumes in a way that what one says cannot. Rachel points out that what people believe about themselves is hardly as telling as how people actually live. In essence, she pathologizes the disjunction between thought and action.
MIND, BODY, AND WITNESS
This disjunction is common in our sociocultural contexts. We find our- selves comfortably accepting of the thought that our true selves are morally intact and tucked away in their safe havens, untouched by the grim realities of our day-to-day happenings. It is comfortable to think that poor actions do not define us and that some inner self can persist and maintain an unblemished identity in spite of our missteps. This sort of disjunction is a luxury afforded by a type of dualism that pervades Western notions of personhood. When Descartes famously asserted “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”), he effectively made it philosophically permissible for subsequent generations to split mind from body, thought from action,4 mere beliefs from concrete ethics, and so on.
I submit that the luxury of viewing
our lives through
such dualistic lenses
constitutes a maneu
ver of power and
privilege that we do
well to work against. By orienting ourselves toward a deeper unity of thought and action, we may find ourselves living more faithfully in the practical sense while also becoming more holistically positioned to occupy the space of prophetic witness.
Prophetic witness would necessitate the dismantling of our own power and privilege, averting our tendencies toward denial (which Anna Freud defined as “getting rid of unwelcome facts”5), and speaking truthfully about that which we do repeatedly and unconsciously in our everyday lives. As cultural beings, we embody habits and meanings that define us and shape us into the people we are. This happens regardless of what we “believe” or say we believe.
MONEY TROUBLES
The pervasive monetization of our daily lives, for example, potentiates the violent capacity for dehumanization.
This occurs by virtue of the very nature
of capital—when it becomes so central
to a culture, it engenders an ethic of expendability. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels referred to this as commodification, noting that in capitalistic societies where human beings operate as means to ends (namely, instruments used to make money, or build more capital) rather than as ends in themselves, humanity becomes overshadowed as people are made “into machines.”6
Reducing human worth in such ways engenders perceptions of human beings as monetized, disposable, or usable. Take, for example, the tendency of politicians and non-politicians alike to speak of war through dollars and cents. Often, sociocultural attitudes of aversion to war are articulated in strictly economical terms that tend to sound more like, “We can’t afford another war” than, “We ought not
kill our fellow human beings.” It is important to notice that in this view, the obliteration of human life becomes blurred—and even goes unnoticed— by virtue of conflating capital with humanity. Such views do not arise from out of thin
air. They are shaped by our everyday cultural embodiments, of which the pervasive monetization and commodification of life is a prime example.
Contrast this violent and dehumanizing reduction with the sort of ethic that French phi
losopher Emmanuel
Lévinas advanced that rested upon the refusal to reduce the other or deny the infinitude of the other.7 When we encounter the world without a sense of mystery and radical openness, we commit the grave mistake of appropriating it and all it contains, including other human beings. Avoiding this mistake does not necessarily need to come in the form of full-scale, anarchistic revolution (though one could make the case that Jesus’s prophetic witness constituted a theologically informed mode of anarchism). Rather, we can take moderate steps toward “de-monetizing” our perceptions of the world by simply being more mindful about the ways that our culture collapses capital and humanity into one another.
One way to promote this mindfulness is through a more careful monitoring of our everyday use of language. When
we catch ourselves speaking of others
in financial terms, we do well to pause and reformulate our words. Rather than allowing ourselves
to make utterances like, “That person is worth every penny,” we should strive for statements like, “That person is so intrinsically valuable, a blessing.” The way we speak goes a long way in not only reifying perceptions of reality, but in shaping ethics and ultimately illuminating our true identities.
There is prophetic witness to be found in Rachel’s admonition in Batman Begins. Whether we like it or not, our everyday cultural embodiments say more about who we really are than we can or do try to say for ourselves. The moment we forget or deny that, we succumb to our power and privilege and lose our capacity for prophetic witness.
Footnotes
1. Batman Begins. Directed by Christopher Nolan. Hollywood, CA: Warner Bros., 2005.
2. D. W. Winnicott (1960a), “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self ” in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (New York: International UP Inc., 1965), 140–152.
3. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
“I Have a Dream” (speech, Washington, DC, August 28, 1963), American Rhetoric, http:// www.americanrhetoric.com /speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm.
4. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994).
5. Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, trans. Cecil Banes (London: Hogarth Press Collection, 1937).
6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, trans. Martin Milligan (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), 73.
7. Emmanuel Lévinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).