Clamour |
We, the veterans of the resistance movements and combat forces of Free France, we call on the young generation to live by, to transmit, the legacy of the Resistance and its ideals. We say to them: Take our place, “Indignez-vous!” [Get angry! or Cry out!].
– Stéphane Hessel
Historically, the most terrible things – war, genocide, and slavery – have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
– Howard Zinn
Jeffrey St Clair reminded me that St Paul hated clamour. For him, submission was the great virtue. In Ephesians 4: 31-32 he lumped clamour together with bitterness, wrath, anger, evil speaking, and all malice, as if he were trying to hide outcry, drown out the noise, smother it with all the things we need to clamour against. He was sending out his message in Koine Greek, in an age when clamour was powerful because public speaking and vocal expression were the main forms of social communication. Clamour, in Greek (κραυγή), was a spontaneous outburst or deliberate call for attention. St Paul was no fan of things spontaneous, including sex. As Australian historian Peter Cochrane wrote (personal communication), St Paul also “advanced the abysmal idea that our bodies were ‘vile’ and that sex was an impediment to salvation”. Sex is a clamorous need and, in some languages, “clamour” contains “amour”. This is, of course, anecdotal, but the connections are suggestive because if human bodies are “vile”, he’s not granting them dignity.
After three recent public lectures on human rights, genocide, and politics in general (with quite a lot of young people in the audience on each occasion), I was approached by several under-25s, who didn’t know each other, all wanting to talk more about human rights and what to do. Some came to visit afterwards and it was striking to see how they were all concerned about the same issues, how they expressed disgust at being forced to live in a world where civilisation’s genocides are a routine thing. These intelligent young people feel “tired”, “burnt-out”, “empty” because of the indifference all around them. They’re expressing what Durkheim called anomie (from the Greek anomos “without law, lawless”). This is a situation where expectations flounder, where the social system is broken and lawless, where young people feel worthless, weak, and in deep despair, with a cruel sense of unbelonging because there’s no community. When laws, conventions, promises, and ethics are trashed, there can be no society because there are no shared interests, no empathetic community to embrace those who feel alone.
The upshot of these encounters with young adults is an attempt to form a group where they can be heard and can clamour against the system that’s so impairing their lives as decent, caring people. The group’s still small but it’s early days yet. Ages range from 17 to 92. We held a first meeting with a couple of 50-ish specialists in housing and universal basic income, which are two of the main issues that arose. We older people, are there for support and not to give lessons, and others are willing to consult from various fields if needed. So far, there’s a possibility of a space to meet in one of Barcelona’s cultural institutions. If this doesn’t come off, Clamour could take to the city squares (just as the Indignez-Vous! movement did nearly 15 years ago), and a first public talk by the young people is being programmed for May. Some of them are good writers. They just need places to be published, to shout, to get their indignation heard.
The name Clamour echoes the outrage of Stéphane Hessel whose famous short essay Indignez-Vous! (Time for Outrage!), written when he was 93, inspired the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, and the Indignados movement in Spain. Many years earlier, Hessel was involved in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and he understood very well that, for all its flaws, its suggestion of universal human rights is one of the most radical political ideas ever. It seems that the British and American signatories recognised this too as they wanted to replace “universal” with the non-committal term “international” (and we know how many peoples are excluded by the term “international”........