(Kan)ye, the Shadow of Radical Love, & Media Existentialism
Do we dare express public love for the man who loves (arguably) the worst of mankind?
I assume everyone reading this already knows of the news surrounding hip-hop artist Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. For context, here’s an article detailing the latest controversy (though not the epistemically necessary evil). I also recommend watching the full show here.
Done? If so, proceed.
Ye’s sentence of controversy is essentially this one: “I love Hitler,” referring (most likely) to former Nazi dictator and orchestrator of the Holocaust Adolf Hitler. He also denied the given facts of the Holocaust (“…that’s not what happened!”). Now I’m not equipped to speak about the role Nazis may have played in constructing unemployment-reducing highways or high-fidelity microphones. But perhaps it’s worth mentioning one of Pakistan’s founding myths as a catch-all. In Faisal Devji’s entrancing book Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, Devji writes:
As early as 1909, in the essay “Islam as a Moral and Political Ideal,” published in the Hindustan Review, [Indian Muslim poet Muhammad] Iqbal had written:
I hope I shall not be offending the reader when I say that I have a certain amount of admiration for the Devil. By refusing to prostrate himself before Adam whom he honestly believed to be his inferior, he revealed a high sense of self-respect, a trait of character, which, in my opinion, ought to redeem him from his spiritual deformity, just as the beautiful eyes of the toad redeem him from his physical repulsiveness.
If one believes in the Abrahamic Devil as much as in Jesus’ teachings of universally forgiving love (or else the logical theories of Buddhist wisdom), one must find some quality within the Devil himself to eventually admire (or else descend into destructive negativity). If one can admire the Devil to some degree, can one not admire Adolf Hitler in some regards so as to avoid psychological collapse over time?
Of course, Pakistan’s military did commit the Bengali Genocide in 1971, an act of overwhelmingly immoral (so it seems to me) self-respect. Was Pakistan so redeemed by this Satanic quality? Is it a Charcoal State, purifying evil and leaving the debris of dead malice in its wake?
I argue that the binder was tragically ill-formed, simply on the grounds that Iqbal mis-extracted the good qualities of the Devil in his well-intentioned Abrahamic Zen experiment. Those qualities were not merely represented by a “firm faith in the independence of one’s own inner life.” (remarked by Iqbal in 1932 to the All-India Conference in Lahore) Nor is it true, as Iqbal argued, that such faith maintained an ethical single-mindedness (that was typically argued for by Christians as a means to keep the Devil at bay, not to embody him!). Perhaps Iqbal’s Ph.D in philosophy from a German university gave too much credit to thought itself, a strangely modest yet ambitious mistake for German idealists who influenced that time period (and whose theoretical “perfectionism” ignored chaotic epistemic potentials).
Instead, what Iqbal should have extracted from the Abrahamic ‘creation of Man’ myth was that an intimate dependence on God’s orders was paramount by virtue of one’s creation by Him. And by failing to heed His newest orders, Satan became too dependent on past orders of the divine, instead expecting divinity to be unchanging (if eternal). In expecting divinity to be as he expected and denying Him superior knowledge of Himself, the Devil believed himself superior and therefore became truly spiritually deformed: Uncertainty is the natural complement to the conceivability of God. Though God would have predicted Satan’s actions, knowing full well his nature, a fact that Satan may become more aware of over time in reducing his uncertainty about the nature of God. (According to this interpretation of Abrahamic divinity.)
In other words, radical love even greater than Ye’s (as it includes all acts before the moralizing of liberal humanism by symbolic inclusion, i.e. the ability to ignore the existential status of humans), has been seen before — and to devastating effect. This is the dark shadow of the notion, prone to psychological negativity bias (negative events and experiences, including the mental, “stick” more than positive ones) in ignoring one’s own humanity, a newly studied phenomenon that even the then US-based Japanese Zen practitioner Shunryu Suzuki couldn’t shake (whose books are still on sale today despite flirting directly with Hitler’s thinking through Hitler himself). One could wonder why Suzuki’s legacy survived relatively unscathed and Ye’s may not. I’d wager skin color after the US-Afghanistan debacle. This would mean overwhelmingly immoral self-respect could be unconscious still; as it is in the consciousness of uncertainty that finds one glimmers of God, as Korean Zen understands quite well by placing absolute Humility as a necessary precondition to absolute Knowledge.
But there is a greater threat to social mores than Christian-styled radical love taking as an object a deeply disturbed individual: media existentialism. This doctrine posits that one exists only in media form; and it can also claim that everything ought to be recorded in media form. Such thinking can help claims that motivate the denial of the Holocaust (by the relative lack of access to such media, or else the co-existence of centralized historical data institutions and truly conspiratorial historic events).
Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, for example, is an extension of media existentialism that risks severe Internet addiction for the sake of sensorily superficial social connection. Elon Musk’s Neuralink, too, is a proposed form of media existentialism, this time narrowing further the gap of cognitive realism between individual thinkers and their socially expressive mediums. Might such realism allow for fantastical wish-fulfillment to potentially catalyze ahistorical social behavior?
I predict that the pan-socialization of inference combined with the derealization of one’s sensory self leads to an animal’s instinctual nightmare: (1) Being stranded in the wild with no ability to make private inferences so as to save oneself and (2) Not recognizing oneself as oneself anyhow.
It is therefore clear we must return to Muhammad Iqbal to some degree. Self-respect, deep faith in one’s own mental independence. These are certainly necessary within reason, for without them, we cannot be without others and survive civilly, with nobility. But we can’t live without God anyhow. Or to say it another way: not without the possibility of uncertainty.
Hitler’s version of media existentialism was a tool of compressed, over-socialized persuasion, preying on increasing self-respect at the expense of existential generality. As it has been for most (if not all) dictators, those who weaponize their convicted voice through manipulating the emotional dis-ease of approaching uncertainty with cowardice, with an overly private sense of self-respect. In this way, dictators do demonize. And the demon is rightly condemned in momentary, holistic fashion though not in analytic decomposition. As we cannot be certain whether the demon will remain as such, as God’s rules appear to change on occasion, depending on His ontological choices, His choices of what to create next: The bad whole may have good parts, just as the good whole may have bad parts, all of which can move to create new beings of different, supervening moral qualities at novel times.
And so if we believe this Abrahamic myth’s updated interpretation, even the one touched by Zen’s fractal non-dual duality, we are resigned to the finitude of our existence, to the unpleasantries of doing away with vivacious attachment, of ditching a conditional love for an apparently unconditional one.
And we may still not know anything at all of God.
Yours (for the time being),
Sound Chef Shehrose