Alistair Cooke and the Human Situation

The below passage has been grinding in my head for two days. Once day for its beauty and two days for the depth of its message. To what extent are we to interpret occurences as a comdemnation of the world in which we live? Could Hitler have survived anywhere other than in a Europe that was ready for it? To subscribe to the argument, there needs to be an understanding of events in a complex cosmological web. How actions, intentions and thought bring about final occurences. It is a belief not unlike the Eastern view of karma, or Western idea of Fate - although dealt by a collective mortal hand.

Is it possible that Robert F. Kennedy was shot because America wasn't ready for the level of liberality he propounded? Sirhan B. Sirhan was thus the finger that pulled the trigger at the end of America (and the world's?) ill-equipped arm.

Could a man be allowed to commit such a crime in a society that could not in its deepest psychological recesses, tolerate it?

It's the opinion of this blog that Mind is not separate, nor belonging to any one individual. Though we may hide from our own scruples and indignities, unless honestly confronted, they will inevitably be brought out in the Mind of another.

A dear friend would draw sneers for suggesting we are responsible for Africa's poverty. I believe he was right. The Earth operates as a single mind, the most conscious aspect of it contributing inevitably to its least.

This is a subtler argument than tying world history in a relentlessly deterministic web. But the cause from the least of our minds must be the responsibility of all.

And respond in what way? - honesty, integrity, engagement, love, courage to fulfil these and forgiveness of others and ourselves when we err in these high aspirations. I do not write these things, they've been said by sages since year dot.

But Cooke here is explicit about responsibility for our own conscience, preferring a dispassionate view of events rather than interment in a cyclic whirr of laying of blame.

I'm sick of intellectual and historical depictifying "To what extent was x responsible..." (hence the question in this blog being on the widest scale possible - universal causality)

The only answer to which is "Completely" and at the same time "Not at all".

See what you think of Campbell's article. As always your comments are warmly invited.

Alistair Cooke on Robert F. Kennedy's assassination (from The Guardian):

There was a head on the floor, streaming blood, and somebody put a Kennedy boater under it, and the blood trickled down like chocolate sauce on an iced cake....I heard somebody cry, "Kennedy - shot," and heard a girl moan, "No, no, not again," and my companion was fingering a cigarette package like a paralytic. A dark woman suddenly bounded to a table and beat it, and howled like a wolf, "Stinking country, no, no, no, no" at the placid television commentators who had not yet got the news.

Well, the next morning when I saw and heard the Pope in his gentle, faltering English, I still could not believe that he was talking about this squalid, appalling scene in a hotel pantry that I had been a part of and would always be a part of. I have no doubt that this experience is a trauma, and because of it, no doubt, several days later, I still cannot rise to the general lamentations about a sick society.

I for one do not feel like an accessory to a crime, and I reject almost as a frivolous obscenity the sophistry of collective guilt, the idea that I or the American people killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Francis Kennedy.

I do not believe either that you conceived Hitler and that, in some deep unfathomable sense, all Europe was responsible for the extermination of six million Jews. With Edmund Burke, I do not know how you can indict a whole nation. To me, this now roaringly fashionable theme is a great folly. It is difficult to resist, because it deflects an attack at one's own conscience to some big corporate culprit.

It sounds wise and deep, but really is a way of opting out of the human situation.