My first All Souls one word prompt: Representation. The first topic that spun into my mind was political representation. We live in a world, after all, fraught with political polarization, with often extreme sides waging against one another in the battle for country and culture. The challenge with political representation is that most representatives seem to have forgotten what it means to represent: to be elected is not merely to be a victor over the vanquished, entitled through “democratic” legitimization to tout one’s own ideology through coercive power. A representative must represent those who voted for her no less than those who did not. You are within a democracy called to the noble role of representing even your enemies.
But political representation struck me as too obvious, too easy. If I were to imitate the legendary All Souls exam takers, surely I had to conjure something more original than basic observations on an all too apparent political reality. To tumble down that path would be to follow the general mass of inflammatory political pundits—none of whom I wish to emulate.
Instead, I turned to representation in art, the concept of mimesis—art imitating life, life imitating art. The notion that we are all but representatives of the culture that surrounds us, heirs to a legacy of norms and beliefs which we have little option but to reflect. And if this be true, what witness does our art give before a jury of our peers—those who preceded us, those who will follow after us. Would we survive such a trial? Could we, representatives of our age, remain upright under the weight of the verdict that would be passed down?
But to ask as much is to assume a deterministic perspective of culture, a view that has been overly normalized in our society, a view of which I am naturally wary. Are we mere products of our cultures? To assume this is to subvert the capacity for change—to define is to limit. A product must conform to the design of its creator; it has no other choice. And that is the crux, is it not? Choice. The ability of each person to transcend their individual circumstances to become something more that what was culturally prescribed unto them. The fierce power of will and desire and adamant self-determination. Humans are little if not wildly free to choose.
Determinism rests at the heart of our rapidly expanding, paternalistic welfare state. Allow me to couch this claim, and those that follow it, with the acknowledgement that a society that cares nothing for the welfare of the least of its citizens is a society only in name, reflecting the very worst aspects of human nature, and deserving of little more than to be overthrown by some more benevolent power. Our willingness to care for the weakest members of our society is a testament to the greatest of what makes us human.
However, to accede this fact is not to admit that the responsibility to care for such people falls to the government. To care for the welfare of downtrodden individuals is not synonymous with establishing a mass system of welfare. The latter has become a dominant touchpoint in current political narratives, to the detriment of all. The adoption of mass, paternalistic welfare programs has at its heart the grievous assumption that for the underclass poverty and misfortune are pervasive, inevitable, and inescapable. We must help everyone in need because they are not responsible for their actions or their circumstances. Or so the reasoning goes. The problem with this, once seen, is obvious: it assumes that the underclass has no freedom to choose. Thus, the poor, the old, the disabled, the ill, the unemployed are all deemed victims of circumstance, unable to conjure the most basic of human capacities—their will—to move above or beyond the conditions “placed upon them” (or, as is often the case, the conditions they willingly entered into. But will, in this narrative, having no meaning, does not enter the equation).
As thinker Roger Scruton so aptly noted in Confessions of a Heretic, “[This leads to the unintended belief] that only the wealthy are accountable, since only they are free. The poor, the indigent and the vulnerable are, on that view, inherently blameless, and nothing bad that arises from their conduct can really be laid at their door.” The poor and vulnerable, occupying a subhuman state, are made all the more subhuman by being stripped of freedom and will itself. This is the ultimate form of disempowerment. Everything is taken, even the power to act.
The unsurprising result is not only a bourgeoning welfare state and an ever expanding government bureaucracy necessary to support it, but a society of individuals who, adopting as fate the inevitability of their conditions, become victims of an ideology that will give them every basic need but that which can help them transcend their circumstances: self-determination. There is nothing empowering about a welfare state that not merely infantilizes but dehumanizes its recipients.
We are not, then, mere representatives of our culture, circumstance, or society. Certainly, each of these will make an imprint upon our lives, but such a cultural tattoo is not permanent. Fate is not, as it was for the wretched Oedipus, final, and it is not fatal. To believe in the nobility of humanity is to believe that each individual has the freedom to choose, the power to change, and the responsibility for their actions. This fundamental principle has been almost erased from our cultural memory, to our collective detriment, and it is well past time we revived it.
This is the first essay in a series working through the All Souls one word essay prompt. Read more about that in my article “Why I’ve Chosen to Work Through the All Souls Examination Questions.”
By way of some background, this essay turned out nothing at all as I’d initially imagined, thoughtfully researched and artfully written. There is art and thought to it, certainly, but my experience with my first essay question was primarily marked by the realization of how daunting it is to be faced with a one word essay prompt—and how tempting and easy it is to go off topic. For my part, my consideration of the welfare state was tangentially, but not closely, related to representation. The challenge for future weeks will be to stay more rigidly focused on the topic at hand, without giving in to the temptation to deviate down other fascinating rabbit trails.
1 thought on “1988: Representation (All Souls #1)”
What a fascinating idea, a substantial form of training for a writer, after which your already excellent work will be even more formidable
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