The Best Lack all Conviction: Marc Gafni

In modernity, as Yeats said in his classic critique, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If we do not reclaim the erotic for the spirit and the good, then its shadow will seduce us and our world to the worst of places.
Fundamentalism is on the rise in the world because it offers a pseudo-erotic experience of community coupled with a pseudo-erotic worldview.

Particularly sacred fellowship, with all of its passion and interconnectivity, is a key feature of the fundamentalist experience. Whether it be the community of mosque, church or synagogue, the eros of communal belonging and caring is intoxicating. Communal ritual with its participatory song and drama, together with an all-embracing world view which seems to explain away alienation and uncertainty, is undeniably seductive.

Fundamentalism is only pseudo-eros however, because ultimately it denies true interconnectivity. To many all-embracing world views are built on excluding the ‘unredeemed’ from their embrace. Fundamentalism in both its secular and religious varieties, offers salvation only to the elite group that subscribes to its set of dogmas. Everyone else is an outsider and usually damned to eternal perdition of some variety.

This is a violation of the core quality of eros — being on the inside. When you are an insider only by making someone else an outsider then there is no interiority and no eros. This is precisely what we have termed pseudo-eros. In your need to fill the emptiness, the other is degraded in order to attain the erotic feeling of being on the inside.

marc gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
share comments on info@marcgafni.com