Josh Zyderveld
“Morality, for the artist, is a sort of sex appeal. He seduces and embellishes himself with it – himself and his work.” – Witold Gombrowicz, Polish novelist and dramatist, 1904.
Evil isn’t the only negation of morality. Nearly as nauseating is the exploitation of morality for the vain purposes common to the artist, the entertainer, the editorialist, the politician, or the conversationalist. Apart from power, nothing is so lusted after as moral purity, for the contemptuous indignation it permits one to feel for others in this sordid, ordinary world. We all seek it.
In Gombrowicz’s day, it was necessary to be – in some usually phony sense – a revolutionary. In ours, it is useful to acquire ‘victimhood’, which elevates in stature, ennobles, and sanctifies. It absolves one, too, of the superficiality of the culture at large. While one may share in the luxury of bourgeois life, one remains forever elect by virtue of one’s suffering.
Whatever the percentage of atheists, agnostics and practitioners of other religions in the West, the culture retains strands of Christian thought at its core. One such notion is what Nietzsche described as the ‘slave-morality’ of inverting all natural values; nothing is so honored in the West as suffering, loss, addiction, defeat, collapse, failure, or victimhood. We do not think highly of those who acquire or wield power or attain success; we think highly of those smashed by chance.
Thus it is that the acquisition of some great trauma confers both suffering and some privilege, to the secret shame of those who consciously or unconsciously exploit it. But perhaps it is the only redemption available for an injury, and who would begrudge a victim the right to transact upon their own pain? I have done it with the pitifully meagre difficulties I’ve faced, and I see at times in the televised treacle of preening anguish an awareness in the faces of those who have made the same choice. They know, as do we all, that as the master and slave moralities in our culture compete, it is the case that sometimes a victim vaults a victor.
So proudly confess to some slick stigma, to a hidden wound that has become like buried treasure, to an ennobling flaw! We may wonder later if there remains any tragedy not trafficked in, any silent suffering unused for moral advantage.