Essay from Christopher Bernard

The Achilles’ Heel of Liberalism: Rights vs. Responsibilities

By Christopher Bernard

The Tragedy of Rights

We live in a civilization whose power has so outstripped human wisdom, and so strained our moral sense, that it threatens our own existence. Though human extinction is unlikely, a collapse of the human population over the next century is almost certain: the heat waves of recent summers, and Hurricane Beryl, the earliest level 5 hurricane ever recorded, are merely a few of the stark warnings nature is giving us. Everyone knows the tedious clichés of horror we face, though few seem really to believe them – from the climate crisis to nuclear war, from the dangers of artificial intelligence to those of microplastics and forever chemicals, from the destruction of biodiversity to the depletion of nonrenewable resources, from the death of vast swaths of the oceans to the collapse of the Gulf Stream and a potential thousand-year winterization of Europe.

If we truly believed in the coming of these disasters – as unambiguously as we believe it when we see a truck barreling toward us at an intersection – we would, of course, respond, if only in pure reflex. But we obey another cliché: like a deer in the headlights, we freeze in panic. We don’t know what to do, or whether doing anything is even possible: every door seems locked, every path closed. We feel trapped in a society, culture and political system that seem to allow of no fundamental change, even when they threaten the destruction of ourselves and the system itself.

The humiliating irony is that we even know why this is so: a comparatively small number of people are making an enormous amount of money and acquiring a vast amount of power from the current political and economic order, and they either cynically don’t care what the future threatens (“After all, I’ll be dead, so what do I care what will happen to people I’ll never know? After all, I don’t owe anyone anything”), or they naively think they will escape its worse consequences (“The rich can always protect themselves. We’ll build bunkers in New Zealand or colonies on Mars if Earth gets too hot. We’ll just have to get out in time”).

How did this come to be? Is it just a result of forces beyond our control? Are we merely the result of the beanbag of fate tossing us back on forth between powers we have no influence over? And yet one thing above all things is clear: we made it happen. Collectively and individually, we are responsible for it.

And there lies an irony indeed.

At the heart of our world are two closely linked values that are foundational to our culture and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights: the rights of the individual and the maximization of personal liberty, the foundational ideas of liberalism, both left (“progressivism”) and right (capitalism, “neoliberalism”). Who can argue with the idea of personal freedom? We all love our liberty and are touchy about anyone who wants to take it away from us. These ideas are fundamental to the politics of a culture driven by the values of the Enlightenment – of science, reason and freedom – that began, four centuries ago, in the France of René Descartes and the England of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; a culture that continues to dominate the modern world – a world that has created a wealth of prosperity, power and knowledge undreamed of in previous human history.

The selfishness of the rich is, of course, no new story: it goes back to the dawn of history and has powered our sense of human evil since biblical times (Radix malorum est cupiditas – “the love of money is the root of all evil”). But never before our time did we deliberately – and to borrow a decidedly appropriate legal phrase, “with malice aforethought” however much we have fooled ourselves, with generations of economists, into believing that this was a private evil that would yield a public good (as if a private monstrosity could yield anything but a public monstrosity however cunningly disguised) – never before now did we make human selfishness the principal driver of social life, never did we put it in the driver’s seat and let it take the rest of us wherever it wanted, in the innocent hope that all would be well, because, after all, either human beings are naturally good (as Rousseau believed) or the “invisible hand” would apportion goods equitably (as Adam Smith believed) or our natural vices would cancel each other out if we just constructed a political system cleverly enough (as our Founding Fathers hoped).

What? you ask, indignantly. What does a culture of liberty and human rights have to do with a culture based on selfishness?

But a culture that values my liberty as its highest good is a culture that makes my selfishness its only good.

One of the reasons we can see no way out of the labyrinth we have made, where every path seems to lead to an almost certain catastrophe, is that we are committed to a set of ideas that hobbles the very way we think. And at the core of those ideas is precisely the priority we have given to the rights of the individual over every other good. And this is what defines “liberalism” that, with its variants of “right” and “left,” is the dominant philosophy of our time.

Liberalism has believed that by prioritizing such rights we would be able to create a just social order and a more or less happy community. When those results did not happen, and they clearly have not, liberalism believed it was because it had not sufficiently secured those rights; it discovered new “areas of oppression” (on the left, groups oppressed by bigotry and prejudice; on the right, actions limited by governmental restraint) and moved heaven and earth to be rid of them through various forms of “liberation” and “empowerment.” And yet these “liberations” and “empowerments” have not succeeded in creating a more just social order; on the contrary, they have simply added to the economic inequalities and social and political insecurities that define our era. We have descended into a war of rights that can have no end because no group is able to gain a definitive victory – and all are headed toward defeat because the civilization we have created on the back of the liberal dispensation is headed for certain collapse – the only question is when.

There is, nevertheless, one possible way out of this moral dead end, and one that has been available to us from the beginning. And that is to place human responsibility – for oneself, for one’s community, for humanity as a whole, for life on earth – at the moral center of society; not our rights, but our obligations; not our freedom to do whatever we feel like, but our freedom to take on the burdens of the world, explore it in its infinite mystery, defend it when attacked, improve it where it can be improved; to love it with a genuine love, a love that is action and not mere feeling – for its own well-being, not just for what it can do for us. And, if and when we fail, to be penalized, immediately and inescapably.

The Myth of the Autonomous Individual

The doctrine of “rights” is based on the idea that the basic social unit is the autonomous individual. But no one is born an “autonomous individual”; we are born weak, dependent babies completely incapable of taking care of ourselves, into families that must take care of us or we will die: each of us is the result of the mating of a male and a female, and at the beginning of our lives we are entirely dependent on the female, our mother, for our very existence, and not just for a few days or weeks, but for years. We are born as part of a community, not as individuals. We have no “rights,” but we do have clamoring needs. If our parents only cared about their rights and did not put their responsibilities to us first, we would have been very dead very quickly. That is a hard fact – the kind that both neoliberals and progressives, indeed that all liberals – run from like the plague. Because fact is authoritarian; it imposes its will and does not care whose rights it scorns or whose feelings it hurts. The truth is a hard task master, but it is also a dependable one.

The family is the heart of the social order, not the individual. We are not autonomous individuals and we never were: we live within an intricate web of interdependencies without which we could not live at all. We easily forget that and equate humanity as such with apparently autonomous adults – but there are no such things as “autonomous adults” except as a legal fiction; adult human beings are as deeply embedded in dependencies as the smallest infants, though it is not always as noisily obvious. Liberalism made the fatal theoretical mistake of harping on the “rights” of the individual. If we held to a truer metaphor – of humanity as dependent on our parent, the natural world, on the universe itself, with responsibilities to the natural order to help keep it healthy and well so that we too may thrive – obligations, in other words, to the “gods” that created us – we would find it easier to make responsibilities primary; indeed, we might even go further and make rights not something we are born with, but something that we earn after fulfilling our responsibilities. Though this might seem too rational, and certainly too radical, to the liberal dispensers of our world!

But the touchy ego of the western male, the driver of much of western culture and civilization, likes to forget its first humiliating dependency; it likes to think it was born, fully formed, from its own brain, a secular Athena from the Zeus of matter. It takes its ego as primary, not as one of nature’s legal fictions that was once a great convenience when creating a conscious, freely choosing, partly self-creating living creature, but that may have become a bit too big for its breeches and may need to be retired soon.

We have not even looked at the deceit wrapped up in the doctrine of “rights.” The idea, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, that “we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” must count as one of the most hypocritical statements in the history of political philosophy: if those rights were indeed “unalienable,” we could not possibly allow capital punishment or war (which deprive vast numbers of people of the “unalienable” right of life), or incarceration of any kind (ditto the “unalienable” right of liberty), or the impoverishment of tens of millions of people (ditto of the “unalienable” right of the pursuit of happiness) while a handful of billionaires soak up most of the wealth of an entire society. So much for “unalienable” rights! How typically “liberal”: the words sound so nice, so generous, so wonderful, but nobody actually believes them! Only the terminally naïve think we should actually believe or, heaven forbid! act on words we claim to live by. After all, the Declaration of Independence is only a piece of parchment slowly fading away in the National Archives, something we quote every July 4, then put away like a babbling senile uncle no one has to take seriously so we can get on with the real business of life: beggaring our neighbor . . .

Liberalism, with its privileging of the autonomous individual and his freedom above all other social values, has been, sadly, like communism: “wonderful as an idea” (“unalienable rights” on the one hand, “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs” on the other”) “but it’s hopelessly unrealistic.” Yet, in the case of liberalism, for a time it seemed it might work after all, with a generous tweak here and there. And it almost did, piling up prosperity, knowledge, and power from the late eighteenth century to our own paradoxical time. But all the time it was turning into a monster feeding on the globe’s resources and poisoning it with our waste, making the only planet where life is known to exist, and where a sane human being might genuinely wish to live without being confined to a technological prison on a lethal rock orbiting a murderous sun, potentially uninhabitable by the cunning ape that now dominates it. There is another irony: a “catastrophic success” indeed! Not that we weren’t forewarned, from the early socialists (and at least one French chemist) to the environmentalists (“environment”! but there is no “environment”: there is only the natural order within which we live; human beings are natural through and through – though we have become one of nature’s most destructive elements: a species of fire, lightning, hurricane, earthquake: one of the more savage pruners of evolution).

Responsibilities Versus Rights

Enlightenment thinkers rarely examined the role of responsibility in the social order. Montesquieu was one of the few, and his book L’Esprit des Lois was an important influence on the Founding Fathers. The one limitation on the privileging of rights in the American political system has been the doctrine of the rule of law; but a central weakness of liberalism has been its failure to see that this doctrine flatly contradicts the primacy of personal liberty – and the doctrine of the rule of law, though implied, is not in fact to be found explicitly stated in either the Declaration or the Constitution. It would have been different if Thomas Jefferson had included “and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable responsibilities, among which is respect for the rights of others,” for example. But alas, the idea seems to have slipped his mind . . . or perhaps these words would have been a little too sensitive for a slaveholder, or indeed for any employer!

It is one thing to examine what one has the right to do, quite another to study what one ought to do. And this is thorny because it imposes the necessity of defining the good, something liberals claim to be reluctant to do. Certain obvious social goods could be defined: social peace, orderliness, predictability, the adjudication of conflict and reduction crime, the fostering of social trust. But Enlightenment philosophers were often reluctant to go into greater detail, even though a substantive definition of the good is implied by any assertion that rights are socially desirable. And soon we see one of the foundations of liberal self-deception, most patently in the one of the greatest of all philosophers of liberalism, John Stuart Mill: the liberal claims not to define the good but claims to be open to all definitions of “the good”; the liberal is “tolerant,” “open-minded” – until he meets a definition of good that refuses to tolerate something the liberal, airily, claims is no evil at all (but who gets to define what is evil? The liberal claims “evil” is only what “harms.” But who gets to define “harm”? Only the liberal . . .) – and the “tolerant” liberal is suddenly no longer so tolerant after all. The liberal’s claim to have no substantive definition of the good is then seen for what it is: hypocrisy when not self-deception.

It did not occur to most philosophers of rights (Nietzsche being the most notable exception) that a regime based exclusively on expanding rights must inevitably lead to massive inequalities of wealth and power, and the oppression of the weak and poor by the rich and powerful, unless there was a means to protect rights when rights clashed, inevitable in such a system. The only way to prevent these oppressions and adjudicate between rights would be to enforce a regime of responsibility, not only to honor one’s own rights, but to honor the rights of others as well – above all, to make that responsibility the primary consideration in every social encounter. Two things would be required: a system of power governing society dedicated to the imposition of responsibility, since free people will do whatever they can to avoid it – and a culture that internalizes a morality of responsibility, often via religion, in its members: both a physical and a spiritual governor for the sometimes wayward animal that is the adult human.

An understanding of rights must be linked to one of responsibilities, obligations, duties, until responsibilities are enshrined, not only in enforceable law, but in a society’s moral code and assumptions. And responsibilities must be prioritized over rights; there needs to be, at all times, an unambiguous priority between them. Responsibilities are innate; rights must be earned.

But this is, as they say, a “hard sell.” In a society drunk on its rights, on its “freedom,” no one will want to hear it. As mentioned above, there has been an attempt, in America in particular, to claim the “rule of law” as the necessary basis for freedom, but laws are no better than the human beings who create them and those who enforce and adjudicate them – and human beings are very weak reeds indeed. At the heart of law is rapacity, selfishness, amoralism, greed, thirst for power, and hunger for revenge – with every so often, a drop of human empathy and wisdom, for human goodness may be weak and easily intimidated, but to deny it exists would be merely to concede victory beforehand to the monster that lurks, side by side with the cowed saint, in every human heart.

We have learned, through numerous studies in the psychology of children, that human beings are reflexively altruistic: our natural impulses are to help others. This is no veneer of virtue; it is our moral bedrock. We instinctively abhor injustice, suffering, and oppression and reflexively seek to end them. I would go further: we hate selfishness of all kinds, including our own. The last thing we want to do, when, in childhood and early adolescence, we are still ruled by our inborn impulses, is to think primarily about “number one.” Further, we instinctively desire to live in a moral order, in a place of justice and truth; we are appalled by injustice, duplicity and moral anarchy. Indeed we hate and despise these things – and above all, those who would impose them on us.

Selfishness, on the other hand, is learned behavior – our experiences teach us to be selfish. We become selfish out of a sense of self-preservation and only as our last option. Our first moral pleasure is helping others; our first moral temptation to evil is when we see a thread between our pain and someone else’s smile – and we see our own instinctive altruism as naïve, even perilous to our survival.

But the fundamental problem of a “rights-based” social and political order is that it privileges precisely those instincts we hate in others and ourselves. It is thus no wonder that such a social order leads to a hysteria of insecurity followed by a pervasive sense of nihilism and despair: when we are forced to think primarily, and sometimes exclusively, about ourselves, and to see others as either real or potential enemies, and always as competitors, we are going to end in rebellion against a social order that enforces mandatory selfishness. Yet the liberal order has placed the “self” of humanity at the center of the universe, the “self” of the nation and community at the center of humanity, and the individual “self” – “me,” in a word – at the center of the community. The liberal order has revealed itself as a kind of moral vacuum parading as the highest good, “progressive,” “vindicated by history.” Yet the liberal order is now well on its way to destroying itself and the world it has made. This, after all, is what evil does, what evil is: self-destruction.

Liberals are chronically unaware of this because they fail to make a distinction between their putative goals and the results their endearingly well-meaning but often damaging policies have actually had. When their policies lead to disaster, rather than critiquing the policies or the assumptions underlying them, they double down on both, insisting they will succeed in contributing to human flourishing if only more such policies are imposed throughout the social order. Liberals of both right and left – neoliberals and capitalists, and leftists and progressives both – have fallen, or rather leapt wholeheartedly, into the same trap. Yet when anarchy is imposed on anarchy, the result is unlikely to be a just social order. Capitalism, the economic avatar of liberalism, is the war of all against all; progressivism is its political counterpart. The notion that either one of these could possibly end well is the kind of irrational hope that could only result from certain forms of secular education, from business schools to the postmodern humanities.

Nevertheless, I refuse to give up hope. We are not nature’s most cunning species for nothing. And if we wake up in time to our responsibilities (especially our first and most important one: to protect life of our home, planet Earth), perhaps we will conquer our own worst impulses and survive; perhaps even thrive in a world where we will have earned the right to be happy.

_____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet and novelist. His collection The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His most recent books are the first in the “Otherwise” series of children’s books – If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia.


Poetry from Christopher Bernard

The Good Father

He is the mountain anchoring the horizon.

He is the sea holding candles for stars.

He is the law on the tablet of wisdom.

He is both wind and the sheltering wall.

He is the stone foundation of homeland.

He is the sun raising day to the sky.

He is the rock his son builds his whole soul on,

and his daughter gets her wings from his eye.

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet and novelist. He is the author of two children’s books, If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment Of Biestia – the first in the “Otherwise” series.


Poetry from Christopher Bernard

The Hallucination

It tracks the edge of the wilderness
inside the skull of the mind,
tongueless yet obstreperous,
shouting like King Ubu lost in Poland.
It is shocking how unshockable it is.
The raptors of consciousness
gather in its many caves,
the blue shells of their eyes
do not blink.
Argus is its only ancient commentary,
though Medusa is to come. 
Count its eggs, those tiny mausolea.
The mice in the garden gave it all their stories.
The mountain flowers are frozen like so many monkeys
in its zoo of gazes. The coyotes themselves
are whining to get in, you can hear them every night.
The ravens shake their beaks and coolly smirk
at the madwomen staring at their hands that are holding nothing.

Essay from Christopher Bernard

Christopher Bernard invites people to sign on to this letter in the comments.

An Open Letter to President Biden

Dear Mr. President:

Surely you would agree that defending a "rules-based order" when, and only when, it decides in your favor is not acceptable; in fact, it violates the very principle of such an order. 

Why, indeed, are we attempting, through legal actions almost too numerous to count, to hold Donald Trump accountable for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election? When a ruling, whether from a judge in court or the voters in an election, goes against you, it is neither morally nor legally acceptable to attack the system that led to that ruling in a fit of pique.

Yet that is precisely what your administration seems intent on doing. The scurrilous response by Secretary of State Blinken to “work with Congress to penalize” the ICC if it merely considers issuing warrants for the arrest of members of Israel's leadership - and your own petulant response (which, ironically, sounds curiously similar to the response by Trump when legal institutions act against him) - are, both of them, indefensible. The hypocrisy of American foreign policy, one of the few dependable truths of world history over the last two and a half centuries, has rarely been quite so blatant.

Israel has been murdering and denying the basic human rights of Palestinians in violation of international law and the U.N. for, not months or years, but generations. Israel has fooled much of the world, and decades of American presidents, into thinking it is the innocent victim when it has been the perpetrator of some of the most heinous offenses of modern times, not least the mass murder of civilians in Gaza since October of last year, and including policies of mass destruction, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, and the killing of civilians going back at least to the Six-Day War of 1967, itself a crime under international law as it was provoked by Israel, who claimed it was a pre-emptive strike against an impending invasion by its Arab neighbors: a falsehood long disproven by the historical record. 

You weep for those killed, horrendously, on October 7. But you have said nothing about the thousands and the tens of thousands who have been massacred by Israeli forces, whose homes have been wiped out, whose land has been stolen, whose families have been slaughtered, whose lives have been destroyed as deliberate Israeli policy since 1948 and before. 

We in the United States are guilty of complicity in war crimes, collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. And that includes, above all, American political leaders.

You can influence long overdue changes in both the policy and actions of the Israeli government toward the Palestinians if you so choose. You can begin by sending Israel no more offensive arms. The Israel Defense Force has clearly, consistently, and defiantly broken American law in its use of our weaponry – weaponry paid for by American taxpayers. As president, you have the power, indeed the moral and legal obligation to do this.  

If you do not reverse your policy of indiscriminate support for Israel, and that means if you do not stop supplying Israel with arms during the current genocidal war against the Palestinians of Gaza – and furthermore, if you do not hold Israel to account for its generations-long apartheid against the people of Palestine – I, and many like me, will find it difficult, if not impossible, to support you for president, despite the truly frightening alternative. 

Often I have had to choose between two evils when voting for an American president, but never to the extent that I am being asked to in this election – and I am haunted by memories of 1968, when the electorate faced a similar moral dilemma during a presidential race, with tragic consequences. Choosing between an insurrectionist and an enabler of crimes against humanity I find profoundly repugnant, on moral grounds. I may find it impossible to make such a choice, or I will vote for a candidate who may have no chance of winning but whose positions do not make me feel I will have blood on my hands if I choose him or her.

I sense there are many like me among the electorate, both Democrats and independents, even among Republicans. If Trump wins in November, his victory, which could well be a catastrophe, may be because you made it morally impossible for conscientious voters to choose the only viable political alternative. 

Respectfully,

Christopher Bernard




Christopher Bernard reviews Cal Performances’ showing of Socrates and Via Dolorosa by the Mark Morris Dance Group

Several groups of dancers in white and tan robes cluster in front of a background painted in various colors: blue, white, red, orange, and yellow.
Mark Morris Dance Group in “Via Dolorosa” (Photo: Chris Hardy)

Calvary and a Prison in Athens

Socrates and Via Dolorosa
Mark Morris Dance Group
Cal Performances
Berkeley, California

Western civilization. Two words that seem to enrage one half the world while blinding the other with a misguided sense of aggrieved loyalty. The so-called progressive left lays the blame for most, if not all of today’s evils at its doorstep. The alt-right and other so-called conservatives claim to be its sole defenders in a world gone mad with resentment and ingratitude.

“Slavery, capitalism, climate change, nuclear war, toxic synthetics, dying seas, the collapsing of wildlife and the sixth extinction,” the left claims, “including our own under the weight of a catastrophic success – these are the legacy of Western civilization.” “Freedom, unsurpassed prosperity, knowledge without equal, human creativity unleashed and human power without limit,” claims the right, “righteousness, grace and God: these are the gifts and the triumph of Western civilization.”

But today there is no longer such a thing as “Western civilization.” Long after Europe lost its empires and its political and economic dominance, its intellectual and spiritual domination of the world is complete. Now “Western civilization” is world civilization: free markets, the primacy of the individual, the sanctity of human rights and the political authority of the people (in theory when not in practice), the imperative of human creativity, technology, critical reason and the scientific method in addressing our problems – these Western definitions of the good are unchallenged by anyone – though the right seems hardly to understand them and the left pretends to forget them. The right defends a grotesque caricature of “the West” that has its roots in the barbarians that brought down an empire and sacked Rome – their founding fathers are Alaric and Attila, the Vandals and Ostrogoths who gaped at the cities they burned.

The left attacks an equally grotesque simulacrum: a “West” that began in 1619, or 1492, or 1605 – when the Atlantic slave trade began, or Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, or the first stock exchange was founded in Amsterdam and what had been an efficient series of trading markets across the continent turned into the many-headed Hydra that now feasts on the globe.

At the heart of our dominant civilization stand two figures whose shadows have been cast down the millennia; the greatest rebels and martyrs of their times – doubters, skeptics, revolutionists. Each stood for his (for they were both men) convictions regarding reality, truth and the good, and each paid the ultimate price: they were summarily killed by the people and powers of their time, with the assumption their ideas and influence would die with them. They did not. Those two individuals also stood for the two poles on which what was, eventually, called “the West” has revolved for centuries. Their names? Socrates and Jesus.

Socrates embedded the dialectics of doubt and reasoned argument into the heart of the West. Jesus embedded the imperative of faith and love. Both stood for truth – though their conceptions of it were not always congruent, and much of Western history has been a long-undecided conflict, sometimes war, between them, one essentially spiritual, the other material – “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” as Matthew Arnold defined them two centuries ago.

Or, as we might say today, alt-right and progressive – neither side seeming to realize that both they and their opponents are Western to the core.

What civilization first placed its own self-criticism as one of its fundamental values? Western – and late Western at that. In most other cultures and civilizations, including earlier versions of Europe, the critic, dissident, rebel would have been imprisoned, executed or dismissed as mad.

What civilization places the idea of moral universals and absolutes at its beating heart? Again, Western. Most, if not all, other cultures enforced loyalty to their own and only their own; anyone outside “the tribe” was not considered entirely “human,” and certainly had no “rights.”

This is not to romanticize the West. Being human, it is imperfect – often floridly so. It has blood on its hands, as does every other culture and civilization since humanity broke off from its simian ancestors. And its virtues were not always intentional; they exist at least partly because there has been in fact no single “Western culture” but rather a cauldron of “Western cultures,” dozens of cultures, ethnicities, religions, races, in perpetual war with each other for millennia. But that discussion must be pursued elsewhere.

The Mark Morris Dance Group brought two dances, balancing these Western, and now world-dominating presences, one intellectual and heroic, the other spiritual and sanctified, to Berkeley’s Zellerbach Theater during a recent weekend; performances that could not help but stimulate these thoughts.

The first was a revival of Mark Morris’s celebrated “Socrates,” an intriguing work set to the music of Eric Satie and a libretto taken from three of Plato’s dialogues. Based on designs to be found in Grecian pottery, and at times curiously reminiscent of Nijinsky’s notorious choreography for Debussy’s “Prelude to ‘L’aprés-midi d’un faune,’” the dance moves in smoothly hieratic poses, sometimes childlike, sometimes serenely adolescent, across a landscape of classical purity and grace.

The dance has a libretto, performed gracefully by tenor Brian Giebler and accompanied by pianist Colin Fowler. The libretto’s first part is taken from The Symposium, the celebrated dialogue on the nature of love. Alicibiades describes Socrates as like a Selenus, a grotesque figurine containing, hiddenly, the figure of a god, and also like Marsyas, a satyr and flute player for the gods – though those who remember their mythology will remember his tragic end when he makes the mistake of challenging Apollo, god of the lyre, to a competition: he loses, predictably, and is skinned alive for his hubris.
The second part describes an idyllic passage in Phaedrus in which Socrates and his young eponymous friend seek a place on the banks of a lovely stream where they will conduct a conversation in search of the true, the beautiful, and the good.

The third is taken from Phaedo, narrating the last moments of Socrates’ life, surrounded by his mourning friends in an Athens prison, when he drinks the hemlock to which he has been condemned by the citizens of Athens for corrupting the youth of the city when, in truth, he was liberating them from the very illusions that led, ironically, tragically, to the greatest of ironist’s own martyrdom.
Eric Satie’s music, famously cool and detached, makes little attempt to express the libretto; Morris’s choreography spends almost all of its time following the music and ignoring the words: there is almost no attempt, for example, to express the pathos of the closing pages until the very end, when, one by one, each of the dancers slips gracefully to the floor, expressing the death, perhaps not only of Socrates, but of the Greek ideal itself.

The second half of the program was a world premiere, awaited with much anticipation: “Via Dolorosa,” set to the music of Nico Muhly, performed on solo harp, with formidable virtuosity, by Parker Ramsay. The dance follows the Stations of the Cross, from Jesus’ condemnation to his crucifixion, death and entombment. Interestingly, it distributes the role of Jesus to dancers of various genders, ethnicities and races, appropriate for the universal humanity of the Good Shepherd. Muhly’s music is, for the most part, as detached as Satie’s, though it occasionally gives way to the harrowing drama of the moment. The stunning stage set – a blowup of a searingly beautiful patch of abstract brushwork, whose colors changed depending on how they were lit – was by Howard Hodgkin.

For this dance, too, there’s a libretto, in this case somewhat overwrought, by Alice Goodman, though in this performance it was neither spoken nor sung (as, it seems, might occur at some performances). Which was just as well, as it is, to be frank, a poor substitute for the simple descriptions in the gospel.

The dance was a little disappointing. Though there were moments of genuine originality and the childlike grace and warm humanity one associates with Morris’s dances, there just was not enough inventiveness and too much reliance on mannerisms one has also come to expect. It seemed just a little tired. There was also a strange attempt to take the edge off the final moments of the entombment, at the very end of the dance, to anticipate the coming resurrection, that felt contrived and forced. After all, even in Giotto’s frescoes, the angels are allowed to weep and lament as if there will be no resurrection to come, not take what looked like a not very unconvincing victory lap.

It was perhaps a more thought-provoking evening than one that was entirely satisfying aesthetically, but it was certainly worth the visit. And the audience gave it a standing ovation.
_____
Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. His most recent books are the children’s books If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . and The Judgment of Biestia, the first two stories in the series “Otherwise.”




Poetry from Christopher Bernard

Eyeless in Gaza

Strong, blind, he stumbles over the broken land.
His teeth are black. Boots crush a few innocents.
What does he care? His old wounds crowd his mind.
“Make everyone pay! Who pitied me? No pity!
Kill the children! Kill the mothers! Kill the men,
above all, who blinded me! Wipe them out!”
His fists hurl through the darkness.
				          The YouTube videos
show children
left behind his boot,
sand packed in their eyes, crusting their lips like dirty glitter,
the black-scarved mothers hysterical with grief,
the sunlight like a scar.

No pity, no pity – an eye for an eye,
and the whole world has gone blind. Evil
stalks men. It eats them. Then it spits them out.

Pity
         everyone,
 		   all of us –

or who shall pity us?


Aaron Bushnell, Martyr

At attention, in battle fatigues,
he stands before the concrete
cube within which
the ambassador sends his dispatches
between capitals. “The president
may say what he wants. The alliance
holds. Only the funds matter.
Gaza never existed anyway.”

He is staring at you.
His clothes are slick
as though he were standing in the rain.
There is a movement of his hand.

The ambassador
looks up, startled,
by a strange smell
as the man outside
becomes, for a moment,
fire.

_____

Christopher Bernard is an American poet, novelist and essayist. (“Eyeless in Gaza” first appeared in his collection Chien Lunatique, but he feels it is even more relevant today than when it first appeared.)

Poem from Christopher Bernard

Fountain

Her hand leaps into the air like spray
as she dances, dances through the shadows
in the hushed auditorium she wraps around her
all the long spring afternoon.
She seems to rise in a lover's arms
of air and fog and sunlight.
Her eyes glimmer, her lips
murmur sweet nothings.
The hair flows over the brim of her shoulders
down her transparent back. Swallows
dance in the rain that dazzles from her fingers:
she is a living fountain, and drowns all the boys.

____

Christopher Bernard is an award-winning poet, novelist and essayist. His most recent books are the first two stories in the series “Otherwise,” for middle-grade readers: If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . .  and The Judgment Of Biestia.