Salem and Jerusalem (Seek and Ye Shall Find)
The sense of pursuing something at all costs is reflective of the will to life. In principle, we are beings who are limited by our form of Being. Even if we have attempted to divide the One and the many, placing the former either in a superior space which is yet life, though beyond itself, or by imagining that we are more deeply and fully part of that same Being, and thus this experience of life is but partial and transitory, we are still confronted by the challenge of living that life as a being incomplete. This is such a daunting prospect for the individual and for the community alike, that the intrusion of the One is historically seen as a regular feature of human existence. Now, whether or not this is truly an ‘intrusion’, irruptive and thus posing as irreal in space and time, or it is merely a construction, can only be judged from without. Modernity does not in general cleave to the conception of the One, for it has firmly parked this sensibility in non-human forms, trading the infinite for the indefinite. So, when we review specific historical events or even moods, we today gaze with both disdain and astonishment, that our ancestors could be so moved to have done what they did at the time in question.
Our two metaphors, one of the witch-hunt and one of the crusade, closely related as they are but trending off in opposite directions – the former toward the person and thence the personal, the latter outward to the world and thence the cultural – will serve us both historically and analytically. Salem is synonymous with paranoia, local politics, Puritanism, misogyny but above all else, the abreaction against the abnormative. In Foucauldian mode, Salem is an exercise in small scale biopower. For pioneer settlers, faced as they were with an unending wilderness populated by superior numbers of indigenous peoples, unmarried childless women were an unaffordable luxury. Whatever the hysteria of charges against these women might have been in the minds of both their peers and their leaders, the basic transgression was of the most basic reproductive rule, made extreme by the circumstances. Salem is with us today in the anti-abortion movement, mainly helmed by women, and in the anti-gay movement. Anyone who opts out of the reproductive cycle cannot entirely be trusted not to do the same with that of production-consumption. Indeed, one might well suggest that child-free couples and gay persons are only tolerated because their lack of childcare duties allows them to be more productive in their workplaces, and this in turn affords them more economic power in the marketplace. If we take this tack, it is merely a question of balancing role-players: how many ‘breeders’ does one need and how many hyper-consumers, how many workaholics and how many stay-at-home caretakers? In this mode of analysis, biopower is diffused along the lines of social role expectation.
But Salem is also an outlook. It casts a profound aspersion upon those who seek to live their lack of oneness outside of the basic social norms. Just so, if the One is lost to that same contemporary life, it can only be approximated in a society that heeds fairly strictly the norms of its organicity. Society can only be made into community in this manner. The former is too abstract a oneness; I cannot experience it directly. But the latter gives me something I can actually feel in my day-to-day rounds. I am part of something larger than myself; a community not of like minds but of like actions and inactions, and through these I express my own willing charity and even good-naturedness interacting with these small scale others. This is the ‘othership’, which partakes only in the Cartesian sense of ‘here is another like myself; they are not me but I could be them’. Here, I am one of them and hence approximate the One with them, but only with them. But to those who depart from this most basic form of otherness, while at the same time potentially adding to the difficulty of both social reproduction and economic growth, I am disagreeable. In salemic times, I am hard-pressed to extend my best self and my otherwise good-naturedness in all directions at once.
This is also key: that there are now a multitude of different callers upon my good will, not just those with alternative sexualities or reproductive sensibilities, but those hailing from a myriad of diverse cultures, who are at once rivals and allies. Globalism is not the same as cosmopolitanism. Acceptance does not equal tolerance, and neither take the place of understanding. Salem itself was so small a group that there could be no deviation, even numerically, between what society was and what was community. Here, acceptance, tolerance and understanding must be the same thing, for the Puritans found themselves living in an organic culture set down into mechanical conditions. In Durkheimian mode, the colonies were a contradiction in organizational terms. When one’s culture and one’s conditions are askew, internal scrutiny becomes the most intense. Everyone must do their part. Beyond this, the original charges against the sectarians, the very reason they fled Europe, included dealings in the occult; they were themselves, by doctrinaire old-world standards, devil-worshippers. To then have even a hint of such within their own exiled and pariah communities would have been too much to bear. At the same time, marriages of convenience always break asunder after the most critical moment has passed. Those brought together by mutual loss and mourning struggle to find their way as a new unit once the much-vaunted ‘new life’ is attained. Wartime allies, such as the Western powers and the Soviet Union in 1945, retreat into their respective geopolitical corners. And communities who have been forced out of one place undergo internecine purges once a safe refuge is discovered. Salem was this purge, this divorce, this political realignment. It was largely symbolic in that it scapegoated a few; anything more widespread would have wiped out the entire affair.
Salem as metaphor is about internal purity, but Jerusalem is about purifying the wider world based upon the already attained purity of the internal Oneness. Jerusalem, as the goal of an externalizing crusade, represents a regaining and thence grounding, just as Salem might be seen as a finding and thence a re-grounding in a mimesis of the autochthonous. Salem is the cosmogony reiterated, Jerusalem the cosmology created, but they are two side of the same historical coin. It is not simply about xenophobia let alone ideology. The fear of otherness is a fear that the self is not able to maintain itself. My homophobia speaks to my own sexual doubts. I may not even be attracted to other men but I will always find some women unattractive. My ethnocentrism expresses a similar skepticism: there are many things within my own culture of birth that I abhor. One sure-fire way of overcoming these doubts is to project them onto others; not so differently do I ‘transfer’ my neurotic symptoms onto significant others, endangering the intimacy of the othership which I hold so dear. A culture that cannot afford to fight amongst itself is best prepared to wage war on another. The historic crusades were an example of this ‘coming together in the face of a common enemy without’. Unlike the Columbian Conquest, which was a competition amongst developing nations who needed the leverage new markets and new resources would bring them, the Crusades engendered a singular goal: the retrieval of the origin of life itself.
If Salem had recreated life, that of the culture and that of the faith, Jerusalem remained the font of both. Only one crusade was actually militarily successful, but this is immaterial to the force of the symbolic content present in the idea of Oneness and how to merge once again with it. In our outsized cosmology, to witness the birth of the current installment of the universe is seemingly a benign crusade. The otherness in the way is itself a mere happenstance; it could have been any different culture, or even a very similar one – indeed, in fact it was, given religion, lifeway, subsistence pattern and economy, gender relations and many more characteristics – which presently occupies the promised landscape; it is simply the idea that I am not within that space, that of creation, that of all the force which opposes death. If Salem means to confront the mortality of the community emanating from within its own bounds, its own force occurs outside of the space of origins. The farther one travelled away from this center, the more at risk one was to encounter the dissenter, for who out here could have heard of the center of life, dwelling at such a distance from it? Salem is also thus a genuflective expression of Jerusalem, an orison directed back toward the center from the uttermost margins, which the new American colonies would certainly have qualified as. Yet Europe, by the High Medieval period, could well have seen itself as a margin, flung out in a patchwork of Christian diasporas, only tenuously tethered to the Levant, facing out upon, at that time, an unknown ocean of counter-being. It is not a coincidence that Europe turned back before turning forward, into its own imagined womb before out into the unimaginable world.
It is transparently clear that both Salem and Jerusalem are with us yet. In all internal examinations, from the petty McCarthyisms of a political purge to the more profound disinfectants of normative salute, the martinette strutting in the first stage, but the marionette the very goal of the second, the salemic jingo speaks its spiel. If in times of relative lack of success in enforcing the oneness upon its own society, then at the cultural level, there will be a call to exogamous arms. The sense that there lies in wait a common enemy, ready to destroy us if we do not ‘come together as one’, surely exerts a powerful suasion. But this aspect of the dual metaphors is old hat. If we are to more fully comprehend the oft-oscillating historical dynamic involving Salem and Jerusalem we would do better to consider their relationship to the will to life as a whole. For one could live on in an altered culture; humanity is in fact not that diverse. No, the truer sticking point is not cultural difference, but that I myself am not the one who can know oneness, who can relive the creation, who is divorced from Being. That some other culture attained the purity of the central mimesis, regained the exacting proximity to the authentic center, the Mecca, the Mt. Fuji, the Ararat, the Mount Meru and so on. To be apart from that ultimate and death-defying success is to be committed to a truncated life. To be only adopted, or yet co-opted, into the other’s existential apex is to lose my ontological status as a being of Being. This is the deeper reason why some refer to those who flout the norms as being ‘existential threats’, whether directed at those of the interior or of the exterior.
Without the center I am absented from the One. I can no longer experience the uniquely plural personhood of beings because I do not have any sure basis of comparison; Being is absent. This modern condition would be tolerable if no other human being yet sought Being through either a Salem or a Jerusalem, but alas we have as a species not matured to the point wherein the center can be redefined as within each human life; where the Being of beings resides only in that same existential arc that defines our collective finitude.
G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.