Peter Koper abstract

Violence does not disappear from the human scene; Greece had invented scientific thought and Attic drama had begun the exposure of the violence underlying myth that the Gospel continued and Girard has explained, but even so, Euripidess last play, The Bacchae, is a warning that sacrificial violence threatens the enlightened polis. The Holocaust is the last centurys confirmation of Euripidess terrible warning.

Eric Ganss analysis of the firstness of Judaisms monotheism explains the ubiquity of anti-Semitism in both Christian and Islamic societies. Islam, especially, was in direct rivalry with Judaism from its beginnings because the Jewish communities of Arabia refused to accept Mohameds revelations and because of the priority of Judaisms theology. The widespread anti-Semitism of Islamic communities in the Mid-east is part of a long tradition exacerbated by conflict with Israel and often difficult social conditions. The Islamic communities of the Mid-east will benefit enormously from sufficient freedom of speech for analyses of the mythic structures of Islam to become widespread, as such analyses of Christianity are now in Europe and the United States.

Well-intentioned communities in the West face a separate issue in their encounter with Islam, it too described by Gans, the rhetorically crippling effects of white guilt. In The United States, the term typically names the attitude of well-intentioned and socially liberal whites towards groups that historically have been subject to de jure distinction and persecution. The Holocaust is the origin of this concern with victimization and its great achievements are the civil rights movements and the end of colonialism. But what Gans calls the guilt of the unmarked towards the marked. generates its own set of tensions to the extent that it sees only victimization when it looks at individual behaviors, some of which should not be tolerated whoever engages in them. Educated whites in the United States often refrain from criticizing mis-behaving African-Americans, inhibited by fear of being or being called racist. This fear prevents them from treating blacks as people whose humanity is the same as their own and has crippled many discussions of race.

What constitutes appropriate and necessary public discussion is a topic affected by white guilts broad inhibitions with respect to public discussions of religion and race. The Islamic communities in Europe, sure signs of a colonial past, invoke the same constellation of attitudes that race does in the United States. The Netherlandss celebrated tradition of toleration is tested by this issue. Athenian culture remains a model of the rhetorical structure of toleration. With important exceptions, the conditions for participation in public discourse were citizenship and an agreement not to kill ones enemies. What emerged out of a politics in which argument was a substitute for warfare was a remarkably vital polity. Silence derived from a white guilt that sacralizes rather than humanizes the once despised does not integrate a polity. The answer to segregation is the sustained, intense, intimate, frankly critical argument of Platos Socrates, not horrified politeness.

Peter T. Koper, Professor Department of English Language and Literature, Central Michigan University

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