‘Raising a Child in the Grave’

‘I saw the shadow of a coachman, he was cleaning the shadow of a carriage with the shadow of a brush.’

Dostoyevsky

 

A friend had told me; years ago, they had arranged an appointment for a business meeting with a Jewish businessman. The man, contrary to his habit, had been late. Then, when he arrived, he apologized and said, sorry, I was with the child. I gave him his water and flowers and spent some time with. I got lost in thought. That’s why I was late, he said. My friend didn’t quite understand, said, God bless, how old is he? The man said, ‘He is finishing his 16.’ Then he added, I mean, if he had lived. How so? When he understood my friend’s curiosity, he continued. In 2004, when the synagogue in Istanbul was bombed, the Jewish businessman was there with his 5-year-old son. In the attack, his son was torn apart and died, and he himself was injured. Since that day, he goes to his son’s grave every day, bringing water and flowers, sometimes also his favorite toys and foods, and spends hours there. He continued to live his whole life as if his son were still alive. As he finished his speech, he said, ‘Do you know, the hardest thing in life is raising children in the grave…’

I don’t know if the Jewish businessman nowadays empathizes with the fathers of the children that his kinsmen have slaughtered in Gaza. But the chilling reality of raising children in a grave evokes staggering evocations of life and death. The tragedy of the vital bond established with death makes everything about man and life meaningless. Or it vaporizes all meanings.

As the poet said, time is an invisible cemetery, maybe we all live in a cemetery. With the instinct of not being able to accept death and searching for immortality, we freeze life in childhood and look for ways not to grow up. We regard the people we exalt as immortal and establish an immortality relationship with them, seeking intercession by visiting their graves, tombs, kurgans. Inspired by the thousands of years of reality of life full of pain, sorrow, and oppression, we escape to the unreal, trying to live in an eternalized childhood paradise. That’s why most people never grow up. They avoid everything that would make them grow, make them mature, make them reach mental maturity, they close their eyes, ears, and minds, and choose a deliberate ignorance. We forget everything that doesn’t suit us and remember what does.

In My Universities, Gorky says: “People do not pursue knowledge, but forgetting and consolation.” Because as people learn, they grow. But those who gather knowledge also gather pain.

Socrates’ maieutic method of teaching with questions was perhaps the result of his realization of this conscious forgetfulness, or rather, chosen ignorance. By asking questions, he would reveal that every person actually knew everything, that is, he would make them remember. ‘If you can only see the light that is revealed, if you can only hear the voice that is spoken, you can neither see nor hear,’ the master would say.

Yes, humanbeing carries within himself the whole knowledge of the universe, of nature, of all stages of existence, of himself, because he has witnessed everything. As he is born and grows, his memory also returns; in relationship with the external world, with an external instructive effect he remembers; he comes to know not what he did not know, but what he did know.

“Find Adam, become Adam, the Adam is hidden in the universe / Do not despise Adam, the universe is hidden in Adam.” (Yozgatlı Fenni)

In the beginning was the word, man grows to remember it, to understand it, to follow it. Man is the embodied form of that word. He is the essence, the summary, the record, and the representation of everything happened/happening in the universe. Most people do not know that they know this. The mission of prophets, philosophers, godly wise tutors is also this; to remind people of what they know, to give them the measures to distinguish right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, to confirm the word. To reveal and free the Adam exiled into the human body. To make him know himself and become the master of his own destiny. To make him, by bringing him to the knowledge of the essence of the Necessary Being, participate in the cosmic manifestation of creation (eternity) together with Him (as servant). That is why La ilaha illallah. For everything that appears other than the One is an idol.

To know is to take on responsibility. For a person to pass adolescence and reach mental maturity means to become a responsible adult. Reason is the user’s manual for knowledge. Understanding is the ability to use knowledge correctly. An adult solves problems by reasoning, meets his basic needs, can choose between what is for and against him, can choose between good and bad. That is, reasoning is a necessary condition of being an adult individual. Understanding is the willpower to use one’s reason and other abilities for what is right, just, good, and beautiful. Most people have reason but are without understanding and willpower. Life, with its conditions that caducous people, renders most people without understanding and willpower. This is a return to adolescence. It is the stopping of growth, the pushing toward childishness. From the moment their understanding and willpower begin to atrophy, most people freeze and remain in that state. No matter their age, they are then an adolescent or a child. They use their reason only to fulfill the requirements of their instincts and habits. They forget what they knew and do not want to learn what they do not know. This state of irresponsibility turns into a personality, and they are then a slave, a mankurt, a part of a crowd, a herd. This is a chosen ignorance, an extended childhood, a frozen vitality. A kind of death, sleep, or paralysis. The world is now a cemetery, and people are the living dead. In this cemetery, neither child nor adult grows. Everything is as if, as if it exists, as if it lives, as if it happens. It’s just as if. This is humanity’s most dangerous state. Because it regresses humanbeing through reverse evolution to an animal level, turning living into a simian imitation. People come to live as if they are living. We don’t know, maybe everyone comes to this world alone and leaves, so they express the fear and hope in their minds and souls. Perhaps humanity is nothing more than the repeated dreams of billions of copies of a single human being.

Most people grow up, live, and die without becoming a full human, that is, Adam. Bukowski begins a paragraph by saying, “The terrible thing is not death, but the lives lived or not lived…” and ends it by writing; “Most people’s deaths are a deception. In fact there is nothing left to die…”

Sezai Karakoç depicts these half-dead as follows:

“Flesh in the soil, cracking bones… / The half-dead are seized by fear,

When skulls touch a stone, / The dead who have only fingernails,

And only twisted kneecaps…”

Yet those who live do not wizen, those who live feel pain, grieve, fight, get angry, object, love, dislike, hate. Life is this whole of genuine behaviors. Oscar Wilde says, ‘An ungrateful, improvident, dissatisfied and rebellious poor man is a genuine personality and he has much substance in him.’ Sometimes even negative traits carry a positive core. Ultimately, the negative that is, the bad, the deficient, the wrong, is the reverse manifestation or fractal reflection of the good in the mirror. Because there is a deliberate choice, a free decision.

Yet slavery means precisely the blunting, limiting, controlling, and using for others of these human behaviors. In slave societies, behaviors are false, hypocritical, in accordance with the desires and interests of the masters. Living without taking responsibility ensures the internalization and acceptance of slavery. In the genetics of most people, there is the cunning of handing over their reason, willpower, and choices to someone else and, in return, gaining only the comfort of living as if they are alive. The slave always prefers to remain a slave rather than to be free. Because slavery is irresponsible childishness. Freedom, however, requires responsibility.

In the ignorant, what is lacking is not reason, he is cunning, what is lacking is morality, says Tolstoy.

Just as human being develops a safe shelter and defensive tools against the dangers in the nature and society into which he is born, he also develops interesting shelters and defense reflexes when he sees his own existence in danger. Chosen ignorance is a shelter. That is, playing dumb, pretending not to know, acting uninterested are actually tactics to gain time to test every development whose outcome he does not yet know. Likewise, habits and behaviors such as drugs, alcohol, gambling, prostitution, exhibitionism are conscious addictions and are the outward expression of the effort of slave souls to imitate the paradise of the masters or to reach a false paradise. These sins, shameful and bad behaviors that religions prohibit are essentially intended to prevent slavery from becoming a way of life. However, most people, in order to avoid responsibility, prefer drunkenness over sound reason, gambling to get rich quick rather than earning through labor, prostitution, fornication, simian entertainment forms, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and other debaucheries instead of the educative, healing, and generationally protective competence of family and love. All of these are quite conscious, quite rational choices. Most people are very smart and are in pursuit of a costless paradise life at the expense of others. Lust and pleasure blunt not reason but understanding and willpower. This is the blunting of the sense of responsibility.

Inspired by the thousands of years of enslavement experience in Africa, people most often play this role and try to protect themselves from new dangers. In fact, the African knows that there is water underground, that any food will grow when the soil is cultivated, how to care for and multiply animals, how to build better houses and roads, but he also knows well that when he does these things, just as his ancestors were taken away in chains and with whips to be worked in distant lands, his own life will be stolen just like his mines were stolen. So they sow only enough for themselves, or they constantly pretend to be hungry and thirsty to get help from strangers who see them in need and take pity on them. Ultimately, aid floods Africa from all over the world through this trade in mercy.

It is easier to play the victim of fate than to be the master of one’s own fate. This false fatalism is also the root cause of immorality. Because the source of morality is the consciousness of responsibility of free will. Every individual who binds his fate to God or, in the same sense, to time, coincidences, external causes, that is, who gains the freedom of irresponsibility based on false explanations also alienates his choices between good and evil, right and wrong, sin and virtue. This style of relationship that he establishes with God, or in the same sense with some other fundamental principle/belief that he believes in without calling it God, determines all his affairs. Every evil, wrong, sin, deficiency is easily attributed to God—or, in the same sense, to circumstances, fate, or destiny. This state which is the product of a primitive childhood belief that puts God in the place of father or mother, that is, not being a adolescent,  is actually a very conscious instinct. The contradiction between instinct and consciousness disappears in this matter of chosen irresponsibility. This is called cunning.

Most people live with this very cunning. They cleverly rationalize every kind of immorality. They knowingly and willingly persist in the wrong, commit sins, cheat in measures and weights, usurp rights, tell lies, commit theft and corruption, deceive even their closest ones with little tricks. They establish the same hypocritical, false, and mercantile style of relationship they have with God, with authorities to whom they voluntarily submit in order to meet their security and needs. They act as if they believe, are loyal, are faithful. To God they display exaggerated acts of worship, excessive religiosity, behaviors like a believer. To authorities, to the state, to the boss, to the manager, they offer the same kind of loyalty, obedience, allegiance, service behaviors. But these exaggerated behaviors are actually a means of concealing his irresponsibility with deep cunning and even using the social surplus value he obtains through this loyalty to dominate others.

Chosen ignorance, with its irresponsibility, or rather with its cunning of transferring responsibility to someone else, has also produced religious or political authorities. This chosen ignorance feeds, grows, and sustains institutional religiosity and similar forms of ideological religiosity. Thus, the cunning ignorant people who make themselves exploitable in the name of God or another sacred being, but actually use these manners for their own instincts, fears, desires, interests, and need for spiritual pleasure, become the willing subjects of a symbiotic colonial relationship. In the master–slave relationship, in fact the master serves the slave; Hegel tried to analyze the unhappy consciousness that formed in the master who realized this. Marx was aware of it. He envisioned a world without a master not because he loved the slave, that is, the proletariat, but because he hated the master, that is, the bourgeoisie. The proletariat, only in such a world, would break its chains, and as it lost its dependence on that paradoxical relationship of degradation, its alienation would end. What Marx did not take into account was the human perception of the lost wisdom, which he had actually reached the threshold of understanding but could not ‘raise it to the level of consciousness’, or rather, which was not included in the pool of Jewish-Christian-Greek accumulation. Thanks to this naivety of Marx, throughout the 20th century, socialism, as the opium of the East of the world, was able to turn the East into a field of capitalist production relations, and Socialism-Marxism was able to transform into another tool of the westernization of the world. Of course, this too happened with the voluntary servitude and manufactured consent of the slaves, the proletariat. Chosen ignorance even managed to sacralize and sanctify a godless-positivist world, producing yet another so-called alternative order that served it and allowed it to meet its needs without cost. Modern capitalist or socialist states, since the French Revolution, have overthrown the monarchical–aristocratic–religious domination of military agricultural empires and established national positivist industrial states in its place, but the master–slave paradox has still not changed. In fact, it has taken on more refined, deeper and more complex forms, and in the final analysis, it has condemned man to a world that does not enrich him, does not sanctify him, does not Adamify him.

Not only states but also the class of clergy, synagogues, churches, rabbis, priests, mullahs, sheikhs, Alawite dedes, babas, are institutionalized examples of this paradox of domination. The ideologues, leaders, and theorists of the ideologized organizations of the modern era are also included in this class of clergy. Today, scientists, philosophers, opinion leaders, intellectuals, famous journalists, and artists are the secular versions of the same model. What produces the class of religious and irreligious men, makes them authorities, and gives them prestige in return for which it receives a hypocritical religiosity and false morality, thereby justifying every act without cost, is chosen ignorance. These conscious ignoramuses use the same style in a more refined and indirect way. People who always try to fix others, judge others, and act like the master of the house in every matter, even in their daily relationships, within the family, and in their relations with relatives and friends, are like unappointed clergy. The thousands of years of history of slavery of humans is the source of these behavior codes based on ruling and governing. At its root lies the feeling of irresponsibility, that is, the inability to become an adolescent and prolonged childhood.

For some, childhood is their paradise, and they live there forever, never wanting to leave. That’s why they never grow up. For others, childhood is hell, and they spend their whole lives running from it, struggling not to relive the scenes of hell only they know. No one understands why they do what they do. Yet they have killed their childhood but never managed to bury it. They have no idea what paradise is, and to them, anything without their hell is paradise.

Most of the wars, conflicts, murders, insanities, massacres, tantrums, harassment, rape, torture and cruelty are committed by these ‘children’. War and violence are already childish behaviors. Lust and fame, ambition and domination are also childhood diseases of humanity. Hoarding money, gold, or property is the result of a childish sense of inadequacy. Such people neither grow up nor are ever satisfied. Because even if children’s bellies are full, their eyes are not. Only those who have truly matured can have both their stomachs and their eyes satisfied.

These traits are childlike forms of play. At its origin lie instincts and behaviors of primitive hunting and gathering ages, such as survival, security, avoiding hunger, will to power, possession games, and the desire to defeat imaginary enemy images. Throughout history, hunting ceremonies held by kings have been organized not only as war exercises but also as rehearsals in governing society. Because, in military agricultural societies, states are shepherds. Anonymous masses, like sheeps, goats, and horses, are trained, conditioned, and accustomed to obedience. The animals that humans domesticated taught humans that they, too, can be domesticated. Human childishness is much like that of animals.

This childishness, when found in real children, is tolerated as endearing mischief, but in those who never grew up or matured, it leads to cruelty. In nature, animals hunt only what they need. But humans want more than they need and also covet what belongs to others. This drive is the deep, primal envy, the deficiency instilled in humans by the Devil/Satan. The Satan and his lineage deceived Adam in the name of being completed, perfected, immortalized, that is, to become like gods, but with the injection it made, it actually diminished him, gave him a sense of incompleteness, and gave him the ambition to constantly complete it.

Humanity has often been the victim of these childish, immature, and immature oppressors, tyrants, and thieves who act with the instinct of completing these deficiencies caused by the Satan and his lineage by dominating others and usurping their rights, and who do this by violence or deception, that is, by force without effort.

The behavior of ruling over others, stealing from others, or judging others is the behavior of incomplete humans. The relationships of those who do not see themselves as incomplete are built only on sharing and solidarity (Salat and Zakat). And piety (taqwa), or avoiding evil, is not for others or for God, but a natural, intrinsic choice to prefer good for its own sake, as part of simply being Adam. In modern philosophy, the moral principle known as Kantian ethics is actually the hallmark of the Abrahamic tradition. Morality is already the act of choosing good and avoiding evil through free will and a sense of responsibility. Moralism, on the other hand, means exploiting morality and using it to show off to others or to dominate others without internalizing moral rules and values. This is the trade of mercy. True morality, on the other hand, is ashamed of doing good for God or for someone else. Because this is a shameful thing. ‘Do not do good for the sake of God, do good because it is good, God is pleased of this kind of good.’ Shame is the first Adamifying emotion of a human being. Shame, bashfulness, decency, modesty, and pudicity are the ability to become Adam. It is the origin of responsibility. It is the source of sound reason and free will. Only those who feel shame do not harm others, know their own limits, and respect the rights of their fellow human beings, other living beings, and nature. That is virtue. ‘The wise learn to carry their own burdens gracefully, shielding others from the emotional violence of their own pain.’

Schopenhauer says, ‘a humanbeing can behave as they wish, but they cannot wish as they wish.’ This is the summary of knowing one’s limits, another principle of morality.

The cemeteries of the whole world are filled with the garbage of impertinent, shameless,  domineering, uncomprehending, willpowerless and greedy ignorant slaves, and wizened-children who could not grow up, and their equally ignorant, mindless and willpowerless but arrogant and insolent masters, that is, humanoids who are the same with them. These human garbage dumps, who have not yet completed their spiritual evolution, are like unburied vampires or spooks. As Lacan says, “Anything not buried properly will haunt.” In this graveyard, time and death walk together.

The very few human (Adam) who truly have existence and live real life, in this cemetery of the world, struggle to breathe the spirit of Adam into these dead, to resurrect them again, to protect them from becoming victims of childish tyrants, to awaken them from the spell of false paradises full of lust, fame, domination and ostentation. This effort is not for the sake of obtaining a result, but to complete their own existence, that is, to complete the process of becoming Adam. They continue this act of worship without ever giving up, with patience, fortitude, and faith.

Raising a child in a graveyard is more genuine, more humane, than pretending to live in the graveyard of one’s own dead soul. At least with a child, a person can grow, mature, ripen, and become Adam. Of course, if they have the ability to empathize and the conscience that will also condemn their own kins. Likewise, those who judge Jews with a sense of virtue but do not look at themselves, who do not see the oppression and injustice of their own kin, co-religionists, or sect members, have no share in becoming Adam. Morality and truth are objective and do not accept favoritism.

Raising a child in a graveyard is hard, but becoming Adam and breathing the spirit of Adam into the dead is a much harder task. Life is like trying to pull the shadows of false people into the light of a real sun in a world that itself is shadow…