Zwarte Piet

ASINTERKLAAS-ZWARTE PIETs always around this time of year, some people are getting upset about the Dutch Saint Nicholas tradition of “Zwarte Piet” (Black Pete). Although it is pretty clear that the origins of this character have nothing to do with racism (some say it goes back to two black ravens who accompanied Wotan in Germanic mythology), and it is even more obvious that it also has nothing to do with racism today, it seems that some people nevertheless take offense at it, thereby playing into the hands of the Dutch political far right and their hate-filled discourse of an immigrant threat to Dutch culture.

Not, I think, very smart, particularly as Black Pete lost his role of tormentor of bad children a while ago, at least in “official” traditions. This hardly seems like the worst social ill one could imagine to protest against, and its elimination would do nothing to promote non-racist attitudes on the part of those stupid enough to have such attitudes in the first place. I venture to suggest that the only reason the Zwarte Piet tradition attracts criticism is because it is an easy but irrelevant target for a complex problem. In other words, this is the availability heuristic at work. During the decades it might take to shame the tradition into submission, actual important issues around say education, policing and discrimination will receive less attention than they could and should. It is easier to blame Zwarte Piet. In fact, the word in everyday Dutch has become a byword for a symbolic figure made to carry the weight of society’s ills: a scapegoat.

The myth does bear deconstruction, however. Although it is said that the contemporary figure no longer has this association, older Zwarte Piet songs make clear that his role, at a certain moment in history in any case, was to punish children who misbehaved and therefore did not merit the rewards that Saint Nicholas was set to bring. It seems that this role separated out from an earlier ambiguity in the person of St Nicholas himself, who, as a saint, was felt to be too good to inflict punishment, a role that therefore needed to be delegated to another character, even if one whose scope of operations was closely linked to that of St Nicholas himself and bore no signs of autonomy. That such a menacing figure is portrayed as being black might constitute or at least contribute to racial stereotyping, but I venture to suggest this is not really the point. The point is that he exists at all. In other words, that we fail to criticize the way in which we fabricate myths in order to control the behavior of children, and then don’t even take responsibility for it by delegating the dirty jobs to someone else.

Zwarte Piet is just one incarnation of this universal bogeyman who happens, unlike the German “Schwarzer Mann“, to be literally, and entirely incidentally, black. His scarcely critized social purpose is to allow adults to manipulate children through the threat of unspoken evil consequences vectored by the agency of omnipotent spirits which inexplicably have not, however, vented their disapproval on the adults in questions rather than their kids.

The Bogeyman has a lot in common with the devil or the demiurge, figures who crystallized out of the ambiguity of traditional representations of God as both loving and savage. He also lives on in adult imaginations, infusing the sinister powers of any public institution that is there to enforce supposedly moral order, and frequently also other more nebulous spirits.

That can lead to real psychic damage, and it’s a game we should stop playing, whatever the color of the skin of the personality we delegate it to. If a compliance-figure has any role, he or she should take moral responsibility for all of his or her decisions, favorable and unfavorable. Better yet, we should not delegate the enforcement of necessary social norms to any fantasy personality at all, whose actions are beyond reasoning and debate. I am as guilty of it as anyone, but God and Father Christmas have crystallized out of the same dissociation that subsequently produced the devil and Zwarte Piet as mere second-order emanations of our inability to reconcile what we think we need to do with how we want to feel about it and how we want our children to view us. We would do better simply to  reunite moral authority and enforcement in the same flesh and blood person, quite able to reconcile these diverse roles, ourselves.

Virtue in education, ou comment faire de bons Belges…

I was at a party organized at my daughter´s school today, and I had another epiphany.

When we chose the school (I’m happy to say she’ll change next year – whether that will be an improvement is of course not preordained), we noticed that there was a very big emphasis on codes of behavior. It was kind of a bit too much, but nothing objectionable that one could put one’s finger on. On the contrary, who could disagree that it was a good thing to learn to listen to others, to take their feelings into account, to be on time in the classroom, and many other laudable aims and intentions?

Plenty of parents hope that school will instil in their youngsters a sense of discipline and standard of behavior which they, as parents, feel they have failed to do at home. This takes on occasion extreme forms in response to desperate parenting failures. We rather hope that school is a place where our children would have fun and learn self-expression; in the right environment, we would expect the rest to follow without any need for compulsion. But of course we also know that not everyone brings up their children like we do, giving the teacher a more difficult job, and we wouldn’t want our daughter to be terrorized by children that are out of control, so I guess we thought we could live with the school’s approach.

As expatriates, and given that she would only spend one year in the school, we haven’t been very closely involved in the life of the school. The only thing that I have found constantly disturbing in this school is the lack of tenderness and joy on the part of the teaching staff. They don’t smile much, and treat children brusquely to say the least. But otherwise – a normal school. Nothing really to complain about.

The event was themed around tolerance of diversity, with plenty of other laudable themes thrown in for good measure – like environmental stewardship and so on. Pretty much as I would imagine American high schools – full of public displays of allegiance to the school’s moral code. Except we’re talking here kindergarten and primary.

I have lived in Brussels for 20 years, so I pretty much know the place. It has been my experience that many members of the educated population present a sycophantic public persona, which is apparently polite and very conflict-averse, but behind which the rage is barely masked – utterly unprovoked verbal aggression is not difficult to solicit from the most innocent of comments or questions. So one might wonder whether this school is typical or counter-cultural.

A casual glance at the faces of the parents present at today’s event, at their body language, or casually eavesdropping on their conversations convinces me that as far as the parent population is concerned, it is typical. And of course I cannot fast-forward 20 years, but both self-selection and the conservatism of social institutions make it highly likely that the children as adults will not be so very different from their parents.

So is the moral education not working?

Of course it is not working. Moral education does not work. We have been amply warned by Nietzsche of the social role and the effects of Morality, and we should have listened better. What is Good flows directly from Lebendigkeit, vitality. The extinction of resistance to the behavioral code you wish to impose can only beget outcomes that are, at the very best, socially convenient; the anger locked inside expresses itself exactly as I have already alluded to.

The insidiousness of this is that it is so hard to argue with and stand up against. Almost no-one will understand you. Don’t we want our children to grow up to be good citizens? To prosper through their connections to their peers?

And so the groupthink marches on, and the Gleichschaltung is assured of success.

There is one word for this: manipulation, and it is a power game whose true nature yields rapidly to analysis. Exactly as many manipulative mothers, my own included, constantly remind(ed) their children of how much their behavior disappoints them, hurts them, how “good boys and girls” don’t do things like that.

Well fuck you. Children owe no duty to their parents in a world where parents have no regard for their children. Children are easy to exploit and emotionally manipulate, but Macht macht kein Recht, power is not morality.

Just before going to that party, I was reading another article from the school promoting the doctrine of non-violence, I believe in the Marshall Rosenberg tradition. I of course agree that when our spontaneous reaction to something is a violent one, we should try to come to an understanding of why that is and maintain our emotional states in consciousness – which is not quite the same as rejecting violence, but it comes close enough in practice. Everything that is said in that article sounds right – about understanding the different perspective of the other, how one’s own psychic wounds predispose one to certain emotional reactions and so on. The problem is that this discourse will inevitably be instrumentalized, implemented in such a way as to impose anyway the will of the more powerful individual by manipulation.

The words don’t matter; only the motivation and consciousness matter, and these will not be changed by words. The realization of this was what underpinned the great post-colonial emancipation movement; and when violence is provoked, it is also legitimate and understandable, even if it is not always wise or enlightened. Even if the original provocation was very well disguised in seemingly philanthropic dress (behind closed doors, be assured the violence is as real). Then, as Sartre put it in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre, “this irrepressible violence [in response to colonial exploitation] is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself”.

These days I am shaken by rediscovered violence from my childhood. I love it, I feel alive, each time I abreact it (of course I don’t hurt anyone; or myself) I come into a new space of greater consciousness and joie de vivre. As for aggression, it is positively sacred in my eyes.

My children don’t need to be brainwashed into subscribing to pretty ideologies and to the relationships of power which vehicle them and are profoundly opposed to their own sense of self.