The Rhenish Missionary Society (is Re: GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[rj]

Michael Perez

> I don't know that at the time the Rhenish missionaries arrived that the
> only alternative for Hereros was death.

Actually, my point there was about Enzian, and I sort of had Weissmann
in mind as the missionary coming to him with Rilke in hand instead of
the Bible. Death, as a virtual certainty for the Herero, came as a
result of the Rhenish Missionary Society's groundwork I agree -- tribal
suicide, the German extermination, the refugees starving in the desert
(GR 316-317, 322-324). But though European and nominally a Christian
Weissmann has absolutely nothing to do with the Rhenish Missionary
Society. 

> Many indigenous cultures were doing
> just fine until the missionaries arrived.

Yes it's true. But once the missionaries have arrived with their ethos
of conversion and education, and then the imperial forces and colonisers
who follow, and then the economic and cultural imperialism -- well, that
indigenous culture has bee irrevocably altered by these things, both the
good and the bad, the concepts of sin and criminality as well as the
vitamin-E supplements to manage infant mortality rates. It's like that
empiric paradox: once you introduce an observer into the equation it
changes the nature of the experiment.

The thing with Pynchon in all of this is that he presents the *victim's*
point of view (or *benefactor's*, depending on which side of the fence
you sit), as well as that of the purportedly do-gooding humanitarian in
his or her autobiography (cf. Pointy at 144), their darker, more selfish
private thoughts (Pointy again, and Weissmann), and the revisionism
which follows the act (the sympathetic and all-too-uncritical
beatification by the ideological regime in which the legend of said
missionary will therein play a part, and then the "cranky ... jeremiad"
of some literary young gun iconoclast from the next, antagonistic,
regime, who, in part, will certainly have ulterior motives of his own in
demonising and defaming whatever was good and virtuous in the initial
act of charity. And so forth.)

We get Enzian's version, or the song and dance routine from Webley
Silvernail's lab rats, as well as the propaganda and the anti-propaganda
of the dominant culture/regime. 

Tom Hickey:
> Is it in Christopher Hitchen's book that he describes a dying patient being
> denied pain killers by Teresa who tells them that they're lucky because
> they're feeling the same pain Jesus felt on the cross and that the pain is
> really kisses from Jesus?

An eye-witness account? I think Teresa was pretty liberal with whatever
foods and medicines she had to hand, and I wonder at the veracity and
verifiability of this. But, I guess this is something like the point at
which we start asking questions about right and wrong, pleasure and
pain, good and evil.

The thing in Pynchon, and what is meant by moral relativism I think, is
that it's not only the issue of what the
missionary/colonialist/"cultural carpetbagger" was thinking at the time,
or what has been written about them since (isn't all writing about an
act a type of "revisionism"?), but what the supposed "victim" was
thinking and doing in the midst of it all (i.e. Enzian, or those who
accepted the charity even if it did mean sacrificing their culture and
kissing the Pope's jewell'd ring). It's a wee bit condescending to leave
the carpetbaggee out of the equation -- I mean they're not just laying
there in their leprous rags (well, they are, but they're making some
pretty major life choices as well. Or maybe they don't or can't, because
they're too weak. But comes a time when they should be strong enough
again to bite the hand that has fed? Or not? Is this what the
Schwarzkommando are doing in the Zone? Bureaucratic bickering over the
reason and rationale of their own private counterforce? Using the
master's own weapons and beneficience to destroy the Empire?)

I think that it is the act of making an "ultimate judgement" which is
the impossibility, and where the real carpetbagging is being done. Such
presumption sounds too much like The Final Solution for mine.

best