We are not in control (and never were)
There is a scene in Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel The Road where the boy and father (kept nameless in the book) encounter a haggard, disheveled nomad named Ely. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, the boy and father are reluctant to approach Ely but eventually do after surveilling him for days, after which they sit and find themselves talking to him for an evening. For his part of the conversation, Ely rambles on about the desolate, depraved nature of the world, of existence, and the utter despair inherent in the world that they all share. In reflecting on what has occurred, Ely observes, “People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.”
One might accuse Ely of short sightedness. Surely, no one would object to planning for what tomorrow might bring. But that does not seem to me to be Ely’s point. Not at that juncture, and certainly not in the context he inhabits anyways. What Ely was referring to is something more fundamental in all of us, a condition which, in calm and stable settings, we are prone to assuming, namely, our propensity to forget the weakness of our being, our diminutive place in all of this, and our utter lack of control over that which we face daily. In truth, we don’t so much forget these things as we ignore them. The thought of our mortality inspires anxiety, not calm. And so we abandon the thought, burying it ever more deeply into crevices that go unexplored for years on end. We turn moments of existential reflection and morbid meditation on their head. Our funerals become celebrations suffused with light hearted comedy (‘he/she would want us to laugh’). When we cry, we emit tears only of joy. The people around us — in our media, donning the images we pass by and see, and those who occupy our social spaces — remind us of youth and beauty. Our elderly are now sequestered in retirement homes at considerable distance from others. Those impaired with disabilities find residence in institutions and are likewise kept out of public view. It is no wonder that the “solution” to Down syndrome in a growing number of countries is the wide scale euthanizing of fetuses testing positive for it in prenatal testing. There is no infringing on the comforts of our lives, and the place of social satisfaction, chiefly (though not exclusively) through entertainment, has left us collectively submerged in a world of decadence.
Such a setting guarantees that our daily discussions concern that external to our being. Consequently, the implicit message takes on explicit definition: the problems — in our communities, families, nations, and the world writ large — are always extrinsic to us, and our role, if we are to have any, is to work to resolve the problems out there. That there are problems intrinsic to us, our states, the corroded spirits and hearts that revel in gossip and abrasively ‘taking down’ some anonymous antagonist online, is never given a second thought. And so our lives grow in superficiality. We reward theatrics and performative output masquerading as righteous crusading, all while growing more distant from those around us. Social media and technologies are balms for a public increasingly incapable of living in the real world and for whom the goal is to maintain the pretense that we are, above all else, in control of it all.
But even collective amnesia, comfortable as it may be, has its limits. Like a pale of water thrust on our face, disease has a way of awakening us from our slumber. Rapidly spreading infection and rising mortality engenders feelings of vulnerability and weakness. And the fear that comes from that is not merely in discovering our infirmities, but in coming to terms with them as ineradicable parts of our being and fundamental to the human condition. This fear is one that can be exceedingly difficult to reconcile. It can be (and often is) palliated with medicines, calmed temporarily by the lies of scientism, materialism, and hedonism, and disregarded in moments of plenitude and material comfort. But when put to test, the truly existential questions of our beings require us to look for answers in the realm of the metaphysical.
Our initial reaction to the spread of COVID-19 is symptomatic of our states. We rush to geopolitical analyses, with the hackneyed and lazy calcifying of left and right wing camps. We seek out the promise of science to deliver us. We jockey and posture, and adjust as much as we see reasonable, but in our minds remind ourselves that this will all blow over soon. But as days pass, the uncertainties grow. COVID-19 testing to date has been limited and questionable in its reliability. We search for panaceas while fast tracking antivirals that might, possibly have a demonstrably positive effect in containing or mitigating the effects of the illness. Yet we still don’t fully understand how it spreads, or why it imperils some and cycles through entirely asymptomatic in others. Medical professionals encourage calm and prudence, but in these reassurances they betray their own uncertainties and concerns. Donald Trump, ever the court jester, has managed to betray moments of genuine concern, recently warning of a “painful two weeks.” Official predictions are now anticipating hundreds of thousands of deaths in the coming days, though the upper and lower limits being predicted sit at radical variance. I suppose we will find out soon enough.
So we are left to wait. How long will this last for? No one knows for sure. There are talks of cancelling the NFL season, while university faculty and staff have begun planning for a semester of studies taught entirely virtually.
But to lie in wait for a return to normalcy would be a recapitulation of the nafs-centered life. Instead, the task of the moment must be to understand our moral duties and, accordingly, foreground the essentially metaphysical questions at the heart of our distempers. For too long, Muslims in the West have labored under the illusion that our problems were limited to the sociological and political. That we just needed to integrate a little more or a little less, or perhaps could move to the left or the right on this or that issue, or that maybe we needed to acquire more power and visibility (a powerful lobby perhaps). But these pursuits, important as they can be, have become all-consuming for far too many. These are the means of crafting civic community, not faith.
The life of faith — of Islam — begins with a rather simple, yet deeply profound conviction: that we are slaves of God and fulfill our purpose in life by submitting to Him. This submission comes to then animate our very existence, reminding us again and again that this life is ephemeral, and that the only guarantee in life is that it will at some point come to an end. And God has power over everything. God is self-sufficient, and you are needy. The Prophet’s (ﷺ) supplication in Ta’if began with an admission of his weakness. In other instances, the Prophet (ﷺ) asked God to never leave him to his own devices, even for the blink of an eye. Indeed, you will certainly die, and indeed, they will too.
Our complete and total dependence upon God for our daily nourishment, for our faculties, for the life that we have been granted temporarily, and with attendant moral duties, is our principal confession from which the rest of our life takes shape — that we are but slaves in this world to God, in a cosmic state of debt that we live every day in remembrance of. We seek through our prayer, remembrance, and observance of His commands some modicum of mercy for our many failures and shortcomings, and hope with that mercy to discover a life of salvation in the (real) life to come.
This promise, the life of Islam, is God’s promise. Reminding ourselves of this, it seems to me at least, is a matter of some urgency. There is no calm in delusions of grandeur, only despair and disappointment. Weathering the storms of our world, in good times and bad, comes from the admission that there is no power or strength except with Him, ‘azza wa jal — la hawl wa la quwwata illa b’ilLah. We are not in control of it all, and never were.
The redoubtable David Bentley Hart offers a thought provoking case for socialism over at Commonweal Magazine. He writes:
Is this freedom? From what, exactly? Certainly not from the state. The heavy hand of centralized government is no lighter — its proprietary power over its citizens is no smaller — here than anywhere else in the developed world. Quite the reverse. Certainly, where taxes are concerned, no government in the developed world is any more rapacious and no legal authority any more draconian. Here, moreover, no less than anywhere else, the state governs trade, makes war, passes laws, delivers mail, does all the most basic things the modern state does; but here also, to a greater degree than in any other advanced economy, the government raises its revenues for the express purpose of transferring as much wealth as possible from the working and middle classes to corporations and plutocrats.
With Ramadan around the corner, I’ll be going on my annual hiatus from writing and social media activity. May Allah grant us health to witness the month and make it a month in which we attain closeness to Him, ‘azza wa jal.
Allah Knows Best.
