The Philosophy of Philistines
Tanya Schryer & Ezat Mossallanejad
In his masterpiece “The Bridge over the Drina”, the Yugoslav novelist Ivo Andric, speaks of a Turkish foreman who orders death sentence by means of horrible techniques of torture against a Bosnian worker due to his alleged rebellious attempts:
“Everything must be made ready so that at noon that same day he should be impaled alive on the outermost part of the construction work at its highest point, so that the whole town and all the worker should be able to see him from the banks of the river…so that midday all the people might see what happened to those who hindered the building of the bridge, and that the whole male population, both Turks and rayah, from children to old men, must gather on one or other of the bands to witness it” (Andric, p.46.)
His order was carried out by a professional torturer, named Merdžan, who crucified the poor victim and prolonged his torture despite his constant pleas to accelerate his death. Merdžan takes pride in his apathy to the victim and in obeying the order of the powerful foreman. It took three days for the worker to die.
It is reputed that the Persian king Abbas I used to keep five hundred professional executioners in his royal court including two man eaters who were assigned to eat prisoners of war alive. The king’s head of the executioners was a person named Ahmad Agha who was once sent to the Northern Province of Gilan to suppress a popular revolt. He went there with iron fists and stayed for one year and massacred thousands of poor and mostly innocent people indiscriminately.
It is unfortunate that in the second decade of the 21st century there is no shortage of human butchers like the king, the foreman, Merdžan, Ahmad Agha, and the man eaters. It is surprising to a decent human person how one can be reduced to a beast that is absolutely apathetic to the horrible suffering of fellow human beings even if they are enemies. It is our contention that the perpetration of atrocities as such, among others, needs a certain level of philistinism.
Nowadays we read quite a few reports about torture, genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity across the globe. In many cases, these crimes are perpetrated by collective actions of military people or ethnic groups. There are horrible cases of public executions or stoning that are watched by thousands of ordinary people. The feelings of apathy in the aforementioned examples are impossible without the existence of philistinism. It can manifest itself in various forms such as solipsism, pedantism, shallowness, narrow-mindedness, and vulgarism.
Philistinism is defined as apathy or hostility towards cultural values including altruism, aesthetics, love, and compassion. Philistines are devoid of delicate feeling with no appreciation of the nobler aspirations and sentiments of humanity. Hubbard, author of Philistine: A Periodical Process, interprets the idea of philistinism as: “[…] a little of the wild beast in a man, a something that is fascinated by suffering, and that delights in inflicting pain […]” (Hubbard & Taber, p.78). The above definition is true about torturers who normally go through regular training and systemic indoctrination on the ideology of torture: chauvinism, social Darwinism, absolute loyalty, sacredness of performing duty, significance of their jobs, etc. There is a level of blatant ignorance a torturer experiences when inflicting such a level of pain onto another human being. They often justify their crimes by mentioning that they had no choice but to obey the orders and perform their duties: “and if I didn’t do that someone else would have done it.”
All philistines suffer from solipsism. They don’t see anybody in the world except themselves. They see themselves through a magnifying mirror and others through a microscope. Philistines take their illusory magnified pictures are real. They become giants to themselves and approach others as dwarfs. They all suffer from what is referred to in psychology as megalomania. To maintain this position they need power – real or delusional. This is a dangerous situation that leads to tyranny and torture.
Ignorant and omnipotent persons who set themselves above everything and everybody are capable of committing multiple crimes including torture to “others” whom they consider their worthless enemies. Hitler considered himself Fuhrer (leader) and who was above all with a “mission” to exterminate Jews, gypsies, communists, and homosexuals. The Hutu genociders in Rwanda referred to their Tutsi victims as Inyenzi (a Kinyarwanda word meaning ‘cockroach’). In August 1979, the Iranian philistine, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared himself the commander in chief of Iranian Armed Forces and ordered the Iranian Army and parliamentary forces to attack Kurdistan. He called his opponents “corrupts on Earth and belligerents to God”. Following his religious verdict thousands of philistines marched in different cities with the following chant, “my beloved Khomeini allowed me to shed blood”. The invasion of Kurdistan by Khomeini’s army and parliamentary led to the massacre of Kurdish people and the perpetration of multiple war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Philistines like Hitler or Khomeini are intoxicated by power. There is no flexibility and tolerance in their outlook and practice. Opponents should be suppressed and not be allowed to live. Nothing is more enjoyable for them to see their potential or actual enemies weak and subordinated. They love to be flattered but pretend that they are humble. This closeness is a green signal to torture and tyranny. According to the Iranian writer and ex-political prisoner Ms. Monireh Baradaran:
“It is simplistic to think that torturers are a bunch of sadists. There might be quite a few sadistic people among them, but experience has shown that quite ordinary people could become the cruelest torturers. Anybody is capable of torturing others if he stops seeing them in their human caliber. What provides a torturer with capability of committing the crime of torture is his unquestionable power as well as his closed ideological world outlook.” (Baradaran, p. 31-32)
Philistines’ megalomania does not prevent them from following a culture of servitude. It is astounding that philistinism can combine two opposites: domination and subordination. Philistines are small with the big and big with the smalls. While they consider themselves king of cats, they cannot decide about anything without a command from the above. Their narrow-mindedness and vulgarism lead them to love a culture of subordination and indoctrination that can include them as both giver and receiver. A tyrannical system that warrants torture propagates philistinism as one of its techniques of survival. Torturers are recruited from among philistines in the rank and files – especially those with a strong tendency for subordination. They take them through regular training and systemic indoctrination on Darwinism, absolute loyalty, sacredness of performing duty, significance of their jobs etc. The closeness of a tyrannical system makes these philistines perpetual captives of their own philistinism with no opening to the world of beauty, wisdom, humanism, love, and compassion. They are brainwashed to consecrate their subordination and justify their crimes in the names of obeying the orders’. They are taught to bestow hierarchy as the highest merit. They develop an attitude that is well described by Erich Fromm as a type of psychological necrophilia. It is a “character rooted passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive” (Aggrawal, p. 30). A necrophilic philistine reduces all human persons to commodities that they can shape and own.
Another characteristic of philistinism is a strict allegiance to the practice of utilitarianism. Philistines are so involved in their petty practical businesses that they do not bother themselves to think, read, or listen unless these serve their immediate needs. They love abstracts figure and famous quotations that they can use in order to push for their narrow-minded practical purposes. They have no time and interest to analyze their statistics or verify the accuracy of the statement with other people’s experience. These pedants get intoxicated by their little knowledge and pretend to know about everything. They have no hesitation to resort to plagiarism and demonstrate discoveries of great thinkers as their own. The philosophy of philistines, therefore, is the caricature of other people’s thoughts. Philistines are always motivated by their blind faith rather than knowledge. They develop a passion for their actions and never go with critical reason. Their passion leads them to make a system that should stay eternally.
Faith without reason and passionate without wisdom may give a carte blanch to torture and tyranny. Going with their sheer sentiments, philistines commit all sorts of crimes in the name of good against evils. According to the celebrated philosopher, Blaise Pascal, “men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction” (Gilbert, p. 34).
Philistines are not consistent in their thoughts and actions. They go with the current and are always overwhelmed with petty problems of daily life. They are highly opportunistic with a tendency to change their loyalty overnight. Depending on the situation they may change from secularism to religious fundamentalism. It is, therefore, not surprising to hear about torturers who serve opponent regimes or communist politicians in the former Soviet Union who became staunch supporters of religion in post-Soviet era in order to maintain their power.
Philistines normally lead a double-standard life. While they take good care of their own skin and that of their close family members, they are apathetic to the suffering of others. They are caring people at home and a human butcher in torture chambers or war zones. What will follow is taken from Edmundo Galeano’s masterpiece “The Book of Embraces”:
“…he and he are not the same person…. after all, he is an official who goes to work on time and does his job. When the exhausting day’s work is done, the torturer washes his hands. Ahmadou Gherab, who fought for the independence of Algeria, told me this. Ahmadou was tortured by a French official for several months. Every day, promptly at 6:00 P.M., the torturer would wipe the sweat from his brow, unplug the electric cattle prod and put away the other tools of the trade. Then he would sit beside the tortured man and speak to him of his family problems and of the promotion that didn’t come and of how expensive life is. The torturer would speak of his insufferable wife and their newborn child who had not permitted him a wink of sleep all night; he railed against Orán, that shitty city, and against the son of a bitch of a colonel who …Ahmadou, bathed in blood, trembling with pain, burning with fever would say nothing.” (Galeano, p. 106-107)
To sum up philistinism is one of the worst evils that can inflict upon an individual, community, or an entire society. Solipsism, vulgarism, narrow-mindedness, and apathy to culture, love, and compassion can lead to hate, to torture, and to tyranny. The prevalence of collective philistinism has led our humanity, on more than one occasion, into a state of fascism. From the regime of Benito Mussolini to the actions of Hitler during WWII to the current events within the autocratic Middle East and Guantanamo Bay, we can easily observe the upper hands of philistinism. The tyranny and philistinism come hand in hand; one cannot exist without the other. When philistines rule then torture and similar heinous crimes will surely ensue. The synergy of these two evils produces a vicious circle that is hard to escape. This never ending circle can only be broken with the use of public awareness towards philosophical enlightenment, humanism, and cultural progress. These have the potential to promulgate the feeling of empathy, love, compassion, and humanity. There is an urgent need to fight against philistinism in today’s alienated world that suffers from all sorts of fanaticisms and obscurantism.
Work Cited
Andric, I. (1997). The Bridge on the Drina. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hubbard, E., & Taber, H. (2003). Philistine: A periodical of protest, December 1902 to May 1903. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.
Baradaran, M., & Shekanjeh, R. (2001). The Psychology of Torture. Baran Publication.
Aggrawal, A. (2011). Necrophilia: Forensic and medico-legal aspects. Boca Raton: Taylor & Francis Group.
Gilbert, R.S.(2005). Exploring: Building your own theology (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Unitarian Universalist Association.
Galeano, E. H. (1992). The Book of Embraces (translated by Cedric Belfrage with Mark Schafer). New York: W.W. Norton.