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Anonymity is the road to nothingness
David Bryant
04/17/05 "The
Guardian" - - Forty-seven years after demobilisation I can still recite my eight-digit national service number. It's an indication of how intrusive and indelible are the depersonalising mechanisms used by institutions to control their members.
The kickback from this can be savage, as Kafka knew. In The Castle he sketches the plight of a Land Surveyor referred to as K. At every step he is harried by malevolent, unseen forces. Disorientated and distressed he becomes a nameless pawn tossed around in a cruel, autocratic world.
More fearful still is the plight of "the nameless ones" of The Argentine who disappeared when the military junta took over in 1976. Ariel Dorfman's words accompanying James Macmillan's musical tribute to the victims make the blood run cold. "What did you say? They found another one? Another one floating in the river? They took him out of the water; he's naked as the day he was born. He doesn't belong to anybody."
Depersonalisation is an insidious evil and it permeates society. Deprive people of their names and they become dispensable, third-rate citizens, fodder for a computer statistic. Stalin was a dab hand at this. He referred to his extermination of the land-owning Kulaks as "a necessary surgical operation".
Victims in the Iraq war are daily "dampened down" and categorised as collateral damage. Give them personality, shape, name and a reference point in society and in conscience you couldn't bomb them. Killing somebody's daughter, mother, girlfriend or baby cuts too near the bone.
And if you shrug your shoulders and say, "Not my problem," there is something else that is. Our society is swimming in isolating terminology, whereby grouping takes precedence over naming. We compartmentalise people into white, black, gay, straight, Muslim or Christian. We chuck our street beggars, teenage mothers, alcoholics and drug addicts into pigeon holes and let the dust settle on them. It's a convenient moral cop out, for who gives a fig for statistics and dusty folders?
An invidious and disintegrating factor lies behind all this. As we categorise and exclude individuals from society's heart, so it becomes progressively more polarised and bigoted. In this depersonalised climate gang warfare, football rioting, street muggings, shop lifting and domestic violence thrive like rank weeds. Even the Anglican church has been afflicted with the malaise. Its endless bickering over women priests, homosexual clergy and way-out liberal theologians has torn it apart. The real, living, loving, hurting, hoping people comprising it have been turned into nameless pawns in a depressing power struggle, an unholy game of dogmatic chess.
Is there a way out of the wreckage? Yes and it springs from the agonised question forced to the lips of those stripped of their personality. "What is my name?"
A name is life-giving. It is the summation of your psyche. It embodies all that you are. It gives you a sense of "is-ness". What's more it places you fairly and squarely in the quantum universe. Your name shouts out loud and strong that you are an invaluable and integral part of the sum of things. It roots you cosmologically and relates you to the society in which you move.
There is an urgent need to re-personalise our towns, villages and housing estates and that can only be done by standing fast against the tide of anonymity, facelessness and indifference that threatens to engulf the country. It needs a massive injection of respect, love, recognition, appreciation, sympathy and understanding into the world order. These are the jewels that can rejuvenate and renew it.
At this point we begin to see the world in a transforming light. The garage attendant isn't only a dispenser of fuel. He is treading the rocky road of recovery from alcoholism. The girl on the till isn't only a supermarket employee but a pregnant teenager fearful of the future. The street beggar has a sister, a mother.
It makes sense. For we're all in the same cosmological boat together. And none of us want to go down to the grave nameless.
David Bryant is a former Anglican priest
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