Denominationalisms
In The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (1997), Regina M. Schwartz draws a deciphering line that connects the violence of cultural and systemic identity formation and what are secondary acts of religious violence. It is distinctive to think of identity formation as an act of violence. When ideology, disinterested love, and the forceful integration of instilling separateness into youth as they navigate self-discovery and ontological stamina all play into identity, certainly it is a form of violence. That this sown the seeds of future enacted violence against the very others they were taught to be apart from, separate from, othered in all respects, this manifestation of violence can be seen to be easy to reproduce, simple to manufacture at either a level of an individual child or as a collective group. Violence enacted as identity formation is a form of biolence.
Collectively this identity formation is tied together by the very insignias of authority that donate collective memory to the self. With this ease of disparity, it becomes clearer that religious freedom is a misnomer as that freedom of religion is not from religion in the auspices of cultural identity formation. Though not absolute, the derivative of limitations of freedoms does equate to a monopolized stance on differentials of choice, experience, expression, and fortitude – economic or otherwise. Those in less economically spurious regions will be less likely to obtain the fortitude of freedom within the navigations of choice of religion – perhaps, signifying the limitations of freedoms to counter violence being subject to the violence of identity distribution and disposition. Identity is limited by the same weight as religion itself. What is internal is shared as a community. What is communal is holistically grand in its interaction with a larger impaled economic entity of the state or denomination to sternly integrate the castration of change to prevent any counterinsurgency that might dissemble the progression of those in power becoming power. Power is law and as Walter Benjamin illustrates, law is violence. The interested parties condemn the individual to the illusion of disinterestedness.
Socio-ontological denominationalism, which are groups within groups, functionary projections of the mind’s executive functioning bringing order to the external world are soliloquies of fostered detention of identity. Between the state, the external public sphere of coercion, this lament carries into the private sphere latent threat centers. This can be manifest in structural constructs of stigma and discrimination or with even more immediate and dire consequences such as in interactions with the police. The mentally ill are 16 times more likely to be killed by the police and by some numbers account for up to half of all fatal police encounters (Treatment Advocacy Center).
The threat of an abstained identity has ramification all throughout society. However, with the insights of experience and age, it will largely be agreed that it can be a good thing and have positive effects on individuals and the community at large. Traditional feminist tokens of the reality of public and private sphere denote the public as male centered and aggressive and the private as female centered and nurturing. This is traditional, though that should be taken loosely, as even within the these staples there is a long – and current – tradition of imprinting the private sphere into the public to make an influence on nuclear religiosity and help attain structural change, laying the foundations for the centered credence of private feminist identity formation which, as has been demonstrated, enforces relief from violence in the public sphere. Women in leadership positions throughout all denominations of the tokens of society leads to peace, restoration, and a healing resolution for those who have been subject to violent identity formation.
To continue the theme of violence of identity formation and socio-ontological denominationalism or, groups within projecting groups, Amartya Sen makes a very finite distinction on choice that I would like to leverage towards our collective choice to overcome the limits of the regressive philosophy of the inevitability of violence. Amartya Sen, in Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, states,
The freedom to determine our loyalties and priorities between the different groups to all of which we may belong is a peculiarly important liberty which we have reason to recognize, value and defend. The existence of choice does not, of course, indicate that there are no constraints restricting choice. Indeed, choices are always made within the limits of what are seen feasible. The feasibilities in the case of identities will depend on individual characteristics and circumstances that determine the alternative possibilities open to us. (2006, 5)
One of such restraints is structural power entities maneuvering power to limit or disobey the merits of discourse. As Amartya Sen later puts forward, “democracy is not just about ballots and votes, but also about public deliberations and reasoning, what – to use an old phrase – is often called ‘government by discussion’” (2006, 53). Models of discourse and tightly gravitated discourse theory often articulate the limits of our canon of knowledge as we have been molded by built-in taught infrastructures of poetry and conquest.
The fact that Shakespeare is so widely taught not only demonstrates a limitation of the masses of imaginations to the portfolio of Shakespeare but is also a model from which we can detect an ongoing deliberation of the limitations to our discussions, decision making, and forged imaginations towards to ends of tempered negotiations of truce and conflict resolution. The arguments for these limitations are sound. The opening up of the literary canon towards multicultural, inclusionary texts not centered on the white male experience is more than a matter of boardroom diversity, but a fight for the existence of our imaginations that we rely upon to forge conclusions in the ontological struggle against authoritarian soft power.
The individual and collective identity molded through a canon selected repeatedly over generations by those few in power is violence. It is the violence of tenure, the violence of relapse to a sequestered hill on the edge of disparity. These previously generated groups within groups of grossly domesticated denominationalisms force back a spirit of openness that would grasp the future’s end; the discontinuation of violence: the solstice of an evening pane blowing against the whistle-blow of an open and fruitful mind. There is significant and evident merit in Leanna Simpon’s assertion that presence leads to revival. Presence is an act that counters normative weights that seek to subdue or act as tranquilizers of peaceful negotiation to one’s lifeforce. In her essay, “Under the Shadow of Empire: Indigenous Girls’ Presencing as Decolonizing Force,” (2016) Sadrina de Finney references Leanna Simpson’s piercing clarity of thought for countering what I refer to as denominationalisms through visibility and presence. de Finney quotes Simpson, stating, “Our processes – be they political, spiritual, education or healing – required a higher degree of presence than modern colonial existence.”
The violence-narratives of those maintaining power imitate disinterestedness as the fashioning of structural presence. However, Simpson’s “presence” counters judges of dismissal and grafters of the illusions of transparent time. The choices we delimitate are portended as arbitrary where instead they are full of voice, individuality, free expression, and lifetimes of experience that we have incorporated into our being.