Debase yourself first before someone else gets the opportunity to humiliate you

[milmor_1]

Debase yourself first before someone else gets the opportunity to humiliate you

We backed off from confrontation; we played along with the diplomatic falsities

Published: 07 April 2007

If Britain has been humiliated by Iran over the hostage crisis and I am British, how come I don't feel humiliated? Am I humiliated? Look at my face. Does any part of my face look humiliated, though?

There is a reasonable chance you will be reading this on your holidays. Stuck in a traffic jam, perhaps, or blistering yourself on the English Riviera - English rivieras being more lethally sunny than anyone else's riviera these days. Many things will already have exasperated you, and many more will exasperate you before the holiday is over. The notices in your hotel pleading with you to go on using dirty towels for the sake of the environment, the time it takes to get room service (room service not speaking English), other people's children being allowed to wander round the dining room, demanding that you find them cute otherwise they will stare at you throughout your meal. But I doubt that the humiliation you are said to have suffered by virtue of being British will be chief among the reasons you are not having as good a time as you would like.

I'd be surprised if even Faye Turney, the sailor with the nous to thank the Iranian people for their magnanimity in capturing her when she made a gross and calculated incursion into their territorial waters, is feeling humiliated now she's home. A lot of kissing, a few stiff rums, many phone calls and much rolling of the eyes is my guess. The things you have to say to get back to your family in time for Easter!

Life's a game, we all know that. To get by we have, 100 times a day, to speak words we don't believe, words which are not true, words on which we fear we are going to choke. We compliment people on their healthy appearance when they look like death. We mutter endearments to those children in the dining room to get them to go and stare at someone else. And when President Ahmadinejad wonders how the British could send a woman on such a dangerous mission when she should be in the home bringing up children with a bag on her head we smile and don't remind him of the condition of women in his own country. Falsity oils the wheels of social intercourse, and international relations are just social intercourse writ large.

That's what diplomacy means: finding a form of words which shrouds the truth to the satisfaction of all parties.

So what's all this about humiliation? Ahmadinejad struts the world stage for a brief minute and makes a good joke about hoping we won't put our sailors on trial for their confession when we get them back. Politically, this is the equivalent of the roastings William Hague used to give Tony Blair at Prime Minister's Questions. He got the laughs but laughs aren't what ultimately count. Thank you, President Ahmadinejad, for returning the hostages to the British people in time for Easter - a religious festival you don't celebrate. Another good gag. But only in some parallel universe to this would anyone suppose that yours is a gesture of friendliness and peace that should make the West in its toothless bellicosity hang its head in shame.

Where did it come from, this humiliation business? Is it a newspaper coinage? Specifically sports-pages coinage? Last week Andy Murray was "humiliated" by Novak Djokovic in the semi-final of the Sony Ericsson in Florida, meaning he didn't put up much of a fight. So why not just say Murray didn't put up much of a fight? 6-0, 6-0, or whatever it was. Poor tennis, but why does shame have to enter it? He wasn't, as far as I know, found bent over Djokovic's knee in the locker room afterwards. He isn't Djokovic's *****. He just couldn't return his serves. As, by the by, neither can I.

At around about the time of Murray's humiliation Arsenal were being humiliated by Liverpool, who had been humiliated by Arsenal just a few weeks before. Same question. What's wrong with outplayed, routed, taken to the cleaners? You win, you lose. Sometimes you win big, sometimes you lose big. Whence this other dimension of ignominy?

Machismo is what it's all about. To lose convincingly is to have your manhood called into question. Collective manhood in the case of Arsenal, national manhood in the case of us and Iran. Though we got back those we wanted to get back we are humiliated because we gave our adversary an advantage in that parallel universe where the pretend becomes the real. We backed off from confrontation; we played along with the diplomatic falsities instead of sending in the army we don't have. Humiliate or be humiliated - it's one or the other.

You can see why Diogenes decided to set up home in a barrel and live like a dog. Lower yourself and you cannot be lowered. Live like a dog and no one will take satisfaction in calling you a dog. "Get out of my sunshine," he told Alexander the Great, who had conquered too much territory to be humiliated by the rebuff. Instead, Alexander saw the advantages of Diogenes's position. "If I wasn't myself I'd be Diogenes," he said. Which you could argue was having it both ways - a strategy we are always at pains to recommend in this column.

After Diogenes, Jesus Christ, who washed the feet of the poor. Isn't that Christianity's first lesson - that we become as God only when we become as the most humble of God's creatures? And in that way put ourselves beyond the reach of humiliation. Attach no value to pride, especially in its macho form, and you cannot be undone through pride. Hence the story of Jesus Christ being led through Jerusalem on an ass - behold the King of the Jews! Hence his coronation with a crown of thorns. Hence his suffering the fate of common criminals - and he the son of God! Instances, all of them, of exaltation seized from the experience of humiliation. You don't have to be Christian to get it. The only way to put yourself above humiliation is to put yourself below it.

But if humiliation is still your bag, there are, you know, places you can lay hands on it, or rather have it lay hands on you. Don't know the going rate. It will depend, presumably, on how thoroughly humiliated you want to be. The equivalent of 6-0, 6-0, or suffering a lecture from Ahmadinejad on mercy and the rights of women could work out expensive. The other way is to grow up, accept that potency must sometimes yield to subterfuge, and feed one's masculinity to the dogs.

Howard Jacobson: Debase yourself first before someone else gets the opportunity to humiliate you - Independent Online Edition > Howard Jacobson