This eloquent essay of M. Ali Lakhani in Sacred Web 52 is a deeply needed physic for our times, given its range and timeless perspicacity.
“Take physic, pomp“ Lear enjoins himself upon entering the hovel to which Kent has led him amid the storm. “Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel...” [Lear III.4: 33-4]. We remember that “physic” meant medicine, the art of healing, and in Shakespeare’s age implies a purge. Lear offers himself to be purged of pride, vainglory and moral blindness, for the threshold of the squalid hovel is the verge of an epiphany: “Wilt break my heart?” he hesitates before entering [III.4: 4].
Indeed it will be: broken open, as our hearts must be.
At the threshold, Lear has considered the “Poor naked wretches” of his kingdom, without shelter, famished for lack of food, “wherso’er you are... I have ta’en / Too little care of this.” [III.4: 28; 32-3].
Lakhani offers us the traditional contrast of the Inner Man vs. Outer Man — bitterly apt when the latter has become the cultural norm and prevailing temper (despite sentimental rhetorical vestiges to the contrary):
“the Outer Man cares only for himself and for the rewards he can grasp and compel from others whom he perceives merely as objects for his use. From a worldly perspective of self-interest, and in a corrupt world where insincerity and deceit are the means of self-advancement, virtue is perceived to be a form of folly.” (emphasis mine)
This faithfully echoes Erasmus’ Moriae Encomium (In Praise of Folly) whose themes Shakespeare of course knew well. Erasmus wrote the work at Sir Thomas More’s house in Bucklersbury; the genitive moriae renders his praise both “of More” and “of folly [moria]”. And Sir Thomas would choose the folly of opposing expanding royal power instead of indulging in his own security, prestige and luxury, as Henry VIII embarked on seizing monastery lands and proclaimed himself “head of the Church” in England.
In our own benighted age (and not only in the ‘Benighted States’) we find both the perversion and inversion of that great theme of folly, from its origin in St. Paul: “...let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God” (1 Cor. 3:18-19).[[1]] This is the folly of Cordelia (mirror image of the l’œil du cœur?), “explicitly associated with truth”, as Lakhani reminds us.
Instead, our dominant culture has opted to emulate Lear’s daughter Goneril, for whom “anyone who succumbs to pangs of conscience is simply ‘a moral fool’.” This is the cynicism of Machiavelli: the triumph of political technique over the pursuit of the common good, tat tragedy which modern politicians prefer to call “realistic” (viz., blind to the truly Real or Al-Haqq, a Divine Quality which denotes the True, the Right and the Just) and “pragmatic” (viz., rendering ethical Principles irrelevant, save as beguiling masks or camouflage).
In forty years as a professor, I have witnessed “Higher Education” eviscerating itself, abandoning the entire Renaissance ideal of nurturing the mind and character—still envisioned as the Platonic Intellect and Will—with thinkers like Coluccio Salutati [1331-1406] emphasising the essential role of literature, history and ethics in developing intellectual skills, attitudes and values that enable students to fulfill their humanity, and become part of a flourishing human community.[[2]] This ideal has been widely supplanted in favour of Lower Education: sheer “vocational” training aimed at securing a successful “job” bereft of a true calling (vocatio as summoning, invoking, inviting), which fosters only the “Outer Man”, even as the noble role of citizen has been replaced with consumer, as communion is effaced through commodification.
Lakhani urges us to dwell on the arc of King Lear, with his “final howling rebuke to the heartless ‘men of stones’ (Lear V.3.314) who have allowed Cordelia/the Fool to be murdered is a rebuke to us all, to anyone who will betray their own consciences and their own humanity...” for the sake of power, prestige... or comfort.
“Truth entails Virtue”, the author reminds us; and as Aristotle insists, Virtue is not a formula or calculation, but entails a constellation of six elements: doing the right thing, in relation to the right person, at the right time, to the right degree, in the right manner, and for the right purpose [Nich. Eth. II.9]. Virtue demands both intellectual awareness, or God-consciousness, and the habitual exercise of conscience.
“It is a matter of conscience that we should protest wrongdoing and evil in the world by ‘men of stones’” Lakhani urges, whilst “politicians wielding tools of propaganda distort truth to rationalize injustice”, and in an age where we are seduced into cramped semblances, even delusions, of Truth by “tribalism, pharisaical dogmatism, political ideology or self-serving pacts of greed...”
Indeed, “truth is under assault”. Thus Marc Owen Jones employs the apt term “alethocide”: the systematic killing of truth conceived as aletheia: Plato’s “unforgetting”, disclosure, the transcendence of that fateful lure of ghaflah that invites us to heedless oblivion.
“We must not permit ourselves to become ‘men of stones’,” Lakhani warns. We must be willing, each in our own sphere and to whatever degree we can, to pay “the price of humanity”, as Francesca Albanese put it. She, for her adherence to Truth and Virtue, has endured not only calumny[[3]] but death threats to herself and family. Just this last week, her sixth UN report has exposed the vast international State and Corporate complicity that profits obscenely and with impunity from the genocide and the systemic violation of International Law. In penetrating to the stony heart of normalised corruption, it should not surprise us that in the wake of her UN Human Rights Council presentation calling for Justice, Accountability, and an end to oligarchical malfeasance, she has been officially sanctioned by the U.S. government, which accuses her of “political and economic warfare.”[[4]] Integrity always exacts a price.
Like Moses during the Exodus, each of us must unseal the stone, the Outer Man or ego, that rock in the desert of our hearts, from which the water of compassion and mercy may flow and quench humanity’s thirst for justice.
“I just want to be happy,” I have been told by several nice people who find reality too “negative; it makes me sad”, they say, to even hear of Palestinian children bombed in tents or on a playground – let alone witness the film of a boy of ten or eleven tenderly gathering into a plastic shopping bag the strips of gore that were once his parents. For many, our delicate feelings matter far more than the utter loss of well-being, than the murder of entire families, than the devastation of dwellings, universities, cultural establishments, and mosques; more than the ecocide of countless dunams of a culture targeted for erasure.
But like Lear, we must cross the threshold into the hovel of humanity’s pain. Our answer to the question, “Wilt break my heart?” must be ‘yes’ – albeit in fear and trembling, yet with sumūd – lest we become those men of stone.
Like Moses during the Exodus, each of us must unseal the stone, the Outer Man or ego, that rock in the desert of our hearts, from which the water of compassion and mercy may flow to quench humanity’s thirst for justice. That sublime symbol occurs both in the Quran (2:60; 7:160) and in the Tanakh: God tells Moses, “...thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink. And Moses did so...” (Exodus 17:6). “Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock... Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their beasts also.” (Numbers 20:8,11).
The Psalms, too, invoke the waters of mercy that await the open heart. “He opened the rock, and waters flowed: rivers ran down in the dry land... as out of the great deep... made streams run down as rivers... The presence of the God of Jacob turned the rock into pools of water, and the stony hill into fountains of waters.” (105: 41; 78:15-16; 114:7-8)
Lakhani’s adjurations join those of the Jewish Prophets (Nevi’im): Amos warns that God does not want burnt offerings or songs in the temple; rather, “Let justice flow down like waters” (Amos 5:24). Jeremiah names those waters: “Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner” (Jer. 22:3); and Micah enjoins us: “act justly... love mercy... walk humbly with your God.” (Mic. 6:8)
Such voices are not consigned to history: we are beholden to hear and honour the many current Jewish voices, who dare to echo the Prophets, even though many governments and mass media ignore and suppress them:
Shoah survivors and their descendants, such as Stephen Kapos, Marione Ingram, Haim Bresheeth, who have been arrested or harassed for demanding peace;
Rabbis Yaakov Shapiro, Brant Rosen and Alissa Weiss (Orthodox, Reformed & Reconstructionist, respectively), who have affirmed that Zionism is an idolatrous perversion of Judaism;
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an American Jew who risked his life, spending months in Gaza tending to wounded and dying Palestinians, amid hospitals bombed that were bereft of vital medicines and supplies;
Israeli historians like Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim, who counter the spurious narratives of hasbara, and Lee Mordechai, who is rigorously chronicling and bearing witness to the genocide as it unfolds;
Jewish genocide scholars like Raz Segal[[5]] and Omer Bartov, who declared genocide long before world leaders;
Jewish lawyers like Omer Schatz, who has filed with the ICC a charge of Incitement to Genocide[[6]] against Israel’s leaders for their myriad statements promoting dehumanisation and atrocities;
the Israeli siblings Miko Peled and Nurit Peled-Elhanan, raised as Zionists, who became fearless critics of apartheid and the ideological erasure of Palestinian culture[[7]];
Jewish-American professors like cultural anthropologist Maura Finkelstein, who despite having tenure, was fired for speaking out against Zionism[[8]];
and Israeli journalists like Gideon Levy, whose compassion permeates his decades of reporting[[9]] and Mairav Zonszein who wrote in 2022: “I look at these young people who are poisoned with racism, and at some of their elders, who implant in them toxic notions of Jewish supremacy, and I see all the antisemites who persecuted their forebears and mine across generations.”[[10]]
Let us join with all those whose hearts have been struck and opened, transcending opacity and petrifaction, who are ‘foolish’ enough to be transformed into the flow of fraternal unity, so that Otherhood becomes Brotherhood, “wherso’er you are”, aware that isolation is illusion.
As Martin Luther King affirmed in his last Sunday Sermon, four days before his assassination: “We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” [31 Mar., 1968 , “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”]
Let us be ‘fools’, then, like the yurodivy of the Russian Orthodox tradition, who sacrifice the “wisdom of this world”, and whose outward veil of eccentricity hides an inner map to the Centre. ‘Fools’ who, along our path of Docta ignorantia, whatever the sorrowful cost, dare to pay the price for embracing our common humanity, the welfare of our sisters and brothers, —trusting that, though we may stumble and sin, God in His Mercy may smile upon our follies as modes of sama and dhikr.
[[1]]: Douay-Rheims translation
[[2]]: Salutati is but one of many Renaissance figures who undermine the false notion that Humanism was entirely secular. His De fato et fortuna (1396–1397) harmonises St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei with his own humanist concerns, in a profound exploration of divine providence, fate and free will. These themes long remained central to Humanism, and were the focus of Erasmus’ De libero arbitrio [On Free Will, 1524], in which he argued vigorously against Luther’s denial of human free will, with its vivid assertion that Man is simply a “beast, ridden either by God or the devil... a captive, subject and slave, either of the will of God, or of the will of Satan.” See my The Angel or the Beast: Will and Wisdom in Spanish Renaissance Literature (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1998), pp. 26–35
[[3]]: The absurdity of allegations against Albanese of antisemitism can be judged by the fact that her Jewish predecessor, Richard Falk (served 2008–14) was subjected to even more virulent defamation
[[4]]: The United States withdrew from the UN Human Rights Council for the second time on 4 Feb., 2025, echoing the first Trump Administration withdrawal on 20 June, 2018
[[5]]: It is remarkable to note that Dr. Segal, an eminent Jewish scholar of genocide, declared on Oct. 13, 2023 that Israel’s assault on Gaza was a “textbook case of genocide” in the article linked herein, a mere six days after the October 7th Hamas attack
[[6]]: Incitement to Genocide is itself a crime under Article 25(3)(e) of the Rome Statute. As Schatz emphasises, incitement is punishable regardless of the crime’s actually occurring or being attempted. There is no explicit requirement in this subsection of Article 25 that genocide actually be committed. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/genocide
[[7]]: Miko and Nurit are grandchildren of Avraham Katznelson, who signed Israel’s Declaration of Independence; their father Mattityahu Peled was a general in the Six-Day War of 1967, formerly a soldier during the Nakba of 1948; he later became a member of the Knesset, Chairman of the Arabic Language and Literature Department of Tel Aviv University, and a fervent peace activist. Nurit’s daughter Smadar, age 13, was murdered in a Palestinian suicide attack (1997); her response was to insist that Israel “end the occupation and negotiate a just peace with our Palestinian partners.” She forbade any Israeli authority, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, from attending her daughter’s funeral. A philologist and professor of language and education, formerly at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she has written books on how the discourse in Israeli textbooks inculcates racism against Palestinians. Awarded the 2001 Sakharov Prize for Human Rights and Freedom of Speech by the European Parliament. She was suspended from David Yellin College on 25 Oct., 2023 for discussing Sartre’s “forms of violence that colonized people may adopt to free themselves from colonialism.” Reprimanded for “expressing identification with Israel’s most bitter enemy,” she tendered her resignation on 23 Dec., 2023. The British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Committee on Academic Freedom protested her suspension
[[8]]: A graduate of Columbia and Stanford Universities, Dr. Maura (no relation to Norman Finkelstein), was fired for sharing an Instagram post. Her termination was deemed a violation of her academic freedom by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)
[[9]]: Gideon Levy has faithfully and candidly reported on Gaza for many years, in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz; his latest book collects many articles written since Oct. 7: The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe (London: Verso, 2024)
[[10]]: Leading Israeli Human Rights lawyer Michael Sfard retweeted this quote from Mairav, signed זונשיי ןמרב on Feb. 11, 2022. Since the change to “X”, it has since been deleted from his former Twitter account at: https://twitter.com/sfardm?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor