After Muhsin Bey: the problem of taught grudge and "essentialism"

Our perceptions of certain people are inevitably influenced by our past experiences with them. We cannot perceive or meet anyone independently of the opinions we previously hold about them. We generally cannot even avoid forming a preliminary opinion about people we do not know at all by likening them, at first encounter, to people we know and with whom we have had an experience. This is a defect from which human consciousness suffers: the human mind works by making typologies and putting typologies to work.

Yet when we are content to lump newly met people together with people we knew before on account of resemblances, and to judge them so, we have not even felt the need to put our quality of being human to work. For being human means, above all, being open to getting to know new, utterly new people and to entering into new experiences. Being human is none other than being open to intimacy with the new; this openness expresses itself both in the discernment of the eye that sees the “other” within its otherness and, accordingly, in one’s own attitudes being open at every moment to change, rather than freezing in a mould.

Have you ever reflected on the verse in Surah Al Imran: “Remember Allah’s favour upon you. When you were enemies of one another, He brought about a reconciliation in your hearts, and by His favour you awoke and became brothers”? These words teach that a Muslim cannot harbour an “essential” enmity even toward his enemy, that enmity is against the attitude that a person can change if only he wishes, that one can even become brothers with an enemy who has changed this attitude, and, moreover, that an enemy becoming a brother is a favour to be thankful for.

Moreover, it is impossible for a heart that grasps that anger toward a people must not lead to injustice against that people to hold a generalising, wholesale, essentialist and racist attitude toward people.

In my view, the quality of political life too can be secured only through adequately grasping this maxim. To understand that the world is not a frozen picture but is subject to a living, dynamic process called life, and to be able to adapt one’s own feelings, thoughts and attitudes in a healthy way in the face of a changing world: what else could be the psychological, epistemological and theoretical foundation of healthy politics?

Looking at what has been written and said, especially on some internet sites and blogs, after the death of Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, we once again observed with astonishment and regret how weak this foundation of politics is.

Muhsin Bey passed through difficult years of prison and torture after 12 September. In these years he saw very well what kind of set-up the whole country’s people, himself included, had been brought into, and learned the lesson of being able to become partners in fate by sharing a two-and-a-half-square-metre space with leftists with whom he could not share the world. After leaving prison he proved in every respect that he had learned this lesson very well; he showed an utterly noble resistance and opposition against coups, set out on a search for a nationalism based on the nation rather than on state and race, and acted with the utmost sensitivity and caution against his own party organisation being used as it was before 12 September, and perhaps because of this had been the target of the attacks that brought about his death.

His change and the quality he brought to politics were something witnessed by millions of people. But there are people whom the change he underwent still has not persuaded. They still remember Muhsin Bey as he was in the right-left strife before Kahramanmaraş and 12 September, and still try to keep him in that frozen picture engraved in their memories.

Yet regarding his role in Maraş too there are only rumours, and both sides of the right-left conflict were used in the same way, but from this picture, whatever Muhsin Bey did and became afterwards, he will not be able to escape carrying the label of “eternal fascist.”

Looking at this left jargon that dominates what has been written about Muhsin Bey, it is not hard to understand why the left in Turkey has been able to remain so alien to politics. Undoubtedly we cannot make a generalising and consuming judgement in the name of the left, but in the case of Muhsin Bey there is an extremely serious problem of “essentialism” that is displayed once again. It need hardly be said that this approach, which grants people no chance of change with an incorrigible rancour and hatred, and which codes labels such as “fascist” and “reactionary” as fixed characteristics of a person, is miles away from politics and distancing from it.

But one thing must be kept being said, always and at every opportunity: from rancour and hatred taught and shared ideologically, no quality worthy of a human being will come, and no left-wing value either.

It is as clear as day that sticking certain labels on people as if they were fixed racial characteristics takes away much from the quality of being human, from the political nature of the human being. For being human is none other than being open to intimacy with the new.