Ahmed the Philosopher: Thirty-Four Short Plays for Children and Everyone Else

RHUBARB. Say what you will, it isn’t moral. Here I am, sitting on this chair, playing a role in front of all these people, all these children. And all this time, what? What’s happening in the world? Famine, dictatorships, the rise of fundamentalism, women forced to wear veils, civil wars, ethnic massacres, the ozone layer, the disappearance of the blue whales, Rwanda, Bosnia, Chernobyl, Algeria, discrimination, homeless people, unemployment among the young, unemployment among executives, unemployment among women, insecticides, pesticides, the greenhouse effect, genital mutilation, genital piercing, polygamy, child prostitution, the Chechens, AIDS, nonrenewable energy sources, social inequality, the refusal of homosexual marriage for priests by the reactionaries of the Vatican, drugs, the inner cities, the refusal of the rank of colonel for lesbians and gays by the half-wits in Washington, the putrefaction of the Mediterranean by viscous algae, the pollution of the Arctic and the Antarctic, oil spills, the Khmer Rouge, the Shining Path, no friendliness anywhere … And me with my ass in a chair, yakking away to make some kids laugh! Where is morality, I ask you! Or ethics!

AHMED. Now that’s the right question! Ethics, morality, one can, if it comes to that, know what it is. But where it is, or where it’s hiding, that’s a real puzzle. You’ve spoken very well of everything that’s wrong with the world. Your list was poignant. My heart felt heavy, the further you went with your calamities, the more I could sense anxiety squeezing my solar plexus. Solar energy, by the way, you could add to the list. What are the powers that be doing about solar energy? The answer is terrible: nothing. And all this time morality is intangible, wandering, vagabond …

But to conclude from this that you’re immoral, there, on your chair! No, Rhubarb, you’re here to proclaim the reign of Evil on earth, on our global village, as you do so well, so admirably! You are the voice of the public consciousness! Without you, all these people would be asleep! You wake them up, Rhubarb, you say to them: “Hear, see, read, understand.” No friendliness anywhere, it’s frightful. Thanks to you, they’re frightened! They too, look at them, they’re in their chairs. But now, they’re afraid of everything that’s happening. They came here courageous, they’re going to leave scared stiff. What tremendous progress! They know that everything is wrong and that they’re doing nothing about it.

RHUBARB. It’s that I don’t do anything either. I’m looking for a friendly and democratic proposal to combat all that, a true morality for our global village, an intensely civilized ethics, but I don’t know where to find it. I’m afraid, Ahmed.

AHMED. Come on, Rhubarb! Edmond Rhubarb! No moping! We’re going to figure out where it is, this morality! You’re afraid: that’s a good start for morality, fear. Buck up! Don’t give up the ship! Listen, we’re going to go back to your wonderful list and we’re going to go through and identify each consensual and effective moral principle point by point. Let’s begin at the beginning. The blue whales, let’s see, the ethics of blue whales, is what?

RHUBARB. A television show, in prime time, with the bishop of Sarges-les-Corneilles having a friendly chat with two bums. No, with a male bum and a female bum. Don’t forget the quota for women, everywhere, always, anywhere, and even anyplace else.

AHMED. Magnificent! In one fell swoop, you’ve dealt with the morality of homelessness and the ethics of sexual difference. We’re making progress, Rhubarb, we’re definitely making progress. OK, so what about massacres and famine in Africa? What is to be done?

RHUBARB. Ask every Frenchman and Frenchwoman to wrap up in cellophane all their unused medications. That’s got to amount to tons! You go around collecting everything, aspirin, tablet by tablet, what’s left in bottles of cough syrup, vitamin C tablets, tubes of Vaseline, even the ones that are already squeezed out and all rolled up, there’s still stuff left in the bottom! And then there you go! The ad hoc committee distributes it among the underprivileged populations.

AHMED. Now, you leave me speechless. You even thought about the cellophane. Wow! No hazy ethics for us! We’re doing ethics at its most concrete! And what about the religious, racial, and ethnic civil wars, where’s the ethics there?

RHUBARB (very serious). That’s hard, it’s difficult. For that, we have to become profoundly responsible. We have to form a committee for universal consciousness, which will draw up a global petition, supported by sponsors, who will pay for television clips where you see every kind of horror, and with these clips we’ll alert the governments to their responsibilities, and then the governments and the international community, with the United Nations in on the deal, will launch completely surgical air strikes against war criminals, strikes directed by laser and infrared photography, strikes that will strike one by one those who’ve committed the atrocities we’ll have seen in the clips, so that they’ll know that the universal consciousness isn’t going to take any assault on human rights lying down. And so, in this spirit of calm determination, and with the communications technology that goes with it, the problem is solved.

AHMED. You’re on top of it. The solution is in the bag. So, you see? Right here, sitting on our chairs, we’ve managed to get to the very bottom of where morality is. One final experiment. The ozone layer, the unacceptable warming of the atmosphere of our global village by unregulated industrial polluters. That’s serious stuff. What will our children say if, ten thousand years from now, it’s a hundred and two degrees beneath the Eiffel Tower? Your morality of pollution and the ozone hole, where do you see that?

RHUBARB. The bicycle. The backpack. Shaving cream in biodegradable aluminum tubes and not in aerosol cans. Good old-fashioned mosquito nets and not dangerous and stinging insecticides. Natural goat cheese, instead of disgusting whipped cream squirting out of all sorts of polluting dispensers. Cow droppings in the meadows instead of poisonous fertilizers. We need a committee for global responsibility, with an adequate representation of women and earthy peasants: the committee against the hole. Just picture it! A gigantic multicultural demonstration with a big banner: “United, we’ll plug up the hole!” That’s the strongest moral image I can think of.

RHUBARB. Yes, what’s it called, when you’ve transcended abstract principles, when you’re dealing with the concrete, when you’ve figured out where it is, morality, in everyone who’s totally responsibilized himself and knows what he has to do, and when you’ve done that through friendly discussion, in your chair, without troublemaking or bureaucratizing, with moderate thinking, very moderate, as mild as holistic medicine, what name does it have, this morality of global friendliness confronted with the technological orgy of Evil?