After the Future

Quote of the Day: Barnett Rubin

(Ed. note: This quote was at first mistakenly attributed to Juan Cole because it appeared on his website.  Didn't read it carefully enough.)

The Bush-Cheney administration has surrendered much of Afghanistan to the Taliban and much of Pakistan to al-Qaida. They have turned most of Iraq over to Iran, creating the very danger over which they now threaten another disastrous war; they have strained the U.S. Armed Forces to the point of exhaustion, turned the Defense Department over to private contractors, the Justice Department over to the Republican National Committee, and the national debt over to foreign creditors, while leading a party whose single most basic belief is supposed to be that individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions. And they dare to lecture us on national security?  Informed Comment, 9/23/07

And yet nobody seems to be able to stand up against this criminal incompetence. Why? The answer to that question, although we seem incapable of facing it, is that we've ceased to be a functional democracy; we are quickly becoming a ceremonial democracy analogous to Britain's having become a ceremonial monarchy.

 

The Myth of Objective Consciousness III

In the two previous posts with this title, I was leaning on Theodore Roszak to make a fundamental point about the arbitrariness and the severe limitations of modern consciousness we take for granted as "objective" when it is in touch with the truth.  That's only true in the world of things and bodies, and while that might be interesting and useful, it's not really what is most important to us.  But even if you accept that there is a certain practical benefit to having "objective consciousness", we have to reckon for the price we are paying to live within its constraints. 

The very fact that I and so many others can even write such a thing points to the fact that the uncontested dominance of the myth of objective consciousness is breaking down.  That's a good thing--our lives will be richer and deeper and more interesting without it.  But it's one thing to be aware of its limitations, and it's another thing to actually liberate oneself from those limitations. It's one thing to recognize that you're living in a prison; it's another to find a way out of it. And so we do what we can do, and one part of the project is to begin to think through the limitations and begin to imagine the world in ways that don't make the assumptions required by the myth of objective consciousness. 

And for that I'm going to lean on Owen Barfield's arguments in his most famous book, Saving the Appearances. His basic goal is to show that what we think of as the "objective" world out there is a complex of mind-dependent collective representations. Ultimately both he and I want to argue for the anteriority of mind to matter.  The idea that mind is somehow produced out of matter, rather than matter produced from mind is a bias of the myth of objective conscious.

So let's begin to crack open that bias. If you take the common experience of seeing a rainbow, it is clearly something that is there--it's not a hallucination. It has an objective existence that is its own.  Others see it and recognize it as being what you recognize it to be. But what are the components required to make the perception possible?   But Is there a rainbow if there is no one to see it?   Because we recognize that there are three components required for the rainbow to exist. You need rain drops, you need sunlight, and you need a perceiver. Two out of the three elements here are "objective" in the sense of not belonging to the perceiving subject.  So there is something out there whether or not there is a human there to perceive it, but the thing we call 'rainbow' is not there unless there is a human being with a particularly configured eye and mind  to connect the dots (or raindrops) into the experience of a rainbow.

This is different point, though similar, from Bishop Berkeley's tree falling in the forest idea. But I don't want to digress too much on that subject to explain the differences at this point.  Suffice it to say that there is no commensurate way to compare what God sees and and what humans see.  In God's mind there may be the idea of a tree, for instance, but there is no reason to think that what that God's idea of a tree and the human idea, while there is some overlap, have little to do with one another.  An ant's perception of a tree has in all probability more resemblance to a human's than God's does.  But more on that another time.

The point here, obviously, is to draw the analogy of our perception of a rainbow to our perception or the things in the world around--like trees.  Wait, you might say.  A tree is different from a rainbow, it has solidity, and when you approach it you can feel it.  We would all say that matter gives a tree its solidity, but what is matter?  Physics tells us that matter is constituted by agglomerations of molecules, which in turn are composed of atoms, which in turn are composed of protons, neutrons, and so on, which are composed of ??? 

Obvious as it may be to reflection that a system of waves or quanta or discrete particles is no more like solid matter than waves of air are like sound, or raindrops like a rainbow, it is not particularly easy to grasp, and it is almost impossible to keep in mind that there is no such thing as unfelt solidity.  It is much more convenient, when we are listening for example to the geologist to forget what we learnt about matter from the chemist and the physicist.  But it really will not do. 22-23

How exactly are the particles, or whatever we want to think of as the fundamental  elements composing matter, different from rain drops, except that they are more densely associated. And what is the ground of all this matter except notional models or symbols of an unrepresented or imperceivable base--they have more to do with raindrops than trees. Barfield says,

that whatever may be thought about the 'unrepresented' background of our perceptions, the familiar world which we see and know around us--that blue sky with white clouds in it, the noise of a waterfall or a motor-bus, the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends--the world too, which (apart from the special inquiry of physics) experts of all kinds methodically investigate--is a system of collective representations.  The time comes when one must either accept this as the truth about the world or reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways . . . .

What he means by "not having it both ways" is that we cannot believe that what physics tells us about the nature of matter and at the same time believe that the things we perceive in the world are there the way we moderns see them in some completely objective, independent way.  Something is there, yes--particles.  And they are configured in a way that is not of our own making.  But the way they appear to us as collective representations is profoundly conditioned by cultural programming that determines what we actually experience when we ecnounter a tree. Another kind of programming, and a very different experience of the tree. Something is there independent of our perception of it, but what we call "tree"  does not exist except as there are minds that organize the "particles" in a certain way to create the collective representation "tree."  If our mind or perceptual apparatus changes, so will the collective representation of the tree.

I realize this might seem like quite a jump, but if you think about it,  you will see it proves true.  In the same way the mind takes water particles and organizes them into the representation we call 'rainbow', it does the same thing with all our percepts of things in the world. For "if the particles, or the unrepresented, are in fact all that is independently there, then the world we all accept as real is in fact a system of collective representations." (20)

The implication:  Mind, not matter, plays a much bigger role in constituting the representations of the things in physical world around us--more than the "physical" particles do. Because what ultimately is the physicality of the particles? But it's important to note that it's not my individual mind that constitutes the world, but my participation in a collective mind, otherwise we'd all be perceiving different things. And in fact people with different cultural programming do see different things, or more accurately, they see the same things differently. Seeing in three-dimensions is something westerners only started doing since around the time of the Renaissance.

But a second implication is that the natural world that scientists seek to understand is a world of collective representations, and their investigations are limited by the programming that at this moment gives us the world as we experience it.  Well, you might ask, what difference does that make if that is the world as it has always been experienced by humans.  Well, that's the point; they haven't always experienced it the way contemporary moderns have.  Moderns assume that aborigines, for instance, experience the world we do, and that all the superstitious animistic stuff is imaginary and childish. Barfield quotes Levy Bruhl:

Almost everything that we see therein (ie, in a being or object or natural phenomenon) escapes their attention or is a matter of indifference to them.   On the other hand they see many things of which we are unconscious. . . .

It is not correct to maintain, as is frequently done, that primitives associate occult powers, magic properties, a kind of soul or vital principle with all the objects which affect their sense or strike the imagination, and that their perceptions are surcharged with animistic beliefs.  It is not a question of association.  The mystic properties with which things are imbued form an integral part of the idea to the primitive who views it as a synthetic whole.  It is at a later stage of social evolution that what we call a natural phenomenon tends to become the sole content of perception to the exclusion of other elements which then assume the aspect of beliefs, and finally appear superstitions.  But as long as the dissociation not take place perception remains an undifferentiated whole.

That's the hard thing to grasp.  Our everyday encounter with the physical world around us is really an encounter with sound and light waves and energy patterns whose ultimate substrate is unknowable and imperceivable.  We want to think about them as having in themselves the solidity and qualities we perceive in them, but like the rainbow, the existence of the world of collective representations is mind-dependent.  Another way of saying it is that what we experience as physical matter is just a habit of mind. And this in turn implies that like all habits, any habit of mind can be broken and replaced with another, preferably better one.

Lest there be any confusion, let me be clear: I'm not saying there is no extra-subjective reality; I am saying there is no extra-collective mental reality. I know that I haven't proved it yet, and that I am only suggesting the outline for a larger argument that Mind, not matter, is the ultimate stuff of the universe, and once one accepts that, everything begins to look differently, not the least of which our ideas about evolution.  Consciousness is not some epiphenomenon of matter; rather, matter is very much the production of mind. This idea is not really all that unusual.  It is in fact supported by the metaphysics of the Hinduism, Buddhism, and the idealist philosophical tradition in the West dating back to Heraclitus and Plato. And it's not in contradiction to the facts, as we currently understand them, of biological evolution.  It just provides a larger context in which to understand them.  It's just that it has become hard for Westerners since the mid 19th century to imagine because of their materialist habits of mind.

Or another way of saying it is that we live in a world of symbols which for the modern mind has lost its referent.  We see only the object, not what it symbolizes, we have come to inhabit a hopelessly flat and prosaic and disenchanted world, even  though it is anything but.  It's not the world that has become disenchanted, but rather our collective perceptual habits of mind that have created filters that have all but blocked out the soul qualities that are there whether we filter them out or not.

Quote of the Day: Broadcast News

AARON: What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? Nobody is going to be taken in if he has a long, red, pointy tail. No...He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing...he will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. (h/t Jonathan Schwarz)

The Myth of Objective Consciousness II

I have nothing against science per se.  My problem is rather with scientism, which takes a limited tool for learning about the mechanics of the material world as the ground for developing a comprehensive worldview.  Scientism is not science.  It is, rather,  "a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science." (Michael Schermer, editor of the magazine, Skeptic.) 

Sounds ok, but the critical word here to define is "empirical."   As Roszak says, "If the telescopes of Astronomers were to discover angels in outer space, science as a method of knowing would not be in any sense discredited; its theories would simply be reformulated in the light of new discoveries.  In contrast to the way we use the phrase 'world view' in other contexts, science rests itself not in the world the scientist beholds at any particular point in time, but in his mode of viewing that world.  A man is a scientist not because of what he sees, but because of how he sees it." 

If he sees angels in what might be described as a paranormal state of mind, it doesn't count, because "how" he sees them is not legitimate. He's either crazy or it's just an interesting aesthetic experience to be enjoyed like a fantasy as we experience them in the movies,  but not to be taken seriously as real.  Visionary experience is by definition excluded as real or truth revealing.  Even if hundreds or thousands of people report having had such experiences. That's data that has to be explained away on terms the naturalist defines as empirical.  And yet what people learn in those experiences might be the most important thing of all to know.

I'd like to lean on Theodore Roszak today to help show to what this worldview leads. 
His 1969 book, The Making of a Counterculture, has been sitting on my bookshelf for some time now, and I just recently began to reread it.  It has aged well, and one realizes that this book, like The Greening of America that came out the following year, despite their notoriety at the time, described an "awakening" that was unable to sustain itself or establish a secure foothold in the mainstream public imagination. The myth of objective consciousness objectifies, and so we who live within such a mythos live in a world rich in objects, but poor in spirit.  We've become all but soul dead living in this wasteland of things, things, and more things.  Everywhere objects; here and there a few subjects

Or so it now seems.  Perhaps it's the old story of taking two steps forward and then a step backward. Some of us, me included, were naive enough to believe that Nixon's political demise showed that the republic was healthy and capable of fending off  such abuses of power.  In retrospect, it would appear that the political class's spitting him out was a temporary aberration. The forces within that class the Nixon represented had a temporary setback, and now are back in the driver's seat.  They brook no opposition. Even eager-to-please aspirants like Bill Clinton were not good enough for this resentful crew. He had too much of the stink of the counterculture about him to be acceptable, and so from Day 1 the backlash establishment ought to excrete him the way the pre-backlash establishment had excreted Nixon.

That's not to say that the counterculture about which Roszak speaks has completely evaporated.  It's there at the fringes.  The question is whether the world view of that counterculture has the vitality and the political wit to supplant the mainstream scientistic materialistic culture and its Bizarro doppelganger, the zombie traditionalist religious right.  For both are trapped within the myth of objective consciousness, and neither offers us the alternative we all depserately need. For the only alternative worth supporting and working for will restore the soul-parched wasteland created by the myth of objective consciousness, so that once again the culture can become intersubjectively fertile.

I'm going to quote at length from Roszak here and build on this in future posts:

Objective consciousness begins by dividing reality into two spheres, which would seem best described as "In-Here" and "Out-There."  By In-Here is meant that place within the person to which consciousness withdraws when one wants to know without becoming involved in or committed to that which is being known. . . .

Whatever the scientific method may or may not be, people think they are behaving scientifically whenever they create an In-Here within themselves which undertakes to know without an investment of the person in the act of knowing.  The necessary effect of distancing, of estranging In-Here from Out-There may be achieved in any number of ways: by the intervention of various mechanical gadgets between observer and observed; by the elaboration of chilly jargons and technical terms that replace sensuous speech; by the invention of strange methodologies which reach out to the subject matter like a pair of mechanical hands; by the subordination of the particular and immediate experience to a statistical generalization; by appeal to a professional standard which excuses the observer from responsibility to anything other than a lofty abstraction--such as  "the pursuit of truth," pure research," etc. All these protective strategies are especially compatible with natures that are beset by timidity and fearfulness; but also with those that are characterized by plain insensitivity and whose habitual mode of contact with the world is a cool curiosity untouched by love, tenderness, or passionate wonder.

The spectating In-Here has been called by many names: ego, intelligence, self, subject, reason. . . .What I prefer to emphasize is the act of contraction that takes place within the person, the sense of taking a step back, away from, and out of.  Not only back and away from the natural world, but from the inarticulate feelings, physical urges, and wayward images that surge up from within the person. . . .

The ideal of objective consciousness is that there should be as little as possible In-Here and, conversely, as much as possible Out-There. For only what is Out-There can be studied and known. Objectivity leads to such a great emptying-out operation: the progressive alienation of more and more of In-Here's personal contents in the effort ot achieve the densest possible unit of observational concentration surrounded by the largest possible area of study. The very word "concentration" yields the interesting image of an identity contracted into a small hard ball; hence a dense, diminished identity, something which is less than one otherwise might be. . . . Curiously, this great good called knowledge, the very guarantee of our survival, is taken to be something that is forthcoming only to this lesser, shriveled-up identity.

The scientific observer who comes to feel that Out-There has begun to implicate him personally--say, in the manner of a lover spellbinding one's sympathies so that one cannot tell clearly where one's self leaves off and the other begins--has begun to lose his objectivity. Therefore, he must fight back this irrational involvement of his personal feeling. . . . But if body, feelings, emotions, moral sentiment, sensuous enchantment are all to be located Out-There, then who is this In-Here that is so stalwartly struggling against the siren song?  . . .

As soon as two human beings relate in detachment as observer to observed, as soon as the observer claims to be aware of nothing more than the behavioral surface of the observed, an invidious hierarchy is established which reduces the observed to a lower status. . . .  For consider the gross impertinence of the act of detached observation.  Psychologist confronting his laboratory subject, anthropologist confronting tribal group, political scientist confronting voting public . . . in all such cases what the observer may very well be saying to the observed is the same:  "I can perceive no more than your behavioral facade.  I can grant you no more reality or psychic coherence than this perception allows.  I shall observe this behavior of yours and record it.  I shall not enter into your life, your task, your condition of existence.  Do not turn to me or appeal to me or ask me to become involved with you.  I am here only as a temporary observer whose role is to stand back and later to make my own sense of what you seem to be doing or intending.  I assume that I can adequately understand what you are doing or intending without entering wholly into your life.  I am not particularly interested in what you uniquely are; I am interested only in the general pattern to which you conform. I assume I have the right to use you to perform this process of classification.  I assume I have the right to reduce all that you are to an integer in my science." . . .

Already legions of scientists and military men throughout the world, the products of careful training and selection, give themselves to whole lives of ultimate objectivity.  They systematically detach themselves from any concern for those lives their inventions and weapons may someday do to death.  They do their job as they are ordered to do it . . . objectively.  For them the world at large has become a laboratory--in the same sense that when they enter upon their professional capacity, they leave their personal feelings behind. Perhaps they even take pride in their capacity to do so, for indeed it requires an act of iron will to ignore the claims that person makes upon person.  pp. 218-23

Our society's primary institutions are dominated by the myth of objectivity as here described. In other words our society is controlled by these dense, flat-souled control freaks who require that anyone who seeks influence and power becomes like them.  That's Obama's dilemma. I want to believe he is not like them, but he has to  become like them if he is to avoid being labeled unserious, or worse, crazy as
Al Gore was. So as long as the freaks control the agenda, the wasteland cannot bloom.  And they will control it until a truly robust alternative presents itself, and when/if it does, they will fight viciously to suppress it. 

We're not Burma. The repression is subtler here.  And as of now there is no cultural or political force that poses a threat that worries the establishment elites. Critics can talk all they want because they have no power and they pose no threat.  A guy like Obama doesn't scare them. He can be easily co-opted, and if he resists, he will be made into an irrelevancy quicker than you can say Howard Dean.

The Myth of Objective Consciousness i

Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture.  It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture.  If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth?  The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond. 

Yet, in our society, myth as it is conventionally understood has become practically a synonym for falsehood.  To be sure, we commonly hear discussion of various social and political myths these days (the myth of the American frontier, the myth of the Founding Fathers, etc.) The more enlightened clergy even talk freely of the "Christian myth." But myths so openly recognized as myths are precisely those that have lost much of their power.  It is the myth we accept without question as truth that holds real influence over us. Is it possible that, in this sense, scientific culture is uniquely a-mythical? Or is it the case that we simply fail to look in the right place--in the deep personality structure of the ideal scientist--for the great controlling my of our culture? . . .

What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth.  Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value.  And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere.  From Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), pp. 214-15

See also Parts II and III.

I've not had the time or the energy to get back to this larger theme that I began exploring this summer.  (See posts here and following in June and July.)  I am interested in understanding better this process of by which the collective representations we call reality are created and maintained and its relationship to  the collective mentality that Roszak describes above as myth.  I honestly don't think it can be done in some consciously manipulative way (that leads to Jacobinism); it has to evolve out of our present social constructions in the light of new discoveries we must make regarding largely unknown possibilities lying dormant in the human soul. Otherwise it's just the old endless cycle of action/reaction.

Lake of Fire

From a Salon review of the three-hour film about abortion in America:

In a pair of sequences guaranteed to unsettle any viewer, Kaye shoots two abortions in intimate detail, one of them a late-term intervention and the other a much earlier, more routine procedure. In both cases, we see exactly what comes out of the women's bodies into the doctor's steel tray, an assortment of chopped-up "tissue" that must then be pieced back together to make sure the entire fetus has been extracted. The principal difference between the two procedures is a matter of size and quantity, but the removed material is recognizably and shockingly human. For much too long, the pro-choice movement has relied on comforting euphemisms suggesting that early abortions result in nothing more than unrecognizable globs of goo. That was always sophistry; when you see tiny severed legs, arms and other body parts in that tray, it seems like something worse than that.

"I was very curious to learn what an abortion actually looked like," Kaye says, "and I quickly became aware, in terms of the structure of the film, that I needed one, and that I needed the story of a woman who goes through one. But I never thought in my wildest imagination that I could film one and that I could get so close. When I did film it, which was after five years of working on the film, I was in" -- here a long pause; he's having trouble getting the words out -- "an altered state when I came out of that place."

Hold those calls and letters, defenders of choice. Throughout the film, Kaye is extraordinarily sensitive to the painful decisions of women who seek out the procedure. If the abortion scenes are shocking, so are Kaye's interviews with the bloody-minded, Bible-pounding zealots of the so-called pro-life movement. These people constitute an entire universe of loner white guys with pinched faces and extremist interpretations of a few passages in ancient Hebrew religious works, perversely devoted to controlling female reproduction but totally unconcerned about the health and welfare of already-existing women and children. As interviewee Noam Chomsky puts it (he's seen here as a logician rather than a polemicist, and in that role he has few peers), the pro-lifers might have a valid moral point to make, if there was any seriousness or consistency or concern about poverty and human welfare in their position.

Exactly.  And that's the tragedy.

Maybe someday sane people can talk sanely about what is really going on with abortion.  Right now it's not possible. For me it's a lot like trying to talk about the Iraq War in its early stages.  Everybody was caught up in the ideological reasons pro and con; only a few people were focused on the carnage that is always associated when the dogs of war are unleashed.

There's always some abstract greater good that is worth the price of all the bloodletting.There are almost always very good, very compelling reasons for doing the wrong thing, but the bottom line is the carnage.  In an insane world you take the exception and make it the rule. Are there sometimes, necessary wars?  Yes, but in a sane world they are the rare exception.  Are there sometimes necessary abortions? Yes, but in a sane world they are the exception.  In an insane world wars and abortions and torture are routine, nothing out of the ordinary.  We are being progressively numbed to accept them as normal.

When the policies you support are responsible for unthinkable carnage, you do your best not to think about it.  It's much easier to stay in the reality-filtered, abstract, bloodless level of ideological debate. When you live in an ideological bubble--whether left, right, or center--you are sealed off from the consequences of your thinking.  It's comfortable, and you never have to change your mind. And that's why nothing ever seems to change. The ideologues change places in an eternally swinging pendulum of action and reaction. 

Most Americans have no idea how American and British policies in the Middle East in the last century have caused the violent blowback we're experiencing from enraged Muslims now.  In the same way, the typical pro-choice liberal has no idea of how abortion policy in this country has caused the violent blowback from enraged right-to-lifers.  Just easier to dismiss them as crazy. And they are crazy, but why?  What's at the root of it?.  I see it as the action/reaction dynamic in a fallen world that has propelled the human tragedy from time immemorial. The only solution is to find a way somehow to stand outside it, to refuse to participate in it. Until enough people do, the insanity, the violence, carnage, and the tears continue.

Along those lines let none of us soon forget the courageous effort of the Buddhist monks and nuns of Burma to stand outside of it.  In the short run it looks as though they have failed, but in the long run we just don't know.  But for now, it's just all so terribly, terribly sad.

Quote of the Day: Mario Cuomo

"Let’s not do what we did before and wind up apologizing for our resolutions and saying we’re sorry. Now remember, the Founding Fathers gave the powers to declare war to the Congress. That power cannot be delegated to the President. You can’t adopt a resolution and say well, the Founding Fathers wanted us to do it, but it’s too heavy a lift for us, so we empower you, Mr. President, if you feel like doing it, to do it.

"And my goodness, the President you’re talking about is the president who started a war with a mistaken context...he was wrong about the reason for it, he was wrong about complicity, he was wrong about how many troops we needed, he was wrong about how we would be greeted when we got there, he was wrong about the civil war, wrong about how much it would cost, wrong about how long it would last and now you’re saying maybe he can start another war. It’s a mistake; this an opportunity for Democrats to show real leadership. And the presidential candidates should lead the way. And if they don’t, then the question is going to be when it comes to improvident war-making, why are you any better than Bush?" (h/t M.J. Rosenberg at TPM Cafe)