After the Future

Breaking Down 'Breaking Bad'

I don’t see “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan as any sort of moral prognosticator. He is a talented and occasionally traditional fantasist who understands that, at the end of the day, the most significant part of the word “antihero” is still “hero.” Gilligan coyly lets us know how shit’s going to go down in the very first scene of the finale: The cops cruise by; Walt escapes capture. Then, as our lovable dirtbag looks to the heavens,  the keys to the car he’s attempting to steal fall right into his hands. God, i.e. the writer/director, is on his side. Walter White is going to win. And he’s going to win quite possibly for no better reason than that this has always been his story. (Remember last week’s episode, when Walt happens to be sitting in the bar in the middle of nowhere just as the Schwartzes appear on television? If that ain’t the Hand of Gilligan bestowing blessings, I don’t know what is.)

Then there's the wonderful meeting with Skyler in which Walt admits (finally?) that he didn't do it for his family. He did it for himself. He did it because he liked it. He did it because he was good at it and because it made him feel 'alive'. And my read is that Gilligan is ok with that, that Walt is a winner in the end because he lived life on his own terms--finally. He accomplished everything that he set out to do. Losing his family was collateral damage, but he was going to lose it anyway to cancer. The money is the only thing that mattered, it's his legacy, and he lives on in it.

And so Gilligan clearly wants us to believe that Walt isn't a monster, but a hero, a tragic American hero. I'm sure the Wall Street masters of the universe think about themselves in the same way.

Why Is 'Breaking Bad' Hitting a Nerve?

There are two interesting articles in Salon about the show, the first by David Sirota suggests that Walter is everyman; he mirrors both the stress the middle class feels, but also the unrestrained greed of its masters of the universe on Wall Street:

Ultimately, all of these themes converge to raise the most harrowing questions of all — the taboo questions about whether we should really cherish the desperation, the greed and the every-man-for-himself ideologies that drive Walter White and that make American the industrialized world’s exception. It is the kind of question “Wall Street” asked back in 1987 when a badly broken Bud Fox dared to ask Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko: “How much is enough?” It is the same question that “Breaking Bad’s” psychopathic murderer Todd recently posed to his neo-Nazi uncle when he asked: “No matter how much you got, how do you turn your back on more?”

And another better article by Colin McEnroe echoes this idea in comparing him to Jamie Dimon:

So who is Walt to us? At the micro level, he’s that person – usually at  your job – whose selfish and ruinous choices never seem to come with a price. We all know a creep who’s been riding for a fall for what seems like forever. Fall already!

At a macro level, he’s a stand-in for all the Wall Street guys who crashed your 401(k) and were never punished. Even as the exhausted Walt trudges down to the road to perdition, Jamie Dimon – where do they get these names? – is flying high. The big cheese at JPMorgan Chase has survived a cascade of revelations about the bank’s fraudulent practices and shoddy bookkeeping. And when I say “survived,” I mean that not only does Dimon face no prosecution but also that he has been re-upped for his job as CEO and chairman. He even got to finish out his term on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York after his bank, in the London Whale imbroglio, pulled the wool over the eyes of regulators – you know, like the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Is that how most people feel about Walt?--has all sympathy for him disappeared? I don't know since I haven't even finished the second season yet. I'm probably not going to watch seasons three and four, but the finale tonight seems like one of those broadly shared cultural moments, and I don't want to miss out. So I'll be watching with everyone else. I think I understand enough of what's going on to make sense of the Gilligan's choice about how to end it. 

McEnroe makes an intersting point about the Jesse Pinkman character:

Jesse Pinkman, meanwhile, has provided us with a rich opportunity to explore our own attitudes about mercy, conscience and redemption. Nobody wants Jesse to die, even though he has done unconscionable things (see: murder of Gale). How do we explain this?

The easy way is to blame Walt and what Ernest Becker called “the spell cast by others – the nexus of unfreedom.” Falstaff could be speaking for Jesse when he says,  “I have forsworn his company hourly any time this two-and-twenty years, and yet I am bewitched with the rogue’s company. If the rascal hath not given me medicines to make me love him, I’ll be hanged.”

Blaming Walt is too easy. What has kept us spellbound is Jesse’s plausible series of transitions from street-rapping huckster to full partner in Walt’s empire to the rare publicly-beheld man in the vise-grip of contrition. We’ve watched a full-blown Augustinian awakening; and it turns out to mean something to us if it’s real, if it’s not crafted by handlers and read off a sheet at a dais.

Huh? It never occurred to me that Jesse could be anything more than a miserable little pissant. The show becomes a whole lot more interesting for me if on a track paralleling  Walt's becoming a monster there's Jesse's becoming more human. In my limited watching of the show the only occasion for seeing something 'more' in Jesse was in the episode ATM episode where he tries to shield the junkies' little boy from the horror of what happened inside. I'm curious to know whether Jesse's development is central to the story or just a subtheme.

So the picture I get of Gilligan's view of American society is that there's this thing over here called conventional America, and it's really pretty boring because it is shot through with alienation and the discontent that comes with living in "civilization". "Nice" but uninteresting people live there. And then over here there's the jungle, and that's the real world, THAT'S where life is interesting--THAT'S where you find out what you are made of. I'm ok with that as a premise for a dramatic series, but it's not my real world, but in my boring little world, there's more than enough scope for significant moral dramas.

(If you comment on this post, don't worry about spoilers; I'm not into this on that level. Also, what happens to Hank? He's interesting to me as Walt's alter ego for having one foot in civilization and the other in the jungle, and I'm interested to learn if he finds a way to live humanly in the tension between them, a balance that the Jekyll/Hyde Walt does not find. I'm at the point where Hank has just been transferred to Texas and is learning he is no longer the big fish in the little pond.)

 

Should We Be Worried?

I haven't been paying much attention to Ted Cruz's antics nor to the threats in the House to shut down the government over Obamacare. This is a soap opera I lost interest in months ago. It's a conflict between the crazy redemptive reactionaries in the Tea Party and the country's political elite. I don't have a dog in this fight. It's as if we're in Egypt and we have to choose between Islamists and the military. I don't like either, but because it comes down to a choice between insanity and business as usual, I am inclined to side with the latter. And I assume the latter will prevail. There's too much power there. Obama and the Democrats are weak, but we're not Weimar, not yet anyway.

But who knows? The crazies might be bluffing, but it's quite possible that they are not--because they really are crazy; they're like suicide bombers who are quite happy to go down in a blaze of glory and in doing so to cause as much damage as they can to the Great Satan. This is how democracy goes down--when the crazies find ways to stretch the rules that destroy the game. I don't think that's going to happen, but we're seeing here a trial run at it. So it will be interesting, and I'm paying more attention now. 

Milbank on Politics

This is a short clip, and it reinforces themes that I've been exploring as a anti-liberal progressive. The solution doesn't lie with the market or with the state, as Milbank points out, but with society--i.e, in the cultural realm as it develops out of modernity and its desiccated imagination of reality.

Milbank's position is that modern Western secularism is a Christian heresy. Its basic presuppositions are deeply rooted in and indebted to the West's Christian heritage, but it has taken that heritage and distorted it in a way that has brought us to this desacralized, consumerist, fragmented neoliberal wasteland that shapes so profoundly the way in which we think and experience the world. The problem for politics, therefore, is framed by the problem posed by secularism.

So the thrust of Milbank's thought--and of Radical Orthodoxy in general--is to look at secularization as a mistake. He traces the mistake back to Duns Scotus and the late medieval nominalists who laid the foundation in thought for what later became the hard dualism nature and grace, which in turn led to a hard separation between the secular and the sacred, laying a foundation for what has become our experience of the separation between the public, objective, world of common experience on the one hand, and on the other, the world of personal subjective experience, the inner world of religious experience about which one cannot generalize.

He argues that the nominalist separating out the natural from the supernatural (grace) gradually replaced the older Christian Neoplatonic participatory imagination in which in which the natural and supernatural were inextricably enmeshed. Perhaps it was a mistake if one believes that the old Neoplatonic imagination is a better description about how things are, and I think it is and  that it's something we've lost and that we have to recover. But I don't look at it as a tragedy, but rather something that had to happen, even if we must pay a price for it.

I would argue that it was inevitable because it reflected a different experience of the world that could no longer be robustly explained within the Neoplatonic participatory framework. The culture's intellectuals, who still thought of themselves as faithful Christians, simply didn't experience the world as an enmeshment of nature and grace. They wanted to keep believing, so they came up with alternative way to think about the world that they felt did a better job of explaining their experience while allowing a space for for God--out there--and faith--in here, within the individual subject's experience.

That it also created a space for the secular is an inevitable consequence, and that space no doubt has been invaded by many demons, but could it, should it have happened differently. I tend to think not. It may even have been a necessary thing, if you believe, as I do, that it was necessary for the human project to disembed from primitive shamanic or animist conssciousness. A participatory ontology makes sense in societies in which a shamanic embedded consciousness still persists. But that older embedded way of experiencing the world is destroyed by literacy--this is a bedrock insight of the McLuhanites, and I am persuaded by it. And so you'd have to persuade me that literacy and its benefits are a bad thing if you want to persuade me that secularism is. 

Now I am personally very sympathetic to a Christian Neoplatonic ontology and epistemology. It makes sense to me and it solves lots of problems on a head level for me. But it does not represent my experience of the world, which is very, very austerely nominalist. A tree is simply a tree in my everyday experience of it, and its reality in my experience is not enhanced by the notion that it participates somehow in the mind of God. I like the idea that it does, but I don't expect anybody else to, at least not until there was some kind of shift in the collective consciousness. In other words we won't experience the world as participatory until our social imaginary changes in such a way that our thought resonates with our experience. How that happens is not something that can be argued for. It has to happen in a way similar to how westerners started seeing in three dimensions in the 15th century.

If McLuhan is right, we're moving into a post-literate society in which our interaction with new technologies is likely reprogram our brains in a way similar to the way the printing press and the ensuing explosion in literacy reprogrammed western brains five hundred years ago. Maybe he's not right. I don't know, but it's plausible. But one way or the other something has got to shift if there's to be any chance of a social imaginary that embraces a participatory ontology. Otherwise it's just an abstraction.

Liberal/Conservative; Revolutionary/Reactionary

There have always been two kinds of reactionaries, though, with different attitudes toward historical change. One type dreams of a return to some real or imaginary state of perfection that existed before a revolution. This can be any sort of revolution—political, religious, economic, or even aesthetic. French aristocrats who hoped to restore the Bourbon dynasty, Russian Old Believers who wanted to recover early Orthodox Christian rites, Pre-Raphaelite painters who rejected the conventions of Mannerism, Morrisites and Ruskinites who raged against the machine, all these were what you might call restorative reactionaries.

A second type—call them redemptive reactionaries—take for granted that the revolution is a fait accompli and that there is no going back. But they are not historical pessimists, or not entirely. They believe that the only sane response to an apocalypse is to provoke another, in hopes of starting over. Ever since the French Revolution reactionaries have seen themselves working toward counterrevolutions that would destroy the present state of affairs and transport the nation, or the faith, or the entire human race to some new Golden Age that would redeem aspects of the past without returning there. . . .

All this [the apocalyptic redemptive reaction of the American Right] is new—and it has little to do with the principles of conservatism, or with the aristocratic prejudice that “some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others,” which Corey Robin sees at the root of everything on the right. No, there is something darker and dystopic at work here. People who know what kind of new world they want to create through revolution are trouble enough; those who only know what they want to destroy are a curse. When I read the new reactionaries or hear them speak I’m reminded of Leo Naphta, the consumptive furloughed Jesuit in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who prowls the corridors of a Swiss sanatorium, raging against the modern Enlightenment and looking for disciples. What infuriates Naphta is that history cannot be reversed, so he dreams of revenge against it. He speaks of a coming apocalypse, a period of cruelty and cleansing, after which man’s original ignorance will return and new forms of authority will be established. Mann did not model Naphta on Edmund Burke or Chateaubriand or Bismarck or any other figure on the traditional European right. He modeled him on George Lukács, the Hungarian Communist philosopher and onetime commissar who loathed liberals and conservatives alike. A man for our time.

This is excerpted from the end of a January 2012 NYRB review of Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind, by Mark Lilla. I haven't read the book, but I read Robin's blog from time to time, and I learn things from him. I don't see myself as sharing his worldview, though, and I find Lilla's account of conservatism more compelling than I do Robin's.

I'd agree with Lilla that Robin has a rather reductionist view of conservatives. Robin's is a class warfare model in which ideology, one's thinking--is always about a deeper self-interested agenda. He sees conservatives as the group in any society that holds most of the power and has no other project except its own self-preservation. They are in that sense non-ideological, except insofar as they embrace whatever ideology de jour will support them in their self-preservationist project. Conservatives are in that sense pragmatists, not ideologues. They believe in nothing except to stay on top, and are intellectually adaptible to whatever type of thinking will support them in doing that. Some might believe their own self-justifying propaganda, but there's nothing more to it than the need to self-justify. 

I think that there are plenty of people who call themselves conservatives that fit this description, and if they are Libertarian, they are, as Lilla points out, really Liberals. Liberalism is the ideology that justifies the ascendancy of the bourgeois over against the entrenched interests of the aristocratic old regime, and its laissez-faire/social Darwinist ideology was "new thinking" that justified bourgeois's holding on to power against the leveling masses that would take it away from them.

But Lilla argues that there's more to it than that. The philoophical difference between Liberals and Conservatives is not only about who's in power and who's not. It's about which side of the individual/society balance you think is more important. Liberals emphasize the individual and conservatives society:

What makes conservatives conservative are the implications they have drawn from Burke’s view of society. Conservatives have always seen society as a kind of inheritance we receive and are responsible for; we have obligations toward those who came before and to those who will come after, and these obligations take priority over our rights. Conservatives have also been inclined to assume, along with Burke, that this inheritance is best passed on implicitly through slow changes in custom and tradition, not through explicit political action. Conservatives loyal to Burke are not hostile to change, only to doctrines and principles that do violence to preexisting opinions and institutions, and open the door to despotism. This was the deepest basis of Burke’s critique of the French Revolution; it was not simply a defense of privilege. 

I'm temperamentally a Burkean conservative by this definition of it, and yet I've also argued that there's very little that's part of a living hertage given to us in a liberal, market-centered society that is worth conserving. I've argued that we're in a spiritual/cultural wasteland now, and that's ok if you accept it as part of a cycle. The challenge, though, is to live austerely in hope for the day we will be ready to enter Canaan, by which I mean the next renascent era of spiritual/cultural creativity. It will come. The purpose of this blog is to be attentive to the signs of the times in the expectation of its coming. 

Plodding along in the desert is rather a bore, and I can understand what animates the Leo Naphtas and Glenn Becks. They are in the grip of the Savonarolan impulse that Lilla calls "redemptive reaction". They feel a loss, and they are made crazy in their grief. They blame those whom they see as responsible for turning paradise into a waste, and they long for cleansing apocalyptic fire. And this is where the difference between Lilla and Robin becomes important. The privileged pragmatists that Robin is talking about--the 1% from age to age--are in our own age making common cause with the redemptive reactionaries that Lilla is talking about. But Lilla understands something that Robin doesn't, which is that the pragmatists are playing with apocalyptic fire. That's a lesson learned the hard way by pragmatic conservatives in Germany in the 1930s. At what point did von Hindenberg learn that he was not the puppeteer but the puppet?

Some Thoughts on 'Breaking Bad'

I came to this show late. I've only watched the first season, and a couple of episodes in the second. I realize that the show's finale is only two episodes off, but I wanted to say a few things about it as it relates to the 'missing middle" post I put up a few days ago.

The story starts with a classic late-modern bourgeois guy who lives in his head--Walter White. He's a chemistry teacher at a high school in Albuquerque. In the pilot he is depicted as weak and ineffectual, and we seem him dramatically contrasted with his brother-in-law, Hank, who heads up the local DEA. Hank is a brash, macho loudmouth. He's annoying, but there are signs he's more than the stereotype he first appears to be. There's substance behind his bluster, he's good at what he does, and he's no jerk.

Walter's teenaged son, Walter Jr., has cerebral palsy. He's a nice kid who just wants to be a normal teenager. It appears he admires his uncle more than he does his father. At one point Junior calls Senior a wuss because he refuses to go through with his cancer treatment.  Walter's wife Skyler is a strong, intelligent woman; she's she's rock-solid sensible. She's the Greek chorus in this drama representing uncritical acceptance of conventional norms and mores. She's what I would describe as a maternal instinctual type--her thinking is very predictable as governed by convention and by her maternal instinct to keep the people she loves safe.It's hard for her to imagine anybody living outside the zone of what is conventionally acceptable.  She's not someone to whom you confide dark secrets. At some point she's going to get stretched, and it will be interesting to learn whether she will snap. 

Walter is a wuss. He's all head, and he can't get it up. He has lived a life in which he risked nothing. He's the kind of person that FOX News likes to make fun of. While red/blue politics are not overt, at least so far, Hank is Hannity and Walter is the nerdy Colmes, and there's not question which of them has more social capital. 

The story arc of the first season follows Walter for several months after he has learned he has an inoperable lung cancer that will killl him in 18 months. We learn that his insurance won't cover much of the cost of his treatment, that he fears bankrupting his family, that he won't accept the charity of rich friend who has offered to pay for it, and that his sense of his own self worth depends on his winning the prize for his family. Walter is clearly living in the breadwinner narrative about which I wrote in the last post. He learns he can do that by 'cooking' the purest, high-quality crystal meth that's available locally. But in making this choice, he must leave the safe harbor of civilization and enter the jungle, and the story is about his learning to survive there.

It's an adventure story in this basic sense, and  the show poses the question right from the beginning:  will he lose his soul? So far, despite his having killed two men, he has not, because he killed neither in cold blood. But foreshadowed is a day when he will.

And so the show interests me because I'm wondering where its writers are coming from and where they are going. If you're a fan up to date with the show, you probably already know. I fear that they will just go down the now tired nihilistic/Freudian path: civilization is emasculating; its laws and norms are arbitrary; real life is only available outside its safe boundaries. We are most alive when we are in touch with our animal instinctual self that makes its own rules.  In other words, does the show embrace the fundamental nihilism of missing middle syndrome, i.e., that we are soulless talking animals, and that morality and decency are a fantasy for people who are living lifeless, alienated lives in the safe cocoon of civilization.

I am hoping that the writers are not going down that well-trod path, and are instead groping  toward an understanding of 'soul' in a way similar to my groping for it--that it's not about either/or intellect or instinct, civilization or jungle, but about holding the two in tension--and where that tension is felt most intensely and painfully is where there is a space stretched open where one can grow a soul.

Hank is the Cal type in East of Eden, and (at this early stage in the series) strikes me as a guy who has been stretched and can be stretched even further. I'd be interested to see if his relationship with Walter stretches him, or whether he just reverts to the formulaic role as enforcer of the law. Walter is the Aron type, and his cancer death sentence has put him into a situation where the dark side of Being has shaken him out of his dormancy, cracked open his cocoon, and he has found himself confronted by the opportunity to hold the light and dark in tension, but the dramatic tension in the series lies in not knowing whether he'll go completely dark, become Crazy 8 or Tuco--or become something else, someone who has grown a soul.

 

What do Men Want?

I was interested to reread recently an old column I’d saved by Maureen Dowd in which she writes about how she was shocked to hear from a male friend that before his recent marriage he had thought about dating her but chose not to because she was too “intimidating”. She also referenced a recent study that showed that women in powerful executive positions were among the least likely to be married or in any kind of intimate relationship with a man. Her conclusion: men have a fundamental need to marry submissive women so they can dominate the relationship.

The balance of power in intimate relationships depends on the issue and depends on the couple—even in traditional patriarchal-age marriages. Clearly the dominating partner in the Macbeth marriage wasn’t he. In more balanced traditional relationships, though, it’s possible for two strong partners to play equally powerful roles. It’s not about dominating and submitting; it’s about embracing a framework that gives both meaning.

I saw The Great Gatsby last week, so I have it on my mind. He’s a prototype of a man for whom the traditional framework provided intense meaning. It was never about the wealth for him, it was about being worthy of his lady’s love. He needed a woman to give his life meaning. His life is meaningless unless there is someone to create a world for. Other men don’t need Gatsby’s grandiosity for the model to work. But Gatsby and other men who have relied on this model depend on finding a woman who wants to play along, someone who likes being the one who is the source of that meaning for her man, who is happy to be given the prize he works so hard for, who is honored to be the one for whom such efforts are expended--and who understands the power she wields in this scheme. Chances are that the guy Dowd is complaining about is a Gatsby type, and it was clear to him that Dowd was no Daisy.

The Gatsby type, in his many varieties, needs a woman to give his life meaning, and that meaning was provided him in the old narrative of prize/bread winner. But in feminist-era marriages, if the woman has gone out and got the prize for herself, there’s no emotional satisfaction in a relationship like that for him. You can say that he should change his thinking, but it’s not about thinking, it’s about an emotional need for meaning that the old narrative fulfilled and the new one does not. Many, many men feels rudderless in this sea change.  They feel emasculated and they don’t like it, and so they start looking for ways to change that, and then they become the selfish jerks castigated in our many pop culture depictions of them.

So I’d argue that many men, especially ambitious men, are not afraid of powerful women with established careers; it’s just that they don’t see that they have anything to give to them, and it’s hard for them to imagine any way to connect in a deep way with them if there is nothing their women need from them that they want to give. They may very much admire them, may be sexually attracted to them—but they don’t see them as marriageable.

So I want to start this longish reflection on the changing relations between the sexes by looking at this issue from the male perspective, and I want to do that by trying to understand the impact the destruction of the traditional male as breadwinner model has had on many if not most men since the 1970s. Because since the seventies it’s been all about what women want, and it’s only rarely asked what men do. The norms have changed, and there are good arguments to support these changes as a matter of justice for women, but those arguments tend to be rather a head trip, and I want to think out loud here about what men need emotionally from women, and why they are not getting it, and why it’s not men’s fault that they often act in ways that disappoint their women. I think that men and women both want the same thing, but that they need it in different ways, and that our culture and its conventional wisdom lack any real wisdom or models that point a way for either to get it.

So I’m not interested in looking at marriage as a social institution or a unit of social order in western societies. I’m more interested it provides or fails to provide meaning. The old breadwinner model dates back at least to the Provencal poets and the chivalric ideals of the late medieval period. Dante needs his Beatrice, and Gatsby needs his Daisy. The male must be worthy of his lady’s love and admiration, and he wins it in the public sphere. And so, yes, Lord Macbeth needs his Lady Macbeth in this scheme, though her ambitions for him, (and thus the bar he must clear to win her admiration) is more than he likely bargained for. Nevertheless, his sense of meaning, purpose, and identity are all linked to whether he will win or lose his lady’s love. Other norms are eclipsed by those. The Macbeth and Gatsby stories make no sense outside that old meaning framework given shape in the old romances.

There is something big here, and it needs closer analysis than I have the space to give it here, but I suspect that there is an aspect to this this model that needs to be retrieved, but in a postmodern key. I explored it in another post about Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. It points to something important even if it seems impossible to imagine having validity in our current confusion regarding who men and women are for one another. So all that matters for our discussion here is that this model no longer works to provide meaning for most educated westerners—at least in ways they would consciously acknowledge—but also that nothing has emerged that effectively replaces it. Is there any reason for a relatively aware twenty-something to see in marriage something to which they can honestly make a life-long commitment? What is the meaning framework in which such a commitment could make any sense, especially when things start getting tough?

We muddle along together, but to what effect? There are some couples who seem to make it work, but for reasons I’ll explain later, I think it’s rare that such relationships are deeply emotionally satisfying. Deeply emotionally satisfying relationships are always rare. That doesn’t mean that these couples don’t make good companions for one another, feel affection and loyalty for one another. But they are not most of them deeply meaningful relationships; they are not relationships about which either partner feels inspired to write sonnets. Where has the poetry gone in our relationships with one another? Isn’t that what men and women really want? Is that too much to expect?

***

Conventional wisdom demands that marriage provide meaning where couples too often experience very little of it. Its solution? Well, couples need to provide for the other’s needs. It’s basically a consumerist model of human intimacy. I was watching Oprah a while back, and she had on a marriage therapist who was counseling a couple that had experienced what he described as an “emotional divorce”. Both the husband and wife struck me as fundamentally sane, decent people—but very conventional, and not particularly insightful. The guy had been made profoundly confused by the way the rules had changed. He saw himself as doing all the right things, as a hard worker and good provider for his family. But his wife wasn’t playing her part. She didn’t want him working so much; she wanted him home and more involved with her and the kids. She said she wanted to have the same kind of intimacy and closeness with him that she felt with her girlfriends.

She was angry, and this guy was not having any of it. The problem lay in that he was playing by one set of rules, and she was playing by a new set that she learned about by reading the women’s magazines and watching shows like Oprah. This particular woman was too weak and lacking in self-confidence to be a true lady Macbeth or even a Maureen Dowd. But there is a poignancy there, for both of them. There is something that she needs, and clearly she isn’t getting it. Neither is he. She wants more emotional intimacy with her husband, and the new conventional wisdom tells her that she should have it, and it’s his fault for not giving it to her. Maybe intimacy is a word to describe what’s lacking in her life, but no one in that TV studio, most of all the therapist, had any good ideas about how she should  get it. It’s first of all not something you can demand. You don’t demand intimacy; you create the conditions that make it possible. And so the basic question is how to do that.

Intimacy is about connection, and I think that men and women connect on three levels. The most common is the physical, instinctual level. This is something everybody understands. Less well understood is a spiritual level. I think there are some marriages made in heaven, but they are not necessarily happy ones—they are what I would describe as karmic. There is some work they have to do with one another, and it’s often painful work. The rarest connection I would describe as a soul connection. It’s rare because few of us have much in the way of souls anymore, and there’s not much in us to connect to on that level. But men and women really want to connect, but they don't know how; they are too soul-weak to effect it. But this is what men really want—and it’s what women want, too. That's what the couple on Oprah wanted. They long for the poetry.

***

We have, we educated moderns and no-longer-moderns, “Missing Middle Syndrome". We are  all brain and genitals, but no middle, no soul.
 It took several centuries to produce such a type in the West; the soul-centered, premodern, magical, shamanic way of experiencing the world lingered tenaciously in the rural countryside, among the illiterate, and in the Mediterranean, Eastern European, and Latin American cultures, which were more resistant to the Modern impulse. We see soul still in the spontaneity and joy of the poorest people who have not yet become soul-shriveled moderns.  But by the time Freud came upon the scene, there was a significant constituency of top-heavy, fat-headed men and hysterical women. But top-heavy guy that Freud was, he saw the problem not about the missing middle, but about a repressed bottom. And so his main contribution to western civilization was to try to fix Victorian angelism by opening up the tap to release repressed instinctually. 



Nineteenth-century Victorian bourgeois culture was extraordinarily head centered in its Gnostic/puritanical rejection of life impulses beneath the neck, which led to the kind of problems that Freud tried to understand. And the model Freud eventually developed was one in which there was a kind of opposition between the goals of civilized life and the goals of human instinctual life. The task for psychotherapy became to find a balance between the brain and the genitals.
It is no wonder that the earliest psychotherapists were called ‘alienists’ because they saw their task as helping their patients to bridge the rift between a kind of head-centered angelism and a genitally centered instinctualism, a split that Freud thought could never be bridged in any deeply satisfactory way.  

The best that could be achieved for the healthy bourgeois post-Freud was to find a balance between the head-centered fulfillments of career and work and the genitally centered pleasures to be found in the erotic. No notice was taken of the still missing middle—not at least until Jung pointed it out. But no one (except flakes) took him very seriously. But ‘soul’ is the missing middle, and it is the only thing that can bridge the gap.
The challenge is to learn how to grow one.

What men long for, but now more than ever women, too, is the missing middle. Women readers, think about it.  Isn’t this really what frustrates you most about the men in your life? You might connect intellectually; you might connect sexually. But something still isn’t there--a level of intimacy that, women, like the wife on the Oprah show, find easier with other women because they are not as soul-dead yet as men are.  Of course, if by some fluke you have a soulful, sensitive man, you’re probably angry at him because he won’t go out and get a job. He's allergic to the soul-deadening corporate workplace and would suffocate there. 



Men want something so badly and women symbolize that for most of them, and they don’t really know what it is, and they certainly don’t know how to get it. That’s the big story behind Don Juan. He is not a crude sensualist; he is a clueless guy with Missing Middle Syndrome who thinks that each time he beds a woman, she will be the one to give him what he’s missing, which is his soul. It doesn’t work; if it did, he’d stop. Don Juan and his early modern cousin Faust, a rationalist at the end of his rope, are archetypes of the missing middle, and as such they symbolize the soul-empty, restless spirit of modernity. Both are looking for what’s missing, but going about it rather ineffectively. Give them credit for trying; at least they’re not vegging out in front of the tube.


The central point I want to make is that while this trend is at least a thousand years old, it’s come to a critical juncture in the twentieth century during which the combined effect of the changing role of women and the growing encroachment of techno-commercial values into every facet of contemporary life has all but extinguished the lingering, atavistic vestiges of premodern soul culture in the West.  This has led to a condition that is not new in the West; it’s just affecting more people than ever before, and the result is the profoundly disorienting experience of a collective soul vacuum, and the culture dislodged from its traditional moorage has been drifting in fragmented confusion for some time now looking for ways to compensate for its loss.  



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So whence the solution? My sense is that it’s the women who will take us to it because they are not as soul dead as we men. The best we men can do now is talk a good spell about what’s wrong and why. We have good enough sniffers to tell whether a solution is bogus or not, but we’re as dimwitted as ever when it comes to finding real solutions, especially if the solutions require any soul sense, which they do. Sure men got us here--it was a male-driven historical impulse that over the centuries has driven us out of the fertile soul world below up into the arid, barren, sun-drenched mountaintops of modern rationality. It was something we had to do, I guess. But it will be the women who lead us down into the fecund valley again.

Many women have come up to the mountain top and sniffed around and learned pretty quickly that this was no place to live a life. They picked up what they needed there, and have already started back down to where the climate is more hospitable. And the men will follow them down because while it might have been interesting climbing to the top, once you get there it gets old. It’s old already, and that’s why we talk about what we’re in right now as the postmodern. The modern Enlightenment impulse is spent; it’s time for something new.

So what do men want in their relationships? They want meaning--deeply felt meaning, and that kind of meaning is not found in sex or in heady conversations or shared ideological commitments. Those connections have their place and importance, but they don't meet the real need, which is for all of us to be more than we are. For what we want most deeply is to be worthy of the beloved's love, and how many of us feel that we  really deserve it? You know what I mean. In the abstract sense, yes, we deserve it, but in the deeply felt sense, there is something deeply narcissistically infantile about you if you really think you deserve the beloved's love. We neither deserve another's love, nor can we demand it. We can only receive it with gratitude. 

So much of what is grand and foolish about men lies in their absurd projects to prove themselves worthy of the beloved's love.That's Dante's story, and Macbeth's and Gatsby's. Gatsby's project and Macbeth's were delusional and evil because the women they loved were themselves unworthy. And with Dante, who knows? Beatrice was a kid he hardly knew, married someone else, and died young. She was never real, never a real human with whom one lives in the day-to-day.

So what do men want? They want capacity, for it's precisely capacity they feel they lack, and they then go about doing the stupidest things to compensate. It's a capacity however that can be filled some by the love a good woman. But a good woman is hard to find these days for lots of reasons because they lack capacity, too. And they, like their men, are looking for it in all the wrong places. 

So what do men want? The same as women--the recovery of their souls, and as they have always done, they look to their women to help them do it. It may be possible for them to do it without women, but I doubt it. The mistake too many women make is to think that men have something they want—like power and influence in the public sphere. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have it if that’s what they want. I’m just saying that they won't find their souls there, and soulless women in the public sphere are just as useless or dangerous as soulless men. Don't follow us into the wasteland; lead us to the promised land. You'll know you've arrived when the poetry begins to flow again.