Some years ago, I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however, becomes enraptured with and starts shacking up with a goat named Silvia--literally a goat. And the play examines how family and friends react when they learn of his breaking the bestiality taboo, and how each falls into a state that I call ontological dizziness.
I'll come back to the play, but first a few words about ontological dizziness. It is an experience that many people are having with increasing frequency: one is walking along in a world that seems securely grounded in reality, but then he becomes aware that all the while he has been balancing on a fraying tightrope over an abyss--and that there's no certainty that the rope is anchored securely anywhere ahead. (See Note 1)
Cultural Liberals and Traditionalist Conservatives in their different ways experience themselves walking on firm ground, but they have been doing it in what I like to think of as Reality Simulation, and these simulations give us the illusion of walking on firm ground. For both Conservatives and Liberals the simulations are getting buggy and unreliable. Another major shock or two can cause them to stop functioning altogether, and that's when you become aware you are on the tightrope hovering over the abyss. And then how does one react?
By 'simulation' I mean that people, all of us, live in symbolic systems that provide models of reality that work with data given by Reality, but these symbolic systems interpret the data in any number of possible ways depending on the cultural download that runs the simulation. It's a simulation because it gives us a model of reality and not reality itself. It filters most of reality out because there's too much data there to work with. When the simulation breaks down reality that has been filtered out comes rushing in and then the interesting question is how one reacts? The Christian existentialist Karl Jaspers called this experience "shipwreck", and everything depends on how the shipwrecked respond. Do they drown, or do they open up to something deeper and richer. This is what I think Albee's play is all about.
Our acculturation sets the filters, and it runs a program that takes the data given by Reality and assembles it into patterns that make a kind of sense of it. A crude analogy here might be an airplane pilot trying to land his plane in a fog using only instruments. He has access to enough accurate data to enable him to navigate the landing, but those instruments filter out everything else as noise.
The best cultural simulations work with the broadest range of accurate data, but even when a simulation works with good data, it always filters out more than it lets in. The tighter the filters, the greater the feeling of alienation; the more porous the filters, the richer the feeling of connection. Someone experiencing Zen satori clearly has a richer, deeper experience of what's there in Reality, but he still filters out more than he filters in. (See Note 2)
I think that most human mistakes are caused by the fact that all simulations that shape our imagination of Reality--even the best of them--always work with incomplete data, and so the programs that run the simulation can only provide best guesses in their interpretation of the data available to it. If the simulation seems to work, i.e., if it enables us to navigate in our day-to-day life, we assume its filtering and organization of the data are good enough. We will continue to think everything is just fine until the simulation gets buggy and starts letting in information about Reality that can crash the simulation.
And because Reality and our relationship with it is dynamic and continuously evolving--or regressing-- sooner or later all simulations break down or need to be upgraded to make the necessary adjustments. It's better for us if the adjustments are gradual--as in the Leonard Cohen lyric--
Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering,
There's a crack in everything, That's how the light gets in.”
The Liberal Simulation has developed in such a way that data suggesting a transcendent spiritual dimension to Reality has been filtered out, even if it seeps in through a crack here and there. Conservatives on the other hand cling to aspects of an older simulation that affirm transcendence, but most have no more access to data about transcendence than Liberals do because they live in the same modern simulation with all the same perceptual filters that Liberals have.
They hold onto what the premodern ancestors understood about reality without the experience that the ancestors had to validate it. I'm not saying people don't have spiritual experiences. People have them all the time. But they don't know how to interpret them or work with them because they live in a simulation that for the most part doesn't take them seriously as real data and treats them as noise.
Progress, the hope for a better future, until about a hundred years ago, had been intrinsic to the Liberal simulation, but the new data given by the reality of the World Wars, the dropping of the atom bomb, the unraveling of traditional American cultural norms in the sixties and seventies, the failure of the Political Left almost everywhere since the 80s has led the Progressive Left to surrender to the anarchy of markets and to a rejection of any grand narratives that suggests there is anything but ontological anarchy.
And so at least among the elite on the Cultural Left, their simulation no longer allows for narratives in which some kind of better future is a possibility, because the word "better" really is a word fraught with metaphysical assumptions that are no longer part of their simulation. Social Justice no longer has a relationship to the idea of the Transcendent Good. It has come to be reduced to a merely negative program to destroy traditionalist taboos. There is for them now only oppressed and liberated with no reason to justify why one group shouldn't be oppressed and another dominant except that it's not nice to oppress people. Otherwise randomness is all, so learn to live with it.
The main difference between Liberals and Conservatives is that Liberals have done a better job of accepting and adapting to the anarchic conditions of Late Modernity. That doesn't make them right; they're not. It just means they're better adapted. They go with the flow because they have no place to set their feet to resist it.
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So this idea of Ontological Dizziness, I would argue, is a key to understanding what Albee is up to in The Goat. In Albee's play, Stevie, Martin's wife, finds herself precisely in this condition of Ontological Dizziness. Her Reality Simulation has been shattered with the shock in learning that her "normal" husband is sexually involved with a goat. So, after her violent, dish-throwing, furniture-overturning rant during the middle of the play when she learns about her husband's "infidelity", she goes out to find Silvia, the goat, severs her head, and hauls the carcass onto the stage in the play's final moment. It's pretty horrifying.
At first, I thought his play was going to be just another transgressive, HBO-style exercise in shock and norm busting, but I think Albee is trying to give the audience an experience of what's causing such widespread ontological dizziness throughout the culture. And so it struck me that the play is a rather conservative statement about the human condition. It seeks to point out that all human beings, even well-educated cosmopolitan, tolerant, live-and-let-live Liberals, need cultural norms and taboos. Even they have limits, and when they are subverted, they experience ontological dizziness just as their conservative counterparts do. Liberals are more like Conservatives than they might want to acknowledge. We all have these filtering systems because we cannot deal with too much reality. They're just different depending on your acculturation.
So, let's go with the basic Freudian/Deleuze-Guattarian assumption, as Albee seems to do, that all human beings are polymorphously perverse in their desires, but those desires are repressed by the Oedipus Complex, which is the cultural download of codes and taboos that we all receive as children. Humans, no matter what their culture, have the Oedipus Complex, which generates the codes in the symbolic sphere--the Reality Simulation--that gives humans their sense of order, an order that no sane person can live without. It creates the program--different for different cultures--that the simulation plays for us.
After the curtain came down, the actors and directors came out to discuss the play with the audience. And I asked these very artsy, urban-hip, intelligent students whether they thought Stevie had over-reacted. "Why couldn't she be more tolerant and understanding of her husband?" I asked. I was curious to see how far their non-judgmental, anything-goes-so-long-as-you-don't-hurt-anybody ethic extended. Apparently it does not extend to bestiality. All the students thought that Stevie's violent freak-out was completely understandable, and that this was not a play celebrating bestiality, but one condemning Martin's committing it.
Apparently some sexual taboos are still in place with this generation. But why should bestiality be so horrifying if taboos are just arbitrary social constructions? Isn't that what these students have come to believe about all the traditional taboos that govern the ethos of Rural America? Why is bestiality different? Martin makes clear that his relationship with Silvia was consensual, and that his love for her was reciprocated. Who are we to judge? Why doesn't everybody condemn Stevie for being so close minded? She should be happy for her husband and the bliss he has found.
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It wouldn't surprise me if Albee was familiar with Derrida's famous 1969 essay, "Plato's Pharmacy" in which Derrida plays with the Greek word pharmakos and pharmakon. Pharmakos has the ambivalent meaning of a potion that can be both cure and poison, while pharmakon is the Greek word for goat. In the play, Silvia, the goat, is a potion that both poisons and cures. It is poison as the kind of potion, like Puck's in Midsummer Night's Dream, that induces Titania to swoon for the ass-headed Bottom.
But is the potion something that creates delusion? Or is it rather something that induces 'disinhibition' insofar as it lets in heretofore filtered-out aspects of Reality? In the play this would be Martin's repressed polymorphous perversity, which is no respecter of taboos in the way it eroticizes everything. Someone like Norman O. Brown (remember him?) would say that a retrieval of polymorphous perversity and its ecstasy is the goal--and even argues that its attainment is the true meaning of the Christian idea of Resurrection of the Body. A guy like Martin is closer to it than Stevie and the others who are so appalled by his breaking of this taboo. Is the pharmakon a blue pill or a red pill? Is it the red pill insofar as it dissolves the Oedipal simulation orb? Or is it the blue pill insofar as it restores the old simulation and the sense of sanity, safety, and order it provides? Or to put it another way, which pill is the poison and which the cure?
So Martin's encounter with Silvia is like his having taken a potion that induces him to leave his particular late-modern, taboo-constrained Oedipal Reality and to enter a kind of Norman O. Brown ecstasy state. Stevie and the others are appalled by the breaking of the taboo, by the disgust that is evoked by the physical act, but for Martin it's all about the ecstasy, an ecstasy he knows the others cannot understand because they have not taken the potion.The old Liberal, taboo-constrained Simulation is dissolved, and he goes into a new, polymorphously perverse simulation of de-tabooed ecstatic Desire. If you've seen Peter Schaffer's play Equus, it explores the same territory. The psychiatrist, 'Martin' Dysart, comes to envy Alan Strang, who by all normal standards of sanity is a madman.
Is Martin ill? Or is Stevie? Or are they both? Now, to step outside the Oedipal Simulation in Freudian terms is mental illness. The degree to which one steps out determines whether one's illness is neurosis or psychosis. So do both need a cure? Which pill to take then--the red or the blue? They both are experiencing aspects of Reality outside the Oedipal System that in their case is defined by the Liberal cosmopolitan Simulation. It has broken down in different ways for both; it's just that Martin does not feel the need to return to the old order whereas Stevie does, and so she acts in uncharacteristically violent ways for an otherwise tolerant, cosmopolitan liberal in order that she might restore the old order.
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And so it struck me that one of the takeaways for these students--and all Liberal, cosmopolitan audiences--is that everybody has taboo systems, and everybody needs them, and when they are subverted, it's understandable that people react as Stevie did, And it's completely understandable that she wants to go back into the old simulation--she wants that blue pill. But if Stevie's violent reaction to the subversion of the bestiality taboo is understandable, isn't the violent reaction of Red America to the subversion of its taboos equally understandable?
The question here is not about what's right or wrong in any ultimate sense, but in just understanding the role that taboos play in keeping us sane. There is nothing absolute about superego, but we need one. The question is how to transform it so that it does its job of preserving our sanity while at the same time it becomes more permeable to a broader, richer experience of Reality.
And I would add that superego always assumes some kind of grand narrative. Collective sanity--a cure for our chronic ontological dizziness--cannot be restored without there being some plausible collective imagination of future possibility that is grounded in Reality. The challenge for us is not to live without such a narrative, but to develop a good one, one that works with the real data that Reality provides for us. Reality is in large part chaotic and anarchic, but what's more important is that humans learn how to work with those energies lawfully. In order to do that, you have to believe that lawfulness has some ontological grounding.
And we don't have a narrative for that yet, at least not one that has broad acceptance. But for me such a future narrative will draw upon the wisdom of the past. While we are in our bodies we will never be able to live outside a Reality Simulation--i.e., the symbolic systems that constitute culture--of one kind or another, but we can keep developing better simulations--better symbolic systems--that use higher levels of good data and are permeable enough to adapt as new, higher quality data becomes available. And that includes data given to us that transcends the anarchic, destructive forces that otherwise will continue to drive history.
Update: After watching the the student production of the play, I used it in a class I taught in 2019, and I used it again the Fall of 2021. In the second reading I was impressed by an aspect of the play I missed the first time: Albee is at pains to describe how vital, grown-up, and admirable the marriage between Martin and Stevie is before Martin shacks up with Silvia.
In my first reading I focussed on how Martin's behavior burst Stevie's simulation thrusting her into deep ontological vertigo, a malady that could only be cured by sacrificing the scapegoat. I was trying to make the point that Liberals are just as burdened by taboos as Conservatives are. The problem is that both reject the taboo structure of the other, but Liberals have no real appreciation for how disoriented Conservatives feel by Liberals who so blithely dismiss the Conservative order.
Albee, in this reading of the play, is trying to give the kind of Liberal who would go to one of his plays an opportunity to empathize with the vertigo Conservatives feel and why that leads them to the kind of extreme, sometime violent behavior they undertake to restore their sense of stability. If we can sympathize or at least come to understand the underlying reasons for Stevie's act of violence, is it perhaps possible to understand why so many stormed the Capitol on January 6 thinking that to sacrifice Nancy Pelosi as a scapegoat would restore order? The point here is not to condone the insanity, but to understand its underlying causes. I think all of this is still true, but in my second reading a more interesting theme emerged for me.
In this reading, I was far more sympathetic to Stevie not because her orderly, bourgeois life was shattered by Martin's taboo breaking, but because he ruined something that was so rare and vital for both of them--a grown-up marriage. His seeking a bliss that excluded her destroyed this rare accomplishment. What was most devastating for Stevie was his willingness to sacrifice their marriage for the fulfillment of what is really, when push comes to shove, an infantile desire, a longing to restore primal narcissism.
It might be understandable if Martin were in a loveless marriage, but clearly this was not the case. The greater moral lapse here was not on the level of taboo, but on the level of taking something sacred--his bond with his wife--and to throw it away, to choose something less valuable. Silvia, the goat, is a stand-in for all the ways we humans choose something easy and regressive for something difficult but which is essential in enabling us to grow in emotional depth and complexity, which is what a good marriage is all about.
This is an edited version of an essay that was posted in 2021.
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Note 1: A species of ontological dizziness is described In a recent interview with Sam Altman, when the NY Times's Casey Newton says--
Casey Newton: I want to ask you about this feeling that Kevin and I have had; we call it “A.I. vertigo.” There’s this moment when you contemplate an A.I. future, and you start to think about what it might mean for the job market, your own job, your daily life, for society. And there is this kind of dizziness that I find sets in. And this year I actually had a nightmare about AGI. And then I sort of asked around, and I feel like people who work on this stuff — that’s not uncommon. I wonder if you have had these moments of vertigo. Or is there at some point where you think about it long enough that you feel like you get your legs underneath you?
Sam Altman: There were some. There were some very strange, extreme vertigo moments. Particularly around the launch of GPT-3. But you do get your legs under you. And I think the future will somehow be less different than we think. Like, we invent AGI, and it matters less than we think. And yet it’s what I expect to happen.
I wonder exactly what he did to get his legs under him, because engineering the possible extinction of humanity is a taboo that maybe humans should try to hold onto. Apparently he's just convinced himself that it's going to be, you know, great. No worries.
Note 2: I'm not crazy about using the term 'simulation' here because it suggests the creation of an alternative reality, but I mean it more in the sense of the airplane pilot flying on instruments. I have in other essays used the term 'imaginary, which I prefer, as in 'social imaginary', 'cosmic imaginary', and 'metaphysical imaginary'. Imaginary is a better term. It's used by different people in different ways, but for me it points to what S. T. Coleridge was trying to get at with his idea of "primary imagination". But that's not easy to explain, and the term simulation works to better for my purposes here. It's' a better metaphor to dramatize the way the mind creates a filtering system that is in relationship with reality, gives us accurate information about reality, but filters out everything in reality that isn't salient. The monk experiencing satori is having an 'imaginal' experience; it's just that his imagination is more deeply attuned to what's actually there.
