After the Future

Taboo and Ontological Dizziness

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. 

***

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. 

***

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.

***

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. 

When God died, he took poetry with him

The problem is not that Eliot put poetry on the wrong track. It’s that he went as far down that track as anyone could, exhausting its possibilities and leaving little or no work for those who came after him. It is precisely this mystique of belatedness that is the source of Eliot’s considerable power. What he seems to be suggesting is that he is the final poet, the last in a long unbroken line of seers to whom the very last visions are being bequeathed, and that he has come to share them with his dying breaths.

I’m convinced. Eliot finished poetry off.

Can it be revived? The political theorist Fredric Jameson has said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. For my part, I have an easier time conceiving of a world socialist utopia than I do a revival of poetry in English.

Matthew Walther, "Poetry Died a Hundred Years  Ago This Month"

It's not that Eliot finished it off, but in his writing "The Wasteland", he wrote its epitaph.

It's not that nobody writes poetry anymore; it's that normal educated, people don't really care. It's not that nobody is religious any more; it's that normal, educated people don't really care. 

It's not that the Living Real that is necessary to make poetry and religion vital isn't there anymore; it's just that religion and poetry no longer provide a portal to it for most normal people. Some might force themselves to read poetry or go to the occasional reading, but they do not leave edified. Same with church. There are exceptions, of course, but not enough to have a broad cultural impact. Other distractions keep us better entertained. There has to be something in you that lights up when in the presence of something that radiates light. Is the problem that nothing is shining or that we have lost the capacity to see it? 

I remember when I first read "The Waste Land" in my late teens. I had much the same response to it that Walther had. He says--

In those days, for reasons I could not understand (and would not wish to understand even now, lest the magic be dispelled), the poems seemed to have an incantatory power. I distinctly recall sitting at the back of the school bus and repeating, mantra-like, the following lines from “The Waste Land”: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?”

For me it was the opening lines-

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

And like Walther, I'm not sure why it evokes what it does. If I were to struggle to put it into words, it's the peculiar mood of expectation that is likely to be frustrated. Like expecting to find a truth that is mysterious and beautiful and instead to find something that is bloody, oozey, and fetid. What we find is true, but is that the whole of it?  If spring is the season of hope, April is the month of primal, larval stirring. There is new life there, and with it the promise of beauty, but no beauty yet. When immersed in April's mood, it's hard to hope that it will ever come.

And so it's fitting that that's the way Eliot's poem begins because the mood of the poem doesn't change much until the end. (But it does change.) It's mostly about about life forms that are only a few degrees ascended from chaos. For the mood of the poem is that of chaos, dissociation--of a world we have no good reason to think is capable making promises much less delivering on them. Perhaps other people lived in other times and places when such promises were made and kept, but that it not our time and our place. We must wander instead in the wasteland. If there's a new world waiting to be born, all we can know of it now is the ugly, cruel, muddy April of it, and there's little in that to cheer the soul.

And so I think that Walther is onto something when he talks about how the death of poetry was announced with Eliot's publication of "The Wasteland". Dreyfus & Kelly indirectly support the assertion when discussing Heidegger's ideas about how great art either focuses or reconfigures a society's understanding of itself:

Temples, cathedrals, epics, plays, and other works of art focus and hold up to a culture what counts as a life worth aspiring to. Works of art in this sense do not represent something else—the way a photograph of one’s children represents them. Indeed, Heidegger says explicitly that the temple “portrays nothing.” Rather, works of art work; they gather practices together to focus and manifest a way of life. When works of art shine, they illuminate and glamorize a way of life, and all other things shine in their light. A work of art embodies the truth of its world.

Of course the temple or the tragedy can only shine in this way when it exists in the context of a living community organized around it. The same Greek temple today, decaying in a desolate rock-cleft valley, cannot be organizing a culture; it cannot focus, glamorize, and stabilize a whole understanding of being for the people whose lives are organized around it. It no longer “gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves.” The temple today can, of course, be an object of aesthetic appreciation. It can elicit “oohs” and “aahs” from the tourists who are standing beside it. But when a Greek temple or a medieval cathedral plays this role, it is no longer “working” as a work of art.

All Things Shining, pp. 101-02

If for Heidegger a "work of art embodies the truth of its world", he meant, according to D&K, the way that Homer's Iliad & Odyssesy, Aeschylus's Oresteia, Dante's Divine Comedy embodied the truth of theirs. But I'd argue that in a similar way that "The Wasteland" embodies the truth of ours. Is it possible to have truly meaningful art if there is no living community to be organized by it? Is what we call late-modern society "living" in any deep, richly meaningful sense of the word? Is there any future work of art that will have the vitality to organize what now seems utterly incapable of either spiritual life or organization?

And so for this reason I think that "The Wasteland" performs Heidegger's focusing function for a work of art ironically: it "embodies the truth of its world," but does so for a society that is itself spiritually dead after the death of God and the death of poetry. "The Wasteland" as a work of art hasn't the vitality to organize a world around it, but just enough to hold a mirror up to it so that we may see in it what has become of us. Is there any poem written since then that has had the broad, cultural resonance that this poem had and still has? Everything written after it seems imitative or at best a clever variation on the same theme. But mostly such subsequent work is tiresome because there's only so much you can say about fragmentation and chaos. 

But April is the cruelest month not because it's about death, but because it's about an awakening of life when we'd rather remain asleep. April is muck and mire and dimly realized, inchoate life. It's the pain of childbirth; it's something we'd rather avoid dealing with if at all possible. Let me roll over and sleep and dream until May, if you don't mind. 

No May poems or June poems can be written now because they would be out of season. But May and June don't arrive without passing through April, and if we sleep through all the ways April discomforts us, it's not likely we'll wake up later. 

 

Some Thoughts on 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic?  I would expect it to be, but It sounds eastern European. That's weird. So after watching the movie, I look it up, and it turns out that it is Bulgarian folk song Polegnala e Todora, and the first thing that comes to mind is Yeats great poem of spiritual longing, "Sailing to Byzantium". 

1920s Ireland/Bulgarian folk song/Istanbul/Byzantium/Yeats. Ok, it's a stretch. I have no idea whether this was in McDonagh's thinking, but it's in mine. So while making that connection of the song to Yeats might appear somewhat tendentious, indulge me. It provides an interesting entry point into a film that otherwise seems so bewildering. I've pasted the full text of the poem in Note 1 below. Read it first, and then I'll try to explain how the movie and the poem explain one another. 

This movie has been described as a breakup story between Colm and the younger Padraig, and it is that, but clearly it's working with much more than the psychology of friendship. It's also been analogized to the breakup that defined the sides in the Irish Civil War, and clearly that's there, but more in the background. These folks live on an island that is undisturbed by history. [See Note 2] 

The site for this film is Edenic, and there are three characters that stand out because they don't fit in it: Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic. Everyone else is more or less like Padraig, happy children in paradise. [See Note 6 about the priest and the policeman.] Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic are restless in a way the other islanders are not. All three need to get out of this beautiful but spiritually claustrophobic world into something bigger. Siobhan takes the boat; Colm takes to art; Dominic commits suicide. 

The story begins in that opening scene when Padraig arrives at Colm's little white house to fetch him to go the pub as is their daily ritual. When he knocks, Colm won't answer. Looking through the window, Padraig can see Colm just sitting, staring blankly, unresponsive to his calls to come out with him. Flummoxed, Padraig tells him he's going to the pub, and he'll wait for him there. No response. Padraig arrives at the pub without Colm, orders two pints, and when Colm comes in later he avoids Padraig at the bar and takes a seat by himself. When Padraig asks him what's going on, Colm tells him he no longer wants to be friends because he finds Padraig too boring.

This is a rather blunt, if not cruel, thing to say to an old friend, especially someone as good-natured and likable as Padraig. We take Padraig's side immediately in this dispute. Colm seems to be a grumpy, old curmudgeon, but soon we learn that the older Colm is feeling his mortality, and he wants to do something with his life--he wants to touch eternity.

This sounds at first rather pretentious, and surely that's how it looks to Padraig and others. But Colm is dead serious. When Padraig refuses to take Colm's ending the friendship seriously, Colm threatens to cut off one of his fingers each time Padraig talks to him. This is shocking, and soon enough, because Padraig cannot restrain himself and so peristently tries to restore the friendship on its old terms, Colm cuts off all the fingers of his left hand, first one and then the other four all at once.

What's going on? Is Colm suffering from some borderline personality disorder? I think this is where Yeats' poem might help us to understand Colm better. He's the aged man about whom the poem speaks--

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

We learn that Colm is composing a tune, and he wants to devote all his time to his music, and so the time he spends with Padraig is time wasted. Well, ok. But it still seems unnecessarily cruel for him to be so blunt about it, and we feel for poor Padraig who finds this change in his friend utterly incomprehensible and destabilizing.  He doesn't understand that Colm has set sail for Byzantium, and in doing so he must leave his old friend behind him if he won't come along.

 

Yeats' poem is about old age, but more than that it's a poem of deep spiritual longing, a longing to be transformed by spiritual fire--

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

We don't think of art as performing this function anymore. And so if there is nothing in you that feels the pull of that to which Yeats is pointing, it will probably be difficult to accept my reading of Banshees: But clearly the movie isn't just about two friends breaking up because one has lost interest in the relationship, but about one waking up in a bigger world and the other adamant to remain dreaming in a smaller one. It's about one who longs to soar, and the other who is happy, utterly unrestless and unalienated, and blissfully undisturbed until the events of the movie that turn his life upside down. But rather than adapt and grow in the new situation, he insists to remain only a talking animal, one whose talk is little more than good-natured birdsong, He's Papageno, [See Note 3] --one of the--

The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

In other words embedded in the beautiful, waxing-and-waning cycle of life and death, an eternally closed but repeating cycle the artist and the saint seek in their different ways to break open.

To sail to Byzantium does not require that one be an artistic genius. Colm is not one, but the longing for eternity that Yeats's poem so beautifully articulates is working in him. He must hearken to it, and he must resist all the forces that seek to draw him back into dreamy Eden. Chopping his fingers off is his way of saying that he no longer lives in a world where such a gesture is absurd. Absurd because why would he do that if his music is so important to him? It prevents him from playing it. But playing isn't the important thing, creating is, even if what he creates is modest by most standards. 

 

I've been re-reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining, and this morning came across this passage about Moby Dick that explains exactly what is working in Colm and then why he must resist Padraig's friendship--

Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land “seemed scorching to his feet.” And he thinks there is something serious and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.

...

Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville’s view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore’s safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, although they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God, and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.

For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the “damp, drizzly November in the soul” that we shall see is so important to Melville’s central character Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the “slavishness” of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. 

All Things Shining, pp. 50-51

It should be pointed out that D&K think Bulkington is a kind of nihilist because of his inability to live a normal, grateful, down-to earth life where the local gods will shine if you can attune to them. They see the longing for transcendence as a temptation to be resisted and that leads inevitably to suicide. There is something of Bulkington in Yeats and Colm, but maybe more in Yeats--

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

 

And while I'm sympathetic to much Dreyfus and Kelly's argument against the kind of transcendence that seeks to lift humans off the earth and out of nature, there is a place for such ecstasy, and ecstatics need to be part of the mix in a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. [See Note 4] And the phrase "out of nature" could be parsed in ways that mean more a transformation of nature than an escape from it. [See Note 5]

 

So Colm is a Bulkington type who must resist human slavish comforts and vulnerabilities if he is to hearken to eternity's call--he needs neither his fingers nor his house to live in the free air of the spirit. But I think there's an important difference between Bulkington and Colm in that Colm's path is not some Icarian, hubristic flight toward the sun. His path is that of an artist. Artists like him don't seek to leave the immanent world to live in a transcendent one, but to bring the transcendent into the immanent world through their poeisis. And that's the reading that I'd give to Yeats' fourth verse. The artist becomes an agent of spiritual transformation in his act of making. He becomes himself transformed by the power that inspires his making. 

Two scenes illustrate that Colm is not about escaping Nature but about transforming it. The first occurs in the moments after he finishes his tune, in his joy he wants to dance, but not alone--he tries to teach his dog to dance. This is not about living among the animals as Padraig does but lifting the animal into the spiritual. The other is the scene at the pub where the fingerless Colm while spraying his blood all over the table leads his students in the playing of his new tune. It's a Eucharistic image. He can no longer play, but he's fully engaged with the other players as they are bathed in his blood in this participative ritual around an altar. This is no depressed loner. This is not a man who is seeking to be absorbed into infinity, but to bring some small part of the infinite into the world in musical ritual.  

Colm can only befriend Padraig if he’s willing to come with him on his voyage to Byzantium. He has this kind of friendship with his students and the other musicians. But Padraig can only befriend Colm if he returns to his dreamy, embedded, Papageno level of existence. Padraig is as stubborn in his resistance to wake up as Colm seems to be in resisting the old comforts. Padraig is intransigent, and he declares war on the one who would disrupt his paradisal life. But of course, because it is already fatally disrupted, there can be no restoring it. So like those today on the American Right who are stewing in similar resentments about the disruption and loss of their world, they grieve rather than nimbly adapt, and go to war against those who have destroyed their sleep.

Siobhan's solution is the story told in Brooklyn of those who left the comforts of the familiar to live in a bigger world. But for Siobhan it's more than that because for her it's not just freedom from the old ways, but a freedom that is defined by the life of the mind and the love of learning. For her there’s no neglect of the monuments of unageing intellect. She leaves the island to take a job as a librarian, i.e., to work as a caretaker in a repository of such monuments. [See Note 6] She is happy in her bigger world and wants Padraig to join her, but he cannot. His world is in Eden and his sense of purpose in life derives from his grievance war with Colm. 

I think that it's rather beautiful the way McDonagh celebrates the ways in which this longing for eternity plays out in the lives of ordinary people. It's as if to say great spirits are all around you if you have the eyes to see them. You don't have to be a prodigy to share in some part of this greatness. You have only to recognize it and hearken to it in whatever capacity you have--and be willing to pay a price for not fitting in.   

 

Note 1: 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

 

II

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

 

III

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

 

IV

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

Note 2: It also occurred to me that there's something of the argument between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Yes and No. Andre wants to soar; Wally finds meaning in a more down to earth way. The trick is to live in the tension between the urge to ascend and descend by finding a way to bring what's higher into what's lower, and to raise what's lower into what's higher. Seems to me that's what happens every time a mass is said. What's above lives into our death, so that we below might die into into the life that comes to us from above and so in our dying into life become gradually agents whose task is to renew the face of the earth. 

 

BTW, Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining is a resolute rejection of Andre and endorsement of Wally. They abhor all things post Axial Revolution. They make their case in what is rather a reductive interpretation of David Foster Wallace's suicide--

PERHAPS THE SADDEST PART of Wallace’s story is that the human qualities he aspired to, the capacities of spirit that he revered and coveted, are a mirage. Indeed the entire mode of existence that he castigated himself for not being strong enough to achieve, far from being the saving possibility for our culture, is in fact a human impossibility. Wallace’s inability to achieve it was not a weakness, but the deep and abiding humanness in his spirit. (p. 42).

Well, maybe impossible for an entire culture, but not a mirage and not an impossibility for some individuals.

To be fair to D&K, they are mostly critical of DFW for imagining this reaching out for eternity as a willful, egoistic, Icarian project absent a spirit of gratitude, which I'd agree with if it were true about him. But I doubt that was true for someone for whom  St. Paul and Dostoyevski were his favorite authors. DFW is more complicated than that, and he deserves better treatment from D&K than he gets from them as a straw man who represents the longing for transcendence that they, good Heideggerians that they are, abhor.

Note 3: Whatever. Colm makes an oblique reference to Mozart most noteworthy for his being corrected by Siobhan about getting his dates wrong. Colm doesn't really care about history. But then a little more free association gives us Mozart/Magic Flute/Tamino v Papageno/Freemasons/Order of the Golden Dawn/Yeats. It's also interesting that Colm finds Padraig most interesting and likable when Padraig laces into him in drunken rage in the pub. His talk then is more than birdsong. It's also interesting that at the end, Padraig is awake in a way he was not because that's what conflict does--it wakes you up. Colm must concede that he will have a relationship with Padraig even if now it will be eternally adversarial. They can only be friends if the one or the other surrenders to live on the level of his adversary. 

Note 4: It's unlikely that if you've read this far, you need persuading that this transcendent dimension exists. But it's a territory that doesn't get much explored in mainstream, late-modern high culture or pop culture. I don't know if this is McDonagh's intent. I'm not yet familiar enough with the rest of his work. My Geneaology Series is largely about trying to make the case for the retrieval of that sense of transcendence as essential for the restoration of a vertical dimension in our broader cultural/metaphysical imaginary. I deal specifically with the idea of Platonic and Neoplatonic ascent in Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic . Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism, and Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation. For me Christianity works faithfully with the Greek transcendental ontology when it reverses the Platonic movement from ascent from below to above, to descent from above to below. Big difference. It’s a difference biblicists and fideists like Luther through Barth never seemed to grok in the way the Chirch fathers through the cathedral schools to Aquinas and Bonaventure and later Cusa and Ficino did.

Note 5: This kind of transformation echoes Ariel's mysterious Sea Change song in The Tempest:

 

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

 

Note 6: What about  Dominic, Peader, and the priest? It's interesting that McDonagh chooses not to take the easy punch at the priest by making the policeman the sexual abuser instead. I don't know that there's much to be said about the priest. Nothing special about him except the role he plays that he fills in an uninspired, pro forma way. The church, of course, symbolizes the community's spiritual and moral ideals, but usually in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way. For most people the Church is a community's superego, its proclaimer and custodian of social norms.  And while the church seems to spend most of its energies in the domestication of what remains untamed in its flock, it is also the custodian of a tradition that calls its members to  the highest levels of spiritual aspiration. It's interesting to me that McDonagh seems to respect that about the church in that the island's Church has a home for both the domesticated and those that like Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic who don't comfortably fit. 

 

The policeman is the enforcer of the community's norms, but in Peader we have the perverse transgressor of them. I could go off on a tangent a la St. Paul about the psychodynamic of law and repression, but the main point here is that in his abusing his son Dominic, he has awakened him. He is no longer asleep in Eden as the others are. He is no longer an innocent and can no longer live there. He seems at first rather a feral animal than the others like Padraig who are more domesticated. He has become something raw and wild and uncomfortable. But then there's that tender moment with Siobhan when in his stumbling way he asks if it would be possible for her to love him. Siobhan understands the poignancy of the moment, and is kind in her refusal. But for Dominic it was his last hope, to be loved by someone he recognizes as capable of loving but not loving him. And that's the end for him.

 

 

Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga

Instead of watching TV in the evenings this summer, which for lack of energy in my evenings has been the only thing I have felt capable of, I decided to listen to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion on Audible. Listening requires less energy than reading, and the narrators are quite good. I was not aware when I did so that Amazon was planning a new series focusing on Galadriel in the Second Age. I was not aware that Queen Elizabeth would die, and England would once again have a king. So both events present an opportunity to reflect a little about my reading LOTR, with an aside to the Parzival or Grail story, in the light of what's really going on in our obsessive fantasies concerning royalty and nobility. 

I first read Tolkien's trilogy when I was in high school, and the last time I read it was in the late 90s to my elementary-school-age son. But I haven't thought much about the trilogy or the Tolkien legendarium since, and I have to say that I have been strangely moved in this most recent reading of it in ways that I was not in earlier readings. There are depths in this story that I missed before, and it's clearer to me now why this "fantasy"  has such cultural resonance.  

I think that what I have found moving in Tolkien's saga relates what in some fictional literature, i.e., some works of the imagination that enable us to transcend the everyday world in such a way as to see it in a broader, potentially more liberating context. That's not something I experience in my watching of, for instance, Game of Thrones, which I gave up on in Season Two because I found it to be an oppressively small, vulgar, predictable world, despite its fantastical elements and its overwrought attempts to titillate and shock. It's fantasy, but it's not escape in the way, as we'll see below, Tolkien thought about it. 

I'll come back to that, but first a thought experiment. Whether or not you believe in angels, let's "fantasize" what it might be like to have an angelic consciousness. If we could look at the world with the non-judgmental dispassionate eyes of an angel, what would we see? By dispassionate, I don't mean unconcerned, I mean without fear and desire. And I don't mean by it without feeling, but rather I mean with a deep compassion for the suffering of humans who are so ignorant about what is best for them. By non-judgmental I don't mean non-discriminating but rather hope without expectation. Angels, in my  imagination of them, hope that humans will make the right choices but have no expectation that they will, and are rather surprised when they do. When it happens they rejoice.

In my fantasy picture of angels I see them as having the long view, as beings who don't have politics, as beings who see the people in one faction being driven by passions as foolish and ignorant as the passions of any other faction. In fact, such a being has no interest in any kind of group mind, or moral systems or principles but only in the individual and his or her choices in a particular moment to do what is called for in that moment. 

And dispassionate does not mean that angels don't suffer, because their own destinies, as I imagine them, are deeply intertwined with human choices. I think of their invovlvement in human affairs as rather like the court of the Fisher King in the Parzival story. Parzival first meets the ailing Fisher King, and the whole court is gathered there because there is a chance that Parzival might ask the key question, and if he does, the King will be healed.

Because this is a fairy story, everybody in the court has what I've been describing as angelic consciousness. Everybody understands what's at stake except Parzival. But nobody can tell Parzival what to do. He has to know from within his own resources what he must do, and because he has not yet developed those resources, he cannot do what the situation requires of him. It's not that he lacks good will; it's that he's too ignorant, too naive, too immature--and so he fails, and the King goes on suffering. It's a remarkable scene and a remarkable metaphor that captures both the significance of human choices and how hard it is for humans to know what the right ones are. And how others--even angelic beings--suffer from human failures. 

It's such a beautiful scene, too, because when you first read it, you wonder how can so much depend on the choice of such a bumpkin, someone so green, so ignorant, so naive? Because by thinking so we are brought into an encounter with our own greenness, ignorance, and naïveté. We are given a parable of what is at stake in our own lives and how all the hosts of heaven are silent witnesses to whether we will be able to become capable of knowing what is called for. And so the point of the story is not that Parzival should just do the right thing--they could have just told him what it was--but that he must become the kind of person who knows what the right thing is and then find the will to do it.

So back to The Fellowship of the Ring: I was reminded of this  scene from the Parzival story when reading the scene about the Council of Elrond in Rivendell when it is decided that the Ring must be destroyed. While everyone is arguing about who should or should not be the ring bearer, the wisest in the group, Elrond and Gandalf, know who alone can do it, but they, like the court of the Fisher King, must wait without importunity to see if he knows what to do and has the courage to do it. Unlike Parzival, Frodo can and does.

He must find from within his own interior resources the ability to choose freely to step forward, to do what is called for. He must choose it, and so much depends on his choice, and he does. And both the book and the film do a good job of establishing what a significant and unexpected moment this is. No one would have expected this of a halfling bumpkin like Frodo, but something in him rises to the occasion and he accepts the burden of the Ring and the all-but-impossible quest to destroy it. No one would have blamed him if he chose not to, and yet so much depended on his ability to understand that this task was his and his alone. 

Parzival, unlike Frodo, fails. But he fails from ignorance not lack of courage. His confrontation shortly after with Cundrie, a being rather like one of the Greek Furies or Erinyes, who rips him up and down, left and right for being such an ignorant dolt. He becomes aware of what was at stake and how he failed, and aware also that the moment has passed, that it's not possible for him to easily correct it--but that his life mission is now to find a way to correct it. It's this idea of mission or quest that Parzival shares with Frodo, and it's only in fairy or fantasy stories that the true nature of this mission can be imagined and explored.

This is his moment when Parzival loses his innocence, when he realizes the consequences of his failure, and is wracked with remorse. How could he have been so stupid? And yet he was, and so we all are. This is the "Fall". This is his waking up to the human condition, to his ignorance. He was always 'fallen', but now he knows it, and that's an important first step. It's the movement from Kierkegaard's Aesthetic to the Ethical. He realizes now that he has a task, a mission and that he must commit his life to it.

Those who remain imprisoned in the Aesthetic continue to stumble ignorantly through life, and they do so until they are confronted with their own ignorance and stupidity, and come to feel an urgent need to undertake a quest to find a remedy. To be in despair is to be in ignorance of the need to undertake this quest. And so his quest to find the Grail Castle begins in earnest. This is the real moment of choice, as was Frodo's choice in Rivendell to find his way to Mt. Orodruin, but undertaking the quest is also to undertake a path fraught with dangers, seductions, dead-ends, and other obstacles one must overcome. But the first step is to choose to undertake the quest, which first requires that one become a person who is capable of making the right choice--not because someone tells you that this is the right choice, but because deep down you know it to be. 

The point is, then, that in matters of the spirit, whether we are sophisticated atheists or religious true believers, we are all alike. Regardless of our bloodline or cultural inheritance, we are all bumpkins until we awake to our need to undertake the lifelong quest for the Grail. In Tolkien's moral world there is no magisterium or rabbinate, but there are the wise and the foolish. There are those--Elves, Men, Dwarves, and even Hobbits--who were seduced or fooled by Melkor or later Sauron, and there are those who resist. Feanor in the First Age fails, Ar-Pharazon fails in the Second Age--and the in Third Age Smeagol fails. Bilbo is sorely tested, but resists. Saruman fails and refuses to repent, Boromir fails and repents, but Faramir resists; Galadriel is sorely tempted but resists and passes the test, and Denethor fails and refuses repentance.

There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing, and to pass the test requires not just that you do the right thing, but that you have developed an interior capacity to know when you are bullshitting yourself. Gandalf and Aragorn seem never to be tempted because they are exemplars in their different ways of characters who are fully formed. They are incapable of bullshitting themselves. They have well developed capacities for moral cognition; they have simply to discern and act. There is never a question whether they will have the courage and will to act, only whether they will know what the right thing to do is, and they usually do. They are all prodigies of the Ethical in their resoluteness in that once a choice or promise has been made to be unwavering in fulfilling it no matter the price, no matter how hopeless, no matter how compelling the reasons might be to justify quitting. This is true nobility of spirit. And this is why The Lord of the Ring has such broad cultural resonance--it provides for the culture what the culture longs for but can no longer find in its most prominent personalities: true nobility of spirit.

Aragorn, like Parzival, has blood nobility that is hidden from the world, and both spend years wandering in obscurity before finally reaching the symbolic culmination of their quests when their inner, now fully achieved nobility is finally recognized in their coronation. Having nobility in the blood is not what makes you noble; rather it's a potential (in all of us) that is achieved only after a lifetime of wandering, learning, and having been tested. How many people today imagine the trajectory of their lives in that way? I think they should, and maybe that requires taking fairy stories more seriously. 

These are old-fashioned virtues only rarely celebrated in contemporary film and fiction. The noblest contemporary protagonists are motivated by a willingness to sacrifice themselves out of loyalty to friends, family, a cause, but there is rarely a character that is motivated by a feeling for this quest to realize his or her inner nobility. The contemporary aesthetic requires that interesting characters be driven by unconscious compulsions of one kind or another, and the character arc focuses on a deconstruction of what might appear at first glance noble in the protagonists but revealed in fact to be Daddy or Mommy issues or insecurities, need for control, vengeance, or just garden-variety egoism.

That's fine so far as it goes because it's generally true about all of us--it's like Parzival's awakening encounter with Cundrie, but it is a wasted moment unless it becomes the first step on the quest. So while there's an implied sense in modern storytelling that there is a right and a wrong choice that confronts the protagonist, there's very little sense about what the stakes are for advancing or regressing the larger story arc of a human life. There's little sense that choices have consequences, not just in the immediate context, but in the larger one that is everyone's life quest story. There's little sense that making the right or the wrong decision is a test, a step in a much longer quest story that has a goal or telos.

Maybe that's not the job of "realistic" fiction, but maybe that's why we need fairy stories. They are fantasies, but not necessarily escapist. Tolkien was quite aware that "escapism" was a criticism that was directed toward his stories, and he rejected it completely. R.J. Reilly addresses this in his Romantic Religion--

Tolkien will not admit that Escape is a bad thing. The word, he thinks, has fallen into disrepute because its users too often confuse "the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter."

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.

Thus Escape from Hitler's Reich is not desertion, it is really rebellion, a refusal to be identified with Hitler. And, Tolkien thinks, this is often the nature of Escape. A man may refuse to write about the world in which he lives not out of cowardice (which is the usual accusation) but because to write about it is in a sense to accept it. (pp. 206-07)

That is, to accept it as the only possible reality, which is to adopt an attitude of complacency and despair. And that's why Game of Thrones isn't escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. It's just a fantastical representation of the jail we all live in and assumes there is no escape from. And the point I'm trying to make here is that escape in this healthy sense is only a possibility for those who can "imagine" and be inspired by a life that exists as a possibility outside the prison walls.

We remain imprisoned so long as we accept the prison as the only reality and the life within it as the only thing that can be legitimately discussed. Game of Thrones's most fantastical elements are horrors like dragons and white walkers. There are horrors like that too in Tolkien, but there is also Lorien and Rivendell and the Undying Lands in the true West. Fantasy for the modern sensibility passes sophisticated critical scrutiny so long as it is horrifying, but it goes too far when it strives to represent liberation as beauty and nobility of spirit. Then it becomes escapist in the most pejorative sense. 

The age of blood nobility has faded by the end of the Third Age in Middle Earth, and it is given a temporary stay with the return of Isildur's heir to the throne in Gondor, but the story is really about this other kind of nobility that is born from within--the kind that Frodo, the suffering servant, exemplifies. He is the true hero of the story, and all the other more obvious exemplars of blood nobility--Galadriel, Mithrandir, Aragorn, Faramir--recognize this. Their time is over; the time for another kind of nobility is nigh in the Fourth Age, one that no longer comes with the blood, but is achieved. This is Tolkien's foundational metaphor in his remarkable twilight-of-the-gods saga. After the passing of the elves to the West, the time of blood nobility wanes, and thereafter true nobility of spirit is something one must quest for. 

So now in England we have the passing of a noble of the blood--a blood line that traces back over a thousand years according to some sources, and now her heir. And what do we have really? A very ordinary woman and a very ordinary man onto whom the world has projected its longing for another kind of nobility, a nobility of the spirit. Many commentators have pointed out that Elizabeth was shrewd enough to keep her mouth shut and to play the role in such a way that the fantasy or mystique could be maintained, but that's all it was, really. An escapist illusion, but not escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. She seems to have been a nice enough old girl, but an exemplar of true nobility of spirit? I don't think so. And now Charles? 

And why this week has there been nothing on the news except this story of the passing of the queen and the return of a king? Because the world longs to be inspired by a manifestation of true nobility of spirit. And because such nobility is nowhere to be found in our public figures, we cannot control our need to fetishize certain personalities that have the trappings of nobility while they haven't the substance of it. For that we must look elsewhere--to fictional characters, the Frodos, Aragorns, and Parzivals, the unpretentious folk who are more than the world perceives them to be--and more than they themselves perceive themselves to be--but who undertake the quest to become what the angels hope for them to become and rejoice when they do. 

Toward a Normie Progressive Politics

I'm getting a little self-conscious about my incessant references to Ezra Klein, but he is quite remarkable for having his finger on what I see as the critical issues. This week he had on Michelle Goldberg, a woman I respect as a sensible Progressive and like for her intellectual honesty and personal authenticity. But she's a good example of this kind of intellectual with all the good will in the world, who I'm sure does not think of herself as a nihilist but whose presuppositions make it difficult for her to argue against ideas that deep down she knows are nonsense. From the podcast transcript:

You know, I’m not sure that there is. I do think that there’s utopian thinking around gender, and this is probably a generational division. And I’m in some ways the wrong person to speak to. There’s someone I interviewed for the piece that I didn’t end up quoting for that bigger piece that we were talking about. I didn’t end up being able to work it in, where she was saying that the thing that really excites her now is the movement for trans rights and these new ways of thinking about and talking about gender.

And it’s not feminism per se, but the idea of making the gender binary, kind of irrelevant as a social organizing principle, I mean, that’s pretty utopian. We’ve never seen anything like that in, as far as I can tell, the history of the world. I mean, this is something that Margaret Mead the anthropologist wrote about, that every society organizes gender differently, assigns different roles to male and female. So those roles, there’s nothing really natural about them. And there’s also a ton of societies that have different iterations of like a third gender, or that allows some sort of flexibility.

Nevertheless basically every society is organized in some sense around the gender binary. You know, so I think there are younger people that have a vision of a society in which that is not true. And it might just be my own lack of vision or creativity that I find it hard to even envision. So I think that is where a lot of the utopian energy on the kind of part of the left that is really concerned about gender.

Utopian thinking is now about making the gender binary irrelevant as a social organizing principle?!?! Goldberg, a married heterosexual with two kids, is rather defensive about her normie status. Maybe, she says, she just doesn't have the vision or creativity of these younger people. Maybe she's just an old fogey now, as if the arrogance of youth gives them a special wisdom and their ideas a legitimacy their elders must bend a knee to. It's the classic conundrum for the contemporary cosmopolitan Liberal elite. The rationalist materialism into which she was acculturated gives her no tools with which to push back when a truly off-the-wall, disembodied Gnostic head trip like this is presented to her.  She has to accept its fundamental validity as the next really cool new thing on the cutting edge even though it goes against what her common sense is telling her is nonsense. Margaret Meade is a straw she desperately grasps at to offer some legitimacy for her understandable negative reaction, but she can't seem otherwise to find a basis to explain it.

The problem here is that this so-called utopian project on the Cultural Left is one that can only be imagined in a society where people believe that humans are only what they are culturally conditioned to be. It's an historicist, anti-essentialist view of humanity, so to be human means whatever people want it to mean. So in the future, since there's no basis for understanding what a human is or what the human good is, whoever has the most power gets to define it. And so at some point, assuming the Cultural Left is running the government, it can decree that all children be acculturated in an AI-powered Skinner's Box where they will be molded into a society that has transcended the gender binary and whatever else the government thinks will make them happy, good citizens.

And why would anyone resist? Everybody will be happily liberated from the constraints of gender. So in such an ideal world we'll all live happily in a transhuman polity where everyone is polymorphously perverse, and no one identifies as male or female, and babies are made in Skinner labs where they are cultivated to fit in a world where everyone is programmed to be like everyone else--happy, happy, happy.

Nobody wants this--not even the people on the cultural Left--but it's what the consequences of their unbalanced equality program lead to. Equality must always be held in tension with freedom, and freedom requires a metaphysical imaginary that is open to possibilities that transcend any particular social arrangement, no matter how utopian its proponents think it. All spirited human beings aspire to something more, something that requires risk and moral courage. The irony of the Cultural Left's project lies in that the "more" that it aspires to leads ultimately to less because its presuppositions shut out other, deeper human possibilities.

Real moral progress cannot come from a behavioral modification regime but by awakening dormant but expansive moral dimensions within people's souls. Such an idea has no resonance within the secular Cultural Left.  People who are awakened like this will be respectful and kind to those who don't fit easily into the broader society's norms, but they will have common sense enough to realize that the norms, though stretchable, cannot be stretched beyond a breaking point. There's a way to make room for people who don't fit without destroying archetypal human norms.

Perhaps in another post I'll talk about how Jung says we're both male and female and St. Paul says we're neither male or female and why I think they're both right teleologically, but my focus here is about our current political situation. My objective here is not to develop an extended argument why this kind of thinking is wrong for us here and now. The gist of such an argument lies with what I've been saying for years now about the way in which Calvinism, Capitalism, and Science have deeply alienated us from any deeply felt connection with the Living Real.

This, I think, was Goldberg's dilemma. Goldberg feels the anomaly, but she can't articulate it in a way that maps to her presuppositions. So this goes to my point about how Liberals are in their own way incapable of thinking outside the norms-destroying frame shaped by Neoliberal and late capitalist presuppositions. These presuppositions certainly shape the ethos of the NY Times and news media in general--but other cultural institutions like universities, non-profits, film, literature, and the other arts. Are the people who work comfortably within these Liberal cultural institutions any more brainwashed than their less sophisticated opponents on the Right?

To the degree that their thinking is simply a reflection of the cultural milieu in which they swim, I'd say they are quite similar in their being unconsciously captured by their respective narrative frames. Are the two frames equally delusional? No, because the Liberal frame maps closer to the world that late capitalism has given us. Even if one is unconsciously captured by it, it aligns with what's there. The Right's narrative exists in a bubble that has only a tangential relationship to what's there. That's why history almost always proves them wrong sooner or later.

And so hard-right narratives are either naive or intellectually dishonest in a way that the Liberal narratives, for all their limitations, are not. Whatever positive step forward that comes next will develop not out of the Right's narrative frame but the Left's. That doesn't mean that we might have to live for a time in a world where the Right tries to jam its narrative down Liberals' throats. But I feel relatively certain that even if the Right enjoys some big short-term victories, it will not be able to sustain control of the critical institutions that shape American society in the long term. They seek to control forces that they simply don't understand.

***

Most Americans accept gay marriages, and if you know any gay-parented families, they are as normal in every way as other American families except for their being two dads or two moms. The point here is that in gay marriage what has been the traditional norm stands; the norm just became flexible enough to accommodate same-sex relationships that before were not accepted as normal. They are broadly acceptable today precisely because while they stretch a norm, they don't seek to abolish or destroy it. Because gay marriage accepts the basic norm, it's easier for traditional normies to accept gay marriage. 

Getting rid of the gender binary, on the other hand, is fundamentally different because such a project assumes that long-standing gender norms are arbitrary constructs whose primary function is to justify patriarchy. I think that's a rather simplistic, reductive way to account for gender. But for the social justice warriors for whom transcending the gender binary is desirable, it follows that it is just as oppressive as racial segregation because it was part of the same patriarchal social structure, and as such has no legitimacy. I have no desire to defend patriarchy, but if there's no idea here of justice as a transcendental, but only of a flattened idea of justice as the repeal of all oppressive taboos. But without any sense of the dignity of human beings as in some way deeply linked to transcendental moral aspiration, the secular cultural Left's taboo-cancelling project ends locking everyone up in some version of a Skinner's Box. 

So there's a difference between stretching norms and destroying them. Insofar as Democrats and Liberals in the media become associated with ideas that are associated with destroying norms that normal Americans believe are central to their identity and to the operating of a healthy society, they will be rejected by most normie Americans. This is a real problem for Democrats insofar as they have allowed themselves to be perceived in the culture wars as associated with cultural energies that are norm destroying. And so it's a real problem for democracy because it depends on Democrats retaining power. 

Democrats differ from Republicans for reasons I outlined yesterday because they are a diverse party of normal Americans who who value tolerance and compromise. However the Democrats as a party have become too identified with extremist activists in their coalition who do not represent the views of most rank-and-file Democrats. Democrats need to become the party of cultural normalcy that contrasts itself with the Republicans who have become the party of crackpot, anti-democracy extremists. To the degree that they can do that, i.e., to the degree that they can accommodate but not become identified the culture-war extremists in their coalition, they can establish a solid governing majority that could pass progressive legislation that will actually be popular.

Most Americans would find Democrats' programs attractive if they weren't proposed by Democrats. Too many normie Americans have come to perceive Democrats as captured by culture-war, norm-destroying activists within their coalition, and so don't trust them in other policy areas. Most rank-and-file Dems are normies, but to the degree that they come to feel that their normalcy is under attack by major constituencies in the Democrats' coalition, they will be pushed toward the Republicans. For Democrats to allow this to conintue in this critical moment would be political malpractice. Democrats need to do everything they can to win the culture war by presenting themselves as the party of normal American values, and if they do that, then they can win on left-of-center Progressive policies. 

Every healthy society needs an avant-garde, but it belongs on the fringes. It stops being avant-garde when it demands to be at the center. Then it just becomes a new Jacobin establishment that will inevitably generate a backlash. So let the avant-garde play its role in challenging and stimulating the thinking and often the gradual evolution of normies, but don't let them push too hard. If they do, they will almost inevitably bring on a backlash that if successful will push them beyond the fringes to underground hidey holes to which they must flee to escape the wrath of the Right that wants payback for all its perceived slights. 

Max Scheler on What Poetry Does

For this reason poets, and all makers of language having the ‘god-given power to tell of what they suffer’ [Goethe, Marienbader Elegie ], fulfil a far higher function than that of giving noble and beautiful expression to their experiences and thereby making them recognisable to the reader, by reference to his own past experience of this kind. For by creating new forms of expression, the poets soar above the prevailing network of ideas in which our experience is confined, as it were, by ordinary language; they enable the rest of us to see , for the first time, in our own experience, something which may answer to these new and richer forms of expression, and by so doing they actually extend the scope of our possible self-awareness. They effect a real enlargement of the kingdom of the mind and make new discoveries, as it were, within that kingdom. It is they who open up new branches and channels in our apprehension of the stream and thereby show us for the first time what we are experiencing. That is indeed the mission of all true art: not to reproduce what is already given (which would be superfluous), nor to create something in the pure play of subjective fancy (which can only be transitory and must necessarily be a matter of complete indifference to other people), but to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed. The history of art may be seen, therefore, as a series of expeditions against the intuitable world, within and without, to subdue it for our comprehension; and that for a kind of comprehension which no science could ever provide. An emotion, for example, which everyone can now perceive in himself, must once have been wrested by some ‘poet’ from the fearful inarticulacy of our inner life for this clear perception of it to be possible: just as in commerce things (such as tea, coffee, pepper, salt, etc.), which were once luxuries, are nowadays articles of everyday use in general supply.  (The Nature of Sympathy, p. 252-53. Quoted in McG, The Master and His Emissary, 341-42)

See also Originality and Novelty.

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I

I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live--as much as that's possible. I realize there's some overlap.

But if it's not clear by now, it should be: The most politically engaged voters on the political Left and Right care much more about cultural and identity issues than boring, practical, policy issues. Policy issues only get traction when they get culturized, as we saw with Obamacare over the last decade. By 'culturized' I mean that if I'm on the Red Team, I'm against it if it's a win for the Blue Team, no matter how positively the policy might benefit me. The more politics becomes culturized, the more it become a zero/sum game, and it's hard to see how democracy survives if this is the only political game we're playing going forward. 

And so our politics has become riven by issues of the spirit that cannot be satisfactorily adjudicated in the practical sphere of politics. Nevertheless, the cultural sphere is where the future of democracy is being put to the test, so Liberals better start learning how to play this game more effectively. If, as I think it does, the future of Democracy depends on the future political success of the Democrats, Democrats need to understand why so many people are not buying what Liberalism is selling. But I fear that the Liberals who are most politically engaged haven't the spiritual imagination to do it in a way that will work effectively enough to save our democracy. 

Despite its having a devout Catholic president who wears his heart on his sleeve, the Democrats are Identified by broad swaths of the electorate as the party of godless atheists and heartless bureaucrats. It is not, more often than not, an inaccurate picture of what most Democrats are really like, but it's true enough for it to stick. For many everyday low-information voters, i.e., people who are not riveted every night to cable news, which is most people, it's what the word 'Democrat' signifies.

Today I was on line at Costco behind a sweet older couple, you know the kind who pay their $300+ bill all in cash. Ok--I'm projecting here--but my guess is that this is the kind of couple that knows enough about Trump to feel uncomfortable about him, so voted for Biden instead in 2020, but in 2022 they probably voted Republican. These are not the kind of folks who religiously watch Fox or spend hours on social media. They just feel more comfortable with politicians who talk Conservative than with those who talk Liberal. They're scared. They think that things are getting out of control, and so that inclines them to look for a strong man, someone who can get things back under control. Trump's bluster looks strong; Biden's physical frailty looks weak. 

Conservative is their native tongue; it's what they grew up with. That's how the people they go to church with and their friends at the coffee shop talk. It used to be that talking Conservative wasn't an impediment to voting Democratic in places like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, but now it is. It's not mainly about race; it's about the larger cultural frame, and yes, that frame is vestigially racist. But that doesn't make people who speak Conservative frothing racists. But race makes them nervous.

The future of democracy depends on who captures those non-frothing Conservative votes. This couple should be on the Blue Team if it were only about policy, but they're not because it's about culture. They're not culture warriors; they're just ordinary folks from Main Street who vote for normalcy, which is what feels 'right' to them, and what feels right is what they grew up with, and what they're seeing in the movies and on TV, and what they hear their smart-ass grandkids home from college spouting at Thanksgiving dinner makes them think that the world has been turned upside down.

What the Democratic establishment doesn't seem to realize is that this is a cultural not an economic concern. Every Democrat I hear being interviewed on TV is clearly speaking as if the only fundamental political truth is that "it's the economy stupid". Well, however true that might have been in the past, now "it's the culture, stupid". Of course, they're not ignorant that culture is political factor; it's that they think they can overcome their cultural negatives with what they see as policy positives. And maybe they could if people were paying attention to policy debates, but they're not. They just vote Red unless there's a really compelling reason not to.  

Few on Main Street care about spending and taxes or extending the safety net, but they fear racial disorder and Big Brother. They fear all the stuff that feels un-American to them because it's not what they grew up with. These are not evil people; they're just scared by change. They are not frothing white nationalists, but they'll vote for the party that provides safe harbor for white nationalists because they can't bring themselves to vote blue because it just doesn't feel "right". And on what they feel is "right" the future of democracy depends. Steve Bannon understands the the future of American politics depends on who wins this decent middle on Main Street, but Liberals seem oblivious. 

Liberal Democrats have to recognize that their biggest asset is their progressive policy agenda, but it's complicated because their biggest liability is how their secularity merges with their advocacy for big-state solutions. That scares people. Working-Class Americans, even many who vote Democratic, don't identify anymore with the Democratic Party. Black and Brown voters are largely culturally conservative, and they vote Democratic because the Red Team is so bad on race. They do not, however, look to Democrat establishment types as "their" people because the Democrats represent the worldview and interests of the educated, affluent top 20%, which is not them. The bond of loyalty there is far weaker than many Liberals think.

Secular Liberals also mostly don't understand that the imaginal worlds in which people live are more important than facts, and that facts get filtered and interpreted though a cultural lens that is shaped by the world they grew up in. Ideas matter, but ideas feel true or untrue depending on how they align or don't with how their cultural imaginary structures their sense of the real. Activists on the cultural Right understand the importance of winning the ideas war no matter what because they live in an imaginal world that they believe faces extinction. Fear of extinction is very politically motivating. 

Whether or not their imaginal deserves to go extinct or whether such fears of extinction are just a paranoid fantasy is not at issue here. It is what it is, and the only way to convert people who have bad ideas is to present them with better, more compelling ones. And that's where secular liberalism has nothing to offer. Liberals need to find a vision that actually sells a positive culture message that has broader appeal, something that is more than a No to the boorish, racist, homophobic Right, something that gives people who speak Conservative a robust sense of positive future possibility. Liberals think their progressive policies are enough, but they just aren't. They need to win over the decent, low-information voters on Main Street with hope. It's important to expand the safety net to ease the stress that so many feel, but the despair and anxiety so many Main Street Americans feel won't be cured by that. It might buy a little time at best. 

***

So here's the bigger issue that has become a political issue whether we like it or not: People want a cure for their existential anxiety and despair, and Liberalism doesn't offer it. Rather Liberalism feels like the cause of it for too many Americans. The radical Right in this country is offering a cure, which, of course, is no cure. But for many it feels like a cure because it draws on a memory that precedes the death of God.

That "God is dead" is simply to say that the word 'God' no longer signifies in a living way in our cultural life. It signifies something, but the signified is not living; it's rather a zombified parody of what the great Jewish prophets and rabbis, Muslim sages, and Christian saints understood by the word. 

'God' still 'signifies' in the old, living way for individuals and some small groups here and there, but not for the culture at large. But so much of what passes for religion today on the cultural Right is an attempt to exhume the dead and to animate it with energies that have nothing to do with a Living God and everything to do with tribal identity. The god the cultural right worships is an idol, a totem, and has nothing to do with the unconditioned boundlessness that the great traditions when they were a living force in culture understood as God.

And from where I sit, that's at the core  of the Crisis of the Liberal Order. A society that is no longer nourished from a living connection to its transcendental roots is a culture that is living on borrowed time. Neither the Right nor the Left has a solution for this problem, and the Left doesn't see it as a problem. And for that reason they don't appreciate how rickety the superstructure they take for granted is, and how easily it will topple from its own dead weight when the next strong storm blows, and that storm she's a-brewin' on the radical Right. America has an infrastructure problem, but it's not just about bridges and the grid. 

When I hear secular Liberals say I don't need religion, it's as if they see it as an an option on a menu of possible consumer choices, and one that only the vulgar would choose. It's understandable if the word "religion" only signifies for them what I would describe as zombie parodies of it. But often when I hear them say it, it sounds to me as foolish as someone saying I don't need love, or I don't need beauty or nature, or I don't need music and poetry. It's true, many people live without these, but such people are not healthy, full-spectrum human beings. They don't feel what they lack, and in that sense they are in the despair that Kierkegaard described as being unaware of itself. But it's one thing for an individual to be in despair; it's quite another for an entire society to be in it. Democracy is not a priority for people who are in despair. Getting out of despair is, and they'll swallow whatever Ivermectin for the soul demagogues and conmen will pitch to them if they think it will provide a cure. 

The Crisis of Liberalism is a crisis of the spirit, which is a crisis of imagined future human possibility. And this is why so many are not interested in buying the kind of human future that Liberals are selling. Classic secular Liberals like Musk and Bezos see the human future somewhere off-planet, because they've all but given up on this one. But earth is where the rest of us are going to live it. The Liberal vision for life on-planet is too impoverished, too flat-souled, too glib--too lacking in wisdom. And so it's too incapable of meeting this crisis of the spirit in a way that resonates, that speaks to the deepest human aspirations. It offers no cure for the people who think Ivermectin might be one. It offers no cure for existential despair.

As I said in the opening paragraph, this shouldn't be a problem for politics to solve, but it is now if we have any hope for saving democracy. At the very least, it's become an aspect of politics that Liberals have to contend with better than they have been. 

Liberals need to develop and embrace a meta-narrative (or mythos) that cures despair, and I believe that the development of such a thing is possible, even in a pluralistic society. But it doesn't matter what I think or some others like me think. It's about how a shift or expansion in the Liberal imaginary might actually be effected so that it might inspire people and give them real hope in an American human future. It's not a head problem; it's a soul problem, so the solution has to be a soul solution. 

So the question is not whether or not we need religion, i.e., a plausible mythos that gives us hope--we do. (Faith, btw, is not religion or mythos. See Part II.) But it's not just that individuals need religion, healthy societies need it too. And the question is whether our culture will be able to find its way to a healthy form of it, a living form of it, one that opens us up to the deepest possibilities for becoming human beings, rather than closing us off to them, which is what bad religion--or none--does.

This ought not to be a problem for politics, but the destructive forces of techno-capitalism have created a spiritual vacuum, and there's a huge swath of Americans on the political Right in this country that thinks its politics can fill it. So Liberals better understand if they have no answer for that, they are playing a losing game.  

In the long run, the only solution is to replace bad religion with good religion. The culture has the resources to do that. We used to believe that we humans were created in the image and likeness of the Living God. Such an idea is retrievable in a postmodern (i.e., post-Liberal) key. And I fear that if something like an idea of the Living God isn't retrieved, even if only in some diminished Feuerbachian sense, then any future possibility dies for the Living Human, and with it any reason to resist becoming machines or letting them takeover.  

Already our diminished imagination of what it means to be human is so far advanced that I wonder if we're too far gone. I wonder if we have become too cut off in a hyper-real, simulacral dream, and so sealed off from the Living Real that if tomorrow Jesus himself were to arrive on clouds of glory, any but a few would notice. That couple on the line at Costco probably would. But most everybody else would be too preoccupied with what's on their screens. What they find there is so much more interesting. 

Go to Part II

Albee's "The Goat" or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness

[Ed. note: I posted this originally in 2018, but I was reminded of it by Will Arbery's play that I wrote recently about. Both are about challenging in interesting ways the more superficial presuppositions of the late modern cosmopolitan imaginary.]

Last weekend 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 sleeping with a goat named Silvia, 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 (OD). 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 finds that all the while he was walking while balancing on a fraying tightrope over an abyss--and that there's no certainty that the rope is anchored securely anywhere ahead. Cultural Liberals and Traditionalist Conservatives in this country 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 Orbs, and these orbs for both groups are breaking down.

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. Our acculturation runs a program that takes the data given by Reality and assembles it into patterns that make a kind of sense of it. The best 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.

We know there's real data, and we know when our simulation fails to interpret it correctly. How? Well, when we make mistakes, i.e., when our simulation isn't reflecting accurately what's there, we pay the price. For instance, Neocons were working with a Reality Simulation in which invading Iraq and replacing Saddam Hussein would be a cakewalk. Their reality simulation worked with some data that was accurate, but their simulation failed because it filtered out too much data, data that was actually readily available, and that's what made their plan so egregiously foolish. We can't know everything, but the definition of foolishness is to reject good data because it challenges the assumptions that govern our simulation orb. Reality has a way of asserting itself when we filter out the parts of it that insist on being taken seriously. 

I think that most human mistakes are caused by the fact that all simulation orbs--even the best of them--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 program seems to work, we assume its interpretations of the data are good enough, at least until they don't work. And because Reality is dynamic and continuously transforming, sooner or later simulations break down or need to be upgraded to make the necessary adjustments. So, for instance, it no longer works for most of us to think that the woods are full of spirits, that the gods control our destiny, that the sun rotates around the earth. Or more recently that Blacks and Native American are subhumans who deserve to be treated like animals if not wiped from the face of the earth.

Most people live in simulations that have made the appropriate adjustments, but many have not. Those who operate in simulations that filter out important data given in a particular society's historical reality have a harder time navigating in the real world. They experience OD with greater intensity than others, and substance abuse, joining cults, or engaging in extremist politics are coping mechanisms for some victims of OD. And some feel OD with such intensity that they will do anything they think necessary to restore the simulation that gives them a sense of security and order. Some of the mass shootings we've seen in recent years are motivated by vengeance, but many of them are motivated by a need to restore the old Reality Simulation that the shooters feel is being undermined by those they shoot.

Capitalism and technological innovation are amoral, anarchic forces that have, like the proverbial bull in the china shop, destroyed every traditional culture into which it has come into contact. Either the people who live in those cultures adjust to the new data or they don't. Liberals are people who have adjusted, and Conservatives are people who have not. The strength of operating within the Liberal Reality Simulation is that it's better adapted to the creative destructive forces of techno-capitalism; the disadvantage is that is that its adaptation has left behind aspects of the older simulations that worked with real data regarding transcendent dimensions of Reality, aspects of Reality that transcended randomness and anarchic change.

The Liberal Simulation has developed in such a way that transcendent data has been filtered out. But that doesn't mean there is no such data available. Conservatives on the other hand cling to aspects of the older reality that affirms transcendence, but they do it in a a way that is deeply maladapted to Reality in a reality shaped by the creative destructive aspects of contemporary techno-capitalism. 

Progress, until recently, has been intrinsic to the Liberal program, 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 anarchy. And so at least among the elite in the Cultural Left, their simulation Orb 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. Randomness is all, so learn to live with it. 

***

This idea of Ontological Dizziness, I would argue, is a key to understanding what Albee is up to in The Goat. At first, I thought his play was going to be just another transgressive, HBO-style exercise in shock and norm busting, but I think he's trying to give the audience an experience of what's causing its OD. And so it struck me that the play is a rather conservative statement about the human condition, in that it seeks to point out that all human beings, even well-educated cosmopolitan, tolerant, live-and-let-live Liberals, need cultural norms and taboos, because when they are subverted, they experience OD just as their conservative counterparts do. They are more like them than they might want to acknowledge. Whether Albee thinks that's a good or bad thing, I don't know. But the underlying point seems to be that we have these filtering systems because we cannot deal with too much reality.

So, let's go with the basic Freudian/Lacanian 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, 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 orb plays for us.

In Albee's play, Stevie, Martin's wife, finds herself precisely in this condition of Ontological Dizziness. Her Reality Simulation Orb has been shattered with the revelation that her "normal" husband is having an affair 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. 

After the curtain came down, the actors and directors came out to discuss the play with the audience. And I asked these very 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, which clearly, they all thought was horrifying.

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? And by what standard do we judge?

Anyway, 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; 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 this case that 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 orb of de-tabooed ecstatic Desire.

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 Orb. 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 a tolerant, cosmopolitan liberal in order that she might restore the old order.

***

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 OD--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.  

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. We may never be able to live outside a Reality Simulation Orb, but we can keep developing better orbs that use higher levels of good data and are flexible 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. 

12/1/21 Update: I used the play in class I've been teaching this quarter, and there's an aspect of it that impressed me more this time than in my first reading. Albee is at pains to describe how vital, grown-up, and admirable the marriage between Martin and Stevie is.

My first reading of Stevie was that Martin's behavior burst her simulation orb thrusting her into 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 order of the other, but Liberals have no real appreciation for how disoriented Conservatives feel by Liberals so blithely breaking Conservative taboos.

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 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 I think a more interesting theme emerged. 

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 an infantile desire.

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. 

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I  haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. 

I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a progressive Catholic sensibility. But while I know many conservative Catholics, I have no personal conversational relationships with the kind of people who appear in this play--extremely Conservative Catholic intellectuals who, with the exception of Emily, seem to befriend only other extremely conservative Catholics. My only encounter with people who think this way is in reading The American Conservative or First Things. The first was founded by Pat Buchanan, and it's a site on which Rod Dreher, a crunchy conservative and the author of The Benedict Option referenced in the play, seems to play an outsized role.

I think the play's performance in New York has gotten a lot of attention because like Hillbilly Elegy, it's an intelligent exposition of an American culture world that most New York cosmopolitans have no understanding of or sympathy for, and as such it is helpful for Liberals struggling to understand how intelligent, sympathetic human beings could vote for Trump. (BTW, alas) The events take place on August 19, 2017, right after Trump dumps Bannon. Although all five characters voted for Trump. Teresa, a wannabe Ann Coulter, is the only one of the five characters who did so without moral ambiguity. Teresa is smart and articulate, but she's the least attractive character in the play, unless, of course, you find someone like Ann Coulter attractive.  

I think the most interesting character is Emily, who is suffering from a mysterious disease reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's Lupus. She's in enormous pain, and she is enormously empathic. Empathy is what this play is all about. It provides an opportunity for Liberals to empathize with this kind of Catholic, but I think Arbery intends it as an appeal to his people back home to encourage them to empathize with the suffering of people who don't fit neatly into their rigid, moralistic cubbies. I think dramatizing Emily's empathy is the central point of the play and is the only real way of understanding the fugue state into which she is transported in the final scene. More about that below.

The second most compelling character is Emily's mother, Gina. She is a woman in her sixties, was a Goldwater girl who knew Hillary Clinton when she was one too, but unlike Clinton Gina remained faithful to the kind of peculiar Libertarian cultural conservatism that Goldwater and later Reagan represented while at the same time being a committed Catholic. She is a First Things kind of conservative Catholic. Perhaps not--she could be a The American Conservative kind of Catholic. The first is more Neoconservative, the latter Paleoconservative, or Rod-Dreher-Crunchy-Conservative. She supported Pat Buchanan, founder of The American Conservative, in his presidential run. 

Gina is the kind of person I've written about over the years who I argue does not understand the intellectual incoherence of holding her Christian commitment together with her capitalist/libertarian political ideology. People like her claim that Liberalism is destroying everything they hold sacred while at the same time embracing capitalism, the engine of cultural Liberalism. Capitalism is the single most powerful force in history in destroying what all traditionalists hold sacred. One of the few people in that conservative Catholic world whose acuity I respect is Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen. He doesn't make that mistake.

I don't know if Gina would be a fan of Ayn Rand, as the similarly intellectually incoherent Catholic Conservative Paul Ryan is, but it wouldn't surprise me. I take that back. I don't think Gina would be taken in by a celebrant of the Darwinian Self like Rand, and she's better and more interesting than a big dope like Ryan. But she has a Barry Goldwater poster in her office, and that speaks to a simplistic, ideological borderline fanaticism that is disturbing. It raises the question: when does having principles slide into becoming fanaticism? More on that below. 

As written, Gina is the kind of person who is a second-rate thinker. I don't mean that in a pejorative, judgmental sense but more in a neutral descriptive one. Most of us are second rate. We are first-rate to the degree that we have thoroughly examined and critiqued our presuppositions. Gina does not lack intelligence or an instinct for truth, but she lives in a parochial world in which the incoherence of her presuppositions have never been challenged--at least not in a compelling way that could pierce her formidably wrought conservative armor. She is in that respect like most intelligent, interesting people, including Liberals.

Few people undertake that kind of rigorous self-examination, but most decent people are open to change their mind, and that's what prevents them from being third rate. Any kind of reductionistic, ideological thinking is third rate. Scientistic materialism of the Dawkins variety, for instance, is third rate in this sense. Or when First Things defended the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it exposed itself in all its ignominious ideological, third rateness. 

To become first rate requires humility enough to recognize the provisionality and limitations of one's thinking and to realize that one's thinking is an evolving, dynamic process. This doesn't mean that anything goes, but that we never arrive, we are always groping toward a deeper apprehension of the truth. Nothing about the truth is black and white, but there is better and worse, deeper and more superficial. Ideological thinking is not about seeking truth and articulating what one finds, but about defending a rigidified abstraction that has lost its living connection to whatever intuitions originally inspired it. A good part of Gina is very much a defender of the faith in this ideological sense, but unlike her protege Teresa, she strikes me as the kind of person who has an openness that makes a deeper movement of the mind a possibility. 

So what's more important about Gina is her basic moral instincts and a basic vulnerability to the truth when it presents itself to her. She's someone who has that possibility in a way that her protege Teresa does not. While she is still captured by her ideological thinking, she's still open. Teresa, intelligent though she is, is a third rate thinker because she lacks that openness to have her ideological thinking be subverted by the truth. Gina is still captured by ideological thinking, but she's not possessed by it in the fanatical way that Teresa is. Gina's healthy moral instincts save her from that. She is Emily's mother, after all.

Although she voted for Trump, Gina has no illusions about Trump and his crowd, and she laces into the Bannonite Teresa in a fittingly apt way that echoes the way that Teresa laced into Kevin earlier in the play. What goes around comes around. But I think that the animus that Gina directs toward Teresa is grounded in a projection of the aforementioned fanatical part of herself that she hasn't yet come to own. Gina is an interesting, but not yet integrated woman. Like most of us, she has parts within her that are not talking to one another. The Emily part isn't talking to the Teresa part, but the Emily part is stronger. 

So Gina is someone, unlike most conservatives I know, with whom I could have a conversation. I think she profoundly misreads the zeitgeist, but does it honestly. She lives and works in a siloed world where she would not have occasion to meet and talk with sane Progressives. She too easily dismisses them as abettors of abortion. Abortion as a political issue makes both Liberals and Conservatives crazy. It's a shibboleth issue for someone like Gina, and as such, as it is for someone from NARAL or MSNBC, it becomes a moral issue virtually impossible to discuss in a sane way. 

Teresa, on the other hand, is an articulate, all-in fanatic. She has virtually no self knowledge, and so no way of understanding the egoism that drives her. She believes that we're headed for a civil war, and that her generation, the millennials who are the Heroes of the Fourth Turning, have to be ready to fight the good fight. She's the kind of person who would have been among the mob storming the Capitol on Jan 6. So I guess if you want an intelligent, articulate justification for that kind of fanaticism, her speeches in the play provide it. But the bottom line is that she's a morally callow nutcase, like most of the people whose ambitions lead them to draft behind someone like Trump. She is a Social Darwinian obsessed with tribal survival. She has no sense that 'tribal Catholic' is an oxymoron. The spirit of the gospels is something incomprehensible to her. Gina sees that about her, and calls it out in no uncertain terms. 

So in Gina and Teresa we explore the question--When does being principled bleed into being a fanatic. Barry Goldwater famously said that "...extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue." Anyone with a lick of sense recognizes extremism/moderation as a false binary, and for that reason Conservatives who find this false binary inspiring confuse being principled with being fanatical. Robespierre didn't think of himself as a fanatic, but as principled. So do Goldwaterite Libertarians. In other words, when being principled becomes a function of reductionistic, third-rate ideological thinking, it is a form of fanaticism. 

It's true that being a moderate can be a coverup for being mushy, for not believing in anything. But moral maturity is always first generous in its judgments and discerning and compassionate in sussing out the good in the fundamental messiness of human affairs. If that manifests as moderation, tolerance, compassion, let's have more of it. Emily is moderate in this deeper sense. She certainly has more generosity of spirit than I have. For instance, she sees more good in someone like Teresa than I ever could. 

So in Gina we have someone who remains largely an unreconstructed Goldwater Girl and for that reason, despite her better moral instincts, retains a latent fanaticism in the liminal shadowy parts of her soul. In someone like Teresa, she encounters that fanaticism in full, throbbing, living color. Gina is horrified by Teresa at least in part because Gina was her mentor when Teresa was a student, and so Gina must now confront in Teresa something of herself that she imparted to Teresa, the latent part of herself that she thought was "principled" but was in fact always much darker. I'd like to think that Gina has the capacity to own that part of herself and do something about it. 

There is nothing much to say about the other two characters. Kevin, a holy fool, brings some comic relief. He represents the chaos archetype. He is Dostoyevski's Smerdyakov or Lear's jester--a teller of uncomfortable truths and asker of uncomfortable questions.  He keeps things moving. Justin, the fifth character, is the chivalric good soldier. A decent guy, an idealist, but lacks down-to-earth sense. His children's book idea--"The Grateful Acre"--is truly bizarre. It parodies a genuine moral insight about gratitude in a way that is off-the-wall inappropriate for children. I think Arbery almost certainly intends it as a sendup of a  perverse, masochistic, peculiarly Catholic celebration of suffering. I say so because I think he has an important to say about Emily's suffering that contrasts with it.  

So back to Emily. There is on the more mystical fringes of Christianity this idea that the most saintly people are capable of identifying empathically in a deeply specific bodily way with the suffering of others. St. Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio were stigmatists, which means that they so empathically identified with the crucified Christ that they developed in their own bodies the the wounds in the hands and feet from the nails that held him to the cross. 

The novelist and Dante scholar Charles Williams talks about substitutionary love. Some people are capable of relieving the suffering of others by absorbing parts of it, by finding a way to empathically transfer it to one's own body. It's a literal way to follow the gospel admonition to carry one another's burdens.  C.S. Lewis reports having done this with his wife while she was dying of cancer. I don't know that Arbery had these examples consciously in mind in writing Emily's character, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. But whether he did or not, it informs how I read the last scene.

As in the line between being principled or fanatic, there's a line between masochism and empathy and its cousin compassion. Clearly in Emily we have no masochist. She would give up her suffering in a New York second if there were a way to. But she's someone whose suffering has opened her up to the suffering of the world in a way that is deeply Christic. The strange fugue state into which her pain and stress induce her in the last scene is not a sign of Emily's lack of faith, but of her Christic capacity. She channeling the psychic pain and anger of the woman she is counseling against getting an abortion. And the pain of the woman, temporarily, fuses with her own.

This is real suffering in all its ugliness. It's not the kind of thing you write a beautiful children's book about.

Bonhoeffer coined the phrase "cheap grace". Justin's children's book about suffering is a mushy piece of cheap grace. I think Arbery means to contrast it with something deeper and truer, a capacity for compassion that is not cheaply bought. It's no wonder that so few of us have much of it except in a cheap, mushy sense. Few of us are willing to pay the price that having the real thing requires. 

Quote of the Day: Simone Weil

Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this true breaking of the pact between the body and the soul. . . .Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible. There is only room for satire. . . . Art will never be reborn except from amidst a general anarchy--it will be epic no doubt, because affliction will have simplified a great many things. . . . Is it therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure, and without an echo . .  . (but without an echo, no art).

--From Gravity and Grace, p 151

To put it another way, the politics of the future must come into being as genuine art does. The poets must become the acknowledged legislators of the world. It must be the product of people who are inspired by the Real. It must be the work of genius in the mode of a poet/prophet like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela--people through whom the god or the inspiring muse Justice shines. I say this not because I know that it will happen but because I believe it must happen if there this to be a human future. The machines must otherwise win by default. 

Our current social order is like the dyke in the story of the Dutch boy who plugs a leak in it with his finger. The Dutch boy at this point is the liberal political/media class. Its main function now is to buy time in the hopes that true greatness of spirit, a greatness that Weil describes that "must take another course", might emerge and so come to support the boy, who by himself is incapable of holding back the flood. I believe this other kind of greatness is developing now quietly in the souls of the solitary and obscure where it is struggling to be reborn.

Greatness is not to be mistaken for the grandiose. People long for greatness but are easily seduced by the grandiose. Something is great to the degree that is disclosive of the Deep Real, which has always been mediated to us by the world's true poets and prophets. And when they do, they awaken awareness of it in the rest of us. Such a prospect in a moment like ours seems farfetched, and yet I believe it will happen because unless it or something like it does, the liberal order will break apart and we will all get washed away in the flood. 

For a more expanded articulation of what I hope will be the alternative to the flood, see this post about what I call the Nunes/Bannon Mind, the mindset that longs for the flood as a kind of eschatological baptism that will wipe the world clean so it can start anew. Needless to say, this is a delusion with deeply destructive potential. 

Iain McGilchrist, Hegel, and the Coincidentia Oppositorum

Ultimately the principle of division (that of the left hemisphere) and the principle of union (that of the right hemisphere) need to be unified: in Hegel’s terms, the thesis and antithesis must be enabled to achieve a synthesis on a higher level. Split-brain patients can tell us a little about this level from their experiences outside the lab, in their encounters with life; for they appear to have problems with dreaming and imagination. In the case of dreaming, it may be that it takes place but that the difficulty lies in the left hemisphere having access to it, and therefore being able to report it. But one can see that the generation of the greatest feats of the human spirit require integration of both hemispheric worlds, and split-brain patients do appear to have an impoverished level of imagination and creativity, suggesting, as I believe to be clearly the case, that integrated functioning of both hemispheres is needed for such activity. The form that that integration takes may be far from straightforward, of course. It may be that, in the absence of the intact corpus callosum, it is impossible for either hemisphere to inhibit the other adequately and stop it from interfering for critical periods. Or it may be a failure of reintegration once the separate business is done.

If the left hemisphere vision predominates, its world becomes denatured (in Heidegger’s terms, there is ‘unworlding’ of the world). Then the left hemisphere senses that something is wrong, something lacking--nothing less than life, in fact. It tries to make its productions live again by appealing to what it sees as the attributes of a living thing: novelty, excitement, stimulation. It is the faculty of imagination, however, which comes into being between the two hemispheres, which enables us to take things back from the world of the left hemisphere and make them live again in the right. It is in this way, not by meretricious novelty, that things are made truly new once again.

The right hemisphere needs the left hemisphere in order to be able to ‘unpack’ experience. Without its distance and structure, certainly, there could be, for example, no art, only experience--Wordsworth’s description of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is just one famous reflection of this. But, just as importantly, if the process ends with the left hemisphere, one has only concepts--abstractions and conceptions, not art at all. Similarly the immediate pre-conceptual sense of awe can evolve into religion only with the help of the left hemisphere: though, if the process stops there, all one has is theology, or sociology, or empty ritual: something else. It seems that, the work of division having been done by the left hemisphere, a new union must be sought, and for this to happen the process needs to be returned to the right hemisphere, so that it can live. This is why Nietzsche held that ‘in contrast to all those who are determined to derive the arts from a single principle, as the necessary source of life for every work of art, I have kept my gaze fixed on these two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysos.’ 

According to Nietzsche, these two gods represented the two fundamentally opposed artistic drives (Kunsttriebe): one towards order, rationality, clarity, the sort of beauty that comes with perfection, human control of nature, and the celebration of masks, representations or appearances; the other towards intuition, the over-riding of all humanly contrived boundaries, a sense of oneness or wholeness, physical pleasure and pain, and the celebration of nature beyond human control, as she really is.

It will be appreciated that this contrast does not correspond neatly to the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere--more, in neuropsychological terms, to the frontal lobes versus the more ancient, subcortical regions of the limbic system; but since, as I have emphasised, such distinctions carry with them implications for the division of the hemispheres (in that the right hemisphere is more in touch with these ancient and ‘primitive’ forces, though modulating them importantly in many respects), they have a relevance to the subject of this book.

The left hemisphere knows things the right hemisphere does not know, just as the right knows things of which the left hemisphere is ignorant. But it is only, as I have tried to suggest in earlier chapters, the right hemisphere that is in direct contact with the embodied lived world: the left hemisphere world is, by comparison, a virtual, bloodless affair. In this sense, the left hemisphere is ‘parasitic’ on the right. It does not itself have life: its life comes from the right hemisphere, to which it can only say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’.

...the relationship between the hemispheres entails more than an equal and symmetrical participation of the two: there is an asymmetry between the principles of division (left hemisphere) and unification (right hemisphere), ultimately in favour of union. Heidegger was not alone in seeing that beauty lies in the coming to rest of opposites, that have been sharply distinguished, in the connectedness of a harmonious unity. The need for ultimate unification of division with union is an important principle in all areas of life; it reflects the need not just for two opposing principles, but for their opposition ultimately to be harmonised. The relation between union and division is not in this sense, once again, equal or symmetrical.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 5568-5611). Yale University Press.

I know--that's a long excerpt. But read it again after reading what I've written below.

So this is meant to be a companion piece to "Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum". I should mention here that in the same way that Apollo and Dionysos do not neatly correlate with left and right hemispheres as McG stipulates above, neither do Serpent and Dove. My interest here is not primarily neuroscience, but if you are interested in how this larger theme of the coincidentia oppositorum is grounded in neuroscience, read the rest of McG's book.

This book is itself an act of imaginative synthesis, an enacting of the coincidentia oppositorum in its own right, using philosophy, primarily drawing from German philosophy from Fichte through Heidegger, with an occasional tip of the hat to Wittgenstein and Merleu-Ponty--to effect a synthesis between science and art by helping us understand how both hemispheres play an essential role in producing both.

The excerpt above is from Chapter 5, "The Primacy of the Right Hemisphere", and in subsequent pages in that chapter he explains Hegel's concept of aufhebung with a clarity that you won't find in Hegel. The German word is usually translated as sublation in English, which of course means nothing that any normal human could find helpful, so I'll stick with the German, 'aufhebung'.

I will probably have more to say about this in future posts in a more nuanced way, but McG tries to show that Hegel understood essentially what is described in the excerpt above, which is a three-phase movement starting from a state of slumbering, undifferentiated unity, to a moment of negation that says "no" to aspects of the undifferentiated unity. This No is required so that parts of that unity recede, become grayed out so to say, into the background so that something might disembed (in the Charles Taylor sense) and stand out vividly and distinctly in the foreground. This saying No is like the sculptor who cuts away the stone so that an imagined figure might come forth. Or as in The Karate Kid when Mr. Miyagi instructs Daniel in how to prune--negate--the the bonsai tree.

Think only tree.  Make perfect picture down to last pine needle. Nothing exist whole world. Only tree.  You got it?”

Daniel nods.

“Remember picture?”, says Miyagi.  

“Yeah.”

“Make like picture.  Just trust picture.”, Miyagi instructs.

Still hesitant, Daniel asks, “How do I know if my picture is the right one?”

Miyagi confirms, “If come from inside you, always the right one.”

Is Mr. Miyagi talking about the same thing here that Goethe was in his assertion that he was able to see the urpflanze? I think they're barking up the same tree, because otherwise how do we know whether what we think is inside us is the real thing, or is just the bric-brac that have infected our minds from other sources? In other words, what is the difference between Coleridge's distinction between primary imagination and fantasy? Knowing the difference is fundamental.

Miyagi, of course, is pointing to the existence of archetypes, archetypes--in this case the urpflanze--within our mind that must be awakened in order to see the way it manifests in the particularity of this tree. I don't think the pruning--the act of negation--if done correctly, is the artist's projecting his own view of what the tree should look like so much as it is an awakening within his mind to the best possibility for this tree to realize its own inherent beauty. If he were given another tree to work on, a completely different possibility is there to be realized.

So there must be a conversation between the tree and the pruner, and when that conversation is genuine, there is no possibility of a mistake. Or perhaps more accurately, the difference between a great artist and a mediocre one has to do with the quality, i.e., the depth of genuineness, of that conversation, of his or her ability to work from the energy in the archetype in time and space. And so the process of saying Yes--the preconceptual state of awe in which I see a slumbering possibility that wants to be realized--is followed by a saying No, which is to cut away the parts that don't belong or fit.  

This negation is what Nietzsche describes as the Apollonian, and it is in McG's terms the task primarily assigned to the left hemisphere. But the act of negation is 'right' only if it is informed by what the right hemisphere delivers to it, which is the slumbering, i.e., preconceptual, archetype. [See Note 1](

But then there must be a third moment, which is the negation of the negation, the aufhebung, which is the reintegration of the individual thing standing out from the blurred background back into the original life context from which it disembedded. But it just doesn't sink back into the embedded, undifferentiated unity; it returns to the right hemisphere and to its living connection to the whole, but now it lives there with its own differentiated identity and in doing so brings a dimension of heightened awareness to the whole. This is how humans will renew the face of the earth. The left hemisphere in having come to know something in disembedding it from the whole, still knows it, but now experiences it as reintegrated with--in communion with--the life world.

McG says later--

In each [step] there is a progress from an intuitive apprehension of whatever it may be, via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytic understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it has undergone.

So the first mistake is either to remain in a state of slumber; the second, to remain in a state defined by the first negation. The second mistake leads to another kind of slumber that Hegel calls the "unhappy consciousness", when consciousness lives in a world of lifeless objects alienated from their origins in the lifeworld of Being, what I call the Living Real. This was Heidegger's big insight--that in privileging what lies in the foreground, we become captured in a world that in negating the lifeworld in the background becomes forgetful of it, i.e., forgets Being.

The first negation--the disembedding--is essential but to stay in it is a kind of living death. It is consciousness, but the unhappiest kind of it. One of the primary symptoms of the unhappy consciousness from Hume through to many of the postmoderns is to assert that the Self is a fiction. This has always struck me as parodic of the older apophatic tradition in Christianity that knows that everything it says about God is untrue, but that doesn't mean that there is no God. The same can be said of the human Self--almost everything we can say about it is untrue, but that does not mean it doesn't exist. If the human self is created in the image and likeness of God, then it follows that if you can't say anything meaningful about one, you can't say it about the other. But that doesn't mean that we ought not to make the attempt to articulate what we can know even if it is dwarfed by what we don't. We can say true things, but always with a humility that is open to what is still unknown disclosing itself. 

And so McGilchrist does a very interesting thing at the end of the chapter in illustrating the aufhebung as "negation of negation" in explaining what he understand the annihilation of Self to mean in Christian and Buddhist terms:

This idea explains the apparently paradoxical attempt according to the spiritual practices of all traditions to ‘annihilate’ the self. Why would one want to do such a thing, if the point of creation was to produce the infinite variety embodied in the myriad selves of all the unique existing beings in the created world? Would this not be just to strive to reverse the creative process, and return from Being to Nothing? Instead what I understand by this miscalled ‘annihilation’ of the self is a sacrifice of the boundaries which once defined the self, not in vitiation of the self, but in its kenosis, a transformation whereby it is emptied out into a whole which is larger than itself. So it is that neither the bud nor the blossom is repudiated by, but rather aufgehoben in, the fruit.

As I have suggested above, all apparently ‘complete’ systems, such as the left hemisphere creates, show themselves ultimately, not just by the standards or values of the right hemisphere, but even in their own terms, to be incomplete. In addition, whether or not the superstructure holds up, their foundations lie in, and are ‘bootstrapped’ on, intuition: the premises from which the rational system building begins, and even the rational mode of operation itself, that of the value of reason, cannot be confirmed by the process of rationalistic systematisation, but need ultimately to be intuited.

That does not invalidate our intuition in favour of reason, of course, any more than it invalidates other of our intuitions, such as the value of goodness, or of beauty, or of truthfulness, or the existence of God. (Wittgenstein in the Tractatus describes each of logic, ethics and aesthetics as transcendental.) But it does mean that they take their origin from the right hemisphere, and cannot transcend their origins except by reverting to the right hemisphere in a process of sublation or Aufhebung. However much rationalistic systems give the illusion of completeness--and they can be very hard to escape for those who cannot see their weaknesses--they do in fact conceal within themselves the clue of thread that leads out of the maze.

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 5782-5798). Yale University Press. 

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that there is no more important task than to find that thread and to pull on it until it leads us out of this maze. This is not just a task for us as individuals, but it must start with individuals.

I spent so much time with Dolly Parton earlier in the week because I think she points to how aufhebung works in a particular life. This is not a task just for philosophers--it's for everyone. It's the eudaemonic, integrating process by which the human being achieves integrity. People from all walks of life accomplish this. It's not an intellectual project but a moral one. Perhaps in fact philosophers are at a disadvantage because of their tendency to get trapped in the unhappy consciousness and the lifeless abstractions of the first negation. And the two dominant moral philosophies--consequentialism and deontology are more impediments than help. In the end, good people do good things, and so the fundamental moral question is not what is the right thing to do, but how do we become good? Dolly Parton is a better model for us than someone, say, like Immanuel Kant.  

But philosophers like McG help us to understand the nature of the problem and where effective solutions might lie. And a big part of that is pointing to the everyday places where solutions are already being lived so that we might learn from them and adapt what we learn in whatever way is appropriate in our own lives.

None of this matters if it doesn't help us in a deeply existential way to effect a deeper personal sense of integration however imagined--as Serpent and Dove, as Apollo and Dionysos, as Division and Union, or as left and right hemispheres. But the experience of the aufhebung, the coincidentia oppositorum, whether in modest, day-to-day ways or in some ultimate eschatological sense is the only antidote for the alienation and estrangement that we late moderns have come to accept as normative.

We know an aufhebung moment when  we experience it as true Communion--the merging of two or more while retaining their individuality--and as true Beauty, which is the response of the soul when it cognizes the how the archetypes, i.e., the transcendent elements in the mind of God, manifest in a dynamic relationship with the particularity of individual beings in time and space. Sometimes these moments come spontaneously as gifts in little or big ways. At other times they are achieved, as, for instance, the becoming of an integrated self is achieved through a life lived faithfully in response to the myriad ways grace works in our lives. A satori moment is in this sense an expansive aufhebung moment.

'Unhappy consciousness' is the basic graceless condition for most of us, especially the educated late-moderns in North Atlantic societies who don't believe in such things. Our grace detector, in McG's terms, is very much a right-brain thing. Our only collective way out is 'renaissance', which would be to effect on a social-cultural level this aufhebung. This would in part require the re-integration of what most philosophy and science have abstracted from the original life world back into that life world. [See Note 2] This would provide a path toward far richer possibilities for genuine human flourishing than science by itself and its mechanomorphic imagination of the human can ever provide.

There has to be some catalytic moment that effects this. I'm not sure how this happens, but it would be similar to what Jaspers describes as what happened during the Axial Age, but in reverse. If the original Axial impulse was to dis-embed, the Axial impulse to come would require us to re-embed, without losing what was gained in the disembedding.  

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Note 1: This idea of archetype and how it operates epistemologically needs more unpacking, but that's for another day. It's enough for our purposes here to say that there is something in the mind that correlates to something in the world, and one's coming into awareness of the extramental reality (percept) requires the stimulation or awakening of an intramental reality (concept). Both participate in an archetypal dimension that provides the transcendental foundation for the possibility of the world's intelligibility. We make progress in knowing more about the world by gradually awakening to it by activating slumbering, unconscious dimensions of our own minds. We call the awakening experience 'having an insight'. But there are insights, and there are INSIGHTS. As the mind awakens, it awakes to what was before unknown in the world in a reverberative dynamic that McGilchrist talks about elsewhere. Also, Coleridge's idea of primary imagination is helpful for how I think about this kind of 'neo-realism'. 

Note 2: My problem with Nietzsche, Heidegger and even with McGilchrist [see "McGilchrist's Reading of Nietzsche's Misreading of Socrates"] is that they think of the post-Socratic philosophical traditions as a mistake, something that permanently damaged us as human beings because of the way that it created an alienation from Being. I see it as a necessary disembedding step in the evolution of consciousness. It's the first negation that enables to individual human being to step out from the collective.  The task before us now is to find a way as individuals and as a collective cultural project to negate the negation, i.e., to reintegrate with the Living Real what we have come to know as disembedded, buffered selves. Science can't do this. It's an artistic, spiritual/moral project. This is the formula for Renaissance. 

Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum

There’s a mesmerizing and ironic artifice to Dolly Parton—a sincere and relatable duality. She’s one of those icons in whom seemingly opposing forces naturally connect: poverty and folksiness against the power of enormous success, vulnerability and tenderness against effervescent self-assuredness, a story of honesty and heartache under an image so artfully plastic it seems to turn in on itself. Her brand of iconography feels so aware of its own longing for beauty that it somehow trips over superficiality and falls back into the deepest reverence. What else is her appearance but a lie she’s telling us because she knows we love to hear it? “I think part of my magic, if I have any at all,” she once said on Australia’s 60 Minutes, “is that I look totally fake but am so totally real.” 

--Chris Dennis in Guernica

I'm sure that if DP saw her name associated with such a pretentious sounding Latin phrase such as coincidentia oppositorum, she'd have a good laugh, but one of the commonest of commonplaces associated with her is how she transcends her contradictions. But it's true--she has significant contradictions and she does transcend them. So I thought it might be important to at least try to understand how she does it. So here are some preliminary thoughts along those lines.

First, If you haven't listened to the nine-part WNYC podcast about her, Dolly Parton's America, you should definitely do that and soon. If you have only time for one, listen to Episode 2, "I will Always Leave You", which is mostly about her fraught relationship with Porter Wagoner. And the Netflix series entitled Dolly Parton's Heartstrings is worth watching too. Most of what I have to say about DP reflects what I learned about her from those two sources. There's a kind of Fichtean theme that runs through both: there are powerful obstacles that separate us. These obstacles and the conflicts they create are not a bug but a feature of life because without them human beings would not have the opportunity to discover who they are as free spiritual beings. We can choose to overcome them, or we can make them worse by ignoring them or feeding the resentment, anger, and fear that fuels them. Each of the Heartstrings stories is about people who choose to confront and overcome these obstacles and in doing so to become more themselves. 

So the goal is not only a Fichtean affirmation of self in overcoming the enemy, but more importantly that we only become more ourselves when we recognize the selfhood and dignity of the "enemy". That's more of a Christian idea than a Fichtean one. The endings in the Heartstring series might be seen as sentimental by some, but I'd say that they are deeply true in the same way as at the end of Shakespeare's comedies. After the conflicts and misunderstandings are resolved, there's usually a wedding or a circle dance, and when well-performed, the audience is caught up in a deep, archetypal joy. This dynamic is at work at the end of Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and it is at work in the Heartstring stories in a similar way. Those who dismiss this as not real or as overly sentimental misread these moments in a very significant way.

On one level such positive outcomes seem unrealistic, but that's because they're hyperrealistic, that is, they tap into the the transformative energy of an archetype, and the archetype active in these stories I'd call the "Communion Archetype". To feel its power is to feel its joy. It's an archetype that that Owen Barfield describes as defining the end of history--Final Participation--that we can now experience proleptically, that is, through a glass darkly. It's an archetype that I'd like to think in its modest way is an inspiration for this blog called "After the Future". 

If these endings feel contrived and sentimental to you, that means that you don't feel the energy of the archetype. And there are many obstacles that prevent our feeling it when it's there. If now, for instance, I was to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I doubt I would feel its power, but that does not mean that the power isn't there. I know it's there because I have memories of experiencing it. The problem now is not with the music, but with something in me--some obstacle--that prevents me from responding to what is there. I don't want to get sidetracked explaining all the "jading" factors that create this obstacle, but to be jaded is not the same thing as to be discriminating. My point is, first, that the effort to overcome such an obstacle is analogous to the overcoming what is dramatized in the stories mentioned above. And, second, if you don't believe there's anything beyond the obstacle, you won't make the effort to overcome it; if you do believe something's there, you will. Our condition as late moderns is to be largely skeptical that there is anything there, and that paralyzes us.

So the goal in Shakespeare, Capra, Heartstrings, and other classic comedies is not the triumph of the individual over the forces of evil, but rather the triumph that overcomes conflict itself in the experience of reconciliation and communion. Communion is the antithesis of the hive mind or the mob because it involves free individuals having to choose it and in choosing it to become more themselves. There is neither individuality nor freedom in the hive or the mob. True communion is only possible among people who are truly themselves, and to be in a hive or mob is by definition to abdicate both. And so the biggest obstacles to communion are the myriad ways we all live false versions of ourselves. And that's what the Heartstings stories are about--people learning that they are trapped in false versions of themselves and then finding a way to free themselves and in doing so to discover the power that lies in communion at a deeper, truer level with others.

This overcoming of false versions of oneself, i.e., to move toward deeper levels of communion, is Dolly Parton's truth, and I think it's the key to understanding what enables her to transcend her contradictions. There is so much about her that seems fake--like her surgically manufactured appearance. But because of the way she jokes about it -- "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap", we can feel confident that she doesn't take that aspect of herself seriously. Like the Wizard of Oz she projects a persona that's bigger than life, but she has no delusions of grandeur. She knows who she is, which is just the little guy behind the curtain having fun trying to put on a good show. She knows the difference between what she projects and who she truly is. I think of Lady Gaga as doing much the same thing. This is completely different from what Donald Trump does. For him there is only the projected image, and that image is an expression of what is truest about him, which is his dishonesty. He's a con man, a modern day P.T. Barnum, and he cons himself as much as he attempts to con others. 

So perhaps because I'm writing this the day after Trump's third State of the Union Address and on the day that he's being acquitted in the Senate, I feel compelled to make the comparison between him and Parton. I'm sure there are many Dolly fans who are also Trump supporters, and they see in him much of what they see in her. It's easy to see why: both are successful entertainers, both wealthy businesspeople, both, though way past their prime, still highly sexualized, both trade on their name branding. What makes Dollywood any different from Trump Tower? Aren't both monuments to inflated ego? I don't think so, but let's suss out why.

Is it possible make such a distinction without knowing either of them personally? Yes and No. It could be that I have it completely wrong, I could find out someday that Trump really was Atticus Finch to those who really knew him and Parton was Cruella DeVil, but I doubt it. There's enough evidence in the public record for both to make some educated guesses we can feel confident about. And I think an exercise like this is instructive for understanding this coincidentia oppositorum theme. I want to argue that each derives her or his power by virtue of an archetype--for Dolly Parton, it's the Communion Archetype; for Trump, the Chaos Archetype. The first has an integrating effect on those who 'participate' in it; the second a disintegrative effect in those it possesses. 

I think a post for another day might be to tease out to what degree bigger-than-life people are free and to what degree they are determined (trapped) by the power of the archetypes that energize them. Was Napoleon free? Was Mozart? I have some ideas about that, but let me stipulate in provisional way for now that the Communion Archetype operates in a way that enhances a fully developed, free human being, and the Chaos Archetype in its many variations requires only raw instinct and animal cunning. The first works to integrate the serpent with the dove, the beast with the angel; the second is the serpent without the dove, the beast without the angel. The Great Chain of Being no longer shapes our cosmic imaginary, but it still works metaphorically. Chaos is at the bottom of the chain; Communion with the godhead is at the top. 

Is there another type that is the Dove without the Serpent? Yes. I write about that in this post about Steinbeck's East of Eden. Doves without Serpents tend to be idealist flakes or hippies in the most benign cases, but in the most malign cases they can be rigid, purist, morally fanatic ideologues--Savonarolas, Robespierres, Inquisitors. Alcoholics and other addictive personality types are often idealist Doves who refuse to deal with the hard realities that the serpent thrives in. Serpents are drug dealers, not users. Or Doves enact an enantiodromia in which in their disillusionment they completely reverse poles from unbalanced, naive Doves to unbalanced, cynical Serpents. Extremely unbalanced Doves or Serpents spin off in one way or another into psychic disintegration and become captured by the Chaos Archetype. And when they do, they wreak havoc in the lives of those around them. 

In the East of Eden post, I talk about how each of us is either a dove-dominant type or a serpent-dominant type, and that neither is morally superior, even if doves tend to be more socially acceptable in a boy-scouty way. Moral development is measured to the degree that doves integrate the recessive serpent aspects of their psyches, and serpents integrate the recessive dove aspects. In other words, we become successful human beings to the degree that we enact the coincidentia oppositorum. The marriage of the serpent-dominant Cal and the dove-dominant Abbra in East of Eden signifies a successful coincidentia oppositorum, the hieros gamos. The Dove-dominant Aron fails and is destroyed as he spins off into fanatic madness.  

I would say that DP is an earthy, savvy Serpent-dominant type who has largely succeeded in integrating her recessive Dove aspect, and Trump is also a serpent-dominant type, who failed to integrate his Dove. He probably at this point in his life has no idea that it even exists. This is what makes him a madman. To what degree he has any culpability in becoming such a truly horrible human being us between him and God, but the fact remains that he is a truly horrible human being and is extremely dangerous because he is so unbalanced. His personal imbalance is bigger than life because of the way that the Chaos Archetype works in him, and he becomes a vortex that sucks into his chaos anyone near him who hasn't a firm foothold to prevent him from being swept off his feet. Until recently the Trumpian vortex was little more than a dust devil. But his election to president has made him a good-sized tornado--a 2 or a 3 on the Fujita scale. God help us if we don't find a way to contain him before he becomes a 5. 

I should say, since I've been writing about it so much recently, that this aligns with Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and the Emissary. My 'dove' correlates with McG's depiction of how the right hemisphere opens us up to the utter uselessness and wonder of Being, and my 'serpent' with how McG's left hemisphere reduces Being to a useful abstraction. The left hemisphere values what is useful, graspable, controllable. In other words it values maps over the the concrete lifeworld of landscapes. Maps are useful in helping us to navigate in the life world, but they are not the life world. There's nothing wrong with maps except when they become valued more than what they represent, especially if they come to substitute for it. 

Thus, Magritte's famous--

We need the the utilitarian serpent and its clever, instrumental reason in order to work effectively and safely in a hostile world teeming with wolves. But when it becomes an end in itself, when it loses its grounding in the right hemisphere, it squeezes the life out of the soul. McG's argument, using my Serpent/Dove analogy (which he does not use), is that we currently live in a Serpent-dominant cultural milieu, and we have to find a way of opening up and reintegrating the repressed Dove, an aspect that the left-dominant elites regard as flaky and naive, subjective and unverifiable. The culture, in other words, is like Trump--dominated by the Serpent and either forgetful or contemptuous of the Dove. 

Dolly Parton is a wealthy entertainer and a shrewd, practical business woman. That's her Serpent part, but she's not just that. In DP we see a model of integration of the Dove with the Serpent, indeed the Serpent is in the service of the Dove, and if this reading of her is correct, it's her ability to keep those two aspects in the right relationship that makes her a model of the coincidentia oppositorum. And that's what makes her so different from Donald Trump, whatever the appearances might indicate otherwise.  

When people effect this reconciliation of opposites in their own lives, it affects those around them. That's why she's a unifying figure while Trump is a polarizing one. Her fraught relationship with Porter Wagoner exemplifies this. It could have been one of the Heartstrings stories. It's about conflict and reconciliation, but not a reconciliation that was effected by giving in on what was essential for the maintenance and growth of her integrity. Their conflict was born of DP's need to be her own woman, and of PW's inability to accept that. This was his failure not hers, because he, not she, was trapped in a false version of himself, and he probably would have stayed stuck in that false version of himself had Dolly not insisted on (1) being her own woman, while at the same time (2) refusing to let PW's bitterness to define the relationship. In refusing to be a false version of herself, she in the end enabled PW to become a better version of himself. In the end, the Communion Archetype  shining through her effected their reconciliation. That's a powerful story because it's a real-life enactment of the Communion Archetype. It's the circle dance at the end of a Shakespeare comedy. 

Not giving-in in the service of one's integrity is completely different from digging-in in the service of protecting one's false version of oneself. (Hat's off to Mitt Romney, btw, for being at this point the only Republican Senator who seems to understand the difference between not giving in and digging in.) At first Porter Wagoner got himself very dug in, and so was like Donald Trump and all the senators who are digging in with him. We'e all been there; we've all dug in to defend false versions of ourselves at different points in our lives. The difference between Wagoner and Trump lies in that Wagoner had a Dolly Parton in his life whereas Trump seems only to have had variations of Stormy Daniels, big-boobed Parton parodies.

That's why Dollywood isn't Trump Tower. Both are expressions of what's real in each, and neither would be possible without their potent fantasy projections, their dreams. But whatever its flaws or whatever criticisms one might direct toward Dollywood, it's something she built to be a source of enjoyment and employment for her people in east Tennessee. I see it as an expression of her Dove and its intimate connection to the lifeworld/culture of her people that shaped her and enabled her to become whom she became. It was a way of giving back. Trump Tower is pure Serpent. 

There's another archetype DP reminds me of--the Samaritain woman Jesus meets at Jacob's Well, Photine (Jolene in Heartsrings?). She's the archetype of a kind of a lively, bawdy sinfulness that is yet supple-hearted and naive enough to respond to the intrusion of a disruptive, transcendent power into her life. Dolly's moment at the well happened when she was younger, in that boarded-up church she used to visit with all the pornographic graffiti decorating it. That's when the Serpent in her bowed to the Dove. She talks about that in episode 9 of the Dolly Parton's America podcast. I think of Jacob's Well as a symbol for the source of the obstacle-shattering life that enables us to become our best selves. It's there for each of us. But while you can lead a horse to water you can't make him drink. I was thinking of bringing in Dorothy Parker here, but it's not apt. The important part about Dolly is that she did drink, and she does think, and that's what makes her the anti-Trump, whether she sees herself that way or not. 

Albee's "The Goat" or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness

Last weekend 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 sleeping with a goat named Silvia, 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.

Ontological Dizziness (OD) 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 finds that all the while he was walking while balancing on a fraying tightrope over an abyss--and that there's no certainty that the rope is anchored securely anywhere ahead. Cultural Liberals and Traditionalist Conservatives in this country 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 Orbs, and these orbs for both groups are breaking down.

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. A good analogy is how a pilot can fly in extreme fog with instruments rather than seeing what's there. The instruments use real data to provide information about what's there. The instruments provide a stripped down version of reality, that is good enough to navigate by, but filters out almost everything else that is not relevant to navigation.

Similarly, our acculturation runs a program that takes the data given by Reality and assembles it into patterns that make a kind of sense of it, but it's a very filtered version of what's actually there. The best 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.

We know there's real data, and we know when our simulation fails to interpret it correctly. How? Well, when we make mistakes, i.e., when our simulation isn't reflecting accurately what's there, we pay the price. For instance, Neocons were working with a Reality Simulation in which invading Iraq and replacing Saddam Hussein would be a cakewalk. Their reality simulation worked with some data that was accurate, but their simulation failed because it filtered out too much data, data that was actually readily available, and that's what made their plan so egregiously foolish. We can't know everything, but the definition of foolishness is to reject good data because it challenges the assumptions that govern our simulation orb. Reality has a way of asserting itself when we filter out the parts of it that insist on being taken seriously. 

I think that most human mistakes are caused by the fact that all simulation orbs--even the best of them--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 program seems to work, we assume it's interpretations of the data are good enough, at least until they don't work. And because Reality is dynamic and continuously transforming, sooner or later simulations break down or need to be upgraded to make the necessary adjustments. So, for instance, it no longer works for most of us to think that the woods are full of spirits, that the gods control our destiny, that the sun rotates around the earth. Or more recently that Blacks and Native American are subhumans who deserve to be treated like animals or just wiped from the face of the earth.

Most people live in simulations that have made the appropriate adjustments, but many have not. Those who operate in simulations that filter out important data given in a particular society's historical reality have a harder time navigating in the real world. They experience OD with greater intensity than others, and substance abuse, joining cults, or engaging in extremist politics are coping mechanisms for some victims of OD. And some feel OD with such intensity that they will do anything they think necessary to restore the simulation that gives them a sense of security and order. Some of the mass shootings we've seen in recent years are motivated by vengeance, but many of them are motivated by a need to restore the old Reality Simulation that the shooters feel is being undermined by those they shoot.

Capitalism and technological innovation are amoral, anarchic forces that have, like the proverbial bull in the china shop, destroyed every traditional culture into which it has come into contact. Either the people who live in those cultures adjust to the new data or they don't. Liberals are people who have adjusted, and Conservatives are people who have not. The strength of operating within the Liberal Reality Simulation is that it's better adapted to the creative destructive forces of techno-capitalism; the disadvantage is that is that its adaptation has left behind aspects of the older simulations that worked with real data regarding transcendent dimensions of Reality, aspects of Reality that transcended randomness and anarchic change.

The Liberal Simulation has developed in such a way that transcendent data has been filtered out. But that doesn't mean there is no such data available. Conservatives on the other hand cling to aspects of the older reality that affirms transcendence, but they do it in a a way that is deeply maladapted to Reality in a reality shaped by the creative destructive aspects of contemporary techno-Capitalism. 

Progress, until recently, has been intrinsic to the Liberal program, but the new data given by the reality of the World Wars, the dropping of the atom bomb, the unraveling of traditional 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 anarchy. And so at least among the elite in the Cultural Left, their simulation Orb 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. Randomness is all, so learn to live with it. 

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This idea of Ontological Dizziness, I would argue, is a key to understanding what Albee is up to in The Goat.At first I thought his play was going to be just another transgressive exercise in shock and norm busting, but I think he's trying to give the audience an experience of what's causing its OD. And so it struck me that the play is a rather conservative statement about the human condition, in that it seeks to point out that all human beings, even well-educated cosmopolitan, tolerant, live-and-let-live Liberals, need cultural norms and taboos, because when they are subverted, they experience OD that just as their conservative opponents do. They are more like them than they might want to acknowledge. Whether Albee thinks that's a good or bad thing, I don't know. But the underlying point seems to be that we have these filtering systems because we cannot deal with too much reality.

So, let's go with the basic Freudian/Lacanian 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, 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 orb plays for us.

In Albee's play, Stevie, Martin's wife, finds herself precisely in this condition of Ontological Dizziness. Her Reality Simulation Orb has been shattered with the revelation that her "normal" husband is having an affair 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. 

After the curtain came down, the actors and directors came out to discuss the play with the audience. And I asked these very 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, which clearly, they all thought was horrifying.

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? And by what standard do we judge?

Anyway, 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; 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 this case Martin's repressed polymorphous perversity that 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 orb of de-tabooed ecstatic Desire.

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 Orb. 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 a tolerant, cosmopolitan liberal in order that she might restore the old order.

***

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 OD--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.  

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. We may never be able to live outside a Reality Simulation Orb, but we can keep developing better orbs that use higher levels of good data and are flexible 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.