After the Future

Mud (again)

[I posted this thought piece on the film Mud in June when it was in the theaters, but since the movie is out in DVD now, I thought I'd post it again. It might help those of you puzzled about what that post about Mandela and Che was all about--this angel/imp, Huck/Tom polarity is for me a central preoccupation, but I think it's also the central preoccupation of this film.]

Jeff Nichols' film Mud is one of those couple-of-times-a-year movies you wake up the next morning with on your mind. It's very, very rich. It asks important questions about love and truth, about the truth of youthful idealism, and its fierceness in a spirited, young soul, and also about its limits, its need to be tempered. It connects with a number of things I've been thinking about lately, so this is going to ramble a bit as I try to think out loud here about them. It won't make a lot of sense unless you've seen the movie, so see it.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious allusions to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, in this case two fourteen-year-old boys, Ellis and Neckbone, and the runaway "Mud" as Jim. But it's important background information, because the "Tom "and "Huck" archetypes are central to the way the movie plays out. They are [angel and imp,] Cain and Abel, and Cal and Aron in Steinbeck's East of Eden (See my post "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves"). Neckbone is shrewd, calculating, and suspicious imp. Ellis is purehearted angel, naively idealistic, and willing to put everything on the line for a noble cause. This movie on one level is about the necessary creative tension between these types, and how anyone is lost if he it too much of one or the other. 

Insofar as this is a story about Ellis and Mud, it's a more about Huck than it is about Tom. I think different cultural eras tend to celebrate one or the other. The Victorian era celebrated Hucks, but we live in an era now in which calculating, ambitious gamers like Tom Sawyer are the dominant prototype, so it's refreshing to see a movie where the guileless Huck gets his due. In this era where cynicism, irony, and calcuated self interest are the norms, we need more of the unreserved idealism of the Huck type. We also need to understand his need of a Tom in his life--and Tom's need for Huck. It's never one or the other; it's both together. This movie understands that. It is about Ellis's learning the limits of his idealism without becoming cynical, and it's also about Neckbone's being won over to Ellis's idealistic cause.

Huck types seem to walk with their feet not quite touching the ground. Toms are very, very grounded in the real world; they know how it works and how to work it. It's Ellis's idealism that gets things moving, but It is Neckbone and 'Tom' Blankenship, who in the end are essential for getting things to work. Blankenship is an image of Neckbone all grown up. 

After the movie, I was thinking about the Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now"--particularly the verse: "I've looked at love from both sides now/from give and take, and still somehow/It's love's illusions I recall/I really don't know love at all." It's song about a romantic idealist experiencing the thud of falling into a world that does not correlate with her ideals. This movie has a lot going on in it, but at its root it's a movie about love in a fallen world. The difference between Neckbone and Ellis lies in that Neckbone, like all Sawyer types, instinctively knows and accepts the world in its fallenness and accepts it as normal. But Ellis doesn't know that yet. He has yet to be snakebit, and then everything depends on how he recovers. The challenge for all Huck types is to learn the lesson without becoming cynical. Ellis recovers, and in doing so learns that people are not how we idealize them--they are more complex than that--and yet while people disappoint us they are nevertheless worthy of our affections and of our loyalty. 

***

So first, a digression about romantic idealization. When we fall in love, do we fall in love with something that we make up? Is it merely a subjective projection? Or is it based on a perception or intuiton of something real about the beloved? Is it all hormones, or is there something else going on? From the Sawyer/Neckbone perspective, it's all about hormones and nice titties and getting to second base; from the Huck/Ellis point of view, it's about touching the eternal. So for the Huck type, less than for the Sawyer type, it's an important issue: Do we see accurately or falsely when we are in the exalted state we call being "in love"? Was there nothing real about it, or was there something in it that points to a reality that we have fallen out of, so to say?  Is falling in love a deluional moment, or is it a privileged one?

Or is it both? In Charles Williams's The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante he tries to answer this question:

What Dante sees is the glory of Beatrice as she is 'in heaven'--that is, as God chose her, unfallen, original; or (if better) redeemed; but at least, either way, celestial. What he sees is something real. It is not 'realer' than the actual Beatrice who, no doubt, had many serious faults, but it is as real. Both Beatrices are aspects of one Beatrice. The revealed virtues are real; so is the celestial beauty.

There is nothing new or uncommon about this experience; it is in a great many novels and films and plays and songs; our modern songs hold it as much as the lyrics of the metaphysical poets. All that is new is the seriousness with which Dante treats it and the style in which he expresses it. The lady creates in her lover the sensation of supreme content. It does not last. Why not? 

Dante, at least, had a perfectly definite answer. Everything desires its own perfection: "in this all desires are appeased and for the sake of this all is desired."  Our desires are everlasting, and to see an image of perfection is not the same thing as to be perfect ourselves, which until we are, possession, even the possession of Beatrice, must lack perfection. This is what all the talk of 'the ideal' comes to; the ideal can never satisfy us until we are [ourselves] ideal.  He who pursues any hope of satisfaction, without his own conditioning perfection is bound, sooner or later, straight for the Inferno.

"It does not last. Why not?" It's a cliche of the Romantic tradition that anyone who has fallen in love feels as though he or she is touching eternity. Well, how can anything eternal not last forever? The fervent commitments of lovers to love forever are sincerely felt, but sooner or later the exaltation passes, and you are with an everyday human being, and sooner or later every romantic has the moment when he asks: what was I thinking?  Were the Neckbones right all along? Does that mean that one's perception of the beloved while being 'in love' was not knowing love at all?

I like Williams's answer: No, it is not delusional; it's partial--it's a glimpse. It's a temporary beholding of the beloved as God created her to be, but not now as she is. And the glimpse is all that we, in our own imperfection, are capable or worthy of. It's a goad, so to say, that motivates our own moral development. A sneak peak at the communion that is our telos in the economy of salvation. It is the first wine given to guests at the Wedding of Cana; the second wine, the wine transformed or Christified, is the wine that we most deeply long for. For it is our own blood that is water turned to wine, it's a transformation we celebrate  in every mass--it's not just the transubstantiation of the bread and wine, but our own. That's my understanding of  William's phrase 'conditioning perfection'.

And if you are married and have stayed married, this is an experience that you have had. We all of us inevitably disappoint one another, but it's ok. Because a different kind of love begins to develop if you are able in the hardest moments to live faithfully in the memory of that glimpse as revealing a proleptic truth. Fidelity is in large part about living now into the future while holding fast to a memory of intuited truths, trusting in the truth of those intuitions while letting the fire of experience temper them. And the task becomes one of loving the real person as she or he is now, but also living in the memory of her and of oneself as temporarily gifted perceivers of the beloved not as she or I am now, but as a future possibility.

It is in this sense that faith--the practice of fidelity--is a virtue, a moral work, a work that transforms water into wine, and wine into blood, which is, the conditioniong of our own perfection. With such wine coursing in our veins we will become drunk with goodness, and that's the goal of moral effort, to become effortlessly, unihibitedly good. To become again like children, like Ellis, but like him after having been snakebit. I for one do not long to be washed by the blood of the lamb, but to be inebriated by it. 

***

Ellis is the fervent, open-hearted, naive idealist whom we see falling into the real world with several thuds. His parents' marriage is breaking up; he learns that his "girlfriend", May Pearl, wasn't ever his girlfriend; he learns that his mission in the service of true love, the reunion of Mud and Juniper, is a failure because they are not the Tristan and Isolde he idealized them to be. He comes to see Mud through Juniper's and Tom's eyes, confronts Mud, screams out his disappointment in him, and runs away falling into a mucky hole full of water mocassins, and he gets bit. Thud in the mud. Welcome to the fallen world, Ellis--a world ruled by serpents who see a dove like you as a fool and who will eat you alive. 

Matthew McConaughey's Mud is a wonderfuly ambivalent character. Mud appears out of nowhere and disappears at the end. He's like a figure in our dreams, but he's not. We never know whether to believe him. He's a murderer on the lam, and who knows how much of what he says is a desperate con? I found myself half the time looking at him like Neckbone--this guy is trouble, let's get out of here--and half the time time like Ellis--there's something noble in him, and he is worthy of my loyalty and commitment--and in the end it turns out that Ellis's intuition was correct.

Mud and Ellis are kindred spirits. He's an already snakebit Ellis all grown up. Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon, is a Tom type like Neckbone, and so is the "assassin", Tom Blankenship, played by Sam Shepherd. Both Juniper and Tom tell Ellis that Mud is a liar, but it turns out they are the liars and everything Mud said was true. But Mud was snakebit--he already had his 'thud' experience, but the wonderful thing about him was that he was faithful to the memory of Beatrice/Juniper despite her being, from the point of view of Sawyerian calculation, not worth it. That's Tom Blankenship's point of view: Mud is a fool, and his foolish love for Juniper has made him vulnerable to manipulation by her. She's eating him alive. But there's more to Juniper than that--and there's more to Tom, too. Tom can't see it, but Mud does. 

But here's the thing about the Tom Sawyer types: they are often deeply moved by and love the Huck types who come into their lives. The Huck type represents a nobility of spirit that Toms find disorienting and hard to understand, but it points to something that they long for. It's why May Pearl, the girl Ellis thinks is his girlfriend, tells him to give her a call. He's just an 8th Grader, and she's much older, but he came to her rescue by recklessly punching a senior who was harrassing her in the 7-11 parking lot. Such guilelessness, such lack of calculation, such purity of heart blows Tom types away; it crashses their frame, so to say, and awakens hidden possibilities in them. It's as if they were waiting all their lives for such a one to find them. And that's why on their "date" later she kisses him. There is such a sweentess in the scene, and it is so lush with misunderstanding. Juniper is May Pearl all grown up. 

Tom types like May Pearl and Juniper are smitten by the Huck types', but cannot live for long in their idealized world, and while they love them, can never live with them--unless they come down to earth. It usually plays out with the Tom types admiring but never really being able to stick for long with the Hucks that come into their lives. They are too restless, and they see Hucks as nice guys they want as friends but not as lovers--perhaps in some cases because they feel that they can never measure up. They can never be the Beatrices Hucks see them as, and they shouldn't feel that they should measure up. It's not their job to. It's Huck's job to love them as they are. 

I think this describes Juniper: in the end she refuses to go with Mud as a act of love; it sets him free because she knows she is not worthy of him, and that she will be the destruction of him. But it's also that Mud, despite his name, has not come down to earth, not enough to make it work with Juniper. It's not completely her failure to be what he needs. That part is unresolved for me. I'd like to think that maybe they'd find one another again somewhere in South America and live there a real life, a down-to-earth life, a menschy life, a  grow-old-together kind of life in which second wine starts to course through their veins. 

There's more to say, but this is enough for now. I might add other thoughts in comments later. I want to say something about the Carver family, particularly about Senior and how he represents a perversion of the Huck type that typifies many on the religious right--religious moralism, or the kind of rigid code-centered, deeply alienating morality that we think of as Victorian--it's what keeps nice Huck types merely nice, and not transformed into something deeply, truly drunk with goodness. But I want to talk about dreams, fantasy, and truth in a broader sense. Why is it that it's love's illusion we recall? Is it really true that we don't know love at all? 

It Is Futile to Reason with Them

From "Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Roger Berkowitz in yesterday's NYT:

That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.

I haven't seen the movie Hannah Arendt yet because it hasn't arrived in Seattle. But in watching the trailers and reading about it I was surprised to learn that Arendt was roundly excoriated for her depiction of Eichmann in her New Yorker dispatches and the book she wrote about the trial. And I was surprised to learn from Berkowitz that the consensus since then about her depiction of Eichmann is that Arendt's book on Eichmann is good philosophy but bad history. Berkowitz defends Arendt, and says that she would be wrong if she said Eichmann was simply a bureaucratic automaton, but that's now what she said. She said that Eichmanns evil lay in his surrendering to a movement and allowing his own autonomy to be obliterated by his merging with it. This is the other side of 'movement politics'. 

I think there are a lot of directions to take this, but the one that interests me at the moment is how people understand the nature of the 'autonomy' that Eichmann surrendered? If Eichmann should have resisted, what is the ground for it? When your entire horizon is filled by norms and everyone you know accepts and reinforces those norms, and those norms are broadly reinforced as noble and idealistic, what resources does an Eichmann have to think or believe otherwise? And why should he think otherwise?

People who have religious commitments have a good answer for that, but I'm curious what the arguments might be for those who don't. Doesn't it just come down to aesthetic preference? Well, you prefer an aesthetic of humaneness and respect--good for you, but I choose power and glory and noble violence. Who are you to say I'm wrong? On what basis can you reason with me? To what in me can you appeal? 

 

The Limits of Authenticity

Simon Critchley in a recent NYT piece: 

Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself. The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma.

Whereas the American dream used to be tied to external reality — say, America as the place where one can openly practice any religion, America as a safe haven from political oppression or America as the land of opportunity where one need not struggle as hard as one’s parents — now, the dream is one of pure psychological transformation.

This is the phenomenon that one might call, with an appreciative nod to Nietzsche, passive nihilism. Authenticity is its dominant contemporary expression.

I think this passage and the rest of the piece adds a layer to the discussion prompted in comments to my last post "Taking Offense".  Louis CK and Eddie Murphy are hierophants in the cult of authenticity.

But the question remains: What is the alternative? Well I've been arguing that a shared sense of collective aspiration might be a good place to start. But you can't snap your fingers and say, "Let's do it." It has to emerge. Critchey is lamenting the loss of a time when we had it, but doesn't really suggest how to retrieve it.

***

I saw the Israeli film Fill the Void this weekend, and it seems connected to this discussion, but I'm not sure I can articulate why clearly yet. So a few preliminary thoughts. 

The film explores the tension between traditional forms and genuine feeling by telling the story of 18-year-old Shira and the marriage match being made for her within her ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Tel Aviv. I came away from the movie thinking about how the forms filter out some feelings and cultivate others. There were times in the movie where the forms seemed mechanical and formulaic, but other times when they were saturated with life and genuine feeling. In the end, the important thing is feeling, not the form--but it has to be the right kind of feeling. There are some feelings you do not feed, and there are others that you encourage. That's what a living traditional culture does. 

In the cult of authenticity, this would be regarded as repressive. but I'd argue that the forms create the possibility for genuine feeling that are impossible where these forms do not exist. The forms are like a trellis on which the capacity of the soul for a broader range of feeling grows. The problem lies when the forms become an end in themselves and no longer mediate feeling. 

I am not someone who is at all attracted to the kind of life depicted in this film, but if given the choice of having to be stranded on a desert island with 100 Louis CKs, Eddie Murphys, Sarah Silvermans, etc.,  or 100 people from a Haredi Jewish community, without hesitation I would choose the latter. I don't doubt that living with the first group would be easier and more entertaining, but for me there is no question that the second group would create a life on that island that would provide the possibility for the richer, more nuanced, and more deeply human life.  

The problem for us in America is that the trellis has been pulled down, it lies in shards, and now the American soul sprawls aimlessly along the ground rather that reaching up toward something worth reaching for. The traditional forms, when they worked, provided a way to reach for that, but they stopped working for an array of complex reasons. Now the challenge is to build something that works. It starts with sorting through the shards of the old, broken-down trellis, and finding something there that you can work with. So it seems to me.

See a related post: "Dying Traditions".

Mud

I saw Jeff Nichols' film Mud last night, and it's one of those couple-of-times-a-year movies you wake up the next morning with on your mind. It's very, very rich. This movie asks important questions about love and truth, about the truth of youthful idealism, and its fierceness in a spirited, young soul, and also about its limits, its need to be tempered. It connects with a number of things I've been thinking about lately, so this is going to ramble a bit as I try to think out loud here about them. It won't make a lot of sense unless you've seen the movie, so see it.

I'm not going to belabor the obvious about its allusions to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, in this case two fourteen-year-old boys, Ellis and Neckbone, and then the runaway "Mud" as Jim. But it's important background information, because the "Tom "and "Huck" archetypes are central to the way the movie plays out. They are Cain and Abel, Cal and Aron, in Steinbeck's East of Eden (See my post "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves"). Neckbone is shrewd, calculating, and suspicious. Ellis is purehearted, naively idealistic, and willing to put everything on the line for a noble cause. This movie on one level is about the necessary creative tension between these types, and how anyone is lost if he it too much of one or the other. The Toms need Hucks in their lives, as the Hucks need Toms. There's the image of Juniper, who is Huckless, so to say, and the image of Tom Blankenship, taking the wounded Mud into the open water at the end of the film. Blankenship is an image of Neckbone all growed up. 

Insofar as this is a story about Ellis and Mud, it's a more about Huck than it is about Tom. I think different cultural eras tend to celebrate one or the other. The Victorian era celebrated Hucks, but we live in an era now in which Toms are the dominant prototype, so it's refreshing to see a movie where Huck gets his due. In this era where cynicism, irony, calcuated self interest are the norms, we need more of the unreserved idealism of the Huck type these days. We also need to understand his need of a Tom in his life--and Tom's need for Huck. It's never one or the other; it's both together. This movie understands that. It is about Ellis's learning the limits of his idealism without becoming cynical, and it's also about Neckbone's being won over to Ellis's idealistic cause. It is Neckbone and another Tom Sawyer figure, Tom Blankenship, who in the end are essential for getting things to work. Huck types seem to walk with their feet not quite touching the ground. Toms are very, very grounded in the real world and know how it works and how to work it. 

After the movie, I was thinking about the Joni Mitchell song "Both Sides Now"--particularly the verse: "I've looked at love from both sides now/from give and take, and still somehow/It's love's illusions I recall/I really don't know love at all." It's song about a romantic idealist experiencing the thud of falling into a world that does not correlate with her ideals. This movie has a lot going on in it, but at its root it's a movie about love in a fallen world. The difference between Neckbone and Ellis lies in that Neckbone, like all Sawyer types, instinctively knows and accepts the world in its fallenness and accepts it as normal. But Ellis doesn't know that yet, and the challenge for all Huck types is to learn the lesson without becoming cynical. Ellis learns that people are not how we idealize them--they are more complex than that--and yet while people disappoint us they are nevertheless worthy of our affections and of our loyalty. 

***

So first, a few thoughts about romantic idealization. When we fall in love, do we fall in love with something that we make up? Is it merely a subjective projection? Or is it based on a perception or intuiton of something real about the beloved? Is it all hormones, or is there something else going on? From the Sawyer/Neckbone perspective, it's all about hormones and nice titties and getting to second base;  from the Huck point of view, it's about touching the eternal. So for the Huck type, less than for the Sawyer type, it's an important issue: Do we see accurately or falsely when we are in the exalted state we call being "in love"? Is it an inflated delusion, or is it real? Was there nothing real about it, or was there something in it that points to a reality that we have fallen away from? Is falling in love a deluional moment, or is it a privileged one?

Or is it both? In Charles Williams's The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante he tries to answer this question:

What Dante sees is the glory of Beatrice as she is 'in heaven'--that is, as God chose her, unfallen, original; or (if better) redeemed; but at least, either way, celestial. What he sees is something real. It is not 'realer' than the actual Beatrice who, no doubt, had many serious faults, but it is as real. Both Beatrices are aspects of one Beatrice. The revealed virtues are real; so is the celestial beauty.

There is nothing new or uncommon about this experience; it is in a great many novels and films and plays and songs; our modern songs hold it as much as the lyrics of the metaphysical poets. All that is new is the seriousness with which Dante treats it and the style in which he expresses it. The lady creates in her lover the sensation of supreme content. It does not last. Why not? 

Dante, at least, had a perfectly definite answer. Everything desires its own perfection: "in this all desires are appeased and for the sake of this all is desired."  Our desires are everlasting, and to see an image of perfection is not the same thing as to be perfect ourselves, which until we are, possession, even the possession of Beatrice, must lack perfection. This is what all the talk of 'the ideal' comes to; the ideal can never satisfy us until we are [ourselves] ideal.  He who pursues any hope of satisfaction, without his own conditioning perfection is bound, sooner or later, straight for the Inferno.

"It does not last. Why not?" It's a cliche of the Romantic tradition that anyone who has fallen in love feels as though he or she is touching eternity. Well how can anything eternal not last? The fervent commitments of lovers to love forever are sincerely felt, but sooner or later the exaltation passes, and you are with an everyday human being, and sooner or later every romantic has the moment when he asks: what was I thinking?  Were the Sawyers right all along? Does that mean that one's perception of the beloved while being 'in love' was not knowing love at all?

I like Williams's answer, which is that No, it is not delusional; it's partial--it's a glimpse. It's a temporary beholding of the beloved as God created her to be, but not now as she is. And the glimpse is all that we, in our own imperfection, are capable or worthy of. It's a goad, so to say, that motivates our own moral development. A sneak peak at the communion that is our telos in the economy of salvation. It is the first wine given to guests at the Wedding of Cana; the second wine, the wine transformed or Christified, is the wine that we most deeply long for. For it is our own blood that is water turned to wine, it's a transformation we celebrate  in every mass--it's not just the transubstantiation of the bread and wine, but our own.

And if nothing else a lifelong, committed relationship lives faithfully in the memory of that glimpse as revealing a proleptic truth. Fidelity is in large part about living now into the future while holding fast to a memory of intuited truths, trusting in the truth of those intuitions while letting the fire of experience temper them. And the task becomes one of loving the real person as she is now but also living in the memory of her and of oneself as temporarily gifted perceivers of the beloved not as she or I am now, but as a future possibility. It is in this sense that faith--the practice of fidelity--is a virtue, a moral work, a work that transforms water into wine, and wine into blood, which is, to use William's phrase, a conditioniong of our own perfection. With such wine coursing in our veins we will become drunk with goodness, and that's the goal of moral effort, to become effortlessly, unihibitedly good. I for one do not long to be washed by the blood of the lamb, but to be inebriated by it. 

***

Back to Mud. Ellis is the fervent, open-hearted, naive idealist whom we see falling into the real world with several thuds. His parents' marriage is breaking up; he learns that his "girlfriend", May Pearl,wasn't ever his girlfriend; he learns that his mission in the service of true love, the reunion of Mud and Juniper, is a failure because they are not the Tristan and Isolde he idealized them to be. He comes to see Mud through Juniper's and Tom's eyes, confronts Mud, screams out his disappointment in him, and runs away falling into a mucky hole full of water mocassins and gets bit. Thud in the mud. Welcome to the fallen world, Ellis--the world ruled by serpents who see a dove like you as a fool and will eat you alive. (Is his name an allusion to Ellis Island, through which poor Europeans expecting to find a world where the streets were paved with gold found instead Lower Eastside tenements? Thud.)

Mud is a wonderfuly ambivalent character wonderfully realized by Matthew McConaughey. Mud appears out of nowhere and disappears at the end. He's like a figure in our dreams, but he's not. We never know whether to believe him. He's a murderer on the lam, and who knows how much of what he says is a desperate con? I found myself half the time looking at him like Neckbone--this guy is trouble, let's get out of here--and half the time time like Ellis--there's something noble in him, and he is worthy of my loyalty and commitment--and in the end it turns out that Ellis's intuition was correct.

Mud, like Ellis, is very much a Huck Finn type. He's Ellis all growed up. They are kindred spirits. Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon, is a Tom type like Neckbone, and so is the "assassin", Tom Blankenship, played by Sam Shepherd. Both Juniper and Tom tell Ellis that Mud is a liar, but it turns out they are the liars and everything Mud said was true. But Mud was snakebit--he already had his 'thud' experience, but the wonderful thing about him was that he was faithful to the memory of Beatrice/Juniper despite her being, from the point of view of Sawyerian calculation, not worth it. That's Tom Blankenship's point of view: Mud is a fool, and his foolish love for Juniper has made him vulnerable to manipulation by her. She's eating him alive. But there's more to Juniper than that. Tom can't see it, but Mud does. 

But here's the thing about the Tom Sawyer types: they are often deeply moved by and love the Huck types who come into their lives. They represent a nobility of spirit that they find disorienting and hard to understand, but it points to something that they long for. It's why May Pearl, the girl Ellis thinks is his girlfriend, tells him to give her a call. He's just an 8th Grader, and she's much older, but he came to her rescue by recklessly punching a senior who was harrassing her in the 7-11 parking lot. Such guilelessness, such lack of calculation, such purity of heart blows Tom types away; it crashses their frame, soto say, and awakens hidden possibilities in them. It's as if they were waiting all their lives for such a one to find them. And that's why on their "date" later she kisses him. There is such a sweentess in the scene, and it is so lush with misunderstanding. Juniper is May Pearl all growed up. 

Tom types like May Pearl and Juniper are smitten by the Huck types', but cannot live for long in their idealized world, and while they love them, can never live with them--unless they come down to earth. It usually plays out with the Tom types admiring but never really being able to stick for long with the Hucks that come into their lives. They are too restless, and they see Hucks a nice guys they want as friends but not as lovers--perhaps in some cases because they feel that they can never measure up. They can never be the Beatrices Hucks see them as, and they shouldn't feel that they should measure up. It's not their job to.

I think this describes Juniper: in the end she refuses to go with Mud as a act of love; it sets him free because she knows she is not worthy of him, and that she will be the destruction of him. (The story of Cal and Abra in East of Eden points to a way that the two can get together, but it's easier, I think, when the girl is the Huck Type and the boy is the Sawyer type.)  

There's more to say, but this is enough for now. I might add other thoughts in comments later. I want to say something about the Carver family, particularly about Senior and how he represents a perversion of the Huck type that typifies many on the religious right--religious moralism, or the kind of rigid code-centered morality that we think of as Victorian is a deep form of alienation--it's what keeps nice Huck types merely nice, and not transformed into something deeply, truly drunk with goodness. But I want to talk about dreams, fantasy, and truth in a broader sense. Why is it that it's love's illusion we recall? Is it really true that we don't know love at all? 

Being in the Grip of Compulsions We Don't Understand

I have been getting this feeling lately about the big historical sweep of things and of our individual seemingly insignificant part to play in it. It’s a feeling of how mostly things don’t change, and yet how they do, how greed and powerlust seem to be in the driver’s seat, and yet that they are not the whole story, how everything seems to point to an undesirable outcome, but that there is always enough to point to that gives one reason for hope.

I've come to believe that a sign of the people who are living well is that their lives are a kind of wandering in the wilderness, of being neither here nor there, of being satisfied with their daily manna allotment, which is just enough to keep them alive and moving. The great intoxications are not for such wanderers; for them it's always just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, and of doing what is required of them on that day and in that place.

We’re at a point in history now where it seems that things will play out the way they will play out. There’s not a lot the wandering folk can do, except what is in front of them to do. The world is in the grip of people who are driven by compulsions they don’t understand, and their compulsions are the root cause of so much needless suffering--for themselves and others. I can rant all I want about the stupidity and selfishness of so much of it, but it’s always been this way. Anything else has been the exception.

The world has always been driven by a quest for the great intoxication. Is it really about money and power, or is it about the momentary states of intoxication that come with their acquisition. And enough is never enough because the intoxication is momentary, and life without it is so empty and drab, and so like addicts in desperate need of a fix, they are compelled to get more power and more wealth, not for there own sake, but as a means to an end, and there is never an end to it.

That's what motivates the great ones, and the rest of us settle for the little intoxications that likewise never satisfy, hedonic adaptation and all that, so we look for love in all the wrong places, play our little ego games at work or in relationships, and in general muck things up because we are in the grip of compulsions we do not understand. 

***

It's more complicated, of course, because the intoxication isn't the problem so much as the compulsive need for it. The problems do not lie so much in being in the state of intoxication itself, but rather in the way people behave when they are not in it. I recently watched The Hustler and The Color of Money--both great films about phenomenally talented pool players played by Paul Newman and Tom Cruise--and they're a study in what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow". When they're in it they believe they are invincible, and often they are. At one point in The Hustler, the Newman character, Fast Eddie says to his girlfriend:

Fast Eddie: . . .When I'm goin', I mean, when I'm REALLY goin' I feel like a... like a jockey must feel. He's sittin' on his horse, he's got all that speed and that power underneath him... he's comin' into the stretch, the pressure's on 'im, and he KNOWS... just feels... when to let it go and how much. Cause he's got everything workin' for 'im: timing, touch. It's a great feeling, boy, it's a real great feeling when you're right and you KNOW you're right. It's like all of a sudden I got oil in my arm. The pool cue's part of me. You know, it's uh - pool cue, it's got nerves in it. It's a piece of wood, it's got nerves in it. Feel the roll of those balls, you don't have to look, you just KNOW. You make shots that nobody's ever made before. I can play that game the way... NOBODY'S ever played it before.

Sarah: You're not a loser, Eddie, you're a winner. Some men never get to feel that way about anything. 

Was this the feeling that Homer’s Greek heroes had? Eddie's jockey-on-a-horse reference brings to mind the theme explored in Peter Shaffer's Equus.

Whatever the source or cause of experiences like these, they are like being possessed by a god because when in a flow state one operates on a level that transcends one’s ordinary level of talent. As with Homer's heroes, the difference between the good and the great is this capability to move into this other dimension when one is taken hold of by the god. I’ve sniffed it now and then, enough to know what it must be like, but never in a way that led me to have any impact. And it's probably just as well. I'm sure I would have become an addict. 

Because if being in the flow is mostly a positive experience, the problem for people who experience its intensity lies in its becoming addictive. When they are not in it, the only important thing is that they get back into it. And sometimes when they are playing they're not in the flow, and they lose, but they think it's just a matter of time before they get back into it. I imagine something like this happens to gamblers who once had a lucky streak and continuously seek the elation it brought them losing untold sums in the quest, thinking they will win it back when their "luck" returns, i.e., when the god once again deigns to lift him above other mortals.

Both the Newman and Cruise characters, who have this experience of being in the flow, are rather guileless and uncalculating--at least in the beginning. The important thing is for them to be in that state, whatever name they give it; it's not really about the money--the money is important for the people around them, their stakeholders, and the stakeholders are continuously frustrated by their players because they have no interest in the hustle game. There is no payoff for these players in the hustle. Making money does not give them the intoxication that they crave; they want that feeling, to be in that intoxicating state of invincibility that comes with being in the flow.

And when they lose, no matter how badly, they think it's just a matter of time before they get back to it, and when they do, all will be well. And they will win back all they have lost. It's just a matter of having enough time and the money to stay in the game.

Isn't this what we are seeing on Wall Street. The big players there are intoxication addicts.They see themselves as invincible. If things have gone south, it's only temporary. Sooner or later they'll be back in the flow. Look--isn't the stock market at an all-time high? They are winners, and the rest of us should trust them, and rely on them as the Achaeans did Achilles. 

Les Miserables, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, et al.

I wanted to like Les Miserables because I am so sympathetic to the underlying Christian mythos of the original Hugo story, but it took all my control to stay in the theater after about a half hour of this musical version of it.

This film lacked emotional texture. It was the same song over and over and over and over again. It was going for big emotions, but it was unrelieved, uninterrupted, strident, cliche-soaked pathos that became in my viewing of it over-the-top, eye-rolling comical by the end.

I checked metacritics after watching, and I was genuinely surprised that it got generally positive reviews with a rating of 64. Maybe this worked better in some of its stage versions, but this film version was a wretched, silly bore.

Spielberg's Lincoln, on the other hand, did work for me. It was a marvel of cinematic historical imagination. Daniel Day-Lewis was crazy good in the title role. Tommy Lee Jones's Thaddeus Stevens was a hoot. The dialogue was crisp and riveting. 

Lincoln was our Bismarck. Both were all about blood and iron. This movie focuses mostly on the slavery theme, and it does so in a very compelling and interesting way, but the American Civil War was first and formost a war to maintain national unity. And Lincoln and Bismarck laid the foundation for their respective countries that insured that both would become superpowers in the next century. Was that really a good thing? I don't think so, and I wonder if a hundred years from now in a thoroughly browned U.S., when slavery and toxic racism become something read about in history books rather than experienced on a daily basis, whether Lincoln will be regarded in the same unambiguously postive light. 

The Civil War, it could be argued, resovled nothing except maintaining a forced national union. Remind me again--why was that so important? Was it worth killing 600,000 plus? Are we happy that laid the foundation for the beast that we have become? 

I've often wondered what would have happened the North just let the south go. Would the North have developed a less belligerent ethos and a greater kinship with Canada while the South became more third-world like with a greater kinship with Mexico? Would the North without the South have had a better chance of working through the contradictions of capitalism and evolved more easily toward European or Canadian style social democracy? Would the South have found it easier to confront the moral contradictions of slavery without the rigidifying resentment of its victim narrative?

I doubt the North would have handled the Indian issue any better--Europeans' 19th century record in dealing with aborigines the world over is pretty dismal--but I think that without the South more sane and humane policies would have been given a better chance.

Which brings us to Zero Dark Thirty. From everything I've read about it, it's about America at its worst. And for me everything that is bad about America right now is mostly about the way the mentality of the South distorts our national dialogue. The Southern narrative--its militarism, its racism, its faux Christian religiosity, its paranoia and sense of aggrieved victimhood--all of these represent what makes our politics so intractable right now. I know these are not just 'southern' characteristics, but they would play a more marginal role in our national discouse if the South were not a part of it. And if the North had evolved more along the lines of Canada, perhaps we would not have had a 9/11 and the national insanity that followed from it. 

Am I being unfair to the south? Tell me why I'm wrong. Remember, it's not about individuals; it's about ethos and the group mentality that undergirds a political narrative. That's what I'm attacking, and while I am by no means exonerating the North from its many sins, I would argue that its menatality has given it a narrative that is better adapted to the complexity of the world as it is, and dealilng with the real world, not some fantasy version of it, is a prerequisite for developing a sane politics. 

The Corporate Empire State 1

I've just started rewatching the Star Wars trilogy. I can't say that I was ever much of a fan--I could never get past the dreadful acting, stilted dialogue, and the cheesy costumes.  And I have always been surprised when people I respect praised it. Joseph Campbell was a fan, and I respect a guy like cultural historian/philosopher John Ebert--and he loves Star Wars:

George Lucas's Star Wars epic is the closest thing that we possess to a modern equivalent of the Ring cycle.for just as Wagner created for the Germans a national mythology of the Industrial Age, Lucas has given us a modern celluloid epic for the Electronic Society, in which the industrial nation state is giving way to an emerging planetary culture.  The Romantic movement of the nineteenth century was a reaction to the industrial system, and the various nationalist movements with their retrieval of ancient myth were, at least partially, an attempt to combat the encroachments of the machine world which was already beginning the process of eroding culture, authenticity, and individuality wherever it went. Thus, the very mechanical Umwelt that was born out of the European nation state arose only to destroy its local, geographically based boundaries with an electronic latticework of metantational corporations. . . .

It seems fitting, then, that the plot of George Lucas's Star Wars prequels is modeled on the decline of the Roman Republic and its transition to the Empire under the Caesars, for that is exactly what is happening to our democracy right now.  In fact, if you pay close enough attention to Lucas's films, you will learn everything you need to know about what is going on in our society, for despite their opening disclaimer, the Star Wars films are not about another world in outer space a long time ago, but about what is happening on the planet right now.  For Lucas is not only a modern Wagner, but a sort of Virgil as well, forging for the Empire--although in this case he is decidedly against it--a national American epic in the time of Caesar. (Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons - Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society, pp. 155-57)

"Inception", "Solaris", and the Unconscious

In the past week I've watched both Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Christopher Nolan's Inception.  Both in very different ways try to grapple with the question: What is the human unconscious? First, a little riff on that question, and then maybe I'll get around to the movies.

We all heard when we were children that that the human brain is underutilized, that we humans are using only a minuscule percentage of its potential. I remember when I first heard that as a kid I thought that if I could just figure out how to increase capacity a little I could get my math homework done more quickly--I thought about it in terms of IQ and mental agiliity. Later I wondered what it would mean to have !00% utilization, and I believe now that there is no 100%, that the brain has no content that can be measured in terms of whether it is being well or underused.

It is, rather,  a mirror-like tool developed for human use so that Nature might become self-aware. But a mirror has no capacity of its own; it's empty and its value lies in its being in good working order: clear and clean rather than cracked, dirty, and distorting. Its content is completely dependent on what comes into view. And what comes into view is potentially limitless because it emerges out of the human unconscious, and the human unconscious is a fathomless, limitless, transpersonal sea of possibility. There are dimensions of the Real of which we are unconscious, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist, only that our awareness of them lies outside the current "consensus reality" or social imaginary.

Carl Jung's understanding of the collective unconscious comes close to what I'm talking about here, but Jung suffered from what Owen Barfield called RUP--Residue of Unresolved Positivism. So when people talk about how we humans use only a small capacity of our brains, I think they really mean to say that we humans are only conscious of a small percentage of the Real, that most of reality is hidden from us--because it is unconscious. But the task is not to use more of the brain's capacity, but rather to find ways of bringing into awareness that which is now outside of it, because submerged in the limitless sea of unconsciousness. If we find ways to bring it out from where it is hidden, the brain as mirror will see it, remember it, and give the viewer something to think about and make sense of. "Making sense" means making it fit within the frame of  the existing social imaginary, or if it doesn't fit, expanding the social imaginary to accommodate the new 'data'. Science is certainly one area where this deepening of awareness is the task, but so is art and spiritual practice. 

It is one thing to look and see; it's another to remember and understand. The brain is the tool that allows us to see, to remember, to make connections, i.e., to be conscious. It is important to have a brain that is clean and in good working order, but more important is the scope and quality of the information available for it to work with. Neuroscience is mirror mechanics, not consciousness mechanics. Consciousness just is. The brain is a function of consciousness, not consciousness a function of the brain.  

 

The argument at this blog has been that moderns and postmoderns, insofar as the scope of our awareness is limited to the positivist frame, to what can be seen and touched, are working with only the surfaces or the husks of things. Far more interesting is what lies behind those surfaces or within those husks. That we are now incapable of experiencing that 'behind' and 'within' does not mean that they aren't there, only that we are unconscious of them, that the modern collective consciousness has forgotten about them. If we can accept that there are individual repressed memories, is it so hard to accept that there are also collective repressed memories? 

Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances says that all Nature is the human unconscious. In other words, it's wrong to think of the Unconscious as yours or mine--its ours; we are all swimming in it, and we are all connected in it. But in the same way that childhood memories are forgotten or repressed, in the same way we cannot bring those forgotten experiences into awareness at will, so too are we unable to bring into felt awareness our connection to the Real beyond the husks that is Natura.

We experience, if we are true moderns and postmoderns, mostly our being cut off from it. We think we are over here and that nature and other people are over there because we have forgotten how we all emerged out of this deep network of interconnection. Our embeddeness in that deep network is a repressed memory. And every once in a while we might have an experience, a moment of recall, so to speak, and we feel that we understand something we once took for granted, but because it is so out of tune with the way everyone thinks and behaves around us, we soon forget what we've remembered and reabsorb into the surrounding social imaginary.

Holding on to the memory is the main discipline in what I think of as 'faith'.  Having these moments of recall are moments of grace, and everything depends on whether they are taken seriously and remembered, whether they are seed moments that fall on fertile ground or fall on ground that is barren or where it is trampled under foot.

***

Of the two movies, Solaris interests me more. And there is more to be said about it than I have the energy to write about it right now--I think I need also to watch it again. But it was developed by Tarkovsky as a response to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think the biggest difference in their respective mythic imaginations lies in that for Tarkovsky reality, the part of it that we have "forgotten", is at its root interpersonal. The Kubrick vision of the Star Child and of Bowman's Odyssesy is suffocatingly disconnected and isolating. They mythic grandeur and ambitions of Kubrick's film are admirable, but it is still very much the product of an imagination that is circumscribed by RUP. Tarkovsky was working in another, very different neighborhood. I'll leave it there for now, but someday I want to come back to that. Or in comments if anybody wants to explore that angle.

And Inception interests me more about what it has to say about our conscious world than what it says about our unconscious. This film isn't about exploring an unconscious dream world; it depicts more an imperial colonization of the unconscious by the conscious. It's not about discovering and entering into a relationship with what's there, but rather a pushing back, as the white man pushed back the Indian, and imposing its old-world structures and habits of thinking in this strange and unfamiliar new world.

And that's fine for the purposes of the movie. Because isn't the real point that what we think of as the real world is pretty much the same kind of construct as the dream worlds?  Isn't the ending with the top spinning meant to suggest that it's not clear whether Cobb is still in a dream world even though he thinks he's in the real world? And isn't the point then that what we take for real, really isn't, that it's just as much a construct and just as much a prison as the so-called Limbos? This story tells us nothing about the unconscious and its mysteries, only about the ephemeral, fundamentally unstable nature of what we take to be conscious reality, or the so-called "real world". 

But I find Nolan's fascination with the role of memory in this movie--as well in his earlier Memento--as interesting and important, and explored in ways that need more exposition than I can do now and here. But the takeaway for now is that remembering, correct memory, is one of the most important things we can do that connects us to the Real, and that improving our capacity for remembering is a critically important spiritual discipline. We are our memories, and the quality of who we are in large part depends on the quality of what we remember.

 

How Far We've Come since 1940

In greed and meanness, that is. This speech might be full of cliches, but it envisions  a cliche world I wouldn't mind to live in. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator

We're All Pottervilleans; We Always Were

I'm up early this Christmas morning waiting for my sleep-deprived family to wake up and came across this article by Rich Cohen in Salon. He has a  somewhat different but I think intriguing angle on Capra's famous Christmas film. The idea that It's a Wonderful Life is sentimental swill is nonsense according to Cohen--the real story is about Dark America.

I do not think the hidden message vanishes when the movie goes Hollywood and happy. I believe the resolution of the darker movie is, in fact, still there, wrapped around the happy ending of the classic. Look again at the closing frames -- shots of Jimmy Stewart staring at his friends. In most, he's joyful. But in a few, he's terrified. As I said, this is a terrifying movie. An hour earlier George was ready to kill himself. He has now returned from a death experience. He was among the unborn, had crossed over like Dante's hero, had seen this world from beyond the veil. In those frames -- "The Night Journey of George Bailey" -- I don't think he's seeing the world that would exist had he never been born. I think he's seeing the world as it does exist, in his time and also in our own.

George had been living in Pottersville all along. He just didn't know it. Because he was seeing the world through his eyes -- not as it was, but as he was: honest and fair. But on "The Night Journey," George is nothing and nobody. When the angel took him out of his life, he took him out of his consciousness, out from behind his eyes. It was only then that he saw America. Bedford Falls was the fantasy. Pottersville is where we live. If you don't believe me, examine the dystopia of the Capra movie -- the nighttime world of neon bars and drunks and showgirl floozies. Does Bedford Falls feel more like the place you live, or does Pottersville? I live in a place that looks very much like Bedford Falls, but after 10 minutes in line at the bank or in the locker room where the squirts are changing for hockey I know I'm in Pottersville.

I'm betting this was as much the case in Capra's time as it is in our own. He loved America but was watching the triumph of Pottersville. That's why, in the last scene, George looks at his friends with terror. He's happy to be alive, but he's disillusioned, wised up in just the worst way. He finally knows the world as it really is, what his friends are capable of, the dark potential coiled in each of them. His wife is a spinster in Pottersville because, if she's not with George, she cannot be anything. She's just one of two characters who are, in fact, the same in both worlds, the other being Mr. Potter. Everyone else is two-faced, masked. Simply put, George has been cursed with knowledge, shown the truth of the world -- seen hidden things. It's the sort of vision that makes a person go insane.

I've written frequently about Capra's America, and my point has been that he sees the dark side of the country with very clear eyes.  But Capra understood and loved the idealistic American narrative, and he wrote stories, I think very powerful stories, designed to remind us about and to affirm that narrative. The dark side is never the whole story, no matter how dark it gets.

The ending works for me. It has a power that cannot be dismissed as sentimental. It works not because it's a realistic depiction about what would have likely happened. There's nothing realistic about this story from beginning to end. It's a symbolic story, a  parable. It's like the biblical stories of Abraham's barren, old wife giving birth to a son, to the woman of Zareptha whose jar of flour never empties, or the story of the Loaves and Fishes--and to the story of Christmas. They all point to this superabundance, this plenitude that doesn't exist in the ordinary world, but seeks to burst into it if it were only given a chance. The ending points us not to the world as it exists but to hidden truths and to hidden possibilities. But I think you need a measure of "second naivete" to see how the story works on this level. People who don't have it must see it as sentimental because it seems exaggerated and impossible.  

So Cohen is right; the people of Bedford Falls are two faced in the sense that there are two possibilities open to them, either to be mean or to be generous and decent. As with all things human, it's never one or the other--it's both.  So yes we all live in Pottersville--we always have, but tha't not the only possibility.  The story's imaginative depiction of the possibility for collective goodness and decency is also there, and it resonates with whatever in us longs for it. If we are so jaded that we cannot believe in the possibility of it, then we can never do the work to realize it. As the blog's Niebuhr epigraph above says, "for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible."

And isn't George's story precisely the story of his longing for that decent world, his working for it, and ultimately his recognizing that in so many ways it had been "approximated" without his knowing it. The story manifests what otherwise lies hidden--not just for George, but for all of us. In real life we don't get to see what George sees in the story; we need a second naivete to keep working for the possible while everything around us tells us it's impossible.

This movie is more about such impossible possibilities than it is about what we are in fact. We must never think that we are incapable of becoming a society as ugly and mean as any in history--there is no American exceptionalism in that regard.  But neither should we forget that we are capable of the decency and generosity that we see in George's "two-faced" neighbors at the end of the film.

Peter Maurin, with Dorothy Day the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement, said that he didn't want a socialist utopia; he just wanted a society in which it was easier for people to be good. I think this was Capra's vision of America as well. It's certainly mine.

Merry Christmas.

 

 

At the Movies with Spencer Tracy

I love TCM.  In the past week they've had some Spencer Tracy movies, and the two I watched were Judgment at Nurmeberg and Pat & Mike. There's something about Tracy, a kind of magnetism that he has that has hardly anything to do with his lumpy looks.  He's a mensch. He's the Walter Cronkite of film stars--the trustworthy, down-to-earth uncle to whom you turn when nobody else will give you a break. The guy who understands human frailty, and how everyone plays the angles, and is looking out for number one, but who also stands for a decency that the pressures of life might bend but can never break. 

Pat & Mike--the seventh of the nine movies Tracy and Hepburn made together--was Hepburn's favorite of the nine, and I can see why. While the plot is silly, the dialog, particularly for Tracy's part, was cleverly written and the chemistry between them is just so comfortable. You can see why the high-strung Hepburn would find a "home" with Tracy. He's the kind of guy that is so at home with himself he creates a home for everyone who is around him.  He's like a big tree in which all kinds of birds make their nests.

Chis Hayes & "System Failure"

Chris Hayes of the Nation has a very nice piece that sums up our predicament.  It's the kind of thing you can give somebody who just doesn't get it because its tone is irenic and its analogies apt. There are several excerptable grafs, but I'll limit myself to a few near the end:

... one thing the Obama campaign got right was its faith in America's history of continually and fruitfully tilling the soil of democracy, struggling against odds until, at certain moments of profound progressive change, a new treasure is improbably found.

It was the possibility of such a democratic unearthing that gave Obama for America its moral force. The most inspiring thing about the campaign had nothing to do with the candidate and everything to do with average citizens from Dubuque to Atlanta who were taking the time and energy to search for a small piece of that treasure. Likewise, the message of the Obama campaign was as much about empowerment, reinvigorating democracy and changing the ways of Washington as it was about the central planks of his agenda. It's for this reason that the greatest disappointment of his first year is the White House's abandonment of this small-d democratic impulse in favor of a strategy almost wholly focused on insider politics.

What the country needs more than higher growth and lower unemployment, greater income equality, a new energy economy and drastically reduced carbon emissions is a redistribution of power, a society-wide epidemic of re-democratization.

Couldn't agree more, and yet what will such a re-democratization look like?  First step toward solving the problem is to understand its nature. Earlier in the piece Hayes asks, "So what, exactly, is it that ails us?"

In pondering the answer, it's useful to distinguish between two separate categories of problems we face. The first are the human, economic and ecological disasters that demand immediate action: a grossly inefficient healthcare sector, millions un- or underinsured, 10 percent unemployment, a planet that's warming, soaring personal bankruptcies, 12 million immigrants working in legal limbo, the list goes on. But the deeper problem, the ultimate cause of many of the first-order problems, is the perverse maldistribution of power in the country: too much in too few hands.

This maldistribution of power is the foundation of all our problems, and it's got significantly worse in the last thirty years because of the dismantlement of the New Deal compromise. The New Deal system wasn't perfect by any means, but it was good insofar as it established a rough balance between capital and the public interest. That balance no longer exists for complex reasons, among them being that enough Americans bought into the Reaganite propaganda that government taxes and regulation were fetters on the American spirit. The result was to create a public mood that permitted the dismantlement by both Republicans (and Dems like Clinton) of many of the public interest protections hard won in the period from the 1930s through 60s.

The Second Civil War 2

In February, I wrote a fantasy post in the form of a movie treatment about how a second Civil War might erupt.  I was unaware until recently that HBO actually presented a movie with this title in 1997. I finally got around to watching it recently, and it's pretty bizarre, but interesting in the category of life imitating fiction and "people were thinking about this twelve years ago?!"

It stars Beau Bridges, Dennis Leary, Phil Hartman, James Coburn, James Earl Jones, and I don't quite know what to make of it. It's a farce, of course, but it's a bloody farce, and it's got everything in today's news from a Governor love-sick over a Latina reporter, to the right-wing, obsession of closing borders, to nuclear bombs going off in Pakistan, to the cynicism of the media which cares about nothing except a 20-share.  It's not great movie making, but it's worth seeing, if only to reflect on how far we haven't come.

Why Liberalism Can't Get It Done III

In the gospels it says that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. This is not the platitudinous condemnation of economic injustice, but rather a shrewd observation about human psychology. The point is that those who have wealth have the ability to create a world that is exactly how they want it, and this world becomes a prison which filters out anything that would intrude into it from the world outside--including grace.  That's the price you pay when you have the means to create a the world in your own image.

It's a prison designed to keep the inmate safe and comfortable and moderately well entertained.  They never have to deal with the world as it is; they live in a world of their own construction in which they are self-sufficient and isolated from "reality" in a way that the poor are not. The poor, who certainly find ways to live in other kinds of hells, nevertheless find it harder to live in self-created delusional worlds because they have fewer resources to block out the real world, and so they are of necessity more vulnerable, and in their vulnerability more open to the movement of grace in their lives.

I think that you could make the argument that the inability of so many Americans to see through the delusional thinking of our current political leaders is a function of their participating in the poison fruits of the affluent society.  We have all to a certain extent been caught up in this ancient syndrome that until recently was the exclusive privilege of the rich, i.e., to build and live in castles of delusion. You could say that the affluent society has democratized delusion. And our national anxiety is in large part derived from our unconscious knowledge how flimsy a structure it really is.  It is metaphysically vaporous.  We've been building our very own Towers of Babel, and at some level we realize that sooner or later it will all come crashing down.  Things can't possibly keep going this way.  Something has to give.  Everything looks more or less normal, but deep down we know that the whole business is rotten and near collapse.

I recently watched the movie version of John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation".  And it struck me that this was the story about how rich people live in such self-created prisons and of how not-rich people, like the insane Paul Poitier (Will Smith) character, long to live in the prisons that these rich people have created. It's also the story of how one of the inmates, Ouisa (Stockard Channing), wakes up to her condition and escapes. She's the camel that somehow found a way out through the eye of that needle. Her path out derived from her "imagination" of how she is connected to people outside that prison she realized she was living in, and in a curious way, Paul, the person who wanted in, became for her the way out.

The exercise of freedom is meaningless unless we're willing to live with the consequences of our choices. Our choices, for better or worse, are what make us real; our history is what gives us metaphysical ballast. Do we make bad choices? Of course we do. But the test of our character is how we respond to the consequences of these choices. The consumer culture in which we live reinforces a mentality that would have us look at these choices as if they were poor purchase decisions for which we have the option to either return or discard what we've bought.  We don't really want to believe that our past has anything to do with who we are; we want to believe that we are infinitely capable of reinventing ourselves.  But what kind of person is capable of that kind of reinvention except someone who is a cipher--a nothing.  But it's precisely this kind of person that modernity and the Liberal imagination of the human has created and celebrates.  The Liberal sensibility hates the past and its limitations, and whether consciously or unconsciously, people who have been acculturated into modern society have this attitude toward the past.

In the affluent velvet prison the inmates are told continuously that they are happy and if they're not, to go shopping.  Because their happiness is measured by their capacity to consume--goods and services, people, experiences. Whatever--we swallow them like junk food, defecate them, and move on. We are not nourished by such consumption, and we're not changed by it, except for the temporary bloated feeling that they cause. We soon forget about them and the sum or our lives is so many forgettable moments. 

This kind of thinking is the air we breathe. But I don't think we have much a sense of how this creates a kind of solipsistic hell in which we all find ourselves; nor do we understand how this contributes to the anxiety that pervades cultures in the affluent, developed world. It's a hell that 's created by the illusion of choices, illusory because they are choices that don't make a difference, that contribute not a whit to our spiritual substance because we almost always get do-overs. Or we find some excuse for running away from the consequences of our choices. 

Because being human in a consumer culture is not about developing into a man or woman of substance, it's about being "happy", and the consumerist definition of happiness reinforces a kind of infantilism that keeps us passive and dependent,  which we don't mind so long as we're relatively comfortable. Our prisons are comfortable, and we have good reason to believe the official propaganda that the consumer choices we make in them are what really makes us free.  It supports us in our  continuing denial of the truth, a truth we don't have the stomach to confront. Is there any wonder we have become so incapable of demanding more of our political leaders? We don't want them to tell us the truth, because it's a truth we'd rather not know about.

So who are we, then, really? What is the nature of our identity in the modern Liberal imagination? Identity in the psychosocial literature has come to mean something that is an arbitrary construction defined either "by the social roles an individual performs, the 'reference group' to which he belongs, or, on the other hand, by the deliberate management of impressions or 'presentation of self,' in Erving Goffman's phrase," writes Christopher Lasch in The Minimal Self.

There's no there there in the individual's identity understood in this way. It's changeable, shifting, and chameleon-like. It's Woody Allen's Zelig on the one hand or Madonna's inventing and reinventing herself on the other. In this understanding of personal identity, we are either subsumed into the group and its group think or we make ourselves up as we go along. And such reinvention is possible because neither is there a there there when it comes to the social world that is over against the individual. It has lost its solidity; it has become whatever we want it to be.

The psychosocial meaning of identity, which has itself passed into the common usage, weakens or eliminates altogether the association between identity and "continuity of the personality." It also excludes the possibility that identity is defined largely through a person's actions and the public record of those actions. In its new meaning, the term registers the waning of the old sense of a life as a life-history or narrative--a way of understanding identity that depended on the belief in a durable public world, reassuring in its solidity, which outlasts an individual life and passes some sort of judgment on it. Note that the older meaning of identity refers both to persons and things. Both have lost their solidity in modern society, their definiteness and continuity. Identity has become uncertain and problematical not because people no longer occupy fixed social stations--a commonplace explanation that unthinkingly incorporates the modern equation of identity and social role--but because they no longer inhabit a world that exists independently of themselves. Minimal Self, p. 32.

I think that this is an accurate description of identity formation in a choice-driven world as contrasted with a given world. In a traditional society, everything is given, and you just accept that this is the way it is because this is the way it always was. In a consumer society, very little is given. And what is given can be easily rejected as one moves on to live a life with little reference to what was given to him as a child. When the social worlds we live in are chosen or rejected as the whim seizes us, we experience our social world as temporary and interchangeable with any other social world and any other group of people. Even if we stay with one group for a long period of time, we know that we can leave it at any time. In fact if you stay in one place for too long--like a job--you are perceived as stodgy or lacking in ambition.

There's a freedom and an exhilaration in knowing that we can always keep our options open in that respect, but it's counterfeit freedom and cheap thrills.  And we pay a price: The world no long maintains its solidity; its quality of being over against us and pointing to something unfathomable and unconsumable has collapsed. And the people and objects in our world lose their ability to be anything more than what makes them useful to us; we keep them in our world so long as there is value in them to consume, and we toss them as soon as they lose their consumable value. We get into relationships with people to "get our needs met," and we get out of them when it's clear that they are unable to give us what we have become convinced they or someone else should give us. There is an objective world of things, but there is no longer an objective world of meaning or value, because the things, including the people, are simply the value we project into them, and this has mostly to do with their usefulness to us, how they meet our needs.

This is reinforced by the therapeutic values of much of the human potential movement which has vulgarized the idea of self actualization into another consumer commodity. Think about how commonplace it has become, even when we are encouraged to volunteer for some social service. We are never "sold" on the idea because it's the right thing to do; we're told instead about how fulfilling the experience will be, and how much you get back when you give. Well, maybe/maybe not. This approach links doing the right thing to false expectations, and it makes of volunteering another experience we treat as a consumable object. We go into these experiences and stay with them only so long as we get something out of them.

My goal is not to shake my finger at the world as if to say, "How dare you be what I think you ought not to be." My goal is simply to see our predicament with as much clarity as I can, because I know that I'm as implicated in all of what I describe here as consumer culture as anyone else. As I've said before, we're all neck deep in this historical current, and I do not propose that we remove ourselves from the stream, only that we keep our head dry, and to make the effort to navigate in this stream rather than simply allow ourselves to swept away by it. But we can do much better than the modern/postmodern nihilistic imagination of the human.

Ultimately the goal is to create a society that reinforces the project to become what we were created to become--beings with a destiny to realize that they are only most profoundly free when as the realized image and likeness of God, beings with enough diamond-hard metaphysical substance that someday they will be able to see God face to face with the uncreated source of all that is, and not be vaporized in the encounter.