After the Future

Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Bugs Me

I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.

H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1925-29

 

Most educated people share a cosmic imaginary that is shaped more by Newton than by relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and quantum mechanics. While a lot of the freakier things like multiverses, black matter, and worm holes make it into popular science fiction, those ideas don't make it into the everyday way educated people imagine their place in the cosmos. We are taught to see it the way Lovecraft describes it. If you accept the description as he presents it as "factual", the conclusions follow--the cosmos is meaningless and absurd. He's just following the evidence.

I don't mean what I write below to be a personal attack on Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but rather on how his attitude typifies a conventional mindset among many (most?) American cultural elites. From all appearances, he seems to be a great guy, someone you'd enjoy conversing with. But I also know enough about him from his public appearances on Colbert's show (See Note 1) that his view of the cosmos, insofar as such a view follows from the material evidence, aligns with Lovecraft's. It follows, therefore, that for him the cosmos is "a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity". To think anything else is to go beyond the evidence. 

But from my pov his evidence-based rationalist materialism is as naive as the Christian fundamentalist who tells you his religious ideas are absolutely true it follows from what's plainly written in the Bible. The same kind of naiveté affects the Originalists on the Supreme Court. The Originalist and the Fundamentalist both say,  "Just read the words in the text". Rationalist materialists like Tyson say, "Just look at the evidence."

As if it were that simple. All three are naive because they don't understand how their unconscious presuppositions organize and filter the "evidence" or the "words", or how they foreground and privilege some evidence and some words, and background or just plain disregard others that don't fit their interpretations. The problem with grasping the truth is not just to see what's there, but to interpret what's there in the most humanly profound way. Both the fundamentalists, Originalists, and rational materialists fail in that regard miserably. 

Part of what I do here is try to deconstruct what I see as incoherent intellectual positions. It's easy to do with most conservatives, but it's done less frequently with rationalist materialists, who tend to be Liberals. I want to argue that Tyson's ontological presuppositions don't fit with what I'm sure are his sincere feelings of awe when contemplating the cosmos. I'm not arguing that his exuberance is fake, but that his feelings are not adequately accounted for by his rationalist materialism. His mistake is to start with the material facts rather than starting with the wonder. Because he starts with the material facts, he cannot give a satisfying account for the source of the wonder. 

Science studies the the husks and mechanics of the cosmos. What science affirms about them is true until new evidence proves them not to be. I have no quarrel with material facts and evidence. My quarrel is with how an obsessive focus on them crowds out other kinds of knowing that are much more important. 

Science has always been a child of instrumental reason, i.e., more interested in utility than awe, in getting results than contemplating in wonder. And instrumental reason has always been the practical, debunking, snarky cousin who thinks he knows better and who delights to make you feel like a naive idiot if you insist there's anything more. "Prove it", he says. And yet to prove it requires proving the existence of 'red' to someone who sees only in black and white. I'm fine with the kind of scientist who is agnostic about matters of the spirit; it's those who aggressively reject the spiritual--like Tyson--who bug me. There is an honest humility in the first, but a smug condescension in the second. 

Do some rationalist materialists nevertheless feel a genuine sense of awe when beholding the cosmos? Of course, and this capacity for wonder points to something about the human spirit that rationalist materialists like Tyson, because of their presuppositions, are unwilling to acknowledge--that the very possibility for awe requires something that cannot be explained in purely materialistic terms. A sack of chemicals is not capable of awe; one needs a mind and a soul to feel them. 

Neither the Mind nor the soul is a material thing, and all attempts to explain their existence in materialist terms fail miserably. As soon as you flip the sequence from matter preceding mind to mind preceding matter, everything makes much more sense. Why is that so difficult for so many among the educated elite? It wasn't the case even 150 years ago. There's no logical reason for anyone to think that Mind is not anterior to matter even now. It's difficult because of how educated elites--especially those who are most influential in our cultural institutions--are acculturated to privilege scientific knowing in a way that delegitimates any other kind of knowing. 

This priority of mind is what every great civilization took for granted until about the middle of the 19th Century in Europe. Hegel, the last of the German Idealists, died in the 1830s. The great early 19th century English Romantic poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelly and figures like R.W. Emerson were all Platonists. These are people whose attempt to make sense of the world began in wonder. They were the cultural elite of their day. 

What changed in the second half of the 19th century? The causes are hard to adequately explain because overdetermined. But clearly one massive reason obtrudes: Western societies at that time were caught up in an infatuation with how technological innovations got material results. Within a few generations concerns of the spirit or the experience of wonder came to appear squishy and trivial. These were concerns that had no robust relationship to the "real world". They were not the concerns of serious men of action with dreams of making a fortune and shaping a brave new world in their mechanomorphic image.

People have always been greedy and lustful for power. But now the machines magnified their wealth and power and made robust resistance to them extraordinarily difficult. And people who might otherwise resist were seduced: "Look at the results! Don't we all benefit from their greed and powerlust?" We became the first great civilization in the history of the world that could actually take seriously the idea that "Greed is good." There was resistance, but it was always relatively powerless and so easily pushed to the Left Bank, so to say. Not a neighborhood where good citizens careful of their reputations dare to wander. 

But few Americans of good will understood then that in allowing the greedy to have their way, they were trading cultural vitality for material prosperity. Americans are optimists, so it was difficult for them to anticipate how with each passing decade since the mid 19th century American society would become a soulless, hollowed-out shell, and so we have no problem electing soulless, hollowed out human beings to represent us politically.  And even now most don't understand what we've lost--even Liberals. They just adapt, and still they marvel at our technology and about how great the machines are going to make our lives. It's gonna be awesome. What's next? Flying cars and vacations on the moon. Can't wait.

Rationalist materialism is not science; it is a particular kind of metaphysics that follows from a particular interpretation of human experience that has been impoverished by the hypertrophying of instrumental reason. The real question is whether other metaphysical presuppositions that would lead us to a deeper, richer understanding of the cosmos and of humanity's place in it is possible for us in the future. For me, it's obvious where the development of such an alternative metaphysical imaginary should begin--by retrieving the ontological anteriority of mind before matter. 

In the meanwhile, the attempt to rhapsodize about what we know from science has always been to me an attempt to make the best of a fundamentally bad situation. It's akin to marveling  about how beautiful or clever the work of a taxidermist or the cosmetic work of the undertaker. There’s skill in it, and even a kind of beauty, but we're marveling at something that is not so marvelous as the thing was when it was alive. It lacks other deeper possibilities for the cognition of beauty because in the end its object is something abstract and dead, and as such a simulacrum, a faded memory of a living Real no longer believed in. 

So any meaning we see in it beyond the engineering practicality of it seems forced at best and perverse at worst. It feels to me like an attempt to make more of something than is really there to make of it: I want to be entertained and to be in a good mood, so by the gods I’m going to enjoy this unfunny movie no matter what, and laugh at its vulgar, unfunny jokes. Similarly regarding the cosmos, I'm going to feel the awe no matter that it is meaningless, purposeless, random arrangement of atoms. It’s an attempt to force some distant memory of beauty, from a time when humans had a profound capacity for apprehending the sacred, onto something that provides no evidence to justify our feelings of awe. Maybe it's unfair to accuse Tyson of this kind of thing, but I can't help but feel there's a forced, performative qualiity to his cosmic ebullience. 

***

Here's another way of getting at what I'm trying to point to: I'm reminded of the story from Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, where the author describes his having achieved a certain archery skill, which he demonstrates it to his teacher. But the teacher is outraged at the fraud because while he might have got the result that indicates mastery, he achieved that result in a non-Zen, mechanistic way. He took mastering the mechanics as the end rather than understanding that the goal was the transformation of his soul. He did not understand that the mechanical result was a secondary effect. He got the result, but getting the result wasn't the point--an expansion of the soul was. He had the appearance--the husks--of the master archer but not the soul of one. Such a distinction is beyond the scope of our contemporary materialistic imaginary, even for most people who profess to be religious.

Something like that is at the bottom of what I’m trying to get at here. The scientistic cosmologists are technically right about the mechanics, but the soul of their excitement isn’t "right". Their experience of awe should call them to seek for a deeper interpretation of its significance. Their excitement by their own presuppositions is the "illusion of significance", to use Lovecraft's phrase. They're not wrong because what they assert about the facts of the cosmos are wrong so far as it goes; they are wrong because the immaterial they insist cannot exist is the source of their capacity for awe. 

So I’m trying to make the point that scientific truth, which is real, and does in fact have a kind of beauty, nevetheless has gradually come to crowd out another kind of experience of truth, and in fact has come to delegitimate it. That's what happens if you start with facts rather than starting with awe and wonder. The rationalist materialist does not see the legitimacy of this other way of understanding the deep source of truth and beauty, so people who retain some level of soul life--and Tyson is clearly among them--try to eke out what juice they can from an unyielding rock because the rock is all they've got. But it doesn’t work. 

I exaggerate, perhaps unfairly, to make a point. A less exaggerated way of saying it might be that there is something inherent in the human spirit that rightly longs for beauty and to participate deeply in the mystery of Being, but we live in a world whose primary imaginary is shaped by engineering utility and capitalist expediency. This imaginary has progressively crowded out our capacity to experience real beauty and real mystery. If you experienced the real thing, it wouldn't be possible to be a rationalist materialist. 

And It becomes a vicious circle--the more our spiritual capacity diminishes, the more jejeune becomes the most frequent articulations of spiritual experience. Serious people see those who claim to be spiritual as jejeune, and so they reject any kind of spiritual reality as unserious--even if they have had such experiences themselves. Such experiences are for them embarrassing, or are dismissed as merely aesthetic. And so because rejected as unserious, the implications of such experiences are not developed, and because they are undeveloped, there are fewer and fewer people who achieve any substantive level of spiritual maturity. The last place one would expect to find such maturity these days is the churches. It's there, but you have to look hard to find it.

So this is not a personal knock on Tyson; it's about the limitations of his cosmic imaginary. I'm sure his enthusiasm and love of science are sincere. But there is, it seems to me, a mismatch between his very conventional, scientistic-materialist worldview and his understandable need to find a mysterious beauty in it. He connects them in a way that seems fraudulent to me--there's an inherent contradiction in it that most people--including Tyson--are oblivious of, and accept without thinking it through. In the end, I'm just saying that If he took the second impulse--his capacity for awe--more seriously, it would lead to his undermining of the first--his materialist presuppositions. 

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Note 1: I'm thinking in particular about one of his appearances on Stephen Colbert. In the clip below you'll see how incredulous Tyson is when he asks Colbert how the "urges of a believer" are compatible with following the evidence.  I've queued this to the point in the video that's most relevant, but watch from beginning if you're unfamiliar with Tyson and his cosmic enthusiasm.  

Animal House and the American Right

Watching it again today, I didn’t think so much of righteous defiance, or underdogs and outsiders; I thought of Wall Street. This particular iteration of Ramis’ martinet vs. slob theme pits—as everyone knows—a prissy, militaristic college fraternity against a fraternity where the boys like pleasure, which is to say, where they drink beer and throw parties and actually enjoy getting laid. If this basic formula doesn’t strike you as particularly rebellious or even remarkable, that’s because it isn’t: in its simple anarchic assertion of appetite, it’s the philosophy of the people who rule us. Everyone is a fraud in this world; learning is a joke; sex objects are easily conned; Kennedy-style idealism is strictly for suckers; and in one telling moment, fratboy 1 remarks to fratboy 2, who is crying over the trashing of his borrowed automobile by fratboy 1 and company, “You fucked up. You trusted us.” What popped into my mind when I heard that line was that other great triumph of the boomer generation: the time-bomb investments of 2008; Goldman Sachs peddling its “shitty deals” to the naive and the credulous.  (Tom Frank) 

Frank points to something that is at the heart of what confuses and ennervates the American Left, which is that its liberation project, insofar as it amounts merely to an f-you to "the Man", whoever the Man of moment might be, is at its heart a nihilistic project not that different from the nihilism of Roger Stone. Different sides of the same coin.

The occasion for Frank's piece in Salon was the passing of Harold Ramis, the creative mind behind Animal House, Caddyshack, and Ghostbusters, movies of the eighties that he argues are celebrations of Reaganism. The flippers off are not in the mold of Che and Angela Davis, but more in the mold of Gordon Gecko and Jordan Belfort. As Frank points out, Otter and Bluto's fraternity was modeled on one at Dartmouth that mainlines its alums to Wall Street. Isn't Scorcese's recent Wolf of Wall Street just Animal House for forty year olds? Isn't Kappa Beta Phi described in Kevin Roose's new book Young Money any different from Bluto's Delta Tau Ki. The plots are all the same--lovable, earthy hedonists vs the conformist, tight-assed, right-thinking, moralistic prigs. 

Caddyshack pits the filthy-rich but down-to-earth, vulgar but lovable wise-cracking, unconstrained Rodney Dangerfield character against the Ted Knight prig, the way The Howards of Virginia pit the Cary Grant character against Sir Cedric Hardwicke. It's a classic Hollywood trope--we are made to admire and root for the lively, clever, freedom-loving, no-rules-or conventions-left-unbroken character as he pits himself against the authoritarians who run the 'Establishment', only the Establishment in the 1970s and 80s was the New Deal Regulations Regime. The 'rules' were all the restrictions imposed on financial markets, you know rules like Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagall is for squares. Who's the real American--Family Ties's Alex Keaton or his cluelessly bland, earnest, conventionally liberal parents? 

Here's the point: those on the cultural left share common ground with those on the libertarian right insofar as both share a liberation project to crash old conventions. The good guys are for individual freedom and the bad guys are those who stand for discipline and restraint. This has been the modern, liberal project at least since Luther posted his 95 theses.

Right wing liberationists are really no different from their counterparts on the Left; it's just that the right-wing types haven't a shred of moral earnestness in their doing it. It's all about the joy of unbridled libido--greed, lust, will to power. The Libs, on the hand, believe their tearing down of repressive traditional forms is making the world a better place. 

And this is where it gets confusing, because so many on the political left are also on the cultural left, there is very little in their code that justifies restraint, and so it is hard for anyone on the Left to support a program in which restraint and discipline play a role. And so, at best, you get ineffectual things like Occupy or Jon Stewart's silly Rally to Restore Sanity.

The problem, of course, is that the hard right has no problem with discipline and restraint. Work hard; play hard is the motto once they get inspired by their desire to own the Libs. Think Roger Stone. The Right  knows how to organize and get things done, and they do it with fanatical zeal. They have a warrior mentality when it comes to discipline and sacrifice. It understands and embraces the will to power in a way that the  can't-we-just-get-along Left cannot even begin to fathom. 

Remember the scene in Freaks and Geeks when Nick wants his garage band to get better to prove to his father he can have a career as a drummer so he won't have to go into the army. Well the rest of the freaks refuse to practice--they say it's too much like school. Daniel says to Nick something like, "It's Rock and Roll, man; it's supposed to come from the crotch. If you got any, you'd know that." And the band breaks up.

That scene for me is a metaphor for the American cultural/political Left. It's not just the bad boys like Daniel, it's the good girls like Lindsay, too. She aligns with the Freaks because she wants something "real", and the Freaks represent that because they are so, what . . .?  Freaky? Unbuttoned down? So uninterested in conventional success, which excludes any idea of becoming successful human beings? Well, whatever it is, it doesn't amount to much more than living from the crotch and bird flipping the Man. And so Lindsay rejects the path of discipline and restraint, a path with the right guidance that might lead her to realize a deeper kind of freedom and capacity as a musician and a human being. But that's sooo square. Better to set forth on some amorphous journey of self-discovery.

Living in a decadent cultural period means that hardly anyone, especially when young, is exposed to deeply successful, i.e., authentic, genuinely menschy, full-spectrum human beings. There are only the prigs and the hedonists. And Liberals these days are doing their best to be prigs in all things except sexual license, and even that they find a way to make boringly politically correct. Liberals work so earnestly to change the rules; Conservatives would rather have fun breaking them. Contemporary Cultural Conservatism is the reductio ad absurdum of the Modern Liberation project; they have even found a way to become liberated from reality. So for the time being, at least, I can see why some think it's a lot more fun to be on the cultural right--to be Matt Gaetz instead of Al Gore. 

And in the meanwhile the wolves circle. 

Judd Apatow is for the Millennials what Harold Ramis was for the Boomers--same old, same old Hollywood nihilsm with a happy face.

[This is a repost from March 2014 somewhat edited. I've changed the opening quote because the one used in 2014 is no longer linkable. I'm posting this now because it relates to a recent post, " Boredom, Dionysos, and the Ethic of Authenticity.]

Boredom, Dionysos, and the Ethic of Authenticity

For people like Trump there is no good or bad; there is only boring and entertaining, and so anything is permitted so long as it is entertaining. The only sin is to be a bore, and it is better to be a boor than a bore.  This is a truth someone like Matt Gaetz well understands. And for the bread-and-circuses constituencies that are not within the Liberal bubble, this sells. People vote for the feeling that certain candidates give them, not for the policies they espouse. NY Times policy-oriented editorials, and the morally earnest editorials of other Liberal newspapers have got to be among the most boring, most unread, and most irrelevant things produced on the planet. I doubt most Liberals like to read them. 

Trump better than any other pol understands how people hate being bored. I remember my feeling of horror when he was elected in 2016, but I remember also feeling, somewhat guiltily, that the next four years, at least, are going to be more interesting than if Hillary had won. Hillary was one of a string of boring politicians Liberals love, perhaps only to be outdone by Al Gore, John Kerry or Michael Dukakis. Like likes like, I guess. 

This is something that Liberals need to understand about themselves--they are toxically boring. They may be right on substance, but they make being right about as unattractive as it could possibly be. To be 'not-boring' does not require that you be a showman or boor like Trump or Gaetz, but to be authentic, i.e., to be a mensch. A mensch can get morally outraged over something that is morally outrageous, but a mensch is never a moralistic scold. 

This is the key to the appeal of Stacy Abrams. She is not boring, and whether or not you agree with her policy preferences, she commands respect because she is interesting, and she is interesting because she is genuinely thoughtful. She is unlike almost every other Dem pol you listen to--even Bernie--spewing the talking points of the moment. Even if what she says isn't that different in substance, it's honestly acquired. It's not the content of what you say so much as the degree to which it is something that comes from an independently thought out understanding of what's called for.

Someone like Joe Biden speaks in political cliches and memes like most conventional pols, but he's won me over to the extent that as much as I saw him as a weathervane on policy, he seems to have thrown all that to the side and we are now seeing a level of honest commitment from him that has required from him a departure from his historical mo. Even though I would not have said this about Joe Biden a year ago, he has a kind of authenticity that comes across in his understated self-presentation. I think he's liberated by the idea that this is the last thing he is going to do. There is no need to triangulate with an eye to the future. 

But the kind of liberalness that gets Al Franken to resign his senate seat or Donald McNeil kicked out of the NY Times or a school renamed in San Francisco is so unattractive because it is so reductively, adolescently moralistic and really just so predictably stupid, and it gives Liberals a bad name for a good reason. And Liberals are for the most part as clueless about that and about how their priggish snowflakiness is so appallingly unattractive to anybody who is not them. I got involved in local Democratic party politics here for a few years about a decade ago, and I was bored to tears by everyone's toxically correct, humorless Liberalness, their obsession with process, their inability to be even in a normal-human-everyday-way interesting. The niceness of it all was suffocating. I'm exaggerating--there were important individual exceptions--but as far as the basic ethos goes, not by much. 

***

And so this screedlet sets up what I really want to talk about which is our condition as moderns, which is alienation and boredom, and how this is not a bug but a feature of contemporary life because of the opportunity it affords. I think this is a part, at least, of understanding David Foster Wallace's spiritual project, but awareness of it as a spiritual opportunity traces back to the condition of the ancient Israelites wandering in the Sinai wilderness. Many of them were so bored that a return to slavery in Egypt seemed a better option. 

I've written here for years about how the gradual disembedding shift from outer to inner requires a degradation of the outer. In other words, the current experience we are having of the collapse of almost every traditional norm is dizzying, but necessary for moral cultural progress. Morality must now increasingly come from an interior source because--for most of us, there are some exceptions-- there is no longer a living tradition to provide a trellis on which our souls might grow. And so this presents an opportunity.

Since the axial period, the shift from outer to inner has been the most important development in human evolution. If in the early days of Christendom the spiritually gifted would leave the conventional, i.e., the normal, outside-in, world for the Egyptian wilderness, now the wilderness has come to us.The monk in the desert confronted his demons as a necessary prequel to his finding God. 

But now there is no need to flee into the wilderness, because the wilderness has come to us, and everything depends on how we respond--whether like the Israelites of old wandering in the Sinai wilderness, we long for the fleshpots of Egypt or whether we walk with hope toward a better future, a future that can only be better if we find a way collectively to confront our demons and discover the possibility to live something collectively more authentic, which must be something more inside-out. 

Nobody wants to feel bored and alienated, so it's understandable that the most spirited people search for a way to overcome it. Kids particularly in their teens, the high-spirited ones, take risks and find all kinds of imaginative ways to beat the boredom, but then they settle into a conventional life of career and family that is often marked by quiet desperation. They seek all kinds of ways to bring back some excitement into their lives, and the results at best provide only a temporary fix.  

This is the basic polarity that pop culture sets up in so much of its fiction: on the one hand, the boring and the conventional; on the other, the Dionysian rules breaker unconstrained by convention and norms, someone deeply in touch with the will to power. But are you familiar with Nietzsche's description of it in Zarathustra?--

And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by “nothingness” as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be “empty” here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms towards the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming which knows no satiety, no disgust no weariness: this my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of twofold voluptuous delight, my “beyond good and evil”, without goal, unless the joy of the circle itself is a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will towards itself— do you want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, most intrepid, most midnightly men?— This world is the will to power— and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power— and nothing besides!

There's a lot to unpack here, but it's important to understand here that the Will to Power is a much broader category than just the will to dominate as it's often described. Nietzsche saw that need to dominate as a kind of weakness, as a way to compensate for one's feeling of being nobody by proving himself superior to an inferior. For Nietzsche the will to power was not egoism in this sense, but more a surrender to this monster of chaotic energy and letting it carry you wherever it will. In my opinion this is what Heidegger thought he was doing in embracing Nazism in the early thirties. He misidentified it as the upwelling of the Dionysian rather than what it really was, which was a mob of Last Men living out a resentment-driven adolescent power fantasy. For Nietzsche it was an openness to an amoral, chaotic power at the heart of Being.

For Nietzsche, this was the only remedy for boredom and alienation. He was half right. That chaotic power is the stuff of all human creativity, and human creativity is the only real antidote to boredom and alienation, but it must be organized or channeled in lawful ways. By law here I mean only what all the great Axial traditions pointed to--from the Tao of Lao Tse to Torah of the ancient Israelites to the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoics. Nietzsche's Will to Power is another name for Deep over which the spirit of the Lord hovers in Genesis. The story of earth evolution is the story of the interpenetration of the Deep with that Spirit, and the human being is the place where they meet and where this interpenetration is effected.  Lawfulness becomes alienation when it becomes an end in itself, when loses its relationship with chaos on the one hand and the dynamic movement of grace on the other.

Nietzsche embraces the Will that Schopenhauer identified as the the malign driving force of earth existence, but unlike Schopenhauer's rejection of it, Nietzsche surrendered to it. But either utterly to reject it or abjectly to surrender to it is a mistake because it lacks metaxis; it must instead be worked with, and to work with it means that you are in relationship with it, and to be in relationship means that you are separate from it. You are in conversation with it, not absorbed into it. 

But the solution for late modern cultural elites, under Nietzsche's influence, has been to surrender to it. This is the choice that all the most compelling, rules-and-conventions-breaking anti-heroes of pop culture make. They are pure, unrepressed, liberated id or or instinct. The rest of us watch such people with a kind of awed, vicarious fascination. It gives us a frisson, as when we watch a horror film or play a video game. We get the feeling without having to live the reality, which in turn only increases our alienation from the actual world we live in. We haven't the courage to live our real lives in such a surrender to chaos, which is why so many admire people like Donald Trump--whose charism derives from his being possessed by the chaos archetype. We disapprove of him and people like him, but secretly we admire them because they are living something larger than the rest of us, and we all want what they have--something bigger, freer, more intensely real. 

I thought this tension was captured well by Breaking Bad's Walter White. We meet him as a decent guy living a life of quiet desperation. He's financially strapped public school science teacher, his wife is sick, and so he takes a leap into the wilderness--literally the New Mexico desert--to discover that he likes walking on the wild side because he's no longer bored or alienated. He meets his demons and he embraces them, and he's never felt so alive. It becomes impossible for him to return to a normal, conventional life. He has opened himself up to the Dionysian and become a Nietzschean uebermensch. He is both admirable and loathsome for viewers, admirable because he is clearly living vitally in a way that most bored, alienated viewers do not experience in their own lives, but loathsome because of all the moral lines he's crossed. We admire him and yet we must condemn him. 

I think this in part explains what we saw on January 6 when Trump supporters stormed the capitol. This is not about people unhappy with Liberal policies, but people who are deeply alienated and want to live something larger. Liberalism with its process and rules and moralistic priggishness represents for them what is small and soulless, and they're not wrong, and I sympathize with their need to reject that. It's just that their remedy is so much worse. But this has always been true during historically decadent periods. Decadence is when a vital cultural impulse dies and there's nothing living to replace it.

Enlightenment rationality was the vital impulse that organized Western societies at least since the late 1600s. It no longer does so, and the fallen stature in the last year of the CDC has become emblematic of that decline in a particularly dramatic way. Science has been reduced to a particular kind of politics, an iffy interpretation of the Real that's part of the Liberal mythos. Enlightenment rationality was always problematic because of its inherent reductiveness and its disdain for the wisdom of the ancestors, but it had energy and it provided a principle around which a society could organize a sense of optimism about the future. It no longer has that energy, and so people are naturally attracted to whatever does have it, and to whatever provides some sense of optimism about the future.

That explains Trump, and it explains Qanon. It's all about energy that presents itself as an alternative to boredom and alienation that define the ethos of the late modern, i.e., the decadent, Liberal Order. That such energy is based purely on delusion is what makes it so destructive.This makes attraction to Trump and cults like Qanon understandable, but it doesn't make such attractions any less destructive. The Trump/Qanon crowd are today that faction of the ancient Israelites who can no longer tolerate the boredom of the desert, and so are inclined to worship golden calves or to head back to Egypt. These are the people who while wandering in the wilderness surrender to their demons rather than learn to work with them, and this leads inevitably to slavery and destruction. 

So is there a vital, authentic remedy? I believe there is. I believe that it's germinating underground--in the depths of the souls of millions of humans of good will--and that at some point it will break the surface and manifest in the daylight world. In the meanwhile we wander in the wilderness, and in our wandering we must hold fast to the hope that we are not lost. As the ancient Israelites had their daily ration of manna, we too are given just enough to get us through the day and to put one foot in front of the other. It is enough for us now simply to resist surrendering to our demons and in doing so to prepare a place for something deeply real, something holy, to grow. This is what the path of authenticity looks like, at least for now.

The Failure of Democracy is the Failure of Elites

For all our talk of democracy, it's pretty obvious that the country is run by elites in business, media, and politics. The rest of us get to ratify the general leftish or rightish direction they seem to be going, but the actual power of the people is pretty crude and is in effect plebiscitary. Elite thinking is the only thinking that really matters, and all talk about the will of the people is really pretty fanciful.

And so people across the political spectrum are for their different reasons have become extremely frustrated that the political system seems so utterly unresponsive to their will that it's completely understandable that cynicism about politics should be so pervasive. This cynicism has turned toxic in the more populist precincts of American society, and Democratic elites bear much of the responsibility for the loss of the white working class to that was solidly Democratic before Reagan to the current fever dreams of the Right.  

So we can talk all we want about how delusional Trump supporters are, but it wouldn't have come to this if it weren't for a fundamental nihilism or fecklessness among the country's elites--including its Liberal elites. I hold the Bill Clintons, Dick Morrises, Rahm Emmanuels, Larry Summers, and the whole Neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party as significantly responsible for the rise of the Tea Party, Trumpism, and  Q anon--if not quite as responsible as spineless Republican elites like Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio or the calculating cynicism of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and so many other game players like them. Not to mention Rupert Murdoch.

My point here is that the Democratic elites were criminally negligent in their Neoliberal Washington Consensus cluelessness, and that combined with their run-of-the mill Beltway swampiness and their capture by a kind politically correct silliness they gave Fox and Limbaugh enough to work with so that even sane people began believing the worst about them. So I think it's fair to say that If Democracy fails in the United States in the next decade, it won't be caused by White Supremacist militias and Q anon conspiracists, but because of the accumulated failures of elites that created the conditions for their emergence. 

In a very blunt sense, Q anon, insane as its specific assertions are, isn't wrong. Elite culture may not be dominated by Satan-worshipping pedophiles with space lasers made by Jews, but there is a kind of nihilism in which ego, greed, and will to power are simply accepted as normative as the main motivating driving forces in politics, business, and media. Mythologizing that nihilism by way of demonizing it in conspiracy theories takes what is kinda true and twists it into something that just isn't, but that doesn't mean that the kinda true part of it can be dismissed because of the crazy way it's being distorted. 

This is not an indictment of many individuals in business, media, and politics because clearly there are many fine people in each of these areas, but there is a pervasive cynicism about the corruption of our institutions that pervades popular culture for good reason. It's understandable why so many people are inclined to think the worst of someone like Joe Biden even if he doesn't deserve it. But why anyone can think the best of a sleazy crackpot like Donald Trump--that he is a better man, a truer American than Joe Biden or Barrack Obama--is one of the most astonishing feats of political jiujitsu in my lifetime. The irony of Trump being adopted as if he were Michael the Archangel leading an army to slay the Satanic armies is so absurdly whackadoodle, it leaves one speechless. 

During most of my adult life, media--especially prestige fiction, film, and TV--present a picture of American institutions that are run by psychopaths whose ego, greed, and will to power are the ugly truth that determines policy no matter what the decent people who work in these institutions would prefer. There is a feeling that the evil power that they and their institutions represent has a kind of stolid inevitability, that Don Quixotes can break their lances tilting at it and might win a victory here or there, but that the power and inevitability of this evil power is implacable. At best the decent folk are the John Kellys or Jim Mattises who try to provide some check on the worst instincts of the really terrible people who rise to the pinnacles of power in these spheres. But in the end, the good people either are either coopted or purged.

Trump isn't an aberration; he's just someone who daylights, magnifies, and exaggerates what's already there almost everywhere. He's somebody who believes that everybody is as bad as he, as cynical and self-interested in his or her motivations as he, and he's more right than wrong about that when it comes to so many of the people who rise to positions of power and influence in this country. 

Does that sound extreme or overly cynical on my part? Maybe, but it seems pretty clear to me that those motivations are by and large accepted as normative within these elite spheres. People working in these institutions as individuals may be more or less decent, but the institutional ethos is deeply corrupted by the exigencies of capitalism, and it makes sense that those who are most successful in such a corrupt values environment are those who have the least compunction about behaving corruptly. Is there any wonder that decent, but poorly informed people in great swaths of America are inclined see the ruling elites the way they do?

But perhaps that's why I feel a scintilla of hope. Yes, it might prove naive, but it's precisely because Trump has daylighted and magnified for all to see what we have in fact become that maybe, just maybe, especially as more comes out about him in coming months, that we will come to some broad collective resolution to reject elite nihilism for something better. The catch, of course, is whether something better will present itself. Biden might buy us some time, but he's not it. Will it come from within elite precincts of American society or from somewhere else? Don't know. But it's more likely to come from African American people of faith than from a soul-eviserated white elite, imo. Not the Kamala Harrises, but the Stacey Abrams. Not the Corey Bookers, but the Raphael Warnocks. We'll see. 

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. 

***

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. 

 

Realigning the Colors

What these figures suggest is that the 2016 election will represent a complete inversion of the New Deal order among white voters. From the 1930s into the 1980s and early 1990s, majorities of downscale whites voted Democratic and upscale whites voted Republican. Now, looking at combined male and female vote totals, the opposite is true. (Thomas Edsall in the NYT)

***

“It’s not what I’m going to do, but I’m scared that the country is going to go into a riot,” said Roger Pillath, 75, a retired teacher from Coleman, Wis. “I’ve never seen the country so divided, just black and white — there’s no compromise whatsoever. The Clinton campaign says together we are stronger, but there’s no together. The country has never been so divided. I’m looking at revolution right now.” (NYT)

***

“I think Trump is speaking to a certain population in our country that hasn’t had a place to belong for a long time,” he said. “I think it’s the depressed population that focusses on Trump, because it gives them a sense of purpose. But what happens when this purpose is in the White House?” The young veteran said that, originally, he had planned to support Trump, until the comments about women became public, and now he didn’t plan to vote at all.

He declined to give his name, because he didn’t want to be publicly attached to this election. He felt that most of his classmates would vote for Trump, but their commitment was shallow, in his opinion. After his time in the Middle East, he had concluded that Americans don’t really understand what an uprising is. “They’re talking about a revolution,” he said, of Trump supporters. “But they’re too lazy. Americans are too lazy. They’re fine with a rally. But they’re not up for a real revolution.”(Peter Hessler in The New Yorker)

Back in 2009, a month after Obama's first inaugural, I wrote what I thought then was a parodic treatment for a first episode in a bad TV miniseries entitled The Second Civil War. It imagined a Seven Days in May scenario where rogue military units in concert with militias all around the country take over federal buildings in the hopes of triggering a broad insurrection. I don't believe anything like that will happen; it was meant as a kind of spoof, but at the time I was surprised that the post got some play in the right-wing blogosphere. 

The guy quoted in the Hessler excerpt above who said Americans are too lazy to actually foment an insurrection is probably right--at least in the short term. But it's hard to imagine that the current red/blue impasse can just continue indefinitely. If it isn't resolved through political compromise, something more violent will increasingly become a possibility. HRC seems the least likely person to find a way to break this impasse. I do truly hope she will surprise us. But I don't think elite Dems feel any urgency. They seem to believe that time is on their side, that browning demographics favor Democrats in the long run, that the angry, white male at the center of Trumpism or the Tea Party is going to die out or exhaust himself in the next decade or so. Even if that happens, and I don't think it will, can we afford to wait before things spin out of control? Maybe we'll find a way to muddle through. Maybe there are forces at work that are invisible to us now that will change the game in unanticipated ways. But I just don't see how an HRC victory is going to change the game at all. 

I think there are two things at work that make me pessimistic about a muddling-through scenario: the first is tribal, and the second is structural. First is the tribal cosmopolitian vs. rural component. We're all familiar with the image below:

This isn't going away because it plays to a basic archetype in the American psyche explained colorfully here: 

There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes. In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy ...while the bad guys live in a shiny space station. In Braveheart, the main character (Dennis Braveheart) is a simple farmer ... and the dastardly Prince Shithead lives in a luxurious castle and wears fancy, foppish clothes. The theme expresses itself in several ways -- primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban. That tense divide between the two doesn't exist because of these movies, obviously. These movies used it as shorthand because the divide already existed.

We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump. I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn't moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I'd be voting for him. I know I would. (Source)

Whose side do you want to be on--the side of the aggrieved simple fold or the side of the decadent elites? In tribal terms, the Democrats have become the party of the cosmopolitan, urban, coastal elites, i.e., the decadent movie bad guys. Tom Frank has already already made the historical case that the blues don't represent ordinary, non-college educated folks anymore, and the Edsall article quoted above ratifies it. Black and Brown Americans, for the time being, align with these elites now because at least don't say awful, racist things about them, but in the long run the real interests of black, brown, and white non-elites do not align with the interests of Democratic elites--be they white, black or brown. This is where the structural factors come into play, and I believe that it will force a realignment of colors over the next decades . 

The Blues in this cycle can justify to themselves that they are the good guys only because the Reds don't care that they have put up such a bizarrely unattractive bad guy. There are lots of sensible Trump supporters who have no illusions about Trump's inadequacies, but they don't care about anything except throwing a grenade into a system they see as profoundly corrupt, and they see "candidate chaos" as their grenade. Dem elites don't understand how justifiably they are perceived as the corrupt bad guys, that they are more Caesar Flickerman than Katniss Everdeen. That's why the Democrats' smugness about demographics being on their side is largely illusory. While the political divide now is largely along tribal (i.e., cultrual values) lines, in the future it will start forming along structural lines.

There's a color realignment coming. Red has always been out of place as the color of upper case "R" convenntional, country-club Republicans. In epic movie terms, Blue has become the color of a morally decadent, anything-goes, cosmopolitan elite, and red is becoming the color of the down-to-earth, aggrieved, simple folk, be they white, black, or brown. It's the color of populist insurrection. Red is the color around which mostly whites rally now, but in the future, as the old racists die out, more blacks and browns will rally to it.  

As race- and ethnic-based tribal lines become less important in coming decades, structural lines will become more important. In every action movie we see, especially the futuristic ones, the good guys are a band of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, band of brothers and sisters. This is a normative social imaginary for most millennials. So as the old racists die out, that will makeroom for Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, and aggrieved Whites to find common cause together. Theirs will be the coalition of the virtuous simple folk against the corrupt elites. That, I would argue, is the real demographic future. The flag they fly will be red not blue. 

IMO, the Blues missed their chance for redemption when they rejected Bernie's bid. The underlying structural forces are against Blue redemption in the future. Bernie understood better than anybody that in the long run it's the structural issues, not the cultural (including racial) issues, that matter most. Again, HRC might surprise us, but she is the embodiment of elite Blue tribal values. The structural issues are simply not central to her understanding of the crisis we face. Even if she has seen the Bernie light to some extent, she is still perceived by the Reds to be someone they cannot trust and cannot work with. Better her than Trump, but if Trump would make things worse, it's hard to see how a Clinton will make things better. Some kind of re-alignment seems inevitable, if not in the next ten years, then soon after. 

HBO's 'The Leftovers': Channeling the Zeitgeist

One of the things that I’ve been thinking about and writing about over the last several years is that while the Age of Faith was supplanted by the Age of Reason, we live in a time now when most thoughtful people no longer believe in reason. Although there are still some dead-enders like Sam Harris, E. O. Wilson, and others, the Enlightenment rationalist project is dead, and we’re living now in the Age of Whatever. The battle between the new atheists and the traditionalist Christians is an argument that no longer makes sense. Rigidly traditionalist Christians are hanging onto forms and ideas that no longer have any life in them. Dead-ender rationalists are deluded if they believe that human reason is a trustworthy guide to navigate in a world that makes little or no rational sense. Both sides argue positions that are irrelevant for helping us understand what we're actually living through at this time.

 

That's why The Leftovers captures the Zeitgeist in a way that probably makes no sense to either rationalists or conventional Christians. It tells a story that assumes the official narratives that shape traditionalist Christianity and modern materialistic rationalism have no real legitimacy. The post-modern (or no-longer-modern) moment is one in which the culture has been stripped almost completely of any collective sense of culturally legitimated meaning. We're in the Age of Whatever, and in it everybody believes pretty much whatever they want. And people either believe uncritically in what they were taught as kids for want of anything better to believe in, or they find some other community, cult, or ideology that better meets their needs. But for a lot of people those options simply don't work; they don't fill the emptiness that follows from realizing that everything is random and pointless. And so for them there's substance abuse or the Virginia Woolf option. This mood of apocalyptic pointlessness that characterizes the Age of Whatever provides the landscape for the story The Leftovers wants to tell. Anything goes, and so why not some anomalous event like the inexplicable simultaneous disappearance of two percent the world's population.

 

Nobody, except the diehard rationalists, cares whether what he believes is objectively, provably true or not; for most of us what matters is what works, and it works if it meets some basic emotional need. If it works, it’s true, or true enough. We’re satisfied with the ‘truthiness’ of things, to use Colbert’s coinage. If it feels right, it is right. There’s some legitimacy in trusting one's gut or instincts, but some people have more trustworthy instincts than others.

 

I think that's because people have different qualities of soul, and some people just have higher-quality souls, and others have pretty low-quality souls. High-quality souls embrace a full-spectrum humanity--nothing human is alien to them, and so  I think that the basic characteristic of a high-quality soul is its relative lack of alienation, If by alienation we mean a level of divorce or disconnection from what is most deeply real. And the more deeply real that grounding connection, the higher the quality of the soul, and the higher the quality of the soul, the more capable the human being to navigate in a world that makes no sense, that has no legitimating nomos.

 

Yeats recognized this apocalyptic state of affairs when he talked in his famous poem about the worst being full of passionate intensity and the best lacking all conviction. And I think that’s the disordered apocalyptic mood that The Leftovers channels: a sense that there is no place to get a foothold, that nothing makes sense, that there are no big answers.The old sense of order that we derived from Faith or Reason no longer has any real legitimacy, and so the 'best' no longer have  a foothold to resist the worst, and for this reason the best often lose in those conflicts where the worst must be resisted. The "best" in The Leftovers are people like Kevin, Nora, Jill, and Erika precisely because they have no foothold, and yet refuse the easy solutions that would give them one. They are 'better' than Evie, Laurie or Tommy, because those three needed the easy answers provided by cultists. 

 

There is another category of character represented primarily by Matt, and on a secondary level by Michael (Evie's twin brother), Virgil, and Isaac. They are in their different ways men of faith. By 'faith' we mean a capacity to be intuitively attuned to a transcendent order of being that others who lack faith have no sense of. Faith isn't about believing in implausible or impossible propositions; it's a way of knowing or having convictions without the evidence of the senses and often without a legitimating narrative. Someone like Matt doesn't really understand any better than anybody else what's objectively happening, and yet there is a deeply grounded subjective conviction in him that guides his choices.

 

In the beginning the show wants us to see Matt as a fanatic or a fool, but in the end we find out he was right about the most important things. Matt is a Job figure, and like Job, no matter what awful stuff happens to him, and plenty does, he refuses despair. He knows something and regardless of the 'common-sense' evidence that seems to contradict it, he refuses to give up on what he 'knows'. The deeply poignant episode "No Room at the Inn" presents his insane sanity as a counterpoint to John Murphy's sane insanity. John is the rationalist dead-ender who thinks he has a firm foothold in what reason and common sense tell him. His foothold is in delusion that his clinging to prevents him from hearing the truth people tell him that don't fit his construct. 

 

Associated with the postmodern mood is the idea that the laws that govern the world are not really laws; they’re simply things we’ve made up, social constructions, provisional stories we tell ourselves to give some order and meaning to our lives. Even scientific "laws" are provisional and must adapt when anomalous events like the departure occur that cannot be explained by the old religious or scientific legitimating rules. and we find out by listening to the TV in the background that science has no explanation for it. If science or religion can't explain it, then it's understandable that many people will "feel safe" by joining a group that has way of explaining it, even if the explanation is the pointlessness of everything.

 

The nihilistic approach is embraced by the Guilty Remnant (GR) and also by people like John Murphy and his daughter Evie, who we find out near the end of Season 2 has not disappeared but has joined the GR. For John and Evie Murphy, there are no miracles in Miracle. For the Guilty Remnant, there is no family. There is no meaning. Nothing matters. Everything, like the broken pencil in the knock-knock joke Meg tells Evie, and Evie later tells John, is pointless. The GR and John and Evie refuse to be deluded, and they insist that those around them not be deluded. If they think you are deluding yourself, they will do whatever they can to disabuse you of your illusions. They will burn your house down; they will shoot you; they will stage their disappearance; they will tear your delusional little town to pieces.

 

But, according to the show, these prophets of meaningless are mostly wrong. On one level, though, they’re right. They are right that after the Sudden Departure things cannot go back to normal. They are right that there is no such thing as the kind of storybook miracles that you hear about in Sunday school, the kind that make a kind of pious sense—there are no miracles of that kind in Miracle. If you are looking for that kind of miracle, you will be disappointed.

 

While the show embraces the nihilistic, depressed, disoriented contemporary zeitgeist as its point of departure, it wants to take us further than that. It wants to take us on a thought experiment that points to another way of understanding everyone's experience of disorder. While John and Evie don't believe in miracles, the show does, if by a miracle you mean the intervention of a higher order of being into the ordinary day-to-day operations of a lower order of being. If you don’t believe a higher order exists, then miracles are theoretically impossible. If you do, then theoretically they are possible. 

 

Maybe anomalous interventions like this happen all the time, but unless we're people like Isaac, Virgil, or Michael, we just don’t notice because the lens through which we look at the world filters the evidence out. But once in a while the evidence is so dramatic that it can’t be filtered or denied. And so when we have a dramatic event like the "sudden departure" that exposes how the old rules no longer have explanatory power, people have to deal with it--you can't go on as if it didn't happen and that its happening hasn't changed everything. October 14 is not just about the collective experience of the loss of friends and family; it about the loss of any vestigial sense of meaningful order--its about the collapse of meaning. 

 

 

***

Existentialism, as we normally think of it—Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, etc—is a reaction to the collapse of the legitimacy of the modern Enlightenment “progressive” project that defined the "old order". Existentialism's energy and its attraction for many people in the post-WWII era lay in its rejection of large, alienating, dehumanizing, rational, "modern" systems that organized governments, corporations, and other huge society-ordering institutions into technocracies with well-intentioned, but insanely sane  experts, the best and brightest. And so much of what they touched because it was sanely insane made things humanly worse, even if there was "data" that indicated they were getting better. The Beats and later the New Left and the anti-nuke and anti-war movements arose to counter the sane insanity with counter-cultural movements that developed very much within the existentialist vein. 

 

The postmodern thinkers, particularly French guys like  Derrida and Lyotard, owe a lot to that stream of existentialism. A key theme for them is to deconstruct all “grand narratives”. Grand narratives are the stories cultures or societies tell that give meaning and purpose to the people who live in them. Religions are founded on grand narratives. The rationalist Enlightenment project is or was the dominant grand narrative of the West until it started to unravel in the wake of WWI in Europe. Postmodern deconstruction is usually designed to make you see the hidden power agendas that lie behind these narratives and to understand which group benefits most from sustaining the narrative. I think The Leftovers is very much attuned to this thought milieu. The people of Jarden have a narrative that's based on its having been spared, and so it follows that it is therefore a place of miracles. John and Evie Murphy are having none of that. They are the deconstructionists: there are no miracles in miracle; there is only disappointment for those who think there are.

 

They, and  Meg's faction of the Guilty Remnant, are on a mission to deconstruct the "miracle" narrative. And for the first half of the second season, it's an open question whether John and Evie are right or whether Matt, who believes that Jarden is a place of miracles, is. In the finale, we find out that Matt was right and John/Evie were wrong. Whatever the show's viewers may think, the show clearly sides with the insane sanes. The sane insanes are sane by virtue of their remaining entrenched in what had been a legitimized narrative. They are insane by virtue of their profound alienation from the  Real because they refuse to adapt to new aspects of it that don't fit their obsoletized construct. The insane sanes are are 'insane from the the POV of the old formerly legitimate but now obsoletized rationalist and religious narratives, but sane because of their ability to adapt to the Real as it reveals itself in ways that transcend and deconstruct the old narratives. 

 

We are insane to the degree we are living in constructs that estrange us from the Real; we are sane to the degree that we live in  constructs that are well adapted to the Real. We are incapable of living without constructs, but some constructs are "better" than others.

 

Existentialism in its post WWII expression leans mostly toward ontological nihilism and/or toward debunking the alienating narratives that have captured naive consciousness of the people in the society around them. But existentialism traces back to Christian thinkers like Kierkegaard and Dostoyevski in the mid to late 19th Century, and neither of them were naive. Christian existentialism and Buddhism, which is a distant cousin in the development of existentialist themes, have, I think, been a powerful influence on themes developed in The Leftovers. Christian existentialism also has an interest in critiquing groundless grand narratives, but it does so in order to more effectively disclose a true narrative, which is found in the gospels. The gospel narrative itself is not immune to being coopted by alienating grand narratives. Indeed, it has been frequently expropriated by elites to support an agenda that has little to do with the deep, subversive truth the gospel narrative wants to tell. For the Christian existentialist, pious, treacly, Christian narratives that support magical thinking are deeply alienating. However, non-alienating narratives are a possibility for Christian existentialists, and the foundational narrative for overcoming the deep alienation that universally afflicts the human condition is depicted in the gospels.

 

[Digression: I loved the scene where Nora is listening to some Christian talk radio show while she's tending to the baby, and the preacher is telling a caller that his wife isn't ready to love yet, and she won't be until Jesus fixes her. Nora walks over to the radio, picks it up, and smashes it on the floor, and then says, "Fix that, Jesus!" I think this points to the way that religious language has become impossible to hear.The problem with religious language and religious texts lies in the way they can simultaneously obscure and disclose. Most of us have heard that kind of pious, platitudinous language so often that whatever might be true in it has become encrusted with misinterpretations that have made it all but impossible to hear on its own terms. But because it is often misinterpreted or misappropriated does not mean that those are the only possibilities.] 

 

Martin Luther King was deeply influenced by the Christian Existentialists and by Gandhi’s application of what is really a strategy grounded in the love-the-enemy spirit of gospels. Central to the thinking (or theology) behind the nonviolence of the Civil Rights movement as worked out by MLK and James Lawson was the refusal to dehumanize the enemy. Violence is intrinsically dehumanizing, and so even in the face of their suffering violence the activist's refusal to react violently is a refusal to become less human by committing dehumanizing acts. But this refusal also creates the conditions that might make it possible for the violent racist attacker to awaken to his own sleeping humanity. Sleeping because of the way he had been acculturated into the sin-saturated, racist grand narrative that supported the dehumanizing institutions of the Jim-Crow south. The racist dehumanizes others because he has been absorbed into a dehumanizing culture organized by a dehumanizing grand narrative. To be dehumanized is normal reality for those asleep in a dehumanizing grand narrative. But the difference between the Christian existentialists and the more nihilistic branches of existentialism lies in that the former believe there is a deeper, dormant humanity that can be awakened. If you don't believe there is a deeper humanity sleeping in the enemy, then you don't believe there is a deeper humanity in yourself either, and so that justifies an ethic of eat or be eaten. Frantz Fanon is right, MLK and Gandhi are wrong.

 

So The Leftovers takes this idea of non-violent confrontation by using the Guilty Remnant as a kind of nihilistic parody or counter-image of the Civil Rights movement. In Perrotta's book on which the HBO series is based, the GR were a more traditional Christian fundamentalist apocalyptic cult. But perhaps through the influence of Damon Lindelof, his co-writer for the TV series, the HBO GR is a cult whose mission is to spread the gospel not of salvation but of pointlessness. Like the Civll Rights movement, the GR wants to awaken those who they believe are asleep to the deep truth, but the truth for the GR is nihilistic: our existence is ontologically random and pointless. All grand narratives that seek to provide answers are false, the only true narrative is that there is no meaningful narrative because there is no point, that everything we think has meaning or gives life meaning is a made-up story we tell ourselves to keep us from being distracted from the harsh, unbearable truth that everything is pointless, random, and cruel.

 

And so people who join the GR do so because they have accepted the pointlessness of their own lives, and find a sense of purpose and meaning in joining with others who know the harsh truth and have a mission to confront and convert others who cannot bear to face it. Their mission is to prevent those who want to move on, resume their normal pre-departure routines, to retrieve their old meaning-generating narratives about family, God, patriotism, whatever--as if nothing happened. But the GR are having none of that. For them something huge happened, which was the definitive disclosure that everything is pointless and meaningless, and the GR mission is to make sure that everybody learns that lesson. Meg continues the logic of the counter-image to the Civil Rights movement. Meg, like those blacks who wearied of non-violence and broke off from the non-violence of the earlier civil rights movement after 1968, looked for ways to be more militantly aggressive. Meg is to the old-guard GR as Angela Davis is to MLK. [I am open to developments in Season 3 that might make the GR into something more than a nihilistic cult, but so far there's very little evidence of it. They're right--people need to wake up; they're wrong that everything is pointless.]

 

The show finds the GR interesting and its response to the departures plausible and important—Patty, Meg, and Evie are all compelling, believable characters, and while (I think) it rejects their nihilistic interpretation of events, I think the show also wants to affirm that the GR are correct--things cannot go back to the way they were. Lindelof and Perotta want to lead us in a thought experiment into a possible future story that draws on unconventional esoteric traditions that claim to know something about the spiritual world and the afterlife. But whatever might be the plausibility of these esoteric themes, it comes back to the existentially grasped truth that cuts down to the only thing that matters in the end, which are the bonds of love and loyalty that hold us in communion. The existential truth of Erika's love for her daughter, of Matt’s love for his catatonic wife, of Nora’s love for her adopted baby, of Kevin’s desire to be with those he loves—that kind of love trumps everything—even death. That’s as Christian existentialist as it gets. In the season 2 finale Evie's confrontation with her mother on the bridge makes clear that she thinks she understands something that her mother does not, but it is Evie who doesn’t understand something that her mother does, which is that love has the last word. That's something the Garveys in their different ways have come to understand.  We'll see in Season 3 whether John and Evie Murphy can learn it. 

 

Randomness, pointlessness, and cruelty are very real parts of our “existential” experience, but so is love, and in the end love does have the last word, and our ability to love and to receive it is the deepest expression of our dignity as human beings, and it's the force that in the long run deconstructs all false, alienating grand or petty narratives. That’s my take on the Season 2 finale. And that's why some people found it weak--it sounds too much like that preacher Nora was listening to who talked about how we need Jesus to fix things. The problem with the real truth, the kind that we actually have some access to, is that it's not something to be sought on mountain tops or in extraordinary epiphanies. Some people, like Kevin, do have extraordinary experiences, but they're not necessary, because the same thing that reveals itself in the extraordinary reveals itself in the ordinary if you have the eyes to see it or the ears to hear it. If you don't, then you might as well join the GR--they at least have the courage of their convictions to live their truth to its logical conclusion. But that's true of all fanatics--they take a partial truth and absolutize it. What makes them fanatics is not the partial truth they understand, but everything they leave out. 

Whither King Laius?

It’s now boring to be a rebel — or, rather, rebels have become boring. When everyone from cashiers at Rite Aid to associate humanities professors to seemingly every single NBA star has a pierced nose or face, ironic clothing item, an elaborate tattoo and disproportionately strong opinions; when multinational corporations selling hamburgers, potato chips and sneakers are urging you to think different and stand out by buying their things, then the specialness of individual rebelliousness is over. The cultural power granted to symbols and accouterments of dissent — signs once referring to the bourgeois person’s cheeky, recalcitrant individuality, his or her deep infusion with modernism — only work when they remain in the margins, when they mean something over and against what everyone else is doing. Only then do they keep their charge and pointed critique at what is “mainstream.” And even that word, “mainstream,” as we have witnessed, has already been co-opted by those non-mainstream mavericks over on the Palin Express. You see, they like “stirrin’ things up and tellin’ it like it is.” They are all up in your grill. The deluxe, stainless steel Kitchen Aid gas-powered kind. "Irony, Sincerety, normcore", by Jay Magill

I suspect I've been 'normcore' all along. Making a statement one way or another with the way I dress has always seemed kind of pointless--as I believe all attempts to shore up tribal identities are. I believe the impulse to be subversive in a corrupted society is healthy, but not if it's just in the service of being oppositional or hip, of saying I'm not with them. It doesn't matter that you are wearing a team uniform; it matters that you act in the service of something constructive, something good and truthful. Just do it; don't advertize it.

But as I've been writing about here lately, I think that one of the main differences between my boomer generation and the current millennials lies in that in our twenties we were involved in a largely reactive Oedipal drama that just isn't a script for millennials to act out the way it was my generation, and that's a good thing. 

Our generation grew up in a world where the "oppressor" was someone we met everyday at school and who was home every night at six. Millennials know there are "bad guys", but they're nobody they know as intimately as we did.They are not likely to be any other adult they have frequent contact with, unless it's a cranky uncle who watches too much FOX News. There's no there there for Millennials to rebel against, so why do it? Oedipal dramas don't change anything; they just waste everybody's time. At best such dramas tear down something that needed to be torn down to clear a path for others to travel later. 

Which is how I see our generations contribution--to clear the field this new generation to take the ball and run with it to the goal line. I think they can do it largely unimpeded--if they can find the will, the motive power, the interior resources, the fire in the heart to do it. If they can do it in a way I think they have the potential to do, then I believe the opposition will melt like wet snow on sun-drenched late-April meadow.

'Animal House' and the American Right

The kind of liberation the rude gesture brings has turned out to be not that liberating after all, but along the way it has crowded out previous ideas of what liberation meant—ideas that had to with equality, with work, with ownership. And still our love of simple, unadorned defiance expands. It is everywhere today. Everyone believes that they’re standing up against unjust authority of some imaginary kind or another—even those whose ultimate aim is obviously to establish an unjust authority of their own. Their terms for it are slightly different than the ones in “Animal House”—they talk about the liberal elite, the statists, the social engineers, the “ruling class.” But they’re all acting out the same old script. The Tea Party movement believes it’s resisting the arrogant liberal know-it-alls. So did Andrew Breitbart, in his brief career as a dealer in pranks and contumely. So do the people who proposed that abominable gay marriage discrimination law in Arizona. Hell, so do the pitiful billionaires of Wall Street—even they think they’re standing bravely for Ayn Rand’s downtrodden job creators.

Maybe the day will come when we finally wake up and understand that insults don’t always set us free. But until that happens, my liberal friends, don’t ask for whom the bird flips: the bird flips for thee. 

--Tom Frank

Tom Frank points to something that is at the heart of what confuses and ennervates the American Left, which is that its liberation project, insofar as it amounts merely a an f-you to "the Man", whoever the Man of moment might be, is at its heart a nihilistic project.

The occasion for this piece in Salon is the recent passing of Harold Ramis, the creative mind behind Animal House, Caddyshack, and Ghostbusters, movies of the eighties that he argues are celebrations of Reaganism. The flippers off are not in the mold of Che and Angela Davis, but more in the mold of Gordon Gecko and Jordan Belfort. As Frank points out, Otter and Bluto's fraternity was modeled on one at Dartmouth that mainlines its alums to Wall Street. Isn't Scorcese's recent Wolf of Wall Street just Animal House for forty year olds? Isn't Kappa Beta Phi described in Kevin Roose's new book Young Money any different from Bluto's Delta Tau Ki.

Caddyshack pits the down-to-earth, wise-cracking, lovable Rodney Dangerfield character against the Ted Knight prig, the way The Howards of Virginia pit the Cary Grant character against Sir Cedric Hardwicke. It's a classic Hollywood trope--we are made to love the lively, clever, freedom-loving, no-rules-or conventions-left-unbroken character as he pits himself against the fascists who run the 'Establishment', only the Establishment in the 1970s and 80s was the New Deal Regulations Regime. The 'rules' were all the restrictions imposed on financial markets, you know rules like Glass Steagall. Glass Steagall is for squares. Who's the real American--Family Ties's Alex Keaton or his cluelessly bland, conventionally liberal parents? 

Here's the point: those on the cultural left share common ground with those on the libertarian right insofar as both want to crash old conventions. This has been the liberal project at least since Luther posted his 95 theses. The good guys are for individual freedom and the bad guys are those who stand for discipline and restraint. And this is where it gets confusing, because so many on the political left are also on the cultural left, there is very little in their code that justifies restraint, and so it is hard for anyone on the Left to support a program in which restraint and discipline play a role. And so, at best, you get ineffectual things like Occupy or Jon Stewart's silly Rally to Restore Sanity.

The problem, of course, is that the hard right has no problem with discipline and restraint. It knows how to organize and get things done, and it has a warrior mentality when it comes to discipline and sacrifice. It understands and embraces the will to power in a way that the feel-good, can't-we-just-get-along left cannot even begin to fathom. 

Remember the scene in Freaks and Geeks when Nick wants his garage band to get better to prove to his father he can have a career as a drummer so he won't have to go into the army. Well the rest of the freaks refuse to practice--they say it's too much like school. Daniel says to Nick something like, "It's Rock and Roll, man; it's supposed to come from the crotch. If you got any, you'd know that." And the band breaks up.

That scene for me is a metaphor for the American cultural/political Left. It's not just the bad boys like Daniel, it's the good girls like Lindsay, too. She aligns with the Freaks because she wants something "real", and the Freaks represent that because they are so, what . . .? Well, it doesn't amount to much more than living from the crotch and bird flipping the Man. And so she rejects the path of discipline and restraint, a path with the right guidance that might lead her to realize a deeper kind of freedom and capacity. But that's sooo square. Better to set forth on some amorphous journey of self-discovery.

And in the meanwhile the wolves circle. 

Judd Apatow is for the Millennials what Harold Ramis was for the Boomers--same old, same old Hollywood nihilsm with a happy face.

Bratton's Anti-TED TED Talk

His point is that TED is to cosmopoliticans what FOX is to conservatives:"TED of course stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and I'll talk a bit about all three. I Think TED actually stands for: middlebrow megachurch infotainment." Yes and No.

The whole thing is worth reading, but a couple of grafs from the close to give you a sense of where he's going:

One TED speaker said recently, "If you remove this boundary ... the only boundary left is our imagination". Wrong.

If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.

Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. This is not about "personal stories of inspiration", it's about the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconceptualisation: the hard stuff that really changes how we think. More Copernicus, less Tony Robbins.

At a societal level, the bottom line is if we invest in things that make us feel good but which don't work, and don't invest in things that don't make us feel good but which may solve problems, then our fate is that it will just get harder to feel good about not solving problems.

As before, yes and no. No, in that I think that Bratton is too hard on imagination. In fact we need a transformation of our collective imagination, which is impoverished by its materialistic assumptions and its spiritual banality.  Yes, in that the materialistic and spiritualy banal is too often celebrated at TED talks. The task demands the intellectual rigor to which he points, but in the end it is an act of imagination that effects the transformation, that changes a geocentric cosmos into a post-Copernican one.

The problem for us now is that too many of us are are living in a late 19th-century social imaginary, and our collective imagination hasn't caught up with what we know. There are many people, maybe more than at any time in history, who are doing the hard work of thinking about complexity. But no one who understands complexity has been able to effectively pull of the Copernican trick for a post quantum theory age. If some have been able to do it for themselves they have not had an impact, at least yet, on the broader collective imagination.

Yes, there's a lot of self-absorbed, Neoliberal-tinged drivel spewed through TED, but  the role that TED or the RSA and other popular education venues can play, and have played when they are at their best, is to take the complexity and to synthesize it in imaginative ways that help reshape our thinking rather than to just reinforce what we already think, as these talks too often do. 

Breaking Down 'Breaking Bad'

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

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

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

Why Is 'Breaking Bad' Hitting a Nerve?

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

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

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

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

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

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

McEnroe makes an intersting point about the Jesse Pinkman character:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Some Thoughts on 'Breaking Bad'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What do Men Want?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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



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

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

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



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


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



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

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

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

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

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

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