After the Future

Stonehenge Explained

Built on the site of an ancient cemetery, Stonehenge was a “monument of remembrance,” he said, and an “expression of unity” that pulled people together in the pursuit of a common endeavor.

Yet, he said, “People don’t want it to be that simple as an explanation.” (NY Times 2/17/22)

The U.S. Capitol explained 2500 years hence:

Built on hill overlooking a swamp, the U.S. Capitol was a place where people got together to chat about what's happening and occasionally to make some plans about this and that. People just don't want it to be that simple as an explanation. 

It's not the facts that someone affirms that makes him so deeply wrong, but what he leaves out, even if it is unknowable. 

Christopher Nolan, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Unconscious

[I haven't had a chance to see Interstellar yet, but Nolan's work has always interested me, and I'm reposting a piece I wrote in 2010 about Tarkovski's Solaris, his response to Kubrick's 2001, which I saw for the first time around the time I first saw Nolan's Inception. I think the post makes sense even if you haven't seen either film. I'm posting it now because it relates to what I wrote "Sacramental Semiotics", and sets up a post I'll probably be writing about Interstellar. Wormhole as metaphor? ]

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

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

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

Carl Jung's understanding of the collective unconscious comes close to what I'm talking about here, but Jung suffered from what Owen Barfield called RUP--Residue of Unresolved Positivism. [Peirce, Heidegger, Barfield are better, if less accessible, guides for our thinking about this.] 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

 

The Dream Prison of Conventional Wisdom, Part I

In the last several years I have been impressed with the power and persistence of conventional thinking in the face of powerful evidence that would contradict it. So what do I want to say here that hasn't be said a thousand times before referencing Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts, etc.  Everybody reading here already understands that conventional thinking creates an epistemological frame that conditions what we accept uncritically as true or reject as false. It's what becomes our "common sense", and I don't have to argue here that too much of that kind of common sense is nonsense.

But I want to think out loud a bit about why we humans are so resistant to having our minds changed. Why do some people eagerly embrace frame-crashing truths and others resist them? Is it merely a superficial embrace of novelty that distinguishes liberal progressives from traditionalist conservatives? Is anyone, if he moves from the old frame to a new one, really just swapping one set of illusions for another? Is the idea of 'progress' always an illusion? If not, how do we discern the difference between the 'novel' and the 'true'? If there is a difference, what is in us that knows it, and what is in us that embraces the truth or resists it? 

So before I go further, let me frame what I'm going to say by laying out my philosophical biases. I think the Christian Neoplatonists have it more right, and the rationalists have it mostly wrong. I'm not going to try to defend that bias here, but merely note that I assume that we all begin in a state of consciousness in which we  see the world as if through a glass darkly. That everything we see and think we understand as true is always partial and  distorted, and that the goal is not simply to correct that problem by adding more light and adjusting the focus, but to deepen our relationshp with the world and people around us, which means to increase our experience and awareness of the ways we participate in Being.

We are each of us deeply embedded in the cosmos, and yet we feel ourselves cut off from it. It's precisely that experience of disembeddedness that distinguishes Moderns from almost everyone else who has ever lived. Most moderns think they are better for it, and in a way I would agree, but I don't think it gives moderns a better sense of what the cosmos is. Moderns think that they have a superior epistemology because it is "objective", and while objectivity and precision are valuable for engineers, an unbalanced preference for objective truth has given us a world of objects and with it a world that has become un-souled.

My criteria for truth has less to do with clarity and certainty than with intensity--Intensity in delivering an experience that expands our level of communion or participation with the 'known'. Truth, the kind that matters, is not something you know like 2 - 2 = 0; it's something you find yourself intensely engaged with, like the love for your children. Objective truth is always either an abstraction from the lived world, or a provisional construction of conventional wisdom--at best a tinny, superficial, provisional representation of the world.

It's in subjective truth you find the gold and the eternally valid. Truth is something that is given, in other words, in ways similar to the way we develop a friendship. We make the initial encounter. We have first impressions and make preliminary judgments, and over time our appreciation for the 'other' deepens. It's the quality of the communion between you and the other that sets the conditions for how deeply he or she can be known. The other can never be completely known, and yet what we know of him is true. The quality of the communion determines the quality of the knowing. So some people know more and others less, because all of us have greater or lesser capacities for communion.

The goal is not to know more, but to know better by increasing our capacity for communion. It's easier to understand how this works with people, but the same kind of communon is possible with all of Being. (I've got Goethe and Buber in mind here, and while I'm not particularly enamored of Heidegger, I think he's barking up the same tree: Communion, or our throwness into Being and enmeshment with it is a given; so why do we experience such a profound alienation from Being, and how do we overcome it?)

So I assume that as moderns we begin in a state of profound alienation from the world and from one another. The more modern you are, the more you live in your head, and the more you live in your head the more alienated you are. And because we are so deeply alienated, we don't see anything clearly and most of the efforts over the last five hundred years to obtain clarity and certainty have been profoundly misguided because they've been such a head trip. They have given us a way of experiencing the world that has allowed us to cleverly exploit it to make the lives of a relative few more comfortable, but at the price of making the world and the creatures in it 'things'--pure extension--and in doing so making the lives of so many people more miserable than they were before their traditional lives, lives saturated with communion, were disrupted by the flat-souled modern obsession with novelties and innovation.

***

So, you may be thinking, this guy thinks of himself as a progressive? He sounds pretty conservative to me. But I'd argue that I am a progressive who rejects the Liberal frame that defines modernity, and this blog is about trying to develop a counter frame to modern liberalism that is nonetheless progressive. Such a counterframe would retrieve the gold that moderns have thrown off the boat over the last five hundred years. Their doing so has given us an impoverished, half-assed metaphysics and epistemology, and it needs to be replaced. But it won't be until our experience of the world changes radically. We can't think our way to a solution, but bad thinking, insofar as it impedes our capacity for freedom and communion, must be called out for what it is, and replaced with something that offers more 'progressive' possibilities. 

The modern philosophical frame is impoverished because its chief characteristic is an epistemology of alienation--it assumes the separation between subject and object rather than their communion. And the epistemology of alienation has had profound effects in shaping our social imaginary. We live in a world of objects that we experience mainly through sight and touch. The only truths our conventional wisdom accepts as true are the ones we can see, ones that can be recorded by a camera, or that can be represented as data on a spread sheet.

So, perhaps to reinforce my anti-liberal bona fides, let me ask the question: Would a camera have recorded the resurrection of Christ? I don't think so. Does that mean it didn't happen? No. Does it mean that the post-Resurrection appearances to the apostles were therefore delusional (or just symbolic)? No, they were real, historical, and transformative events, but they cannot be understood within a modern rationalist frame because it is too one dimensional.

My argument is that this rejection of what seems to be the more outlandish claims of Christianity derives from the limitations of the frame or the lens through which the modern mind encounters them. They can be more easily understood within a different frame that embraces a participatory and cosmic multidimensionality, which is essentially what the Christian Neoplatonism of the medievals embraced, and it's why I think it needs to be retrieved and adapted to a post-quantum theory world.

The post-resurrection appearances in such a frame are quite plausible if you understand it as a historical moment when reality in one dimension interpenetrated with another in such a way that some humans were conscious of it. It was, in other words, a privileged, but temporary moment of interdimensional communion. I would say that the salvation of the world that Christians and some other religious traditions talk about it is essentially a process of becoming increasingly aware of the communion between these dimensions. It is the only progressive remedy to the deep alienation we currently experience. 

Nominalism and the kind of rationalism that engenders it has led to the  hypertrophying of the eye, which in turn has led to the atrophying of soul, and the atrophying of the soul leads to a diminished capacity for communion. The more diminished our capacity for communion, the more implausible the existence of anything existing that cannot be empirically verified as true. And so the more we live in the surface reality, the more inaccessible and unconscious becomes the deep reality. The more unconscious it becomes, the less we are capable of understanding and managing our lives freely.

We are unfree to the degree that our lives are determined by any number of entities that can compel us to do what we do not will to do, whether enemies or family, the gods or the tribe, or our own inner demons, addictions, and compulsions.

And so the more unconscious we are, the more vulnerable and receptive we are to a will that is not our own. We are easily hypnotized by the will of the crowd and seduced into living in a collective dream that we call conventional wisdom, which in our time is dominated by the rationalistic, materialistic assumptions on one hand, or a banal, self-absorbed New Age spirituality on the other. The key characteristic of any idea that comes to us from conventional thinking is its banality, its flatness. When something is deeply, truly true, it has an energy, an intensity, that disrupts our superficial complacency and moves us into a deeper experience of communion. There are subjective truths, and there are subjective cliches. 

None of us can resist living in the darkened, alienated consciousness that is given to us through conventional thinking, but the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that what is given to us by conventional wisdom is mostly wrong and that we should be suspicious of it, and that what is resistant in us to its soul-deadening banality is the best thing in us--our longing for a deeper communion with Being, and to participate consciously in the world at greater and greater levels of depth.

Both skeptic and cynic share the fundamental insight that the world defined by conventional thinking is a skein of illusions, but skepticism is not cynicism. The difference lies in that the skeptic accepts the conventional reality as a provisional convenience, something he needs to work in because that's the world everybody lives in, but it's not what he cares about. He cares more about the subjective truths that grab him and subvert the collective dream. He believes that there is an alternative to collective delusion, that the alienation that comes with a non-participatory, non-communal experience of the world can be overcome. Cynicism, on the other hand, believes that there is no alternative, that delusion is all there is, so make yourself as comfortable as you can in a world that makes no sense. Both conventional thinking and the cynicism that stays stuck in debunking it are mental prisons, both in their different ways are forms of arrested development stuck in the same closed system.

In the opening paragraph I asked:

Is anyone, if he moves from the old frame to a new one, really just swapping one set of illusions for another? If not, how do we discern the difference between the 'novel' and the 'true'? If there is a difference, what is in us that knows it, and what is in us that embraces the truth--or resists it? 

Truth works on us in different ways to wake us up, first, to the fact of our alienation and, second, to the freedom and communion that lie beyond it. Progress is not just more novelty or innovaton; it's a movement toward greater freedom and deeper communion. That which is deeply true increases our capacity for freedom and communion. That which is false impedes it. And for any culture its conventional wisdom either works to  enhance or impede its "progress". It is false to the degree that it impedes, and true to the degree that it enhances. It's hard to imagine a moment in our history when there was a greater impediment to progress. That's where I share common ground with thoughtful conservatives. But the challenge is to move beyond those impediments, and it's usually there that I part company with them. For me the 'moving beyond' overlaps with the future orientation that typifies the conventional wisdom of the left. 

But there are positive and negative ways of moving beyond. I see the conservatism of the political right in this country as a particularly insane form of the basic alienation that affects us all; it offers no solutions, and if anything aggravates what is already a bad situation. But neither does Liberalism have a solution. I see the Liberalism of the political left as a spent force that was always contrained by its rationalist assumptions. It was just a matter of time before it would collapse, and we're living through its collapse now. At best it was just something we had to go through; at worst, it's laid a path leading to a mechanomorphic transhuman future.

Such a transhuman future is not my idea of progress, but perhaps that's because I look at it through the limitations of the current conventional wisdom's materialistic framing of it. If transhumans have a greater capacity for freedom and cosmic interdimensional communion, I would embrace such a future. Pehaps the resurrected Christ was the first transhuman.

In Part II I want to look at two films, Costa Gavras's 1982 Missing and the 1984 film The Shawshank Redemption as parables that show how we both want to leave our world of alienation and yet often fight tooth and nail to stay in it. I want to look at the parallel relationships between, on the one hand, Andy DuFresne and Red Redding in Shawshank, and on the other, Charlie & Beth Horman's relationship with their father/father-in-law, Ed, in Missing. The first part of the pair are more "progressed", so to say,  because they are freer and more deeply in communion with the world outside the constraints of the prison of conventional wisdom; as such they point the way for those of us who are still contrained.  

Quote of the Day: Ian McGilchrist

Moral values are not somethig that we work out rationally on the principle of utility, or any other principle, for that matter, but are irreducible aspects fo the phenomenal world, like colour. I agree with Max Scheler, and for that matter with Wittgenstein, that moral value is a form of experience irreducible to any other kind, or accountable for on any other terms; and I believe this perception underlies Kant's derivation of God from the existence of moral values rather than moral values from the existence of a God. Such values are linked to the capacity for empathy, nor reasoning; and moral judgments are not deliberative but unconscious and intuitive, deeply bound up with our emotional sensitivity to others. Empathy is intrinsic to morality. The Master and the Emissary, p. 86

If you are unaware of this book, it's definitely a must read. Now I have some extra time during the holidays I'm just working my way through it. I'm taking a lot of extra time with chapter two because I have to educate myself on brain physiology and function. 

I was wondering if there was any interest out there to do a book club on it. I'm open to it if there are three or four others who might want to join me as I dig through it.  I think it's a very, very important book.

The passage quoted, I think, stands on its own, but it is supported by the larger argument that he is making in his book. Rather than go into it here again, I point you to earlier post on the book. 

 

Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments (repost)

All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking in a groupthink? I want to set up my answer to that question by discussing first the difference between calculation and wisdom.

It doesn't require discernment to determine that 2 + 2 = 4. You just need a mind that operates in a mechanically logical way. And in our day-to-day life a lot of what passes for wisdom is really calculation in this sense--it's automatic and mechanical: "The wise person reads his Consumer Reports before making a purchase decision."  Obviously some calculations are more complicated than others because more factors than price may enter into consideration. But what I mean by wisdom comes into view in situations that require a weighing of alternatives for which no calculus offers an answer. It requires something else--discernment, and the discernments of the truly wise leads them to make good judgments that prove themselves correct time after time that contrasts with the poor judgments consistently made by those whose judgments are based on the groupthink of a conventional wisdom, which more often than not has gone off the tracks.

I would argue that not all groupthink is bad. The tribal wisdom handed down from generation to generation in vibrant traditional societies was real and lifegiving. In such societies there is an experience of the living presence of the wisdom of the ancestors. And one could say that the life of the tradition is the soul of a culture, and it's that soul or ancestral mind that thinks in the people in a living traditional culture. But a tradition that no longer conveys in a living way the mind of the ancestors is a failed tradition. The tradition no longer functions as the medium through which its members experience cognitive moments that reveal the inner content of the traditional formulations. The formulations, as a consequence, become empty and rigid.

This cognitive moment, as I want to talk about it, is close to what Heidegger meant by his term 'ereignis'. It conveys the idea of numinous Being revealing itself and of its being authentically appropriated. A tradition that no longer discloses the sacred, in other words, is no longer a living tradition. It's in this sense that Nietzsche was right in describing our condition as moderns by saying not just that God was dead, but that we moderns killed him.  It's not a statement so much about God as about how modern consciousness has lost its capacity to naturally and easily experience the sacred. Moderns, to use the Heideggerian phrase, have forgotten Being--they live now in a sterile world of things. We even have to fight hard to think of people as something other than things. For souls shaped by such a world, the sacred rarely discloses itself.

Already for the literate Athenians in Socrates' time, a "Being-mediating" traditional consciousness was withering, and with it the traditional forms were starting to rigidify into sterile groupthink. Socrates' demployment of his deconstructive 'elenchus', was his attempt to clear away the dead wood to open up a space for Being to reveal itself. Socrates pushed his interlocutors to move from naive, unconscious acceptance of conventional wisdom to aporia--a condition of 'knowing ignorance' promoted in Plato's early dialogues, a condition which clears the way for a deeper cognitive apprehension of Being. I'd argue that Plato's 'anamnesis' or 'remembering' is a different way of talking about the same movement in consciousness to which Heidegger's 'ereignis'. (Forgetfulness, after all, is the central problem for H.) I'm also inclined to think that Plato's theory of the forms derived from an experience or intuition of Being, which he later tried to make sense of in rational terms with unsatisfactory results. I'd argue that the Christian Neoplatonists develop more satisfactorily what he began, but that's another discussion.   

So authentic appropriation of traditional wisdom requires a cognitive, "numinous" moment in which the sacred character of the traditional wisdom reveals itself, and this contrasts with modern traditionalism which accepts social norms as ends in themselves rather than as a means to something more important. Such "cognitive moments" are not impossible in our world, but they are much harder to come by in pluralistic, tradition-dead societies that shapes the human soul by its crude materialistic sensibility. It used to be the goal of a liberal, humanistic education to help us "remember" Being.  Poetry is the primary linguistic form that seeks to disclose being, but it's boring for most of us now because our capacity to have Being revealed to us has all but withered away. And as a result wisdom is in short supply. We have lots of people with good heads, but dried-out souls, many who are good calculators, but few who are wise.

***

So the healthy groupthink of living tradition is rare or nonexistent in modern pluralistic, choice-centered societies in which any sense of living tradition is a distant memory. And as a result we hold on to traditional forms that have no living content, and the forms rigidify as do the souls ensnared by them. In politics and business social calculation substitutes for wisdom. When we complain that the media pundits or politicians no longer speak the truth, it's because these people are a courtier class possessed by the spirit of social calculation. They have become incapable of the kind of judgments that distinguish what is true from what is false, and when if someone actually speaks the truth, the courtiers immediately reduce it to terms of social, economic, or political calculation.

These courtiers have themselves been coopted by a calculating groupthink, so it has become impossible for them to think anything else is possible. Social calculation is the only thing they understand because it consumes them, and its the primary skill that propelled them into the prominent positions they occupy. And the system selects and promotes only those who distinguish themselves as prodigies of social calculation. It's another way of saying that the people who set the agenda and shape the conventional wisdom or groupthink in this society are mentally ill.

Now the people who subject all traditional wisdom to the Socratic test and find it completely unacceptable are called cynics. Cynics are either disappointed idealists embittered by the failure of the world to live up to their naive expectations, or they are extreme rationalists for whom everything is rational calculation. For the latter group the phrase 'cognitive moment' as I speak of it here is meaningless.

Skepticism is different from cynicism. Skepticism as aporia it is a first step toward wisdom, but it becomes cynicism when it refuses to take the next step, which requires the acknowledgment of the logic of the heart or logic of the suprarational. Heart logic is what opens us up to cognitive moments. It is our an innate capacity to think in a non-calculative way and as such a prerequisite for wisdom, but it remains dormant in many, a seed waiting to germinate. It is no longer awakened in us automatically as it was in living traditional societies.

If such moments occur in our society, they are individual experiences, not group experiences. And so, as described above, the more typical kind of groupthink that arises in tradition-dead societies is an empty, lifeless formalism, and as such an emptiness vulnerable to be filled by various seductions. Like a vacant house on a rundown city block, groupthinks often find themselves occupied by squatters that make a bad situation worse. So back to the question in the first paragraph:  Q: What thinks in a groupthink?  A: In tradition-dead societies psychic complexes fill the empty forms and perform a compulsive kind of thinking that infects the group with collective mental illness. The degree of mental illness is measured by the degree a society is alienated from Being. We see this alienation in religious cults; we see it in political movements; and we see it in the media, and in the inanity of fashion, celebrity, and consumer fads. It's everywhere, and because it's everywhere we think it's real. It's not; it's nuts. (See my pieces on Zombie Traditionalism that explore this theme further.)

A conversation is not possible between two people who are possessed by the "demons" animating tradition-dead groupthink. It's not possible even if only one of the two interlocutors is possessed. Such people only make calculations about whether what the other says meets their litmus test for orthodoxy. A real conversation is possible only between two people who have the mutual intent to have a cognitive moment with one another--when both are open for the revelation in the Other of the sacred. Everything else is chatter, and chatter has its place. But our intersubjective experience is for most of us the last place where our capacity to recognize the sacred has not completely withered. We experience Love in the presence of the sacred. And so if other people have been occasions of the disclosure of the sacred and the awakening of 'real' love, other beings can also be the occasion for such disclosures. And that's the task, to extend our capacity for experiencing the sacred by increasing our capacity for love, even ultimately for the hated Other, the enemy.   

This is a cultural and not a political, task, but it has political implications insofar as it shapes our political discourse. Because two people in the grip of opposing groupthinks cannot possibly communicate with one another. In order for such cognitive moment to occur in the political sphere, both parties have to be open to the Other's disclosing something 'real'. But if neither party has anything but groupthink truisms to parrot, no cognitive moments are possible. The culture wars, as we have experienced them in this country, at least since the time of the Scopes trial, are like two crazy people trying to have conversation. Neither is in his right mind. Neither is capable of true judgment. All they can do is shout at one another. The best one can do is create the conditions for an opening by refusing to be sucked into the left/right groupthink polarity. (Listen to this podcast interview with Douglas Johnston for an example of someone who seeks to create this kind of opening with Muslims.)

***

Now the groupthinks of the political left and the right, insofar as either is unconsciously assimilated, infect individuals as a kind of naive idealism. And insofar as it is naive, i.e., lacking the "cognitive moment' described above, it is innocent and well-intentioned, but empty. And insofar as it is empty, it is a vacuum ready to suck in anything that will enliven it. Demagogues are con men who understand how this process works, and they are masters who feed off of the naive idealism of either the left or the right. They don't care about traditional values, and they don't care about ideals; they only care about concentrating power under their control. And  they understand that their ability to consolidate power requires that they manipulate the naive groupthink of a majority of the public. If they can control the majority groupthink, they can simply dismiss the concerns of the minority. They know how to work with Resentment and Arrogance to achieve their ends.

Maintaining power by manipulating groupthink was Orwell's great theme. The demagogue drapes everything he does in idealistic or obfuscating language, and those for whom those words have no living cognitive content simply accept the new content that the demagogues fill them with. And the next thing you know, the words have no relationship to their original meanings. They are old wine skins filled with new wine, wine whose purpose is to addle the minds of the cognitively naive. What thinks in the Orwellian groupthink is the mind of Big Brother, which is the mind of the demagogue.  This is our social evolution:  From a groupthink that thinks the wisdom of the ancestors to a groupthink that thinks the nihilism of the Powermad.

The point is this: The power hungry feed off naive idealistic groupthink, which they are very skilled at manipulating. It doesn't matter if it's the utopian idealism of the left or the traditionalist idealism of the right. Demagogues care only about manipulating whichever naive groupthink will best serve their purposes. This is Orwell's insight. Left, right--it doesn't matter. But in this country, at this time, they are working the empty, naive idealism of the traditionalist right. And their basic strategy is to incite traditionalist resentment toward the secular liberal elites, who play into this strategy by disdaining traditionalist concerns as foolish.

Their concerns are not foolish, but naive traditonalists are indeed foolish to the degree they allow themselves to be manipulated by demagogues who pretend to care about those concerns. But so are the secular liberals foolish insofar as they are unable to transcend the toxicity of the left/right polarity. Both sides need some tough-love slaps upside the head to snap the spell and bring them back to what's real. So-called moderate strategies to split the difference between the polarities can't work because they accept the insanity of the system as normative.

An intervention is called for, and it will come in the form of catastrophe if we don't find another way. 9/11 was Reality's warning shot across the bow, and we took all the wrong lessons from it. But one way or the other, something from outside the system will be introduced, something that will bring us back to reality, and then it's a matter of enough people recognizing and working with it. But more important in the short run is having enough people to say No to demagogic manipulation. Its groupthink has to be seen through, deconstructed, so that a space can be cleared for something real to disclose itself.

[I thought it might be interesting to repost this entry from July 2001 after my post a few days ago about Groupthinks. If this interests you, the discussion in comments on the original post is pretty lively. Sorry for the length. If I had more time I'd edit it down.]

The Master and His Emissary

This is the title of Iain McGilchrist's important new book. It's subtitle is "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". The video below summarizes very succinctly and broadly the argument he's making, but it's based on a story by Nietzsche:

There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted.

Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he trusted most to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not influence, and on his missions on his master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

McGilchrist comments: At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however, gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary.

Echoes of Dostoyevski's Grand Inquisitor story, no? Or Prospero and Antonio?

Have you ever wondered why there are these historical moments, renaissance moments, that bloom and fade: 5th-century Athens, 15th century Florence, Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries? Why can't these moments be sustained? Well, McGilchrist has an unusual take on it that is rooted in hemispheric brain research. So he starts from characterizations about the roles the right and left hemispheres play in the way individual human beings relate to reality, but it's particularly interesting for its implications about the way human beings develop their collective habits of mind--their cultures, their politics, and economics. 

The right brain is the Master, and the left is the Emissary; people and cultures begin to decay as soon as the emissary begins to think it no longer needs the master. Left-brained scientistic and bureacratic thinking sees itself as the master of its domains, but it's not. And that's why they are so arrogant, because they have forgotten whom they serve. The first claims to serve the truth, but it is such an attenuated, meaningless notion of truth as to be worthless. The second claims to be serving the public, but all bureaucracies serve themselves and their own institutional interests first. And both modes of left brain thinking are all about control and about filtering out or de-legimitating whatever they cannot control. 

If you have ten minutes to spare, watch the RSA video. It mainly focuses on how the right and brain hemisphers function, how they relate to one another, and suggests at the end the price we pay when the left brain operates independently from the right. 

 

I have the book on order, so I haven't had a chance to read it yet.  But anybody who has been a long-time reader here can see how it relates to themes I've developed over the years.  

I also want to relate it to my recent involvement in Public Schools and the politics of education reform. The reformers are egregiously left-brained in their understanding the of the challenges, and the results have been predicatably disastrous.

I've characterized the the conflict as one between technocrats and humanists, but the humanists are at a very severe disadvantage, not only because they haven't near the money or the media megaphone that the technocrats have, but because they don't really have a coherent, legitimated world view that gives them a strong place to stand and fight back. The video clip above refers to the difficulty when it talks about the Berlusconi function of the left brain. It controls the messaging, and it tends to filter out anything that does not fit its preconceptions.

Many people who are inclined to be open to humanist thinking feel ambivalently about it because they have come to accept that the discussion is to be held on left-brain terms following left-brain rules, and so the humanist cannot talk about the colors red, green, and blue in a discussion where the rules stipulate that only black and white are permitted. The argument, therefore, is lost from the get-go because the master, the part of us that has the most important things to say, is locked up in the back room bound in chains.

More when I've had a chance to read the book.

UPDATE: Interesting review of the book here.

 

 

History & Meaning

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
--Blaise Pascal 

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.  --Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

“If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”--St. John of the Cross

Most people would say that their lives have meaning. It's not something they think a lot about. It just does, and it does because each of us has been socialized into a set of meanings about which we had no choice. Custom is, in this sense, our nature, and these meanings given by custom or tradition are in the background for all of us, even if we consciously reject some of them somewhere along the way. And while I do not want to suggest that I undervalue the importance of given meanings, it's also clear that in the modern world custom and tradition are not what they used to be. And clearly the pluralization of custom in a globalizing world has a fragilizing effect on human nature--neither are we humans what we used to be.  There are opportunities, but also risks that come with this changed context in which humans come to define who they are what they are capable of. 

It should be clear that there is something essential in the spirit of modernity, coupled with its capitalist economic engine, that destroys customs and traditions and replaces them with other practices that tend to have a soul-flattening effect.   Everywhere modernity has established itself traditions and customary practices have died. Islam is quite right to see modernity (or westernization or globalization) as a threat. It will destroy its traditions as it has destroyed the traditions of the West. And the hyper-cerebral logic of modernity is now turning on itself attacking even the traditions of rationality that have developed since the Enlightenment. 

And the result, of course, is social fragmentation and with it the slow destruction of any sense of robust 'given' collective meanings, and with that increased loneliness and alienation, loss of depth and texture in our experience, anomie and a growing sense that nothing is really important, and in the final analysis all that matters is our relative comfort or discomfort. It's in this sense that modernity has had a soul-flattening effect.

If things continue on their present course, we will have soon enough a globalized world in which all collective social meanings except commercial/consumerist meanings will have withered away. Other meanings, insofar as one can find them, will be a matter for individuals and small groups, who will live as islands surrounded by an ocean dominated by a globalcommercial culture that will produce, already is producing, crude Donald-Trump-type culture heroes, elites committed to their own aggrandizement--and thought well of for it, because, according to the new collective values emerging, they are embraced as life's winners. Who are  the winners and who the losers, who the master, who the slaves?--that's the only thing that matters in such collective values constellation. And it's a world in which the masses will be increasingly anesthetized by hi-tech bread and circuses, or preoccupied in passively observing elites as they play their power and sex games with one another on tabloid tv and computer screens and iPhones.

In the meanwhile the older traditions continue to provide something of a meaning backdrop, but do so without much, if any, vitality. There are exceptions in pockets here and there, but they are moribund. These dying traditions still provide a certain kind of order, but they no longer have any real life; they no longer have any eros. They are like dead trees that maintain the shape given to them by the life force that once suffused them, but which now are sapless and brittle. So "higher" meaning in the modern age has withered into boring, eros-less abstractions, and its sapless cultural forms have become what African-Americans call “whitebread”--bland, textureless, soulless. Sure, there is a superstructure of meaning, and most people find a way to live a life within it, but it won’t take much to blow it away. And a storm, she's a brewin'.

***

Ideas Matter II

I embrace the idea that we humans never know the truth in any direct way, and that all we have is provisional "interpretations". But some interpretations are better than others because there is a Good that those interpretations bear a closer or more distant relationship to. I know that this is not how moderns think, but I'm trying to make the case that we are no longer moderns and that our thinking remains modern merely by force of habit, because something better has not yet been proposed. I see the breakdown in modern habits of mind as an opportunity to recover important elements of Western thinking that have been forgotten or mistakenly rejected because of the materialist or uber-rationalist biases of modern habits of thought.

Those biases are gradually losing their hold on the mainstream culture, and the crisis in political Liberalism is closely related to the diminishing influence of those biases in our common imaginary.  Right wing sub-rationality is having a field day because there is no robust opposition to it. I think that right-wing sub-rationalism is attractive to even thoughtful moderates because the stench of the decaying corpse of Liberalism is repugnant, and average Americans will naturally choose the  alternative that has vitality. At least the Right has a pulse. It may or may not have its facts straight, but who cares? Liberals stand for no deeply grounded principles one can care deeply about. They seem to be all about expediency, and because there is nothing they will go to the mat for, the so-called reasonableness of Liberalism doesn't stand a chance against the passionate intensity of the right. Ideas matter, but they are useless unless they touch the heart, stimulate the imagination, and motivate action.

So my argument here is that Liberalism is dangerous, not because of what it affirms, which within its limitations is unobjectionable, but because of what it cannot affirm--a plausible, philosophy of history or an ontological narrative of history grounded in supra-rational ideals that would inspire and give direction to progressive action. Liberalism as a mindset has no sense of its future possibility. It is dangerous because it creates a vacuum that is otherwise filled by more primitive passions. The bourgeois Enlightenment progressive narrative embraced and shaped to a large degree by a guy like Benjamin Franklin no longer inspires; neither does revolutionary fervor excited by Marxist eschatology. Because there is no inspiring alternative narrative to motivate the Left, the Right has an open field in which to run. The passionate intensity of the Right remains ascendant until it is countered by an alternative that is emotionally and spiritually robust enough to challenge it.

That's enough on this for now, but I want to explore this theme in some depth. I'm hoping that there are others out there who are like me who want to think about this, too--people who support Liberalism in the political sphere even though they reject it in the cultural sphere, the sphere of thought and of deeply felt value. We support it as a bulwark against the dark sub-rationalism of the Right in the hopes of buying time until a compelling supra-rational imagination of future possibility might take hold. The heroes of supra-rational inspiration to which I would point are Gandhi, King, Mandela.  Nothing short of that kind of inspiration will get us out of this mess. I certainly don't have definitive answers or an alternative vision that would even begin to be widely embraced, but I do have some ideas that I would like to use this blog to think out loud about.  In coming weeks, I'll be writing posts entitled "Ideas Matter III, IV, etc. 

Thoughts on "Lost" and "The Divine Comedy"

During seasons 1 and 2 of Carlton Cuse's and Damon Lindelof's Lost, I would put up the random post when a particular episode grabbed me, but it became clear after a while that the writers were operating at a level of complexity that made it futile, for me anyway, to try to grasp what they were trying to do. So I decided to go along for the ride and see where they wanted to take us. Well, we're in the final season, and there are six more hours to go, and because a clearer picture, more or less, is emerging, I'll be posting again about Lost as the series draws to a close.

The narrative has become extraordinarily convoluted, but I think in a good and interesting way. Nevertheless, it's hard to believe that in the six remaining hours all shall be made clear. We'll see. I'm more interested in the overarching narrative pattern than trying to parse out the show's many subthemes, and I think the pattern of that basic story is finally taking shape.  And in future posts I might talk more about some of the subthemes that interest me, but today I just want to talk about what I think, at this juncture anyway, that basic narrative pattern is. I also want to think out loud a bit about what the possible significance of the series might be as a cultural event: I'd argue it's the most important and ambitious of several pop-cultural attempts to help us establish an imaginative beachhead in a postmodern, post-Quantum Theory world. I'll get to that, but first let me ramble a bit by reflecting on some interesting connections I see between post-Newtonian Lost and Dante's Ptolemaic Divine Comedy:

In one post about the second-season episode "Psalm 23", I speculated that the Island was Purgatory, a hellish place, but one in which the dead still have choices and a future. I have not for a long time thought that the Lost survivors are dead in the Sixth-Sense sense, but the Island does still appear to be playing a purgatorial role. It's a threshold place, an in-between place, neither wholly belonging to the Newtonian, three-dimensional world, which for most of us still defines normal reality, nor belonging to the spiritual world--although spirits haunt it everywhere and have a special interest in what happens on the Island.

The people who come to the Island, whether they are aware of it or not, are playing a part in a larger struggle waged by two beings who are clearly spiritual or angelic entities of some kind, Jacob and his unnamed nemesis simply referred to by Cuse and Lindelof as the Man in Black. The latter from time to time makes an appearance as the serpentine Smoke Monster, and he seems to have a claim on those who come to the Island whom he judges to be dark-souled, more evil than good.

The Man in Black is the archetypal force of chaos and destruction, and his power in some way correlates with the electromagnetic energies of the Island. Electromagnetism is a kind of crossover phenomenon, like light, neither wholly wave nor particle, neither wholly material nor wholly spiritual. As light has always played a metaphoric role in telling us something about the radiance of truth, beauty, and goodness as transcendent realities, so does electromagnetism stand metaphorically for the forces of evil, for the forces of chaos and destruction. Electromagnetism is how the forces of evil roll.

Jacob, like the angel who stands at the gate of the Garden of Eden to prevent Adam and Eve from re-entering, stands on the Island to prevent the Man in Black from leaving. He must do so to preserve the human project, which is an experiment in freedom.  And while Jacob still survives on the Island he protects those whom he draws to the Island who still have the capacity to choose between Good and Evil. Once Ben kills Jacob, he still has a discarnate presence on the Island, but is unable to hold the Man in Black in check.

So it's as if the Island was a cork in a bottle holding back the churning forces of chaos, electromagnetic or otherwise, and once the cork is popped, chaos wins, the world is destroyed, the human experiment over. That seems to be the basic mythic narrative that the writers are working with, and now that God (or his representative) is dead, it's up to the free humans to keep the Man in Black in check because the Divine can't (or won't) do it. A basic theme explored on this blog is the idea that the widespread contemporary experience of the death of God, especially among the culture's most educated and elite, is a necessary precondition for humans to take responsibility for the future of the earth, which is, as I've been arguing here from the beginning, the goal of the human experiment. 

We have emerged from the embedded consciousness of animist or shamanic peoples to a kind of free, but disconnnected (from nature and other people) and quite uncomfortable disembeddedness that is nevertheless a necessary precondition for the full maturation of human freedom. Connection is possible, but it is no longer a given; it must be chosen. Though we experience God as dead, he isn't.  He's there, like Jacob, in the wings making suggestions, but they're suggestions that we are free to refuse. We are no longer puppets of the gods as, for instance, the Greeks thought of themselves. We are not fated, but control our own destiny, if we are willing to man up and accept the responsibility for it.

So in the Lost narrative everything is at stake. And let's be clear, for us in our non-fictional, non-mythic, prosaic, everyday world everything is at stake as well, and it all depends on the exercise of human freedom. We have to choose to avoid environmental cataclysm, and we have to choose to make choices about technological developments if we are not to risk a cataclysmic technological singularity.

In our "real" world, the forces of chaos have an unprecedented opportunity for a win in the next several decades. What we saw of the forces of chaos unleashed during World War II was a mere shot across the bow. And so if we're at all awake, we have this sense of living now at a threshold moment, and the story being told here on Lost projects for us what the stakes are using a technique that interweaves themes from both science and religion, logos and mythos. But at the heart of our story, as it is in the Lost story, is the mystery of freedom. Evolution is in human hands--what will we humans do with the responsibility?

So the basic drama unfolding in the last season is about whether the humans find a way to keep the cork in place or whether they don't, whether chaos wins, or whether the experiment in human freedom continues.  The mythic narrative raises a question for the human race: Now that the responsibility for the continuation of the human experiment in freedom has been surrendered by the Divine to humans, will the experiment continue, or will it end, either from cataclysm or by humans becoming something unhuman? It wouldn't surprise me if Cuse's and Lindelof's story ends not as Commedia but as Tragedia.

***

Thus my segue into the Divine Comedy theme for this post. For Dante, Purgatory was an island in the southern hemisphere, unreachable by ordinary means. It was the antipode to Jerusalem, which was the the center of the northern hemisphere, the top half of the earth, which in Dante's imagination of it stretched east to west, from the Ganges to Gibraltar. Purgatory is a mountain on this island at the center of the bottom half of the earth. So the central axis of the earth is defined by the North Pole at Mt. Calvary, and by Mt. Purgatorio and the South Pole, and the summit of Mt. Purgatorio is Eden, from which Adam and Eve were banned. And between the two lies hell.

Calvary, in Jerusalem, and Christ's harrowing of hell after his crucifxion created the opening by which humans from the post-Adamic fallen world in the Northern hemisphere could find passage back to the South, through Hell and then beyond to climb the Purgatorial mountain, to its summit, Eden, which is the staging area for salvific release into the heavens. This is a journey Dante takes with Beatrice in the Paradiso cantos.

Dante passes through hell and then comes out in the south on the Island at the South Pole, and then he climbs the purgatorial mountain there to reach the original Garden of Eden. And from Eden he departs into the several levels of heaven defined by the planetary spheres, the fixed stars, and the realm that lies beyond the fixed stars where one encounters the Godhead in the Beatific Vision. This was Dante's journey in the flesh, and perhaps it's analogous, in its Purgatorial phase, to the journey the Lost survivors have made that have brought them to the Island. 

In Dante's imagination of the earth, the southern hemisphere, the world down under,  is the underworld, in the sense that it is under the top part of the world, but the top half is the realm of fallen consciousness, of Maya, illusion. In Christian terms, the northern hemisphere is a place of fallen exile, the place in which we're all metaphysically "lost." The underworld is for fallen consciousness a dream world, but from the perspective of those in the underworld, the northern hemisphere is the hallucination. The underworld is non-hallucinatory because there lies the path home. A journey into the underworld must be undertaken if one is to find his way home. He must pass through it to get back where he is to end his exile, to be no longer lost, to return to where it all began, where lies the real home and the ultimate destination for all those who by grace and choice undertake to become un-lost.

***

Clearly Cuse and Lindelof are playing with this traditional cosmology, as they are, of course, using ideas from several other sources. This is for them a wildly syncretistic exercise, but all the more interesting for that. The Postmodern era is the Age of Syncretism--of all manner of creative fusions.

So the Island in the Lost narrative, in addition to being a cork, is a threshold, a place between here and there, and the writers do a very interesting job of creating a sense of displacement or dislocation that relates to the situation of these exiles: Is being on the Island really to be Lost, or is it to be found?  Hasn't Jacob found them and brought them there? And it's clear that their longing for home in the Northern hemisphere is nostalgia for the hallucination, like the Israelites in the wilderness longing to return to Egypt. They are exiles, yes, but right where they need to be.

And since the detonation of the Jughead and the creation of the sideways reality, a new kind of alienation into a hallucinatory exile has been created. It is the obverse of the more conventional idea of exile, which is to be "neither/nor"; in its being "both/and". The more typical form of exile in at Ptolemaic or Newtonian universe is to be neither here nor there, to be between home and some future destination, either a future return to the original home or to find a new one. No two things can occupy the same space at the same time, but can one thing occupy two spaces at the same time, to be both here and there?  The Lost writers seem are telling us that it is possible, but if so, what are the implications? And it's not a good thing to be so split.

A traditional pre-Quantum Theory archetype for exile, for being "lost" is the biblical neither here nor there, to be neither in Egypt nor yet in Jerusalem, to be wandering futilely in a wilderness. But post-Jughead the survivors in the Lost story are now both here and there in two parallel realities at the same time--on the Island in the Southern hemisphere and in the sideways reality in the Northern hemisphere in which Oceanic 815 never crashes.

And while those on the Island (except Desmond apparently) have no awareness of their other lives in the Northern hemisphere, those in the northern world are all gradually awakening to their parallel existence on the Island. So this is the big question to be resolved in the next six hours:  What is the relationship between the two parallel realities? How is it possible to live in two worlds with two separate narratives at the same time? Are they both equally real, or is one a kind of hallucination, and if so, which one is the hallucination?  For me the answer is clear, but we'll see if that's where the writers go with it.

Because if the Dante paradigm gives us a clue, the northern hemisphere is the fallen world of illusion (and we're specifically talking about Los Angeles here to boot) and the southern hemisphere, or the underworld, the world down under, is the staging area for salvation. And if the writers are working with a Dante-esque logic, the people in the sideways timeline in the northern hemisphere are living in a hallucination from which they must wake up. They must return to the Island, and it appears they are in the process of figuring that out as the men, anyway, are having experiences that awaken them to the memory of their Beatrices, Claire for Charlie, Penny for Desmond, Libby for Hurley, and Helen for Locke. The memory of something emotionally real awakens them to their hallucinatory status in the sidways timeline. Very Dante-esque.

This logic would explain why it was wrong for the survivors to leave the Island in 2004, and why Farraday was wrong to set off the bomb that created the timeline in which Oceanic 815 never crashes. The sideways reality represents a regression, the comforting fleshpots of Egypt; the true path lies ahead on the Island. The Island is a wilderness staging area in which the survivors are learning that their old ways of thinking are obsolete; it's where, like the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness, they are being prepared to move forward on to the next stage.

That's one way to think about what's happening here, but I'm usually wrong when it comes to guessing where the writers are going.  What I've written here has been more of an exercise of my projecting what I want them to do with the story than it is likely what they will do with it. Nevertheless, I'm interested to see where they go.  And I continue to hope that no matter where they go it won't wind up with some cheesy, non-explanation explanation for the two timelines and everything else. I'm eager to be surprised, but I'm half expecting to be disappointed as I was by Battlestar Galactica's finale.  What a contrived, slapped-together hodgepodge.

***

Others have played with this idea of parallel universes or parallel realities--it's at the heart of the Narnia stories; it's in the Phillip Pullman trilogy, it's currently at the heart of Fox TV's Fringe, and there are apparently comic book stories that have explored the idea in the sixties. For me it's all fascinating stuff because these are all efforts to explore imaginatively the threshold between science and faith, between logos and mythos. In the three-dimensional Newtonian world which still plays a dominant role in organizing our imagination of the real, there is no legitimate place for mythos or for a mythological geography like Dante's northern and southern hemispheres of the earth.

In a post-Quantum Theory world there is a place for it, and once the Newtonian model breaks down as our common sense imagination of the real, all kinds of mythopoetic possibilities become plausible. All these storytellers are attempting in a very preliminary way, to help us imagine what it might mean to live in a world in which the collective imagination of the real has caught up with the science in a post-Quantum Theory world. That's at least a working hypothesis for me as I follow where these shows are going.

These are contemporary exercises very similar to Dante's in the prodigious imaginative world he created in his Divine Comedy. There are the facts as he knew them then and we know them now, but as Dante attempted to weave logos and mythos into a compelling synthetic narrative, it's not been possible to weave the two during the modern period, except as something considered unserious, as a flight of fancy, an entertainment. We don't have the cultural commonplaces that Dante had to make a more serious metaphysical symbolic story. We don't believe that symbols are real. But as Dante aspired to give us more than a fanciful entertainment, I suspect Cuse and Lindelof aspire to give us more as well. They want to stretch our imaginations so that we see the world not through the commonplace modern's habitual mindset, but to work at the fringe of that mindset, and in working there to let seep in what lies outside it to reshape or reconfigure how we imagine what is real as we move on to the next stage of cultural evolution.

These storytellers exploring ideas about parallel realities make no pretension to be telling us the way things literally are, but they are interesting and important insofar as their stories work for us as a kind of groping toward an alternative common-sense imagination we know needs to be substituted for our current inadequate imagination of the real. We know the world is not adequately explained or imagined in Newtonian terms, just as moderns understood that the world was not adequately explained or imagined by Ptolemy. But it takes a while for the common-sense imagination to catch up; it take a while for the mythos to catch up with the logos.

Because the more important thing that opens up to us with the demise of modern, three-dimensional reality is the scientifically validated idea that there is no longer any such thing as literal or one-dimensional truth. How many of us really accept that everything is interpretation, and that whatever interpretation we're currently working with is provisional mythos. Whatever we think of as "facts" are facts only insofar as they fit into an interpretive pattern, a pattern which has changed radically over the course of human history and will change again, because the facts we accept now as "factual" can be assimilated into a grander synthesis once new levels of facts and experience are uncovered. And high-level physics is pointing us to the "fact" that reality is multi-dimensional and multi-leveled.

Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension, so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.

What does it mean to have postmodern consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack. 

So the question for me about Lost is whether years from now it will be judged to be merely a clever entertainment, or whether it will be seen as real Art in the sense described above, as an artifact which contributes to changing our common imagination of the real. I don't know. At the very least I think it performs the service alluded to above for helping us to establish an imaginative beachhead in a post-Quantum Theory cosmos in which mythos and logos interweave. Whether in the long run it succeeds as something more than that remains to be seen. But because it starts with a respect for the multi-dimensionality of things, you have to  admire its ambition and its ability to hold an audience for six years.  It says something about who we are and what we're about.

For my post-finale thoughst on Lost, see:

"More on Lost and Dante's Island Down Under"

"The Lost Sensibility"

 

People and Their Mindsets

I'm getting a few lectures about how wrong it is for me to be so hard on the tea partiers because they are mostly good-hearted folks who hate the bailouts/outsourcing/corporatism just like the rest of us. But that argument makes me feel the same way I felt when people told me that Bush wasn't really that bad or that Rush is just an entertainer or that the rush to war with Iraq made sense. It's an awful lot like being told you can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes. I know what I see. Digby

Yes and No. This post by Digby gives me the opportunity to clarify a few things about recent posts I've put up. There's a difference between a "mindset" and a "person". My critique is directed toward mindsets and not persons. A mindset does not tell us everything about a person who has a particular mindset. Different people participate in a mindset to different degrees. Only fanatics are completely possessed by a mindset; most people are more adaptive.

Now all of us operate with a mindset because we have to. But some mindsets are better than others, and the measure of a good mindset as contrasted with a bad one is the degree of complexity a particular mindset can work with comfortably. And the degree of complexity a particular mindset can work with depends on the individual's adaptability and capacity for independent thinking. Mature, independent thinking requires, for instance, that we have some sense that our mindset does not define who we are, that our identity, our humanity, is not coterminous with our mindset and that whatever our mindset might be, it's not THE truth; it's just a set of mental habits that help us to navigate effectively in the world without having to rethink everything we've learned as we go through our day.

Libertarian Takedown

Tristero at Hullabaloo:

. . . to the extent that libertarians hold up the individual as primary and fail to recognize that individuals simply cannot physically exist without a social/cultural/environmental context, libertarianism is worthless. To the extent that libertarianism does recognize the complex dialectic between the individual and her/his social and physical environment, libertarianism is indistinguishable from liberalism.

As a moral philosophy, by failing to recognize an indisputable physical and ethical reality - namely, that the conflict between the one and the many is primary - libertarianism is all but useless. As a political philosophy, especially when it comes to issues affecting the "rights of businesses", libertarianism is often deeply immoral, providing flimsy rationales for destructive acquisition, thievery, fraud, and greed - typically, and ironically, in the service of the largest corporations, not individuals. When political libertarianism does pursue goals worthwhile to the individual and to society - eg, in calling for the end of sodomy laws - they add no arguments to the debate that liberals and progressives haven't already expressed.

The whole piece is worth reading.

My sense of the kind of typical, often very intelligent person who is attracted to Randian Libertarianism or the candidacies of people like Ron Paul is that they are like fundamentalists or old-fashioned communist party members or anybody, really, that has a need to live within a closed ideas system.  They embrace a rigid set of ideas, sometimes simplistic, sometimes complex, that has a certain interior logic or sense to it so long as you stay inside its bubble.  Problems arise, though, when they try to make the complexity of the world fit into their bubble, because too much of it does not and cannot fit. It's a form of idolatry, if by idolatry we mean the absolutizing and worshipping of a partial truth.

Here's a post I wrote expanding on the second rate-ness of Libertarian thinking a couple of years ago.

Quote of the Day: Ta-Nehisi Coates

I have, after many conversations and arguments, concluded that some aspects of understanding are about information. But others are about will--people understand what they want to understand, what they believe is in their interest to understand. (Source)

In my experience, with some very rare exceptions, the only people who are persuadable are people who have not already formed an opinion or who have experienced something so devastating to their previously held worldview that they are vulnerable or open to almost any alternative explanations to the ones they once held.

I would say, though, that while you can find as many people on the left who are as unpersuadable as those on the right, rationalists, who tend to lean left because of their modern commitment to rationality and evidence-based assertions, are persuadable so long as you operate within the limits of their rationalist framework. So, for instance, discussions about religious faith with such people almost always go nowhere.

But I'd rather deal with someone whose framework for evaluation is open to factual information that might change his mind than to those like the "birthers" for whom no facts are relevant except those that fit within and support their rigidly constructed, a priori worldview.

Moby Dick Syndrome

I don't like what the Clintons stand for. I couldn't bring myself to vote for Bill in his second term, but I did feel that he was unfairly treated by the Republicans and the press in the runup to his impeachment, which was bad political farce from beginning to end.  That's when it first became lucidly clear that the GOP was run by people who had lost touch with reality. They were living in something other than the real world, but their mutual reinforcement of it made it seem real to everyone within their world even though it seemed over the top to every one who stood outside of it. They were in the grip of what I think of as a collective complex I call Moby Dick Syndrome. Bill Clinton was their Moby Dick, and what made Republicans truly crazy in the nineties was their obsession to destroy him.

I find this idea of a complex or syndrome helpful to understand the way we organize, think about, and operate within a world that is fundamentally out of touch with reality, but nevertheless seems to be intensely real. We all experience complexes on a personal level, but sooner or later we recover and return to our senses. Think about infatuations you have experienced or times you were in the grip of a reality-distorting anxiety. The sanest of us experience such episodes, but if we are truly sane we come to our senses sooner rather than later, and when we do, it's like waking up from a dream. You wonder what all the fuss was about and feel foolish, especially if your public behavior was influenced by the syndrome.

When we wake from an intense nocturnal dream we recognize that what had a few minutes before seemed so real was not.  But complexes are like waking dreams; they take hold of us and organize our conscious perceptions of the world around us. They are bad enough when we experience them individually, but they are truly pernicious when they take hold of a group because they create self-reinforcing bubbles.

The feeding  frenzy we saw during the Clinton impeachment was a dramatic example. Normal people watching from outside the complex were disgusted by Clinton's adolescent idiocy, but they were more disgusted by the Republican response to it. Clinton was an idiot, but the Republicans seemed truly obsessed and borderline insane. They  in the grip of Moby Dick Syndrome.

Moby Dick Syndrome is particularly strong in America.  We see people in the grip of it when they become obsessed with eliminating or crushing Evil. It involves projecting Evil onto some thing or some group, and the projection makes it impossible to see the way a sober person would. The Pequod crew at first had no reason to look at Moby Dick the way Ahab did, but they got caught up in it, especially after the gold coin was nailed to the mast, and they were dragged along to their destruction, which is what happens to anyone who is seduced by demagoguery.  

The Myth of Objective Consciousness III

In the two previous posts with this title, I was leaning on Theodore Roszak to make a fundamental point about the arbitrariness and the severe limitations of modern consciousness we take for granted as "objective" when it is in touch with the truth.  That's only true in the world of things and bodies, and while that might be interesting and useful, it's not really what is most important to us.  But even if you accept that there is a certain practical benefit to having "objective consciousness", we have to reckon for the price we are paying to live within its constraints. 

The very fact that I and so many others can even write such a thing points to the fact that the uncontested dominance of the myth of objective consciousness is breaking down.  That's a good thing--our lives will be richer and deeper and more interesting without it.  But it's one thing to be aware of its limitations, and it's another thing to actually liberate oneself from those limitations. It's one thing to recognize that you're living in a prison; it's another to find a way out of it. And so we do what we can do, and one part of the project is to begin to think through the limitations and begin to imagine the world in ways that don't make the assumptions required by the myth of objective consciousness. 

And for that I'm going to lean on Owen Barfield's arguments in his most famous book, Saving the Appearances. His basic goal is to show that what we think of as the "objective" world out there is a complex of mind-dependent collective representations. Ultimately both he and I want to argue for the anteriority of mind to matter.  The idea that mind is somehow produced out of matter, rather than matter produced from mind is a bias of the myth of objective conscious.

So let's begin to crack open that bias. If you take the common experience of seeing a rainbow, it is clearly something that is there--it's not a hallucination. It has an objective existence that is its own.  Others see it and recognize it as being what you recognize it to be. But what are the components required to make the perception possible?   But Is there a rainbow if there is no one to see it?   Because we recognize that there are three components required for the rainbow to exist. You need rain drops, you need sunlight, and you need a perceiver. Two out of the three elements here are "objective" in the sense of not belonging to the perceiving subject.  So there is something out there whether or not there is a human there to perceive it, but the thing we call 'rainbow' is not there unless there is a human being with a particularly configured eye and mind  to connect the dots (or raindrops) into the experience of a rainbow.

This is different point, though similar, from Bishop Berkeley's tree falling in the forest idea. But I don't want to digress too much on that subject to explain the differences at this point.  Suffice it to say that there is no commensurate way to compare what God sees and and what humans see.  In God's mind there may be the idea of a tree, for instance, but there is no reason to think that what that God's idea of a tree and the human idea, while there is some overlap, have little to do with one another.  An ant's perception of a tree has in all probability more resemblance to a human's than God's does.  But more on that another time.

The point here, obviously, is to draw the analogy of our perception of a rainbow to our perception or the things in the world around--like trees.  Wait, you might say.  A tree is different from a rainbow, it has solidity, and when you approach it you can feel it.  We would all say that matter gives a tree its solidity, but what is matter?  Physics tells us that matter is constituted by agglomerations of molecules, which in turn are composed of atoms, which in turn are composed of protons, neutrons, and so on, which are composed of ??? 

Obvious as it may be to reflection that a system of waves or quanta or discrete particles is no more like solid matter than waves of air are like sound, or raindrops like a rainbow, it is not particularly easy to grasp, and it is almost impossible to keep in mind that there is no such thing as unfelt solidity.  It is much more convenient, when we are listening for example to the geologist to forget what we learnt about matter from the chemist and the physicist.  But it really will not do. 22-23

How exactly are the particles, or whatever we want to think of as the fundamental  elements composing matter, different from rain drops, except that they are more densely associated. And what is the ground of all this matter except notional models or symbols of an unrepresented or imperceivable base--they have more to do with raindrops than trees. Barfield says,

that whatever may be thought about the 'unrepresented' background of our perceptions, the familiar world which we see and know around us--that blue sky with white clouds in it, the noise of a waterfall or a motor-bus, the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends--the world too, which (apart from the special inquiry of physics) experts of all kinds methodically investigate--is a system of collective representations.  The time comes when one must either accept this as the truth about the world or reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways . . . .

What he means by "not having it both ways" is that we cannot believe that what physics tells us about the nature of matter and at the same time believe that the things we perceive in the world are there the way we moderns see them in some completely objective, independent way.  Something is there, yes--particles.  And they are configured in a way that is not of our own making.  But the way they appear to us as collective representations is profoundly conditioned by cultural programming that determines what we actually experience when we ecnounter a tree. Another kind of programming, and a very different experience of the tree. Something is there independent of our perception of it, but what we call "tree"  does not exist except as there are minds that organize the "particles" in a certain way to create the collective representation "tree."  If our mind or perceptual apparatus changes, so will the collective representation of the tree.

I realize this might seem like quite a jump, but if you think about it,  you will see it proves true.  In the same way the mind takes water particles and organizes them into the representation we call 'rainbow', it does the same thing with all our percepts of things in the world. For "if the particles, or the unrepresented, are in fact all that is independently there, then the world we all accept as real is in fact a system of collective representations." (20)

The implication:  Mind, not matter, plays a much bigger role in constituting the representations of the things in physical world around us--more than the "physical" particles do. Because what ultimately is the physicality of the particles? But it's important to note that it's not my individual mind that constitutes the world, but my participation in a collective mind, otherwise we'd all be perceiving different things. And in fact people with different cultural programming do see different things, or more accurately, they see the same things differently. Seeing in three-dimensions is something westerners only started doing since around the time of the Renaissance.

But a second implication is that the natural world that scientists seek to understand is a world of collective representations, and their investigations are limited by the programming that at this moment gives us the world as we experience it.  Well, you might ask, what difference does that make if that is the world as it has always been experienced by humans.  Well, that's the point; they haven't always experienced it the way contemporary moderns have.  Moderns assume that aborigines, for instance, experience the world we do, and that all the superstitious animistic stuff is imaginary and childish. Barfield quotes Levy Bruhl:

Almost everything that we see therein (ie, in a being or object or natural phenomenon) escapes their attention or is a matter of indifference to them.   On the other hand they see many things of which we are unconscious. . . .

It is not correct to maintain, as is frequently done, that primitives associate occult powers, magic properties, a kind of soul or vital principle with all the objects which affect their sense or strike the imagination, and that their perceptions are surcharged with animistic beliefs.  It is not a question of association.  The mystic properties with which things are imbued form an integral part of the idea to the primitive who views it as a synthetic whole.  It is at a later stage of social evolution that what we call a natural phenomenon tends to become the sole content of perception to the exclusion of other elements which then assume the aspect of beliefs, and finally appear superstitions.  But as long as the dissociation not take place perception remains an undifferentiated whole.

That's the hard thing to grasp.  Our everyday encounter with the physical world around us is really an encounter with sound and light waves and energy patterns whose ultimate substrate is unknowable and imperceivable.  We want to think about them as having in themselves the solidity and qualities we perceive in them, but like the rainbow, the existence of the world of collective representations is mind-dependent.  Another way of saying it is that what we experience as physical matter is just a habit of mind. And this in turn implies that like all habits, any habit of mind can be broken and replaced with another, preferably better one.

Lest there be any confusion, let me be clear: I'm not saying there is no extra-subjective reality; I am saying there is no extra-collective mental reality. I know that I haven't proved it yet, and that I am only suggesting the outline for a larger argument that Mind, not matter, is the ultimate stuff of the universe, and once one accepts that, everything begins to look differently, not the least of which our ideas about evolution.  Consciousness is not some epiphenomenon of matter; rather, matter is very much the production of mind. This idea is not really all that unusual.  It is in fact supported by the metaphysics of the Hinduism, Buddhism, and the idealist philosophical tradition in the West dating back to Heraclitus and Plato. And it's not in contradiction to the facts, as we currently understand them, of biological evolution.  It just provides a larger context in which to understand them.  It's just that it has become hard for Westerners since the mid 19th century to imagine because of their materialist habits of mind.

Or another way of saying it is that we live in a world of symbols which for the modern mind has lost its referent.  We see only the object, not what it symbolizes, we have come to inhabit a hopelessly flat and prosaic and disenchanted world, even  though it is anything but.  It's not the world that has become disenchanted, but rather our collective perceptual habits of mind that have created filters that have all but blocked out the soul qualities that are there whether we filter them out or not.

The Myth of Objective Consciousness II

I have nothing against science per se.  My problem is rather with scientism, which takes a limited tool for learning about the mechanics of the material world as the ground for developing a comprehensive worldview.  Scientism is not science.  It is, rather,  "a scientific worldview that encompasses natural explanations for all phenomena, eschews supernatural and paranormal speculations, and embraces empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science." (Michael Schermer, editor of the magazine, Skeptic.) 

Sounds ok, but the critical word here to define is "empirical."   As Roszak says, "If the telescopes of Astronomers were to discover angels in outer space, science as a method of knowing would not be in any sense discredited; its theories would simply be reformulated in the light of new discoveries.  In contrast to the way we use the phrase 'world view' in other contexts, science rests itself not in the world the scientist beholds at any particular point in time, but in his mode of viewing that world.  A man is a scientist not because of what he sees, but because of how he sees it." 

If he sees angels in what might be described as a paranormal state of mind, it doesn't count, because "how" he sees them is not legitimate. He's either crazy or it's just an interesting aesthetic experience to be enjoyed like a fantasy as we experience them in the movies,  but not to be taken seriously as real.  Visionary experience is by definition excluded as real or truth revealing.  Even if hundreds or thousands of people report having had such experiences. That's data that has to be explained away on terms the naturalist defines as empirical.  And yet what people learn in those experiences might be the most important thing of all to know.

I'd like to lean on Theodore Roszak today to help show to what this worldview leads. 
His 1969 book, The Making of a Counterculture, has been sitting on my bookshelf for some time now, and I just recently began to reread it.  It has aged well, and one realizes that this book, like The Greening of America that came out the following year, despite their notoriety at the time, described an "awakening" that was unable to sustain itself or establish a secure foothold in the mainstream public imagination. The myth of objective consciousness objectifies, and so we who live within such a mythos live in a world rich in objects, but poor in spirit.  We've become all but soul dead living in this wasteland of things, things, and more things.  Everywhere objects; here and there a few subjects

Or so it now seems.  Perhaps it's the old story of taking two steps forward and then a step backward. Some of us, me included, were naive enough to believe that Nixon's political demise showed that the republic was healthy and capable of fending off  such abuses of power.  In retrospect, it would appear that the political class's spitting him out was a temporary aberration. The forces within that class the Nixon represented had a temporary setback, and now are back in the driver's seat.  They brook no opposition. Even eager-to-please aspirants like Bill Clinton were not good enough for this resentful crew. He had too much of the stink of the counterculture about him to be acceptable, and so from Day 1 the backlash establishment ought to excrete him the way the pre-backlash establishment had excreted Nixon.

That's not to say that the counterculture about which Roszak speaks has completely evaporated.  It's there at the fringes.  The question is whether the world view of that counterculture has the vitality and the political wit to supplant the mainstream scientistic materialistic culture and its Bizarro doppelganger, the zombie traditionalist religious right.  For both are trapped within the myth of objective consciousness, and neither offers us the alternative we all depserately need. For the only alternative worth supporting and working for will restore the soul-parched wasteland created by the myth of objective consciousness, so that once again the culture can become intersubjectively fertile.

I'm going to quote at length from Roszak here and build on this in future posts:

Objective consciousness begins by dividing reality into two spheres, which would seem best described as "In-Here" and "Out-There."  By In-Here is meant that place within the person to which consciousness withdraws when one wants to know without becoming involved in or committed to that which is being known. . . .

Whatever the scientific method may or may not be, people think they are behaving scientifically whenever they create an In-Here within themselves which undertakes to know without an investment of the person in the act of knowing.  The necessary effect of distancing, of estranging In-Here from Out-There may be achieved in any number of ways: by the intervention of various mechanical gadgets between observer and observed; by the elaboration of chilly jargons and technical terms that replace sensuous speech; by the invention of strange methodologies which reach out to the subject matter like a pair of mechanical hands; by the subordination of the particular and immediate experience to a statistical generalization; by appeal to a professional standard which excuses the observer from responsibility to anything other than a lofty abstraction--such as  "the pursuit of truth," pure research," etc. All these protective strategies are especially compatible with natures that are beset by timidity and fearfulness; but also with those that are characterized by plain insensitivity and whose habitual mode of contact with the world is a cool curiosity untouched by love, tenderness, or passionate wonder.

The spectating In-Here has been called by many names: ego, intelligence, self, subject, reason. . . .What I prefer to emphasize is the act of contraction that takes place within the person, the sense of taking a step back, away from, and out of.  Not only back and away from the natural world, but from the inarticulate feelings, physical urges, and wayward images that surge up from within the person. . . .

The ideal of objective consciousness is that there should be as little as possible In-Here and, conversely, as much as possible Out-There. For only what is Out-There can be studied and known. Objectivity leads to such a great emptying-out operation: the progressive alienation of more and more of In-Here's personal contents in the effort ot achieve the densest possible unit of observational concentration surrounded by the largest possible area of study. The very word "concentration" yields the interesting image of an identity contracted into a small hard ball; hence a dense, diminished identity, something which is less than one otherwise might be. . . . Curiously, this great good called knowledge, the very guarantee of our survival, is taken to be something that is forthcoming only to this lesser, shriveled-up identity.

The scientific observer who comes to feel that Out-There has begun to implicate him personally--say, in the manner of a lover spellbinding one's sympathies so that one cannot tell clearly where one's self leaves off and the other begins--has begun to lose his objectivity. Therefore, he must fight back this irrational involvement of his personal feeling. . . . But if body, feelings, emotions, moral sentiment, sensuous enchantment are all to be located Out-There, then who is this In-Here that is so stalwartly struggling against the siren song?  . . .

As soon as two human beings relate in detachment as observer to observed, as soon as the observer claims to be aware of nothing more than the behavioral surface of the observed, an invidious hierarchy is established which reduces the observed to a lower status. . . .  For consider the gross impertinence of the act of detached observation.  Psychologist confronting his laboratory subject, anthropologist confronting tribal group, political scientist confronting voting public . . . in all such cases what the observer may very well be saying to the observed is the same:  "I can perceive no more than your behavioral facade.  I can grant you no more reality or psychic coherence than this perception allows.  I shall observe this behavior of yours and record it.  I shall not enter into your life, your task, your condition of existence.  Do not turn to me or appeal to me or ask me to become involved with you.  I am here only as a temporary observer whose role is to stand back and later to make my own sense of what you seem to be doing or intending.  I assume that I can adequately understand what you are doing or intending without entering wholly into your life.  I am not particularly interested in what you uniquely are; I am interested only in the general pattern to which you conform. I assume I have the right to use you to perform this process of classification.  I assume I have the right to reduce all that you are to an integer in my science." . . .

Already legions of scientists and military men throughout the world, the products of careful training and selection, give themselves to whole lives of ultimate objectivity.  They systematically detach themselves from any concern for those lives their inventions and weapons may someday do to death.  They do their job as they are ordered to do it . . . objectively.  For them the world at large has become a laboratory--in the same sense that when they enter upon their professional capacity, they leave their personal feelings behind. Perhaps they even take pride in their capacity to do so, for indeed it requires an act of iron will to ignore the claims that person makes upon person.  pp. 218-23

Our society's primary institutions are dominated by the myth of objectivity as here described. In other words our society is controlled by these dense, flat-souled control freaks who require that anyone who seeks influence and power becomes like them.  That's Obama's dilemma. I want to believe he is not like them, but he has to  become like them if he is to avoid being labeled unserious, or worse, crazy as
Al Gore was. So as long as the freaks control the agenda, the wasteland cannot bloom.  And they will control it until a truly robust alternative presents itself, and when/if it does, they will fight viciously to suppress it. 

We're not Burma. The repression is subtler here.  And as of now there is no cultural or political force that poses a threat that worries the establishment elites. Critics can talk all they want because they have no power and they pose no threat.  A guy like Obama doesn't scare them. He can be easily co-opted, and if he resists, he will be made into an irrelevancy quicker than you can say Howard Dean.