Sound of the Silent Mystics
Oh mind, let me in—
Into the deep, dark, din
Of my Oblivion--
Into the sound of the silent mystics.
Conceal me in its depths
That I might no more be left
The vain shapes my eyes beget
Or the faces I used to dream of.
Let me find no more truth in love—
In unions fated from above—
But in the sound of the silent mystics.
Let me think no more on where I’ve been
Now—now that I am comfortably within
The deep dark din of my Oblivion.
In mystical literature such self-contradictory phrases as 'dazzling obscurity,' 'whispering silence,' 'teeming desert,' are continually met with. They prove that not conceptual speech, but music rather, is the element through which we are best spoken to by mystical truth.
William James (The varieties of religious experience)
Do I sound contradictory? I am much, I am many, I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Action and Art
This morning I watched a docudrama about the Rwandan genocide. In one scene a Huntu man, loyal to “the party”, is stopped at a roadblock and made to watch his Tutsis wife and their children being slaughtered in front of him; afterwards, the killers let him pass. Another scene has a group of school girls being mowed down in mass because they stood together and refused to give up the Tutsis among them. In both episodes I was brought to tears and driven to contemplate what my own behavior would have been under the same circumstances. In both cases I determined that I would’ve acted heroically. I would’ve given my life (with a fight, of course) to show solidarity with the others and hopefully reveal to my oppressors a little of their inhumanity, thus planting the seeds for change. That said, I don’t think I’m ready, and neither is anyone else, to pin an award for heroism on my chest and congratulate myself for hypothetical bravery and sacrifice. Feeling moved by a movie isn’t the same as being moved by real life—and acting hypothetically isn’t the same as acting in relation to other living things. At the same time, I don’t think life and fiction are completely separate, either. So what does it mean that I felt so moved by this movie, but when the Rwandan genocide was actually taking place I was mostly oblivious to it?
I belong to a theater group which practices elements of what’s called Theater of the Oppressed, a type of interactive theater designed to empower others to see themselves as subjects rather than objects within an imposed political system. Essentially, we try to pose the same kinds of questions I asked myself during the movie—what would you do in this situation and what would that accomplish? More than that, though, we want to show that art isn’t just a packaged reality to be passively accepted but a real “thing” to respond to and accept responsibility for—as the expression of a subject interacting with other subjects. As Samuel Beckett said, “it isn’t about something, it is the thing itself!”
In contrast, you have pornography. I read an interview of Susan Griffin yesterday, in which she condemned pornography as being deterministic. I quote: “The pornographers are very deterministic. They feel, well this is the way people are and we're just giving them what they need. But in fact that's not at all true. The culture is a human creation and we can make choices in what kind of culture we create, and culture has a profound effect on behavior.” I also found an excerpt from the book she was being interviewed about (Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature) in which she says: “And let us remember finally that we cannot choose to have both Eros and pornography; we must choose between beauty and silence. (p. 249)” James Joyce distinguishes between art and pornography by claiming that art arrests the mind while pornography stimulates it. I think this is true. Moreover, I think pornography kills emotion while art heightens and at the same time transcends it. Beauty (in art or in nature) makes me feel more alive and more eager to take action—not action to satisfy a craving but action motivated by a feeling of relationship to and dependence on other living things—a feeling of thankfulness. To paraphrase Joyce, beauty enables me to see a thing as the thing that it is that can be no other thing or to see the other as autonomous and separate from myself, yet necessary to my existence. It makes me want to “act lovingly” as opposed to falling in love or giving love. It places the behavior, as opposed to the principle or concept, as the subjective essence. Pornography, on the other hand, turns experience into an object. It locks the experience down, pigeonholes it, defines it, takes away its freedom and determines it to be something. It suggests that your desires are determined rather than made, and that your desires are a part of you, when in fact they’re by definition separate and other and can never be possessed. In summary, art empowers us and makes us account for our freedom while pornography determines (makes us all the same—at one with the universe) and manipulates us.
But maybe I’m oversimplifying. Is the docudrama I saw on the Rwandan genocide artistic or pornographic? Or neither? On one hand it stimulated and made me want to do something. It prompted this writing for one (if you can call that doing). But I’m not so sure it was the movie that prompted me to write this or the discomfort I felt knowing that I could be so moved by a film when all around me real life tragedies are going on that I’m unaware of and unmoved by. Is art a replacement for experience? By vicariously experiencing these people’s sufferings am I protecting myself from them—denying responsibility for them? In art, aren’t we primarily living in the past or the future—in our imaginations instead of our hearts? Aren’t we eliminating risk from our experiences? I’m wondering if art doesn’t help us maintain our purity in the world by presenting us with clear-cut decisions which don’t require compromise.
While I’m writing this, there’s a movie called Speak playing on TV. I’ve seen it before and, like the docudrama on Rwanda, it moved me to tears several times. Speak is a pretty cheesy movie, though, and hardly what I’d intuitively call art. The bad guys are clear-cut stereotypical villains and the good guys are clear-cut stereotypical heroes and the victims are clear-cut stereotypical victims. And I think the docudrama on Rwanda is probably closer in substance and style to Speak than it is to Hamlet or War and Peace. The villains in both movies are easy to hate, and the choices represented in both movies are the kinds of choices we’d all like to have in real life, but can’t. Right now I’d like to go out and do something. I’d like to go out and give money to a homeless person, fight alongside a freedom fighter in the Third World, make an abused woman feel like she’s a human being—anything besides sitting here in front of my computer and bitching into a word processor. In short, I’d like to act heroically (even if only for appearances sake). But those heroic choices aren’t available. The homeless person I give money to might grow increasingly reliant on the generosity of others and view him or herself with less and less respect. The freedom fighter might use my assistance to replace one repressive regime with another. The abused woman might see my concern as yet another manipulation or come on. So how can I act in a way that really communicates who I am or want to be (and heroic isn’t how I really want to be but an egoistic fantasy, but that’s another subject)? Through art?
Doesn’t real life and real freedom require that we sully ourselves—that we act period instead of for the sake of principle? Doesn’t art preserve principle? Preserve our dignity and our selves as objects? In that sense, isn’t all art pornographic? Or can art avoid objectification by calling attention to itself as art, by maintaining its ambiguity and declaring itself as behavior rather than dogma? There is, naturally, an obvious difference between Deep Throat and Speak—between pornography and cheesy but well intentioned movies, that is. And there’s even a bigger difference between Sade (educated porn but still porn) and Shakespeare or Dante or Emily Bronte or Jane Austen or Rembrandt or Bergman or Bach. I think pornography deadens but art enriches. I think art enhances awareness and immanence. At the same time, it memorializes and kills. It replaces reality with language and ideology. It oversimplifies and delays action. It encourages myth and fantasy. And if we lived in a pure perfect world then there might not be any need for it, but that isn’t the world we live in. And if we want to live in the actual world, we have to tolerate ambiguity and imperfection and compromise. We have to pollute our images and we have to be willing to take risks. So art isn’t perfect, but if it empowers people to take action and to better appreciate natural beauty, as I think it often does, then it matters, even if in turn it risks the abstraction of real life. Art isn’t our salvation but neither is it our ruin. Some art works are more empowering than others and some works of pornography are less degenerate than others. If the world we live in is artificial then maybe it’s necessary to use artifice to get us out of that world, no matter how simplistic or even emotionally manipulative the art form might be. Art that exposes our cultural assumptions—that lifts the veil we cover nature with—that transforms us—is valuable and empowering. A docudrama reminding me of a genocide that took place while I was alive to help prevent it may not be Shakespeare but it is art and it is something that matters—and so is writing about it … I guess … maybe….
*****
There's no such thing as a compassionate person who doesn't act compassionate, as a thoughtful person who can't articulate her thoughts, or a villian who doesn't participate in acts of villiany. We are what we do. Period. Actions beget principles, not the other way around. And the same goes for emotions. If you don't have a heart, act as if you do, and you'll have one. Fail to act, and you'll be left with nothing except your purity.
*****
To know and not to act is not to know.
Ancient Chinese proverb
I belong to a theater group which practices elements of what’s called Theater of the Oppressed, a type of interactive theater designed to empower others to see themselves as subjects rather than objects within an imposed political system. Essentially, we try to pose the same kinds of questions I asked myself during the movie—what would you do in this situation and what would that accomplish? More than that, though, we want to show that art isn’t just a packaged reality to be passively accepted but a real “thing” to respond to and accept responsibility for—as the expression of a subject interacting with other subjects. As Samuel Beckett said, “it isn’t about something, it is the thing itself!”
In contrast, you have pornography. I read an interview of Susan Griffin yesterday, in which she condemned pornography as being deterministic. I quote: “The pornographers are very deterministic. They feel, well this is the way people are and we're just giving them what they need. But in fact that's not at all true. The culture is a human creation and we can make choices in what kind of culture we create, and culture has a profound effect on behavior.” I also found an excerpt from the book she was being interviewed about (Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature) in which she says: “And let us remember finally that we cannot choose to have both Eros and pornography; we must choose between beauty and silence. (p. 249)” James Joyce distinguishes between art and pornography by claiming that art arrests the mind while pornography stimulates it. I think this is true. Moreover, I think pornography kills emotion while art heightens and at the same time transcends it. Beauty (in art or in nature) makes me feel more alive and more eager to take action—not action to satisfy a craving but action motivated by a feeling of relationship to and dependence on other living things—a feeling of thankfulness. To paraphrase Joyce, beauty enables me to see a thing as the thing that it is that can be no other thing or to see the other as autonomous and separate from myself, yet necessary to my existence. It makes me want to “act lovingly” as opposed to falling in love or giving love. It places the behavior, as opposed to the principle or concept, as the subjective essence. Pornography, on the other hand, turns experience into an object. It locks the experience down, pigeonholes it, defines it, takes away its freedom and determines it to be something. It suggests that your desires are determined rather than made, and that your desires are a part of you, when in fact they’re by definition separate and other and can never be possessed. In summary, art empowers us and makes us account for our freedom while pornography determines (makes us all the same—at one with the universe) and manipulates us.
But maybe I’m oversimplifying. Is the docudrama I saw on the Rwandan genocide artistic or pornographic? Or neither? On one hand it stimulated and made me want to do something. It prompted this writing for one (if you can call that doing). But I’m not so sure it was the movie that prompted me to write this or the discomfort I felt knowing that I could be so moved by a film when all around me real life tragedies are going on that I’m unaware of and unmoved by. Is art a replacement for experience? By vicariously experiencing these people’s sufferings am I protecting myself from them—denying responsibility for them? In art, aren’t we primarily living in the past or the future—in our imaginations instead of our hearts? Aren’t we eliminating risk from our experiences? I’m wondering if art doesn’t help us maintain our purity in the world by presenting us with clear-cut decisions which don’t require compromise.
While I’m writing this, there’s a movie called Speak playing on TV. I’ve seen it before and, like the docudrama on Rwanda, it moved me to tears several times. Speak is a pretty cheesy movie, though, and hardly what I’d intuitively call art. The bad guys are clear-cut stereotypical villains and the good guys are clear-cut stereotypical heroes and the victims are clear-cut stereotypical victims. And I think the docudrama on Rwanda is probably closer in substance and style to Speak than it is to Hamlet or War and Peace. The villains in both movies are easy to hate, and the choices represented in both movies are the kinds of choices we’d all like to have in real life, but can’t. Right now I’d like to go out and do something. I’d like to go out and give money to a homeless person, fight alongside a freedom fighter in the Third World, make an abused woman feel like she’s a human being—anything besides sitting here in front of my computer and bitching into a word processor. In short, I’d like to act heroically (even if only for appearances sake). But those heroic choices aren’t available. The homeless person I give money to might grow increasingly reliant on the generosity of others and view him or herself with less and less respect. The freedom fighter might use my assistance to replace one repressive regime with another. The abused woman might see my concern as yet another manipulation or come on. So how can I act in a way that really communicates who I am or want to be (and heroic isn’t how I really want to be but an egoistic fantasy, but that’s another subject)? Through art?
Doesn’t real life and real freedom require that we sully ourselves—that we act period instead of for the sake of principle? Doesn’t art preserve principle? Preserve our dignity and our selves as objects? In that sense, isn’t all art pornographic? Or can art avoid objectification by calling attention to itself as art, by maintaining its ambiguity and declaring itself as behavior rather than dogma? There is, naturally, an obvious difference between Deep Throat and Speak—between pornography and cheesy but well intentioned movies, that is. And there’s even a bigger difference between Sade (educated porn but still porn) and Shakespeare or Dante or Emily Bronte or Jane Austen or Rembrandt or Bergman or Bach. I think pornography deadens but art enriches. I think art enhances awareness and immanence. At the same time, it memorializes and kills. It replaces reality with language and ideology. It oversimplifies and delays action. It encourages myth and fantasy. And if we lived in a pure perfect world then there might not be any need for it, but that isn’t the world we live in. And if we want to live in the actual world, we have to tolerate ambiguity and imperfection and compromise. We have to pollute our images and we have to be willing to take risks. So art isn’t perfect, but if it empowers people to take action and to better appreciate natural beauty, as I think it often does, then it matters, even if in turn it risks the abstraction of real life. Art isn’t our salvation but neither is it our ruin. Some art works are more empowering than others and some works of pornography are less degenerate than others. If the world we live in is artificial then maybe it’s necessary to use artifice to get us out of that world, no matter how simplistic or even emotionally manipulative the art form might be. Art that exposes our cultural assumptions—that lifts the veil we cover nature with—that transforms us—is valuable and empowering. A docudrama reminding me of a genocide that took place while I was alive to help prevent it may not be Shakespeare but it is art and it is something that matters—and so is writing about it … I guess … maybe….
*****
There's no such thing as a compassionate person who doesn't act compassionate, as a thoughtful person who can't articulate her thoughts, or a villian who doesn't participate in acts of villiany. We are what we do. Period. Actions beget principles, not the other way around. And the same goes for emotions. If you don't have a heart, act as if you do, and you'll have one. Fail to act, and you'll be left with nothing except your purity.
*****
To know and not to act is not to know.
Ancient Chinese proverb
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Awareness
Last weekend I went out to celebrate Halloween (this is a dated entry). I had a great time, but there’s one particular not-so-great moment that stands out. Towards the end of the night, we stopped off at a bar, where I met, talked to, and exchanged email addresses with an attractive woman named Laura. She probably isn’t my type, but I was flattered by the attention and we were having a fun time together—so much fun, in fact, that when a homeless man entered and sat down a few seats away from us, I did everything within my power to ignore his presence. He didn’t do anything wrong—he didn’t act strangely, emit any body odor, or ask me for money—yet, as my body language no doubt made clear, he was an unwelcome intrusion into my life. The reason was obvious. I was having a good time, and I didn’t want anyone disturbing it.
It was pretty easy to ignore him, too. I can’t tell you how long he sat there; when, or if, he left the bar; nor would I even have a memory of seeing him if it weren’t for the fact that my housemate had spoken to him that night and later recounted to me his extremely tragic story (he killed his wife and kids in a drunk driving accident). Who’s to say how many people I casually dismiss from my life in the same manner—not only the homeless, but prison inmates, Native Americans on reservations, the disabled, the unattractive, the socially awkward, the depressed, the abused—anyone who fails to enhance my good time. And what does it mean to have a good time? In this case, it meant that I was fitting in. I was following the appropriate conventions of dress and behavior and, in turn, being included in conversations, flirted with, and acknowledged as a real human being. That’s rewarding. Shallow, yeah, but still rewarding. And that’s why acknowledging a homeless person beside me creates such discomfort. Acknowledging him means acknowledging the reality of life outside the group, which means acknowledging a threat to my good time. Acknowledging a homeless person also means that in some way I have to relate to him. That means becoming part of his world and experiencing a part of his isolation—an isolation I never feel too far removed from and which scares me more than anything else. Moreover, it means acknowledging my own privileged situation, which brings up the reality of my being an oppressor—or part of an oppressive system, at the very least.
And this is why I live the way I do. This is why I don’t buy some land in the forest and learn how to practice permaculture. It isn’t because life within civilization is safer or more convenient. (With crime, traffic dangers, air pollution, war, carcinogens, and terrorist activity civilization can hardly be described as safe. And working forty plus hour work weeks with two to three hour commutes tacked on is hardly my idea of a convenient lifestyle.) It’s because I don’t dare to become a social outcast. And this is why I so often fail to act on my beliefs. The opportunities to act on my beliefs and become the person I want to be are everywhere, but I don’t seize them because I don’t want to exchange social isolation for private fulfillment.
To some extent, compromise is inevitable. If we give up our membership in society we likewise give up our ability to influence that society—and that helps no one. Nevertheless, being a part of society doesn’t mean that we have to lose touch with everything outside of it—with the homeless, the Third World, the animals, and so on. We don’t have to surrender our natural selves entirely. Nor do we have to participate full-force in our society’s exploitation of the natural world and non-elites. Nor do we have to ignore the homeless and other outcasts. We can, with help—and only with help—learn to put up some resistance and become more aware of ourselves as repressive vectors and agents, and with that awareness we might gain the courage to live outside of the system. But we can’t do it alone.
Social isolation doesn’t just scare me; it’s an absolute terror. It terrifies me for two reasons: one, it’s a real and ever-present possibility in my life, and two, it represents the loss of the one thing I care most about—relationship. Anyhow, that’s what I tell myself—that’s how I rationalize my fear. In truth, you could argue that it isn’t social isolation that scares me but class isolation. But see, that’s part of the problem. You can’t separate the two. I think I would be content with the company of the underclass if the underclass would be content with me—but I don’t think that’s possible. In many ways, prison life represents my ideal lifestyle—lots of free time, no responsibility, relatively few stresses. In fact, my lifestyle now isn’t much different from that of your average inmate’s. And I could say the same thing about the lifestyle of the average homeless person or institutionalized mental patient. It’s pretty similar to mine (even in terms of income), except in one key respect—I’m a professional, and, as such, I have a degree of status in our society which confers on me a certain degree of esteem and the freedom that comes with that esteem. For that reason, my language is different, my dress is different, my habits are different, and my methods of relating to others are different. And those are the qualities that social interaction is based on. That’s what having a good time is based on, too, but, to be clear, having a good time has nothing to do with relationship.
Relationship depends on bringing your whole self to a situation, and you can’t bring your whole self to a situation if you’re in denial about the homeless person setting next to you. Having a good time, in most cases, is opposed to being authentic and authentically relating to others. You have a choice: put on the social mask and participate in our culture or tear the mask off and risk permanent exile and isolation. And I have to be honest. For me, the illusionary and egoistic pleasures of participating in society feel good—not as good as forging an authentic relationship with someone, but good nonetheless. On the other hand, loneliness hurts. It isn’t an abstract pain, either. It physically hurts. It hurts so bad that putting a bullet in my brain can strike me as a welcome relief—a lesser pain. And therein lies the rub. If social membership requires personal delusion, where do you draw the line? Where’s the circumference from which you can both be yourself and be in honest relation to other human beings?
I can’t remember what it’s called, but Sartre wrote a book about the Jew and the Anti-Semite, in which he suggests that secular Judaism might be a response to Jewish oppression. The secular Jew, Sartre contends, conceives of psychological processes as mechanical functionings. Being condemned by opinion, the secular Jew strives to negate the value of opinion in favor of rationality (today’s Liberalism). In this way, the Jew can recreate society in a manner which allows his equal participation in it. That’s one way of re-integrating yourself into the system—changing the system. But that method has its costs—namely, that you have to lie; you have to objectify yourself via scientific rationalism. You have to give up your humanity. That isn’t relating; it’s being co-opted. But for Sartre there is another option. You can choose to be an outcast. That is, you can will yourself into history as a doomed and exiled creation. You can accept the obligation to live an effectively unlivable life. By consenting to your isolation, you escape it. You discover your true humanity and the limitless possibilities contained therein.
And what, according to Sartre, is true for the Jew is true for all of us. You can’t become an authentic human being without renouncing the confines of society. You can’t live a dignified and truly free life, except in exile. But that doesn’t say anything about the political solution to the problems of classism, racism, sexism, or consumer capitalism. And neither does it say anything about fulfilling human needs. We need other people. We need relationship. But if our needs can’t be fully realized either in human relations or in isolation, then aren’t we doomed to suffer regardless of our choices? Isn’t life a ridiculous Catch 22?
I don’t believe so. But, for the moment, I can’t articulate why. In part, it’s because my life seems to have gotten so much more fulfilling since I’ve started to deliberately set myself apart from society. But that isn’t an entirely accurate description of what I’ve been doing. If anything, I’m becoming more involved in society, in the respect that I’m accepting more social responsibility, interacting with more like-minded people, doing more political work, going out more often, and expressing myself more openly. Concurrently, I’m more ignorant of popular culture, less willing to tolerate the company of assholes, and increasingly separate from modern interests and customs. And I’m a more complete person, too. Yet I still block out the reality of homelessness at times.
In addition, I block out women who have snubbed me, men who have exploited me, and authority figures who have failed me. It isn’t just my social inferiors I repress awareness of, I reject those higher up on the ladder, as well—those who haven’t accepted me as their equal and who thereby deny my reality in the same way that I deny the reality of homeless men who sit down next to me at a bar.
Yesterday I read an email about a woman who had been at a bar where a man tried to rape her. She yelled in fear and the man backed off. Then, as she returned to her friends she actually apologized to the man for yelling. She apologized to her would-be rapist! I’ve seen similar acts of self deference in the homeless, prison inmates (I used to teach in the prison system), and employees when confronted by acts of abuse by their superiors. It isn’t uncommon. From women loving their abusers to the poor admiring the rich, human beings find it easy to deny the realities of oppression. We deny it when we excuse our own mistreatment but also when we fail to acknowledge or thwart the mistreatment of others—or to see the abuser in ourselves. And when we deny oppression, we in effect deny reality. We enhance our good time at the cost of self (and other)-awareness. Acknowledging reality in all its ugliness, however, doesn’t have to lead to guilt and nihilism. It can be fulfilling, too.
Awareness, no matter how disturbing, doesn’t produce unhappiness. It may produce sadness, shame, gravity, remorse, or indignation—in other words, it might put an end to our superficial good time, but it doesn’t produce the inane and nauseating depression that typifies life in our culture. A good time in our culture is nothing more than a flight from discomfort, not the eradication of it. We prefer escapism because our society’s problems are seemingly so insurmountable that we can’t bring ourselves to confront them—so awareness of the disease, not the disease itself, becomes the agony we run from. When not acted on, awareness strikes us like a lost love. It hurts. It hurts in the same way that remembering the good times of a spoiled relationship hurts--it emphasizes everything that isn't. By the same token, it reminds us of the freedom and camaraderie with others we might create if we give up on having a good time—if we stop hiding behind intoxicants, religion, popular media, and Halloween costumes and face up to the suffering of our species and ourselves—a suffering wherein we might learn to be honestly happy and exceptionally sad and serious at the same time.
What isn’t conscious, can’t be consciously expelled.
Robbe Grillet (I think)
It was pretty easy to ignore him, too. I can’t tell you how long he sat there; when, or if, he left the bar; nor would I even have a memory of seeing him if it weren’t for the fact that my housemate had spoken to him that night and later recounted to me his extremely tragic story (he killed his wife and kids in a drunk driving accident). Who’s to say how many people I casually dismiss from my life in the same manner—not only the homeless, but prison inmates, Native Americans on reservations, the disabled, the unattractive, the socially awkward, the depressed, the abused—anyone who fails to enhance my good time. And what does it mean to have a good time? In this case, it meant that I was fitting in. I was following the appropriate conventions of dress and behavior and, in turn, being included in conversations, flirted with, and acknowledged as a real human being. That’s rewarding. Shallow, yeah, but still rewarding. And that’s why acknowledging a homeless person beside me creates such discomfort. Acknowledging him means acknowledging the reality of life outside the group, which means acknowledging a threat to my good time. Acknowledging a homeless person also means that in some way I have to relate to him. That means becoming part of his world and experiencing a part of his isolation—an isolation I never feel too far removed from and which scares me more than anything else. Moreover, it means acknowledging my own privileged situation, which brings up the reality of my being an oppressor—or part of an oppressive system, at the very least.
And this is why I live the way I do. This is why I don’t buy some land in the forest and learn how to practice permaculture. It isn’t because life within civilization is safer or more convenient. (With crime, traffic dangers, air pollution, war, carcinogens, and terrorist activity civilization can hardly be described as safe. And working forty plus hour work weeks with two to three hour commutes tacked on is hardly my idea of a convenient lifestyle.) It’s because I don’t dare to become a social outcast. And this is why I so often fail to act on my beliefs. The opportunities to act on my beliefs and become the person I want to be are everywhere, but I don’t seize them because I don’t want to exchange social isolation for private fulfillment.
To some extent, compromise is inevitable. If we give up our membership in society we likewise give up our ability to influence that society—and that helps no one. Nevertheless, being a part of society doesn’t mean that we have to lose touch with everything outside of it—with the homeless, the Third World, the animals, and so on. We don’t have to surrender our natural selves entirely. Nor do we have to participate full-force in our society’s exploitation of the natural world and non-elites. Nor do we have to ignore the homeless and other outcasts. We can, with help—and only with help—learn to put up some resistance and become more aware of ourselves as repressive vectors and agents, and with that awareness we might gain the courage to live outside of the system. But we can’t do it alone.
Social isolation doesn’t just scare me; it’s an absolute terror. It terrifies me for two reasons: one, it’s a real and ever-present possibility in my life, and two, it represents the loss of the one thing I care most about—relationship. Anyhow, that’s what I tell myself—that’s how I rationalize my fear. In truth, you could argue that it isn’t social isolation that scares me but class isolation. But see, that’s part of the problem. You can’t separate the two. I think I would be content with the company of the underclass if the underclass would be content with me—but I don’t think that’s possible. In many ways, prison life represents my ideal lifestyle—lots of free time, no responsibility, relatively few stresses. In fact, my lifestyle now isn’t much different from that of your average inmate’s. And I could say the same thing about the lifestyle of the average homeless person or institutionalized mental patient. It’s pretty similar to mine (even in terms of income), except in one key respect—I’m a professional, and, as such, I have a degree of status in our society which confers on me a certain degree of esteem and the freedom that comes with that esteem. For that reason, my language is different, my dress is different, my habits are different, and my methods of relating to others are different. And those are the qualities that social interaction is based on. That’s what having a good time is based on, too, but, to be clear, having a good time has nothing to do with relationship.
Relationship depends on bringing your whole self to a situation, and you can’t bring your whole self to a situation if you’re in denial about the homeless person setting next to you. Having a good time, in most cases, is opposed to being authentic and authentically relating to others. You have a choice: put on the social mask and participate in our culture or tear the mask off and risk permanent exile and isolation. And I have to be honest. For me, the illusionary and egoistic pleasures of participating in society feel good—not as good as forging an authentic relationship with someone, but good nonetheless. On the other hand, loneliness hurts. It isn’t an abstract pain, either. It physically hurts. It hurts so bad that putting a bullet in my brain can strike me as a welcome relief—a lesser pain. And therein lies the rub. If social membership requires personal delusion, where do you draw the line? Where’s the circumference from which you can both be yourself and be in honest relation to other human beings?
I can’t remember what it’s called, but Sartre wrote a book about the Jew and the Anti-Semite, in which he suggests that secular Judaism might be a response to Jewish oppression. The secular Jew, Sartre contends, conceives of psychological processes as mechanical functionings. Being condemned by opinion, the secular Jew strives to negate the value of opinion in favor of rationality (today’s Liberalism). In this way, the Jew can recreate society in a manner which allows his equal participation in it. That’s one way of re-integrating yourself into the system—changing the system. But that method has its costs—namely, that you have to lie; you have to objectify yourself via scientific rationalism. You have to give up your humanity. That isn’t relating; it’s being co-opted. But for Sartre there is another option. You can choose to be an outcast. That is, you can will yourself into history as a doomed and exiled creation. You can accept the obligation to live an effectively unlivable life. By consenting to your isolation, you escape it. You discover your true humanity and the limitless possibilities contained therein.
And what, according to Sartre, is true for the Jew is true for all of us. You can’t become an authentic human being without renouncing the confines of society. You can’t live a dignified and truly free life, except in exile. But that doesn’t say anything about the political solution to the problems of classism, racism, sexism, or consumer capitalism. And neither does it say anything about fulfilling human needs. We need other people. We need relationship. But if our needs can’t be fully realized either in human relations or in isolation, then aren’t we doomed to suffer regardless of our choices? Isn’t life a ridiculous Catch 22?
I don’t believe so. But, for the moment, I can’t articulate why. In part, it’s because my life seems to have gotten so much more fulfilling since I’ve started to deliberately set myself apart from society. But that isn’t an entirely accurate description of what I’ve been doing. If anything, I’m becoming more involved in society, in the respect that I’m accepting more social responsibility, interacting with more like-minded people, doing more political work, going out more often, and expressing myself more openly. Concurrently, I’m more ignorant of popular culture, less willing to tolerate the company of assholes, and increasingly separate from modern interests and customs. And I’m a more complete person, too. Yet I still block out the reality of homelessness at times.
In addition, I block out women who have snubbed me, men who have exploited me, and authority figures who have failed me. It isn’t just my social inferiors I repress awareness of, I reject those higher up on the ladder, as well—those who haven’t accepted me as their equal and who thereby deny my reality in the same way that I deny the reality of homeless men who sit down next to me at a bar.
Yesterday I read an email about a woman who had been at a bar where a man tried to rape her. She yelled in fear and the man backed off. Then, as she returned to her friends she actually apologized to the man for yelling. She apologized to her would-be rapist! I’ve seen similar acts of self deference in the homeless, prison inmates (I used to teach in the prison system), and employees when confronted by acts of abuse by their superiors. It isn’t uncommon. From women loving their abusers to the poor admiring the rich, human beings find it easy to deny the realities of oppression. We deny it when we excuse our own mistreatment but also when we fail to acknowledge or thwart the mistreatment of others—or to see the abuser in ourselves. And when we deny oppression, we in effect deny reality. We enhance our good time at the cost of self (and other)-awareness. Acknowledging reality in all its ugliness, however, doesn’t have to lead to guilt and nihilism. It can be fulfilling, too.
Awareness, no matter how disturbing, doesn’t produce unhappiness. It may produce sadness, shame, gravity, remorse, or indignation—in other words, it might put an end to our superficial good time, but it doesn’t produce the inane and nauseating depression that typifies life in our culture. A good time in our culture is nothing more than a flight from discomfort, not the eradication of it. We prefer escapism because our society’s problems are seemingly so insurmountable that we can’t bring ourselves to confront them—so awareness of the disease, not the disease itself, becomes the agony we run from. When not acted on, awareness strikes us like a lost love. It hurts. It hurts in the same way that remembering the good times of a spoiled relationship hurts--it emphasizes everything that isn't. By the same token, it reminds us of the freedom and camaraderie with others we might create if we give up on having a good time—if we stop hiding behind intoxicants, religion, popular media, and Halloween costumes and face up to the suffering of our species and ourselves—a suffering wherein we might learn to be honestly happy and exceptionally sad and serious at the same time.
What isn’t conscious, can’t be consciously expelled.
Robbe Grillet (I think)
Clarifications
Due to some recent confusion by several of my friends, I thought I should clarify my use of a couple terms:
Civilization:
As defined by Derrick Jensen, civilization, which is characterized by the development of cities, is any settlement of humans requiring the importation of resources. Anthropologist Stanley Diamond adds: “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” That's what civilizations do--conquer and repress. They couldn't exist, otherwise, because they're fundamentally unsustainable. Being opposed to civilization, for me, means only that I'm opposed to societies that can't survive without exploitation; it doesn't mean, necessarily, that I'm opposed to all of civilization's constructs (i.e. art, technology....)
Anarchist
There are all kinds of anarchists out there--anarcho communists, situationist anarchists, anarcho feminists, anarcho primitivists, anarcho syndicalists, etc. The only common thread they all have is that they don't believe in artificial hierarchy and artificial laws (nature's rules are enough). Anarchists are NOT wild-eyed, impractical dreamers trying to create Utopia. Anarchist communities aren't perfect. Contrary to popular belief, however, they are efficient and they are sustainable and they are, or have been I should say, widely practiced by human beings--especially during our early history (Don't take my word for it, though. Do the research). When I call myself an Anarchist, I'm not advocating violence and mayhem; I'm advocating democracy and revolution. In other words, I'm neither for or against violence, but I am for bringing down civilization by whatever responsible and well thought-out means possible. Moreover, I don't believe the system (Civilization) is capable of reform--not to the degree that real democracy and freedom are achievable.
Civilization:
As defined by Derrick Jensen, civilization, which is characterized by the development of cities, is any settlement of humans requiring the importation of resources. Anthropologist Stanley Diamond adds: “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.” That's what civilizations do--conquer and repress. They couldn't exist, otherwise, because they're fundamentally unsustainable. Being opposed to civilization, for me, means only that I'm opposed to societies that can't survive without exploitation; it doesn't mean, necessarily, that I'm opposed to all of civilization's constructs (i.e. art, technology....)
Anarchist
There are all kinds of anarchists out there--anarcho communists, situationist anarchists, anarcho feminists, anarcho primitivists, anarcho syndicalists, etc. The only common thread they all have is that they don't believe in artificial hierarchy and artificial laws (nature's rules are enough). Anarchists are NOT wild-eyed, impractical dreamers trying to create Utopia. Anarchist communities aren't perfect. Contrary to popular belief, however, they are efficient and they are sustainable and they are, or have been I should say, widely practiced by human beings--especially during our early history (Don't take my word for it, though. Do the research). When I call myself an Anarchist, I'm not advocating violence and mayhem; I'm advocating democracy and revolution. In other words, I'm neither for or against violence, but I am for bringing down civilization by whatever responsible and well thought-out means possible. Moreover, I don't believe the system (Civilization) is capable of reform--not to the degree that real democracy and freedom are achievable.
Sunday, December 04, 2005
liger
I just found the perfect metaphor for modern human beings. Apparently, when you cross a male lion and a female tiger you produce what’s called a Liger—an animal three to four times the size of either of the species that produced it. The reason it’s so big is that a gene present in the male lion for increasing appetite (and growth) is not balanced by a gene typically passed on by the female lion for decreasing appetite. As a result, the Liger doesn’t know when to say when. Having such a large appetite is an obvious disadvantage in the wild where you run the risk of depleting your food sources (or becoming too slow to catch them), so these sluggish and unwary creatures can only exist within zoos and protective sanctuaries—kind of like us.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
quote
Believing means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted, you can’t then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it acceptable.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein
poem
Rejection
I had no questions when she left
In silence I defected
A light beteemed by eyes of seraphs
Was all that I detected
And now outside chimeras dance
And every sound becomes
A voice that speaks another’s trance
Another’s fate undone
*****
quote (unrelated to poem):
There is no place for great souls in society as it exists. For man and woman both, they must seek their fullfillment outside—in crime and in death.
Simone de Beauvoir
I had no questions when she left
In silence I defected
A light beteemed by eyes of seraphs
Was all that I detected
And now outside chimeras dance
And every sound becomes
A voice that speaks another’s trance
Another’s fate undone
*****
quote (unrelated to poem):
There is no place for great souls in society as it exists. For man and woman both, they must seek their fullfillment outside—in crime and in death.
Simone de Beauvoir
civilian casualties and ethics
Today it was announced that US casualties in the war in Iraq have reached 2119. That’s an awful lot of people, but it barely merits consideration when put alongside the number of Iraqi civilian deaths (upwards of 150,000 according to some reports). The liberal pundits prefer to focus on the American deaths, thinking, no doubt, that they have to play to America’s xenophobia to rally dissent against the war, but in doing so they fail to expose the main injustice of government aggression—that innocent people are knowingly put to death—and accordingly they spoil a great occasion to challenge people’s blind faith and support of a corrupt system. It goes without saying that the motives for the Iraqi war are beyond dubious, but even if we grant the administration its best rationalization—that we’re fighting this war to help the Iraqi people and to export Democracy and freedom to the world (stop laughing), then does that justify killing 150,000 civilians? (footnote: America represents six percent of world population and consumes almost forty percent of the world’s energy resources. Do you really think that’s an exportable product?)
Think about it. If a person acted in the same way as even the most responsible government, not one in a thousand Americans would approve. If someone blew up an elementary school, for example, in order to eliminate a serial killer who had taken refuge inside, then not even the most callous pragmatist would condone the behavior—even if the serial killer were the most prolific in history (someone worse than Columbus, maybe). And yet that’s exactly what we do every time we declare war. We condone the killing of innocent men, women, and children. No war in history has spared the innocent. We know that. And we also know that every time we declare or support a war we are knowingly making a decision to kill non-combatants. So why do we do it?
Let’s take another scenario. Say I decide to blow up a dam in order to restore an eco-system. I have a noble objective, right? And I take every precaution imaginable to ensure that no human lives are lost. Nevertheless, a group of high school kids decide to go skinny dipping downstream when I set off the explosives at 4 am. How many Americans would approve of my actions? At the same time the mayor of Denver decides to implement a Light Rail transportation system (also good for the environment, right?), but the first week of its inception nine people are killed due to traffic mishaps involving the newly-placed light rail stops. Is anyone calling for the mayor’s head?
I’m not trying to make an argument for non-violence here. Life’s choices are far too complex to be governed by a particular ideology, no matter how well-intentioned the motives that inspired it. But I do hope to show how lenient we are in applying our own standard of ethics to government actions. That’s because ethics are pure hyperbole. They have little to do with right or wrong and everything to do with protecting what is ours or perceived to be ours (i.e. the precise opposite of altruism). Though our own ethical standards condemn our government’s behavior, we continue to honor our political leaders, pledge allegiance to the flag, and celebrate the Fourth of July. We do so, if we do so, because we’re cowards—because dissent and resistance require risk, and risk means potentially losing our status and our egoistic identities, which means potentially becoming something other than, and less than, American.
Civilian deaths during WWII (the good war): 25,000,000.
Think about it. If a person acted in the same way as even the most responsible government, not one in a thousand Americans would approve. If someone blew up an elementary school, for example, in order to eliminate a serial killer who had taken refuge inside, then not even the most callous pragmatist would condone the behavior—even if the serial killer were the most prolific in history (someone worse than Columbus, maybe). And yet that’s exactly what we do every time we declare war. We condone the killing of innocent men, women, and children. No war in history has spared the innocent. We know that. And we also know that every time we declare or support a war we are knowingly making a decision to kill non-combatants. So why do we do it?
Let’s take another scenario. Say I decide to blow up a dam in order to restore an eco-system. I have a noble objective, right? And I take every precaution imaginable to ensure that no human lives are lost. Nevertheless, a group of high school kids decide to go skinny dipping downstream when I set off the explosives at 4 am. How many Americans would approve of my actions? At the same time the mayor of Denver decides to implement a Light Rail transportation system (also good for the environment, right?), but the first week of its inception nine people are killed due to traffic mishaps involving the newly-placed light rail stops. Is anyone calling for the mayor’s head?
I’m not trying to make an argument for non-violence here. Life’s choices are far too complex to be governed by a particular ideology, no matter how well-intentioned the motives that inspired it. But I do hope to show how lenient we are in applying our own standard of ethics to government actions. That’s because ethics are pure hyperbole. They have little to do with right or wrong and everything to do with protecting what is ours or perceived to be ours (i.e. the precise opposite of altruism). Though our own ethical standards condemn our government’s behavior, we continue to honor our political leaders, pledge allegiance to the flag, and celebrate the Fourth of July. We do so, if we do so, because we’re cowards—because dissent and resistance require risk, and risk means potentially losing our status and our egoistic identities, which means potentially becoming something other than, and less than, American.
Civilian deaths during WWII (the good war): 25,000,000.
poem
On Reading Paul Eluard and Thinking of Gale
She gives me flowers every Winter
Her dry breath in the Spring
Her voice when I hear not a whisper
Her silence when she sings
Alone, her eyes are upon me
Beside her, I disappear
Each thought I have defies me
Is voiced, and dies in my ears
She brings me shade in beams of sunlight
Dreams in the brightest day
Night that prevents me from sleeping
Words when I’ve nothing to say
*****
quote: (unrelated to poem)
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid.
Franz Kafka
She gives me flowers every Winter
Her dry breath in the Spring
Her voice when I hear not a whisper
Her silence when she sings
Alone, her eyes are upon me
Beside her, I disappear
Each thought I have defies me
Is voiced, and dies in my ears
She brings me shade in beams of sunlight
Dreams in the brightest day
Night that prevents me from sleeping
Words when I’ve nothing to say
*****
quote: (unrelated to poem)
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid.
Franz Kafka
solitary confinement
In 1829 Eastern State prison in Pennsylvania conducted an experiment. They built an underground correctional facility that denied inmates any knowledge of the outside world. Inmates were deprived of sunlight; they couldn’t write or receive letters from loved ones; they couldn’t have visitors, or receive news of worldly events (and when taken out of their cells, they had to be hooded so as to prevent them from even seeing a natural living object). The idea was a puritanical one. You could reform the corrupted by denying them contact with the corrupting forces of society. Everyone, according to Quaker theology, has the “inner light of God” within them, so by replacing social interaction with solitary reflection, an individual might become reacquainted with ‘natural’ concepts of right and wrong and thereby rehabilitate himself.
Needless to say, the experiment failed. When Charles Dickens visited the prison in 1842, he declared the psychological effects on the inmates to be “cruel and wrong”. He described the inmate in solitary confinement as “a man buried alive—dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair”. Moreover, studies showed the inmates to be less able to reintegrate themselves into society upon their releases, and, as expected, recidivism increased. Finally, in 1913, the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement was abandoned as a failure.
Since then, numerous studies have shown a direct link between solitary confinement and mental illness—not to mention physical disease and death. As put by psychologist Angie Hougas: The complied research from … models and other studies revealed there are symptoms that can be attributed to conditions of confinement. Some of these symptoms are: perceptual distortions, illusions, vivid fantasies (sometimes along with vivid hallucinations) and hyperresponsivity to external stimuli. Along with these, some people developed observable syndromes which include cognitive impairment, massive free-floating anxiety, extreme motor restlessness, emergence of primitive aggressive fantasies (sometimes along with fearful hallucinations) and in some cases, delirium like conditions. EEG's confirmed the same abnormalities typical of stupor and delirium. It was also seen that there were organic changes in the brain similar to stupor and delirium.
Yet, despite the problems and despite any evidence of ameliorating effects, the current American penal system not only refuses to abandon solitary confinement as a tool for modifying inmate behavior, the practice is now increasing. Currently, more than 20,000 prisoners are kept in SuperMax and SHU prisons, where the use of solitary confinement is widespread. The idea for these prisons began in 1983 when a federal prison in Marion, Illinois ordered a permanent ‘lockdown’ after inmates killed two guards. The concept caught on, and the first SuperMax prison was opened two years later in Florence, Colorado. Today, more than 38 states have similar institutions.
The trend is disturbing, but not in the least surprising. Solitary confinement is, after all, an American idea. It originated here and continues to flourish here in spite of almost unanimous disapproval by the rest of the world. Not even the rationale for it has changed much since the 1800s. While no longer appealing to puritanical doctrine directly, its advocates continue to defend its use as a means of modifying degenerate behavior. Correction officials say they need it as an incentive for good conduct and to maintain order within the system, even while studies point to an increased propensity for violence in prisons where the procedure is commonplace.
One might be tempted to see in such an obdurate refusal to give up a failed practice a uniquely American pathology. The Quakers, though, like the Calvinists and other puritan religious groups that were prominent in early America, were influenced in large part by European Catholic tradition, and the solitary reflection advocated by puritanical thought isn’t at all unsimilar to that practiced in Catholic monasteries. Still, Europeans didn’t come up with the idea of solitary confinement, nor have they continued its practice the way we have in America. So maybe there is something about the American psyche that makes our prison system so hopelessly irrational.
We continue to build new SuperMax and SHU prisons even though most of the inmates in those prisons have release dates, and they’re going to come out a lot worse than when they came in, thanks to our blind respect for failed policy. Do we really want to propagate the number of insane felons let out in the streets or is there some method to our madness?
America is a country of loners (it isn’t just me). We prize individualism above all other virtues. Self reliance, individual liberty, personal achievement. These are the values we live by. Our heroes are rugged frontiersman and solitary, misunderstood supermen. We prefer playing computer games to talking with friends, driving our private automobiles to using public transportation, and watching television to getting to know our neighbors. We’re not a social country. And in some respects, that’s alright. The individualism championed by Thoreau and those like him is admirable. It leads to a distrust of authority, a support of the underdog, self-sufficiency, and enhanced creativity, to name but a few of its attributes. But it also has a dark side, and it’s the dark side of individualism that is frequently encountered in American society and embodied by our prison system.
In many ways, the American prison system is a microcosm for American society in general. In spite of whatever rationalizations are put forward by the higher-ups, the real motivation behind any governmental action is always power and control. This is true in prisons, and it’s true whenever our leaders wage war or raise taxes or hand out parking citations. Our government doesn’t make decisions to protect the social welfare but to preserve the interests of the men and women who own the country—namely, the people who run the corporations.
It’s interesting to note that only five years after opening, Easter State Penitentiary was investigated by the state on charges of prisoner abuse and embezzlement. Testimony indicated that inmates were often let out of their cells to do administrative duties for the staff and to do work that made money for the guards, and money laundering was widespread. The hypocrisy was revealed: the prison wasn’t being run as a sincere effort to reform criminals; it was being run to benefit the people who owned and made money from the prison.
In this light, solitary confinement makes a lot of sense. If you’re making money exploiting people it pays to not only keep those people from communicating to each other and with the outside world but to silence them altogether. In Turkey several years back, the government implemented a policy of modeling its own prison system on America’s SuperMax example. In defending the policy, officials (off the record, at least) didn’t make any duplicitous claims about reforming the inmates or cleaning up the community; they justified the new f-type prisons, as they were called, as providing a necessary secrecy to the officers. No doubt, this is why the practice of solitary confinement persists in America, too.
And if officials could get away with it, I’ve little doubt that they’d implement the practice on the country at large. In a way, our leaders have been promoting solitary confinement as the ideal lifestyle since the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. This is what American individualism really amounts to, not a confirmation of the self as the subject and creator of one’s relationship to the world, but a veneration of private fantasy and separatism—the triumph of ego and desire over responsibility and awareness. In America, our heroes don’t represent the creative individuality of the artist or the lover, but the perverse individuality of the sociopath—a private omnipotence in which the self is held aloft and separated from the outside world. Americans don’t prize individualism, we prize secrecy. The reason our secrecy is so important is because hierarchy and consumer capitalism can’t exist without it. Secrecy is promoted as a catalyst for insanity, because only the insane can take seriously an economic and political system that pretends resources are infinite and some living things are more entitled than others. We exchange the complicated truth for simple insanity. And the truth is that the pie can’t continue to increase forever (the primary excuse for consumer capitalism) and the pie isn’t getting bigger for everybody, only for the rich (the very rich, I might add. According to the Federal Reserve Bulletin, since 1973 the net value of income has increased for the top 9% of Americans and decreased for the other 91%, in spite of a decline in worker benefits and an increase in the number of hours worked. And the gap has widened even more in the rest of the world). The truth is that consumer capitalism is built on exploitation, and we can’t let ourselves admit that our privileges are paid for at the expense of the Third World and other minorities. Exploitation is a double edged sword, too—it leads to lies and denials by the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The oppressors have to lie about their motives—claim that they’re helping the less fortunate, and the oppressed have to lie about being oppressed—deny the fact that they’ve come out as the losers in the game. So both sides collude in maintaining the delusion. They do so because neither side wants to give up the dream of private egoistic fulfillment. We want to believe we really can have it all.
What’s interesting about the effects of social isolation is the way they’re covered up. When inmates are subjected to solitary confinement, they don’t exaggerate their symptoms in an effort to get attention, they turn surprisingly evasive. They attempt to rationalize the effects away, or deny they’ve been adversely affected at all. This is in sharp contrast to the behavior inmates exhibit when suffering from so-called physical diseases. In those cases, the symptoms tend to be highly exaggerated or even made up, and great care is taken to secure drugs and other remedies to reduce the sufferer’s discomfort. Not so when it comes to the damaging effects inflicted on the mind.
For whatever reason, no one, not the victim or the perpetrator, wants to acknowledge insanity. We don’t want to challenge the apparitions in our own heads, and we don’t want to face up to the fact that our system of government is fundamentally irrational and psychotic, probably because facing up to that would mean admitting that possession doesn’t lead to fulfillment--that the self has limitations and that we can’t have everything we want, which means the system isn’t in service of the ever-consuming and insatiable individual but the other way around. Only if we buy into a false concept of individuality based on private accumulation and refuge is it possible to believe otherwise. On the other hand, if we can satisfy ourselves that egoism is essential to human nature (the true private self), then irrationality becomes the norm. That’s the big secret right there. It’s a secret we keep from each other, but especially from ourselves. If you believe the lie, it’s easier to perpetuate it. And once you begin lying, the lies have to pile up in defense. Before you know it, you can sell yourself on the idea that Native Americans are less entitled to live on the land than Europeans (who make better use of it), that Blacks are happier on slave plantations than on their own, that women are dumber than men because their brains are smaller, that Iraq is being invaded to promote democracy, that globalization is good for the Third World, that a corporation deserves all the rights of an individual but none of the restraints, that solitary confinement is necessary for the public good, or that consumer capitalism is sustainable. And to believe all that you have to believe that whatever happens to individuals in the public arena is somehow in their private best interests and that American individuality isn’t simply a myth designed to ensure control—a false concept that pushes people into private fantasy worlds to prevent them from knowing or admitting to knowing that their life is a lie. Put simply, you have to believe and live in an intensely solipsistic world that’s been detached from reality; you have to be insane.
And it’s the insanity that makes the practice of solitary confinement so horrific and damaging. As one inmate put it, “it’d be a lot more caring to be taken out to the desert and locked into a 5’ by 7’ tin cage and left to rot. At least then you’d know that you’re there to be punished.” Hate is something we understand; it’s human. Mechanical torture is something else entirely.
Mechanical torture is the unique specialty of modern government. In our modern prisons, computers have become the primary tools of operation: the cell doors open and close automatically, the food is delivered automatically, and human beings are needed only for the occasional emergency and to monitor and trouble-shoot the computers. It’s very efficient—efficient like a machine. And efficiency in America is another way of saying increased profit and consumption, and when profit rules, you need to preserve secrecy before anything else; you need the other to be just like you—automated and objectified, and thereby as much in service of your private desires as you are of his--like a fellow machine--a machine with no scruples and no natural connections or vulnerabilities--a completely private entity whose appetites can't possibly be in conflict with anyone else's because it isn't connected to anyone else--it's alone. In a private universe, you can’t be held accountable for your actions. You have license. And that’s what we mean by democratic freedom in America; we mean that you have license to act without consideration of the other, that you can have whatever you want and do whatever you want—in isolation and in secrecy.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9801/09/solitary.confinement/
http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/98-09%20FALL/solitary.html
http://northstargallery.com/ESP/easternstatehistory01.htm
Needless to say, the experiment failed. When Charles Dickens visited the prison in 1842, he declared the psychological effects on the inmates to be “cruel and wrong”. He described the inmate in solitary confinement as “a man buried alive—dead to everything but torturing anxieties and horrible despair”. Moreover, studies showed the inmates to be less able to reintegrate themselves into society upon their releases, and, as expected, recidivism increased. Finally, in 1913, the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement was abandoned as a failure.
Since then, numerous studies have shown a direct link between solitary confinement and mental illness—not to mention physical disease and death. As put by psychologist Angie Hougas: The complied research from … models and other studies revealed there are symptoms that can be attributed to conditions of confinement. Some of these symptoms are: perceptual distortions, illusions, vivid fantasies (sometimes along with vivid hallucinations) and hyperresponsivity to external stimuli. Along with these, some people developed observable syndromes which include cognitive impairment, massive free-floating anxiety, extreme motor restlessness, emergence of primitive aggressive fantasies (sometimes along with fearful hallucinations) and in some cases, delirium like conditions. EEG's confirmed the same abnormalities typical of stupor and delirium. It was also seen that there were organic changes in the brain similar to stupor and delirium.
Yet, despite the problems and despite any evidence of ameliorating effects, the current American penal system not only refuses to abandon solitary confinement as a tool for modifying inmate behavior, the practice is now increasing. Currently, more than 20,000 prisoners are kept in SuperMax and SHU prisons, where the use of solitary confinement is widespread. The idea for these prisons began in 1983 when a federal prison in Marion, Illinois ordered a permanent ‘lockdown’ after inmates killed two guards. The concept caught on, and the first SuperMax prison was opened two years later in Florence, Colorado. Today, more than 38 states have similar institutions.
The trend is disturbing, but not in the least surprising. Solitary confinement is, after all, an American idea. It originated here and continues to flourish here in spite of almost unanimous disapproval by the rest of the world. Not even the rationale for it has changed much since the 1800s. While no longer appealing to puritanical doctrine directly, its advocates continue to defend its use as a means of modifying degenerate behavior. Correction officials say they need it as an incentive for good conduct and to maintain order within the system, even while studies point to an increased propensity for violence in prisons where the procedure is commonplace.
One might be tempted to see in such an obdurate refusal to give up a failed practice a uniquely American pathology. The Quakers, though, like the Calvinists and other puritan religious groups that were prominent in early America, were influenced in large part by European Catholic tradition, and the solitary reflection advocated by puritanical thought isn’t at all unsimilar to that practiced in Catholic monasteries. Still, Europeans didn’t come up with the idea of solitary confinement, nor have they continued its practice the way we have in America. So maybe there is something about the American psyche that makes our prison system so hopelessly irrational.
We continue to build new SuperMax and SHU prisons even though most of the inmates in those prisons have release dates, and they’re going to come out a lot worse than when they came in, thanks to our blind respect for failed policy. Do we really want to propagate the number of insane felons let out in the streets or is there some method to our madness?
America is a country of loners (it isn’t just me). We prize individualism above all other virtues. Self reliance, individual liberty, personal achievement. These are the values we live by. Our heroes are rugged frontiersman and solitary, misunderstood supermen. We prefer playing computer games to talking with friends, driving our private automobiles to using public transportation, and watching television to getting to know our neighbors. We’re not a social country. And in some respects, that’s alright. The individualism championed by Thoreau and those like him is admirable. It leads to a distrust of authority, a support of the underdog, self-sufficiency, and enhanced creativity, to name but a few of its attributes. But it also has a dark side, and it’s the dark side of individualism that is frequently encountered in American society and embodied by our prison system.
In many ways, the American prison system is a microcosm for American society in general. In spite of whatever rationalizations are put forward by the higher-ups, the real motivation behind any governmental action is always power and control. This is true in prisons, and it’s true whenever our leaders wage war or raise taxes or hand out parking citations. Our government doesn’t make decisions to protect the social welfare but to preserve the interests of the men and women who own the country—namely, the people who run the corporations.
It’s interesting to note that only five years after opening, Easter State Penitentiary was investigated by the state on charges of prisoner abuse and embezzlement. Testimony indicated that inmates were often let out of their cells to do administrative duties for the staff and to do work that made money for the guards, and money laundering was widespread. The hypocrisy was revealed: the prison wasn’t being run as a sincere effort to reform criminals; it was being run to benefit the people who owned and made money from the prison.
In this light, solitary confinement makes a lot of sense. If you’re making money exploiting people it pays to not only keep those people from communicating to each other and with the outside world but to silence them altogether. In Turkey several years back, the government implemented a policy of modeling its own prison system on America’s SuperMax example. In defending the policy, officials (off the record, at least) didn’t make any duplicitous claims about reforming the inmates or cleaning up the community; they justified the new f-type prisons, as they were called, as providing a necessary secrecy to the officers. No doubt, this is why the practice of solitary confinement persists in America, too.
And if officials could get away with it, I’ve little doubt that they’d implement the practice on the country at large. In a way, our leaders have been promoting solitary confinement as the ideal lifestyle since the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. This is what American individualism really amounts to, not a confirmation of the self as the subject and creator of one’s relationship to the world, but a veneration of private fantasy and separatism—the triumph of ego and desire over responsibility and awareness. In America, our heroes don’t represent the creative individuality of the artist or the lover, but the perverse individuality of the sociopath—a private omnipotence in which the self is held aloft and separated from the outside world. Americans don’t prize individualism, we prize secrecy. The reason our secrecy is so important is because hierarchy and consumer capitalism can’t exist without it. Secrecy is promoted as a catalyst for insanity, because only the insane can take seriously an economic and political system that pretends resources are infinite and some living things are more entitled than others. We exchange the complicated truth for simple insanity. And the truth is that the pie can’t continue to increase forever (the primary excuse for consumer capitalism) and the pie isn’t getting bigger for everybody, only for the rich (the very rich, I might add. According to the Federal Reserve Bulletin, since 1973 the net value of income has increased for the top 9% of Americans and decreased for the other 91%, in spite of a decline in worker benefits and an increase in the number of hours worked. And the gap has widened even more in the rest of the world). The truth is that consumer capitalism is built on exploitation, and we can’t let ourselves admit that our privileges are paid for at the expense of the Third World and other minorities. Exploitation is a double edged sword, too—it leads to lies and denials by the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The oppressors have to lie about their motives—claim that they’re helping the less fortunate, and the oppressed have to lie about being oppressed—deny the fact that they’ve come out as the losers in the game. So both sides collude in maintaining the delusion. They do so because neither side wants to give up the dream of private egoistic fulfillment. We want to believe we really can have it all.
What’s interesting about the effects of social isolation is the way they’re covered up. When inmates are subjected to solitary confinement, they don’t exaggerate their symptoms in an effort to get attention, they turn surprisingly evasive. They attempt to rationalize the effects away, or deny they’ve been adversely affected at all. This is in sharp contrast to the behavior inmates exhibit when suffering from so-called physical diseases. In those cases, the symptoms tend to be highly exaggerated or even made up, and great care is taken to secure drugs and other remedies to reduce the sufferer’s discomfort. Not so when it comes to the damaging effects inflicted on the mind.
For whatever reason, no one, not the victim or the perpetrator, wants to acknowledge insanity. We don’t want to challenge the apparitions in our own heads, and we don’t want to face up to the fact that our system of government is fundamentally irrational and psychotic, probably because facing up to that would mean admitting that possession doesn’t lead to fulfillment--that the self has limitations and that we can’t have everything we want, which means the system isn’t in service of the ever-consuming and insatiable individual but the other way around. Only if we buy into a false concept of individuality based on private accumulation and refuge is it possible to believe otherwise. On the other hand, if we can satisfy ourselves that egoism is essential to human nature (the true private self), then irrationality becomes the norm. That’s the big secret right there. It’s a secret we keep from each other, but especially from ourselves. If you believe the lie, it’s easier to perpetuate it. And once you begin lying, the lies have to pile up in defense. Before you know it, you can sell yourself on the idea that Native Americans are less entitled to live on the land than Europeans (who make better use of it), that Blacks are happier on slave plantations than on their own, that women are dumber than men because their brains are smaller, that Iraq is being invaded to promote democracy, that globalization is good for the Third World, that a corporation deserves all the rights of an individual but none of the restraints, that solitary confinement is necessary for the public good, or that consumer capitalism is sustainable. And to believe all that you have to believe that whatever happens to individuals in the public arena is somehow in their private best interests and that American individuality isn’t simply a myth designed to ensure control—a false concept that pushes people into private fantasy worlds to prevent them from knowing or admitting to knowing that their life is a lie. Put simply, you have to believe and live in an intensely solipsistic world that’s been detached from reality; you have to be insane.
And it’s the insanity that makes the practice of solitary confinement so horrific and damaging. As one inmate put it, “it’d be a lot more caring to be taken out to the desert and locked into a 5’ by 7’ tin cage and left to rot. At least then you’d know that you’re there to be punished.” Hate is something we understand; it’s human. Mechanical torture is something else entirely.
Mechanical torture is the unique specialty of modern government. In our modern prisons, computers have become the primary tools of operation: the cell doors open and close automatically, the food is delivered automatically, and human beings are needed only for the occasional emergency and to monitor and trouble-shoot the computers. It’s very efficient—efficient like a machine. And efficiency in America is another way of saying increased profit and consumption, and when profit rules, you need to preserve secrecy before anything else; you need the other to be just like you—automated and objectified, and thereby as much in service of your private desires as you are of his--like a fellow machine--a machine with no scruples and no natural connections or vulnerabilities--a completely private entity whose appetites can't possibly be in conflict with anyone else's because it isn't connected to anyone else--it's alone. In a private universe, you can’t be held accountable for your actions. You have license. And that’s what we mean by democratic freedom in America; we mean that you have license to act without consideration of the other, that you can have whatever you want and do whatever you want—in isolation and in secrecy.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9801/09/solitary.confinement/
http://www.sonic.net/~doretk/Issues/98-09%20FALL/solitary.html
http://northstargallery.com/ESP/easternstatehistory01.htm
casual sex and consumerism
I met someone last weekend—someone who is smart (or well educated, at least), sexy, and … well, that’s all I know for now. She definitely perked my interests, but if she were to call me up right now and ask me to go to bed with her, I’d say no in a heartbeat. I might change my mind in the next few weeks or so, but for the time being I seem to have lost my interest in casual sex. In fact, I haven’t been interested in casual sex for about four years. For that matter, I’ve been less interested in sex overall. I’m sure that has something to do with the aging process (on the back side of thirty now) but I also think it involves my self-imposed exile from society—my deliberate withdrawal from the workforce and from popular culture and popular uses of power and appearances (to the degree that I’m able).
For one thing, my diet has changed. I’m no longer eating as much meat and I’m eating almost exclusively organic foods (but still tons of refined sugar). I’ve also decreased my work hours, my TV consumption, and sworn off pornography. In addition, I’ve made efforts to be more emotionally accessible, both to myself and to the people I care about, and to keep fewer secrets. I go hiking more often, I exercise, I meditate, I’m more politically active, and, in general, I take more risks. By that, I mean I try to act more on the things I believe in (or think I believe in), even when doing so might result in public shame or ridicule. All in all, these changes have made my life more fulfilling. Where my life hasn’t been enriched, though, is in the area of romance. Where that’s concerned, the last two years have probably been the worst of my life. I’ve dated maybe three women and I’ve only had one brief—and long distance—relationship.
Every one tells me that I’ll meet someone when I no longer care about meeting someone. But if that were true, I would never have been in a romantic relationship in my life. In fact, the ONLY times I get romantically involved are when I’m actively seeking a romantic relationship—when I go looking. Lately, though, I haven’t been looking at all. I’m “on the look”, you might say, but certainly not actively looking. The reason, I think, is that I’m happier—I’m less needy. And that might also explain why I haven’t been as interested in sex of late.
I’m also less interested in certain types of food since changing my diet, less interested in sports since I stopped watching ESPN, less concerned with making money since I decreased my work hours. The point I’m trying to make is that my decreased interest in casual sex isn’t a weakness; it isn’t a choice made for me and it isn’t a sign of my lack of manly virility or my fear of the opposite sex. It’s a healthy adaptation to circumstances. It may not be ‘normal’, but it isn’t unnatural, either. It’s a rational, positive, and willed response to consumer culture. Indeed, the only feasible way to affectively resist consumerism—to avoid being smothered by its dull perfunctory embrace—is to learn to do without—to do without excess food, excess energy, excess work, excess money, excess drugs, and excess sex. That’s what dropping out of our culture means—not participating in its consumption. And make no mistake about it, casual sex is an element of our culture, not a threat. Promiscuity may exist as an ideological prohibition, but as a practice it has never been scorned or seriously devalued, leastwise not for men, and especially not for men in positions of power. To characterize promiscuity as an act of liberation or revolt is no more than a bourgeoisie appeasement—a means of turning revolution into style.
Recently I read about a case of schizophrenia involving a Vietnamese man who had immigrated to the U.S. in the late sixties. The diagnosis was attributed to severe culture shock. Being ill at ease with American language and custom, the patient found himself reduced to a utility—“a mere category in another person’s system”. His relations with the opposite sex were particularly bewildering, because women, if accessible at all, didn’t treat him with the respect of a real man but as an exotic diversion. They didn’t take him seriously because he hadn’t been able to adapt to the environment he and they coexisted in—and he wasn’t thereby integrated into the same social reality. As a result, sex for the patient became a “segregated, obsessive, detached and, in both reality and fantasy, autistic activity”.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the precise definition of casual sex? Detached? Obsessive? Segregated? Autistic? Isn’t the unfamiliarity and anonymity of the casual sex act what distinguishes it from sex within a loving relationship? And if so, isn’t our whole society schizophrenic when it comes to sexual relations (even within most marriages)? I don’t know. I suppose you could argue that both forms of sexuality can co-exist, but to say that desire for more than intimate sex is unhealthy or abnormal seems a little like arguing that some measure of schizophrenia is a requirement for normalcy. And, in a certain very real and frightening sense, I suppose it is—in the same sense that consuming more McDonald’s cheeseburgers—or any food beyond what’s needed for survival or that’s detrimental to health—is a normal response to increased advertising. But it isn’t a requirement for happiness or masculinity. Being apart from society might make you lonely from time to time, but it doesn’t have to make you feel unhappy or inadequate.
Being unwilling, or maybe even unable, to indulge in casual sex doesn’t make me less satisfied with life. Nor do I think my declining interest in sex is related solely to the aging process. If I were in a loving relationship (which is not to be confused with a monogamous relationship), I’m sure the ‘quality’ of my sex life would rival any twenty year olds. For now, though, it’s possible that being a eunuch is the only way to preserve my sexual health and sanity within an insane world. One thing I’m certain of is that artificially altering my libido to conform to social expectations, while it might make me more popular and more desirable and more sexual, won’t make me any happier—too preoccupied and obsessed to realize my misery, maybe—but not any happier—nor any manlier, either.
*****
**Incidentally, I’m not condemning casual sex (I said I’m less interested not uninterested)—in the same sense that I wouldn’t condemn myself for eating a cookie made entirely of refined sugar and preservatives—like I just did. I’m merely challenging the societal attitude that equates casual sex and conquest—and which implies that quantity of sexual experience, irrespective of meaning and intimacy, determines your sexual value and degree of manliness. I’m not being a prude.
***
There is a crisis facing sexuality. The signs are everywhere, from the saturation of public space by sexual imagery to the proliferation of Viagra. Quantity has replaced quality. The number of sexual experiences is now the criteria by which sexual fulfillment is judged, and casual sex invitations are everywhere. You can’t shop, eat, ride a bus, or see a movie without being exposed to it; as each day you are inundated with it to encourage your consumption of other products and services. Like the replacement of essential nutriment by junk food, casual sex lovers are expected to surrender real feeling and consume the phony McSex that can be more effectively controlled and used for profit than the genuine article.
A paraphrase of an article by Pete Seeger on music. (I replaced the allusions to music with sex to get this.)
***
The competition for economized love changes us. We lose our spontaneity, our free and playful self-expression. It doesn't do to act as we truly feel. We must make ourselves desirable. If we are good-looking by cultural standards, we have a big advantage, for appearance is a major part of what makes a desirable sexual commodity. But there are other useful traits--strength, sexual prowess, "good taste," intelligence, sparkling wit. And, of course, knowledge of how to play the social-sexual games. The better actor wins at these games. Knowing how to put across the right image, knowing just what role to play in what situation--this will buy you economized love. But at the expense of losing yourself.
--Feral Faun
For one thing, my diet has changed. I’m no longer eating as much meat and I’m eating almost exclusively organic foods (but still tons of refined sugar). I’ve also decreased my work hours, my TV consumption, and sworn off pornography. In addition, I’ve made efforts to be more emotionally accessible, both to myself and to the people I care about, and to keep fewer secrets. I go hiking more often, I exercise, I meditate, I’m more politically active, and, in general, I take more risks. By that, I mean I try to act more on the things I believe in (or think I believe in), even when doing so might result in public shame or ridicule. All in all, these changes have made my life more fulfilling. Where my life hasn’t been enriched, though, is in the area of romance. Where that’s concerned, the last two years have probably been the worst of my life. I’ve dated maybe three women and I’ve only had one brief—and long distance—relationship.
Every one tells me that I’ll meet someone when I no longer care about meeting someone. But if that were true, I would never have been in a romantic relationship in my life. In fact, the ONLY times I get romantically involved are when I’m actively seeking a romantic relationship—when I go looking. Lately, though, I haven’t been looking at all. I’m “on the look”, you might say, but certainly not actively looking. The reason, I think, is that I’m happier—I’m less needy. And that might also explain why I haven’t been as interested in sex of late.
I’m also less interested in certain types of food since changing my diet, less interested in sports since I stopped watching ESPN, less concerned with making money since I decreased my work hours. The point I’m trying to make is that my decreased interest in casual sex isn’t a weakness; it isn’t a choice made for me and it isn’t a sign of my lack of manly virility or my fear of the opposite sex. It’s a healthy adaptation to circumstances. It may not be ‘normal’, but it isn’t unnatural, either. It’s a rational, positive, and willed response to consumer culture. Indeed, the only feasible way to affectively resist consumerism—to avoid being smothered by its dull perfunctory embrace—is to learn to do without—to do without excess food, excess energy, excess work, excess money, excess drugs, and excess sex. That’s what dropping out of our culture means—not participating in its consumption. And make no mistake about it, casual sex is an element of our culture, not a threat. Promiscuity may exist as an ideological prohibition, but as a practice it has never been scorned or seriously devalued, leastwise not for men, and especially not for men in positions of power. To characterize promiscuity as an act of liberation or revolt is no more than a bourgeoisie appeasement—a means of turning revolution into style.
Recently I read about a case of schizophrenia involving a Vietnamese man who had immigrated to the U.S. in the late sixties. The diagnosis was attributed to severe culture shock. Being ill at ease with American language and custom, the patient found himself reduced to a utility—“a mere category in another person’s system”. His relations with the opposite sex were particularly bewildering, because women, if accessible at all, didn’t treat him with the respect of a real man but as an exotic diversion. They didn’t take him seriously because he hadn’t been able to adapt to the environment he and they coexisted in—and he wasn’t thereby integrated into the same social reality. As a result, sex for the patient became a “segregated, obsessive, detached and, in both reality and fantasy, autistic activity”.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the precise definition of casual sex? Detached? Obsessive? Segregated? Autistic? Isn’t the unfamiliarity and anonymity of the casual sex act what distinguishes it from sex within a loving relationship? And if so, isn’t our whole society schizophrenic when it comes to sexual relations (even within most marriages)? I don’t know. I suppose you could argue that both forms of sexuality can co-exist, but to say that desire for more than intimate sex is unhealthy or abnormal seems a little like arguing that some measure of schizophrenia is a requirement for normalcy. And, in a certain very real and frightening sense, I suppose it is—in the same sense that consuming more McDonald’s cheeseburgers—or any food beyond what’s needed for survival or that’s detrimental to health—is a normal response to increased advertising. But it isn’t a requirement for happiness or masculinity. Being apart from society might make you lonely from time to time, but it doesn’t have to make you feel unhappy or inadequate.
Being unwilling, or maybe even unable, to indulge in casual sex doesn’t make me less satisfied with life. Nor do I think my declining interest in sex is related solely to the aging process. If I were in a loving relationship (which is not to be confused with a monogamous relationship), I’m sure the ‘quality’ of my sex life would rival any twenty year olds. For now, though, it’s possible that being a eunuch is the only way to preserve my sexual health and sanity within an insane world. One thing I’m certain of is that artificially altering my libido to conform to social expectations, while it might make me more popular and more desirable and more sexual, won’t make me any happier—too preoccupied and obsessed to realize my misery, maybe—but not any happier—nor any manlier, either.
*****
**Incidentally, I’m not condemning casual sex (I said I’m less interested not uninterested)—in the same sense that I wouldn’t condemn myself for eating a cookie made entirely of refined sugar and preservatives—like I just did. I’m merely challenging the societal attitude that equates casual sex and conquest—and which implies that quantity of sexual experience, irrespective of meaning and intimacy, determines your sexual value and degree of manliness. I’m not being a prude.
***
There is a crisis facing sexuality. The signs are everywhere, from the saturation of public space by sexual imagery to the proliferation of Viagra. Quantity has replaced quality. The number of sexual experiences is now the criteria by which sexual fulfillment is judged, and casual sex invitations are everywhere. You can’t shop, eat, ride a bus, or see a movie without being exposed to it; as each day you are inundated with it to encourage your consumption of other products and services. Like the replacement of essential nutriment by junk food, casual sex lovers are expected to surrender real feeling and consume the phony McSex that can be more effectively controlled and used for profit than the genuine article.
A paraphrase of an article by Pete Seeger on music. (I replaced the allusions to music with sex to get this.)
***
The competition for economized love changes us. We lose our spontaneity, our free and playful self-expression. It doesn't do to act as we truly feel. We must make ourselves desirable. If we are good-looking by cultural standards, we have a big advantage, for appearance is a major part of what makes a desirable sexual commodity. But there are other useful traits--strength, sexual prowess, "good taste," intelligence, sparkling wit. And, of course, knowledge of how to play the social-sexual games. The better actor wins at these games. Knowing how to put across the right image, knowing just what role to play in what situation--this will buy you economized love. But at the expense of losing yourself.
--Feral Faun
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
On Instinct and Intelligence
Today I went hiking. About halfway up the trail I had a moment. It happens a lot when I hike. I turn my head and see something out of the corner of my eye—a swathe of snow dotted by small yellow leaves, for example. And when I stop for a closer look, it hits me. I wouldn’t describe these moments as happy, though I certainly feel a sense of elation when they happen, and I wouldn’t describe them as sad, either, though “lacking sadness” is just as inaccurate. Neither do I feel any fear at these moments, yet my mortality is in the fullest sense palpable. No doubt I’m talking about experiences of a spiritual nature, but I’m not going to assign that label without first divesting the word spiritual of all its New Age and religious connotations.
In the Western World when we say something is spiritual we mean that it’s transcendent—in other words, that it’s divorced from nature and from the body. This isn’t what I’m talking about. And I’m not talking about the New Age sense of being at one with the universe, either. When, and if, I use the word spiritual, I mean that I feel the full weight of existence. I feel empty yet full of longing, alone yet surrounded by company, sensual yet free of desire. There isn’t any transcendence and there isn’t any joining—just the intensity and grace of being alive at that moment. What’s more, these moments are accessible at any time. That’s something I’ve come to realize. The reason they’re accessible is that there’s nothing transcendent about them at all. They’re natural. They only seem resplendent and unfamiliar because our current way of life forbids us from indulging in them.
In fact, I’m sure this is why the word spiritual has the connotations that it does. By calling something spiritual we essentially define it as an abstraction. In retrospect the experience is co-opted as a gift from God or from his angels and made to seem supernatural. Spirituality then becomes a euphemism to cover up a basic truth about ourselves—that we’re animals. We haven’t been trained in this culture to deal with the natural world and so we’re afraid of it. Consequently, the epiphanies we might have while hiking are either labeled and explained away as transcendent religious phenomena or avoided altogether. I think Freud was onto something when he talked about artistic sublimation, only I don’t think it explains artistic fecundity, I think it explains religious ecstasy. Because natural feeling has been made practically taboo in today’s world, we project it onto the other. We make it socially acceptable, that is, by relating it to an accepted religious or new age concept. We turn nature into culture. In turn, the experience is murdered, thus the violence civilization does to the environment is also done to ourselves and our experiences.
Consider the smugness with which people proclaim our superiority over the animals. The assumption is that our superiority has already been proven, so it hardly needs stating (just as the supremacy of whites over blacks and men over women was once proven). Anyone who challenges that assumption must have a few screws loose and hasn’t yet learned the proper uses of rational thought. After all, we are the top predators—at the top of the food chain. What is there to argue? But in the animal kingdom hierarchies aren’t as clear cut as we’d like them to be. In a symbiotic world made of finite resources it doesn’t make sense to talk about who is and who isn’t the top dog. Competition doesn’t drive evolution, adaptation and cooperation does (I’ll leave it to John Livingston and K.C. Cole to make my point on that matter). Conquest might help you to survive, at least in the short term, but it won’t make you any happier. It’s like a marriage: if you deliberately deny your partner’s happiness then you’ll deny your own happiness as well, provided you stay together and can’t seek fulfillment elsewhere. No matter how dutifully your physical and material needs are tended to, if your partner is reduced to a slave, he/she won’t be able to give you what you really want—a creative and genuine and stimulating relationship. If our only concern is to subdue and control the outer world, then we won’t have genuinely ‘spiritual’ moments within that relationship. Life will be dull. And unfortunately (for the environment, that is), in our relationship with nature, divorce isn’t an option. And neither is murder, though that seems to be the course we’ve chosen.
But of course human beings are smarter than the rest of the animal kingdom, right? And again, this goes without saying. There isn’t any reason to question it. But what evidence is there that instinct is inferior to conscious thought? And that’s what we mean when we say that we’re smarter; we mean that we’re more conscious—that we consciously regulate more of our natural functions than the other animals do. Not only that, but we have more conscious control of the natural world in general. Consequently, we’re better problem solvers. And we have more power. The last point, I readily admit to. But to say that we’re smarter because we’re more conscious doesn’t make much sense to me. Our instincts perform almost flawlessly when not interfered with. In sports we train to let our instincts take over—to “let our bodies do what they know how to do”. And more than that, natural instincts don’t deter the functioning of the rest of the environment the way our conscious minds can. When the instincts of the Salmon compel it to swim upstream to spawn, it not only benefits the Salmon species, it benefits an entire ecosystem—from the predatory mammals and the aquatic invertebrates and fish who feed on the Salmon to the fauna that benefits from the marine nutrients pushed upstream by the Salmon migration. It would take an awfully clever person to figure out how to provide all that benefit through conscious processes. So why waste the effort? Isn’t the ‘smart’ choice to defer to our instincts? If power increased our chances at survival then it might make sense to take conscious control of our environment, but power doesn’t mean anything in a mutually beneficial relationship. If deer could learn to overcome their predators, it might make them more secure and more powerful, but it would also lead to their extinction. Predictably, the herd would outgrow its food source—get older, more disease-ridden, more feeble—and they, along with their predators, would eventually die off. Isn’t that the fate of our own species if we continue with our current consumption-based way of life?
***
Anyone who chooses to can learn how to regulate her heartbeat, and there are times when you might want to—if you’re in a pressurized athletic competition, for example (i.e. an artificial environment). But would you want to take full conscious control of your heartbeat twenty four/seven? Or how about your breathing? It seems to me that instinct does a pretty good job of handling those functions, and by allowing my instincts to do their jobs I become more liberated. If I had to focus on maintaining my breath and heartbeat, I wouldn’t have much time for anything else. Life wouldn’t be very interesting, either—maybe even less interesting than a life spent in pursuit of money and fame and conquest. And if you value freedom and diverse experience, why would you, if you’re so God damn smart, decide to give it up to become more ‘conscious’? Why would you give up a hunter/gatherer lifestyle in which you could meet all your basic needs with less than four hours of work per day for a lifestyle of forty plus hour work weeks and endless commutes and less healthy diets? Is it a sign of intelligence that we deliberately make our lives more dull and stressful?
Whenever I bring this up to a civilization apologist, I inevitably hear about the satisfactions of hard work (the Work Ethic) and how boring life would be if we just sat around wildling arrowheads all day. And they’re right. Domesticated people like us would get bored. But we’re bored because we’re not very good company. It’s like I tell my writing students when they complain that writing is a boring subject: Writing isn’t boring. YOU ARE! If writing is simply a recording of your own thoughts, then being bored by writing must mean you don’t have any interest in your mind’s own processes. You might have a boring teacher, a boring instruction book, or a boring topic, but writing isn’t boring—not unless the writer makes it so. In spite of our TVs and our sporting contests, our excessive work habits and constant barrage of stimuli, we can’t escape our boredom. That’s not because life is boring, it’s because we’re boring. We’re boring because we’re disconnected from real experience, real emotion, and real relationships. We’re bored because we can’t revert to our instincts, because in the artificial world we’ve created for ourselves our instincts won’t work. We’re bored because even when we have real experiences we have to domesticate them. We have to label them as abstractions and as otherworldly; that way, our true wild selves won’t run us over and exile us from society. To preserve our society we have to kill our natural selves and the rest of the natural world with us. Otherwise, we risk becoming alienated from our incredibly intelligent and civilized human companions. But we can’t maintain human companionship while destroying the natural environment which makes association possible in the first place. In other words, we can’t deny our animal nature and preserve humanity. If we’re serious about connecting to our fellow human beings, then isn’t it also time we got serious about questioning, and maybe even giving up, some of our precious human intelligence?
"Incapable of enjoying the moment, the male needs something to look forward to, and money provides him with an eternal, never-ending goal: Just think of what you could do with 80 trillion dollars -- invest it! And in three years time you'd have 300 trillion dollars!!!"- Valerie Solanas
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."- Philip K. Dick
In the Western World when we say something is spiritual we mean that it’s transcendent—in other words, that it’s divorced from nature and from the body. This isn’t what I’m talking about. And I’m not talking about the New Age sense of being at one with the universe, either. When, and if, I use the word spiritual, I mean that I feel the full weight of existence. I feel empty yet full of longing, alone yet surrounded by company, sensual yet free of desire. There isn’t any transcendence and there isn’t any joining—just the intensity and grace of being alive at that moment. What’s more, these moments are accessible at any time. That’s something I’ve come to realize. The reason they’re accessible is that there’s nothing transcendent about them at all. They’re natural. They only seem resplendent and unfamiliar because our current way of life forbids us from indulging in them.
In fact, I’m sure this is why the word spiritual has the connotations that it does. By calling something spiritual we essentially define it as an abstraction. In retrospect the experience is co-opted as a gift from God or from his angels and made to seem supernatural. Spirituality then becomes a euphemism to cover up a basic truth about ourselves—that we’re animals. We haven’t been trained in this culture to deal with the natural world and so we’re afraid of it. Consequently, the epiphanies we might have while hiking are either labeled and explained away as transcendent religious phenomena or avoided altogether. I think Freud was onto something when he talked about artistic sublimation, only I don’t think it explains artistic fecundity, I think it explains religious ecstasy. Because natural feeling has been made practically taboo in today’s world, we project it onto the other. We make it socially acceptable, that is, by relating it to an accepted religious or new age concept. We turn nature into culture. In turn, the experience is murdered, thus the violence civilization does to the environment is also done to ourselves and our experiences.
Consider the smugness with which people proclaim our superiority over the animals. The assumption is that our superiority has already been proven, so it hardly needs stating (just as the supremacy of whites over blacks and men over women was once proven). Anyone who challenges that assumption must have a few screws loose and hasn’t yet learned the proper uses of rational thought. After all, we are the top predators—at the top of the food chain. What is there to argue? But in the animal kingdom hierarchies aren’t as clear cut as we’d like them to be. In a symbiotic world made of finite resources it doesn’t make sense to talk about who is and who isn’t the top dog. Competition doesn’t drive evolution, adaptation and cooperation does (I’ll leave it to John Livingston and K.C. Cole to make my point on that matter). Conquest might help you to survive, at least in the short term, but it won’t make you any happier. It’s like a marriage: if you deliberately deny your partner’s happiness then you’ll deny your own happiness as well, provided you stay together and can’t seek fulfillment elsewhere. No matter how dutifully your physical and material needs are tended to, if your partner is reduced to a slave, he/she won’t be able to give you what you really want—a creative and genuine and stimulating relationship. If our only concern is to subdue and control the outer world, then we won’t have genuinely ‘spiritual’ moments within that relationship. Life will be dull. And unfortunately (for the environment, that is), in our relationship with nature, divorce isn’t an option. And neither is murder, though that seems to be the course we’ve chosen.
But of course human beings are smarter than the rest of the animal kingdom, right? And again, this goes without saying. There isn’t any reason to question it. But what evidence is there that instinct is inferior to conscious thought? And that’s what we mean when we say that we’re smarter; we mean that we’re more conscious—that we consciously regulate more of our natural functions than the other animals do. Not only that, but we have more conscious control of the natural world in general. Consequently, we’re better problem solvers. And we have more power. The last point, I readily admit to. But to say that we’re smarter because we’re more conscious doesn’t make much sense to me. Our instincts perform almost flawlessly when not interfered with. In sports we train to let our instincts take over—to “let our bodies do what they know how to do”. And more than that, natural instincts don’t deter the functioning of the rest of the environment the way our conscious minds can. When the instincts of the Salmon compel it to swim upstream to spawn, it not only benefits the Salmon species, it benefits an entire ecosystem—from the predatory mammals and the aquatic invertebrates and fish who feed on the Salmon to the fauna that benefits from the marine nutrients pushed upstream by the Salmon migration. It would take an awfully clever person to figure out how to provide all that benefit through conscious processes. So why waste the effort? Isn’t the ‘smart’ choice to defer to our instincts? If power increased our chances at survival then it might make sense to take conscious control of our environment, but power doesn’t mean anything in a mutually beneficial relationship. If deer could learn to overcome their predators, it might make them more secure and more powerful, but it would also lead to their extinction. Predictably, the herd would outgrow its food source—get older, more disease-ridden, more feeble—and they, along with their predators, would eventually die off. Isn’t that the fate of our own species if we continue with our current consumption-based way of life?
***
Anyone who chooses to can learn how to regulate her heartbeat, and there are times when you might want to—if you’re in a pressurized athletic competition, for example (i.e. an artificial environment). But would you want to take full conscious control of your heartbeat twenty four/seven? Or how about your breathing? It seems to me that instinct does a pretty good job of handling those functions, and by allowing my instincts to do their jobs I become more liberated. If I had to focus on maintaining my breath and heartbeat, I wouldn’t have much time for anything else. Life wouldn’t be very interesting, either—maybe even less interesting than a life spent in pursuit of money and fame and conquest. And if you value freedom and diverse experience, why would you, if you’re so God damn smart, decide to give it up to become more ‘conscious’? Why would you give up a hunter/gatherer lifestyle in which you could meet all your basic needs with less than four hours of work per day for a lifestyle of forty plus hour work weeks and endless commutes and less healthy diets? Is it a sign of intelligence that we deliberately make our lives more dull and stressful?
Whenever I bring this up to a civilization apologist, I inevitably hear about the satisfactions of hard work (the Work Ethic) and how boring life would be if we just sat around wildling arrowheads all day. And they’re right. Domesticated people like us would get bored. But we’re bored because we’re not very good company. It’s like I tell my writing students when they complain that writing is a boring subject: Writing isn’t boring. YOU ARE! If writing is simply a recording of your own thoughts, then being bored by writing must mean you don’t have any interest in your mind’s own processes. You might have a boring teacher, a boring instruction book, or a boring topic, but writing isn’t boring—not unless the writer makes it so. In spite of our TVs and our sporting contests, our excessive work habits and constant barrage of stimuli, we can’t escape our boredom. That’s not because life is boring, it’s because we’re boring. We’re boring because we’re disconnected from real experience, real emotion, and real relationships. We’re bored because we can’t revert to our instincts, because in the artificial world we’ve created for ourselves our instincts won’t work. We’re bored because even when we have real experiences we have to domesticate them. We have to label them as abstractions and as otherworldly; that way, our true wild selves won’t run us over and exile us from society. To preserve our society we have to kill our natural selves and the rest of the natural world with us. Otherwise, we risk becoming alienated from our incredibly intelligent and civilized human companions. But we can’t maintain human companionship while destroying the natural environment which makes association possible in the first place. In other words, we can’t deny our animal nature and preserve humanity. If we’re serious about connecting to our fellow human beings, then isn’t it also time we got serious about questioning, and maybe even giving up, some of our precious human intelligence?
"Incapable of enjoying the moment, the male needs something to look forward to, and money provides him with an eternal, never-ending goal: Just think of what you could do with 80 trillion dollars -- invest it! And in three years time you'd have 300 trillion dollars!!!"- Valerie Solanas
"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."- Philip K. Dick
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