The Cages of Birds in a Fat House

Like cages full of birds,
their houses are full of deceit;
they have become rich and powerful
and have grown fat and sleek.

Their evil deeds have no limit;
they do not plead the case of the fatherless to win it,
they do not defend the rights of the poor.

Should I not punish them for this?”
declares the Lord.
“Should I not avenge myself
on such a nation as this?

“A horrible and shocking thing
has happened in the land:

The prophets prophesy lies,
the priests rule by their own authority,
and my people love it this way.
But what will you do in the end?
--- Jer. 5:25-31

In a recent poll, 90 percent of Iraqis expressed growing despair in what's become a civil war in their country. Their psychological distress no doubt reflects what some have described as hell. (Also, see this essay on "The Creation of Hell.")

What is even more apparent, though, is that the US public has little comprehension of the daily terror and uncertainty of this life in Iraq. Perhaps many think of Iraq's civil war along the lines of America's own ghettos where gangs fight over turf and where innocents are killed.

I have argued in the past that many Americans willingly suppress their awareness of these realities. Perhaps it is out of apathy, busyness, or even a malicious disregard for the suffering of those we consider the enemy.

I would argue, though, that all of these excuses are manifestations of a form of despair that is spiritual and ethical in nature and that represents an evil so great that it creates the conditions for greater evils.

Talk of what led up to the war rarely broaches issues that you can characterize as spiritual. Even those religious commentators who don't simply spout the rhetoric of Xtendom facing down the enemies of civilization and Christian culture usually frame their discussion in political terms that reflect a liberal vocabulary that seems empty to me, if simply because that vocabulary is spiritually vacant.

The spiritual malaise that led to this war originates in fear and the reaction that people exhibited at the 911 attack exhibited little public virtue, as the Machiavellians might put it. Instead of facing such atrocity with any semblance of courage, the country's leaders responded as so many bullies whose worst fear had come to light: their own feelings of inadequacy and weakness.

Nor did they exhibit anything that you might call religious courage. To speak of a religious courage opposed to an ethical courage may appear odd, yet it is easy enough to cite examples of this kind of courage. The early Christian church martyrs exhibited just such courage. In the face of immense oppression and persecution, not to mention torture, these martyrs faced the possibility of extinction with joy and hope. They did not react in violence, nor did they band together to wreak vengeance.

As much as Americans hate to think that there's any meaning to corporate sinfulness—relying instead on some corrupt image of the monadic individual--this war and its aftermath must bring to consciousness exactly that realization of sin perpetrated by a horde. After all, the majority of people in the US backed this war until it started going bad. Many voted for the man who perpetrated the fiasco.

Until Americans begin to plumb the depths of their spirits and acknowledge their complicity in this monumental crime against the Iraqi people, they will never solve the problem of terror.

In all the religious rhetoric that the Xtian preachers spout--even those from the Left--few invoke the words and message of the Hebrew prophets. This is shameful. For those prophets like Jeremiah inveighing against imperial pretensions and injustice made in the name of a nation state point not simply to the leaders but also the corrupt and spiritual blindness of an entire nation.

These words might seems to echo the more fanatical cries of the Jihadis. I can only say that Americans must stand up to the hate-filled and unjust violence purveyed by these fanatics. But to do so, they must take the road of faith and repentance, with an open heart disciplined by failure and the experience of imperial folly. But not only must they hear the fanatics in the street outside but they must also hear the voices of those they invite into their own homes.

Americans must begin to see their world as larger than the environs of US borders. They must begin to see themselves as world citizens where the actions that they perform in their food market or gas station can potentially affect the lives of others. Americans must reject their narcissistic egotism that sees the world in their own image and begin to see that others are different and believe differently.

True justice demands not that we see the world as having the same desires, needs, and dreams as we do. It demands seeing ourselves in the nothingness that is common to us all in our most painful and powerless moments. It is embracing that nothingness and taking it into our hearts and forming our will around the contours of its freedom and liberating breath.

As the prophet Jeremiah reminds us, any God that’s worth its/his/her salt demands justice. If that justice does not include the less fortunate and those forgotten by us in our busyness, then that simply means that we refuse to listen to the calls for justice.

It is obvious that the leaders of this country—whether left, right, or center—borrow an old grammar and vocabulary whose story will result in instituting the machinery of injustice. For the new world that is taking shape through war and struggle, the old stories do not work any longer. They are fairy tales that the nation-state nanny tells its cowed and fearful children to keep away the terrors of night.

But the terror is real; the boogeyman does have teeth and does eat children. Like so many stories of family and personal tragedy show, often the perpetrator is someone known, a relative and no stranger. The beast sits in the heart of the very fathers and brothers and mothers who are meant to protect us but whose hearts have been warped by temptation and corruption to betray and terrorize their own.

Indeed, the prophet is right. The prophets lie, the priests rule in their own name and we do indeed love it. Read more!

American Neoliberalism: Intro to Demonology 101

Talk about demons appeals to the popular consciousness. Numerous works of fiction and film exploit the idea that we humans can be inhabited and made to do things that we otherwise would not do. Evil things--evil things so horrendously heinous and terrible that we'd despair of some presupposed innocence that we're born with.

Of course, the most spectacular of these films was Peter Blatty's potboiler, The Exorcist. The film based on the book made huge bundles of cash for Hollywood and spawned two sequels. The most recent, The Exorcist: The Beginning just played last year and is now on HBO.

I watched this most recent installment the other night. Beyond the obvious absurdities, and the still quaint notion that evil inhabits another woman, what struck me most was the indefatigable tenaciousness of the priest who doesn't believe in God anymore. His spiritual journey back to faith is played out against the backdrop of his loss of faith occasioned by the massacre of innocents by Nazis. While the special effects are decent, and the story is often compelling, the movie is not very convincing in showing the true meaning of the demonic.

Two recent articles show the Catholic Church's unwavering war against demons, however. Working on empirical data that demon possession is on the rise, the Church has revamped its book of exorcism, enlisted a cadre of new exorcists, and made public pronouncements of its unerring belief in the reality of the Devil. ...

In an interview with Sign and Sight one exorcist, Rev. Pedro Barrajon, claims:

Cases of possession seem to me to be the evil flip-side of miracles, which are equally inexplicable, but which we can also observe. The devil is present everywhere that evil things happen within the normal laws of nature. In anyone who says: I don't accept love, the love of my brothers and sisters, the love of God. And in many places, in all massacres, in every murder, in physical catastrophes, in every concentration camp, in all evil. Sometimes he shows himself, strangely, but also in cases of possession. But he's much more dangerous where he doesn't let himself be seen, where he can't be done away with through exorcism. No question.

Such expressions, of course, meet with a skeptical guffaw from the intelligentsia. A scientific age cannot and will not believe in anything that cannot be subsumed under the aegis of empirical study. But the empirical is exactly what the demonologists work with. As innumerable ethnographic reports will tell you, demon possession is real--for those possessed and for those who witness it.

The point, of course, is that these cases are simply manifestations of psychological problems that proper psychiatric care can dispel and cure. Or so it is said. For anyone familiar with the incapacity of modern psychiatry to truly effect cures in the mentally disturbed, such claims as cure and returns to normal are irenic at best, self-delusionary at worst. If you think that prescribing powerful anti-hallucinogens and mood-altering drugs is a cure, then perhaps we need to redefine the concept of cure.

I am not saying that cases of possession aren't symptoms of deep and profound psychological problems. Indeed, I believe that modern psychiatry and psychology are correct in identifying the mundane causes of these symptoms and taking them out of the realm of the supernatural. No doubt, more people have been helped--however relatively--by the psychological treatments than by medieval treatments for possession. Again, however, this statement must be put into context. Traditional and indigenous methodologies show an amazing ability to cast out demons and integrate individuals back to social normality.

I've intentionally conveyed the impression here that I am skeptical of both the religionists who use demon posession to cover up their own connivance with power structures as well as the brainiacs who think that the demonic is simply the distorted manifestations of superstitious minds.
---------------------------------
In a recent post, I quoted Martin Matustik's characterization of Kierkegaard's understanding of the "diabolical." Contrary to every received opinion of Kierkegaard as a thinker, he was intimately concerned about the political and social events of his time. For Kierkegaard, from his post-Xtian perspective, the demonic manifests itself in ways that traditional religionists would reject and rationalists would find offensive.

In the context of US foreign policy in Iraq, Matustik identifies the the desire of Americans to appear innocent to themselves and to their friends and enemies. Matustik writes:

Known to [Frederick] Douglass but lost on most contemporary Americans is the danger of an even greater evil: what Kierkegaard called the human capacity for acting “diabolically.” The “diabolical” is anyone who wills oneself to be good without having confronted one’s capacity for evil. Such a person must cling fast to false innocence because this person despairs over the question whether he or she truly is innocent. The politically “diabolical” is any regime that in despair wills its false innocence. The desire to be the innocent source of one’s power - a phenomenon we can call the despair of America - can be confronted, says Kierkegaard, by the breakdown of the false ego and its attachment to power.

Matustik calls to attention the innate tendency of Americans to impute to itself an inherent innocence when it comes to dealing with others. In a country where difference means everything yet is itself to be erased in the great melting pot, the erasure is supposed to return us to a commonly shared humanity that short-circuits the influences of tradition and cultural conditioning. But this supposed dimensionless region of individuality is a con job since it abrogates the obvious effects that environment and socio-cultural institutions and life-forms have on humans. You can’t, at the risk of becoming wraithful non-beings, abrogate personal history or the general history of your society.

The pernicious notion that society or culture does not affect an innate innocence produces individuals who are tragically unconscious of their own responsibility for evil. We go through life believing that we are simply atoms borne about by chaotic and ultimately unknowable forces. In the popular imagination, this state produces an anxiousness about the unknown that continually beckons from fictional accounts of evil forces inhabiting otherwise decent human beings. The mass production of horror and slasher films and TV programs indicates the uneasiness that many feel about their place in the universe.

On the obverse side of this coin, the scientist attempts to reduce the anxiety to physiological processes that only a scientist or expert can understand. From the notion that we are hardwired to do what we do to the idea that environment determines all our actions, the scientific lack of imagination believes that it can explain human life and thereby serve as the keystone is an edifice of a yet-to-be-determined socially engineered utopia. That the theory changes every few months based on new studies and new data; that the final explanation of the data is always put off until more data or new instrumentation is available; all this does not deter the rationalist mind from pronouncing that the end of the search for who we are is at an end.

The ethico-religious implications of this confusion are obvious. In the face of the general uncertainty about what humans really are reinforce the demand to follow rigidly defined dogmas and a nihilistic appeal to a mealy-mouthed fideism. This fideism is not the leap into the absurd of a Kierkegaard or Camus but is instead an act of despair that ultimately bolsters the prevailing machinery of power and self-interest.

For the social engineers, the uncertainty is equally unsettling yet blinded by the starry night of scientific promise they simply point to a future age when the anxiety will end. Hoping to usurp the role of oracle and prophetic office that religion served in the past, the engineers can at least point to concrete and hardcore results that supposedly prove their truth. Yet it is a truth that benefits the demonic eye in the sky that ensures social conformity and comity. It steels the mechanics of control, feeding in to the spiritual and socio-cultural fears that no psychology will ever erase but only repress.

And in their repression they combobulate and fester and breed the swirling crimes of personalistic nightmares: the serial killer, nice guy who lives next door, the consumerist queen who will kill to stay on top of the mass production fashion hill, the angst-filled adolescents stalking the halls of revenge.

For Kierkegaard and Douglass, according to Matustik, the demonic is a massive con job, perpetrated by individuals in their denial of a self beyond self-interest, as well as selves that desire to hide from themselves their own potential for perpetrating evil acts while seeming innocent.

Kierkegaard's take on evil and the demonic is situated in the individual and his/her journey to true selfhood. Given the propensity for lying to oneself and covering over one's true motives, this search often involves outright rejection of the Good simply because it is the good. Yet, the more insidious forms of the demonic, according to Kierkegaard come in the form of those who espouse religion while secretly using it to bolster their own cherished rejection of the true demands of what the Good demands.

In its wraithful obsession with denying the other, in being like the others better than them, in fearing that someone else more rights or more things or more beauty, Americans have become the walking dead crack ho of the world. Possessed by all that it denies in others and its dreams of pie-in-the-sky happiness, we stalk the stage of history like those brain-dead zombies in George Romero’s films. For as much as Americans want to be different they are just as much envious of anyone who might find a source of life-filled meaning that does not measure up to the criteria by which we gauge real success and real equality. Read more!

Babel and the God’s-eye View of Reality

In a recent posting, biblical scholar Ben Witherington reviews the new film Babel. For Witherington, Babel’s power comes in its ability to provide what I will call the God’s view of reality by showing how seemingly random events fit into a higher, more ethical universe of meaning. The filmmaker seems intent on showing the ethical implications of actions that are disjoined by time/space.

I have not seen Babel yet, so my comments will revert to other movies, especially Crash, although I could have just as easily mentioned Syriana or Traffic. These two movies do not necessarily have the same subtext—dealing with actions and their ethical repercussion, but they do share the intent of providing a view of reality that shows the interconnectedness of events and human behavior. …

In the biblical book of Job, the apotheosis of the action is without doubt the vision that Job has of God speaking from a tornado. In his questioning of the rebellious and straight-talking Job, God questions him about his ability to see the world as God the creator and sustainer of creation does. God sees all and tends all; God sees how all things interconnect and views what no human could ever see, not to mention understand.

Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: "Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you declare to me.
Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified? Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?
"Deck yourself with majesty and dignity; clothe yourself with glory and splendor.
Pour forth the overflowings of your anger, and look on every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked where they stand.
Hide them all in the dust together; bind their faces in the world below.
Then will I also acknowledge to you, that your own right hand can give you victory. (Job 40:6-14)

I have chosen a passage that stresses God’s purported justice and His ability to bring to justice those that human laws cannot or will not bow low.

The passages preceding this one emphasize God’s omniscience, as well as His omnipotence. In the modern audience such passages might elicit something of a titter, especially if you’re disposed to a healthy skepticism. In terms of His omniscience, anyone who watches National Geographic or Animal Planet could answer God back and say, “Yes, we have seen those hidden things that once were hidden to human eyes.”

As to omnipotence, the scientist would point to the fact that physicists do indeed understand the workings of the forces at play when the cosmos was created. In fact, their knowledge is so profound that they can actually create the conditions and circumstances of that birth in the laboratory.

With these remarks as background, it is not difficult to see why filmmakers believe they can provide exactly that type of cosmic vision that God gives Job. The camera eye seems supremely made to depict reality “as it is.” For this task, the camera does not filter the information that it spies. Unfiltered, naked fact speaks from every frame since the camera cannot lie. As the truism goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Indeed, what better testimony to the ability of the camera to capture truth than those videos in which criminal behavior is caught on tape and then used in court, as in the Rodney King case? The attractiveness of the camera to capture the unseen crime, the hidden truth behind the façade of custom and human pretensions, has made its way into TV programs such as COPS and its spin-off spawn.

There is the difference, though, between a film and these videos, as well as their filmic grandparents, the documentary. The most notable difference is the staging that goes into any dramatic film. As every student of Film 101 learns, every scene contains exactly what the film’s director wants us to see. Every color, every thing in the film, not to mention the actions of the characters, are dictated strictly by the director.

Even given these dramaturgical and technical details, however, we could say that God does the same thing. If God is indeed in charge of time and history, then He arranges things as he sees fit and therefore can be seen as a film director writ in large letters.

Yet, the details of any film will always be limited by the human capacity to reach that state of ex-stasis (ecstasy) or point outside of time wherein s/he can view the entirety of events and their interconnectedness. Indeed, as you will know it takes several Cray supercomputers to handle the amount of weather data and perform the chaos theory formulae on it to get what anyone—including systems architects—would call information.

But there’s more to the story than this simple inability of the human bio-computer to handle the plethora of data that world events, and their apparent chaos, entail. This issue relates to the ethical dimension of events. That is, the power of Job’s vision is that God has the frame-of-reference, so to speak, within which to make sense of the seeming injustice and meaningless suffering that humans endure and inflict on each other. Indeed, it is God who makes sure that that cosmic balance and justice are somehow maintained.

The film Crash is perhaps a film that has the more modest goals in this regard. Through inter-related stories that switch back and forth between present past and (the illusion of) the future, we see how the actions of each character bring about tragic consequences. The film’s ability to travel through time, as it were—gives us a feeling of transcending those very boundaries that capture us in their confines. Isn’t an attribute of God called omnipresence? Isn’t this power of the artist to transcend these boundaries and take us with him or her in that shamanic journey an exercise in the theophanic vision that placated Job’s rage against his own and others’ unjust suffering?

For Witherington, Babel at least examines this moral dimension of the world and its interconnectedness—not in abstract sociological terms, but in specifically ethical terms. Witherington writes:

So what is the message of this film? Interestingly enough the director seems to be making another Biblical point, [sic] and not one connected with Babel. It is that bad actions always have negative consequences somehow, for someone. This is true for the person who fired the gun, and it is equally true for the nanny who takes the children across the border, when she is illegally in the U.S. So, are we being told that despite the fallenness and the chaos that there is a moral order to this human connnectedness, or at least moral consequences to immoral actions? Yes, I think that is part of the point. But this is a movie which one needs to watch several times to catch all the nuances.

For Witherington, then, the power of the film Babel shows that despite the apparent chaos ruling events and the world as we encounter it in the news, for example, there is indeed a structure and coherence to it. The panoptic vision of the film then is able to show us that structure because of its ability to span time/space and present the intricacies of each action in the very historical, social, and cultural circumstances in which they happen.

Isn’t this what God shows Job? That despite Job’s limited perception of reality—especially as seen through his own suffering—there is indeed a cosmic structure and ethical/spiritual meaning to the world that engages us often as chaos?

"Can you draw out Levi'athan with a fishhook, or press down his tongue with a cord?
Can you put a rope in his nose, or pierce his jaw with a hook?
Will he make many supplications to you? Will he speak to you soft words?
Will he make a covenant with you to take him for your servant for ever?
Will you play with him as with a bird, or will you put him on leash for your maidens? (Job 41:1-5)

Leviathan here is the ancient symbol for chaos. Borrowed by the Hebrews from ancient Mesopotamian creation stories, it represents the primeval chaos from the creator-god forms order and all that we see and use in the world.

I just want to add one more remark in what is probably an overlong posting. This question relates to the issue of what’s to be done once I see the film? What happens after I witness the God-view that a film like Crash or Babel might give me? I want to suggest that the danger in any aesthetic artifact such as a film is that they might give the viewer the feeling that once they “experience” the God-view then they have nothing more to do. There’s no reason to change anything—in yourself or the world—since the act of being a viewer is enough.

Since I have the film, what else is needed? The film serves as a replacement for action. Knowing about something takes the place of action, whatever that might be. The options here might include a stoicism born from a feeling that “in the big picture it all makes sense so what I must do is accept it and do what I do.” There’s also the possibility that the satiation of the aesthetic experience may itself seem to satisfy any other ethical response, whether for moving on to practicing justice, say.

Not to put too fine a point on these random remarks, I respect and admire the artistic vision that tries to expand the limitations of artistic renditions of the human condition—expansions that attempt to create a bridge to the ethical dimension of our lives. Much like their literary doubles The Divine Comedy, War and Peace, August 1914, these films in their striving for the epic crash on the rocks of what the old-timers called the human existential condition. That contradiction of being beings in time capable of transcending time in glimpses and intimations but always called back to finitude and the anxiety that it inspires. Read more!

Man of Constant Sorrow

Driving home early in the morning from my other job one Sunday, I turned the radio to the local AM channel. I don't listen much to AM radio except to listen to sports events, but I hit the Scan button and the first channel it landed on was the local one.

I guess it's a Christian station for it was playing Christian Bluegrass songs. I don't know how much folks on this forum know about American music, but Bluegrass is one of those more traditional musical genres that has its roots in folk songs brought by Anglo immigrants to the US. Remembered and nurtured by the hills and dales of the Appalachian mountains, the music thrived for many years only in the minds and souls of some of the more destitute and dispossessed of Americans. ...

The more religious songs were a staple at that uniquely American phenomenon of the tent meeting Christian celebrations. Very emotional and evocative these meetings were the brainchild of Methodist circuit riders. itinerant preachers who wandered the wilderness of America bringing the salvation experience to those Americans who had no church nearby. The music recently gained some exposure as the musical landscape of the film, Oh Brother Where Art Thou.

I have a close place in my heart for this music since my mother would listen to it on Saturdays, a day off from her job as a hospital receptionist. She'd spend that time cleaning and arranging our lives to order and cleanliness. She's was not and is not a religious woman, so I imagine that the reason she listened to it is for its melodies, beautiful harmonies, and simple but evocative lyrics.

I never knew that the music was anything special until many years in college when friends played the music. From upper-class backgrounds, their interest in the music was as connoisseurs of a music that could legitimately call itself traditional American music. It had, after all, influenced many of the popular folk musicians of the 60s like Bob Dylan.

On that Sunday I drove home from work, one of my favorite melodies was on. It's gained much notoriety from the Oh Brother film. In one of those small epiphanies I am prone to, the song was especially evocative for me this Sunday morning. Its story of someone who has no roots and is enmeshed in unspoken sorrows brought home in a simultaneous moment the drift and weft of much of my own life.

I am a man of constant sorrow
I've seen trouble all my days
I bid farewell to old Kentucky
The state where I was borned and raised

For six long years I've been in trouble
No pleasure here on earth I find
For in this world I'm bound to ramble
I have no friends to help me now

It's fare thee well my own true lover
I never expect to see you again
For I'm bound to ride that northern railroad
Perhaps I'll die upon this train

You can bury me in some deep valley
For many years where I may lay
Then you may learn to love another
While I am sleeping in my grave.

It's fare you well to a native country
The places I have loved so well
For I have seen all kinds of trouble
In this cruel world, no tongue can tell.

Maybe your friends think I'm just a stranger
My face you'll never see no more
But there is one promise that is given
I'll meet you on God's golden shore.

Those words of a person wandering without roots and neither place nor home to lay his head describes several times during my own life. The loveless existence and the sorrows that you bring on yourself or into others' lives ring still true to me. And the feeling that only in the end will all find resolution and meaning still hover about my thoughts as I try to put shape and form on all I have seen and felt in my life.

In my thoughts were also some of the things I had written here before concerning the rootlessness of modern existence. The words of the song do indeed seem to embody the experience of that rootlessness that some might say is the bane of modern life. For without roots in tradition, culture, and the land what are we humans but sad wraiths looking for a home that is not of this earth?

It does seem in many ways that it is this rootlessness that defines the so-called American experience. For, as immigrants torn from the social, cultural and physical matrixes that human societies have formed to anchor the search for meaning, Americans undergo a kind of levelling that looks upon all those things as old and useless.

The uniquely American, it might be said, is the power to cut yourself from all those old life-forms that define the old world, thereby opening up the possibility of a new world. In this new world, it's believed, we create out own reality, relying on nothing but ourselves and the innate genius and character that nature bequeathes us.

This, at least, is perhaps the message that that eminently American writer Emerson hoped to bring as the good news to Americans. It was perhaps also his vision as the meaning that America itself might represent for human history, a message that others who groaned under the burden of slavery to social, political, and cultural constraints find themselves in.

Emerson was not oblivious to the potential for anarchy inherent in this experience. Rootless and without an anchor in anything except self-reliance what was to keep people from simply living out their own selfish, brutish worst selves? Emerson, I think, believed that we must understand ourselves as creatures of nature, interconnected in wonderful and ingeniously complex ways. Doing so, we could salvage a sense of purpose that transcended simple self-centered behavior and realized itself in a kind of mystical bond with all beings, human, animal, and non-human.

Many will perhaps see this Emersonian vision as naive. How many, for example, have the time or inclination to overcome that seemingly selfish nature that exhibits itself in all cultures and all times? I think that Emerson felt that the republican values instituted by the American constitution had solved many of those problems. Indeed, I believe that Emerson saw American democracy itself as a type of religion that would replace other religions. In fact, I imagine that for him this was an inevitable result of the arc of history.

I think that Emerson is the uniquely American philosopher. I say that since people from many political persuasions count his writings as support for their philosophies. Yet, in my own experience, the Emersonian vision has fared poorly when regarded in the light of that very history he perhaps identified too closely with natural forces. Instead, history has shown that to disregard the human dimension of history is to disregard the potential for death and destruction that those who idolize it wreak.

I will leave these thoughts here for the moment, as I have to go off and cook dinner. I'll finish with the following thought: the rootlessness I know in my own life and that brings so much sorrow may form the kenotic basis on which a deeper awareness of realities beyond this one have yet other dimensions of life to reveal. Read more!

Memories: Lord of the Flies 1960

This article from CCN got me to thinking:

As a child of about four or five, at my grandparents' farm for a summer week, I watched my grandmother wreak vengeance on the files in the kitchen and porch.

I took her cue, it seems, and began trying to kill them myself. I'd stalk them with the fly swatter raised like Death's scythe. I even caught and belegged them in cruel curiosity.

I called myself the Fly Hunter.



More recently, I delved into the dynamics of how hard it is to kill a fly. I realized what the CNN report says:

"We also found that when the fly makes planning movements prior to take-off, it takes into account its body position at the time it first sees the threat," Dickinson said."When it first notices an approaching threat, a fly's body might be in any sort of posture depending on what it was doing at the time, like grooming, feeding, walking, or courting. Our experiments showed that the fly somehow 'knows' whether it needs to make large or small postural changes to reach the correct preflight posture."

I also came to the same conclusion:

"It is best not to swat at the fly's starting position, but rather to aim a bit forward of that to anticipate where the fly is going to jump when it first sees your swatter," [the research said] said.

Not only I not have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to figure it out, but I

Of course, I should perhaps feel proud that I concluded with my own native intelligence what It took scientists to figure out over tens, if not hundreds of experiments.

Yet, I should also feel grateful to science, perhaps, for confirming my findings. That is the best spirit of science, I think. Working with others in a common endeavor to unveil the truth about the world--even the lowly world of the fly. (The tears of common effort and communal task swell my breast.)

Addenda

1. One of my favorite Blake poems is The Fly.

Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.

Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?

For I dance
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

If thought is life
And strength and breath
And the want
Of thought is death;

Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

2. One of the scarier movies I saw was David Cronenberg's "The Fly." The ending suicide scene is so raw, so right, yet metaphysically terrifying. There's pity, horror at something so loathsome in humans that parades as honor and pride but ultimately stands revealed as ugly and petty. Even Geena Davis' heart-rending love for Goldbloom's character cannot tear the scab from that realization.

3. The scene in Herzog's Nosferatu, where the insane Jonathan Harker captures flies and eats them for their blood often strikes me as particularly terrifying. Being reduced to a fly-hunting speck of a human, contemptible not only in other people's eyes but your own. The object of a pity that verges on hilarity, if one were not so ridiculously self-absorbed in tasks only a spider would understand.

Read more!

The Dresden Dolls: Girl Anachronism music video

This is very good, I think. Poetix calls it "brechtian punk cabaret," perhaps facetiously.

The lyrics remind me of my daughters, not so happily I fear.

Read more!

What Are U Doing Here?!

Originally published two years ago. I wanted to update it with the following video from ABC News.



Update: This is one the most found of my posts that people find via Google and/or link. Regrettably, I do not think it is just an interest in the discussion that attracts most people. Indeed, the most used words to find this post are "kill all muslims." In fact, the 14,000th hit on the site used the search terms, "I want to kill all muslims." My advice for this person is to seek help. U others, please consider the import of the post if you really are asking the question about whether killing all Muslims is a live alternative.

The question of whether the US or its proxies or even western nations as a whole should kill all Muslims has been gaining wide support around the darker corners of the blogosphere lately. I say darker, since you'd expect it to be limited to what used to be called racist sites run by the Aryan Nation or KKK. However, you can even hear such sentiments expressed on daily talk-shows.

A recent unscientific poll at the Spengler Forum asked the members outright whether all Muslims should be killed. ....

The poll at Spengler's forum is ambiguous. Before it was locked and shut down due to the acrimonious accusations passing back and forth between the commenters, enough people voted to show that yes, 23% believed all Muslims should be killed outright; 61% did not think this; and 14% charitably believed that "killing the majority of them should be sufficient to break their will."

Perhaps these are the same people--or at least close relatives--of those who sent out a mass email that is counseling readers to “Kill ‘Em All. Let Allah Sort ‘Em Out.” According to ThinkProgress, the email contains the following statements:

A disproportionate response is the best kind. … What would a proportionate Israeli response be? Snatching two Hezbollah fighters, torturing them to death, cutting off their genitals and stuffing them in their mouths?

Lebanon used to be a nice little country, before the Sons of Allah got their blood-smeared hands on it. Believe it or not, Beirut was once…the most advanced and prosperous country in the Arab world — because a majority of Lebanese were Christians.

Israel needs to step-up its air strikes and send in the troops (can you say “massive deployment, baby?”) to do the job only ground forces can do. … To resurrect and reconfigure one of my favorite Vietnam-era slogans — Kill ‘em all. Let Allah sort ‘em out.

Again, such extreme views have always been present in modern western societies. They are usually controlled by various venting processes that occur during socialization. Although they may form a part of even everyday speech, as they are in various ethnic slurs and nicknames, they are usually stigmatized so that people do not act on them.

Unfortunately, what is happening in response to the War in Iraq is that such views and sentiments are not only on the rise but are also becoming part of the mainstream dialog and everyday speech. That is, while ethnic slurs are to be expected, the open discussion of exterminating entire groups of people is something new in the US--at least since the end of the 1930s, after the decline of the KKK as a national movement.

But this is changing, obviously. During his talk-show, Michael Savage, for example, can be heard expressing such views (via Media Matter) as the following:

In the long term, the only thing that can make a difference is a devastating, catastrophic, overwhelming victory for the Israelis, where nothing is left living in southern Lebanon, south of the Litani River.

While these comments do not express the genocide of all Moslems and Arabs, they certainly reflect a terrible indifference to the pain and suffering--whether of the innocent or the guilty--with the implication being that because they are ethnically Muslim, they should be treated in this way.

As Islamophobia Watch is reporting, traditionally anti-Semitic groups are now exploiting the anger generated by extremist Moslem attacks in the US, England, and Spain. Quoting the British Nationalist Party's (BNP) newspaper, IW posts:

"The BNP has moved on in recent years, casting off the leg-irons of conspiracy theories and the thinly veiled anti-Semitism which has held this party back for two decades. The real enemies of the British people are home grown Anglo-Saxon Celtic liberal-leftists who seek to ... impose multiculturalism on a reluctant indigenous population, and the Crescent Horde – the endless wave of Islamics who are flocking to our shores to bring our island nations into the embrace of their barbaric desert religion."

Notice how these anti-Islamic statements are combined with the issues or liberals, immigration, and what is called "Eurabia."

This last view has various associated concepts, including the view that Europe is vanishing because of low birth-rates, and along with it something called Christendom; that is, the supposed Judeo-Christian tradition that has given birth, these proponents suggest, to the freedoms and liberties we all benefit from. What the influx of Moslems and Arabs supposedly threatens are these very freedoms and liberties, as well as the vast cultural heritage from Greece to modern secularism.

Dare one even say that these views are not just historically idiotic--it was, after all, the Muslems who maintained the very Greek tradition and its culture that these people suppose is their own--they also reflect a dangerous attachment to something that simply does not exist. That is, a homogeneous culture that has somehow statically existed in a hermetically sealed environment where influences--cultural and otherwise--have not affected it.

But these peremptory remarks will not stop those who want to eradicate a threat that seems not only to be directed at a "civilization" but perhaps even more importantly threatens them individually, personally--as though their very existence is in question when they look at the world around them.

How else explain the following view, which introduces that unscientific poll I linked to at the beginning of this post?

Why don't we kill all Muslims? All of them. As Geotima would say, we are already in a World War, let's fight like we mean it. So why don't we start to plan for their complete extermination? They are hateful and will not stop until they force everyone in the world to submit to Islam. There is no reasoning with them, we must fight them with all we have. As we all know Muslims are at their best when they are being defeated, so we cannot afford to keep them in a constant state nominal defeat lest they rise and do greater damage to the rest of us. They attack all nations that are not Muslim, every western nation, China, India, Russia all suffer from Islamic terrorism.

Since overwhelming force will not defeat the Muslims unless we kill the overwhelming majority, let's talk about how we would go about killing every last one? You know that genocide is on the top of the tongue of many of the posters here, you know that this is the only way that such overwhelming force can possibly defeat such an irrational force.

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Practice Nonviolent Communication - wikiHow

Practice Nonviolent Communication - wikiHow

Read more!

"Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent" I

There are few characters in world literature as evil as Shakespeare's Richard III. Yet, to see his evil unfold we run the risk of assuming that the evil will manifest itself in words and gestures that are too easily discovered. Richard's personality and actions belie this easy perception. And that is, perhaps, the genius of Shakespeare's artistic rendering of this evil. In many ways, Richard is the paradigmatic evil modern man. His power machinations, while wholly Machiavellian, exhibit spiritual qualities that Shakespeare's study points to.

Gloucester: Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here
Clarence comes. -- Act I, Sc. 1

One can ask whether Richard is not simply a study of Machiavellian cynicism and vertu. Based mostly on the common understanding of Machiavelli's book, The Prince, this understanding sees the politician as a rapacious individual willing to go to any extreme to satiate his or her thirst for power. (I will not go into historigraphical studies that add a more nuanced reading of Machiavelli, especially his republican writings, as expatiated by Skinner and Pocock.)

I think there's much to the common-sense perception of Richard's evil. Its portrayal in art can be very powerful and chilling to see unfold. Yet, like much art, the freezing of evil in a moment or series of moments often exaggerates features of evil that make it grotesque and ultimately deceptive. As much fiction does, art can even sexify evil. This statement does not apply to fiction alone, though. Even news accounts can present evil in such a way that it takes on this attractive quality.

Simone Weil and Kierkegaard discuss this often overlooked tendency of literature. Without going into an analysis, I think Kierkegaard's statement about the "sympathetic antipathy" to the strange and weird makes sense. Writers can exploit this feature of the human psyche to varying degrees, depending on talent and ethical concerns. Kierkegaard himself uses the full panoply of fear and horror to create a spiritual space where the reader finds possibilities open up for different ethical and religious stances toward life.

Something of the horror that great artists can evoke is shown in the following speech of Richard III in Henry VI.



The entire production here is geared to heighten the terrifying aspects of the speech. While highly effective and aesthetically pleasing, the performance and production is so grotesque that it pulls one out of the ordinary in such a way that it is otherworldly. Obviously, this can be the purpose of art: to open up realms of possibility that give insight into our own and others' psyches.

Yet, the obverse of this type of production is that it makes evil or life in general so unreal that we cannot see evil in its mundane everydayness. This can go so far that, as Weil points out, evil becomes alluring and "sexy." From the Marquis de Sade to Anne Rice, the attraction of such artistic renditions obscures the ethical questions posed by the actions portrayed. Commenting on de Sade, for example, the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz noted that his de Sade's work is effectively a manual on criminality.

For his part, Georg Lukacs theorized that the reason for much of this failure in ethics is the result of artistic presentation that disregards sociological, historical, and philosophical questions. For Lukacs, the realistic novel addresses these deficiencies. Basing him or herself on an understanding of historical awareness, the novelist can bring in elements that undermine the tendency of art to spectacle and moral indifference.

I will not go into the theoretical aspects of these questions in the following sections. Instead, I will look at the opening scene from Shakespeare's Richard III, specifically his opening speech. I will first do so from within the context of these comments. I will then end with comments by Kierkegaard that places the psychological type of Richard as indicative of an aspect of modern capitalist false consciousness. Read more!

"Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent" II: Invisibility

The question about illusion and reality, the inside versus the outside of why a person acts morally or not goes back to Plato. In Republic, Glaucon--one of Socrates' questioners--asks the Greek wise man how we could ever know whether someone is really good. We can't really look into someone's soul--or whatever--after all, so how can we ever know that someone "means it" when they act justly? They might do something good, or apparently so, but that act could be part of a series of acts that end in something bad. After all, Hitler did bring Germany out of economic and social catastrophe, right?

Plato's question about the "really" good is further elaborated in the dialog when Glaucon asks about the nature of justice and suggests that if we could follow people "in imagination," we'd see that their motives were far from pure or sincere. Glaucon tells Socrates:

But as for the second point, that those who practise it do so unwillingly and from want of power to commit injustice--we shall be most likely to apprehend that if we entertain some such supposition as this in thought: [359c] if we grant to each, the just and the unjust, licence and power to do whatever he pleases, and then accompany them in imagination and see whither his desire will conduct each. We should then catch the just man in the very act of resorting to the same conduct as the unjust man because of the self-advantage which every creature by its nature pursues as a good, while by the convention of law1 it is forcibly diverted to paying honor to 'equality.' The license that I mean would be most nearly such as would result from supposing them to have the power [359d] which men say once came to the ancestor of Gyges the Lydian. -- Plato, Republic

The allusion to Gyges refers to a man who discovers a ring that makes him invisible. Glaucon notes that people--everyone, it is assumed--, once released from social conventions and laws, would exploit this situation and commit forbidden and immoral acts.

The myth about the ring of Gyges is a variant of the proverbial fly-on-the wall. Were we to become flies and observe others, what hypocrisy and dissimulation would we find? Wouldn't we want to visit Ms. Goody-two-shoe's apartment and see whether she's as good as she puts out in public? In a world with stories of church leaders and good husbands who turn out to be serial killers, the shadowland that most people inhabit when it comes to dealing with their passions, faults, fantasies, and frailties belies the idea that people can act purely and without self-interest.

The relationship with how art depicts reality is pertinent here. The artist can plumb the imagination and bring to light those secret passions that others might not wish to see exposed. Great artists like Shakespeare portray the dialectic between act and motive, and the disjunction between the two becomes great art in their hands. While the question is a favorite theme of aesthetic theoreticians and even of artists like Borges, the relationship that the question has to morality is often elided if not disregarded altogether. Borges, for example, often takes his Schopenhauerian aesthetics for granted and simply sees the metaphysical conundrum posed by reality and fiction as subsuming ethical questions in the aesthetic experience of terror and paradox.



Shakespeare's Richard III (Earl of Gloucester) seems to be a complete study in this disjunction between reality and illusion. Richard is the Magus of reality--the sleight-of-mind artist who can divert attention from his true intent and put a dagger in the ribs as your attention is diverted. He is a master psychologist and knows how to play the heart strings of gullibility and vanity, disgust and shame, pride and cowardice. Yet it is too simplistic to characterize Gloucester's actions in only utilitarian terms. I will argue later that a Kierkegaardian analysis provides more insight into this character's actions. In this regard, I hope to elicit a broader perspective on Gloucester's brand of evil than the utilitarian or even the Machiavellian vs. Christian framework allows.

There is a chilling scene in Ian McKellen's portrayal of Richard that brings the "looking into the mind" of evil to birth in the viewer in a powerful way. The beginning words of the play are staged in such a way that--unlike in Olivier's version for example--we are moved from an objective, public speech listening to Richard speak to himself in the public restroom. The final words of the speech are spoken by McKellen in front of the public bathroom mirror.

The idea that this should occur in a bathroom is a stroke of genius on the director's part, I suggest. It displaces the viewer from the grand and mighty festivities of the jet set, omni-powerful and beautiful in the prior scenes and relegates it to the most plebeian space that everyone recognizes. The place where many of our bodily functions are in full display in all their disgust and privacy, where our full humanity exposes itself to us in its mundane shame and animality, where we can't hide from ourselves, is a powerful image.

This links to many subthemes that Richard's own rage at his humanity play on. In an extraordinarily powerful way, we see Richard, a man who has seen human disgust and shame at work in his very existence, reveal himself in his true milieu. In the place where we dread to tread, where we have to face ourselves in all our nudity and animality, Richard sharpens his plan and his blade of bitterness gleams brightly.

I have written before about the theme of disgust, especially in relationship to Martha Nussbaum's book on that subject. One of her theses is that disgust originates in a primitive reaction to our own humanity or animal nature. While it might seem that Richard has in some way transcended this disgust at his own deformity, I will argue later that it his rage at his own physical defects that drives him to destroy not only others but himself. This analysis will eventuate in a reference to Kierkegaard's work, The Sickness Unto Death, especially his schematic on despair.

The scene in the bathroom displays another feature. It comes while Richard speaks to his own image. Then in a truly harrowing gesture, he looks behind his shoulder, finally recognizing the presence of the observer--us. For me, at least, this scene is harrowing because I was sucked into the film convention that gives us the illusion that we, the audience, see them but they do not see us. The short moment of recognition that we have been seen by the observed object is disconcerting to say the least.



This gesture of recognition on Gloucester's part: does it make us confidants or co-conspirators? Are we to witness evil take place to learn its secret machinations or to live out in fantasy those secret desires for vengeance we might all harbor? On a deeper level, are we Gloucester's confreres because we ourselves not only find shame in our secret deformities--whether physical, psychological, or social--but also seek to avenge them on a world and a power, nature, that has made us so?

Gloucester is the epitome of illusion--of performing evil while doing apparent good. The scene depicted here clues us into the secret of Gloucester's intent. Like the fly-on-the wall we will witness evil as it unfolds, confidant to its inner workings, geared in to its windings and turns as it maneuvers through the world. The question becomes, however, whether we simply watch Richard's bloody deeds as though they are just another instance of a monster or whether we find in ourselves those same desires and deception that motivate his vast power project of illusion.

As witnesses to this project, we must decide how much the illusion redoubles itself in our own imaginations. Do we let the acid of the picture as it is etched in our souls reveal those secret reservoirs of resentment and revenge that we nurture so secretly and often unconsciously?

The idea of a nation of voyeurs and spectators goes back to Plato. In his famous allegory of the Cave, Plato describes the uninitiated and ignorant masses as living lives of passive spectatorship in a world populated by shadows. Philosophy breaks the chains of this slavery and ultimately leads the seeker to see the Real. Simone Weil update the allegory in political terms, likening the slaves to modern day film goers undergoing indoctrination via propaganda.

It is debatable that Shakespeare had such intentions in mind in his use of the soliloquy. It is not simply a literary technique in his hands, however, and in Richard III we find it used to powerful psychological effect. The fact that we watch Richard's evil plans unfold, as though looking over his misshapen shoulder, makes us complicit in a way that expands Aristotle's notion of catharsis in a profoundly disturbing way.

Kierkegaard analyzed the spectator society in depth. Basing his analysis on sociological concepts, he sees the spectator as a phenomenon endemic to modern capitalist false consciousness. Kierkegaard sees the psychological foundations for this in the human propensity to identify with others and thereby form self-identity. In modern society, the result of this is envy and much of modern psychological resentment and other ethical and moral behavior originates in this envious viewing.

The idea that we can be invisible to others, thereby losing ourselves in a world where moral culpability is lost has many sources. For Kierkegaard, Richard III epitomizes the modern self-conscious ego in its violent ferocity rebelling against the facts of environmental and genetic givenness. The existential situation we all face, in all our fragility, drives us to seek anonymity and invisibility from the stare of others. We seek to cloak ourselves in a secret world of envious self-deceit.

Richard's self-consciousness of his faults and his rebellion against the facts of his physical and social condition is simply the condition of the modern human writ large. For Kierkegaard, this complex of psychological, social, moral, and political concerns is schematized as despair. In the following, I will expand on this concept and describe further how Richard's actions render despair in a prototypical manner. Read more!

"Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent" III: The Architecture of Despair

The idea of invisibility seems to be something primitive enough to the human psyche as to ask what it is that seeks to hide, from whom, and why. In the preceding sections, I noted that Shakespeare's Richard III exploits the chasm between what others see someone do and say and the underlying reasons or motives that might be impelling to do so. The notion of an interior space or thing existing apart from an external world has come under philosophical attack.

Without going into the details of this important debate, I will simply assume in the following that the chasm exists, in whatever way it does. In doing so, I will continue focusing on Gloucester, but this time from Kierkegaard's reflective psychology. This psychology breaks from the traditional notion of a separate entity that somehow exists apart from social, biological, and political forces active in human life.

[I]t is inconceivable that it has not already happened that by a generatio aequivoca [self-procreation] our generation has itself given birth to its hero, the demon, who ruthlessly puts on the dreadful theatrical piece that makes the whole generation laugh and forget that it is laughing at itself. Indeed, what other value does existence have than to be laughed at--when one has already attained the highest by the age of twenty. -- Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trns. Hongs, p. 101

Gloucester is a man eaten to the core by resentment and hatred of those whose image of him makes into a less-than-human stump of a man. Cursed by life itself with a deformity that moves others to laugh in secret, Gloucester marshals his formidable self-awareness and profound understanding of psychology to turn that comic effect he produces in others onto the laughers themselves. He attacks human hypocrisy and social convention, turning it on its head, gutting the seamy underbelly of self-deception and lies that people tell themselves.

Within the microcosm of the play, it is difficult to apply the ferocity of Gloucester's actions in their social, political, and individual dimensions. What is especially difficult is seeing how the individual act embodies these dimensions in such a way that we are for the most unconscious of their influence. Gloucester's self-consciousness can be frightening in this respect. Perhaps gaining insight from his position at the margins of society, as well as his being the brunt of jokes and ridicule, he

In some ways, Gloucester is the prototypical Shakespearean fool, a person who sees the hypocrisies and vanities of life and turns his insight into jokes and irony. While it is true that Gloucester laughs at existence, his immense Machiavellian skills and thirst for power turn his actions into a horrible and terrifying joke that would threaten to turn creation itself into a farce. He wants to harness that laughter and derision thrown at him throughout his life and turn it back onto others not simply as bon mots or fool's wit but siege engines undermining the foundations that support the very beliefs we tell use to organize and channel reality into easily understood concepts and values.

Something of the farce that Gloucester tries to make of life and the continuing joke he sees life as comes, I think, in the following scene depicting his death.



Gloucester has seen into the nothing, that abyss at the core of existence where all is allowed and nothing is real except the stand a human takes. It is Kierkegaard who has schematized these psychological processes. Contrary to much of western philosophy, Kierkegaard's analysis of self-formation in relationship to social, religious, and ideological constructs undermines the notion that these are somehow eternal. The self, or whatever it is that human consciousness of itself is to be called, is a task that finds no certainty in anything other than its own desire for or flight from the freedom to exist.

Gloucester demolishes the crutches and sophistry we depend on to keep ourselves from seeing that abyss or appropriating the responsibility to make ourselves who we are. For Kierkegaard, the tendency of most humans is to react in terror at the thought that the social conventions that support us are only provisional constructs. While we are attracted to this freedom, we also fear it and run as far away as we can in the opposite direction, grasping at every banister or jetsam and flotsam that might float our way to keep us from having to face this freedom. We then lose ourselves in innumerable ways in mindless and senseless behavior.

These remarks about Gloucester lead in a direction that some might find unexpected, at least from within the psychology of capitalism (more about this later) that Kierkegaard undertakes. That is, Kierkegaard takes this notion of absolute freedom as a preliminary stage in living an authentic life. Anything less is simply one or another form of self-deceit, according to Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard recognizes the genius that is Gloucester. Yet, as he is more than willing to admit, this genius is demonic. It is so not because it's a dumb or ignorant person who has no self-awareness. Instead, it is a demonic genius that is self-aware not only of its foibles but of the very freedom and power that gives it this self-awareness.

For Kierkegaard, humans are bio-psychic assemblages which can be constructed in varying degrees of adaptation to the social and physical environments. What brings these pieces together, so to speak, is a sense or awareness that the freedom to put them together resides in the person whose various components--the biological, historical, and physical processes--form not just the world outside but our own attitude to that world.

For Kierkegaard, this self-awareness of the various sides to what is to be human is called the self. It is a recognition and understanding of the relationship between the physical and psychological sides of human being. A key aspect of this awareness is the need to maintain a balance between these elements. They represent not only the very biological processes known from empirical study but also the values and beliefs that one builds up based on experiences of limitation and freedom, dream and reality, possibility and necessity. This self attempts to balance the various needs, desires and memories into a viable being in pursuit of happiness.

But the self is not simply a combination of the physical and psychological. There is also the very background against which this self acts and finds itself. For the various elements described above will lead only to a fragmented being without a guiding pattern, without the love and friendship that complete the whole. This pattern or guiding pattern is the other in whose face I find myself being seen and recognized for who I want to be and believe I am. Much like the android in the movie Blade Runner, the creature wishes to know its creator. For humans, these are family. When they are left, those we look to to acknowledge us and to whom we look to gain status and patterns of molding our behavior are friends and heroes.

The disrelationship of any of these elements causes despair. This notion is often associated with situations where we have no recourse to attaining something, whether that be safety, health, or goods. For Kierkegaard, however, the spiritual dimension of despair relates to the entire relationship humans form with their world, others, and themselves. Since the self is a relationship of various elements, internal and external, despair can occur at any level. People exhibit more and more despair and therefore suffer more the higher one attains consciousness of the factors comprising the self and the responsibility you have in coordinating them.

I will discuss the notion of an image and the role in plays in forming the self in the following section. This is significant especially in the context of political and historical factors that contribute to who we are. In the process, I hope to show how Gloucester exhibits that type of despair that is prototypical in a capitalist society. Read more!

"Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent" IVa: Despair and Tabula Rasa

The last section left open the question about how or why Gloucester might be in despair. Even were the schematic of anxiety and despair that Kierkegaard constructs true, whether Gloucester is in despair is highly questionable and counter-intuitive. Isn't he a dynamo of anger? Isn't he in constant motion to destroy and wreak havoc?

Granted, maybe, he acts like a man possessed by envy and hatred, even evil. His control of his circumstances and his manipulation of reality and illusion is immensely conscious and disturbing. But despair--doesn't despair mean someone who is the victim of circumstances rather than their master?

Laurence Olivier's portrayal of Gloucester emphasizes this world-domineering, Machiavellian Gloucester. In the following clip, you find the deformed Gloucester laying out his plan for assuming royal power in cold, almost clinical detachment. His passion rises to heaven but it is a the passionate outburst of a ravening objective beast that only humans can be.

Hence it is that there can be two forms of despair properly so called. If the human self had constituted itself, there could be a question only of one form, that of not willing to be one’s own self, of willing to get rid of oneself, but there would be no question of despairingly willing to be oneself. This formula [i.e. that the self is constituted by another] is the expression for the total dependence of the relation (the self namely), the expression for the fact that the self cannot of itself attain and remain in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only by relating itself to that [p]ower which constituted the whole relation. Indeed, so far is it from being true that this second form of despair (despair at willing to be one’s own self) denotes only a particular kind of despair, that on the contrary all despair can in the last analysis be reduced to this. If a man in despair is as he thinks conscious of his despair, ... and if by himself and by himself only he would abolish the despair, then by all the labor he expends he is only laboring himself deeper into a deeper despair. -- Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death¹

This notoriously difficult statement from Kierkegaard's pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, contains an algebraic description of the despair that Gloucester manifests. As Kierkegaard notes, we often assume that someone in despair is a victim. They suffer at the hands of external events. They cry out from the depths for help. Whether by their own decision or by accident, they suffer pain and for no fault of their own. They suffer passively.

Yet Kierkegaard also says that those who act to mold and shape events can be in despair. ² Counter-intuitively, it seems, a person in despair can indeed act from despair in a way that gives the impression, the illusion one could say, that they are in control of events. When I am in control I bring to bear the resources of the psyche to shape the world of things into a place where I find security and prosperity, shelter from mortality. The man of action, the usurper seems intensely in control and s/he is master of fortune, seducer of men and women, molder of history itself.

For sure, it's not uncommon to say that someone acts out of despair. If I face financial ruin, I might embezzle funds out of despair to save myself. Or I might kill myself to forestall further physical or psychological pain. This appears in Kierkegaard's quote above. Suicide is a way out for a self that is in disrelationship with the side of its social being, where it undergo the pain and suffering associated with social opprobrium.

Kierkegaard is keen to point out that it's the self--the process that relates the two sides of human being and attempts to balance them--that is in imbalance, out of whack. This being out of whack, though, occurs not simply because I am unrealistic by placing too much emphasis on imagined possibilities, for example, whereas my circumstances constrain and impose limitations. The imbalance occurs because the way that the self takes this fantastic being and relates to others outside my self in a fantastic way. And as long as I do so, I live in a fantasy world of my own creation.

The person considering suicide wants not just to be rid of their physiological being; they want to be rid of their self. In another place, Kierkegaard emphasizes that it is this self, what we have come to understand as our psychological side, that the suicide despairs over, not the physiological being per se. I despair of being the person I am, not who or what I want to be. I want to be happy but events overwhelm me. I want to be rich but I am poor. I want to be beautiful but I am not. Who I want to be, which ultimately means who I am, and the fact that I am not that person causes me to despair.

The monitoring and coordinating process, the self, can be conscious at various levels of awareness of those things that come into play to help me or derail me from being who I want to be. We can see this in the fact that things influence us in ways that we don't at first recognize. After these experiences we understand that we were not conscious of determining factors--whether psychological or external--things and their role in forming me.

After a crisis, for example, I see that I acted for reasons that were self-deceptive or short-sighted. While there are different levels or degrees of consciousness; while I can understand why I do what I do in varying degrees of rational and emotional clarity, I can never understand outside of space/time, as many scientists and philosophers trying to be scientists seem to imply we can. We cannot, contrary to della Miradola's ecstatic theo-philosophy become either angels or gods. This lack of ultimate distance is cause for despair. I realize that i do not have the control that i though I did in determining who I am.

We are always in time/space, always engrossed by the world, enmeshed in a play of various forces that encompass external and internal dimensions. Crises bring this inability to grasp the world in its entirety to the fore. In cases where these crises cause suffering or where what I thought might happen and what does actually occur clash, I find that the entity I call my self stands questioned to its core.

In cases of extreme crisis, where this rupture between self-understandings is most catastrophic, I find that I cannot abide the person I am or have become. I might therefore seek to be rid of the self that I am but don't want. The underlying assumption here is that there is a self that is given, a being that somehow exists before I was born. We are beings given, as noted, in biological, historical, and environmental factors.

We often forget about the givenness, the social, cultural, and other facts of our existence that determine how we think and act. The Enlightenment notion that I am born a blank slate, a tabula rasa, is so prevalent as an underlying assumption for how I relate to who and how I am that it informs what choices and decisions I can make in being who I am.

This conception of a self infinitely varied and changeable forms a foundation stone of the modern state and its cultural background. We grow up believing that all we have to do to be happy is to change ourselves, gain some means of self-transformation and thereby redefine myself, as the pop psychology so prevalent in consumer culture puts it.

In the context of Richard III, we see this notion of change and rebellion against the givenness in full play. Gloucester is a man who is misshapen from birth. Yet through intelligence, will, and imagination he has designed a plan to demolish all obstacles such as accidents of birth that stand in the way of his gaining the crown. He understands the variability of human nature, knows how to simulate love when he hates, feign sorrow when he exults over someone else's suffering, play the fool to distract from the knife that lays bare in his hand.

He will do anything and everything to attain power. Yet, if the preceding is correct, he is not simply an unleashed force of nature that does what it is naturally designed to do, as a Nietzschean might say, but is instead manifesting a state of being that is ultimately self-deceptive about itself.

In the next section, I will continue this discussion about despair, relating it to the Enlightenment notion of the tabula rasa and the politics of despair.

¹ The Lowrie translation capitalizes the word power; the Hong trns. does not. The non-capitalized version reflects the text. It is not obvious that Kierkegaard is necessarily speaking of God here, as the Lowrie upper case would imply. I say this, because Kierkegaard notes later that humans often identify as powers other entities that are not divine.

² The following remarks about active despair build on Hannay's exegesis of Sickness Unto Death. See, for example, the introduction to his own translation of that book.Back To Text Read more!

Underestimating the Xtians

Conventional wisdom of the talking heads is that Huckabee's win seems a fluke. Many of these commentators on the left, like Chris Matthews, say that unlike Iowa, the rest of the country has less evangelical voters. Therefore, Huckabee will not do as well and is probably just a one-hit wonder.



Chris Matthews laughed at Huckabee's lack of current affairs knowledge last night on MSNBC. I think Huckabee might have the last laugh here. For it seems that Matthews is as blind as a bat when it comes to understanding the breadth and depth of the evangelical population. For instance, just in April, the NYT reported:

Johnson and his fellow Christian right activists speak of "values voters," but most of these voters are evangelical Protestants. Evangelicals have a disproportionate part in what pollsters call the "God gap" between the two parties. They make up a quarter of the population—around 75 million people—and a far higher percentage of them are frequent churchgoers than are mainline Protestants and Catholics. Furthermore, the group as a whole has for a decade voted Republican in much greater proportion than the other two groups. In 2000, 68 percent of evangelicals voted for George Bush; in 2004, 78 percent of them did. Last summer, polls showed that the war in Iraq, corruption, and the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina had brought the evangelicals' approval ratings for Bush and the GOP down by twenty points in just two years. But on the last Election Day they turned out in their usual numbers, and over 70 percent of them voted for Republican congressional candidates. White evangelicals have, in other words, become the GOP's most reliable constituency, and they normally provide about a third of the Republican votes.

Where do people like Matthews think all of these people live? I imagine that he and others think they are distributed throuout backwoods and rural America, so-called Red America. It is my experience, though, that the evangelical movement is far and wide and includes urban areas as much as those traditionally believed by the Left to be "religious."

Perhaps someone has done more in-depth demographic analysis of the geographical distribution of evangelicals. I am open to correction and perhaps will do some research on it myself in the next few days.

Matthews and others like him seem to have no clue about Huckabee's appeal. I think Howard Fineman gets it, He even coined a phrase that I imagine he will begin using in his articles, :the politics of intimacy." Huckabee is a charming, disarming person in his interviews. He diverts attention away from polarizing stereotypes and runs hits at the center of the humanity of his questioners.

This is a new take and powerful tack on how to deal with the media and seems especially suited to media-centered coverage. For now, I will coin my own term for Huckabee's approach. He is the "Being There" candidate. Much like Chauncey Phillips in the novel and film of that name, he evokes a sense of sincerity and disingenuousness that belies cynicism so rampant among the media pundits.

Update via Washington Note: Not exactly an objective view but effective anti-Huckabee ad.

Read more!

Eviscerate the Beast and Discard Its Remnants in the Pit of Hell

The following words from Chalmers Johnson (in the midst of reviewing a book on the inteelectual apparatus leading up to the putsch that overthrew the US) deserve repeating:

There is, I believe, only one solution to the crisis we face. The American people must make the decision to dismantle both the empire that has been created in their name and the huge, still growing military establishment that undergirds it. It is a task at least comparable to that undertaken by the British government when, after World War II, it liquidated the British Empire. By doing so, Britain avoided the fate of the Roman Republic -- becoming a domestic tyranny and losing its democracy, as would have been required if it had continued to try to dominate much of the world by force.

Then again, wasn't it the British--trying to feel a little bit of empire in its stones/ovaries that contributed a bit to Bush's delusions of grandueur? be that as it may, Johnson's analysis is imp[ortant for the way it understands how deep the changes to the present system need to go. Read more!

Don't Say It's About! It's about the Oil...

As I wrote several years ago, the question of why the US is in Iraq is about oil. Though the many innocent and trusting faces of people don't wish to believe this, well... read Alan Greenspan or any other knowing clone. It is about the oil, was about the oil, and will continue to be about the oil. And if you think that Hillary Clinton or any other Democrat will leave Iraq for humanitarian reasons, you are barking up a dead tree.

I have been thinking that the Bushistas may indeed have won and that I and my paranoia about getting out of Iraq were simply self-delusive. Why I haven't had time to elucidate these inchoate intimations is another story. Needless to say, some wits and bright bulbs have beat me to the punch. They do see that Bush et al indeed have won their war, and (as Rupert Murdoch would say) at minimal cost to highly fungible resources.

Robert Holt writes (via Empire Burlesque):

Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.

This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.

Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.

It's not about the oil. It is the oil. Whatever that means. Read more!

Xtian-Fascism Awareness Week

I've been critical of Leiter on his views of Derrida and Foucault. But let's let bygones be bygones. He's got something going here with his idea of holding a Xtian-Fascism Awareness Week in response to David "I Lied Before the PA Legislature" Horowitz's proposed plan for an Islamo-Fascism week.

Leiter quotes from an excellent article by Chris Hedges--whose work I have linked to several times--that sums up perfectly what it is that a Xtian-Fascist represents. In the article Hedges quotes a Harvard professor of his who worked with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and Albert Schweitzer to undermine the Nazi terror machine. Hedges writes:

Adams understood that totalitarian movements are built out of deep personal and economic despair. He warned that the flight of manufacturing jobs, the impoverishment of the American working class, the physical obliteration of communities in the vast, soulless exurbs and decaying Rust Belt, were swiftly deforming our society. The current assault on the middle class, which now lives in a world in which anything that can be put on software can be outsourced, would have terrified him. The stories that many in this movement told me over the past two years as I worked on "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" were stories of this failure -- personal, communal and often economic. This despair, Adams said, would empower dangerous dreamers -- those who today bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through violent apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old, sinful world that has failed many Americans.

These Christian utopians promise to replace this internal and external emptiness with a mythical world where time stops and all problems are solved. The mounting despair rippling across the United States, one I witnessed repeatedly as I traveled the country, remains unaddressed by the Democratic Party, which has abandoned the working class, like its Republican counterpart, for massive corporate funding.

I bet you never heard about this in your history classes. Nor will you ever hear about in the so-called free press. Read more!

Dirty Secrets (n): A Continuing Laundry List

If you want to know what's wrong with the media coverage of this so-caled war, you can't do worse than look at this story. I posted on the subject almost two years ago. Only today, however, have I heard anything about the subject, and it comes from NPR. Well, at least they have the courage (I guess) to cover a story that's been out there for two years.

Then there's the statistic that makes the soul reel and the gorge rise in bitter gall: over 28% of US women soldiers report incidents of sexual misconduct, mostly rape. That's from their own comrade in arms. Where do you start when it comes to this kind of hypocrisy?

NPR reports:

A 2003 survey of women using the Veterans Administration health care system reports that 28 percent experienced at least one sexual assault during military service.

I was just thinking about this last night. If there's one thing I hate it's a rapist. Someone who preys on women and takes advantage of them. I still remember scenes from Romero where the young nun is taken out and gang raped and then shot and left dead in the garbage dump. The rape camps of the former Yugoslavia have made their way into my poems and nightmares. The stories that Ken Knange did on the women raped in civil war seared my soul.

I have n irony for this kind of thing. I have no sarcasm left. This either strikes too close to home or I am simply sick of the bestiality that people breed in their souls. And my most lasting bile will be spit in the direction of the men and women who put our daughters and loved ones in these circumstances.

You want to know what betrayal is, Rex Judas? It is that wherein you send people to war and have your shining lies betray them with scars that will never die, never fade, because they are invisible. Read more!

The Dead Will Laugh George Bush to Hell: The Historian Reviews the Lie that Is Bush's Iraq

Martin van Creveld likes to tell it like it is. He said Bush's invasion of Iraq was the worst military decision in 2,000 years and now he says the US and the world can live with a nuclear Iran. As pinpointed repeatedly thruout this blog, this view only echoes expert assessments that a nuclear Iran threatening world peace is a nightmare propagated by people who want Iranian oil fields. The US Army war College itself has written extensively about this issue.

Creveld--an Israeli military historian whom some consider the greatest war historian alive--echoes these views when he writes:

Since 1945 hardly one year has gone by in which some voices — mainly American ones concerned about preserving Washington’s monopoly over nuclear weapons to the greatest extent possible — did not decry the terrible consequences that would follow if additional countries went nuclear. So far, not one of those warnings has come true. To the contrary: in every place where nuclear weapons were introduced, large-scale wars between their owners have disappeared.

General John Abizaid, the former commander of United States Central Command, is only the latest in a long list of experts to argue that the world can live with a nuclear Iran. Their views deserve to be carefully considered, lest Ahmadinejad’s fear-driven posturing cause anybody to do something stupid.

But like everything else in this environment of PR and propaganda, such informed and rational views may go unheeded until it is too late.

There's a tinge in Creveld's opposition to the Israel/US position vis a vis Iran. They come out in a statement like the following:

And behind Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stands President Bush — the same President Bush who four years ago needed no reason at all to take on Iran’s neighbor to the west and demolish it to the point where it may never rise again.

For a historian who knows the way words can deceive, such a statement is a big deal coming from such an eminent historian.

Creveld's comments should be seen as a commentary on the following description provided by journalist Nir Rosen concerning the true reality of post-Bush Iraq:

What will happen to Iraq? Think Mogadishu, small warlords controlling various neighborhoods, militias preying on those left behind, more powerful warlords controlling areas with resources, such as oil fields, ports, and lucrative pilgrimage routes and shrines. Irredentist Sunni militias will attempt to retake their lost land, but they will be pushed into the Anbar Province, Jordan, and Syria, where they may link up with local Islamist militants to destabilize Amman and Damascus. Some will look to fight elsewhere; unable to continue the jihad in Iraq they will find common cause with Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and others alienated from their societies and hateful of Shias. The new rump Shia statelet, including Baghdad and the South, will be quarantined by the Sunni states in the region and pushed inexorably into Iranian hands whether Shia Iraqis want this or not. It will be isolated and radicalized, and Shia militias loyal to Muqtada al Sadr, Abdul Aziz al Hakim, Muhamad al Yaqubi, and others will battle for power.

There is no “surge.” At best it can be called an ooze, a slow increase of American occupying forces by a mere 15 percent, consisting of few new soldiers and many whose terms of service have been merely extended. Yet the U.S. has doubled the size of its mission, announcing it will also take on the Shia militias as well as the Sunni ones. On the ground, that means American soldiers secure areas and then hand them over to Iraqi security forces who impose a reign of terror on the inhabitants. In the Iraqi civil war the army and police are not the solution; they are combatants, fighting on behalf of Shia-sectarian Islamist parties. The vaunted efforts to train Iraqi security forces have merely trained better death squads. The Americans continue to imprison thousands of Iraqis, and kill many others. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations that would normally demand that the United States comply with international law and hand over imprisoned Iraqis to the “sovereign” Iraqi government are not doing so, knowing that their treatment at the hands of the government would be far worse than anything they would endure while in American captivity. The occupation is not benign. It is profoundly painful, humiliating, and lethal.

All hail Rex Judas. All hail hell and the poor souls George Bush will hear laughing at him on his way to hell.

UpdateWar and Piece recently noted that HaAretz reports that Israeli Foreign Minister Livni writes:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.

The article also reveals for the first time a document Livni prepared and sent to Olmert a few months after the Second Lebanon War proposing a new division of labor between the two. "Enclosed is a proposal for work procedures between us, with the aim of providing an answer to Israel's strategic needs and facilitating early planning and the formulation of coordinated Israeli positions ... within the framework of cooperative relations, full transparency and continuous mutual updates," wrote Livni. ...

Explain to me again why the US press does not report these things. Read more!