The Neurotic Misery of Islamic Civilization

Saturday

---

A Psychodynamic Account of Contemporary

Islam and its Place in Civilizational Seriation

---

Some time ago in From Neurotic Misery to Ordinary Human Unhappiness I discussed a famous Freud quote. The quote runs as follows:

…much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.

After this, in Miserable and Unhappy Civilizations, I suggested that Freud’s distinction between neurotic misery and ordinary human unhappiness can be applied not only to individuals but also to social wholes. Thus it makes sense to speak of neurotically miserable civilizations as compared to civilizations possessing merely ordinary levels of human unhappiness.

Then I went yet further afield in Agriculture and the Macabre, in which I tried to make the case the agricultural civilization is particularly vulnerable to neurotic misery. While industrial-technological civilization certainly has its problems and its limitations, whatever may be said of it, it is not macabre and retrospective in the way that agricultural civilization is.

I have been even more specific in identifying the religious wars of Early Modern Europe (also corresponding with the witch craze) as the nadir of Western civilization and as a paradigm case of a civilization in the grip of neurotic misery. Eventually Western civilization grew out of its neurotic misery, although not without an unprecedented level of carnage, and today Western civilization is a fine representative of ordinary human unhappiness as the basis for civilization. Not very exciting, but it’s better than the alternative.

Islam, as an historical phenomenon, is several hundred years behind Christianity in its development. I do not intend this statement to in any way imply that there is anything intrinsic to Islam that keeps its development behind that of Christendom, but there is the historical fact that, of these two religious traditions of the masses, Islam was promulgated six hundred years later than Christianity. Christianity had already been at its internecine squabbles for hundreds of years when Mohammad performed the Hijra to Medina to found the first Muslim community.

The strife we see today in Islam is the sign of a civilization — Islamic civilization — in the grip of neurotic misery. This situation did not come about suddenly, and it is not going to go away suddenly. It is a narrative that must unfold over a period of hundreds of years, and, as I recently wrote in Why tyranny always fails but democracy does not always prevail, Homo non facit saltum — Man makes no leaps. All development is evolutionary.

The trend toward the neurotic misery of Islamic civilization has been developing for quite some time. Charles Doughty, who traveled through Arab lands in the nineteenth century, frequently comments on the fanaticism of his hosts, as, for example, in this passage:

“The high sententious fantasy of ignorant Arabs, the same that will not trust the heart of man, is full of infantile credulity in all religious matter; and already the young religionist was rolling the sentiment of divine mission in his unquiet spirit.”

Charles Montagu Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Volume 1, Cambridge, 1888, p. 95

And this…

“I wondered with a secret horror at the fiend-like malice of these fanatical beduins, with whom no keeping touch nor truth of honourable life, no performance of good offices, might win the least favor from the dreary, inhuman, and for our sins, inveterate dotage of their bloodguilty religion. But I had eaten of their cheer, and might sleep among wolves.”

Op. cit., p. 502

Such passages are most unwelcome today, and many would regard them as an embarrassment better forgotten, but I suspect that Charles Doughty knew a great deal more about Arabia than many an Arabist today. Rather than taking such remarks as a sign of Doughty’s racism, we might take them in historical context as intimations of what was to come. And historical context is crucial here, since precisely the same thing would no doubt have been in found in Christendom in a parallel historical context. I have no doubt that if a worldly and learned Muslim visited Europe one or two hundred years before Europe’s religious wars, he would have found much the same thing. In fact, Montesquieu depicted exactly this after Europe’s neurotic misery in his epistolary novel The Persian Letters.

A recent feature in Foreign Policy magazine, It’s Not About Us by Christian Caryl (20 February 2013) about intra-Islamic relations, and especially the split between Sunni and Shia branches of Islam, is an exposition of the extent to which Islam is as much at war with itself as with the infidel — exactly like Christendom during its period of neurotic misery. It is well known that militant Jihadis sympathetic to Al Qaeda tend to be Sunni, while the Persians and minority communities throughout the Arab world are Shia, and that there are radical elements on both sides of this divide who are vying to be recognized as the vanguard to militant Islam in the contemporary world. These sectarian divides within Islam frequently correspond to divisions in political power and economic influence, making the religious quarrel indistinguishable from broader social conflicts (again, like early modern Europe). And why should social groups contest with each other to be recognized as the vanguard of Islamic radicalism? Because there is a social consensus that radical Islamism is the telos of civilization.

Just as there were many sane and rational men who lived through Christendom’s neurotic misery (Michel de Montaigne comes to mind, for example), so too there are many sane and rational Muslims in our age of Islam’s neurotic misery — but it would be dishonest to pretend that the exceptions to the rule are anything other than exceptions. When almost everyone agreed that “spectral evidence’ could be admitted in the trials of individuals accused of witchcraft, we must acknowledge that there existed at that time a social consensus that this is what constituted “justice.” And so, too, today, when polls reveal that a majority of Muslims will not condemn atrocities and acts of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam and Jihad, we must acknowledge that there is a social consensus that such acts are widely considered to be permissible, if not encouraged — no matter the reasonable few who are rightly horrified.

I have learned that when talking about the scales of history that apply to civilization and big history that one must go out of one’s way to emphasize that these are not events or movements that can be observed in a single human lifetime. Christianity’s buildup to its own neurotic misery required hundreds and hundreds of years of development; the actual period of neurotic misery lasted as much as two centuries, and the whole episode is still, hundreds of years later, being put behind us. It doesn’t matter how much you might want things to be tied up neatly in your lifetime — if you’re going to discuss these great forces that shape civilizations, you have to get used to the idea that it’s not like observing the life cycles of fruit flies.

Astronomers, who similarly work on very long time scales, have the same difficulty in explaining themselves and getting others to understand in a visceral sense the elapse of eons. The astronomer reconstructs the dynamic history of a universe that seems, to us, to be standing still, by looking in all different directions in the sky and observing different kinds of celestial bodies at different stages of development. The astronomer must then put all these fragments of cosmological history together on one large canvas that he will never himself see in a lifetime, but which he sees in his mind’s eye.

When archaeologists similarly survey different sites and find pottery in different stages of development in different places, they try to put it all together with the movements of ancient peoples. This assembly of a structure in time is called seriation. The astronomer engages in cosmological seriation. (The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram is the seriation of stellar evolution.) The student of civilization and of big history, engages in civilizational seriation.

We observe but a single slice of time — the present — and from this single slice of time we attempt to reconstruct the whole of the continuum of time. Ultimately, this is a project of temporal seriation.

The limited temporal horizon of most contemporary commentators on political strife makes it impossible to seem the larger patterns revealed by civilizational and temporal seriation, and so they make elementary errors of historiography. And not only in politics, but in every aspect of civilization. I have repeatedly tried to point out the misunderstandings in the media of China’s “peaceful rise,” which is really China’s industrial revolution.

Have I repeated myself a sufficient number of time to make my point? I doubt it. But i will keep at it, reminding the reader at every turn that the perspective of Big History cannot be assimilated to the personal experience of time, and that one must pursue a strategy of temporal seriation to see larger patterns that do not reveal themselves to the eye.

One of these larger patterns is the pattern of the development of religion as a mass social phenomenon, and among mass religions one pattern is that of passing through a stage of neurotic misery on the way to the mature expression of religion within a civilization that does not cripple that civilization.

Religion begins with something as small and as personal as a superstition or a ritual observance. Eventually it becomes a system of mythology, and once the system of mythology is systematically integrated with the state structures of agricultural civilization religion becomes a principle of social order and a locus of conflict. This conflict must play itself out until civilization gropes its way toward a social principle consistent with the change and diversity that makes a state successful in an age of industrialized economies. All of this takes time — much more time than any one individual can observe in a lifetime. (There, I’ve repeated myself again.)

The neurotic misery of Islam will persist for hundreds of years, as the neurotic misery of Christendom persisted for hundreds of years. There are perhaps ways to ease the transition and lessen the suffering, but we cannot simply leap over this unpleasantness. It must be worked on in real time, just as a patient on the psychiatrist’s couch must work his way through painful early memories before he can simply be unhappy instead of being neurotically or hysterically miserable.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Philosophy and drama, and a new philosophical play in 2013

Monday

---

---

Dear Readers,

It is a privilege and a pleasure for me to offer you the guest post below from William Lyons. Mr. Lyons will be having his new play about Socrates produced in London next summer; previously he had a play about Wittgenstein produced. I’m very pleased to be able to give you Mr. Lyon’s reflections on philosophy and drama.

Happy New Year!

Nick Nielsen

---

There will always be those who will immediately point out that philosophy and drama never go well together, no matter what form the conjunction takes. While there have been over the history of philosophy many famous philosophical dialogues, written by such great philosophers as Plato, Anselm, Berkeley and Hume, they remain just that, dialogues not drama, just talking heads. Talking heads run an acute risk of being acutely boring for any audience, especially if the heads are talking philosophy. Certainly it is true that a number of classical scholars have suggested that Plato’s dialogues were performed as live dramas at some of the great Athenian dramatic festivals such as the City Dionysia. In the final analysis, however one looks at it, dialogues will always be just that, people talking. So, even if I managed to persuade some artistic director to stage one, I myself, a writer of philosophical plays, have no desire to bore a theatre audience with yet another philosophical dialogue.

Anyone interested in French cinema will be used to characters in films discussing Plato or Descartes or Voltaire or Sartre in some café that resembles the Parisian intellectuals’ Café de Flore or the Café Les Deux Magots. But these films are not really philosophical films but films that display some character’s sophistication by having him or her talk about the views of some famous philosophers. More truly philosophical are those plays by the French Existentialists, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus which not merely often featured philosophers as characters in a play but explored philosophical themes. The French Théatre de l’Absurde, which had an influence on Beckett, also had Existentialist themes at its core – the non‐existence of God, the denial of an after‐life, the repudiation of objective moral values and so, in consequence, the absurdity of life.

My starting point is different. An apt alternative title for what I am trying to achieve might be “the drama of a genuinely philosophical life”. Thus my attempt, in my initial trilogy of plays, at making the connection between philosophy and drama is focused particularly on philosophers themselves, on their philosophical life and the difficulties in leading it. I’m interested in how a philosopher, at least one worthy of the name, goes about his or her business. In particular I’m interested in how a philosopher functions in a world where the core philosophical virtues of intellectual integrity, moral courage, and honesty are generally ignored. Thus I’ve been interested in those philosophers who conspicuously lived by their philosophical beliefs when this was not an easy thing to do, and obversely in those philosophers who, while professing certain philosophical beliefs, conspicuously separated those beliefs from their ordinary lives. In writing this sort of drama I have as an additional aim a desire to draw philosophy to the attention of the “ordinary person” who would not ordinarily come across philosophy during his or her life much less engage with it. I fancy that displaying the philosophical life, or philosophy as incarnated in the life of some philosopher, may well be a good way to do this.

Given this approach, the big question is how can one generate philosophical drama about a philosopher that is true to his or her core ideas but is also alive and engaging? A philosopher is famous mainly because of some core texts of which he or she is the author. But philosophy books are notoriously complex and difficult texts. So in dramatizing the life of a particular philosopher, the temptation is to avoid the philosophy and concentrate instead on the more sensational events, if any, in the philosopher’s life. The film “Iris”, for example, is a brilliant piece of film‐making about the novelist and philosopher, Iris Murdoch. But the film is about Iris Murdoch’s relations with her husband, the literary critic John Bayley, and especially about the tensions in that relationship caused by Iris’s gradual descent into the cognitive darkness of Alzheimer’s disease. A viewer gets little or no sense that Iris was a famous novelist nor is provided with any clues about her philosophical ideas or ideals.

Drama involves focusing on the events in people’s lives. If the life in question is that of a philosopher, it seems that one way forward is for a dramatist to be interested in how at least some of those events were shaped by the philosopher’s ideas. A convincing interweaving of the life and thought of a philosopher is possible, particularly in the case of philosophers, like Socrates and Wittgenstein, who lived their philosophy in a profound way. So I have written plays about both Socrates and Wittgenstein. I have also written a play about the relationship between the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. These two also manifested their philosophical views in their lives, though it is arguable that Heidegger spent considerable time and energy denying this. In the course of the post‐war defence of his actions during the Nazi era in Germany, he suggested that philosophy, or at least his philosophy, should be separated from a philosopher’s life. In the play this attitude is contrasted with that of Hannah Arendt whose philosophy was undeniably shaped by her experiences during that same period of history and clearly acknowledged by her as such.

While my play about Heidegger and Arendt is yet to be staged, my play about Wittgenstein, “Wittgenstein — The Crooked Roads”, had its world premiére and subsequent performances in April-May 2011 at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London. At present I am engaged in the pre‐production planning for the world premiére and subsequent performances of my play about Socrates, “Socrates and his Clouds”, at the Jermyn Street Theatre in central London, 3^rd June – 22^nd June 2013. So, as an example of how I go about writing a “theatre of thought” or “theatre of thinkers” drama, let me say something about this play, in particular something about its inspiration, ideas and form.

Socrates is a central figure in the history of Western philosophy and thereby an iconic figure in Western civilization. While there is not even one piece of philosophical writing published under his own name, he appears to have been such a memorable and successful teacher of philosophy that he was written about by contemporaries such as Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes, and, some centuries later, he is a central figure in Diogenes Laertius’s “Lives and Opinions of the Philosophers”. What draws authors to Socrates is the single‐minded intensity, integrity and dialectical force of his enquiry into the nature of the virtues, the ideals of education, the best way to organize a society and above all the best way for an individual to live his or her own life. He is the philosophers’ philosopher as well as the ordinary person’s, or ordinary educated person’s, ideal of a philosopher. He is the initial paradigm in Western culture of what a philosopher should be like.

But there have been many plays written about Socrates, almost all of them concentrating on his trial and conviction on the twin charges of corrupting the youth and of impiety or belittling the traditional religion, and so in turn on his subsequent death sentence and execution by poisoning. So I decided to avoid going down that well‐trodden path. This led me to look at Aristophanes’ famous debunking of Socrates in his play “Clouds”. This is a powerful piece of what has subsequently come to be called “Old Comedy” or “Comedy of Ideas”. Indeed this form of serious farce was invented by Aristophanes. Some critics have suggested that his depiction in the “Clouds” of Socrates as a sophistic charlatan and dithering buffoon seriously undermined Socrates’ defence in his trial before the democratic court of 501 male citizens in 399 b.c. I decided to give a different account of Socrates as teacher of philosophy but at the same time not to neglect the wit and fun of serious comedy. So “Socrates and his Clouds” is my attempt to revive “Old Comedy” or “Comedy of Ideas” with, of course, as the title implies, much homage to the master himself, Aristophanes. But, among other things, I substitute someone more like the witty, wry and wise Socrates of Plato’s dialogues for the buffoon of Aristophanes. I depict Socrates as aged 70, just before he is indicted for his crimes of corrupting the youth and impiety but fully conscious of the fact that his enemies are closing in on him. I borrow some of the characters from Aristophanes’ “Clouds” and some of the plot. But the text is otherwise completely new and original. I turn the play into a serious‐comedy about the ever‐fraught father‐son relationship, the nature of education, the place of religion in a society, the role of reason, and the perennial problem about how one should live one’s life.

The theatre company producing the play is a Greek one so that, whether intentionally or not, the production is bound to be imbued with an appropriately Greek flavour. Perhaps I should describe the company as Anglo‐Greek as most of those involved in it are young Greeks or Cypriots now living in London. This Anglo‐Greek company, called The Meddlers Theatre Company, is led by Melina Theocharidou. She is a Cypriot Greek who studied for an arts degree in Nicosia, then studied drama at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London), King’s College London, the Athinais Theatre in Athens and, as a summer intern, at the Lincoln Center Theater Directors’ Lab in New York (where she and fellow interns work‐shopped “Socrates and his Clouds” in 2012). The designer of the set and costumes is in the hands of Katerina Angelopoulou, daughter of the late great Greek film director, Theo Angelopoulos, on whose last films she worked. She is also an award‐winning theatre designer in her own right. As there is in the play a singing and dancing Greek Chorus of street buskers who might also be, it seems, The Fates, so there are music directors. These are also Greek — Olivios Karaolides (composition) and Constantine Andronikou (singing).

That the production will have a pronounced Greek flavour seems to me to be timely and apt. Over the last year and a half Greece has being endlessly criticized and belittled by the world’s press. Through its focus on Socrates, I hope that this Greek production will remind us of the fact that, since the golden age of Athenian civilization, Greece has been the source of so many of the great aspects of our culture.

The theatre where the production will be staged is the Jermyn Street Theatre in central London, an outfield baseball throw from Piccadilly Circus. It is a small intimate studio theatre, seating c. 75 persons grouped around three sides of the stage area. In short it is very audience friendly. The theatre was named as the Fringe Theatre of the Year 2012 and has an acclaimed artistic director, Antony Biggs, as well as an experienced and dedicated staff.

What I have not yet mentioned is the dispiriting and wearying work of trying to raise sufficient sponsorship for this production. Because sponsorship for drama from the British Arts Council has been decimated, so few theatres now receive support from it, so that theatre rental costs have climbed alarmingly. Fringe theatre in Britain, the home of new writing, has rarely received much commercial sponsorship as commercial sponsors tend to support sporting events or pop concerts which gain wide tv coverage and so provide prime advertising time for them. As the life of an actor is always financially fragile, we would also like to pay our cast basic Equity rates of pay. So if there are any kind souls out there, who love theatre or philosophy, or both, and would love to help sponsor the London production of “Socrates and his Clouds”, please contact me (at wlyons@tcd.ie). I should also make clear that I myself will neither be asking for nor accepting any form of fee, royalty or even expenses.

William Lyons.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

The Re-Proletarianization of the Workforce

Saturday

---

Was the rise of the middle class

a temporary aberration of industrial capitalism?

---

In several posts I have argued that the view that Marx may be dismissed because the end of the Cold War “proved” that capitalism has defeated communism (a thesis that might also be identified with Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis) is mistaken. I am not a Marxist sentimentalist, who, like many on the left today, needs to believe in Marx, including that which has been shown to be manifestly false or inadequate, but the point I want to make has nothing to do with a sentimental connection to Marxist thought. To twist the world around so that it either agrees perfectly with Marx or utterly overthrows Marx is to completely miss the point. What is the point? The point is to find that which is of perennial value in any first rate thinker.

Here are some of the posts in which I have addressed this question:

● Globalization and Marxism

● The Continuing Relevance of Marx

● The Extinction of the External Proletariat

● Marxist Easchatology

My argument in these posts has been that, since the industrial revolution is still unfolding, it is not yet the case, nor has it yet been the case in global history, that the economy of the entire world has been industrialized — a condition that I have called industrialization at totality. Therefore the predictions of Marx that, once industrialization had run its course, consolidations within industry would concentrate wealth at the top and gradually tend to immiserate the proletariat until the proletariat was better off overthrowing the few at the top and taking over industry for themselves, still remain as predictions that could be proved to be true by subsequent historical events.

We are now witnessing the extension of the industrial revolution to those parts of the world that were called the “Third World” during the latter part of the twentieth century. China and India are rapidly industrializing, and it is changing the overall structure of the world economy. It was just reported in the past week that, by 2030, China’s economy will be the largest on the planet (though not by a per capita measure). In the later twenty-first century, Asia will consolidate its industrialization while Africa will be well on its way to industrialization. Sometime in the twenty-second century we may see the entire world consisting of industrialized nation-states in which subsistence farming simply no longer exists.

In this scenario of global industrialization as I have outlined it above, it is likely that the living standards of peoples all over the world will have been greatly improved, and this flies in the face of the Marxist prediction of immiserization. If this is the case, there will be no incentive for worldwide proletarian revolution, and then at that time Marx will have been proved wrong. But the convergence of the world entire upon industrialization is only the beginning of the story.

We are now seeing in the advanced industrialized economies what industrialized capitalism looks like in its senescence, and what it looks like, unfortunately, is macro-parasitism in the form of crony capitalism. Those who are in a position of influence with respect to the privileged elites of industrialized nation-states shamelessly use their influence to obtain favorable circumstances for themselves and their cronies in industry. Thus while the initial stage of global industrialization will likely bring significantly higher living standards to the masses, if this system is allowed to develop globally as it has developed in North America and Western Europe — and I see no reason why it should not do so — what we will see one or two hundred years after the consolidation of global industrialization is a global regime of crony capitalism every bit as egregious as Marx predicted.

This is a development that we should all find worrying. We are in danger of creating a society as backward and as retrograde as feudalism at its worst, only feudalism with the instruments of industrialized technology at its command — something that Winston Churchill might well have called, “the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

While part of this development is due to blind forces acting within the economy, part of it is a policy choice that has been knowingly pursued by those in a position of political power. Of course, policy choices can, in turn, be the result of blind political forces, in contradistinction to the blind economic forces that act directly upon the economy, but the result is the same. When political organization careens thoughtlessly from one crisis to the next, never acting but only reacting to the forces to which it is subject, this is an abject dereliction of political responsibility by those placed in a position that gives them the opportunity to do something other than merely react to pressure.

In previous posts such as Celebrating the American Laborer and The Genealogy of Labor I have pointed out how the so-called “middle class” has been fetishized in American political thought, but even as it is fetishized it is being reduced to insignificance by the economic and political forces mentioned above. And because of the ability of large sections of the population to engage in economic self-deception (of the kind I described in Progress, Stagnation, and Retrogression), we might continue to frame ourselves as a “middle class society” for decades even while the middle class is disappearing.

So I, too, risk appearing as just another commentator bemoaning the loss of the middle class in the US, so that what I say is very likely to be drowned in the background noise of economic complaint. But the problem is real, and it is worse than we suppose. It is bad enough that in the advanced industrialized nation-states we could be said to be witnessing the re-proletarianization of the workforce. What is a proletariat? The word “proletariat” comes from the Latin prōlētārius, the lowest class of Roman citizens. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a proletariat as, “Wage earners collectively, esp. those who have no capital and who depend for subsistence on their daily labour” and “The lowest class in society; the poor, the masses.”

I have observed that absolutely no one today wants to be called a proletariat, and because of the economic self-deception that I described in Progress, Stagnation, and Retrogression it is entirely possible to be a proletariat for all intents and purposes while denying that one is such a thing — or even that there is such a thing. This is the opposite of class-consciousness: it is class unconsciousness. So if it is part of orthodox Marxist doctrine that class consciousness will emerge with the growth of the proletariat, then in this I think Marx was dead wrong. But if this sad scenario comes to pass, class unconsciousness will be sufficient, because we know from Freud that the unconscious can manifest itself in inconvenient forms, such as neuroses. We should expect to see, then, social neuroses — the sort of thing one would expect from neurotically miserable civilizations.

The proletariat is an industrial serf — the peasant of the factory system — and a serf or a peasant feels little or no connection to the social order of which we forms the lowest tier. This is a problem. If those whose work makes industrial-technological civilization function come to realize that they have no stake in this civilization, they will do nothing to sustain it, nothing to maintain it, nothing to preserve it if it is in danger. Thus the re-proletarianization of the workforce is potentially a profound source of existential risk — the risk of flawed realization.

It has been argued that a society must get its system of rewards more or less right if it is going to incentivize productive and innovative behaviors, and this is the argument that is used to defend stock options with an up side and no down side, to defend disproportionately large executive pay packages, and in general to defend every method that the privileged employ to milk the system for their own exclusive benefit. That these are spectacularly self-serving arguments made by the shills of the privileged class has not stopped them from being made — repeatedly.

But there are two sides to the incentive system: capital and labor, and labor requires its incentives no less than does capital. Some interesting results in experimental economics in scenarios designed by game theorists give us the precise counter-argument to the incentive system argument as used to defend the absence of upper bounds to elite compensation. One such game involves giving a certain amount of money to player A with the instruction that Player A must share the money with Player B. If player B accepts the proposed allocations of shares, both players get to keep the money; if player B rejects the allocation of shares, neither player gets anything. When such experiments are run, most offers made by player A are for a 50/50 split, and these offers are almost always accepted. When player A offers an allocation that disproportionately advantages player A, like a 90/10 split favoring player A, such allocations are almost always rejected. In other words, player B would usually rather get nothing than see player A get almost everything.

This is an ominous result for contemporary economics in the advanced industrialized nation-states, because the gradual convergence upon a “winner take all” incentive system is pushing the rewards system in the direction of giving the privileged classes almost everything while giving the unprivileged masses very little of what is available over all. Now we know from game theory and experimental economics that players almost always refuse such a deal when it confronts them in an explicit form.

It is no leap from this result to get to the point that the less privileged working classes who make the economies of advanced industrialized nation-states operate, when they fully realize that the deal they are getting is so disproportionately small, that they would prefer nothing at all to allowing the other player in the game to get almost everything. Of course, the masses are slow to realize this, and the elite classes who also operate the mass media are in no hurry to explain this to the masses. But we cannot count on a system of radically disproportionate rewards to last indefinitely.

If real, substantive, systematic, and effective measures are not taken to approach a more equal distribution of the rewards of industrial-technological civilization, Marx will be proved right in the long term. If those who are the primary producers of this wealth do not share in the wealth, they will see no reason to continue to cooperate in the production of wealth in which they do not share.

Of course, a lot can happen in the two to three hundred years it could take for global industrialization to consolidate its position and then to reach the sad state of crony capitalism now seen primarily in only the most mature industrialized nation-states. Unprecedented and unpredictable historical developments of many different forms could hold off global industrialization or direct it into unexpected channels. In such cases, the proof or disproof of Marx may have to wait even longer.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

The Zero Hour Thesis

Thursday

---

What happens after the end of history?

Zero hour arrives…

---

If history is defined in terms of ideological struggle, and the ideological struggles that defined the modern period of Western history ended with the end of the Cold War, then we are living today after the end of history.

One of the paradoxes we have witnessed along with the death knell of history is that the only political ideology that supposedly remains in the wake of hundreds of years of bitter ideological conflict — what Fukuyama identified as liberal democracy — has few friends, and fewer yet true believers.

I invite the reader to go out on the street and ask passers-by about their political ideologies, and I suspect that fewer than one in ten will identify themselves as an advocate of liberal democracy (whether explicitly or by any of its familiar code words). You will likely find more professing Marxists and fundamentalists than professing advocates of the liberal democratic nation-state.

There are many reasons for the lackluster image of liberal democracy today. In From American Exceptionalism to American Declensionism I argued that, “the political class of the US does not believe in the Enlightenment ideals that were instrumental in constituting the US political system.” There is also the disconnect between the glittering generalities of democracy and freedom and the actual living conditions of most people; the end of history has not bequeathed to us a planet full of Switzerlands who behave responsibly toward each other and are solicitous of the welfare of their citizens.

The central reason, however, for the lack of enthusiasm for liberal democracy in its moment of ideological triumph is quite simple: the “system” of liberal democracy lacks all legitimacy. Liberal democratic societies in their mature incarnations have not given us more democracy or more freedom, but less. Just as importantly, the liberal democratic world order has not produced a more just world order, and the manifest absence of both distributive and retributive justice has begun to rankle.

Even those who administer the justice system know that it has failed and is beyond reform, since the administrators of justice have turned to de facto exemplary justice through media exposure. This is what is commonly known as the “perp walk.” When a wealthy and influential individual is arrested for a crime, he or she is paraded before television cameras for a public shaming. Why? Because everyone knows that the television cameras will spread the message to the world, but that the legal system will not.

In the case of highly complex political or financial fraud, in which the explanation of the fraud in a court of law is likely to be as sophisticated and detailed as the crime itself, if not more so, it is inevitable that the outcome will be murky. In the most sophisticated forms of crime, there may not even be laws that address the malfeasance. Charges and counter-charges will be made in court, some charges will stick while others will not, but the result will not satisfy anyone’s conception of justice. So the television cameras are called in to do what the courts will not or cannot do.

There is a recognition, in such cases, that there has been some kind of wrongdoing, even if that wrongdoing is extraordinarily difficult to define, to document, or to prove in court. No one, not even the accused, questions that something problematic has occurred, and that many people have been bilked and cheated and lied to, but it is also increasingly beyond question that the guilty party will not be held criminally responsible, or even, for that matter, held responsible in any sense whatsoever.

The political process is as compromised as the legal process, if not more so. In fact, all of the prized procedural rationality that goes into court cases and electioneering and financial deals is a contributing cause of the social and political failure of contemporary liberal democracy, and not the solution to the problem. And this is why increasing the number of rules, regulations, and laws only increases the public’s sense of frustration, because the public knows that the very complexity of the regulatory apparatus will allow the privileged to skip to the front of the line in life, while the rest must queue around the block.

The closer our procedural rationality brings us to a pure democracy, or at least to a pure exemplar of representative institutions based on popular sovereignty, the more we willingly deliver ourselves to celebrity over meritocracy. A corrupt democracy in which votes are bought or are to be had through intimidation is a political system that is partly insulated from the politics of celebrity. The more we improve our political system, the more we contribute to the pervasive “dumbing down” of contemporary culture by making all political decisions on the basis of popularity.

The failure of liberal democracy to deliver a just political order calls the liberal democratic ideology into question. Liberal democracy has not attained the just social order that its advocates have presented as its raison d’être. Even if an ideologically-inspired reconstruction of the social order fails to bring about the imagined ideal social order, it might nevertheless bring about a (marginally) better life for the greater number of people, almost as an afterthought, or even as an unintended consequence. Has this come about? It could be argued that it has, but it could be argued with equally plausibility that the contemporary political order has made the peoples under its rule so poor and miserable in spirit that no luxuries have been worth the exchange.

Today there are still true believers. That means that ideologies retain their attractiveness and at least some of their efficacy. It is only when all ideologies find themselves bereft of believers that our condition can proceed beyond the end of history, i.e., can drop below history degree one to history degree zero.

There are true believers who do not know that they are true believers, because that in which they truly believe has never been called into question — has never, if you like, faced an existential risk. And the true object of belief of the true believers in the political system of our time is not liberal democracy, as I noted in History Degree Zero, but the nation-state system. It is the ideology of the nation-state that is triumphant today; it the political order itself, and not any one particular constituent of that political order (i.e., a nation-state), that has unquestioned sway.

In our post-historical present of metapolitical monoculture, in which stability and continuity are the be-all and end-all of social organization — that is to say, at history degree one — we have seen not the emergence of an “Axis of Evil” but rather a shifting matrix of powers and would-be powers who adventitiously and opportunistically form transient alliances in order to oppose the metapolitical order. Among these powers and would-be powers are the peoples of the world, putatively represented by their nation-states, but in fact unrepresented because they represent no interest group within the metapolitical order.

As long as there is this belief in metapolitical stability, then there will be two factions: those who want to perpetuate the status quo and those who oppose the status quo. Where there are two factions, there are true believers on both sides of the divide, and thus the metapolitical monoculture of liberal democracy, i.e., the nation-state system, continues to produce robust and vigorous ideological struggle even beyond the end of history at history degree one. In other words, there is no more conservative force in the world today than that of anarchism, which holds what influence it does hold in virtue of its struggle with its other — metapolitical stability.

It is only when the world has been so utterly cleansed of political delusion that faction will become impossible because not only is there nothing to believe in, there is also nothing to meaningfully oppose. This is Zero Hour.

Zero Hour is the explicit and conscious recognition of the radical failure of all ideological movements (without qualification or exception) to both:

1. attain their stated ends, and…

2. broadly improve the standard of living

Zero Hour implies that we are returned to a state of nature and its presumed attendant political innocence. At Zero Hour, not only have all known political ideologies failed, but everyone knows that all political ideologies have failed. Zero Hour means that there are no more true believers, because even the true believers have been disabused of their ideals and disillusioned. (To find innocence, we must go by the way of corruption, as Heraclitus might have formulated it.)

Should we fear Zero Hour, or should we welcome it? Will we even know it when it happens — if it happens? Will we be able to recognize Zero Hour for what it is? What signs and wonders would herald forth the coming of Zero Hour?

Some ages of global history dawn suddenly, while others dawn gradually. I have recently noted in Addendum on the Temporal Structures of Civilization that the historical transition between medievalism and modernism was continuous at every point.

Unlike the slow, gradual, and incremental emergence of modernism, or even of the Industrial Age, to which no particular calendar date can be attached, the Atomic Age blazed suddenly and dramatically into existence on 06 August 1945 at Hiroshima, Japan, and flared again three days later on 09 August 1945 at Nagasaki. The age-old human vision of the End of the World became something real and palpable in a way that it had not been before, and now the power to end the world was in human hands.

Will Zero Hour arrive with a bang or a whimper?

The only thing we know is that we do not know.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

The Kantian Continuum

Wednesday

---

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is the central figure in modern philosophy. He synthesized early modern rationalism and empiricism, set the terms for much of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophy, and continues to exercise a significant influence today in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, and other fields. (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Kantian Continuum of Means and Ends in Personhood

While Kant’s second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, gives a systematic account of his moral philosophy, not surprisingly it is Kant’s shorter work of 1785, his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, that has been the more widely read and influential. In this little book Kant has this to say about our relation to other persons:

“Now I say: man and generally any rational being exists as an end in himself, not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will, but in all his actions, whether they concern himself or other rational beings, must be always regarded at the same time as an end.”

And…

“For all rational beings come under the law that each of them must treat itself and all others never merely as means, but in every case at the same time as ends in themselves.”

Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, 1785

I have cited this passage previously (in Being Valued by the Other) and noted that while we cannot avoid using other persons as means to an end in the ordinary business of life, the crucial sense of this passage is that even when we are forced to deal with other persons as a means, that they must also also be considered as ends in themselves. This is simply a philosophical formulation of the intuitive idea that all persons are due respect and dignity regardless of their condition, and if we must routinely use others as a means to obtaining our contingent ends, we also have a moral responsibility to acknowledge at the same time that these others are ends in themselves, so that our contingent business with them must be conducted with respect and dignity.

When I was thinking about this passage from Kant this morning I thought of it in relation to Edith Wyschogrod’s conception of sainthood in her book Saints and Postmodernism:

“I shall, however, define the saint — the subject of hagiographic narrative — as one whose adult life in its entirety is devoted to the alleviation of sorrow (the psychological suffering) and pain (the physical suffering) that afflicts other persons without distinction of rank or group or, alternatively, that afflicts sentient beings, whatever the cost to the saint in pain or sorrow.”

Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy, p. 34

In brief, the saint is that individual who has devoted his or her life to the other. The Kantian formulation of his would be that the saint always regards the other as an end in himself, to the exclusion of the use of the other as a means to an end.

It seems to me that, whether or not we are skeptical of sainthood, and whether or not we accept Wyschogrod’s definition of the saint, we must at least recognize the theoretical possibility of acting purely on the other’s personhood as an end in itself. As soon as we recognize this ideal possibility recognizing others as ends in themselves, we immediately see the all-too-real possibility of the anti-saint who acts purely on the other’s personhood as a means to an end (and which end is entirely independent of the other’s personhood).

The extremes of the as-an-end-only relation to others and the as-a-means-only relation to others defines a continuum of possibilities, along which continuum the ordinary business of life can be located as it approximates one extreme or the other, or balances the two and inhabits the middle portion of the continuum. Thus what I am here calling the Kantian continuum is that continuum of gradations between relating to others purely as as ends in themselves through relating to others purely as means to an end. Between these two extremes are circumstances when we mostly treat others as ends but also a little as means, when we treat others equally as ends and means, and when we primarily treat others as means to an end and only as an afterthought also treat them as ends in themselves.

Think of the situations and circumstances that one routinely encounters in the course of the ordinary business of life, as, for example, when one enters an establishment that still has living human clerks (as opposed to automated check out terminals) and you conduct a mundane exchange of money for goods, and perhaps acknowledge the clerk with a nod or a few scraps of conversation. This is a relationship that is primarily instrumental, and only as an afterthought do we knowledge the personhood of the other. While the purely instrumental approach to life probably belongs to pathology and is gratifyingly rare, the sort of transaction I have described is quite common in industrial-technological civilization.

At the other end of the scale, short of ideal sainthood but still at the altruistic end of the spectrum, our relationships with friends and family are primarily person-centered relationships that are very much constituted by the meaning and value that these others have for us as persons. It is only as an afterthought that we ask them to do something for us, and the doing of the task is usually accomplished in a way the the personhood of all involved is fully engaged. In fact, in so far as we ask something of those who love us, they may well enjoy serving us or be eager to provide for our needs, and vice versa if we are being asked to provide for those that we love.

One of the central concepts of Kant’s ethics is that of the “kingdom of ends.” Kant characterizes the kingdom of ends in this way:

“By a kingdom I understand the union of different rational beings in a system by common laws. Now since it is by laws that ends are determined as regards their universal validity, hence, if we abstract from the personal differences of rational beings and likewise from all the content of their private ends, we shall be able to conceive all ends combined in a systematic whole (including both rational beings as ends in themselves, and also the special ends which each may propose to himself), that is to say, we can conceive a kingdom of ends, which on the preceding principles is possible.”

Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, 1785

It seems to me that Kant’s kingdom of ends comprises the whole of the Kantian continuum with the exception of the extreme end point of using persons exclusively as means and not at the same time as an end in themselves. Clearly, it is using others that is excluded in Kantian ethics. While I suspect that most will follow Kant in this, the implicit sanctioning of personhood as an afterthought, near the as-a-means-only end of the Kantian continuum, contains in embryo much of that which has made life in industrial-technological civilization so dehumanizing and depersonalizing.

I am not here trying to censure Kant, or to find him responsible for the failings of modern society — there are a great many philosophers who have vigorously taken up the critique of Kantian ethics, and ably so — but I only wish to illustration how the Enlightenment universalism of Kant so easily passes over into its other. The very off-handedness of a recognition of one’s personhood as an afterthought is itself something less than full personhood — and, often, we feel it, but at the same time we understand it, so it does not often injure us.

It is difficult to point a finger at any individual as particularly responsible for the affronts to human dignity that assail us every day in industrial-technological civilization, since it is all-too-easy to understand how things became the way that they are now, and how difficult it would be to change them.

If, when engaged in some trivial transaction of contemporary life, one were to attempt to engage with the other first as a person, one’s actions would probably immediately elicit suspicion. Some few have the gift of engaging in a genuine way with others, even for a brief period of time, but it is not found all that often.

The bureaucratization of society that so marks industrial-technological civilization incorporates a pro forma recognition of the personhood of the other, in deference to our moral intuitions of the respect and dignity due to all persons, but it is precisely the pro forma character of the recognition that drains it of human meaning. Many have commented on the formalism of Kant’s ethics, and in the passage I quoted above Kant says we must, “abstract from the personal differences of rational beings,” yet it is the personal touch that most often breaks through as a recognition of personhood in otherwise anonymous transactions.

How many times in life does it happen that we are engaged in the formal courtesies required of us by society when someone accidentally goes “off script” and all present laugh at the deviation and suddenly there is a more relaxed feeling and people feel freer to be themselves and to express themselves? This, too, is a mutual recognition of personhood — of the concrete and fallible dimension of personhood that makes us human — and it is perhaps this kind of recognition of personhood that is most valued informally because it doesn’t come across as odd or strained like some ham-handed attempts to engage others.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Pascal:

“When we see a natural style, we are astonished and delighted; for we expected to see an author, and we find a man. Whereas those who have good taste, and who seeing a book expect to find a man, are quite surprised to find an author. Plus poetice quam humane locutus es.”

There is not only a natural style in literature, but also a natural style in personal comportment, and when we encounter this natural style in manners we are astonished and delighted, for we expected to find a type, a cipher, an official, a bureaucrat, and instead we find a man. We also find ourselves, and feel a little freer to be human in the presence of such an other.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Apollo and Everest

Thursday

---

The recent passing of Neil Armstrong provides an opportunity to reflect once again on the moribund space program and the sorry state of human space exploration. In my Tumblr post on Neil Armstrong I mentioned the article Neil Armstrong’s death should be a wake-up call for the world by Martin Robbins writing in The Guardian, which was a forceful reflection on precisely this topic.

The collapse of ambitious human spaceflight programs (sometimes called the “Conquest of Space”), and the constant talk of a manned mission to Mars coupled with the absence of any action to begin such a project, contrasts strikingly with the “Conquest of Everest” by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, which began an ambitious mountaineering trend that has, in our own time, come close to being a mass phenomenon — sort of like playing golf, although a bit more restrictive and exclusive.

In the case of the lack of any follow-through after, or follow-up to, the Apollo program, this lack of action followed a public perception revealed in contemporary sources that all would be onward and upward after the Apollo program: that we would continue to go to the moon and not too long after that to Mars, and we would inhabit that exciting world that the futurists presented to us. Of course, we could have done so, but this didn’t happen. On the contrary, “moonshot” has now become an immediately and intuitively unambiguous metaphor that refers to a one-off heroic effort that is not followed by an encore.

In the case of Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay, the opposite expectation was operative. I have previously quoted Sir Edmund Hilary (in The Heroic Conception of Civilization) regarding his ascent of Everest, as follows:

…Sir Edmund Hillary… was quoted by the National Geographic as saying, “Both Tenzing and I thought that once we’d climbed the mountain, it was unlikely anyone would ever make another attempt.” Hillary went on to add, “We couldn’t have been more wrong.”

Yet Sir Edmund Hilary could not have been more mistaken, and he recognized this in the quote above. This effort to climb Everest, which he had himself understood as a “one-off heroic effort” that would not be followed by an encore, began a trickle that has now become a flood; the ascent of Everest has now become a “bucket list” item for the wealthy and privileged rather than a one-off “moonshot” that was impracticable to replicate.

At least part of the different perception and different consequences of Apollo and Everest must be attributed to the nearly insurmountable technical and financial obstacles to human spaceflight. To date, only large and relatively wealthy nation-states can afford the resources of putting human beings into space, and as a consequence these efforts came to be seen as intrinsically related to national prestige, whereas the work-a-day satellite launching business now has quite a number of competing enterprises both public and private represented.

As important as this is, however, it is not the whole difference. Part of it must also be credited to the shift, following the end of the Second World War and the middle of the century, from an Heroic Conception of Civilization to an Iterative Conception of Civilization. That the ascent of Everest can be iterated by anyone with sufficient resources and will makes it a Maslovian “peak experience” (if you will forgive the pun) available to a select and privileged subset of Mass Man.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Addendum on the Myth of the Happy Family

Sunday

---

A few days ago in Myth, Ritual, and Social Consensus I expounded what I called the myth of the happy family. In that post I made a number of corollary claims that I had planned to develop more fully, but which I did not at that time expand upon.

Two unexplained asides in the following paragraph, taken that from post, in particular require further elaboration:

For every myth, there is a true believer out there (or many of them) for whom a given myth is an adequate expression of the world. By the same token, for every myth there is a skeptic (or many of them) who feel shortchanged by a myth that did not and could not be, for them, an adequate expression of life. So it was with the myth of the happy family. Some gloried in it; others despised it. Because a myth reaches only a part of a mass population on a visceral level, for the myth to have social efficacy it must be policed by social and state institutions. The myth of the happy family could only be perpetuated by the brutal suppression of any non-conforming element that defied the myth or failed to fulfill the rituals by which the myth was reenacted in the daily lives of the members of industrialized society. For example, the myth of the happy family essentially excluded social mobility.

The two items above that I want to discuss are:

● “a myth reaches only a part of a mass population on a visceral level”

● “the myth of the happy family essentially excluded social mobility”

As for the first item, one of the important distinctions between the function of myths in traditional (non-industrialized societies) and the function of myths in contemporary societies is that contemporary societies are mass societies. Those mythologies that date to the Axial Age derive from societies in which the presence of a living god or the presence of a living prophet in the midst of the people was considered commonplace, and possibly also the conditio sine qua non of political society. The great gulf between the rulers and the ruled in traditional societies was paradoxically wedded to an intimacy born of very small societies

Intimacy between rulers and the ruled in traditional societies has been a casualty of mass society. Today rulers and ruled communicate through mass media outlets such as television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the internet. However skilled contemporary politicians become in the exploitation of mass media, it is still mass media and it is not a personal, face to face encounter — not even from a distance.

The exponential increases in population that accompany the early stages if industrialization and urbanization (the result of improved nutrition and improved medical care) create mass society, and mass society can only be reached through the mass media. Even if a politician today preferred to meet constituents face to face, it is physically impossible for any one individual to meet millions of people; any politician who disdained the mass media would be defeated, so that the use the mass media is strongly selective. However, once mass media becomes the primary tool of political communication, it changes the nature of communication. Mass communication is de-personalized. Another word for “depersonalization” is “dehumanization.” We have all felt this, that the bureaucratic organization of mass society is depersonalizing and dehumanizing, even if we hesitate to admit to ourselves the full implications of this feeling.

A small, traditional society is dominated by personal relationships and interactions on a human scale. As we have seen, this is impossible in industrialized societies. In anonymity of mass society, social sanctions and social rewards that functioned efficiently in small, traditional societies function inefficiently or not at all. It would be extraordinarily difficult, in the midst of a large conurbation to, for example, enforce “shunning,” since a shunned individual or family could simply move to another neighborhood within the same large city. It is not at all unusual in our time for individuals to “re-invent” themselves by suddenly finding new friends, going to different places and participating in different events than those that has previously given structure to their lives. This kind of personal reinvention was impossible in the past for those who remained within their community.

In traditional societies, mythologies were coextensive with the closed social group that constituted the society. If anyone was alienated by the mythology that permeated a traditional society, they would have to leave because they could not avoid it. This is no longer true. Today, a particular mythology may be dominant, but the minorities that do not share the mythology are significant. In the early modern period, several nascent nation-states sought to purge their countries of non-conforming elements, as when France sought to expel or convert the Huguenots and Spain sought to expel or convert the Jews. For ideologically-motivated monarchs who sat at the head of the dominant mythology, there was a strong desire to “clean house,” but this strategy turned out to be economically ruinous. The practice has not entirely disappeared, as the Nazis tried to exterminate the Jews and recently several exercises in “ethnic cleansing” have sought to purge the body politics of elements deemed undesirable, but in democratic capitalism such efforts are difficult to carry out and counter-productive.

As a result of these trends, the dominant myth of a given mass society is probably only felt on a visceral level by a core minority in positions of privilege and status. This dominant minority that lives the myth might prefer that everyone shared their personal commitment to the mythology they understand to be central to their society, but such mythological conformity can no longer be enforced in fact, and an attempt to enforce it would be so socially disruptive that it would threaten the social cohesion of the society and therefore the myth itself.

As for the second item, that social mobility is largely excluded by the myth of the happy family, I suppose that some readers might find this an odd claim for me to make, since the myth of the happy family is so closely associated in the minds of many with the “American Dream,” and for many, again, the American Dream is nothing but social mobility: the you will eventually live better than when you started out, and that your children will live better than you, possibly joining the professional class and moving up in society not merely in terms of income and comfort, but also in terms of social status.

There are as many versions of the American Dream as there are hopeful Americans (and would-be Americans) dreaming for a better tomorrow for themselves and for their children. But in so far as the strong form of the myth of the happy family persists (and it is arguable that it no longer persists in its strong form at all today, even though it does persist in several weaker permutations), it excludes from under its “sacred canopy” anyone whose social status advances to the point that the rituals of domesticity by which individuals participate in the myth become impracticable or impossible. If you are always away rushing to meetings or flying to conferences, you can’t be at home to participate in daily family rituals. If you’re too busy to attend to domestic responsibilities yourself, and you hire help to clean or mow the lawn or to take care of your children, with each domestic responsibility relinquished there goes along with it one domestic ritual, and one less opportunity to participate in the myth of the happy family.

At least one of the drivers of social change in our time, which includes the process I have attempted to describe of seeking a new social consensus for the organization of industrial society, is the fact that the dominant minority who truly believe in and viscerally have felt the myth of the happy family are those who have been most successful and therefore most forced by circumstances to abandon the rituals of the happy family in order to attend to their duties to larger social wholes. Such individuals, trapped by their own feelings and beliefs, produce rationalizations and justifications for being absent from the formative events in their childrens’ lives, but precisely because they are true believers in the myth they know in their hearts that these rationalizations and justifications are just that — rationalizations and justifications.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Myth, Ritual, and Social Consensus

Thursday

---

The Myth of the Happy Family in

Mid-Twentieth Century Industrialized Society

---

In an early post to this forum, Social Consensus in Industrialized Society, I suggested that, since the advent of the industrial revolution, industrialized societies have passed through two stages of social consensus in the social organization of industrialized society. At present I consider industrialized societies to be in search of a third social consensus for the structure of an industrialized society. I have returned to this theme on several occasions, and wrote about the mythological dimension of industrialized societies in The Role of Ritual in Industrialized Society and Ritual and Myth in Modernity.

The first stage of social consensus under industrialization was the “factory system” that closely resembled the social organization of agricultural society, of which early industrial society was the immediate successor. The second social consensus of industrialization was the sanitized image of mid-twentieth century normalcy of neighborhoods, schools, churches, and hospitals. An important difference between these two previous forms of social organization is that the first was a mere accident of history — a displacement of the organization of agricultural production into industrial production — while the second was based on a modern myth.

A social consensus with a mythology attached to it is something far more powerful that a social consensus that comes about as a result of the accidents of history — i.e., a form of social organization that a society blunders into as a result of doing the best it can at each stage of development. When a myth is attached to a social consensus, that social consensus becomes a model to which people aspire to live up to.

What was the myth of the second industrialized social consensus? For convenience I will call it The Myth of the Happy Family, although the mythology is much larger than happiness or families narrowly construed. Tolstoy famously said that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This imperative of likeness makes the myth of the happy family a mythology of conformism and rigid social roles. It is to be noted that this was not a religious mythology, but a domestic mythology.

I have many times quoted Joseph Campbell to the effect that a ritual is an opportunity to participate in a myth. The rituals by which one participated in the myth of the happy family were the rituals of domesticity: father coming home from work, hanging his hat up, saying, “Honey, I’m home!” as he closes the door, with his wife standing there with a martini already prepared and handing it to him while two beaming children stand in the background, ready to hug their father after he has kissed his wife. The ritualized family evening meal follows next.

The larger social myth associated with the myth of the happy family is the myth of the happy family extrapolated, extended, and expanded to include social wholes: church, school, neighborhood, community, and nation were all to be “one big, happy family,” and the pater familias who presided over this beneficent and hierarchical structure was “the father of his people.”

For every myth, there is a true believer out there (or many of them) for whom a given myth is an adequate expression of the world. By the same token, for every myth there is a skeptic (or many of them) who feel shortchanged by a myth that did not and could not be, for them, an adequate expression of life. So it was with the myth of the happy family. Some gloried in it; others despised it. Because a myth reaches only a part of a mass population on a visceral level, for the myth to have social efficacy it must be policed by social and state institutions. The myth of the happy family could only be perpetuated by the brutal suppression of any non-conforming element that defied the myth or failed to fulfill the rituals by which the myth was reenacted in the daily lives of the members of industrialized society. For example, the myth of the happy family essentially excluded social mobility.

While the living and working conditions of the working class during the early industrial revolution under the “factory system” were appalling, and are remembered as such — there is no nostalgia for these conditions — the myth of the happy family continues to have its adherents. It retains a seductive quality precisely because of the power of its strong social roles and unambiguous expectations for individuals. People who feel discomfited by the complexities and shifting expectations of the contemporary world look back to the myth of the happy family as a model still to be instantiated by industrialized society.

This mythology still today influences how we live our lives — not only because of nostalgia, but for concrete, economic reasons. In fact, the myth of the happy family influences our architecture, as I tried to show in Industrialized Space and Time. Recent attempts at architectural traditionalism incorporating front porches and driveways and garages confined to alleyways are intended to reproduce a neighborly community where families sit on their front porch sipping lemonade and chatting with their neighbors who stroll by, all without being interrupted by vehicular traffic. It sounds silly to talk about it in this explicit way, but given the price of housing in industrialized countries there is serious money at stake in this quaint vision.

It is possible that contemporary developments are pushing us toward of social consensus that might be called The Myth of the Happy Individual. I don’t think that this myth has fully taken form yet, and I am not predicting that it will fully take form, but there are signs of it throughout contemporary society. There is an implicit paradigm of the well-lived life today as consisting of a highly diverse collection of personal experiences, as exemplified in a “bucket list” of things that an individual would like to experience before “kicking the bucket.” This is the vulgar version, but you may also recognize the happy individual as the fully self-actualized individual perched on the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Both myths — the myth of the happy family and the myth of the happy individual — are equally pernicious. Both engender far more unhappiness than happiness precisely because they attempt to enforce happiness as a norm. If your family isn’t happy, then there is something wrong with it and you’d better get it fixed. If you’re not happy, there is obviously something wrong with you and you probably should be in therapy. Life is hard enough as it is; to add the extra burden of the expectation of happiness makes it unbearable more often than not.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Addendum on Neo-Agriculturalism

Thursday

---

In my recent post on neo-agriculturalism I mentioned the back-to-the-land movement that was especially prevalent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Often the back-to-the-land movement was undertaken (when it was in fact undertaken) as a family affair. In its more radical and ideologically-motivated forms, however, the back-to-the-land movement involved the founding of communes.

Communes are a venerable American tradition. In the nineteenth century there were several American experiments with communes — proving the durability of the “back-to-the-land” movement — the most famous of which was the Brook Farm. Brook Farm became famous not least because Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there for a time and based his novel The Blithedale Romance on his experiences there.

A number of utopian currents fed into the nineteenth century vogue for communes, so they were probably doomed from the start. Take a little socialism, mix in Fourierism and some New England transcendentalism, liberally season with naïveté and youthful ideals, and you get a nineteenth century American commune. Since most of these short-lived institutions were founded by intellectuals with more experience of books and writing than of farming and animal husbandry, the stories that come out of these noble social experiments often sounds like a frighteningly close anticipation of Orwell’s Animal Farm, where one or a few members of the community (like the workhorse in Orwell’s fictional account) take on the actual burden of engaging in the unpleasant but necessary labor that makes life possible, while the rest shut themselves in their cottages to read and write.

One thing that can be said for the nineteenth century communes is that these visionaries and idealists actually tried to put their visions and ideals into practice. They not only talked the talk, they also tried to walk the walk — at least for a time. Which brings me to my theme: while there are a few experiments in communal living today, relative to the size of the global population these experiments are quite rare.

For those on the political left who favor cooperativism over individualism (the tension between which two I recently discussed in Addendum on Marxist Eschatology), and for those who have strongly advocated for communal living and cooperativist ideals — whether on the basis of a social philosophy or a particular understanding of economics — the establishment of a commune provides the possibility of a concrete experiment in communal living. And almost all of these have been failures. I find this to be highly significant, and the absence both of voluntary communism and discussion of the failure of communes to be also very significant.

For quite some time I have been meaning to write about the absence of voluntary communism and voluntary communes, which is, sociological speaking, very interesting. Yes, I know there are a few communes that are functioning, and there are long-term experiments in communal living such as the Kibbutz movement in Israel, but these amount to little when compared to what might have been… or what might yet be. If one really believes that a communal way of life is a good thing, or that the economics of communal living are superior to the economics of anarchic, unplanned and individualist capitalism, then one is free to make common cause with others of similar beliefs and to create a little utopia of one’s own — or rather of the community doing so together, in a spirit of mutual cooperation and shared sacrifice — even in the midst of capitalism.

In the twentieth century — so different from the experience of the nineteenth century — it became the tradition not to voluntarily establish communes, but to attempt to create communal living arrangements by threat of force and military coercion. This was the fundamental idea of what I have called The Stalin Doctrine, which Stalin himself formulated as: “Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise. If now there is not a communist government in Paris, the cause of this is Russia has no army that can reach Paris in 1945.” This is the paradigm of non-voluntary communism.

These twentieth century “experiments” — which we might call “socialism under duress” — were enormous, catastrophic failures. We must not allow the short-sightedness of contemporary institutions or the nostalgia of memory to attempt to paper over the complete and utter failure of large-scale collectivism. The nation-states that attempted to put collectivism into practice, whether by a complete attempt at communism or a more gradual process of the nationalization of industry and expanding the social welfare state, are still suffering from the effects of this, and will continue to suffer for many decades, if not centuries.

What then of small-scale collectivism? Why should not those who are alive today, who believe strongly in collectivist ideals and who campaign and protest for these ideals, when there are precious few large-scale social experiments under way, get together and try socialism on a voluntary basis, without barbed wire and without armed guards in watchtowers forcing the residents of a presumptively communal society to remain against their will? Why not demonstrate to the world entire that collectivism is not dependent upon The Stalin Doctrine and that a social system need not have an army at its command in order to succeed?

Please don’t try to tell me that it can’t work. We know that one of the few Western institutions that functioned during the Middle Ages was that of cenobitic monasticism, which were isolated and nearly closed communities that not only survived, but ultimately thrived in the lawless conditions of medieval Europe. In fact, medieval monastic communities were so successful that they eventually became multi-national corporations that held enormous properties and governed some of the largest industries of the late middle ages. This was why Henry VIII dissolved them and expropriated their properties (and the revenues from these properties) for the crown.

Please don’t try to tell me that communal and cooperativist living must be global or the system simply won’t work, because the same cenobitic monastic communities just mentioned were almost always isolated islands of communal living. And, again, please don’t try to tell met that the initial capital for such an experiment is lacking, because there are quite a few wealthy individuals with collectivist sentiments who could easily sponsor a few hundred acres and a few dozen buildings as the seed for a contemporary voluntary commune.

What is lacking today is not the means or the opportunity to engage in voluntary collectivist living, but the will. The fact of the matter is that individualism has become what Fukuyama has called, “a systematic idea of political and social justice” much more so than the idea of liberal democracy, and this is because individualism is the practical implementation of what Fukuyama has called “The Drive for Dignity.” People today rarely if ever advocate individualism as a political philosophy — it sounds selfish when expressed explicitly — but they don’t need to advocate for individualism when then live its doctrines 24/7.

Whether in the heyday of non-voluntary communism during the twentieth century, or those who protest today for collectivist ideals, communism is always seems to be something for other people. Just as the Kim dynasty has lived in personal luxury while the people of North Korea starve, or Presidente Gonzalo lived in an upscale Lima apartment while directing the Maoist insurgency in Peru, or the Nomenklatura enjoyed the privileges of the elite under the Soviet Union, or the Princelings (children of communist party leaders) in China use their connections to become wealthy, those with presumably the greatest stake in collectivist living never want to live collectively themselves.

It is important to point out that when we speak of voluntary or non-voluntary communism we talking about a social arrangement that can be chosen or rejected. In the sense in which Marx discussed communism, and the sense in which I have recently written about communism in Marxist Eschatology and Addendum on Marxist Eschatology, communism is an historical force that is larger than the individual, and not something that can be chosen or rejected.

Thus we are talking about two fundamentally different things here:

1. communism as a political idea, which as such behaves according to the presuppositions of political society, being chosen by individuals or imposed by force, and…

2. communism as an historical idea, which as such is a category of historical understanding whereby we interpret and understand the large-scale movements and patterns of human society

The distinction is a subtle one, because a political idea often emerges from an historical idea implicit within a given political milieu, while an historical idea will often be used to analyze political ideas. But the difference, while subtle, is important, because the two kinds of ideas are opposed as contraries: with a political idea, essence precedes existence, while with an historical idea, existence precedes essence.

We should expect to find that the other possible futures that I have discussed alongside communism — extraterrestrialization, pastoralization, singularization, and now also neo-agriculturalism — will be expressed as both political ideas and historical ideas. And, in fact, when we pause to think it over, we do find that there are those thinking of political terms who want to foster the creation of a society that embodies these historical movements, while there are others thinking in historical terms of these possibilities as ideas already present at history and only discovered upon analysis.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Areté and Selection

Thursday

---

Aristotle as depicted in a medieval woodcut. Aristotle was a central influence shaping the intellectual life of the Middle Ages, the direct ancestor to our own civilization.

In several posts I have written about the Aristotelian conception of excellence, i.e., Areté (ἀρετή in the original Greek, and sometimes translated as “virtue,” just like Machiavelli’s Virtù). Throughout Aristotle’s ethics there is a clear implication that human beings take pleasure in achieving excellence, and in so doing experience a proper sense of pride in their accomplishment. Here is Aristotle’s take on this:

“…the Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them…”

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Rackham translation of I.7.1098a

Excellence is not only a virtue, and the good for man, but is also desirable:

“…the activities of the part of the soul that is by nature superior must be preferable for those persons who are capable of attaining either all the soul’s activities or two out of the three; since that thing is always most desirable for each person which is the highest to which it is possible for him to attain.”

In regard to the “two out of three” reference in the above, the Aristotle text at Perseus Digital Library has this footnote:

i.e. the two lower ones, the three being the activities of the theoretic reason, of the practical reason, and of the passions that although irrational are amenable to reason.

Aristotle, Politics, Book 7, 1333a

This has been called Aristotle’s principle of perfection by Fred Miller, who cites a different translation of this same passage. Fred Miller in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Aristotle’s Political Theory, includes a list of Presuppositions of Aristotle’s Politics, which names the Principle of teleology as the first of Aristotle’s presuppositions:

Principle of teleology Aristotle begins the Politics by invoking the concept of nature (see Political Naturalism). In the Physics Aristotle identifies the nature of a thing above all with its end or final cause (Physics II.2.194a28–9, 8.199b15–18). The end of a thing is also its function (Eudemian Ethics II.1.1219a8), which is its defining principle (Meteorology IV.12.390a10–11). On Aristotle’s view plants and animals are paradigm cases of natural existents, because they have a nature in the sense of an internal causal principle which explains how it comes into being and behaves (Phys. II.1.192b32–3). For example, an acorn has an inherent tendency to grow into an oak tree, so that the tree exists by nature rather than by craft or by chance. The thesis that human beings have a natural function has a fundamental place in the Eudemian Ethics II.1, Nicomachean Ethics I.7, and Politics I.2. The Politics further argues that it is part of the nature of human beings that they are political or adapted for life in the city-state. Thus teleology is crucial for the political naturalism which is at the foundation of Aristotle’s political philosophy. (For discussion of teleology see the entry on Aristotle’s biology.)

Now, there is no question that Aristotle was as Greek as any other Greek, and was very much a man of his time, even while being one of the greatest philosophers who ever lived. I make this obvious statement only because I must follow it with the observation that Aristotle’s very Greek philosophy was eventually appropriated by medieval European philosophers, and there it took on a second life, providing the theoretical framework for Scholasticism.

When we consider the role of Aristotle in medieval scholastic theology, and the ongoing role of medieval civilization in the constitution of our own industrial-technological civilization, we can see how hard it has been for us to overcome teleological thinking. Medieval civilization is the direct ancestor to our civilization; there was no catastrophic break between the Middle Ages and Modernity, but rather a smooth and continuous tradition that left many aspects of medievalism intact well into modern times.

Because of Aristotle’s pervasive teleology, he formulated his ethics and his politics teleologically, and transmitted them into this form to posterity, and it was in this form that medieval philosophers received them. In a Greek context I don’t think that Aristotle’s teleology had quite the meaning that it came to have, and indeed scholastic philosopher’s developed Aristotle’s distinction between potency and act into an entire metaphysics in its own right. In the context of a civilization almost entirely constructed upon an eschatological basis, Aristotle’s teleology and his conception of potential take on a meaning that they did not have for Ancient Greeks.

Medieval philosophers more or less ran wild with Aristotle, and I think it is this potent admixture of Aristotelian teleology and medieval eschatology that gives us that Arthur Lovejoy famously called the Great Chain of Being — the metaphysical idea of an exhaustive hierarchy in which there is a place for everything, and everything is to be found in its proper place. Linnaeus eventually naturalized the great chain of being as a system of taxonomy, and the Linnaean system continues to be used today, with evolutionary phylogeny only gradually forcing revisions to cladistic systematics.

There was no need for Aristotle to look for any alternative formulation for this ethical and political views, and his metaphysics were adequate to the scientific knowledge of his time. But since Aristotle’s time we have learned a lot, and one of the most important things we have learned is how to explain the natural world, and our place within it, without recourse to teleology. Now, I really believe that if Aristotle himself could see the naturalistic account of the world produced by contemporary science he would be enthusiastic beyond words. But the Aristotle read through Scholastic spectacles might well be horrified. There is nothing in Aristotle that suggests to me that he was committed to any anti-naturatlistic mode of thought, but Aristotelian doctrines do become anti-naturalistic in the hands of the Schoolmen.

Thus it is no surprise that Aristotle did not recognize that his conception of Areté has strongly selective connotations. If human beings find it desirable to engage in activities that are, “the highest to which it is possible for him to attain,” I think you will find that people truly enjoy doing these things. You will also find that people generally don’t much enjoy doing things that they are not at all good at doing (acknowledging important recreational exceptions — I enjoy swimming but am in no sense good at it). On the whole, then, individuals will be attracted to activities at which they excel, while they will be indifferent to, or perhaps even distance themselves from, activities at which they do not excel.

Moreover, when you become highly competent in some activity, you want to engage in this activity with others who are also highly competent. For example, if you are really good at tennis, you will want to find other really good tennis players in order to play a really satisfying game. You would not be able to have a really good game with someone who knew nothing about tennis. And so there is an elaborate system of rating tennis players that can be used to pair players of a similar skill level. I once read a quote from an institutionalized philosopher (I think it was Richard Cartwright, but I’m not certain; I’ll look up the quote later) saying that he did not like to discuss philosophy with those who had not studied the subject. Same idea as the tennis ratings. An institutionalized philosopher is a like a seeded tennis player.

The preference of the individual for activities at which the individual excels, further escalated by the preference of groups of individuals for others who have attained a similar level of excellence, produces a strong selective effect in human communities. This is one source — one source among many — of what has been called “the great sort.” People sort themselves into communities by temperament and inclination. Individual temperament and inclination tend to lead a person toward a particular community. One of the characteristics of a community is that it tends to be good at something, like Switzerland is good at clock and watch making. Something as large as a nation-state will contain considerable diversity, so there are probably many Swiss who have never assembled a watch in their life, but something as small as an academic or sports clique can be aggressively exclusive to a particular interest or talent.

There is something essentially anti-democratic — or, at least, non-egalitarian — about cliques, and, by extension, Aristotelian Areté. In its best exemplification it produces most of what is valuable in human civilization; in its worst exemplification it is insufferably aristocratic in the worst sense: ossified and unimaginative. Thus it has become one of the great problems of the age of popular sovereignty to understand and to cultivate excellence for its own sake. Popular culture is littered with failed examples of the cultivation of excellence in democratic societies. There are pathetic attempts to identify the talented when they are young, but this is almost always distorted by family connections and prejudice. And there are the monetary rewards that have created the contemporary “culture industry” and its “commodity music” (as well as “commodity painting” and commodity arts of all kinds), which is without any true cultural value. And there is the population culture fascination with fame. The potent mixture of fame of money has meant that people become involved in cinema because wnat to be rich and famous, and not because they can make great movies.

This is a problem, and it is an admittedly unresolved problem. Egalitarianism subordinates excellence to the lowest common denominator, and leaves us with the civilization not worthy of the name; aristocracy at times manages to advance excellence, but much more often it declines into mere inherited privilege, as bereft of cultural value as civilization today.

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .