The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: In the Beginning Was the Word

Lewis Mumford (from The Myth of the Machine):

Karl Marx gave the material instruments of production the central place and directive function in human development. Thomas Carlyle described man as ‘a tool-using animal,’ as if this were the one trait that elevated him above the rest of brute creation. This overweighting of tools, weapons, physical apparatus, and machines has obscured the actual path of human development.

In fact, to consider man as primarily a tool-using animal (Homo Faber) is to overlook the main thread of human history. For man is pre-eminently a mind-making, self-mastering, and self-designing animal; and the primary locus of all his activities lies first in his own organism, and then in the social organization through which it finds further expression.

So certain were nineteenth-century archaeologists about the primacy of stone tools and weapons in prehistoric man’s ‘struggle for existence’ that when the first paleolithic cave paintings were discovered in Spain in 1879, they were denounced, out of hand, as an outrageous hoax, on the grounds that Ice Age hunters could not have had the leisure, or the mind, to produce the elegant art of Altamira.

But mind was exactly what Homo Sapiens possessed in a singular degree: mind based on the fullest use of all his bodily organs, not just his hands. At every stage, man’s inventions and transformations were less for the purpose of increasing the food supply or controlling nature than for utilizing his own immense organic resources and expressing his latent potentialities. When not curbed by hostile environmental pressures, man’s elaboration of symbolic culture answered a more imperative need than that for control over the environment—and, one must infer, largely predated it and for long outpaced it.

The evolution of language—a culmination of man’s more elementary forms of expressing and transmitting meaning—was incomparably more important to further human development than the chipping of a mountain of hand-axes. Compared to the relatively simple coordination required for tool-using, the delicate interplay of the many organs needed for the creation of articulate speech was a far more striking advance.

In this process of self-discovery and self-transformation, tools served well as subsidiary instruments, but not as the main operative agent in man’s development. Until our own age, technics has never disassociated itself from the larger cultural whole in which man, as man, has always functioned. For the greater part of human history, no distinction was made between industrial production and ‘fine’ or symbolic art; these aspects were inseparable, one addressing objective conditions and functions, the other addressing subjective needs.

At its point of origin, technics was related to the whole nature of man, and that nature played a part in every aspect of human activity; thus, technics, at the beginning, was life-centered, not work-centered or power-centered. Though language was mankind’s most potent symbolic expression, it flowed from the same common source that eventually produced the machine: the primeval repetitive order of ritual, a mode of order man was forced to develop in self-protection to control the tremendous overcharge of psychical energy that his large brain placed at his disposal.

Once this basic internal organization was established and regulated, technics supported and enlarged the capacities for human expression. The discipline of toolmaking and tool-using, moreover, served as a correction to the inordinate powers of invention that spoken language gave to man—powers that otherwise unduly inflated the ego and tempted man to substitute magical verbal formulae for efficacious work.

The specific human achievement which set man apart from even his nearest anthropoid relatives, was the shaping of a new self, visibly different in appearance, in behavior, and in plan of life from his primitive animal forebears. Man speeded the process of his evolution, achieving through culture in a relatively short span of years changes that other species accomplished laboriously (if at all) through organic processes. The main business of man became his own self-transformation, which freed his brain, his best developed organ, for other tasks than ensuring physical survival. The dominant human trait, central to all other traits, is this capacity for conscious, purposeful self-identification, self-transformation, and ultimately for self-understanding.

Saturday Lecture: The Only Game in Town

{Among the many variations on the Great Refusal, the wholesale rejection of civilization stands out. One of the more interesting modern critics of ‘the cult of civilization’ was the anthropologist Stanley Diamond, whose ‘In Search of the Primitive’ highlights some of the discontents of civilization. Contrary to my usual practice with the “Saturday Lecture” series, I have added some commentary of my own.}

Stanley Diamond (from In Search of the Primitive):

Civilization has always had to be imposed, not as a psycho-dynamic necessity or a repressive condition of evolved social life, as Freud supposed, and not only in terms of the state’s power securing itself against its own subjects, but also with reference to the barbarian or primitive peoples who moved on the frontiers. Native communities were the ground out of which the earliest class-structured, territorially defined civilizations arose. Internally, these native peoples were transformed into the peasant and proletarian ‘masses’ who supported the apparatus of the state. No matter how ‘necessary’ the political structure of civilization may have been initially, the progressive degradation of the native communities remains a truth of history. No rationalization for the existence of the early state can alter the fact that the majority of the people were always taxed, in goods and labor, far more than they received from the state in the form of protection and services.

Even if we acknowledge the necessity—due to population pressure, scarcity of land, water, and other resources—for political constraints in the earliest stages of state formation, there is no inherent reason for it to have taken the oppressive form that it did—except for the burgeoning anxiety of those removed from direct production about their economic and political security. If we assume that primitive societies were proto-democratic and even communalistic; and that the character of the neolithic communities that immediately preceded the rise of the earliest civilizations could be similarly defined; primitive customs and habits so long in their formulation could hardly have been transformed without very great resistance. The consequent struggle between the state—the civil authority—and the constituent kin or quasi-kin units of society is the basic social struggle in human history. It is still reflected in local attitudes and institutional buffers against the central authority.

From our point of view, it’s easy to assume that civilized life came as a great relief to our uncivilized ancestors; but Diamond is surely correct to note the “very great resistance” that has always accompanied the assaults (which is how they must have been perceived) on settled and satisfactory ways of living.

Diamond continues:

Anxiety about not being self-supporting, along with the anticipation of resistance, seems to constitute the motive for the upper class’s elaborate extortion of wealth from the direct producers. But, again, even if we accept all the above, this does not account for the accelerating inequities in the distribution of wealth. The widening gap between rich and poor as ancient civilizations developed could not have been due simply to scarcity or to the need to support specialists removed from subsistence activity. Rather, it was due to increasing expropriation. As Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, the richer a society, the greater the distance between its classes and the greater the concentration of wealth at the summit.

Claims about a “wealth gap” and about wealth inequality are contentious, not so much because the gap does not exist (it does) but because, in absolute terms, even today’s poor are better off than in the past. If the rising economic tide does indeed lift all boats, then the patched-up dinghy and the spanking new luxury yacht are both beneficiaries; but a dinghy riding higher in the water is a dinghy nonetheless. If trickle-down economics works as advertised, then the poor get to feed off the crumbs dropped from the tables of the rich, and more and better food for the wealthy means more and better crumbs for the poor, who nonetheless ungratefully complain about living off crumbs.  

Nor was the archaic concentration of wealth a function of its presumably rational reinvestment. Not only were the uses of wealth irrational, inflating the tautology of power, but redistribution in the form of public works and services eventually increased, rather than lessened, the gap between classes. The dynamics of archaic civilizations reveal the pathology of wealth—wealth as power, or luxury as ‘well-being’—and the inadequacy of the distribution of wealth. By 3000 BCE in the Middle East, such rationalizations for the state, which also apply to monopoly capitalism, are apparent.

We accept the maxim that “Power corrupts,” but we seem oblivious to the obvious corollary: since wealth is a form of power, then “Wealth corrupts” as well. For whatever reasons, we have chosen to believe otherwise, but the wealth gap is also a “power gap”; the poor have little if any social or political power, especially compared to the rich—and they know it.

The critical question, then, is that of socioeconomic exploitation and the concomitant loss of the cultural creativity and autonomy of the vast majority of human beings. Conspicuous extortion from worker and peasant was a confirmation of power; but power, so reified, not only confirmed social status, it also displaced anxiety about the actual powerlessness of the privileged, which was a result of the loss of their direct command of the environment. The sheer accumulation of wealth, the antithesis of primitive customary usage, was thus compensatory, a sign of the fear of impotence. It is a response of the alienated in pursuit of security; the manipulation of people is substituted for the command of things. As civilization spreads and deepens, it is ultimately man’s self, his species being, which is imperialized.

Modernity’s signal achievement lies in having improved both its “command of things,” via science and technology, and its “manipulation of people,” via Max Weber’s “iron cage” of managerial techniques, bureaucratic structures, and corporate- or state-controlled media. Setting aside the degradation of the planetary environment, the occasional world war, and the development, stockpiling, and sporadic use of weapons of mass destruction: I would say civilization has been, and continues to be, the best deal around.

If it has its way, it will soon be the only game in town.

Saturday Lecture: Ciphers of History

Stanley Diamond (from In Search of the Primitive):

“In the modern era, the mission of civilization is simply civilization itself.” (Stanley Diamond)

The question of ‘progress’ is critical. With the rise of industrialism and the related ideology of science, the total conscious transformation of society and nature was, for the first time in human history, considered both possible and desirable. The West does not doubt the superiority of its techniques or its vision; its mission can be ‘objectively’ evaluated. But the fulfillment of the mission requires a universal polity; cultural imperialism is conceived as a leveling—and, at the same time, as a progressive—force. The cultures of societies everywhere are reduced to the common denominators of their respective ‘occupying’ powers; world hegemony becomes the paradigm for world government.

The basic apology for any kind of imperialism remains the idea of progress. The brutality of the means of conquest, the erosion of other cultural possibilities, the necessity of political tutelage, even economic exploitation, are all rationalized in that context. Their unintended consequences are conceived as positive; enlightened self-interest, it is fancied, ultimately resolves itself in the universal good. The manifest and ‘scientifically demonstrable’ superiority of the West seems to be the logical denouement of the history of the species; the ideal of Western civilization is projected as no less than the goal of humanity—a goal which all rational men are obliged to share. If Europe is faithful to its own heritage, the rationalization runs, and fully realizes its potential, then it is bound to become the civilization of the world—everyman’s fate.

Faith in progress as the outcome of their techniques and ideas justifies Western civilized men to themselves. That faith is the dominant idea of Western civilization. In its name, Western man rationalizes not only his self-interest, but also his failures; he does not perceive his failures as the result of his goals, nor of his motives, but rather of the means at his disposal, or of his human limitations. He cannot surrender the notion of progress without destroying the rationale for his entire civilization. No matter how critical he may be of the realities of his society, he clings to his progressivism as he would to his sanity. It is the notion of progress that mediates his alienation and makes it possible for him to construct a reality which he does not actually experience.

But his commitment to progress is less of a faith than a compulsion. No matter what aspects of Western culture he assumes to be superior to the cultures of other times and places, the case for such superiority is always weaker than the intensity of his argument. This argument is, therefore, grotesque, a deformation of consciousness, for the idea of progress is not based on a rational analysis of our civilization. It springs instead from the disequilibrium of the system in which Western man finds himself.

The social structure of the United States, for example, limits the uses of technology. Corporate capitalism is misrepresented as ‘free enterprise,’ or as the realization of the revolutionary spirit of the eighteenth century; Thomas Jefferson is linked to General Motors. Modern technology, society, and ideology are always out of joint with each other; and this sensed disjunction generates the idea of progress. Caught in the contradictions of society, Westerners see themselves as ciphers of history; incomplete and always waiting to be completed. Disintegrated by the extreme division of labor, by competition for goods and services and status, they obsessively anticipate integration.

The idea of progress is, above all, the precipitant of unresolved social and personal conflicts in modern civilization, conflicts that feed on themselves. It is the awareness of these conflicts, along with the effort at resolving them, that creates the sense of unresolved movement toward specific goals which are defined as ‘progressive’.

In primitive societies, progress is a reality of personal growth, a progress through society, not of society. The structure of primitive societies is perceived as permanent, while the individual moves from experience to experience on what the Winnebago call ‘the road of life and death’. ‘Progress,’ in such societies, if this Western conception can be applied to them at all, would be a metaphor for spiritual transformation. The contradictions of growth through the various phases of the life cycle are socially recognized, ritually expressed, and dialectically resolved. The person evolves through hierarchies of being, that is, the ‘becoming’ of personal growth is balanced by the ‘being’ of personal realization on all significant levels of existence—our [Western] perception of history is irrelevant.

In our civilization, the person is reduced to a status, a reflex of society; it is society which is supposed to progress. Compelled by their conflicts, Westerners are always trying to find concrete evidence for their superiority; they feel that they represent the West, the logical inheritance of the past, civilization itself. Our culturally compulsive need to believe in progress is one thing, but the rational evidence is quite another; in fact, the evidence is weak.

‘Progress’ means advancement to a better condition, not simply evolution or development. The belief in progress through advanced science or technology is a uniquely Western fallacy. First, science and technology are not necessarily related; man was a technician long before he was a scientist. More pertinently, science and technology, reified and divorced from the human context and from social application, are no more than mechanical fetishes. Western man fantasizes, understandably enough, that he will one day be replaced by the robot or the computer; but this replacement has already begun. Therefore, it is only from the standpoint of the machine, representing the disengaged category of ‘science and technology,’ that progress remains possible. To maintain the fiction of progress, Westerners entertain the notion of negating humanity itself.

This, in turn, is related to the irrational production of commodities over which ordinary people have no control but which they are conditioned to consume. In the joint perspective of the worker and the consumer, commodities take on a life of their own; after all, they have not invented them, and they have no voice in their use or replication. The imperious ring of the telephone, for example, interrupts all other activities. Its trivial, dissociated, and obsessive use reflects both the alienating character of the society that prizes it so highly and the transnational corporations that profit from it. The telephone as ordinarily used becomes a sign, not of communication, but of the lack of communication and of the consequent compelling desire to relate to others, but to relate at a distance.

Anthropologists cite [as evidence of progress] the extension of ‘in-group ethical commands,’ but that, of course, has not occurred. The fact that the great majority of murders in the United States occur within families, or among close friends and acquaintances, denies the logic of this claim. Moreover, the intensity and duration of modern war, enabled by science and technology, is unknown among primitives, for whom murder, rape, and theft are also rare occurrences. Still another criterion [of progress], the increase in the health, safety, and comfort of the individual, is not only impossible to measure ‘objectively,’ but if measurable in the terms stated, would require a bourgeois yardstick.

The anthropologist does not mention transcendence, spiritual growth, or maturation. He overlooks the increase in certain diseases—cancer, schizophrenia, arteriosclerosis. The pollution of the environment, the increased rate of industrial accidents, and the unhealthy character of daily life, all militate against the notion that the species has been improving itself. Progress must be correlated with the possibility of human fulfillment and the understanding of the human condition.

_____________________________________________

Stanley Diamond - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: The Riddle of Man

Emil Brunner (from Man in Revolt):

Who is this being who questions — the one behind all questions? Who is this who perceives the infinity of the world? Who is this who is tortured by all life’s problems — whether in human existence or outside it? Who is this being who sees himself as a mere speck in the universe, and yet, even while so doing, measures the infinite horizon with his mind? We are here confronted by the problem of the subject, separated by a great gulf from all problems of the objective world. What is this to which things are objects, which they are ‘set over against’?

Man is not merely what he is; he is the being which first seeks himself. All that man creates by his own works, which express his nature, is at the same time a manifestation of the fact that he seeks to understand himself. Man is not at home with himself; as he is, he cannot come to terms with himself. He is a divided being and is always conscious of this division. The ‘harmonious human nature’ completely at rest within itself is an extreme instance which does not really exist, whereas the other extreme instance certainly does exist — that of the man who is so divided that his inner nature no longer finds any unity at all, the schizophrenic, the insane. The sense of division, however, owing to the contrast between that which he is and that which he ought to be or would like to be, forms part of the very essence of all human life known to us.

Is it not a fact that the mind, the very element which teaches human beings to understand one another, is also the main cause of their being brought into conflict with one another? Indeed, is it not true that the more we learn to understand man the more we see that it is impossible to understand him?

The line of thought which starts with the contrast between the subject and the object isolates the individual human being as though it were something which could be understood as an independent entity, whereas man in his concrete actuality not only does not occur as an individual, or cannot exist physically, but precisely in his peculiar existence as human can only be conceived and understood in his relation to the other. The decisive, distinctive element is not the I which confronts the object, the ‘It,' but the I which confronts the ‘Thou’ — or rather does not confront the ‘Thou,’ but in its very existence as an I is also determined by the ‘Thou.’

The fact that man is a social being was already taught by Aristotle in a decisive passage. The fact that the individual can only be understood in the context of a larger whole was indeed, although in an entirely opposite way, brought afresh to our consciousness by Darwin and Hegel: the individual human being a dependent member in the series of his species, and further in the series of living creatures in general; the individual man a more or less unimportant point of transition in the universal history of Spirit, which attains its highest point in the State. In both views the individual is understood as a collective being, as a dependent part of a larger whole.

But the idea that the ‘I’ can only be understood in the light of the ‘Thou’ means something quite different. It is not the member of a species, and not man as the more or less indifferent transitional point in the history of civilization and of Spirit, the spirit-being, which knows the ‘Thou,’ but solely the human being who, in the ‘Thou’ of the ‘Other,’ comes to realize that his being a Self means his being a person, which is not subordinated to any higher ‘something,’ but is itself the ultimate meaning — that which alone gives to every mental object, to all culture and civilization, and to all life in political communities, its meaning and its right.

The person only arises and exists in inseparable union with the ‘Thou’ of the ‘Other’ as 'I-Myself.’ Just as man, as the subject of all science, stands over against all objects of knowledge and cannot be included among them as a member of a series, so man as person stands over against all his intellectual objects, his science, his art, his civilization, his political life, as their source, the one who gives them meaning, and their measure, and is neither incorporated with nor subordinated to them. Man does not exist for the sake of culture or civilization, he is not a means to an end, but he is an end for himself, precisely because, and in so far as, he, as person, is a self which is related to and bound up with a ‘Thou.’ A new depth of human existence and of the riddle of man has disclosed itself to our gaze.

________________________________________

Emil Brunner - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: Deconstructing Virtue

{Is all so-called virtue merely ‘virtue signaling’? Are we all entitled to benefits based on our 'perpetual moral disabilities'? Such were the arguments made some 1600 years ago by Bishop Augustine of Hippo, the man who invented the introspective conscience of the West. ¹ For Augustine, human reason, passion, and will were an unholy trinity that ruled over the human soul; neither individually nor in any combination could they be trusted. What was left? Faith, of course, and divine grace; in what follows, however, there is little of those. Instead, and what makes this essay of such interest, E.J. Hundert explains how Augustine ruthlessly applied a hermeneutic of suspicion to every human action, motive, and virtue; we learn that Augustine was a pioneer of deconstruction (of human behavior) and unmasking (of human moral pretensions). You might even refer to Augustine’s moral reasoning as CMT: Critical Moral Theory.}

“Reason is and must always be the slave of the passions.” (David Hume)

“All human acts cry out to be deconstructed…” (E.J. Hundert)

E.J. Hundert on Augustine’s understanding of "the divided self":

Augustine argued that reason itself, rather than providing suitable criteria for moral choice in rational beings, only functions instrumentally in self-interested creatures. Reason offers to human actors strategies for the attainment of their ends, but in no way can unaided reason provide efficient guidance to an agent for the choice of these ends themselves, since they are always objects decided by the passions alone.

Augustine’s reasoning explains how beings who were created in God’s image and who retain, even in their fallen state, the capacity for rational choice, are nevertheless drawn to the evil they properly despise. When Augustine disobeyed his parents and teachers as a boy, he did so not because he wanted to do something better with his time but from no other motives but frivolity and competitiveness. When he and his friends stole some pears from a neighbor’s orchard, they did so not because they wanted to eat but for the singular desire to be wicked: the act of theft itself made the indifferent fruit delicious.

Most evil deeds appear rationally unintelligible because the satisfactions they bring bear no necessary relation to the intrinsic worth of their objects. They remain inexplicable if considered within the context of the traditional moral argument that sought in reason’s governance a bridle to passion’s power. Augustine claimed that the impulse to evil cannot be accounted for by bodily or social circumstances external to the soul, just as his own experience demonstrated (he insisted) that evil acts were not the consequence of false beliefs induced by fallacious reasoning. The paradox of evil derives from the fact that it appears fully formed and fully effective even in the young and well-nurtured child whose will could not plausibly have been so perversely shaped by the environment in which he lived.

Augustine isolated the paradox which lies behind all purely mortal achievements by bringing into sharp focus the final emptiness of human virtues. Every worldly action, regardless of its apparent grandeur, must in fact properly be reduced to its elemental, self-regarding sources if it is to become morally comprehensible; and none more so than the apparent ‘loftiness’ of the great and the seemingly charitable acts of the mighty. Indeed, all human acts cry out to be deconstructed into the merely outward expressions of unacknowledged inner needs, the forever incomplete and so active attempts at happiness by morally blind sensibilities living under the dominion of their overpowering and incomprehensible wills.

Such moral rigorism was the conceptual foundation of an ongoing project developed by Augustine’s early modern successors. If the proper account of action depended on an exact evaluation of emotions, then the moralist had before him an enormous, virtually never-ending task of psychological decoding. Just as vice sought by dissimulation to parade as virtue and so cried out for exposure, almost all apparent virtues were themselves only the residue of one hidden, self-interested passion checking another. Self-deceived but ever seeking to deceive their fellows, men resembled nothing so much as actors consumed by the performative requirements of the parts they played.

It was possible to conceive of an individual’s life as a journey of self-discovery; even so, any presentation of the self within this life was an act tainted by self-regard. Obsessive seekers of the world’s applause, men were obliged to conceal from the gaze of others those signs of pride whose exposure would reveal as unobtainable the ‘delights’ they compulsively sought from society.

Thus, after Augustine, the bringing to consciousness of hidden impulses through the activity of unmasking became for Christian intellectuals a duty, one of placing before a properly chagrined consciousness the otherwise concealed evidence of the self’s perpetual moral disabilities.

________________________________________

Augustine and the Sources of the Divided Self on JSTOR (Original publication 1992)

¹ Credit for that invention had long been given to Paul the apostle, but Krister Stendahl debunked that claim decades ago.

Wednesday with Pascal: Schizophrenia and Civilization

{Inexplicably, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat continues to explore the Great Refusals of the late Stanley Diamond, whose research among ‘primitive’ tribes, combined with his Marxist perspective on capitalism, led him to conclude that we would be well advised to resist being civilized and to light out for the territories instead.}

Fun fact: mental illness exists only in civilized societies. Primitive cultures have their fair share of oddballs and weirdos, to be sure, but those cultures have no diagnostic categories in which to place such individuals; instead, the oddballs and weirdos are simply accepted as part of the cultural landscape. Even our own pre-modern times lacked the modern ‘understanding’ of mental illness; our ignorant ancestors believed that the mad were possessed by demons! Of course, we believe the same thing today; we have simply renamed the demons—Beelzebub is now ‘Dopamine’ and Lucifer is now ‘Serotonin’. Psychotropic medications are essentially chemical exorcisms, psychiatrists being the consecrated priests of the new order.

Like the contrarian (and Professor of Psychiatry) Thomas Szasz (The Myth of Mental Illness), the anthropologist Stanley Diamond was skeptical of the modern civilized approach; in part, of course, because he was skeptical of civilization in general. He expressed his views in the essay, “Schizophrenia and Civilization”:

The mental health establishment assumes (a conventional assumption in our society) that the expenditure of vast sums of money on so-called research will eventually reveal ‘the causes of mental illness’—that money in research can reveal the cause and cure of anything. This is not merely a scientific idea but is deeply related to the fact that the tragic contradictions of life have little or no standing in our society. We seek to cure people of everything; we tinker with the human machine. All the ills that the flesh and spirit of man are heir to are reduced to abstractions. We are dedicated to the proposition that pain can be eliminated. An instrumental, hyper-civilized, consumerist, and clinically oriented culture such as ours generates, and simultaneously avoids acknowledging, the [conflicts and] contradictions that are the occasions for tragedy. We perceive the crack-up of the individual in society as we would an automobile accident, rather than as a struggle for awareness that is at once moribund and transcendent.

The “crack-up”: people with mental illnesses (especially schizophrenia) are, colloquially, cracked. ¹ It is perhaps counterintuitive to suggest that the apparently meaningless and frequently bizarre delusions of the mentally ill (“My family is trying to poison me,” “My ex- is listening in on my calls,” “Megyn Kelly communicates with me through coded messages in her broadcasts”) are struggles, as Diamond says, for awareness, for identity, and for meaning. None of those can be achieved in a vacuum; that is, they require social, cultural, and emotional supports and guidance, role models and mentors—other people, that is. But the lived reality of having what we call ‘mental illness’ is that of being trapped in a private world (an ‘idios kosmos’), speaking a private language, unable to understand or to be understood by those around us whose understanding we desperately need. Mental illnesses represent failures of communication caused by the inability of the afflicted to speak the lingua franca of those around them and by the inability (and/or unwillingness) of others to engage in the painstaking, tedious work of translation. ²

Schizophrenia, suggests Stanley Diamond, is a social disease, “the process through which the inadequacy of the culture is concretized in the consciousness of individuals. That inadequacy may be as deeply sensed, without being named, as it is reflected in ‘pathological’ behavior.” But if psychological wholeness depends on integrating self with world while yet distinguishing the two, “the struggle for awareness [will be] a catastrophic, insurmountable challenge” if it takes place “in a culture which fails to serve as the ground for the development of the self. The struggle for meaning is a drama enacted and re-enacted in the decisions confronted during the ordinary course of life.” While the modern mental health establishment seeks to reduce, if not to eliminate, psychological discomfort, it ought to be engaged in understanding and translating the symptoms of that discomfort; “It is precisely the tragic experience,” writes Diamond, “which is the hallmark of the healthy culture.”

What if individuals who are labeled “mentally ill” are canaries in our cultural coal mine? What if their natural and invaluable social function is to warn the so-called “normal” populace that something is amiss, that we are all being exposed to psychological pathogens, and that ‘civilization’ is a trap? What if we stopped trying to “cure” the “mentally ill” and learned instead to listen to them, to understand them, and to take them seriously as human beings whose predicament, ultimately, is the same as ours: frightened children trying to navigate a haunted wood, in a world that has never been happy, a world that has never been good. ³

Paradoxically, the more we ‘know’ about mental illness, and the more ‘treatments’ we develop to ‘manage’ it, the more intractable the ‘problem’ becomes. A popular (if misguided) definition of insanity is, “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” Stanley Diamond notes:

The mental health establishment is a latter-day Platonic academy enfranchised by the society it represents to search out the ‘essences’ that are hidden behind what are taken to be the signs of mental disease. [The establishment itself] is a pathological symptom of the society that created it, part of a fragmented social process within which the alienated study the alienated. After decades of research, the behavioral science ‘experts’ have failed to discover either the cause of or the cure for schizophrenia; nor have they defined the elusive essence which they have been tasked to understand. No researcher could possibly familiarize himself with the vast store of available information; and yet, periodically, we are informed that the problem of schizophrenia is greater, more prevalent, and more subtle (in the clinical sense) than ever before.

What if the ‘disease’ clinicians are trying to treat is, as Stanley Diamond suggests, civilization itself?

___________________________________________________________

Note: The views expressed by Pascal the existential Russian blue cat are his own.

¹ But then, as Leonard Cohen observed, “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” (from “Anthem”)

² See Philip K. Dick’s novel Martian Time-Slip for an uncanny evocation of the phenomenon.

³ W.H. Auden: “[We are] lost in a haunted wood, / Children afraid of the night, / Who have never been happy or good.” (from “September 1, 1939”)

Wednesday with Pascal: Whose History? Whose Progress?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat, nihilist that he is, is fascinated by anarcho-primitivists, paleo-conservatives, and latter-day Luddites determined to bring the wheels of Progress to a stop and the edifice of Civilization crashing to the ground. In today’s entry, Pascal has a chat with his latest anti-modern crush, the late Stanley Diamond, a Marxist anthropologist of some note.}

Pascal: You say you want civilization? Well, you know, someone will have to pay the cost.

Stanley Diamond: Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home. Each is an aspect of the other. Words such as ‘acculturation’ beg this basic question. For the major mode of acculturation, the direct shaping of one culture by another through which civilization develops, has been conquest. Observe, for example, the Euro-American ‘influence’ on the South Vietnamese, or the fact that white Protestant Anglo-Saxons who settled in New England learned a few things from the aboriginal Indian people, and that Black slaves ‘contributed’ African rhythms to southern American music. In all these instances, one group was dominant and the other subordinate.

Pascal: When it comes to justifying the march of civilization, the important thing is never to humanize the losses: never focus on the cost to individuals, or to specific tribes or villages, or to specific customs, languages, religions, or ways of life. Keep the picture abstract, a matter of the superior (civilized) way of life replacing the inferior (primitive) competition; if need be, go so far as to play the victim and to whine about “the white man’s burden”.  

Stanley Diamond: When this process is [presented] as an abstract exchange, somehow justified by the universal balance sheet of civilization, the assault by the civilized upon primitive or traditional societies is masked, or its implications evaded. The propagation of basic elements of Egyptian culture along the eastern Mediterranean strip was, for example, a precipitant of political and economic conquest. The politically ‘weaker’ people were confronted with a single set of alternatives rooted in the Egyptian experience. This historical fact is then related as a law of development; as civilization accelerates, its proponents project their historical present as the progressive destiny of the entire human race. The political component is obscured by deterministic arguments from natural law, natural history, and natural science.

Pascal: Not to mention arguments from a ‘Divine plan’. If history unfolds according to the will of God (or the gods), then the winners can pretend that politics—that is, human decisions—had nothing to do with the outcome. 

Stanley Diamond: Despite these ethnocentric notions of historical inevitability, political decisions are rather more existential in nature. They can be literally decisive; they are implicated with problems of will and authority. ¹ Popular (as opposed to imposed) politics is people in groups deciding to act in order to reject, create, or maintain a given form of social life. Civilized people and civilized disciplines have therefore been particularly sensitive to political action on the part of ‘backward’ peoples which created the possibility of autonomous societies and alternative cultures. 

In the mind of the imperialist, the world is small, and loss of control in one area threatens the whole. The fabric of world culture, our oral or inscribed literary, aesthetic, and religious inheritance, may be, as anthropologists put it, a ‘multicolored fabric’; but since the rise of civilization that fabric has been woven on a political loom.

No matter how far we range in time and space, the tale is always the same. No matter what distinctions we encounter in language, art, religion, cultural style, or social structure, the history of civilization repeats itself, not as farce but as tragedy, in the shadow of which the achievements of civilization are reduced to their proper proportions. Those achievements were intended for the use and pleasure of the very few at the expense of the skill and labor of the many.

Pascal: Is civilization ultimately a pyramid scheme? ²

Stanley Diamond: The original crimes of civilization—conquest and political repression—were committed in silence, and that is still the intention, if not always the result. Most of the victims throughout human history could not, and cannot, read or write. It is sometimes said that they therefore had no history, an opinion which is both false yet profoundly true in a way not intended. It is false, of course, because it assumes that history is a matter of documents. Conventional historians, who live by documents and therefore consider them sacrosanct, would thus deny authentic history to most of the human race for the greater period of its time on this planet. The opinion of Hugh Trevor-Roper is typical: ‘Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach, but at present there is none. There is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness…”

Trevor-Roper was, in a sense, perfectly correct, but in a way he would not have wanted to admit: most men, whether Africans, medieval Europeans, or working-class Englishmen, have lived in the ‘darkness’ to which they have been confined by those who record and rationalize the career of civilization. Their histories—for example, in Africa—were of no use to the European historian; not being reified, they could not be endlessly mined for the sake of either the academic specialist or the establishment he represented. When Trevor-Roper claims that Africa has no history, he means that Africa has no history that he can use.

Pascal: Written history—writing in general—exemplifies what Wittgenstein called “the bewitchments of language”. Why do marks on paper possess such power? ³ What alchemy turns them into reality? Whose idea was it that ‘In the beginning was the Word’?

Stanley Diamond: The people who could write, the scribes and priests of Egypt, Babylonia, and China, were rarely disposed to record the attitudes of those they taxed, subordinated, and mystified. Writing was originally used to keep taxes, census, and other official records; it was, in short, an instrument invented by bureaucrats for the recording of official histories. ⁴ The oral tradition, the ceremony, the round of daily life, the use and manufacture of tools by the people at large did not depend on writing, nor did they need to be reflected in writing. The compulsive rite of civilization is writing, and the compulsions of the official concept of reality are both experienced and expressed in the exclusive, one-dimensional mode of cognition signified by writing.

Pascal: We write, therefore we are. Or, more accurately: They write, therefore they are. To paraphrase Socrates, the unwritten life is not worth living, nor is it worth remembering.

Stanley Diamond: Writing was one of the original mysteries of civilization, and it reduced the complexities of experience to the written word. Moreover, writing provides the ruling classes with an ideological instrument of incalculable power; the word of God becomes an invincible law, mediated by priests. With the advent of writing, symbols became explicit; they lost a certain richness. Man’s word was no longer an endless exploration of reality, but a sign that could be used against him.

Writing splits consciousness in two ways—it becomes more authoritative than talking, thus degrading the meaning of speech and eroding oral tradition; and it makes it possible to use words for the political manipulation and control of others. Written signs supplant memory; an official, fixed, and permanent version of events can be made. ⁵ If it is written, in early civilizations, it is bound to be true. ⁶

History has always been written by the conqueror; the majority of people have traditionally remained silent, and this is still largely the case.

___________________________________

All Stanley Diamond quotes are from his book, In Search of the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (1974)

Stanley Diamond - Wikipedia

¹ And power, though Diamond does not here mention it. Both conquest and repression, the categories Diamond associates with civilization, require power, along with the willingness and the ability to use it.

² Insert your own ‘Egypt’ joke here.

³ “He wrote, recognizing the irony.”

⁴ And for the invention and embellishment of such histories.

⁵ Notice that Diamond uses the word “version” here rather than the word “record”. The two words are clearly not synonymous.

⁶ “So let it be written; so let it be done.”

Barbarity vs. Civilization (from Kung Fu Tea)

Saturday Lecture: Man at the Center

{Question: “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Reply: “Who wants to know?”}

Mark Greif, from The Age of the Crisis of Man:

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, American intellectuals converged on a perception of danger: not just the crisis of the liberal state, or capitalist economy generally, and not only the imminent paroxysm of world war. The threat was now to ‘Man’. ‘Man’ was in ‘crisis.’ This jeopardy changed the tone and content of intellectual, political, and literary enterprise, from the late thirties forward, in ways that—because they are so intertwined with panic, anxiety, and the permanent philosophical questions of human nature—have still not been given an adequate accounting.

To its adherents, the crisis of man specified the danger of the end or barbarization of Western civilization. New conditions seemed destined to snap the long tradition of humanism, the filament of learning, humane confidence, and respect for human capacities that had made intellect modern and progressive since the Renaissance. Thinkers mourned the ‘end of history’ as a forward-moving, progressive stream; it seemed a lonesome terminus in their eyes and not a fulfillment. Their fear, above all, was that human nature was being changed, either in its permanent essence or in its lineaments for the eyes of other men. The change would have the same result either way: the demolition of those certainties about human nature which had been pillars for optimistic thinkers for two centuries.

The Rights of Man had been the foundation upon which modern democracies had been built. After 1939, those unalienable rights could not be taken for granted in Europe, as ‘man’ was being alienated and eradicated, altered and undone. These erasures largely occurred at gunpoint, of Nazi, Soviet, or fascist arms, though intellectuals took the threat to be much more general. Perhaps, they thought, men had been better off in ignorance and naïve hopefulness—except that, the intellectuals warned, it was this blindness that had prepared the field for the disasters of Nazism and totalitarianism.

Meditations on fundamental anthropology are as continuous a stream of introspection as one can find in the history of philosophy; you can reach down and pull up a dipperful of speculations on ‘the human’ in any given year. Still, the period of the interwar years and World War II constituted a landmark; in that moment, the modern progress of expanded rights and protections for oppressed human groups and ignored subjects—the nonwhite, the nonmale, and the nonelite—gave way to a new inquiry into the unmarked human subject itself, to change and reground the rationale for human moral status and inviolability.

From the 1930s through the 1950s, intellectuals debated a fundamental abstraction. ‘Whatever the line of inquiry, the thread leads back to man. Man is the problem,’ Will Herberg wrote in 1951, speaking for a perception of the uniqueness of his time. His mentor, Reinhold Niebuhr, had stated the discourse’s difficulty, along with its necessity, a decade earlier: ‘Man has always been his own most vexing problem. How shall he think of himself? Every affirmation which he may make about his stature, virtue, or place in the cosmos becomes involved in contradictions when analyzed.’ Interminable analysis became the intellectuals’ form of action, a means to pull others into the framework of affirmation and contradiction that their thought created.

The thirty-one years of continuous war that defined the early twentieth century constituted a single movement, in a way, of changed political, technological, and philosophical norms for Europe. American intellectuals who identified with world politics could recite a continuous list of crises leading up to World War II, a litany they learned from newspapers or from their political comrades. Those in the United States, though suffering none of the European disasters, still knew that the political philosophy of fascism spelled something terrible for the liberal-democratic West. Serious arguments were offered that the totalitarian model was more efficient and effective than the liberal state’s manner of leaving men on their own. Such proposals reinforced the 1930s intellectuals’ habitual mistrust of liberalism.

With the U.S. entry into the war, mass magazines in America began to take up the language of the new crisis. The editors of Fortune declared, ‘Without vision of deep purpose, we shall perish,’ and turned to professors of philosophy and theologians for ‘a general meaning.’ Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard, in an article on ‘What Man Can Make of Man,’ warned that ‘In all our doings, and by way of these doings, something is happening to human nature.’ The French Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain proposed that ‘the only way of regeneration for the human community is the rediscovery of the true image of man’—in his case, of course, a Catholic image.

One can discern much in the early discourse of the crisis of man that was desperate and hortatory. Intellectuals asked what man was, in what part of himself he should have a steady faith, and how he had come to this pass. A confusion and difficulty of their philosophic enterprise was that they were claiming to ask anew a question that they had always asked; philosophers had contemplated man’s nature for three thousand years. In Kant’s ‘Logic,’ he says there are only four true questions of philosophy: ‘What can I know?’, “What ought I to do?’, ‘What can I hope for?’, and ‘What is man?’

Man became at midcentury the figure everyone agreed must be addressed, recognized, helped, made the center, the measure, the root, and set free for ‘what was in him.’ But the thinkers who encouraged this were not, themselves, naïve. The more skeptical among them even acknowledged that every effort to specify what the quiddity was that defined man seemed doomed. Still, knowing the difficulty or even the absurdity of the project, the midcentury intellectual pondered the question, ‘What is man?’ And he intended to give an answer.    

__________________

{The above excerpts have been gently edited.}

Mark Greif - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: Human Domination

Kirkpatrick Sale, from After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination (2005):

Think of it: ours is the only species in all the long history of life on earth that has ever spread around the entire world, occupying every continent and nearly every island, effectively subjugating all the animals and plants and natural systems it has encountered and over a relatively short period of time establishing itself in vast numbers as the single most dominant species of all.

It is a wonder that this singular fact seems not to have imprinted itself powerfully upon the consciousness of us all, filling us with daily amazement, or bewilderment, or awe. Nor has it been the bedrock of religions, regarded as a phenomenon worthy of praise and gratitude and homage; nor the preoccupation of scholars, recounting how this marvelous and unique transformation has taken place and investigating why it is that humans, and only humans, are everywhere; nor the inspiration of the arts, celebrating the immensity of this achievement and the treasures it has devolved upon us.

Instead, we take it for granted. That is the way things are, and why not?

But in the preceding two million years, none of the earlier hominid species did anything like that. Their effect on the environment was very limited, as were their numbers at any one place, and they lived in settings confined in space and impact, not terribly different from other mammalian species, except that they had stone tools and intimate social groupings. ‘Homo erectus,’ it is true, did spread out of Africa several times, into the Levant, the Caucuses, and southern Asia and China, but in only modest numbers and with limited technologies insufficient for widespread conquest and dominion.

It was not until our species—‘Homo sapiens,’ we pridefully call it—came upon the earth and began to use its bigger and more pleated brain, its more complex technologies, and its more elaborate social networks, that any creature was able regularly to control an increasing number of the other elements of the natural world for its own use and pleasure. And it was not until our species that any creature developed the psychological perceptions, and then the behavioral manifestations, that allowed it to stand distanced from that world—indeed, in many ways opposed to it—so that it was able to expand its control and dominion in a totally unprecedented way, justified in the name of survival. The evolution of human dominance is the evolution of ‘Homo sapiens’ into a creature that could kill ‘every beast of the earth’ and thus in time conquer and transform the world.

Consider the extent of our domination. Modern humans, now numbering six billion and predicted to go to ten billion, have left not one ecosystem on the surface of the earth free of pervasive human influence, transforming more than half the land on the planet for their own use (a quarter for farming and forestry, a quarter for pasture, 3 percent for housing, industry, and transport), consuming more than 40 percent of the total photosynthetic productivity of the sun, using 55 percent of the world’s freshwater, controlling and regulating two-thirds of all the rivers and streams, and consuming a vast variety of plant, animal, and mineral resources, often to depletion, at a pace that is estimated not to be sustainable for more than fifty years. Like volcanoes and earthquakes, humans have become a force in nature. Only more so—humans now produce about three thousand times more heat energy on average than the world’s volcanoes—and on a worldwide scale without precedence.

It is this extraordinary dominance by one single bipedal species that has brought us to the present imperilment of the earth, including the extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems, the alteration of climate, the pollution of waters and soils, the exhaustion of fisheries, the elimination of forests, the spread of deserts, and the disruption of the atmosphere. There is some dispute about when the ecological catastrophe as a result of all this is likely to hit us full force, and in what ghastly form, but it is no exaggeration to say that the undeniable scientific and informed consensus is that if western civilization continues its reckless policies and practices toward the earth we are headed toward ‘ecocide’.

How did we get into this predicament? How did humankind develop the attitude that it was right and good for it to dominate nature as much as possible, to regard the earth and its creatures and its habitats as there for unconstrained human consumption and manipulation? And how can humankind possibly alter that perception, learn to live in balance with nature as we once did during the long ages that made up 99 percent of the time humans have been on earth?

Saturday Lecture: Our Animal Nature?

“It is only through real understanding of the ways in which chimpanzees and men show similarities of behavior that we can reflect, with meaning, on the ways in which men and chimpanzees differ. And only then can we really begin to appreciate, in a biological and spiritual manner, the full extent of man’s uniqueness.” (Jane Goodall)

Raymond Tallis (from Enemies of Hope):

Critics of civilization believe that where we come from is the Animal Kingdom and that consequently many of the discontents of civilization arise from the conflicts between the demands, values, and beliefs of civilized society and our animal instincts. We are animals, yes, but we are sick animals, because life in human society denies expression to our animal nature and, worse, even prevents us from acknowledging that nature. We are possessed by instincts that we can neither express nor even admit to. The result is that, at best, we suffer in secret the consequences of inner division between our civic and our instinctual beings and that, at worst, we give distorted external expression to our denied instincts, so that others suffer—in, for example, the gratuitous violence and petty tyrannies of domestic life and the oppressions, wars, etc. of public life.

This story of human beings as frustrated animals—or as frustrated primitives (who once enjoyed a closer relationship to our common animal nature—seems to have received a huge boost from the recent advances in life-sciences: Darwinian evolutionary theory, ethology, and molecular biology all seem to point to a closer kinship between mankind and animal-kind than [we are] comfortable with. The message from the biologists has inspired many twentieth-century novelists, who see the truth about character as being located in those immemorial primitive tropisms and animal instincts that really regulate behavior and belief. They believe, as D.H. Lawrence did, that underneath personality there is something much more important and powerful and true than personality—the impersonal inheritance from the primitive and animal past. For such writers, civilization is always assumed to be a ‘thin veneer’ over a seething, pullulating mass of uncivilized appetites, instincts, and emotions.

There is hardly a schoolchild who has not learned from a compulsory study of Lord of the Flies that, left to themselves, human beings will naturally revert to a condition of primitives and wild beasts, creating a lawless society in which the strongest rule and the weakest are exploited or become the object of arbitrary cruelty or the unwilling victim of a blood sacrifice. The influence of the novelists has, in its turn, greatly amplified the influence of the biologists. And biologism has also been mediated to the wider public by quasi-scientific writers such as Freud, who in their turn have had an incalculable impact on the literary imagination.

[For these critics] the assumption is that there is no sharp break between humans and other animals [and that] the enormous distance between animal origin and contemporary human destination that has accrued over millions of years since a distinctively human species appeared amounts to nothing. Man may remove himself from within the animal kingdom but the animal kingdom cannot be removed from within mankind. However the fundamental opposition between (animal) Nature and (human) Culture may dominate human experience, discourse, attitudes, and behavior, this opposition is simply the master-myth by which humans organize their pictures of the world and make the world over into their thing. Our human nature remains rooted in our animal origins; we are up to our leaves in our roots. 

According, then, to biologists, anthropologists, and others, the stories we tell ourselves about our origins exaggerate the sharpness of the distinction between man and the infra-human animals. In contrast, I contend that eliding the absolutely fundamental difference requires us to overlook, indeed traduce, humankind and to deny the central mystery of what we are. Understanding humanity in terms of animality, and seeing men as beasts self-deceived by a surface rationality as to their true nature, prevents us from thinking about our own natures in a helpful and constructive way. It is a crucial factor in the emptiness of much contemporary social thought and cultural criticism.