Clowns on Parade

http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/08/24/dumb-things-americans-believe.html

Spheres of Influence

Some time ago, I had an opportunity to do a silent five-day retreat at a Benedictine monastery. In the past, I had done long meditation retreats of a Buddhist nature, but I had never done anything in a Christian context before, so I decided I should give it a try.

The monastery, which I’ll call Our Lady of Silence, was located in the back woods of Mexico, in the middle of nowhere. The grounds were incredibly beautiful, dotted with agave and cactus, nopal and mesquite. Burros and sheep wandered across the landscape, which was so quiet you could almost hear the butterflies winging past you. Except for the occasional hum of crickets, the stillness was literally absolute.

This beauty extended to the architecture as well. The new church, cloister, and refectory were built only a few years ago, with a kind of simple, modern design that nevertheless captured the harmony of the Middle Ages, complete with wooden beams and stained glass. Seven monks and a priest constituted the permanent residents; most of them were in their late twenties. At one point, I remember looking across the table at one older monk, with his cropped hair, carefully trimmed beard, and pensive aura, and thinking that I must have seen him before, in some medieval woodcut.

Hours are observed here with great regularity: Matins at 4:30 a.m., Lauds at 6:30, mass at 7, breakfast at 8, Terce at 8:50, lunch at 1:25 p.m., Nones at 2:30, Vespers at 5:30, dinner at 6:45, Compline at 8:10. I went to Vespers every day; the chanting of the monks was so gentle, it was as though they were singing love songs, like the troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

And it was, in fact, like living during that time; really, like living in a kind of glass sphere. No outside news entered the monastery. There was no TV or radio, no newspapers or journals of any kind. I wondered if the monks knew who the current president of Mexico was, let alone of the United States.

I had brought a couple of books of a spiritual nature along with me to read, but other than that, I had decided to follow the monastic example and stay cut off from the outside world: no magazines, history books, transistor radios, or anything of the kind. As a result, the silence, and the empty space, got filled up with the contents of my psyche. Material spontaneously started drifting upward, as it were. Within two hours of arriving at the monastery I had a major breakthrough, unraveling something that I had been emotionally wrestling with for several weeks.

Two other experiences stand out. One was coming into the refectory at dinner and sitting down in front of what looked like a blue corn patty, mixed in with nopal. As I picked up my knife and fork, one of the monks slipped a CD of Ave Maria into the stereo system. The sounds filled the hall; I wavered, suddenly on the verge of tears, not able to eat for two or three minutes. (I later learned that the monks were worried I might be staging a protest against the food. The patty did, in fact, require a large dollop of salsa roja in order to liven it up.)

The second event consisted of “accidentally” locking myself out of my cell at 6:20 in the morning, on the way to the bathroom. My first reaction was: Oh dammit to hell. But then I was grateful that I was dressed and wearing clogs, and carrying a flashlight; it could have been much worse. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to put on my glasses, and I am terribly nearsighted. I also realized that this annoying event was probably not an accident: I had been embroiled in identity issues for three days now, and keys are a symbol of that. Whenever these types of issues arise for me, I typically lose my keys or wallet, or lock myself out of my car, and/or have a dream about these things. I should have known, I thought. In any case, what was there to do, in the near-freezing cold, except climb the hill up to the church and sit through Lauds and the mass? At least, I consoled myself, it was warm in the church.

I had been to mass only once before in my life, Christmas Eve 1973, at the Église St.-Séverin in Paris, a thirteenth-century structure that sits adjacent to the Sorbonne. It had been exquisite; it’s a wonder I didn’t convert to Catholicism right then and there (my complete atheism notwithstanding). The mass at the monastery was also “Parisian,” but in a rather different way: without my glasses, I couldn’t see much beyond blobs of color–an Impressionist mass, as it were. When it was over, I approached one of the monks with my problem, and he immediately got the master key and let me back into my cell.

The day before, I had been rereading one of the books I brought with me, What We May Be, by Piero Ferrucci. Ferrucci is an Italian psychotherapist, a student of Roberto Assagioli, who founded a school and technique known as Psychosynthesis. It has much in common with Jungian analysis, in fact. The section I had been reading deals with beauty:

Music [he writes] has a powerful effect on several bodily
rhythms and functions and on psychological states...neural
networks in the brain may be responsive to harmonic principles
in general. And there is such a factor within us as an “inbuilt
urge to maintain a state of intellectual and aesthetic order
and harmonic balance, essential to mental health.”
But we do not need research to know that the
magnificence of a cathedral’s rose window, the design of
Celtic manuscripts, a flower in full bloom, or the perfect
geometry of a Greek temple does not leave us unaffected.
And the moment we let ourselves be touched by beauty, that
part of us which has been badly bruised or even shattered by
the events of life may begin to be revitalized. At that moment
a true victory takes place–a victory over discouragement, a
positive affirmation against resigning ourselves to the process
of crystallization and death. That victory is also a step forward in
our growth in a very precise and literal sense, for the moment we
fully appreciate beauty we become more than we were. We live
in a moment of pure psychological health. We effortlessly build a
stronghold against the negative pressures that life inevitably brings.
But that is not all, for all stimuli–beautiful or ugly–sink into
the unconscious, where their influence becomes less immediate,
but more powerful and pervasive....
When stimuli of the same kind are repeated a number of
times–as in the case of the 15,000 killings the average American
adolescent has seen on TV*–their effects multiply and come to
generate a real psychological climate in the inner world of the
individual....
We can be[come] exposed to what Assagioli called “psychic
smog”–the prevailing mass of free-floating psychological poisons....

Earlier I referred to the monastery as a kind of glass sphere, hermetically sealed. If it keeps out the news of the modern world, it also keeps out the garbage of that world as well. It is a sphere of harmony, of beauty, designed to bring peace to the soul. As for the modern world, in particular the America of endless violence and “psychic smog,” Ferrucci follows up the above quotation with a reference to a famous painting by Hieronymus Bosch, in which the sixteenth-century artist “depicts the damned of Hell as being enveloped by an opaque crystal ball, impeding all communication with the outside world.”

And this is, very unfortunately, a fair description of the United States. The fact is that Americans live in a kind of hologram, or glass sphere with mirroring on the inside. Literally every thought they have is on the order of a programmed response, dating from the early years of the Republic: “chosen people,” “City on a Hill,” “endless frontier,” “rugged individualism,” and so on. For more than two centuries now, the same slogans and buzzwords have bounced around inside the sphere, mirroring and confirming each other. Contradictory information–represented, for example, by the analysis of that sphere and its mental processes–is never allowed to get through in any significant way. (There are hundreds of examples of this: Noam Chomsky, William Appleman Williams, Chris Hedges, etc. etc. A recent example is Walter Hixson’s The Myth of American Diplomacy, an attack on the sphere so massive in scope, and so fundamental, that only a tiny handful of Americans would be able to read it without having a nervous breakdown. It got very few reviews.) The result is the smog or poison Assagioli talks about: a culture that is not merely stupid (and stupefied), but remarkably violent, all the while celebrating how “superior” it is to all the rest–and certainly, to some medieval throwback in the hinterland of Mexico, right? In fact, when you think about it, American society is no less hermetically sealed than the world of a medieval monastery; only the content is different.

I couldn’t help remembering a film I had seen shortly before coming to the monastery, Crossing Over, about the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its persecution of alien residents, legal as well as illegal. But it proves to be about much more than the daily activities of the ICE. By the end of the film, you realize that you have been watching an X-ray of the American soul, and you are struck dumb by how violent it is, down to its very core. Destructive as well as self-destructive, it reflects a culture in a state of fear, on its last legs, lashing out at helpless victims and imaginary enemies alike. The “toxic cloud” Don DeLillo described many years ago in his brilliant novel, White Noise, now seems to have arrived in full force. This is psychological poison at its worst (or close to it).

I left Our Lady of Silence determined to carry the silence with me into my daily life: gardening, walking, meditating more, whatever. But the key issue, of course, is not my own personal life, but the dichotomy, the problem of the two separate spheres. Very few of us are cut out to live in a monastery, after all, myself included. All beauty aside, it’s not a solution for the modern world. Yet what kind of solution–to anything–is U.S. corporate-commercial culture? That much of the world seeks to emulate it doesn’t change the fact that it amounts to little more than trash, “psychic smog” that is slowly (and sometimes rapidly) killing off its inhabitants (who nevertheless can’t seem to get enough of it). If there is a third sphere, a serious institutional alternative to these two that exists in practice, not just theory, I have yet to see it. And without that, what kind of future do we finally have?

*Written ca. 1980; we can expect that the current number is by now four or five times that amount, especially if we add in input from movies, DVD’s, computer games, and the Internet.

©Morris Berman, 2010

Democracy in America

Since American democracy is in the process of committing suicide, it might be worthwhile to reflect on the nature of the phenomenon, and the sources of its dialectical death. In 1982 the eminent French scholar, Pierre Manent, published a study of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, the two volumes of which came out in 1835/40. Manent's work was subsequently translated into English under the title Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy; Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University contributed a Foreword to it. Mansfield writes:

"Democracy produces a sense of independence in its citizens, a sentiment that each is a whole because he depends on no one else; and the democratic dogma [nota bene] states that every citizen is competent to govern his own life. Hence democracy is not merely, perhaps not primarily, a form of government; or it is [a] form of government that almost denies the need for government. And as a society, democracy is antisocial; it severs individuals from one another by pronouncing each of them equally free. All the traditional relationships are broken or weakened...Above all, democracy does not know where it tends and where it should go."

The blurb on the back cover of the book states that "Pierre Manent's analysis concludes that the growth of state power and the homogenization of society are two primary consequences of equalizing conditions." We are, of course, seeing these consequences 175 years later.

Prof. Mansfield is, as one would expect, a proponent of democracy; most Americans are. Yet one wonders what he thinks of his own critique; the characteristics he identifies don't exactly amount to minor drawbacks in the system. I couldn't help looking at it through the lens of Islamic societies (to the extent that I am able to do such a thing). Quite obviously, I'm not a big fan of Allah's, nor of stoning adulterers to death, nor of intellectual stultification, etc. etc., and I suspect it will be a fairly long time before I put down a cash advance on a condo in Tehran. But their problems don't do anything to improve our own, quite obviously, and it seems to me that their revulsion toward the United States is not all that puzzling, if one considers the following points:

-"each is a whole because he depends on no one else"
-"a form of government that almost denies the need for government"
-"democracy is antisocial; it severs individuals from one another"
-"all the traditional relationships are broken or weakened"
-"democracy does not know...where it should go"

Clearly, with friends like these (Harvey Mansfield), democracy needs no enemies; this is a fairly good description of a "psychological slum," as Philip Slater once called the United States. And speaking of enemies, I couldn't help thinking of the message to the American people delivered by Osama bin Laden on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. I don't have the text in front of me at this moment, but I remember him saying, "You have no Guide, no Helper." He understood that America was a ship without a rudder--something that the two candidates, G.W. Bush and John Kerry, were unable to grasp. They both condemned the address without any substantive comment, to show they were "tough on terrorism"; thereby losing the opportunity to reflect, publicly, on what bin Laden was saying and what had gone wrong with American democracy (which of course wouldn't have gone over well with a basically stupefied electorate--and indeed, one of Tocqueville's major points was that democracy ultimately wouldn't work if the population wasn't too bright).

Mansfield's critique also meshes well with the recent book by Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, The Lonely American, which documents the lives of quiet desperation that Americans lead. Nationwide, 25% of all habitations are single-person dwellings, and the figure for New York City is nearly 50%. In recent years the number of people who said they have not a single person they can confide in has jumped to 33%, if I remember correctly. It's a sad, if honest, book--an obituary, really, for a bold and brilliant experiment that finally didn't work out. For suicide takes place on two levels: the macrolevel, of public institutions and domestic and foreign policy; and the microlevel, i.e. in the hearts and minds of individual citizens.

Finally: I have always been a great admirer of Isaiah Berlin, the Russian-Jewish-British political scientist who spent his life cautioning the West about the dangers of coercive systems such as that of the former Soviet Union. In his famous Oxford University inaugural lecture of 1958, "Two Concepts of Liberty," Berlin defined "negative freedom" as freedom from; it is the freedom to do what the heck you please as long as you don't infringe on anyone else. "Positive freedom," on the other hand, is freedom to; it is the freedom of a directive ideal, one that holds up a vision of the good life (whatever that might be) and encourages--or forces--people to conform to that image. Going back to at least the 17th century, negative freedom is the Anglo-Saxon conception of what it means to be free; and as far as Berlin was concerned (as a good British subject--he became Sir Isaiah the year before his inaugural lecture), that was the only freedom around; the other variety, he believed, was inevitably dangerous. The only problem is, without a positive vision of the good life, the good society, what are we? How could we be anything else except a ship without a rudder? This, to me, is the Achilles heel in the Berlinian edifice, for negative freedom finally affirms nothing--as the example of contemporary America clearly demonstrates. George H.W. Bush, that great intellectual, was fond of using the word "vision" sarcastically; he was proud of the fact that he had none. (What a shock, that his son became an alcoholic and a Christian fundamentalist.) He was a synecdoche for the nation, and ironically, he confirmed what Osama bin Laden said about the U.S. a dozen or so years later.

There is no doubt, of course, that "vision" can get out of hand; this was Isaiah Berlin's whole point. But what Berlin failed to understand was that lack of vision can also get out of hand, as Harvey Mansfield makes abundantly clear. And that has happened in the United States, which accounts for the odd combination in our contemporary political life of hysteria plus inertia. (The working title of my book Dark Ages America was Colossus Adrift.) It also means that there is no way of reversing the trajectory; I mean, where do you start? You can't just assign the country "vision," and think that's going to work (this was in fact the idea of the communitarian movement of the nineties, led by Amitai Etzioni, and it was an embarrassing failure). The dialectical part of this is that the strengths of American democracy are precisely its weaknesses; the whole thing is a package deal. Or to put it another way, the ideology of negative freedom, of no-vision, cannot evolve into anything else but the negative, visionless society that we now have, and the seeds of this were planted a long time ago.

So here we are, wrote T.S. Eliot in the Four Quartets, "in the middle way...years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres" (obviously more than deux, in the case of the United States),

"And so each venture
Is...a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating..."

The Four Quartets is about many things, but I believe Eliot's major theme here is the acceptance of death. Wouldn't it make sense, at this point, for America to "resign" with dignity? To come to terms with the dynamics of its collapse, and just accept it? To finally (to quote another famous poet) "go gentle into that good night"? I expect that kind of maturity is completely beyond our grasp; but it would be, at long last, a vision of sorts.

© Morris Berman, 2010

This American Life

[This is Will Okun's column on CNN, 2 July 2010. He taught high school for nine years on Chicago's West Side. Italics are mine.]

Chicago's longstanding ban on handguns, which the Supreme Court this week ruled as unconstitutional, was a complete failure.

Two years ago, every student in my first-period English class on the West Side of Chicago claimed to have easy access to a handgun -- even the goody-two-shoes Honors student in the front row. When I doubted her, she looked at me as if I were a fool. "I could get you one from my uncle tonight," she informed me with a quizzical look. "He might ask me why I needed it, might not."

Guns were so abundant that there was only, maybe, one big fight a year among the males in our school building because it was understood that the simplest of physical confrontations too quickly could escalate into deadly shootings. "You have to walk away from a lot," observed one former student of mine who has lost several friends and relatives to gun violence. "For instance, dude deserves to be beat and I know I could beat his ass, but then what? No one is just going to take an ass-beating, they're going to want to do something about it."

And he added, "Then you got to worry about him and his guys jumping on you. Or more than likely, he's going to get a gun to show that he's not a punk. That's how a lot of these shootings happen, it's over nothing."

Violence was so omnipresent that when I returned to school a few days after being shot in the arm with a .22 (I'd rather not discuss), a staggering number of students lifted their shirts to show their bullet wounds. "What you going to do?" they seemed to say with a shrug, as if this were everyday life.

In a city where an average of four people are shot every day, the random shooting death a few years ago of an amazing, beautiful person, Alto Brown, a friend of mine, was reduced to a single line in a three-paragraph newspaper story coldly tallying weekend homicides. "Everything happens for a reason," the pastor said at his funeral. "He's now in a better place."

As gangs and their illegal guns held whole communities hostage, it seemed as if the only people prevented from possessing firearms were citizens like Keith Thomas, who was raised on the West Side and now works as a mentor to at-risk youth for an alternatives schools program in Chicago

"I don't think anybody in their right mind would argue that more guns are a good thing," said Thomas, who has the scar from a bullet wound on his right wrist. "But I think the Supreme Court made the right decision. I think right now, at this point, the ban is not helping to serve any real purpose."

Thomas does not believe that the court's decision will result in significantly more or less violence, but he does hope that the ruling will force political leaders to seek community improvements beyond just strict gun control.

"It's not enough to just say we need more gun control. That's not what's causing all these problems out here, the guns are the result," he explained. "If we want to stop violence, we need to make real changes. That's a lot harder and requires a lot more money than just saying no guns."

In too many low-income communities of Chicago, the schools are in shambles, quality after-school programs are scarce, well-paying jobs are almost nonexistent, and the family structure is in full crisis. It is an easy notion to disregard, but many of these children are struggling daily to thrive in an environment that fosters failure.

"We have to get them early, before they start getting lost," Thomas said of the youth he advises, get them redirected with organizations like his and other successful mentoring interventions like the Youth Advocates Programs. "Once they start believing there's nothing else, that they have nothing to lose, they're the ones most likely to do the shooting."

After a recent weekend in which 10 people were killed and 60 wounded by gunfire, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley continued to argue the necessity of a citywide gun ban. "Look at all the guns that shot people this weekend. Where did they come from? That is the issue."

But one must ask, truly, is it?

Is There Life After Birth?

[Some time ago I was asked by the Mexican actor, Diego Luna, to write an analysis of his first film as director, Abel, which won an award at the Sundance Festival and was recently released in Mexico. The essay was subsequently published in a book on the film, also entitled Abel. Text as follows:]

It is generally accepted that the author of any creative work is only half conscious of what he or she is doing. Indeed, without this sort of "vagueness," or indeterminacy, multiple interpretations of a novel, poem, or screenplay--which are the norm--would not be possible. And if the author objects, says, "but that's not what I meant," it isn't completely arrogant for the critic to reply, "no--at least not consciously." So let me put aside any false modesty here and say what I think this strange and remarkable film is "really" about.

Although it is not as popular today as it was forty years ago (give or take), there is a mode of treating psychological disturbances known as "family systems therapy," in which the therapist regards the pathology displayed by an individual as symptomatic of a larger problem--usually, a secret--that is woven into the fabric of the person's familial relationships. Within the family, there is an unspoken agreement that this thing, whatever it is, will never be mentioned. What the supposedly disturbed individual--say, a sixteen-year-old boy--is trying to do when he steals a car and gets caught, is bring attention to the family secret; to flush it out. (In psychological jargon this is called "acting out.") Therapy that focuses only on the adolescent and his criminal activity--makes him the "Identified Patient," so to speak--is missing the boat, on this interpretation. In truth, the kid is a healing agent, trying to expose the rot in the system, if only the family would be willing to stop playing an elaborate game of self-deception. In fact, if the son cleans up his act, stops stealing cars, and starts getting good grades in school, what happens? The fifteen-year-old daughter, previously a paragon of virtue, suddenly shows up pregnant. If she has the baby, gives it up for adoption, stops sleeping around, and manages to work out a healthy adolescent life, the father, amazingly enough, starts to drink. If he then goes to Alcoholics Anonymous and quits drinking, the mother becomes schizophrenic and is committed to a mental institution. Or perhaps hangs herself. You get the idea. The one thing the family does not want to do is address the Big Secret, the pathology that lies underneath the pathology. So like Hegel's zeitgeist, the ghost, the energy, keeps moving from person to person, making it look as though each successive "Identified Patient" is the problem, when it is actually the family dynamic that is the real problem.

In many ways, Abel is a quintessentially Mexican film. As a foreigner who has lived in Mexico for four years now, and has been visiting the place for more than thirty, I have been acutely aware of the juxtaposition of socioeconomic poverty and sensual intensity. In keeping with this, the action of the film takes place in a shabby, rundown area of an unnamed city (in fact, Aguascalientes), and this contrasts sharply with the exquisite photography of the film, which gives the movie an incredible texture, at once tactile and visual. But beyond that, the theme seems universal, for the story can very well be analyzed in terms of family systems therapy. In fact, what came to mind for me when I was watching it was a British tale of family dysfunction written around four hundred years ago--King Lear, by William Shakespeare--and a short story written nearly fifty years ago by the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, "Facing the Forests." In all three of these works--the film, the play, the story--the Identified Patient is depressed/autistic (the child in Abel), supposedly mad (the Fool in Lear), or unable to speak (an old Arab who had his tongue cut out). In each case, their particular version of silence is witness to the Big Secret, and represents it metaphorically.

Lear
Interested in flattery, the king commits a fatal error, believing the false declarations of love given to him by his two eldest daughters, Goneril and Regan, and failing to realize that it is his youngest, Cordelia, who really loves him for who he is. Worse, he disowns her for not flattering him. Meanwhile, the Fool keeps babbling his "nonsense," which is actually insight into what is really going on, if only Lear would listen. Instead, the king eventually goes mad; at that point, the Fool disappears--he is no longer needed. But had Lear come to terms with the Big Secret, confronted the family dynamic, the Fool would not have been needed in the first place, and the insanity never have happened. (Also, there would have been no play!) Unfortunately, as any family systems therapist can tell you, health is the rare exception to the rule, which can be summarized as, "Let the charade continue!"

Facing the Forests
Here, the "family" is Israel/Palestine, and the "therapist" is the author of the story, who is trying to heal his society. Yehoshua's novella is about a graduate student in history who takes a job with the forest service, his assignment being to guard against forest fires. The forest consists of trees planted since 1948 to celebrate the state of Israel, most of them being paid for by American Jews. The family mythology, which is partly true, is one of pioneers in a new land, Holocaust survivors determined to make the Zionist dream a reality. The Big Secret is that in the process of doing that, 700,000 Palestinian Arabs, some deliberately and some as an accidental by-product of war, were forced to flee their homes and their land. In Yehoshua's story (and in reality as well, on more than one occasion), an Arab village was bulldozed to make way for the newly planted forest of pine trees. Flitting between the slender pines, a sort of caretaker and his daughter inhabit the premises, haunt them, one might say, like ghosts. But as I already indicated, the old Arab cannot speak--he was apparently tortured, had his tongue cut out. With a little research, the history student pieces together what happened to the village, and manages to communicate with the old Arab about it through gestures. By this time, however, the Arab has had it, and burns down the forest in revenge. The police arrest him and interrogate him, asking him the same questions over and over again, and the student says to himself: “A foul stench rises from the burnt forest, as though a huge carcass were rotting away all around them. The interrogation gains momentum. A big bore. What did he see, what did he hear, what did he do. It’s insulting, this insistence upon the tangible—as though that were the main point, as though there weren’t some idea involved here.”

But the student remains silent. Neither he nor anybody else is going to say out loud what the main point, the large, intangible idea, is, because to do that would blow the lid on the family mythology. Instead of dealing with its past, and the Big Secret, Israel prefers to symbolically make this old Arab without a voice the Identified Patient. That was in 1963, a mere fifteen years after the War of Independence (or the Catastrophe, if you are talking to an Arab). Nearly fifty years later, and despite a growing literature by a number of very talented revisionist historians, the majority of Israelis (judging from how they have voted in recent elections) still can't seem to fathom the violence and "rebelliousness" of these "wayward" Palestinian "children," who could solve the whole problem of the Middle East if they just "behaved themselves" and stopped acting "irrationally." (I've actually heard Israelis talk in these terms.) Yehoshua was trying to shine some light on the Big Secret, but this is largely taboo in Israeli society, and certainly was in 1963. For the most part, then, the charade continues.

Abel
On to the film. The plot is something like this: Two years ago, Anselmo, the father in this particular family drama, declared he was going to the U.S. to work, and left. His eight-year-old son, Abel, went into a deep depression as a result and had to be hospitalized. Two years later, his doctor believes he is ready to come home, even though he displays the characteristics of an autistic child. So he returns home, and everyone--mother, sister, brother--sort of walks on eggshells around him, as the doctor has indicated that Abel is not to be upset in any way. The problem is that his behavior becomes increasingly erratic, as he seems to think he is the father of the family and to act accordingly. He puts a ring on his mother's finger, and starts sleeping in her bed. He wears his father's clothes. He also "drops" his autism and begins to talk, mostly giving orders to the other members of the family. He signs his sister's report card from school, and checks her homework. Rather creepy, but everyone plays along with it.

Out of the blue, Anselmo comes back home; but before he can re-assert his role as father, Cecilia, Abel's mother, tells the child that this is her cousin. Soon Anselmo is playing along with this farce as well, even though he (rightly) regards the situation as nuts. By chance, the daughter examines the photographs in her father's digital camera, only to discover that he has another wife (or perhaps it is a girlfriend) and a child by her. It turns out he was only in the United States for two months; the rest of the time he was living a completely separate family life some distance away in the town of Saltillo. One night during this time, i.e. the time of Anselmo's return, Abel climbs on top of his mother and pretends he is having sex with her, then pretends to smoke a post-coital cigarette. The next morning he announces to the family that he and Cecilia have had sex, and that she is pregnant. For Anselmo, this is the last straw, and he confronts Abel with the fact that he is his father. Abel spins out of control and deliberately injures himself; in general, all hell breaks loose. Undaunted, Anselmo finds Abel's doctor and signs him back into the hospital in Mexico City. We then see Anselmo in his truck on the road back to Saltillo, abandoning the family once again, and Cecilia visiting Abel in the hospital, where he is emotionally vacant and has returned to his autistic behavior.

What in the world?

If we try to decode this bizarre tale by means of family systems therapy, it seems fairly obvious that the family mythology in this case is that there actually is a family. But the truth, the Big Secret, is that the father has another family, and doesn't really give a damn about this one. He returns momentarily, and claims to be the father of this family, which he is biologically; but the truth is that he has no legitimacy. On some level, Abel knows all this, in the uncanny way that children typically do. And so, in a parody of the family lie, he takes over the function of the father. He is not quite acting; he really seems to believe it. And yet it is a charade, one that has two crucial systemic functions. First, it cancels out the abandonment: if the family now has a father, even if it is Abel himself, then Abel has not been abandoned and in fact feels (and acts) healthy and strong, for his world has been sewn back together. He is alive as the "father," dead as the abandoned son. Second, as the Identified Patient, Abel is unconsciously trying to send a signal to the family that this situation is fucked up beyond belief; in a word, he's trying to repair the mess in some weird sort of way. Yet the family dynamic, as before, is to pretend that nothing is amiss, or more precisely, that it is only Abel that is the problem. The "crazy" behavior of the child is in fact a type of intuitive wisdom, for it is the entire situation that is crazy. Focusing on Abel's apparent insanity, and not willing (or able) to admit that if anyone precipitated this situation it was himself, Anselmo blows the whistle and has Abel sent back to the hospital. And then, asshole that he is, he abandons the boy, and the family, as he did two years before. So this "solution" solves nothing, because the Big Secret, the fact that this family is in no way a family, never gets dealt with. Thus we are back to Square One, with Anselmo having gone AWOL and the kid in the hospital, once again emotionally dead. As in the case of the hypothetical family I described earlier, or the family of King Lear, or the "family" of Israel/Palestine, the temptation to focus on the Identified Patient rather than get to the heart of the matter is too powerful to resist, because getting to the heart of the matter is inevitably terrifying. Not to put too fine a point on it, Abel is nothing less than a work of genius. It is at once a Mexican tragedy, a Shakespearean tragedy, a Middle Eastern tragedy, and a universal tragedy, which can be summarized in the words of the British poet W.H. Auden: "We would rather be ruined than changed." Great stories generally don't have happy endings, what can I tell you.


©Morris Berman, 2010

Is Debt the New Karma? Why America Finally Fell Apart

The American Way of Life–which can be basically characterized as the union of technological innovation and economic expansion– has been mythologized or romanticized in various ways, and one of these is in terms of the story of Prometheus, a god of great energy who stole fire from Zeus and passed it on to mankind. It is a powerful image, and one that feeds the notion of American exceptionalism. What Americans tend to forget, however, is that there was a debt involved in this transaction. For Zeus was angry at Prometheus and had him chained to a rock, where an eagle or a vulture would come every day and eat out his liver. Since Prometheus was a god, the liver would regrow during the night, only to be devoured again the next day. Unfortunately for the United States, and contrary to popular belief, the country is not divine, and so its liver is now being devoured without possibility of regeneration. We can thus summarize the story as follows: first hubris, then nemesis–a fair portrait of the rise and fall of the American empire. Hubris incurs the debt; nemesis is the collection agency that comes to get the money back.

A second allegory of the American Way of Life is the story of Dr. Faustus, who made a pact with the devil. “A Faustian bargain,” writes the Canadian author Margaret Atwood in her book Payback, “is one in which you exchange your soul or something equally vital for a lot of glitzy but ultimately worthless short-term junk.” Your soul, in other words, is the debt that has to be paid at the end of the day.

In effect, the American Way of Life has been a Faustian bargain, and this is true both domestically and in the arena of U.S. foreign policy. Alistair Cooke, who used to host a “Letter From America” program on the BBC every week, once said that the essential idea of America was to regard as necessities those things that the rest of the world regarded as luxuries. This attitude manifests itself in the fact that although the United States comprises less than 5% of the world’s population, it consumes 25% of its energy–a situation that was condemned by only one American president, Jimmy Carter, and Americans did not take kindly to him as a result. The dark, or debt side of the notion that life is about unlimited material goods shows up in the data on bankruptcy: whereas 8,600 Americans filed for bankruptcy in 1946, more than 2 million did in 2005. Put another way, in 1946 one in 17,000 Americans declared bankruptcy; in 2005, one in 150 did. By 2006, the total public debt stood at $9 trillion, or 70% of the GDP, and personal bankruptcy filings for 2007 increased 40% over the figure for 2006. Journalist Chris Hedges reports that as of 2009, American consumers were $14 trillion in debt. As for the activity of the U.S. government in this arena, Hedges reports that the Obama administration

"has spent, lent or guaranteed $12.8 trillion in taxpayer dollars to
Wall Street and insolvent banks in a doomed effort to reinflate the
bubble economy, a tactic that at best forestalls catastrophe and will
leave us broke in a time of profound crisis. [In addition] Obama has
allocated nearly $1 trillion in defense-related spending and the
continuation of our doomed imperial projects in Iraq, where military
planners now estimate that 70,000 troops will remain for the next
15 to 20 years."

In fact, the bailout did not stay at $12.8 trillion for very long; it soon turned into $13.3 trillion, then $17.5 trillion, and, at one point, $19 trillion. Meanwhile, we are expanding the war in Afghanistan, a land that has traditionally been called “the graveyard of empires.” But “America’s most dangerous enemies,” writes Hedges, “are not Islamic radicals but those who sold us the perverted ideology of free-market capitalism and globalization. They have dynamited the foundations of our society.”

The best example of these domestic radicals is the Wall Street firm of Goldman Sachs, the world’s most powerful global bank. In a 2009 article in Rolling Stone, journalist Matt Taibbi documents how GS played a key role in the crash of 2008, and how it has been doing this repeatedly since the crash of 1929. Their formula, he says, is to position themselves in the middle of a speculative bubble and sell investments they know to be worthless. They then make huge amounts of money, and when the bubble bursts they reposition themselves to begin the process all over again, in a different sector of the economy. In the case of the housing crisis, GS created financial vehicles to package bad mortgages and sell them to insurance companies and pension funds (the failure of which wiped out the savings of millions of older citizens). This created a “mass market for toxic debt.” GS hid these in Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO’s), which turned junk-rated mortgages into AAA-rated investments. They then got companies such as AIG to provide insurance (known as credit default swaps) for the CDO’s, by means of which they were actually betting that homeowners would default. Meanwhile, the government, which at any time is typically staffed with Goldmanites or ex-Goldmanites, was persuaded to change the rules of the banking game so that all of this, if grossly unethical, is technically legal. (Nomi Prins, a former managing director of GS, characterizes this incestuous relationship as “Government Sachs”; Taibbi notes that GS contributed nearly $1 million to the Obama election campaign.)

In the case of the subsequent bailout, says Taibbi, former GS CEO Henry Paulson (G.W. Bush’s last Treasury secretary) took trillions of dollars and funneled them into the pockets of his friends on Wall Street. So Robert Rubin (at GS for 26 years and Clinton’s former Treasury secretary) moved to Citigroup, which then got received $300 billion from Paulson; John Thain, who moved to Merrill Lynch, also got a multibillion-dollar handout; and AIG received $85 billion, which enabled it to repay the $13 billion it owed GS. “Gangster elite” is the appropriate phrase for these people, I would think, although Taibbi himself favors the phrase “vampire squid.” He points out that after playing a key role in four historical bubble catastrophes, helping $5 trillion disappear from the NASDAQ, and pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and American cities, GS paid a total of $14 million in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of 1%.

As a former GS insider, Nomi Prins makes it abundantly clear that her ex-colleagues care absolutely nothing about the country, and everything about their own private wealth and power. They believe, she writes, that their privileged position is their destiny, and regard themselves as being completely “above explaining their actions to the public or expressing anything that might look like contrition or humility.” This proved to be true in April 2010, when the Senate finally dragged some of these executives to a hearing on GS business practices. The list of accusations was quite extensive: you stacked the deck against clients in the market slide of 2007; you set up your company’s own securities to fail, secretly bet against those securities, and never told your buyers what you were doing; you dumped toxic mortgage assets on unwitting clients; etc. Several senators read aloud internal GS documents, in which these men boasted of how they had helped GS profit from the declining housing market, or described the firm’s subprime deals in scatological terms. No matter; the Goldmanites refused to show any regret for their actions, and would not admit that they had behaved irresponsibly or had anything to do with the crash of 2008. A few argued that they were in fact the victims of this financial debacle. In fact, GS behavior continues much as before, as the subsequent Greek economic crisis, in which they played a key role, demonstrates. Meanwhile, as Paul Krugman and several other leading economists have argued, indicators are that our economy is not likely to recover from the crash of 2008 for a very long time (given the historical record on these things), and that we can actually expect worse crises to come, since no significant change of mindset, financial practices, or even personnel has surfaced on Wall Street or in the U.S. government. Indeed, with the possible exception of the millions of unemployed, most Americans seem to believe that the “glitch” is over, that we dodged a bullet, and that we can keep doing what we’ve always been doing without having to “really” pay the subsequent debt.

Somewhat atypical of the American Faustian pattern was our seventh president, Andrew Jackson, whose farewell address of 1837 eerily predicted these kinds of events. In fact, his speech comes off as a pretty good characterization of Goldman Sachs. Jackson’s focus was on the behavior of banks, who (he said) think only of themselves, and never of the community. “These banks may and do operate injuriously upon the habits of business, the pecuniary concerns, and the moral tone of society,” he declared. Their bent for speculation, he warned,

"will foster this eager desire to amass wealth without labor; it will multiply
the number of dependents on bank accommodations and bank favors; the
temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice will become stronger and stronger,
and inevitably lead to corruption which will find its way into your public
councils and destroy, at no distant day, the purity of your Government."

The danger, Jackson went on, is that “the Government would have passed from the hands of the many to the hands of the few; and this organized money power, from its secret conclave, would have dictated the choice of your highest officers….The forms of your government might, for a time, have remained, but its living spirit would have departed from it.”

“The temptation to obtain money at any sacrifice,” “this organized money power,” “secret conclave”—these are indeed key elements of our Faustian bargain, ones that have, as Chris Hedges asserts, dynamited the foundations of our society. However, I believe we need to put all of this in a larger perspective, a social and even spiritual context, if you will, because it can be argued that these foundations were not all that solid to begin with. The real debt incurred by the United States took place very early in its history, and it involved choosing a way of life that was ultimately not viable and even self-destructive. In that sense, outrage at Goldman Sachs may be misplaced, because from this broader perspective, they were just doing what all good Americans are supposed to be doing—hustling, as the historian Walter McDougall characterizes the American Way of Life. McDougall argues that this way of life can actually be dated from the late sixteenth century; but let me turn to the late eighteenth instead, and follow the analysis of Joyce Appleby in her book Capitalism and a New Social Order.

According to Appleby, the colonial understanding of social organization turned on the concept of virtue. Following the European model, virtue was defined as the capacity of individuals “to rise above private interests and devote themselves to the public good.” Free men realized their human potential in service to the commonwealth, in other words, and this was the dominant definition of virtue in the colonies for much of the eighteenth century. By the 1790s, however, this began to change, and by 1800 it had undergone a complete inversion: virtue now meant the ability to look out for oneself and one’s family, nothing more: personal success in an opportunistic environment.

Appleby locates the source of this change in the impact of the English Industrial Revolution and the French and Scottish Enlightenment. The liberal concept of freedom was individualistic, based on self-interest, and lay at the heart of the new market economy. For Adam Smith, every man was basically a merchant, and a proper society was a commercial one. Through the so-called “invisible hand” of the market, the collective result of individual selfish actions would supposedly result in the greater good.

These ideas fell on receptive ears on the other side of the Atlantic. While the Federalists held on to the classical definition of virtue, the Jeffersonian Republicans were strongly attracted to the notion of laissez-faire. Thus during the 1790s in particular, the new nation began to shed its European ethos; and the organic model of society, which saw virtue in terms of reciprocal rights and obligations, began to dissolve. Literature during this period extolled the search for new commodities, and Thomas Cooper, in Political Arithmetic, wrote that “consumers form the nation.” Competition, not cooperation, would be the order of the day, and Thomas Jefferson was only too happy to distribute Cooper’s work as election campaign material in 1800. With his victory, the communitarian vision of the Federalists, which gave primacy to public over private interest, was eclipsed. The result, wrote the historian Richard Hofstadter, was “a democracy of cupidity.”

But it didn’t have to be this way. Marginalized though it was, America had an alternative tradition, dating from John Winthrop’s sermon on the Arabella in 1630. Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting the part about the “City on a Hill.” What he failed to add was the part that came after that, in which Winthrop told his flock that they would have to be vigilant so as to insure that the “good of the public oversway all private interests.” If it was a maverick tradition (although it may have included President Jackson among its ranks), it was nevertheless a vibrant one. From Emerson and Thoreau to Frederick Law Olmsted and Lewis Mumford to Vance Packard and beyond, the argument of this alternative tradition was that the dominant tradition, the so-called American Way of Life, was flawed and misguided. As opposed to the pursuit of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “outer frontier”–i.e., the geographical or material one–the alternative tradition focused on an “inner frontier” that reflected the values of craft, quality, and community. All this was rejected as “elitism” by the dominant culture, however, and got pretty much repressed very early on. Historian Sidney Mead tells us that as a result there was a loneliness and remorse in the frontier adventure, expressed in sad folks songs and gospel hymns, but that this was “a minor refrain, drowned in the great crashing music of the outward events that mark in history the conquering of a continent and the building of a great nation.” This conquest, he goes on, has been “told and retold until it has overshadowed and suppressed the equally vital, but more somber, story of the inner experience.” In his book How Cities Work, Alex Marshall argues that we could have chosen the community solution over the individual one time and again in every area of American life, but that we almost never did that. The result, he says, is that “we live in one of the loneliest societies on earth.” Indeed, between 1985 and 2004, the number of Americans who said they had no one in whom they could really confide tripled. The U.S. Census for 2000 revealed that 25% of American households consisted of only one person; the figure for New York City was nearly 50%. No other society is as isolated as ours. There is a debt here, in other words, in terms of “shadow” material–material that is now knocking at our door. In his recent book, Come Home, America, William Greider writes that the cost of this tradeoff has been a great loss, such as “the small grace notes of everyday life, like the ritual of having a daily dinner with everyone present.” He goes on:

"The more substantial thing we sacrifice is time to experience the joys
and mysteries of nurturing the children, the small pleasures of idle
curiosity, of learning to craft things by one’s own hand, and the
satisfactions of friendships and social cooperation....If we could
somehow add up all the private pain and loss caused by the pursuit
of unbounded material prosperity, the result might look like a major
political grievance of our time."

And, I would add, a major social and psychological debt. Indeed, it goes way beyond this: the data of ignorance and violence for the United States, for example, are astounding. Nearly 25% of all the prisoners in the world are incarcerated in American prisons, and 24% of the adult population says it is OK to use violence in the pursuit of one’s goals. Two-thirds of the global market in antidepressants are purchased by Americans, and in 2008 164 million prescriptions were written for these drugs. Nearly 60% of the population is sitting around waiting for the “Rapture” and the Second Coming; 45% believe that extra-terrestrials have visited the planet during the past year. Twenty percent think the sun revolves around the earth, and another 9% say they have no idea as to which revolves around which. Eighty-seven percent cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map. The United States ranks thirty-seventh among developed or developing nations in quality of health care. Etc., etc. As New York Times columnist Roger Cohen put it just a few months ago, if we wish to talk about American exceptionalism, we should take note of the fact that the number of our prison inmates is exceptional, the quality of our health care is exceptionally bad, the degree of our social inequality is exceptionally acute, and public education has gone into exceptional decline.

The arena of U.S. foreign policy is also a classic study of spiritual debt, of oppressing, torturing, and massacring other peoples until they finally couldn’t take it anymore. What else was 9/11 about, really? Not hard to figure out, if you study the record of our political and military interference in the Middle East. The media suppressed any real coverage of Obama’s disavowed pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, back in 2008, but in fact the man was no fool: “When you terrorize other people,” he declared, “eventually they are going to terrorize you.” This is not rocket science; it’s just Newton’s Third Law of Motion—action and reaction. New York Times reporter Steven Kinzer said much the same thing in his book All the Shah’s Men when he asserted that there is a direct line from what the CIA did to Iran in 1953–overthrowing a democratically elected government and replacing it with a torture regime–to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Even Henry Kissinger understands this, having pointed out, a year before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, that “hegemonic empires almost automatically elicit universal resistance, which is why all such claimants have sooner or later exhausted themselves.” I could write a book about it, but inasmuch as I already have, let me pass over the subject of U.S. foreign policy and refer you to the work of the sociologist Robert Bellah, in particular his book The Broken Covenant. Looking around at what constitutes daily life in America–and this in the seventies, when it was significantly better than it is today–Bellah suggested that there was something karmic about it all: “our material success,” he wrote, “is our punishment, in terms of what that success has done to the natural environment, our social fabric, and our personal lives.” In the early years of the Republic, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush predicted that the nation “would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness.” The crash of 2008; the subsequent, actual unemployment rate of nearly 20%; the payout, by Wall Street firms, of $18 billion in bonuses in the wake of that crash; the ranks of the former middle class lining up at food banks and soup kitchens—all of this suggests that that day has arrived.

“We will,” writes Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, “emerge from the crisis with a much larger legacy of debt…and more vulnerable to another crisis.” In fact, if you look closely at the 2010-11federal budget, the projected deficit for that fiscal year is nearly 11% of the country’s entire economic output; and by Mr. Obama’s own projections, U.S. deficits will not return to what are generally regarded as sustainable levels over the next decade. It’s not likely that they will ever return to those levels. We are a nation, in short, that cannot and will not get our collective head above water. In his book Reinventing Collapse, Dmitri Orlov writes: “We’re in hospice care. The bailouts can be viewed as ever bigger doses of morphine for a patient that’s not long for this world.” The truth is that in a whole variety of ways—social, cultural, financial, and spiritual—our liver is now being devoured, and Mephistopheles has returned to collect his due. Karma, after all, is about reaping what you sow.

©Morris Berman, 2010