I had forgotten that Hillary was scheduled to make an appearance in town the last week of January, even though a friend of mine had mentioned it to me. So, fool that I was, I drove into the town center, planning to withdraw some pesos from the ATM connected to my bank. I parked, walked about a hundred yards, and suddenly was surrounded by a fleet of SUVs, black and gray, and Mexican army regulars sporting machine guns. WTF? “What is all this?,” I asked a news vendor. “Hillary,” he sort of grunted. “She needs all these cars?” I asked him. He gave me a half smile. You poor dumb gringo, he seemed to be saying.
It was quite a show, and the worst possible one to put on in a Latin American country. But this is how the American Empire makes its appearance, namely with a display of violence and arrogance. Look how mighty we are, is the message—designed to endear us to any of our southern neighbors. I recall a few years ago William Lederer, the author of The Ugly American (1958), was interviewed by phone at his rural home in Vermont (he is now 99 years old), and told the reporter that absolutely nothing had changed since he described the stupidity of American “diplomacy” and the moronic behavior of the diplomatic corps. “It’s as if I had never written the book,” he remarked.
Hillary proceeded to give a talk that was both boring and vapid. I support President Calderón, she said. We have to fight the drug lords, and that’s what he has been doing. We need more of the same, until the cartels are destroyed. This is the only solution, she told her audience—a “solution,” BTW, that Calderón has been pursuing for more than four years now, and the result has been the death of tens of thousands of people and what seems like an actual increase in drug trafficking. What was the definition of insanity, once again?
“What pomposity!” a Mexican friend remarked to me the next day. “She said nothing she couldn’t have communicated in a diplomatic cable, or in a statement to the press in Washington. And we’ve heard it all before, after all; why did she have to come here to say it? This was about appearances, nada más.” Here are a few things Hillary did not say, which I and perhaps a small handful of Americans (and a large percentage of the Mexican population, I suspect) would like to have heard:
1. The American demand for drugs is the inevitable result of a virulent form of cowboy capitalism that we practice in the United States, and which has turned our society into a war of all against all. In addition, the American Dream has not worked out, and Americans are now leading empty lives. Actually, they always were, but now they are more or less aware of it. The same could be said of me, sadly enough, although my drug of choice is power. I can’t get enough of it.
2. In a US diplomatic memo that appeared in Wikileaks recently, dating from 2009, the official who drew up the report concluded that Calderón’s intelligence-gathering services were not very competent; haphazard and ineffectual, in fact.
3. As has been widely reported, in a few Mexican states some of the police are in cahoots with the drug dealers.
4. Also in a few cases, the drug cartels apparently provide services for the local population that neither the local or federal governments seem willing to bother with: schools, hospitals, pensions for widows, taking care of the poor, and the like. In short, they enjoy popular support, due to some of their more benevolent behavior. More on this can be found in William Finnegan’s article, “Silver or Lead,” which appeared in The New Yorker, issue of 31 May 2010.
5. There is a widespread belief down here that your own president may be leading a double life. Apparently, a lot of Mexicans believe he is “comprado”—bought—i.e., in the pay of the drug lords. I’m not saying this is true; I have no idea whether it is, and I certainly hope it’s not. But obviously, if it is true, the whole war on drugs is a sham. Which it is anyway.
6. As Carlos Fuentes and many others have pointed out, the only solution is not to do more of the same—which would be a colossal waste of time—but to legalize the stuff. After all, after the repeal of Prohibition (1933) crime dropped off significantly in the United States, because there was no longer a payoff in trafficking in (former) contraband material.
7. However, there are probably business interests in both countries that would oppose such a move. I trust I don’t have to spell this out.
8. I myself am little more than a pawn in a game of international chess. My real purpose in coming down here is to polish my career portfolio, and prepare for the Democratic nomination of 2016; in fact, possibly 2012, since Mr. Obama has been as about effective a leader as Millard Fillmore. The truth is that I care about myself and my career; beyond Mexico serving as a market for our consumer goods, and as a source of cheap labor for the United States, I don’t give two shits about the place. I suspect you all know this.
9. I appreciate, however, the fact that Mexicans are cynical about the whole drug and crime situation, and that they are savvy: they know that nothing will be done about it, in the end. As for my own countrymen, “savvy” isn’t quite the word; “clueless” is closer to the mark. Even if they did understand what was going on down here, they wouldn’t give a damn anyway. They don’t really care about much of anything beyond their own immediate situation—like me, if the truth be told.
10. Morris Berman lives in this town, as it turns out, and he can tell you that I’m so full of shit I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. When my husband was president he got the UN to maintain sanctions against Iraq, which led to the death of 500,000 Iraqi children from starvation and malnutrition. To this, I made no objection at all. In addition, for my presidential campaign of 2008 I hired Mark Penn as my campaign manager, the man who heads a PR firm (Burson-Marsteller) that served as adviser to the junta in Argentina, and which, at the request of the Argentine military, organized a campaign against human rights organizations. I’m also not bothered by the fact that he represented Blackwater Worldwide, the military contractor blamed for numerous civilian deaths in Iraq. I say this so you know who it is that stands before you; who I am.
11. What I really need to do is resign my position as secretary of state, and enroll in a 12-step program to get me off my addiction to power and bullshit. I may look impressive, but the truth is that I’m a walking tragedy. I’m no more a force for good in the world than is the American Empire, whose agenda I serve. Rather than being a force, I am a farce—a fact that haunts me every waking day of my life.
12. I shouldn’t have come here, and I apologize for wasting your time.
___________________
Clearly, it would have been a marvelous speech. As for me, I never did get to the bank.
©Morris Berman, 2011
February 11, 2011
February 06, 2011
100
Well, gang, whoda thunk it? This is the 100th post! I don't have anything particular to say on this occasion, but I wanted to mark the milestone. Nearly 5 yrs ago, when I was cruelly forced into doing this, I figured I would attract 3 or 4 contributors, that the blog wd last abt 3 or 4 mos., end of story. And here we are, with no less than 42 correspondents, and almost 5 yrs to our credit. Sometimes I think: Maybe I shd change the format, and just report bowling scores of various leagues around the country. Or perhaps post the average GPA's at all of the community colleges in the US, month by month. But then it's so much fun documenting our collapse, and depressing each other w/stories of life in the US, that I figure we shd just limp merrily along, doing what we do best. So a salute, then, to all of us, and I'm hoping u can join Sarah and myself north of the Arctic Circle for our nuptials, shortly after her election in 2012. It's lookin' good, no doubt abt it...xoxo, mb
January 29, 2011
The Structuralists
[Once again, let me apologize to those of you who bought a copy of A Question of Values. The following essay is included in that collection, but is posted here online for the first time.]
Limbo is our Way of Life.
–William Appleman Williams
The word "structuralism" is commonly associated with a group of French intellectuals who were prominent in the sixties and seventies, and whose work, which was based on linguistics, came to dominate the human sciences for a good many years. Indeed, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Louis Althusser constituted a veritable galaxy of talent. Although one can find numerous academic texts explaining what structuralism is, the philosophy (or mode of analysis) can be summarized as follows:
1. Every system, whether it be a novel or a civilization, has a structure, i.e. is characterized by deep underlying patterns.
2. That structure is more significant than the individual elements of the system, and in fact determines the position or role of the elements in the system.
3. In any system, continuity is much more common than change, and that continuity follows the "map" provided by the deep underlying patterns.
4. Structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface phenomena, or appearances (cf. the distinction between light and shadows in Plato's Parable of the Cave).
Understood in this way, it seems fair to assert that structuralism is not the exclusive property of the French. For example, although structural analysis is not typical of U.S. intellectual circles, a few American scholars have nevertheless used it in their research to great effect. I am thinking of four writers in particular, whose work, when integrated into a comprehensive whole, provides a radically different picture of the United States than the one commonly held: the land of freedom and opportunity. It is not likely that many Americans would be able to tolerate this alternative structuralist view of American history, although they needn't worry, inasmuch as anything even mildly resembling it remains very far removed from public discussion. Thus for most Americans, Vietnam was an unfortunate "mistake"; Iraq is part of the effort to "spread democracy" (but now in the process of being reclassified as a mistake); September 11th was the result of enemies who are "evil" or "insane"; and the economic crash of October 2008 was the product of individual greed, the work of a few (perhaps even quite a few) "bad apples". None of these sorts of events (which could, in fact, be multiplied indefinitely) are seen as being endemic to the system, to the American Way of Life; as following inevitably from its underlying structure. That would, needless to say, be a wake-up call of the first magnitude.
The four scholars I have in mind probably never met, and for the most part (not entirely) were ignorant of each others' work. These are the historians William Appleman Williams (d. 1990) and Joyce Appleby (Professor Emerita, UCLA); the philosopher Albert Borgmann (U of Montana); and the Chilean-born writer and journalist Ariel Dorfman (who has lived and worked in the United States for several decades now). Ostensibly, they don't have all that much in common, having directed their attention to very diverse topics. But as indicated above, when you put them together you get a picture of the United States that forms a coherent whole, one that most Americans would find very disturbing to contemplate. As the saying goes, they don't teach this sort of thing in school.
To begin with Williams, then: 2009 marked the fiftieth anniversary of his most famous work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In this book, Williams argues that the expansionist or imperial tendencies of the United States were present from its earliest days. American political leaders, he writes, believed that the doors to economic expansion had to be open in order to secure U.S. democratic institutions. They couldn't imagine the American people living within the limits of their own resources. And the American people, he goes on to say, were thoroughly on board with this program. Whether we are talking about farmers or workers or the middle class, they all shared an ideology of informal imperialism. Empire, in a word, was seen as essential to the good life. In particular, the Founding Fathers regarded territorial expansion as key to keeping American society from congealing into a European class system. But there was a price to be paid for all of this, and it was not a small one. For what the frontier did, according to Williams, was take us away from what was essential–a fair and just society, organized along the lines of democratic socialism. Instead, there was a collective (if unconscious, I would add) decision to run away from this, and thus to run away from (real) life. In The Contours of American History (1961), Williams puts it this way:
Americans...have the chance to create the first truly
democratic socialism in the world. That opportunity
is the only real frontier available to Americans in the
second half of the twentieth century. If they...acted
upon the...intelligence and morality and courage
that it would take to explore and develop that frontier,
then they would finally have broken the chains of their
own past. Otherwise, they would ultimately fall victims
to a nostalgia for their childhood.
I shall return to this theme of childhood in a moment. For now, let us be clear about the conundrum that Williams identified: the choice between individual capital accumulation, or obsession with private property, and a more equitable capital distribution, or concern for the collective well-being of the nation. Williams traced this fundamental conflict back to England's Glorious Revolution (1688), by which time it was clearly understood that expansion was the only way to reconcile these opposing ways of life. In the American context, it took the form of an addiction to the frontier as utopia. As a result, there really was no positive vision of commonwealth. In the nineteenth century, says Williams, the focus was on expansion, pure and simple, at the cost of social and personal values. To put it bluntly, Americans have always relied on expansion to escape from domestic problems, and resorted to violence and aggression when this failed. Williams was fond of quoting James Madison on the subject: "Extend the sphere and you have made it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens."
According to Williams, then, the United States was caught in a kind of balancing act, in which outward movement–territorial conquest, market expansion, or war–became the default solution to all of its domestic ills. Empire would reconcile avarice and morality. You defuse demands for a redistribution of wealth by opening up "surplus social space." "We have been playing hide-and-seek for two centuries," he wrote in 1976; "limbo is our Way of Life."
Still, it is not clear what Americans are running from; it is probably deeper than democratic socialism, and at one point Williams argues that we are afraid of our own violence. Whatever this dark presence is, it has to run very deep, because as Williams shows, anything that stood in the way of expansion--Native Americans, the Confederacy, the Soviet Union, and finally the Third World--was regarded as "evil," unnatural, beyond redemption. Looking inward, looking at ourselves, was never a serious option, and examining the structures that underlay its behavior was never America's forte.
Before we can ascertain what Americans are running from, however, it will be necessary to get some idea of how they wound up in a state of internal conflict and competition in the first place. On the surface, it seems almost as though aggression, narcissism, and imperialism are literally woven into the country's DNA; as though, in the United States, life and greed are synonymous. The shift from a European-based sense of commonwealth to a me-first free-for-all dates primarily from the 1790s.* Until that time, according to Joyce Appleby, the idea of a greater good and a system of reciprocal obligations still carried some weight, and the word "virtue" was defined as a commitment to those things. Under the impact of the ideas of Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment, however, this began to change. The new Newtonian-based philosophy held that societies were collections of individuals ("atoms"), and that the pursuit of profit on the part of each of these entities combined–i.e. the collective result of individual self-interest–would be the prosperity of the whole. "Virtue," in other words, had by 1800 come to mean personal success in an opportunistic environment; looking out for Number One.
The result was that the glue that had held colonial life together began to disintegrate, for individual greed is basically an antiglue. Historically speaking, according to Gordon Wood, this constituted a complete transformation in human social relations, amounting to a very new type of society. One might even call it an antisociety. Contemplating these developments in the early years of the Republic, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush was forced to conclude that the nation "would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness." The reality of contemporary America would undoubtedly shock Dr. Rush, were he to return from the grave, but it probably would not surprise him.
(As an aside I offer the following anecdote: a friend of mine who happens to be the dean of a major medical school in the United States read Appleby's work some time ago and was very impressed with it. But he discovered that whenever he tried to discuss her thesis with members of the faculty, their eyes would glaze over within thirty seconds and they would change the subject. I believe this attests to the massive brainwashing prevalent in the United States, such that even the nation's most intelligent citizens literally cannot tolerate even a casual examination of the country's structural premises.)
In any case, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890; there was no more unclaimed land to be had. Having stolen half of Mexico in 1848, the United States really couldn't now lay claim to the rest of that country, so it began looking farther afield for new conquests. Thus, the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the formulation of the Open Door Policy in 1899, which asserted the importance of overseas economic expansion. Yet the real frontier of the so-called Progressive Era was internal, which is to say, technological--a conception that has lasted down to the present day. For this development we need to move on to the third figure on our list, Albert Borgmann, whose Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) takes the work of William Appleman Williams to the next level.
In some ways, Borgmann was anticipated by the historian David Potter, who recognized (in People of Plenty, 1954) that Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis," while correct, didn't have to be conceived of in strictly geographical terms. The psychic frontier in the United States, he said, is based on the interaction between technology and the environment, and hence the promised expansion is without limit. This had actually been made explicit by the first presidential scientific adviser, Vannevar Bush, in his definitive essay of 1945: Science the Endless Frontier. But the basic structural mechanism–expansion as a way of mitigating domestic conflict–was in place long before Potter or Bush arrived on the scene. "Commodity expansion," to coin a phrase, was merely the old structure of Manifest Destiny mapped onto a different field; and as Borgmann demonstrates, it "works" even better. For there isn't, and there will not be, an end to the gizmos and gadgets the consumer society can crank out. Where there are now ten varieties of razor blades, there will be twenty tomorrow, and fifty a year from now--all "new and improved," with advertising serving to convince us that all of this junk is essential to our lives. From Milton Friedman to Condoleezza Rice, drowning in crap is regarded as "freedom," with virtually no dissent on the subject from the American people.
Here is a definition of democracy provided by a former American ambassador to Brazil (1961-62), Lincoln Gordon, in his book A New Deal for Latin America:
True democracy...is the regime of continuous social
revolution. I use the word revolution to mean a
process of structural change in society—an alteration
in the pattern of social class, in the social mobility
of individuals and their children, in the educational
structure, in methods of production, standards of living,
and the distribution of income, and in attitudes toward
relationships among individuals, business and other
private organizations, and the State.
Sounds pretty good, right? A far cry from the stagnant, class-based society of medieval Europe, to be sure. But what it amounts to in practice–if we leave aside the reference to distribution of income, which strikes an odd note here–is the society Joyce Appleby described and Benjamin Rush decried: an endless jockeying for position and power. And what fuels this social mobility, as Borgmann recognized, is constant invention and innovation, so that the lower class believes it can acquire the goods and lifestyle of the middle class, and the middle class believes it can acquire the same of the upper class. In Dark Ages America I wrote:
The privileges of the ruling class are exercised in
consonance with popular goals. Rich and poor both
want the same things, and in this way commodities
...are the stabilizing factors of technological societies.
Social inequality favors the advancement of the reign
of technology, in other words, because it presents a
ladder of what can be attained through technology.
This results in an equilibrium that can be maintained
only by the production of more and more commodities.
The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to
catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains
without substance, a realm from which the crucial
dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.
In reality, this "escalator" of social mobility is an illusion. Very little wealth "trickles down," and the statistics are quite clear on this point: the vast majority of the population never escape from the class into which they were born. But the combination of techno-economic expansion, and stories of the "self-made man," are sufficient to keep the lid on the conflict and hostility that are generated by endless competition. Meanwhile, our lives are filled with toys as substitutes for friendship, community, craftsmanship, quality, an equitable distribution of wealth, and an enlightened citizenry as opposed to a large collection of child-consumers who have literally no idea as to what genuine political debate is about. "Growth" is all...but to what end? This is the question that almost never gets asked.
The matter of children and their toys brings us to the fourth author, Ariel Dorfman, who formulated the concept of "soft power" long before Joseph Nye of Harvard University coined the phrase. What Dorfman asked was this: What makes American culture so popular, worldwide? Why is everyone attracted to its omnipresent symbols--Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, blue jeans, American sitcoms, and the like? What a paradox, that so many nations despise the United States while the citizens of those nations are literally addicted to American television programs. What, in short, is America's secret?
Dorfman is a Marxist, yet he surprised himself when he realized the decidedly non-Marxist answer to this question: "The way in which American mass culture reaches out to people may touch upon mechanisms embedded in our innermost being." In a word, the appeal is archetypal, transhistorical, and transcultural. For human beings are biologically programmed to respond to anything tinged with childhood. We seek to protect our young; we have tender feelings toward them. Mickey Mouse effectively joins power and infantilization, as does virtually all of American culture. That culture broadcasts a message of rejuvenation, a fountain of eternal youth, and (says Dorfman) "the possibility of conserving some form of innocence as one grows up." Whereas previously the U.S. Army was the means of exerting influence, the mass media now becomes a "peaceful" way of extending the American frontier. In fact, it is far superior to "hard power," because it enables Americans to retain an image of themselves as innocent, and to not have to recognize that this is just another version of imperial expansion. "America was able to project a universal category–childhood–onto alien cultures that were subjected politically and economically, and to seek in them infantile echoes, the yearning for redemption, innocence, and eternal life that, to one degree or another, are part of the constitution of all human beings." But when the American is shorn of adult faculties, adds Dorfman, and "handed solutions that suckle and comfort him...what is left is a babe, a dwindled, decreased human being."
The recent remarks of third-party candidate Ralph Nader, who could never manage to garner more than a tiny fraction of the vote, are quite relevant in this regard: the new generation of Americans, he said, “have little toys and gizmos that they hold in their hands. They have no idea of any public protest or activity. It is a tapestry of passivity." But the problem goes way beyond toys as a political substitute. It is all part of remaining a child, and of renewing or "reinventing" oneself through the latest electronic gadget or new consumer product that rolls off the assembly line. (One could include New Age gurus and philosophies in this list as well.) And even beyond this, the notion is that all of the world can be renewed by turning it into one huge market place, or toy store. What else, after all, is life about–for a child?
This, then, is the heart of "soft power," that empire and childhood are linked by an endless succession of new toys; a world in which every day is Christmas, and in which the neurosis of the United States becomes the power of the United States, as every last human being on the planet is sucked into this vortex. The American empire, in reality, is an Empire of Children.
We are now, I believe, in a position to answer the question of what all of this frenetic activity is designed to hide; what Americans are running away from. Toward the end of his life Williams wrote: "America is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." This is a haunting, if enigmatic, sentence. What truth, after all? Possibly, an example of what not to do. For the truth here is an emptiness at the center, to which is added a desire to never grow up. It should be obvious by now that the American definition of "progress" is little more than a joke, and that running away from the responsibilities of adulthood–including the construction of a society not based on endless consumption, competition, and expansion–could be the single greatest thread in American history. That there is a possible alternative history, and a very different type of progress, characterized (for example) by marginal figures such as Lewis Mumford or the late Jane Jacobs, is something Americans don't wish to contemplate, for alternatives to the life of running faster to get nowhere scare them. No, the expansion game, and the life of limbo, as Williams puts it, will continue until we hit a wall, and the game cannot be played any longer (although I suspect we shall be able to limp along with "crisis management" for two or three more decades). This game, of self-destruction and the destruction of others, will continue until there is no place for America to go except to the graveyard of failed empires. And as Williams suggested, violence is very likely part of the equation.
In the meantime, much of the world, ironically enough, will go on taking the United States as a model for development, ignoring the bankruptcy of this way of life. The sadness of it all was captured by Richard Easterlin in his incisive study, Growth Triumphant: "In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity." Once expansion fails, however, the jig will be up. Whether Americans will finally address the thing they've been hiding from all these years is another question altogether.
The widespread emulation of this model is thus a peculiarly depressing aspect of the whole drama. I wrote this article in Mexico City, and being late for a meeting with a friend, shut my notebook and grabbed a taxi to get to my rendezvous on time. The driver, a young man of about twenty-five years of age, stared into the screen of his cell phone or blackberry while weaving through traffic. As I glanced over his shoulder, I saw that he was looking at cartoons, of the kind I watched on television when I was seven years old. Finally, nervous that he was going to plow into the truck in front of us, I asked him whether watching a screen while driving wasn't just a little bit dangerous. "Oh no," he told me, never taking his eyes off the screen; "not a problem." Meanwhile, he overshot my destination, had to consult the map I had with me, and wound up charging me twice as much as the ride would normally cost. I wasn’t in the mood to get into a long argument with him in Spanish about it, so I paid the fare and wished him buen día. But I couldn't help thinking what a jackass this kid was, and, at the same time, that what was in his head regarding the components of a meaningful life was probably not very different from what was in the head of the president of any Mexican or American or (for that matter) Indian university or corporation. Clearly, the psychology of expand-and-hide spreads like cancer: "growth" über Alles.
We see, then, the picture of the United States that emerges when we look at it structurally. Put Williams, Appleby, Borgmann, and Dorfman together, and it is as though you are looking at America with X-ray eyes. "Freedom" and "Opportunity" are not what stand out, on this view. Rather, the X-ray vision reveals something much closer to disease, what has been called an "ideological pathology." Living in limbo, as Williams told us over and over again, cannot be prolonged indefinitely. Yet the real tragedy, in my view, is not one of American diplomacy but of willful ignorance. Is it likely, when the system finally unravels and the empire is a feeble shadow of its former self, that we (or the hegemon that replaces us) will have learned anything at all?
*This is not quite true. Walter McDougall, in Freedom Just Around the Corner (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), says we were a nation of hustlers (his word) from the get-go; and Richard Bushman documents this for eighteenth-century Connecticut in From Puritan to Yankee (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970).
References
Keith Berwick, review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1963, pp. 144-46.
Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, "War Without End," The Village Voice, 5 November 1991, p. 75.
Ariel Dorfman, The Empire's Old Clothes, trans. Clark Hansen (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
Greg Grandin, "Off Dead Center," The Nation, 1 July 2009.
Chris Hedges, "Nader Was Right," posted on http://www.truthdig.com/, 10 August 2009.
William Fletcher Thompson, Jr., review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 1962-63, pp. 139-40.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” lecture to the American Historical Association, Chicago, 1893; reprinted in numerous anthologies and available at http://www.historians.org/pubs/archives/Turnerthesis.htm
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Limbo is our Way of Life.
–William Appleman Williams
The word "structuralism" is commonly associated with a group of French intellectuals who were prominent in the sixties and seventies, and whose work, which was based on linguistics, came to dominate the human sciences for a good many years. Indeed, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Louis Althusser constituted a veritable galaxy of talent. Although one can find numerous academic texts explaining what structuralism is, the philosophy (or mode of analysis) can be summarized as follows:
1. Every system, whether it be a novel or a civilization, has a structure, i.e. is characterized by deep underlying patterns.
2. That structure is more significant than the individual elements of the system, and in fact determines the position or role of the elements in the system.
3. In any system, continuity is much more common than change, and that continuity follows the "map" provided by the deep underlying patterns.
4. Structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface phenomena, or appearances (cf. the distinction between light and shadows in Plato's Parable of the Cave).
Understood in this way, it seems fair to assert that structuralism is not the exclusive property of the French. For example, although structural analysis is not typical of U.S. intellectual circles, a few American scholars have nevertheless used it in their research to great effect. I am thinking of four writers in particular, whose work, when integrated into a comprehensive whole, provides a radically different picture of the United States than the one commonly held: the land of freedom and opportunity. It is not likely that many Americans would be able to tolerate this alternative structuralist view of American history, although they needn't worry, inasmuch as anything even mildly resembling it remains very far removed from public discussion. Thus for most Americans, Vietnam was an unfortunate "mistake"; Iraq is part of the effort to "spread democracy" (but now in the process of being reclassified as a mistake); September 11th was the result of enemies who are "evil" or "insane"; and the economic crash of October 2008 was the product of individual greed, the work of a few (perhaps even quite a few) "bad apples". None of these sorts of events (which could, in fact, be multiplied indefinitely) are seen as being endemic to the system, to the American Way of Life; as following inevitably from its underlying structure. That would, needless to say, be a wake-up call of the first magnitude.
The four scholars I have in mind probably never met, and for the most part (not entirely) were ignorant of each others' work. These are the historians William Appleman Williams (d. 1990) and Joyce Appleby (Professor Emerita, UCLA); the philosopher Albert Borgmann (U of Montana); and the Chilean-born writer and journalist Ariel Dorfman (who has lived and worked in the United States for several decades now). Ostensibly, they don't have all that much in common, having directed their attention to very diverse topics. But as indicated above, when you put them together you get a picture of the United States that forms a coherent whole, one that most Americans would find very disturbing to contemplate. As the saying goes, they don't teach this sort of thing in school.
To begin with Williams, then: 2009 marked the fiftieth anniversary of his most famous work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In this book, Williams argues that the expansionist or imperial tendencies of the United States were present from its earliest days. American political leaders, he writes, believed that the doors to economic expansion had to be open in order to secure U.S. democratic institutions. They couldn't imagine the American people living within the limits of their own resources. And the American people, he goes on to say, were thoroughly on board with this program. Whether we are talking about farmers or workers or the middle class, they all shared an ideology of informal imperialism. Empire, in a word, was seen as essential to the good life. In particular, the Founding Fathers regarded territorial expansion as key to keeping American society from congealing into a European class system. But there was a price to be paid for all of this, and it was not a small one. For what the frontier did, according to Williams, was take us away from what was essential–a fair and just society, organized along the lines of democratic socialism. Instead, there was a collective (if unconscious, I would add) decision to run away from this, and thus to run away from (real) life. In The Contours of American History (1961), Williams puts it this way:
Americans...have the chance to create the first truly
democratic socialism in the world. That opportunity
is the only real frontier available to Americans in the
second half of the twentieth century. If they...acted
upon the...intelligence and morality and courage
that it would take to explore and develop that frontier,
then they would finally have broken the chains of their
own past. Otherwise, they would ultimately fall victims
to a nostalgia for their childhood.
I shall return to this theme of childhood in a moment. For now, let us be clear about the conundrum that Williams identified: the choice between individual capital accumulation, or obsession with private property, and a more equitable capital distribution, or concern for the collective well-being of the nation. Williams traced this fundamental conflict back to England's Glorious Revolution (1688), by which time it was clearly understood that expansion was the only way to reconcile these opposing ways of life. In the American context, it took the form of an addiction to the frontier as utopia. As a result, there really was no positive vision of commonwealth. In the nineteenth century, says Williams, the focus was on expansion, pure and simple, at the cost of social and personal values. To put it bluntly, Americans have always relied on expansion to escape from domestic problems, and resorted to violence and aggression when this failed. Williams was fond of quoting James Madison on the subject: "Extend the sphere and you have made it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens."
According to Williams, then, the United States was caught in a kind of balancing act, in which outward movement–territorial conquest, market expansion, or war–became the default solution to all of its domestic ills. Empire would reconcile avarice and morality. You defuse demands for a redistribution of wealth by opening up "surplus social space." "We have been playing hide-and-seek for two centuries," he wrote in 1976; "limbo is our Way of Life."
Still, it is not clear what Americans are running from; it is probably deeper than democratic socialism, and at one point Williams argues that we are afraid of our own violence. Whatever this dark presence is, it has to run very deep, because as Williams shows, anything that stood in the way of expansion--Native Americans, the Confederacy, the Soviet Union, and finally the Third World--was regarded as "evil," unnatural, beyond redemption. Looking inward, looking at ourselves, was never a serious option, and examining the structures that underlay its behavior was never America's forte.
Before we can ascertain what Americans are running from, however, it will be necessary to get some idea of how they wound up in a state of internal conflict and competition in the first place. On the surface, it seems almost as though aggression, narcissism, and imperialism are literally woven into the country's DNA; as though, in the United States, life and greed are synonymous. The shift from a European-based sense of commonwealth to a me-first free-for-all dates primarily from the 1790s.* Until that time, according to Joyce Appleby, the idea of a greater good and a system of reciprocal obligations still carried some weight, and the word "virtue" was defined as a commitment to those things. Under the impact of the ideas of Adam Smith and the Scottish enlightenment, however, this began to change. The new Newtonian-based philosophy held that societies were collections of individuals ("atoms"), and that the pursuit of profit on the part of each of these entities combined–i.e. the collective result of individual self-interest–would be the prosperity of the whole. "Virtue," in other words, had by 1800 come to mean personal success in an opportunistic environment; looking out for Number One.
The result was that the glue that had held colonial life together began to disintegrate, for individual greed is basically an antiglue. Historically speaking, according to Gordon Wood, this constituted a complete transformation in human social relations, amounting to a very new type of society. One might even call it an antisociety. Contemplating these developments in the early years of the Republic, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush was forced to conclude that the nation "would eventually fall apart in an orgy of selfishness." The reality of contemporary America would undoubtedly shock Dr. Rush, were he to return from the grave, but it probably would not surprise him.
(As an aside I offer the following anecdote: a friend of mine who happens to be the dean of a major medical school in the United States read Appleby's work some time ago and was very impressed with it. But he discovered that whenever he tried to discuss her thesis with members of the faculty, their eyes would glaze over within thirty seconds and they would change the subject. I believe this attests to the massive brainwashing prevalent in the United States, such that even the nation's most intelligent citizens literally cannot tolerate even a casual examination of the country's structural premises.)
In any case, the U.S. Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890; there was no more unclaimed land to be had. Having stolen half of Mexico in 1848, the United States really couldn't now lay claim to the rest of that country, so it began looking farther afield for new conquests. Thus, the Spanish-American War of 1898, and the formulation of the Open Door Policy in 1899, which asserted the importance of overseas economic expansion. Yet the real frontier of the so-called Progressive Era was internal, which is to say, technological--a conception that has lasted down to the present day. For this development we need to move on to the third figure on our list, Albert Borgmann, whose Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) takes the work of William Appleman Williams to the next level.
In some ways, Borgmann was anticipated by the historian David Potter, who recognized (in People of Plenty, 1954) that Frederick Jackson Turner's famous "frontier thesis," while correct, didn't have to be conceived of in strictly geographical terms. The psychic frontier in the United States, he said, is based on the interaction between technology and the environment, and hence the promised expansion is without limit. This had actually been made explicit by the first presidential scientific adviser, Vannevar Bush, in his definitive essay of 1945: Science the Endless Frontier. But the basic structural mechanism–expansion as a way of mitigating domestic conflict–was in place long before Potter or Bush arrived on the scene. "Commodity expansion," to coin a phrase, was merely the old structure of Manifest Destiny mapped onto a different field; and as Borgmann demonstrates, it "works" even better. For there isn't, and there will not be, an end to the gizmos and gadgets the consumer society can crank out. Where there are now ten varieties of razor blades, there will be twenty tomorrow, and fifty a year from now--all "new and improved," with advertising serving to convince us that all of this junk is essential to our lives. From Milton Friedman to Condoleezza Rice, drowning in crap is regarded as "freedom," with virtually no dissent on the subject from the American people.
Here is a definition of democracy provided by a former American ambassador to Brazil (1961-62), Lincoln Gordon, in his book A New Deal for Latin America:
True democracy...is the regime of continuous social
revolution. I use the word revolution to mean a
process of structural change in society—an alteration
in the pattern of social class, in the social mobility
of individuals and their children, in the educational
structure, in methods of production, standards of living,
and the distribution of income, and in attitudes toward
relationships among individuals, business and other
private organizations, and the State.
Sounds pretty good, right? A far cry from the stagnant, class-based society of medieval Europe, to be sure. But what it amounts to in practice–if we leave aside the reference to distribution of income, which strikes an odd note here–is the society Joyce Appleby described and Benjamin Rush decried: an endless jockeying for position and power. And what fuels this social mobility, as Borgmann recognized, is constant invention and innovation, so that the lower class believes it can acquire the goods and lifestyle of the middle class, and the middle class believes it can acquire the same of the upper class. In Dark Ages America I wrote:
The privileges of the ruling class are exercised in
consonance with popular goals. Rich and poor both
want the same things, and in this way commodities
...are the stabilizing factors of technological societies.
Social inequality favors the advancement of the reign
of technology, in other words, because it presents a
ladder of what can be attained through technology.
This results in an equilibrium that can be maintained
only by the production of more and more commodities.
The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to
catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains
without substance, a realm from which the crucial
dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.
In reality, this "escalator" of social mobility is an illusion. Very little wealth "trickles down," and the statistics are quite clear on this point: the vast majority of the population never escape from the class into which they were born. But the combination of techno-economic expansion, and stories of the "self-made man," are sufficient to keep the lid on the conflict and hostility that are generated by endless competition. Meanwhile, our lives are filled with toys as substitutes for friendship, community, craftsmanship, quality, an equitable distribution of wealth, and an enlightened citizenry as opposed to a large collection of child-consumers who have literally no idea as to what genuine political debate is about. "Growth" is all...but to what end? This is the question that almost never gets asked.
The matter of children and their toys brings us to the fourth author, Ariel Dorfman, who formulated the concept of "soft power" long before Joseph Nye of Harvard University coined the phrase. What Dorfman asked was this: What makes American culture so popular, worldwide? Why is everyone attracted to its omnipresent symbols--Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, blue jeans, American sitcoms, and the like? What a paradox, that so many nations despise the United States while the citizens of those nations are literally addicted to American television programs. What, in short, is America's secret?
Dorfman is a Marxist, yet he surprised himself when he realized the decidedly non-Marxist answer to this question: "The way in which American mass culture reaches out to people may touch upon mechanisms embedded in our innermost being." In a word, the appeal is archetypal, transhistorical, and transcultural. For human beings are biologically programmed to respond to anything tinged with childhood. We seek to protect our young; we have tender feelings toward them. Mickey Mouse effectively joins power and infantilization, as does virtually all of American culture. That culture broadcasts a message of rejuvenation, a fountain of eternal youth, and (says Dorfman) "the possibility of conserving some form of innocence as one grows up." Whereas previously the U.S. Army was the means of exerting influence, the mass media now becomes a "peaceful" way of extending the American frontier. In fact, it is far superior to "hard power," because it enables Americans to retain an image of themselves as innocent, and to not have to recognize that this is just another version of imperial expansion. "America was able to project a universal category–childhood–onto alien cultures that were subjected politically and economically, and to seek in them infantile echoes, the yearning for redemption, innocence, and eternal life that, to one degree or another, are part of the constitution of all human beings." But when the American is shorn of adult faculties, adds Dorfman, and "handed solutions that suckle and comfort him...what is left is a babe, a dwindled, decreased human being."
The recent remarks of third-party candidate Ralph Nader, who could never manage to garner more than a tiny fraction of the vote, are quite relevant in this regard: the new generation of Americans, he said, “have little toys and gizmos that they hold in their hands. They have no idea of any public protest or activity. It is a tapestry of passivity." But the problem goes way beyond toys as a political substitute. It is all part of remaining a child, and of renewing or "reinventing" oneself through the latest electronic gadget or new consumer product that rolls off the assembly line. (One could include New Age gurus and philosophies in this list as well.) And even beyond this, the notion is that all of the world can be renewed by turning it into one huge market place, or toy store. What else, after all, is life about–for a child?
This, then, is the heart of "soft power," that empire and childhood are linked by an endless succession of new toys; a world in which every day is Christmas, and in which the neurosis of the United States becomes the power of the United States, as every last human being on the planet is sucked into this vortex. The American empire, in reality, is an Empire of Children.
We are now, I believe, in a position to answer the question of what all of this frenetic activity is designed to hide; what Americans are running away from. Toward the end of his life Williams wrote: "America is the kind of culture that wakes you in the night, the kind of nightmare that may [yet] possibly lead us closer to the truth." This is a haunting, if enigmatic, sentence. What truth, after all? Possibly, an example of what not to do. For the truth here is an emptiness at the center, to which is added a desire to never grow up. It should be obvious by now that the American definition of "progress" is little more than a joke, and that running away from the responsibilities of adulthood–including the construction of a society not based on endless consumption, competition, and expansion–could be the single greatest thread in American history. That there is a possible alternative history, and a very different type of progress, characterized (for example) by marginal figures such as Lewis Mumford or the late Jane Jacobs, is something Americans don't wish to contemplate, for alternatives to the life of running faster to get nowhere scare them. No, the expansion game, and the life of limbo, as Williams puts it, will continue until we hit a wall, and the game cannot be played any longer (although I suspect we shall be able to limp along with "crisis management" for two or three more decades). This game, of self-destruction and the destruction of others, will continue until there is no place for America to go except to the graveyard of failed empires. And as Williams suggested, violence is very likely part of the equation.
In the meantime, much of the world, ironically enough, will go on taking the United States as a model for development, ignoring the bankruptcy of this way of life. The sadness of it all was captured by Richard Easterlin in his incisive study, Growth Triumphant: "In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity." Once expansion fails, however, the jig will be up. Whether Americans will finally address the thing they've been hiding from all these years is another question altogether.
The widespread emulation of this model is thus a peculiarly depressing aspect of the whole drama. I wrote this article in Mexico City, and being late for a meeting with a friend, shut my notebook and grabbed a taxi to get to my rendezvous on time. The driver, a young man of about twenty-five years of age, stared into the screen of his cell phone or blackberry while weaving through traffic. As I glanced over his shoulder, I saw that he was looking at cartoons, of the kind I watched on television when I was seven years old. Finally, nervous that he was going to plow into the truck in front of us, I asked him whether watching a screen while driving wasn't just a little bit dangerous. "Oh no," he told me, never taking his eyes off the screen; "not a problem." Meanwhile, he overshot my destination, had to consult the map I had with me, and wound up charging me twice as much as the ride would normally cost. I wasn’t in the mood to get into a long argument with him in Spanish about it, so I paid the fare and wished him buen día. But I couldn't help thinking what a jackass this kid was, and, at the same time, that what was in his head regarding the components of a meaningful life was probably not very different from what was in the head of the president of any Mexican or American or (for that matter) Indian university or corporation. Clearly, the psychology of expand-and-hide spreads like cancer: "growth" über Alles.
We see, then, the picture of the United States that emerges when we look at it structurally. Put Williams, Appleby, Borgmann, and Dorfman together, and it is as though you are looking at America with X-ray eyes. "Freedom" and "Opportunity" are not what stand out, on this view. Rather, the X-ray vision reveals something much closer to disease, what has been called an "ideological pathology." Living in limbo, as Williams told us over and over again, cannot be prolonged indefinitely. Yet the real tragedy, in my view, is not one of American diplomacy but of willful ignorance. Is it likely, when the system finally unravels and the empire is a feeble shadow of its former self, that we (or the hegemon that replaces us) will have learned anything at all?
*This is not quite true. Walter McDougall, in Freedom Just Around the Corner (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), says we were a nation of hustlers (his word) from the get-go; and Richard Bushman documents this for eighteenth-century Connecticut in From Puritan to Yankee (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970).
References
Keith Berwick, review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The William and Mary Quarterly, January 1963, pp. 144-46.
Paul Buhle and Edward Rice-Maximin, "War Without End," The Village Voice, 5 November 1991, p. 75.
Ariel Dorfman, The Empire's Old Clothes, trans. Clark Hansen (New York: Pantheon, 1983).
Greg Grandin, "Off Dead Center," The Nation, 1 July 2009.
Chris Hedges, "Nader Was Right," posted on http://www.truthdig.com/, 10 August 2009.
William Fletcher Thompson, Jr., review of Williams, The Contours of American History, in The Wisconsin Magazine of History, Winter 1962-63, pp. 139-40.
Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” lecture to the American Historical Association, Chicago, 1893; reprinted in numerous anthologies and available at http://www.historians.org/pubs/archives/Turnerthesis.htm
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993).
January 11, 2011
The Lure of Other Worlds
[Apologies to those of you who have already read this in A Question of Values. Sad to say, not everyone has bought the book (yet), so I thought I’d post this for the bookless among us.]
The essence of man is desire.
–Spinoza
At one time or another, all of us ponder the notion of happiness–what it consists of, and how to achieve it. This is my own small contribution to this great question.
Let me start with two vignettes from Proust, in this case from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs–“In the shadow of young girls in bloom”–the second volume of In Search of Lost Time (and rendered in English as Within a Budding Grove). The vignettes are but a few pages apart. Marcel has just seen the gaggle of the young girls in bloom, and there was one in particular who gave him a “smiling, sidelong glance, aimed from the centre of that inhuman world which enclosed the life of this little tribe, an inaccessible, unknown world wherein the idea of what I was could certainly never penetrate or find a place.” He goes on:
"From the depths of what universe did she discern me?
It would have been as difficult for me to say as, when
certain distinguishing features in a neighbouring planet
are made visible thanks to the telescope, it is to conclude
therefrom that human beings inhabit it, and that they can
see us, and to guess what ideas the sight of us can have
aroused in their minds."
This wonder over who she is, writes Proust, leads Marcel to think:
"And it was consequently her whole life that filled me
with desire; a sorrowful desire because I felt that it
was not to be fulfilled, but an exhilarating one because,
what had hitherto been my life having ceased of a
sudden to be my whole life, being no more now than
a small part of the space stretching out before me
which I was burning to cover and which was
composed of the lives of these girls, it offered me that
prolongation, that possible multiplication of oneself,
which is happiness."
So happiness is the possibility of entering another world, or another culture, which will lead to a multiplication of oneself–an extension to greater realms. Two pages later, Marcel ruminates on the role of the imagination in this process:
"To strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce
them to their own dimensions, that is to say to
nothing....We need imagination, awakened by
the uncertainty of being unable to attain its object,
to create a goal which hides the other goal from us,
and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of
penetrating another life, prevents us from recognising
that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from
restricting it to its own range."
By comparison, Proust imagines sitting before a plate of fish, and says that between us and the enjoyment of the flesh of that fish we need a certain intervention. We imagine sitting by the water with the rod in our hand, and see “the rippling eddy to whose surface come flashing...the bright gleam of flesh, the hint of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and mobile azure.” The imagination thus moves in to replace the actual sensual experience (whether of savoring a woman or a fish). This, he seems to suggest, is the Other World that we wish to enter, that offers happiness–the enlargement of oneself.
I remember an ad that was popular in the 1960s–it could have been for aftershave, for all I know–showing an elegantly dressed man sitting at a table surrounded by classic Japanese wood-and-paper screens (shoji), on which was a Go set. The caption read something like: “He is at home in worlds most people don’t even know exist.” And I remember, as a young adult, identifying with that man, wanting to be him, wanting familiarity with unknown worlds–probably because I understood that this would extend my own world, and thus make me happier.
The notion that the imaginary does not substitute for the sensual, but is somehow fused with it, is a major motif in the work of the great Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965). In Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds, Ken Ito explores this in detail, showing how Tanizaki is able to create shimmering visions of other worlds–including the world of his childhood–which transcend the ordinary. As he puts it, “Tanizaki’s other worlds are realms limned by culturally determined erotic longing, where men find sensual and aesthetic satisfactions unavailable in the given world of modernizing Japan.”
In fact, in his early work, the West was the other world, the other culture, that Tanizaki found fascinating, and sought to enter. A bit later, he reversed himself, and made the lost traditional world of Japan, a world that was rapidly succumbing to modernization (i.e., Americanization), the culture that was alluring. After the War, Tanizaki came to a more integrated position, and broadened out to an examination of “the desire that underlies cultural aspiration” in general. He became, in short, both a brilliant psychologist and a brilliant storyteller, in a single stroke.
Tanizaki’s novels, says Ito, “brim with characters who labor to realize visions of sexual and cultural fulfillment in the exterior world.” Naomi, for example, is the story of a westernized Japanese woman who is the obsession of Joji, a Japanese man who cannot really distinguish between his yearning for her and his yearning for the West–at least, the West as it existed then in the popular Japanese imagination (powerful, sensual, and replete with all kinds of exotic possibilities). Similarly, in his description of his childhood, Tanizaki evokes “an ‘other world’ that transcends the ordinary,” a world of mystery, in which “sampling just a bit of squid, salty and slick, can be a revelation; the way to a noodle shop can lead through a scene straight out of a Hiroshige print; and a restaurant’s garden can take on the hazy luminosity of a ‘dream world’.” Treated in this way, even one’s own childhood can be exotic. As one Japanese writer put it, in a commentary on Tanizaki, “exoticism is an attempt to find something lacking within the self in an object or person that is foreign, strange, or distant. It can thus be defined as an outwardly projected act of self-recovery.”
(My own encounter with the fusion of sexuality and otherness occurred with my second sexual partner–I was lucky, I guess–who was half Native American. The sensation was something along the lines of, “Where have I been all my life?” For this went way beyond “getting laid”; it was an entrée into a world the existence of which I previously had no idea. Its dimensions seemed gigantic; I suddenly realized that Mystery was not just a concept, and that understood properly, the whole world could be experienced as erotic. Sad to say, that relationship didn’t last very long, and it was more than ten years before it happened to me again. C’est la vie.)
This definition of exoticism has a lot in common with Georges Batailles’ definition of eroticism, which he characterizes as a process where “man is everlastingly in search of an object outside himself but this object answers the innerness of the desire.” Of course, the real question is whether it does answer the innerness of desire. The French psychologist, Jacques Lacan (1901-81), believed it didn’t. For Lacan, these other worlds that we are reaching for, and the desire that impels us, are purely illusory. Lacan argued that the transference that occurs in the analytic situation is really to the knowledge that the patient thinks his or her analyst possesses. The analyst is the sujet supposé savoir, the subject who is supposedly in the know. But what Lacan occasionally hinted at, and what he actually demonstrated in his own life–in his consummate capacity as a charlatan–was that there was no hidden knowledge, no other world. As in the case of The Wizard of Oz, in which the various characters believe themselves to be incomplete (lacking a heart, a brain, etc.) and go off in search of the Wizard, who is supposedly going to make them whole, the journey ends when the “Wizard” turns out to be a nobody. He is just some little bald guy behind a screen, fiddling with levers and pulleys. The knowledge, the other world, was totally in the mind of the desirers. True fulfillment, true self-recovery, consists in grasping that the journey was completely unnecessary. Unfortunately, as Lacan well knew, very few people are willing to recognize this. For then the game would be up, and one would be faced with a very different, and much less dazzling, version of reality.
(I recall a joke in which a young American adventurer learns of some guru in the Himalayas who supposedly knows what life really is. He crosses the Atlantic, hitchhikes through Europe and Asia, climbs the Himalayas, and finally corners the guru, meditating in his cave. “Oh Swami!” he cries, “please tell me what life really is!” The guru, in an authoritative, high-pitched voice, points his finger toward the heavens and declares, “Life is a waterfall.” The young lad stares at him for a moment and finally says, with some anger, “That’s it? Life is a waterfall? I came all this way to hear that ‘life is a waterfall’?” The guru looks at him, a bit puzzled, and then says: “It isn’t?”)
What, then, would be this less dazzling version of reality, and how does it relate to the theme of other worlds? One pioneer in this area–one might well call him the grandfather of body work–was F.M. Alexander (1869-1955), an Australian actor who immigrated to England in 1904 and subsequently developed a technique of mind-body integration that bears his name. He had some very famous students, including Aldous Huxley, who immortalized him as a seer and visionary (as “James Miller”) in his novel, Eyeless in Gaza. Alexander was also in search of other worlds, and an expanded self, but in his hands (literally) these things took on a whole new meaning. For according to Alexander, it is precisely the refusal to indulge in desire, and to inhibit it instead, that opens up a new possibility. In his work with his clients, he sought to disrupt the well-worn grooves of habit and replace them with spontaneity. While not strictly ascetic, the lure here is that a much fuller life awaits one who does not act on impulse, but instead renounces it. This involves crossing a kind of watershed, of the kind I discuss in the final chapter of my book Coming to Our Senses, “The Two Faces of Creativity.” I call these Creativity II and Creativity III, the first being allied to the tormented genius theory, fueled by drama and conflict–Van Gogh, let’s say, or Sylvia Plath. The second is illustrated by the medieval craft tradition, or by much Eastern art, in which the work emerges out of serenity rather than emotional extremes. I point out that it is very hard for us westerners to get to Cr. III because the impulsive, passionate nature of Cr. II makes it seem so alive; and until you reach the other shore, the feeling is one of meaninglessness, loss of purpose. Those who study things such as the Alexander Technique, or emptiness meditation, eventually find themselves face to face with this “dark night of the soul.”
In The Compassionate Presence, Stephen Schwartz talks in similar terms, ones which are reminiscent of my discussion of creativity. The first type, he says, is ego-driven and conflict-based; it prods us into acting, doing. We remain ignorant of the awareness “that there is another kind of impetus besides the motivation of ‘should’ and ‘must’.” This other impetus arises out of trust, not pressure, whereas “ego suggests that no challenge will exist when we stop pushing our life into the ground.” However, if we let go of the old ways before we are ready for the new, Schwartz goes on to say, “a certain kind of forward-directed activity seems to cease.” The ego sees the resulting deflation as “proof” of its theory, that drivenness is the key to life.
“We find ourselves for a while in a kind of paralysis,” writes Schwartz. “This can feel like a barren place,” a place of no hope. It’s a half-way place. “We find ourselves [there] because a specific kind of certainty does not yet exist in full consciousness.” But eventually, another kind of impulse arises, one that is not the result of pushing and doubt. Proust (let alone the Buddha) would say that very few of us get there. In Tolstoy’s famous story of Ivan Ilych, the central character–Everyman, in a word–realizes only on his deathbed that his entire life was a waste of time.
This is where Alexander is relevant, for his teaching was designed to help people work through this “dark night of the soul” on a bodily level. It means putting yourself in physical postures that seem wrong only because you’ve been doing what’s wrong all your life. As in the case of Wilhelm Reich, the idea is to return to a “natural” body, one without tension, without the coercive ego structure of pushing and doubt. “If it feels wrong, leave it wrong,” Alexander used to tell his students. The entire process of the Alexander Technique is counterintuitive. In this case, the other world is an inner rather than an outer world, and as already noted, it is attained not through desire but through its inhibition. This has obvious connections with Buddhism or Taoism, and the classical Chinese notion of wu wei, or not-doing. The promise is that of a richer existence, a happiness borne not out of the multiplication of self, but out of the holding back of the self. As someone once said, Zen is the practice of manifesting oneself as emptiness. The paradox is that renunciation creates a sensation of fullness, of limitless horizons.
Similar conclusions were reached independently by the Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski (1902-80), who pioneered something called the Theory of Positive Disintegration. Dabrowski saw depression and anxiety as necessary for real growth, disintegrative processes that he regarded as positive because they were developmental. Crises, in other words, cause us to review ourselves, possibly redo ourselves, and to make new worlds as a result. One has to weather the darkness, which is not conceived of in negative terms. (Not easy!)
I have repeated this cycle of drivenness/surrender a number of times in my life, most recently in the wake of surgery that left me confined to my house for a few weeks. My doctor told me the following were off limits: spicy foods, fats, sugar, salt, soda pop, tobacco, coffee, too much food in general, sex, exercise, and driving anywhere. After three weeks of this, I was pretty much a basket case. It was as though all my “friends” had suddenly deserted me. I had no interest in doing any work; indeed, it felt like nothing would ever turn me on again. Finally, as Dabrowski says, one has no choice (in lieu of spiraling downward) but to trust the process, give it a positive “spin”. In time, with a little luck (or maybe it’s divine intervention, who knows), the outlines of the farther shore emerge, and one lives to write, and love, again.
The essence of man is desire.
–Spinoza
At one time or another, all of us ponder the notion of happiness–what it consists of, and how to achieve it. This is my own small contribution to this great question.
Let me start with two vignettes from Proust, in this case from A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs–“In the shadow of young girls in bloom”–the second volume of In Search of Lost Time (and rendered in English as Within a Budding Grove). The vignettes are but a few pages apart. Marcel has just seen the gaggle of the young girls in bloom, and there was one in particular who gave him a “smiling, sidelong glance, aimed from the centre of that inhuman world which enclosed the life of this little tribe, an inaccessible, unknown world wherein the idea of what I was could certainly never penetrate or find a place.” He goes on:
"From the depths of what universe did she discern me?
It would have been as difficult for me to say as, when
certain distinguishing features in a neighbouring planet
are made visible thanks to the telescope, it is to conclude
therefrom that human beings inhabit it, and that they can
see us, and to guess what ideas the sight of us can have
aroused in their minds."
This wonder over who she is, writes Proust, leads Marcel to think:
"And it was consequently her whole life that filled me
with desire; a sorrowful desire because I felt that it
was not to be fulfilled, but an exhilarating one because,
what had hitherto been my life having ceased of a
sudden to be my whole life, being no more now than
a small part of the space stretching out before me
which I was burning to cover and which was
composed of the lives of these girls, it offered me that
prolongation, that possible multiplication of oneself,
which is happiness."
So happiness is the possibility of entering another world, or another culture, which will lead to a multiplication of oneself–an extension to greater realms. Two pages later, Marcel ruminates on the role of the imagination in this process:
"To strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce
them to their own dimensions, that is to say to
nothing....We need imagination, awakened by
the uncertainty of being unable to attain its object,
to create a goal which hides the other goal from us,
and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of
penetrating another life, prevents us from recognising
that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from
restricting it to its own range."
By comparison, Proust imagines sitting before a plate of fish, and says that between us and the enjoyment of the flesh of that fish we need a certain intervention. We imagine sitting by the water with the rod in our hand, and see “the rippling eddy to whose surface come flashing...the bright gleam of flesh, the hint of a form, in the fluidity of a transparent and mobile azure.” The imagination thus moves in to replace the actual sensual experience (whether of savoring a woman or a fish). This, he seems to suggest, is the Other World that we wish to enter, that offers happiness–the enlargement of oneself.
I remember an ad that was popular in the 1960s–it could have been for aftershave, for all I know–showing an elegantly dressed man sitting at a table surrounded by classic Japanese wood-and-paper screens (shoji), on which was a Go set. The caption read something like: “He is at home in worlds most people don’t even know exist.” And I remember, as a young adult, identifying with that man, wanting to be him, wanting familiarity with unknown worlds–probably because I understood that this would extend my own world, and thus make me happier.
The notion that the imaginary does not substitute for the sensual, but is somehow fused with it, is a major motif in the work of the great Japanese writer Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965). In Visions of Desire: Tanizaki’s Fictional Worlds, Ken Ito explores this in detail, showing how Tanizaki is able to create shimmering visions of other worlds–including the world of his childhood–which transcend the ordinary. As he puts it, “Tanizaki’s other worlds are realms limned by culturally determined erotic longing, where men find sensual and aesthetic satisfactions unavailable in the given world of modernizing Japan.”
In fact, in his early work, the West was the other world, the other culture, that Tanizaki found fascinating, and sought to enter. A bit later, he reversed himself, and made the lost traditional world of Japan, a world that was rapidly succumbing to modernization (i.e., Americanization), the culture that was alluring. After the War, Tanizaki came to a more integrated position, and broadened out to an examination of “the desire that underlies cultural aspiration” in general. He became, in short, both a brilliant psychologist and a brilliant storyteller, in a single stroke.
Tanizaki’s novels, says Ito, “brim with characters who labor to realize visions of sexual and cultural fulfillment in the exterior world.” Naomi, for example, is the story of a westernized Japanese woman who is the obsession of Joji, a Japanese man who cannot really distinguish between his yearning for her and his yearning for the West–at least, the West as it existed then in the popular Japanese imagination (powerful, sensual, and replete with all kinds of exotic possibilities). Similarly, in his description of his childhood, Tanizaki evokes “an ‘other world’ that transcends the ordinary,” a world of mystery, in which “sampling just a bit of squid, salty and slick, can be a revelation; the way to a noodle shop can lead through a scene straight out of a Hiroshige print; and a restaurant’s garden can take on the hazy luminosity of a ‘dream world’.” Treated in this way, even one’s own childhood can be exotic. As one Japanese writer put it, in a commentary on Tanizaki, “exoticism is an attempt to find something lacking within the self in an object or person that is foreign, strange, or distant. It can thus be defined as an outwardly projected act of self-recovery.”
(My own encounter with the fusion of sexuality and otherness occurred with my second sexual partner–I was lucky, I guess–who was half Native American. The sensation was something along the lines of, “Where have I been all my life?” For this went way beyond “getting laid”; it was an entrée into a world the existence of which I previously had no idea. Its dimensions seemed gigantic; I suddenly realized that Mystery was not just a concept, and that understood properly, the whole world could be experienced as erotic. Sad to say, that relationship didn’t last very long, and it was more than ten years before it happened to me again. C’est la vie.)
This definition of exoticism has a lot in common with Georges Batailles’ definition of eroticism, which he characterizes as a process where “man is everlastingly in search of an object outside himself but this object answers the innerness of the desire.” Of course, the real question is whether it does answer the innerness of desire. The French psychologist, Jacques Lacan (1901-81), believed it didn’t. For Lacan, these other worlds that we are reaching for, and the desire that impels us, are purely illusory. Lacan argued that the transference that occurs in the analytic situation is really to the knowledge that the patient thinks his or her analyst possesses. The analyst is the sujet supposé savoir, the subject who is supposedly in the know. But what Lacan occasionally hinted at, and what he actually demonstrated in his own life–in his consummate capacity as a charlatan–was that there was no hidden knowledge, no other world. As in the case of The Wizard of Oz, in which the various characters believe themselves to be incomplete (lacking a heart, a brain, etc.) and go off in search of the Wizard, who is supposedly going to make them whole, the journey ends when the “Wizard” turns out to be a nobody. He is just some little bald guy behind a screen, fiddling with levers and pulleys. The knowledge, the other world, was totally in the mind of the desirers. True fulfillment, true self-recovery, consists in grasping that the journey was completely unnecessary. Unfortunately, as Lacan well knew, very few people are willing to recognize this. For then the game would be up, and one would be faced with a very different, and much less dazzling, version of reality.
(I recall a joke in which a young American adventurer learns of some guru in the Himalayas who supposedly knows what life really is. He crosses the Atlantic, hitchhikes through Europe and Asia, climbs the Himalayas, and finally corners the guru, meditating in his cave. “Oh Swami!” he cries, “please tell me what life really is!” The guru, in an authoritative, high-pitched voice, points his finger toward the heavens and declares, “Life is a waterfall.” The young lad stares at him for a moment and finally says, with some anger, “That’s it? Life is a waterfall? I came all this way to hear that ‘life is a waterfall’?” The guru looks at him, a bit puzzled, and then says: “It isn’t?”)
What, then, would be this less dazzling version of reality, and how does it relate to the theme of other worlds? One pioneer in this area–one might well call him the grandfather of body work–was F.M. Alexander (1869-1955), an Australian actor who immigrated to England in 1904 and subsequently developed a technique of mind-body integration that bears his name. He had some very famous students, including Aldous Huxley, who immortalized him as a seer and visionary (as “James Miller”) in his novel, Eyeless in Gaza. Alexander was also in search of other worlds, and an expanded self, but in his hands (literally) these things took on a whole new meaning. For according to Alexander, it is precisely the refusal to indulge in desire, and to inhibit it instead, that opens up a new possibility. In his work with his clients, he sought to disrupt the well-worn grooves of habit and replace them with spontaneity. While not strictly ascetic, the lure here is that a much fuller life awaits one who does not act on impulse, but instead renounces it. This involves crossing a kind of watershed, of the kind I discuss in the final chapter of my book Coming to Our Senses, “The Two Faces of Creativity.” I call these Creativity II and Creativity III, the first being allied to the tormented genius theory, fueled by drama and conflict–Van Gogh, let’s say, or Sylvia Plath. The second is illustrated by the medieval craft tradition, or by much Eastern art, in which the work emerges out of serenity rather than emotional extremes. I point out that it is very hard for us westerners to get to Cr. III because the impulsive, passionate nature of Cr. II makes it seem so alive; and until you reach the other shore, the feeling is one of meaninglessness, loss of purpose. Those who study things such as the Alexander Technique, or emptiness meditation, eventually find themselves face to face with this “dark night of the soul.”
In The Compassionate Presence, Stephen Schwartz talks in similar terms, ones which are reminiscent of my discussion of creativity. The first type, he says, is ego-driven and conflict-based; it prods us into acting, doing. We remain ignorant of the awareness “that there is another kind of impetus besides the motivation of ‘should’ and ‘must’.” This other impetus arises out of trust, not pressure, whereas “ego suggests that no challenge will exist when we stop pushing our life into the ground.” However, if we let go of the old ways before we are ready for the new, Schwartz goes on to say, “a certain kind of forward-directed activity seems to cease.” The ego sees the resulting deflation as “proof” of its theory, that drivenness is the key to life.
“We find ourselves for a while in a kind of paralysis,” writes Schwartz. “This can feel like a barren place,” a place of no hope. It’s a half-way place. “We find ourselves [there] because a specific kind of certainty does not yet exist in full consciousness.” But eventually, another kind of impulse arises, one that is not the result of pushing and doubt. Proust (let alone the Buddha) would say that very few of us get there. In Tolstoy’s famous story of Ivan Ilych, the central character–Everyman, in a word–realizes only on his deathbed that his entire life was a waste of time.
This is where Alexander is relevant, for his teaching was designed to help people work through this “dark night of the soul” on a bodily level. It means putting yourself in physical postures that seem wrong only because you’ve been doing what’s wrong all your life. As in the case of Wilhelm Reich, the idea is to return to a “natural” body, one without tension, without the coercive ego structure of pushing and doubt. “If it feels wrong, leave it wrong,” Alexander used to tell his students. The entire process of the Alexander Technique is counterintuitive. In this case, the other world is an inner rather than an outer world, and as already noted, it is attained not through desire but through its inhibition. This has obvious connections with Buddhism or Taoism, and the classical Chinese notion of wu wei, or not-doing. The promise is that of a richer existence, a happiness borne not out of the multiplication of self, but out of the holding back of the self. As someone once said, Zen is the practice of manifesting oneself as emptiness. The paradox is that renunciation creates a sensation of fullness, of limitless horizons.
Similar conclusions were reached independently by the Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski (1902-80), who pioneered something called the Theory of Positive Disintegration. Dabrowski saw depression and anxiety as necessary for real growth, disintegrative processes that he regarded as positive because they were developmental. Crises, in other words, cause us to review ourselves, possibly redo ourselves, and to make new worlds as a result. One has to weather the darkness, which is not conceived of in negative terms. (Not easy!)
I have repeated this cycle of drivenness/surrender a number of times in my life, most recently in the wake of surgery that left me confined to my house for a few weeks. My doctor told me the following were off limits: spicy foods, fats, sugar, salt, soda pop, tobacco, coffee, too much food in general, sex, exercise, and driving anywhere. After three weeks of this, I was pretty much a basket case. It was as though all my “friends” had suddenly deserted me. I had no interest in doing any work; indeed, it felt like nothing would ever turn me on again. Finally, as Dabrowski says, one has no choice (in lieu of spiraling downward) but to trust the process, give it a positive “spin”. In time, with a little luck (or maybe it’s divine intervention, who knows), the outlines of the farther shore emerge, and one lives to write, and love, again.
January 02, 2011
Second Interview with Ken Rose
Dear Friends,
Ken runs a show on KOWS-FM in Occidental, CA, called "What Now," and interviewed me last May. After my smash run on Broadway, he could hardly decline to have me again, so here's the info (interview is abt 1 hr long):
Go to www.pantedmonkey.org, scroll down to 12-27-10, and click on my name. Lean back, pull up a stiff glass of Scotch, and enjoy (or not).
-mb
Ken runs a show on KOWS-FM in Occidental, CA, called "What Now," and interviewed me last May. After my smash run on Broadway, he could hardly decline to have me again, so here's the info (interview is abt 1 hr long):
Go to www.pantedmonkey.org, scroll down to 12-27-10, and click on my name. Lean back, pull up a stiff glass of Scotch, and enjoy (or not).
-mb
December 30, 2010
Thoughts for the End of the Year
Dear Friends (aka DAA42)-
As the year comes to a close, I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about the past 4.5 yrs (when, under severe pressure from agent and editor, I agreed to start this blog) and the next few. I'm glad, in retrospect, that I knuckled under to pressure from these folks, as the evolution of this blog has taught me a lot; and it's been great getting to know you guys, if only virtually. It took a while to shake out, as I recently explained: the self-advertising and the severely neurotic have (thank god) departed for greener pastures, and what is left is a group of thoughtful people who want to reflect on what's happening to the US and where we are collectively going. Art, Dave, Susan, Tim, Joe, El Juero, Mike (et al.)--thank you for being there, and for contributing as much as you have.
I suspect the next 2-3 years are going to be quite fateful for the US, and not in a good way. I very much doubt there is anything substantive any of us can do to derail America from its destructive, self-defeating course. But we can attend to our souls a bit; at least there's that. With that in mind, here is a quote from Marilynne Robinson's recent book, Absence of Mind. She writes of
"...that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer so diligently....I am hungry, I am comfortable, I am a singer, I am a cook. The abrupt descent into particularity in every statement of this kind, Being itself made an auxiliary to some momentary accident of being, may only startle in the dark of the night, when the intuition comes that there is no proportion [i.e., relationship] between the great given of existence and the narrow vessel of circumstance into which it is inevitably forced [Heidegger: thrown]...The soul [is simply] a name for an aspect of deep experience...."
To all of you, a happy and soulful 2011.
--mb
As the year comes to a close, I wanted to share a few thoughts with you about the past 4.5 yrs (when, under severe pressure from agent and editor, I agreed to start this blog) and the next few. I'm glad, in retrospect, that I knuckled under to pressure from these folks, as the evolution of this blog has taught me a lot; and it's been great getting to know you guys, if only virtually. It took a while to shake out, as I recently explained: the self-advertising and the severely neurotic have (thank god) departed for greener pastures, and what is left is a group of thoughtful people who want to reflect on what's happening to the US and where we are collectively going. Art, Dave, Susan, Tim, Joe, El Juero, Mike (et al.)--thank you for being there, and for contributing as much as you have.
I suspect the next 2-3 years are going to be quite fateful for the US, and not in a good way. I very much doubt there is anything substantive any of us can do to derail America from its destructive, self-defeating course. But we can attend to our souls a bit; at least there's that. With that in mind, here is a quote from Marilynne Robinson's recent book, Absence of Mind. She writes of
"...that haunting I who wakes us in the night wondering where time has gone, the I we waken to, sharply aware that we have been unfaithful to ourselves, that a life lived otherwise would have acknowledged a yearning more our own than any of the daylit motives whose behests we answer so diligently....I am hungry, I am comfortable, I am a singer, I am a cook. The abrupt descent into particularity in every statement of this kind, Being itself made an auxiliary to some momentary accident of being, may only startle in the dark of the night, when the intuition comes that there is no proportion [i.e., relationship] between the great given of existence and the narrow vessel of circumstance into which it is inevitably forced [Heidegger: thrown]...The soul [is simply] a name for an aspect of deep experience...."
To all of you, a happy and soulful 2011.
--mb
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