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
May 27, 2010
Interview with Ken Rose
Dear Friends,
Ken Rose has a kind of controversial thought program on KOSW-FM, I think it is, in California, and recently did an interview with me--abt 50 mins. long. You can access it, if you'd like, on his website: www.pantedmonkey.org. Just scroll down to May 24 and then click on my name.
Enjoy...mb
Ken Rose has a kind of controversial thought program on KOSW-FM, I think it is, in California, and recently did an interview with me--abt 50 mins. long. You can access it, if you'd like, on his website: www.pantedmonkey.org. Just scroll down to May 24 and then click on my name.
Enjoy...mb
May 26, 2010
The Cellular World
I always enjoyed the story of how Ludwig Wittgenstein, after delivering a four-hour lecture to his class in Cambridge on the intricacies of some logical problem, would then go to a movie in town (his favorite genre was the American Western) and sit in the front row, letting the images inundate his overheated brain. Intuitively, it makes sense, the need to turn off the intellect and immerse oneself in fantasy for a while. Now it turns out that it makes scientific sense as well. In her recent book, The Philosophical Baby, psychologist Alison Gopnik notes that magnetic imaging studies show that the occipital cortex, which is very active in the infant brain, lights up in adults while they are watching a movie, while the prefrontal lobe shuts down. In short, there is a reversion (if that is the right word) to pre-critical thinking, which adults often experience as a relief from the “tyranny” of the prefrontal cortex. This latter part of the brain is undeveloped in infants, and doesn’t fully form in most individuals until they are in their twenties. The implication is that imagination precedes rational analysis; to do art, be creative, or imagine hypothetical worlds, one has to play, to tap into that preverbal substrate of the mind.
In his review of Gopnik’s work (New York Review of Books, 11 March 2010), Michael Greenberg talks about how elusive and shadowy the infant’s consciousness really is. Tolstoy wrote that it was but a slight step from a five-year-old boy to a man of fifty, but a huge distance between a newborn and a five-year-old. Greenberg says of the first five years of life:
“Mysterious and otherworldly, infancy and early childhood are surrounded later in life by a curious amnesia, broken by flashes of memory that come upon us unbidden, for the most part, with no coherent or reliable context. With their sensorial, almost cellular evocations, these memories seem to reside more in the body than the mind; yet they are central to our sense of who we are to ourselves.”
Proust immediately comes to mind, of course: the scene with the madeleine in Du côté de chez Swann, where the taste of the cookie suddenly opens the door to a flood of childhood memories, long forgotten but still latent in the body. “Cellular evocations…central to our sense of who we are to ourselves.” If the phrase “human identity” has a meaning, surely this is it. And yet that fundamental cellular identity gets papered over, as it were; as we grow older, we become someone else. But it is not clear that the archaic self ever goes away completely.
In his autobiography, the psychologist Carl Jung tells the story of a man who comes to him for therapy, apparently at the insistence of his wife. The man is dull as a stick: a Swiss high school principal of about sixty years of age, who did everything “right” all his life, and never experienced a moment of ecstasy or imagination. Jung suggests that he keep a record of his dreams, which he does, showing up at the second session with something potentially disturbing. He dreamt that he entered a darkened room, and found a three-year-old infant covered with feces, and crying. What, he asked Dr. Jung, could it mean? Jung decided not to tell him the obvious: that the baby was himself, that it had had the life crushed out of it at an early age, and was now crying out to be heard. Exposing the “shadow” to the light of day, Jung told himself, would precipitate a psychosis in this poor guy; he wouldn’t be able to handle the psychic confrontation. So Jung gave him some sort of neutral explanation, saw the man a few more times, finally pronounced him “cured,” and let him go.
One wonders if the good doctor did the right thing. Is a living death preferable to a psychotic awakening? On the other hand—and I have a feeling Jung would agree with me on this—aren’t we all that man, to some degree? Perhaps not as wigged out, but it may be a question of degree, nothing more. Abandonment of that cellular identity is the abandonment of life itself; the abandonment of the part of ourselves that is in touch with the “miraculous,” as some have called it.
A couple of poems come to mind. One is by Antonio Machado (my translation):
The wind, one clear day, called to my heart
with the sweet smell of jasmine.
“In exchange for this aroma,
I want the scent of all your roses.”
“I have no roses; the flowers
in my garden are gone; they are all dead.”
“Then I’ll take the tears from your fountains,
The yellow leaves and the withered petals.”
And the wind left…My heart bled…
“My soul, what have you done with your poor little garden?”
Who, upon reading this, can’t feel a sense of guilt, a sense of something having been betrayed, and now faintly stirring, knocking on the door of consciousness, asking to be heard, at long last?
The same theme comes up in “Faith Healing,” by the British poet Philip Larkin, which describes a “workshop” being held somewhere in England by a visiting American guru. Undoubtedly, he is something of a charlatan; but even (or especially) charlatans know how to press the right buttons. The women in the workshop line up to be held by him for twenty seconds, to hear him ask, “Now, dear child, What’s wrong,” before he moves on to the next person. Most just come and go, but some start twitching, crying,
…as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone…
What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
Larkin goes on to compare this moment to the thawing of a frozen landscape, a weeping that spreads slowly through the body—just from the fact of being asked the question, of having someone recognize that there is even a question to be asked. As with Machado, it’s hard not to identify with the emotion that is being pulled out of a deep cellular memory. What is the “poor little garden,” if not the “sense of life lived according to love” sleeping within us, the cellular memory that never really goes away?
There is, of course, in virtually every society, a kind of conspiracy to keep that memory out of conscious awareness. We need to ask why that would be the case; but meanwhile, it’s clear that if it emerges at all, it is by “accident” (the madeleine that triggers a kinesthetic memory, e.g.), or in a therapist’s office, or in a dream (or a poem). If the cellular world is repressed within the individual, it is also repressed within society. Hence, to study human psychology is really to study abnormal psychology, and to study sociology is to really to study a kind of institutionalized insanity; or weirdness, at the very least. But it is hardly an accident that the two go hand in hand. Observing the phenomenon in the United States, the psychiatrist Thomas Lewis remarks that “A good deal of modern American culture is an extended experiment in the effects of depriving people of what they crave most.” “Happiness,” he concludes, “is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America’s values.”
A grim assessment, but I doubt there is any way of denying it. Nor is it limited to the United States, of course; if Freud was right, there is no civilization without deep discontent. It just takes a different form in different cultures. And in any case, it is hard to imagine what a society based entirely on cellular memory would be like—although figures such as Rousseau and Nietzsche did their best to sketch it out. True, the results are less than impressive, but one would like to think that more can be done in this direction beyond individual initiative. It is very rare for a society to literally stop, for a moment, and collectively discuss what an authentic way of life might consist of. Indeed, I can barely imagine such a thing, except that it actually happened in France in May/June of 1968, and for those who were privileged enough to have been at the two-month “teach-in” held at the Sorbonne during that time, it was like breathing oxygen. What is man? What is the good life? What are we doing here? And: Why aren’t we asking ourselves these questions all the time?
“Come my friends,” wrote Alfred Lord Tennyson; “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
What a thought.
©Morris Berman, 2010
In his review of Gopnik’s work (New York Review of Books, 11 March 2010), Michael Greenberg talks about how elusive and shadowy the infant’s consciousness really is. Tolstoy wrote that it was but a slight step from a five-year-old boy to a man of fifty, but a huge distance between a newborn and a five-year-old. Greenberg says of the first five years of life:
“Mysterious and otherworldly, infancy and early childhood are surrounded later in life by a curious amnesia, broken by flashes of memory that come upon us unbidden, for the most part, with no coherent or reliable context. With their sensorial, almost cellular evocations, these memories seem to reside more in the body than the mind; yet they are central to our sense of who we are to ourselves.”
Proust immediately comes to mind, of course: the scene with the madeleine in Du côté de chez Swann, where the taste of the cookie suddenly opens the door to a flood of childhood memories, long forgotten but still latent in the body. “Cellular evocations…central to our sense of who we are to ourselves.” If the phrase “human identity” has a meaning, surely this is it. And yet that fundamental cellular identity gets papered over, as it were; as we grow older, we become someone else. But it is not clear that the archaic self ever goes away completely.
In his autobiography, the psychologist Carl Jung tells the story of a man who comes to him for therapy, apparently at the insistence of his wife. The man is dull as a stick: a Swiss high school principal of about sixty years of age, who did everything “right” all his life, and never experienced a moment of ecstasy or imagination. Jung suggests that he keep a record of his dreams, which he does, showing up at the second session with something potentially disturbing. He dreamt that he entered a darkened room, and found a three-year-old infant covered with feces, and crying. What, he asked Dr. Jung, could it mean? Jung decided not to tell him the obvious: that the baby was himself, that it had had the life crushed out of it at an early age, and was now crying out to be heard. Exposing the “shadow” to the light of day, Jung told himself, would precipitate a psychosis in this poor guy; he wouldn’t be able to handle the psychic confrontation. So Jung gave him some sort of neutral explanation, saw the man a few more times, finally pronounced him “cured,” and let him go.
One wonders if the good doctor did the right thing. Is a living death preferable to a psychotic awakening? On the other hand—and I have a feeling Jung would agree with me on this—aren’t we all that man, to some degree? Perhaps not as wigged out, but it may be a question of degree, nothing more. Abandonment of that cellular identity is the abandonment of life itself; the abandonment of the part of ourselves that is in touch with the “miraculous,” as some have called it.
A couple of poems come to mind. One is by Antonio Machado (my translation):
The wind, one clear day, called to my heart
with the sweet smell of jasmine.
“In exchange for this aroma,
I want the scent of all your roses.”
“I have no roses; the flowers
in my garden are gone; they are all dead.”
“Then I’ll take the tears from your fountains,
The yellow leaves and the withered petals.”
And the wind left…My heart bled…
“My soul, what have you done with your poor little garden?”
Who, upon reading this, can’t feel a sense of guilt, a sense of something having been betrayed, and now faintly stirring, knocking on the door of consciousness, asking to be heard, at long last?
The same theme comes up in “Faith Healing,” by the British poet Philip Larkin, which describes a “workshop” being held somewhere in England by a visiting American guru. Undoubtedly, he is something of a charlatan; but even (or especially) charlatans know how to press the right buttons. The women in the workshop line up to be held by him for twenty seconds, to hear him ask, “Now, dear child, What’s wrong,” before he moves on to the next person. Most just come and go, but some start twitching, crying,
…as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone…
What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
Larkin goes on to compare this moment to the thawing of a frozen landscape, a weeping that spreads slowly through the body—just from the fact of being asked the question, of having someone recognize that there is even a question to be asked. As with Machado, it’s hard not to identify with the emotion that is being pulled out of a deep cellular memory. What is the “poor little garden,” if not the “sense of life lived according to love” sleeping within us, the cellular memory that never really goes away?
There is, of course, in virtually every society, a kind of conspiracy to keep that memory out of conscious awareness. We need to ask why that would be the case; but meanwhile, it’s clear that if it emerges at all, it is by “accident” (the madeleine that triggers a kinesthetic memory, e.g.), or in a therapist’s office, or in a dream (or a poem). If the cellular world is repressed within the individual, it is also repressed within society. Hence, to study human psychology is really to study abnormal psychology, and to study sociology is to really to study a kind of institutionalized insanity; or weirdness, at the very least. But it is hardly an accident that the two go hand in hand. Observing the phenomenon in the United States, the psychiatrist Thomas Lewis remarks that “A good deal of modern American culture is an extended experiment in the effects of depriving people of what they crave most.” “Happiness,” he concludes, “is within range only for adroit people who give the slip to America’s values.”
A grim assessment, but I doubt there is any way of denying it. Nor is it limited to the United States, of course; if Freud was right, there is no civilization without deep discontent. It just takes a different form in different cultures. And in any case, it is hard to imagine what a society based entirely on cellular memory would be like—although figures such as Rousseau and Nietzsche did their best to sketch it out. True, the results are less than impressive, but one would like to think that more can be done in this direction beyond individual initiative. It is very rare for a society to literally stop, for a moment, and collectively discuss what an authentic way of life might consist of. Indeed, I can barely imagine such a thing, except that it actually happened in France in May/June of 1968, and for those who were privileged enough to have been at the two-month “teach-in” held at the Sorbonne during that time, it was like breathing oxygen. What is man? What is the good life? What are we doing here? And: Why aren’t we asking ourselves these questions all the time?
“Come my friends,” wrote Alfred Lord Tennyson; “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
What a thought.
©Morris Berman, 2010
May 17, 2010
An American Diary
This is a record of a trip I made to the United States during April 28-May 16. I was asked to give a lecture at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee campus; after which I spent two weeks in New York visiting friends and just wandering around. The decision to keep a record of the trip was prompted by a minor incident at Immigration at the Dallas Airport, which reminded me of the rudeness of everyday American discourse. Once the diary was begun, the rest followed quite naturally.
April 28: Arrival at Immigration at DFW. The Immigration official directs me to line #38. I walk over to line #38, where an electronic sign announces that this line is for non-US citizens. I return to the official, mention to her that line #38 is for non-US citizens. "I know that, sir," she says coldly, staring at me. Nothing more; no explanation for the obvious contradiction. Just simple, rude noncommunication. For me to reply, "I'm sorry, but I don't understand why you would send a US citizen to a line expressly marked for non-US citizens," would probably have gotten me detained. So I return to line #38, reflecting on how rudeness in everyday interactions in the US is simply coin of the realm.
April 29: Milwaukee.
a) In a coffee shop not far from the university. I get to the front of the line. The barista, a woman of about 20, says nothing and doesn't make eye contact. No "Hello, can I help you?"--nothing. She's almost hostile. I order a cappuccino; when she finally speaks, it's to tell me the price.
b) I get into a taxi. The meter is not running. I point this out to the driver. He mumbles something incoherent. I give him the address where I am going, ask again about the meter. He finally says it's not working. "Well, what are you going to charge me?" I ask. He says $4. I notice a sign inside the taxi that indicates that the maximum charge for a ride is $5. We get to my destination, and I offer him $4 plus a dollar tip. "It's $15," he says. "You said $4," I remind him. "It was farther away than I expected," he says. "I'm sorry," I tell him, "but you can't tell a customer it's $4 before the ride and then $15 after the ride." I put $5 on the handrest next to him and make to leave the cab; he locks the doors. "I'm going to call dispatch," he says. "Why not call the cops?" I reply; "they should be able to sort this out." This calls his bluff, and he lets me go.
c) Now out of the cab, I am approached by a woman standing near the curb, who seems very concerned, and asks me what happened. I tell her; she is very sympathetic. Then she asks me for $1.50.
d) Later in the day, I'm back at the coffee shop. I order orange juice and a muffin. The barista (a different one this time) tells me that in the afternoon they have a promotion: I can take another muffin or pastry for free. I reach for a danish; the guy behind the counter snaps at me, "Don't use your fingers!" Apparently, it doesn't occur to these folks to say to the customer, "Let me get it for you." Once again, the rudeness of “normal” American discourse (I can't really imagine a service person in Europe or Mexico behaving like this).
e) I am staying at a dormitory run by the University of Wisconsin. There are two computers with Internet connection on a desk on the second floor. Near them are posted two signs, in large block capitals: PLEASE KEEP YOUR FEET OFF THE WALL. Why would they need to be telling the residents not to be slobs?
Again, I couldn't help thinking of how all of this--with the possible exception of the taxi incident--is just part of the air we breathe. In order to protect yourself, you have to be on edge, "scanning" all the time, which is an exhausting way to live. Is it a wonder that although Americans comprise less than 5% of the world's population, they consume 67% of the global market in antidepressants?
April 30: Back at the coffee shop for breakfast (apparently I'm a masochist). It consists of a single room, not very large. In the center, some guy is talking loudly on his cell phone, so that everyone has to listen. The narcissism of this is astounding. "What's the margin on that?" he says. "Can you give me a 100% guarantee? What does Ellis say?" Etc. It never ends. I'm there for a half an hour, and when I leave, he's still talking. Nobody, myself included, can tell him to take the conversation outside, because (a) he would probably just tell us to fuck off, and (b) the management of the coffee house would surely not back us up; obnoxious customers are still customers, after all, and cash is king.
May 5: New York. I start talking to my taxi driver, who turns out to be from Senegal. He has lived in the US for 20 years, he tells me. I ask him how he feels about life in the United States. "Well, I've also lived in Europe," he says; "it's very different." "How?" I ask him. "Europeans tend to think about things," he replies. "Americans are basically robots; they just go through the motions, they really don't know what they are doing or why. I think they are sad people." No shit. (I left the cab with a sense of admiration for his honesty. After all, he couldn't have known that I would agree with him; it would be more likely, as an American, that I would take offense at his remarks, perhaps refuse to tip him.)
May 7: I'm on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. A kid of about 16 is sitting with both feet up on the seat, listening to an iPod. Again, I realize there is no way I or anyone can say, "Take your feet off the seat; you're not at home, for God's sake." When his stop approaches, he gets up and rearranges his pants so that they are completely below his ass, with his underpants showing. What to think? He's basically a trashy product of a trashy culture. I refrain from asking him if he's an utter moron.
Later that day, I'm at the Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA literature indicates that the use of cell phones is forbidden in the galleries. Of course, I soon see some guy in his twenties talking on a cell phone. I go over to the guard, and nod toward the cell phone user. "Cell phones are not permitted in the museum, right?" I ask him. "Not permitted in the galleries," he says. "This is a gallery," I tell him; "we are in a gallery." I watch him struggling to work this out, as if he is considering for the first time that he is being paid to monitor the galleries, and is in fact in one. Finally, he walks over to the kid and tells him that he can't use his cell phone in the galleries. The kid pays him no attention at all, just keeps on talking. The guard doesn't ask the kid to leave or do anything at all. "I guess you really put the fear of God into him," I tell him. I don't wait for him to process this, as I figure it might be a while. Instead, I think about the Senegalese taxi driver's comment on robots, and how completely under water so much of the American population is. We seem to be turning into caricatures, parodies of ourselves. Marshall McLuhan once said that if a fish could talk, and you asked it what was the most obvious feature of its environment, the very last thing it would say is "water". We simply don’t see our culture for what it is.
May 9: I'm walking to a restaurant with a few friends in Jackson Heights (Queens) when the wind kicks up and something enters my right eye. Perhaps a particle of dust, although it feels like a piece of glass. Tears are pouring down my cheek. Somebody says, "There's a drugstore in that supermarket over there; we can get some Visine." We enter the supermarket, go over to the drug counter. A young woman of about 20 is talking to some guy across the counter. Someone in the group tells her, "We need Visine." She goes off and gets it, hands it to me while still talking to the guy. She makes no eye contact; the only thing she says to any of us (me) is "$6.45" (or something like that). I hand her a $20, she makes change, and in terms of her conversation with the guy, never misses a beat. I pour the drops into my eye; she continues talking. My eye seems to be a bit better, and we leave. Again, the unconsciousness of the whole thing impresses me. This girl would never regard her behavior as rude; probably, most of her customers wouldn't as well. Interactions with the staff of stores now boils down to nothing more than a cash transaction, for both parties; the idea that there once was, or should be, a human dimension to these interactions is off the radar screen.
I also found a sort of zombie-ish quality to greater New York on this trip. At any given moment, something like 25% of the people walking down the street are not mentally present in the environment. Instead, they walk (or rush) down the street with a cell phone pasted to their ear. It gives the city a feeling of a ghost town, as their bodies are present but their minds are 100 or 1000 miles away. Thus the environment is little more than a "receptacle" for their activity; it isn't something people have a real relationship to, any more. This seems like an icon for the culture in general, which is hollow, dying.
Below are some excerpts from Dick Meyer's book, Why We Hate Us, which I believe are relevant to my own experience.
"There is no longer much vibrant, living tradition and community to be born into, to inherit, or to bequeath." There has been "an erosion of socially shared ways of treating others respectfully, the ties that make community possible." "U.S. citizens are isolated because it is unhealthy to risk contact with one's fellow citizens. When bullies are free to act out their aggression and disdain for others--threatening behavior, in other words--road rage, cell phone calls at the top of their lungs, shoving in grocery stores are just a few examples--then others will act to limit their exposure to people. Humans wish to survive. It is healthier to be lonely than to risk contact with a society without decency and without mores."
"Boorishness and vulgarity are sanctified by public culture and thus omnipresent." "The social superego has been silenced or at least muted. Brothers have no keepers. Respectful, polite behavior can't be enforced by external, deliberate action, by vigilant etiquette and spontaneous censorship. It comes from shared boundaries and conventions, and they are disappearing." But "We don't see ourselves as belonging anywhere, in history or in community." As Pope Benedict XVI said, "We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires." "[American] Society is constantly urging us to give in to our impulses. It slowly erodes the maturity of us all."
One cannot be "an admired leader of a corrupt institution, a noble player in a decadent system, or a clean pool in a toxic stream." "Manners die in a vacuum of community...The lack of manners is probably the most constant and unavoidable source of why we hate us...Manners in a culture of narcissism are practically an oxymoron."
"Techno-boors are oblivious to others and to public space in a way that feels menacing and destabilizing. It's like living in a zombie world. A rude zombie world." And it has an addictive quality to it. "People touch their portable devices like rosary beads. They are compelled to check their e-mail when they could be talking to you face-to-face. Parents who roamed their neighborhoods at will when they were little kids now freak out if they can't have instant access to their own children by cell phone." "Wireless technology allows people to hook into the Internet umbilical all over, so coffee shops, airports, parks, and bookstores are populated by laptop hooligans...This kind of behavior also signals an egomaniacal message like 'I'm very, very important. I am more important than you. I must be connected at all times'." This form of technological social obliviousness is "absent presence...when a person is on a cell phone in a store, it seems to be acceptable for that person not to thank or exchange pleasantries with the cashier. Well, that isn't acceptable...'absent presence' and techno-aggression are more pervasive threats to social well-being and...destructive of social capital." "Much of what we hate in everyday life are the things that make us feel alone, invisible, disregarded, or dismissed. That's how we feel when someone is using a Blackberry in the middle of a conversation or talking loudly on a cell phone in a line for a movie."
Meyer concludes with two voluntaristic "projects" to change all this, based on individual initiative; he admits, however, that these projects are not achievable. The above description is, after all, what America is in its essence; it's not going to become a different country.
April 28: Arrival at Immigration at DFW. The Immigration official directs me to line #38. I walk over to line #38, where an electronic sign announces that this line is for non-US citizens. I return to the official, mention to her that line #38 is for non-US citizens. "I know that, sir," she says coldly, staring at me. Nothing more; no explanation for the obvious contradiction. Just simple, rude noncommunication. For me to reply, "I'm sorry, but I don't understand why you would send a US citizen to a line expressly marked for non-US citizens," would probably have gotten me detained. So I return to line #38, reflecting on how rudeness in everyday interactions in the US is simply coin of the realm.
April 29: Milwaukee.
a) In a coffee shop not far from the university. I get to the front of the line. The barista, a woman of about 20, says nothing and doesn't make eye contact. No "Hello, can I help you?"--nothing. She's almost hostile. I order a cappuccino; when she finally speaks, it's to tell me the price.
b) I get into a taxi. The meter is not running. I point this out to the driver. He mumbles something incoherent. I give him the address where I am going, ask again about the meter. He finally says it's not working. "Well, what are you going to charge me?" I ask. He says $4. I notice a sign inside the taxi that indicates that the maximum charge for a ride is $5. We get to my destination, and I offer him $4 plus a dollar tip. "It's $15," he says. "You said $4," I remind him. "It was farther away than I expected," he says. "I'm sorry," I tell him, "but you can't tell a customer it's $4 before the ride and then $15 after the ride." I put $5 on the handrest next to him and make to leave the cab; he locks the doors. "I'm going to call dispatch," he says. "Why not call the cops?" I reply; "they should be able to sort this out." This calls his bluff, and he lets me go.
c) Now out of the cab, I am approached by a woman standing near the curb, who seems very concerned, and asks me what happened. I tell her; she is very sympathetic. Then she asks me for $1.50.
d) Later in the day, I'm back at the coffee shop. I order orange juice and a muffin. The barista (a different one this time) tells me that in the afternoon they have a promotion: I can take another muffin or pastry for free. I reach for a danish; the guy behind the counter snaps at me, "Don't use your fingers!" Apparently, it doesn't occur to these folks to say to the customer, "Let me get it for you." Once again, the rudeness of “normal” American discourse (I can't really imagine a service person in Europe or Mexico behaving like this).
e) I am staying at a dormitory run by the University of Wisconsin. There are two computers with Internet connection on a desk on the second floor. Near them are posted two signs, in large block capitals: PLEASE KEEP YOUR FEET OFF THE WALL. Why would they need to be telling the residents not to be slobs?
Again, I couldn't help thinking of how all of this--with the possible exception of the taxi incident--is just part of the air we breathe. In order to protect yourself, you have to be on edge, "scanning" all the time, which is an exhausting way to live. Is it a wonder that although Americans comprise less than 5% of the world's population, they consume 67% of the global market in antidepressants?
April 30: Back at the coffee shop for breakfast (apparently I'm a masochist). It consists of a single room, not very large. In the center, some guy is talking loudly on his cell phone, so that everyone has to listen. The narcissism of this is astounding. "What's the margin on that?" he says. "Can you give me a 100% guarantee? What does Ellis say?" Etc. It never ends. I'm there for a half an hour, and when I leave, he's still talking. Nobody, myself included, can tell him to take the conversation outside, because (a) he would probably just tell us to fuck off, and (b) the management of the coffee house would surely not back us up; obnoxious customers are still customers, after all, and cash is king.
May 5: New York. I start talking to my taxi driver, who turns out to be from Senegal. He has lived in the US for 20 years, he tells me. I ask him how he feels about life in the United States. "Well, I've also lived in Europe," he says; "it's very different." "How?" I ask him. "Europeans tend to think about things," he replies. "Americans are basically robots; they just go through the motions, they really don't know what they are doing or why. I think they are sad people." No shit. (I left the cab with a sense of admiration for his honesty. After all, he couldn't have known that I would agree with him; it would be more likely, as an American, that I would take offense at his remarks, perhaps refuse to tip him.)
May 7: I'm on the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan. A kid of about 16 is sitting with both feet up on the seat, listening to an iPod. Again, I realize there is no way I or anyone can say, "Take your feet off the seat; you're not at home, for God's sake." When his stop approaches, he gets up and rearranges his pants so that they are completely below his ass, with his underpants showing. What to think? He's basically a trashy product of a trashy culture. I refrain from asking him if he's an utter moron.
Later that day, I'm at the Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA literature indicates that the use of cell phones is forbidden in the galleries. Of course, I soon see some guy in his twenties talking on a cell phone. I go over to the guard, and nod toward the cell phone user. "Cell phones are not permitted in the museum, right?" I ask him. "Not permitted in the galleries," he says. "This is a gallery," I tell him; "we are in a gallery." I watch him struggling to work this out, as if he is considering for the first time that he is being paid to monitor the galleries, and is in fact in one. Finally, he walks over to the kid and tells him that he can't use his cell phone in the galleries. The kid pays him no attention at all, just keeps on talking. The guard doesn't ask the kid to leave or do anything at all. "I guess you really put the fear of God into him," I tell him. I don't wait for him to process this, as I figure it might be a while. Instead, I think about the Senegalese taxi driver's comment on robots, and how completely under water so much of the American population is. We seem to be turning into caricatures, parodies of ourselves. Marshall McLuhan once said that if a fish could talk, and you asked it what was the most obvious feature of its environment, the very last thing it would say is "water". We simply don’t see our culture for what it is.
May 9: I'm walking to a restaurant with a few friends in Jackson Heights (Queens) when the wind kicks up and something enters my right eye. Perhaps a particle of dust, although it feels like a piece of glass. Tears are pouring down my cheek. Somebody says, "There's a drugstore in that supermarket over there; we can get some Visine." We enter the supermarket, go over to the drug counter. A young woman of about 20 is talking to some guy across the counter. Someone in the group tells her, "We need Visine." She goes off and gets it, hands it to me while still talking to the guy. She makes no eye contact; the only thing she says to any of us (me) is "$6.45" (or something like that). I hand her a $20, she makes change, and in terms of her conversation with the guy, never misses a beat. I pour the drops into my eye; she continues talking. My eye seems to be a bit better, and we leave. Again, the unconsciousness of the whole thing impresses me. This girl would never regard her behavior as rude; probably, most of her customers wouldn't as well. Interactions with the staff of stores now boils down to nothing more than a cash transaction, for both parties; the idea that there once was, or should be, a human dimension to these interactions is off the radar screen.
I also found a sort of zombie-ish quality to greater New York on this trip. At any given moment, something like 25% of the people walking down the street are not mentally present in the environment. Instead, they walk (or rush) down the street with a cell phone pasted to their ear. It gives the city a feeling of a ghost town, as their bodies are present but their minds are 100 or 1000 miles away. Thus the environment is little more than a "receptacle" for their activity; it isn't something people have a real relationship to, any more. This seems like an icon for the culture in general, which is hollow, dying.
Below are some excerpts from Dick Meyer's book, Why We Hate Us, which I believe are relevant to my own experience.
"There is no longer much vibrant, living tradition and community to be born into, to inherit, or to bequeath." There has been "an erosion of socially shared ways of treating others respectfully, the ties that make community possible." "U.S. citizens are isolated because it is unhealthy to risk contact with one's fellow citizens. When bullies are free to act out their aggression and disdain for others--threatening behavior, in other words--road rage, cell phone calls at the top of their lungs, shoving in grocery stores are just a few examples--then others will act to limit their exposure to people. Humans wish to survive. It is healthier to be lonely than to risk contact with a society without decency and without mores."
"Boorishness and vulgarity are sanctified by public culture and thus omnipresent." "The social superego has been silenced or at least muted. Brothers have no keepers. Respectful, polite behavior can't be enforced by external, deliberate action, by vigilant etiquette and spontaneous censorship. It comes from shared boundaries and conventions, and they are disappearing." But "We don't see ourselves as belonging anywhere, in history or in community." As Pope Benedict XVI said, "We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires." "[American] Society is constantly urging us to give in to our impulses. It slowly erodes the maturity of us all."
One cannot be "an admired leader of a corrupt institution, a noble player in a decadent system, or a clean pool in a toxic stream." "Manners die in a vacuum of community...The lack of manners is probably the most constant and unavoidable source of why we hate us...Manners in a culture of narcissism are practically an oxymoron."
"Techno-boors are oblivious to others and to public space in a way that feels menacing and destabilizing. It's like living in a zombie world. A rude zombie world." And it has an addictive quality to it. "People touch their portable devices like rosary beads. They are compelled to check their e-mail when they could be talking to you face-to-face. Parents who roamed their neighborhoods at will when they were little kids now freak out if they can't have instant access to their own children by cell phone." "Wireless technology allows people to hook into the Internet umbilical all over, so coffee shops, airports, parks, and bookstores are populated by laptop hooligans...This kind of behavior also signals an egomaniacal message like 'I'm very, very important. I am more important than you. I must be connected at all times'." This form of technological social obliviousness is "absent presence...when a person is on a cell phone in a store, it seems to be acceptable for that person not to thank or exchange pleasantries with the cashier. Well, that isn't acceptable...'absent presence' and techno-aggression are more pervasive threats to social well-being and...destructive of social capital." "Much of what we hate in everyday life are the things that make us feel alone, invisible, disregarded, or dismissed. That's how we feel when someone is using a Blackberry in the middle of a conversation or talking loudly on a cell phone in a line for a movie."
Meyer concludes with two voluntaristic "projects" to change all this, based on individual initiative; he admits, however, that these projects are not achievable. The above description is, after all, what America is in its essence; it's not going to become a different country.
April 19, 2010
Choose Your Violence
I have never worried about violence in Mexico. Of course, I know it exists. Like everyone else, I read the newspapers, and the evidence for widespread, drug-related violence is clear enough. True, the guns for this violence are largely supplied by American arms dealers just north of the border, as President Obama himself omitted when he visited Mexico early in 2009. But leaving that inconvenient fact aside, there is no doubt that there is a lot of crime-related violence in Mexico, not only from drugs but from extortion and kidnapping and sex trafficking as well, and that it casts a long, dark shadow over Mexican life.
And yet, I never feel nervous walking the streets of, say, Mexico City. I have walked around the city at night, many times, by myself, and (call me naïve) I have never felt the need to keep looking over my shoulder. On the other hand, I find that I am typically edgy when I visit the United States, and over the last few months I began to think about why this is the case. Finally, it came to me: yes, Mexican violence is quite real, but it doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the boundaries of gang wars and criminal activity. American violence, on the other hand, is a different kind of creature. It doesn’t have the dramatic flavor of the Al Capone-style violence of the 1920s anymore. Rather, it seems to be woven into the fabric of everyday life. It often feels to me as though the entire society is violent; that random incidents could turn very ugly very fast. Which they often do, in the U.S. (a casual put-down remark leads to someone getting blown away in a drive-by shooting the next day, for example—events that are by now so common they get reported online, but not in the newspapers), and I suspect it is this that makes me nervous, because you never know what’s going to happen. The question is, which of the two types—Mexican or American—is worse?
I had occasion to confront this dilemma in the form of two incidents that occurred in the closing months of last year. In September, I was staying for a week in a part of Mexico City that has always seemed to me to be relatively safe. One evening during that time I had dinner with a friend of mine, and she subsequently dropped me off about a block from my apartment building (the street was temporarily closed to traffic, for some reason). As I walked home, I passed a young man of about twenty-two years of age, who seemed to want something. I stopped for a moment; he looked at me with rather glazed eyes and said, “Que pasó?” (what’s happening?), slurring his speech. He was obviously drunk. I turned away and kept on walking, whereupon he attacked me from behind, striking me in the head and knocking my hat off. My reaction was one I would not have anticipated: I was filled with rage. I wheeled around and advanced on him, inexplicably yelling “déjalo!” (let it go!). Of course, I should have shouted “lárgate!” (get lost!), but “déjalo!” was what came out. However, the words didn’t really matter; it was the body language that stopped him in his tracks. He was aware, as was I, that if he made one false move he was going to have a fight on his hands. We stood there for about twenty seconds, staring at each other. Finally, I felt he got the message. I turned and left; he didn’t follow me.
In the ensuing days, I puzzled over my surprising reaction to this strange encounter. For one thing, I was aware that if it had taken place in the United States, I would have reacted quite differently. Specifically, I would have been very cautious, because I expect Americans to be unpredictable and potentially volatile. (In fact, in a confrontation of this sort, the American assailant could easily have been carrying a gun.) My experience of Mexico, however, is that daily life is not permeated by the kind of free-floating anger and incipient aggression that I find characteristic of American life. Indeed, Mexican behavior in public spaces tends to be polite, if not actually gracious. Hence, when this drunken kid unexpectedly jumped me from behind, my feeling was one of outrage. If I could have put my thought process into words at that moment, it would have been something along the lines of, “How dare you attack me in my adopted country?” For clearly, he had violated my standards of expectation of public behavior in Mexico, and I wasn’t about to let him off lightly.
The second incident occurred on a flight from Mexico to Houston just after Christmas. Once again, the “attack” (not quite the right word) came from behind, but the guy in question was an American. As we took our seats on the plane, I adjusted mine so that it reclined a bit. The man in the seat behind me—white-haired, my age or a bit older (he looked a lot like Colonel Sanders of KFC)—asked me to keep my seat upright, as his legs (he told me) were right up against the back of it. I noticed, however, that he had a briefcase tucked under his calves, which were pushing his legs forward, and I was aware that this violated flight regulations (carry-ons have to be stowed in the overhead bins or under the seat in front of you). However, I decided to give “the Colonel” the benefit of the doubt. He did have rather long legs, and the seat didn’t recline that much anyway. I figured I could live without the luxury of a reclinable seat for what was a relatively short flight.
At some point toward the end of the flight, I must have fallen asleep; and my seat, for some unknown reason, slid back on its own. I was rudely awakened by the guy behind me shoving my seat forward, quite violently, and pitching me into the back of the seat in front of me. “I asked you to keep your seat upright!”, he exclaimed quite vehemently, nearly shouting. I was absolutely stunned by this behavior; I hardly knew what to say. All I could think of was, “If you stored your briefcase where it belonged, there would be enough room for both of us.” Which I told him, and left it at that.
Nevertheless, I was quite angry at being treated so rudely. Is this enough?, I thought to myself. Should I report him to the flight attendant? I mean, he could have just tapped me on the shoulder, or at least checked out what had happened, before going a bit loco. Reacting violently when things don’t go your way is, after all, the behavior of a spoiled child. But in the end, I decided not to pursue it. We were almost in Houston, and I didn’t want to make a scene. It was very different from the confrontation with the drunk in Mexico City, who actually struck me. This was a tantrum, not a physical attack, and I just couldn’t see the wisdom of making a federal case out of it. I decided to write the airlines about it, and leave it at that.
As in the case of the Mexico City event, however, I was subsequently led to think about the implications of what had happened. What occurred to me was the following:
1. There appears to be a level of rage in American society simmering just below the surface, a rage that most other societies—crime and political conflict excepted—don’t seem to possess. For example, some years ago a U.S.-Canadian research team conducted a poll that asked the question, “Do you believe that the use of violence is acceptable in the pursuit of your goals?” While 12% of the Canadians surveyed answered in the affirmative, exactly twice as many, i.e. 24%, of the Americans did.
2. This level of incipient violence is probably inseparable from the ideology of “American exceptionalism,” whereby Americans believe that they are the “chosen people,” entitled to whatever they want whenever they want it. One can call it narcissism or extreme individualism, but it does seem to boil down to a kind of infantilism. This is a people who never grew up, and who will throw a tantrum if they think their “rights” are being violated. The result is aggressiveness and endless competition as a norm; they are raised in a Top Dog/Bottom Dog philosophy, one that says, “I come first and other people don’t count.” I doubt whether many Americans are free of this unconscious programming.
3. I regret that the U.S.-Canada study was not extended to Mexico, because after visiting Mexico off and on since 1979, and living here since 2006, I cannot imagine a Mexican individual behaving the way the guy on the plane did. As already noted, I experience Mexicans as being courteous or even gracious in public spaces. I can only imagine that most Mexicans would find “Colonel Sanders’” behavior grotesque. In the U.S., on the other hand, it merely falls at the far end of the social-behavioral spectrum. If nearly a quarter of the population thinks violence is acceptable in the pursuit of one’s goals, and if establishing oneself as “Top Dog” is a something of a norm, then “Colonel Sanders’” behavior may not be all that aberrant. For me, a rather unhappy conclusion to come to, and one, as I said, that makes me nervous when I am in the U.S.
So there you have it: two types of violence. South of the border, largely restricted to criminal activity. North of the border, literally part of the air that Americans breathe. Which would you choose?
©Morris Berman, 2010
And yet, I never feel nervous walking the streets of, say, Mexico City. I have walked around the city at night, many times, by myself, and (call me naïve) I have never felt the need to keep looking over my shoulder. On the other hand, I find that I am typically edgy when I visit the United States, and over the last few months I began to think about why this is the case. Finally, it came to me: yes, Mexican violence is quite real, but it doesn’t seem to extend much beyond the boundaries of gang wars and criminal activity. American violence, on the other hand, is a different kind of creature. It doesn’t have the dramatic flavor of the Al Capone-style violence of the 1920s anymore. Rather, it seems to be woven into the fabric of everyday life. It often feels to me as though the entire society is violent; that random incidents could turn very ugly very fast. Which they often do, in the U.S. (a casual put-down remark leads to someone getting blown away in a drive-by shooting the next day, for example—events that are by now so common they get reported online, but not in the newspapers), and I suspect it is this that makes me nervous, because you never know what’s going to happen. The question is, which of the two types—Mexican or American—is worse?
I had occasion to confront this dilemma in the form of two incidents that occurred in the closing months of last year. In September, I was staying for a week in a part of Mexico City that has always seemed to me to be relatively safe. One evening during that time I had dinner with a friend of mine, and she subsequently dropped me off about a block from my apartment building (the street was temporarily closed to traffic, for some reason). As I walked home, I passed a young man of about twenty-two years of age, who seemed to want something. I stopped for a moment; he looked at me with rather glazed eyes and said, “Que pasó?” (what’s happening?), slurring his speech. He was obviously drunk. I turned away and kept on walking, whereupon he attacked me from behind, striking me in the head and knocking my hat off. My reaction was one I would not have anticipated: I was filled with rage. I wheeled around and advanced on him, inexplicably yelling “déjalo!” (let it go!). Of course, I should have shouted “lárgate!” (get lost!), but “déjalo!” was what came out. However, the words didn’t really matter; it was the body language that stopped him in his tracks. He was aware, as was I, that if he made one false move he was going to have a fight on his hands. We stood there for about twenty seconds, staring at each other. Finally, I felt he got the message. I turned and left; he didn’t follow me.
In the ensuing days, I puzzled over my surprising reaction to this strange encounter. For one thing, I was aware that if it had taken place in the United States, I would have reacted quite differently. Specifically, I would have been very cautious, because I expect Americans to be unpredictable and potentially volatile. (In fact, in a confrontation of this sort, the American assailant could easily have been carrying a gun.) My experience of Mexico, however, is that daily life is not permeated by the kind of free-floating anger and incipient aggression that I find characteristic of American life. Indeed, Mexican behavior in public spaces tends to be polite, if not actually gracious. Hence, when this drunken kid unexpectedly jumped me from behind, my feeling was one of outrage. If I could have put my thought process into words at that moment, it would have been something along the lines of, “How dare you attack me in my adopted country?” For clearly, he had violated my standards of expectation of public behavior in Mexico, and I wasn’t about to let him off lightly.
The second incident occurred on a flight from Mexico to Houston just after Christmas. Once again, the “attack” (not quite the right word) came from behind, but the guy in question was an American. As we took our seats on the plane, I adjusted mine so that it reclined a bit. The man in the seat behind me—white-haired, my age or a bit older (he looked a lot like Colonel Sanders of KFC)—asked me to keep my seat upright, as his legs (he told me) were right up against the back of it. I noticed, however, that he had a briefcase tucked under his calves, which were pushing his legs forward, and I was aware that this violated flight regulations (carry-ons have to be stowed in the overhead bins or under the seat in front of you). However, I decided to give “the Colonel” the benefit of the doubt. He did have rather long legs, and the seat didn’t recline that much anyway. I figured I could live without the luxury of a reclinable seat for what was a relatively short flight.
At some point toward the end of the flight, I must have fallen asleep; and my seat, for some unknown reason, slid back on its own. I was rudely awakened by the guy behind me shoving my seat forward, quite violently, and pitching me into the back of the seat in front of me. “I asked you to keep your seat upright!”, he exclaimed quite vehemently, nearly shouting. I was absolutely stunned by this behavior; I hardly knew what to say. All I could think of was, “If you stored your briefcase where it belonged, there would be enough room for both of us.” Which I told him, and left it at that.
Nevertheless, I was quite angry at being treated so rudely. Is this enough?, I thought to myself. Should I report him to the flight attendant? I mean, he could have just tapped me on the shoulder, or at least checked out what had happened, before going a bit loco. Reacting violently when things don’t go your way is, after all, the behavior of a spoiled child. But in the end, I decided not to pursue it. We were almost in Houston, and I didn’t want to make a scene. It was very different from the confrontation with the drunk in Mexico City, who actually struck me. This was a tantrum, not a physical attack, and I just couldn’t see the wisdom of making a federal case out of it. I decided to write the airlines about it, and leave it at that.
As in the case of the Mexico City event, however, I was subsequently led to think about the implications of what had happened. What occurred to me was the following:
1. There appears to be a level of rage in American society simmering just below the surface, a rage that most other societies—crime and political conflict excepted—don’t seem to possess. For example, some years ago a U.S.-Canadian research team conducted a poll that asked the question, “Do you believe that the use of violence is acceptable in the pursuit of your goals?” While 12% of the Canadians surveyed answered in the affirmative, exactly twice as many, i.e. 24%, of the Americans did.
2. This level of incipient violence is probably inseparable from the ideology of “American exceptionalism,” whereby Americans believe that they are the “chosen people,” entitled to whatever they want whenever they want it. One can call it narcissism or extreme individualism, but it does seem to boil down to a kind of infantilism. This is a people who never grew up, and who will throw a tantrum if they think their “rights” are being violated. The result is aggressiveness and endless competition as a norm; they are raised in a Top Dog/Bottom Dog philosophy, one that says, “I come first and other people don’t count.” I doubt whether many Americans are free of this unconscious programming.
3. I regret that the U.S.-Canada study was not extended to Mexico, because after visiting Mexico off and on since 1979, and living here since 2006, I cannot imagine a Mexican individual behaving the way the guy on the plane did. As already noted, I experience Mexicans as being courteous or even gracious in public spaces. I can only imagine that most Mexicans would find “Colonel Sanders’” behavior grotesque. In the U.S., on the other hand, it merely falls at the far end of the social-behavioral spectrum. If nearly a quarter of the population thinks violence is acceptable in the pursuit of one’s goals, and if establishing oneself as “Top Dog” is a something of a norm, then “Colonel Sanders’” behavior may not be all that aberrant. For me, a rather unhappy conclusion to come to, and one, as I said, that makes me nervous when I am in the U.S.
So there you have it: two types of violence. South of the border, largely restricted to criminal activity. North of the border, literally part of the air that Americans breathe. Which would you choose?
©Morris Berman, 2010
April 01, 2010
The Nonentity in the White House
From Kevin Baker's essay in the April issue of Harper's Magazine, "The Vanishing Liberal":
Baker comments on Obama's West Point speech of 1 December 2009, in which he first said that we have to limit our troop commitment in Afghanistan, because our own priorities come first, and then announced that he was sending 30,000 more troops there. He continues:
"How could this be? It was the question that Obama's most fervent supporters had been asking themselves for months, as their candidate discarded almost every vision of a new America, a new world, that he had described during his campaign. By the time of his West Point speech, health-care 'reform' had already been transformed into yet another scheme to transfer wealth to the richest corporate interests in the country. The stimulus program had been botched, the promised money delayed and diverted from badly needed public projects into unhelpful tax cuts. The banks had been bailed out but not the people, and any significant proposals for repairing our infrastructure, addressing climate change, re-regulating the financial markets, or rebuilding New Orleans were generally acknowledged to be dead letters.
"Now, with the president's decision on Afghanistan, our foreign policy settled back into its familiar pattern of endless war for unknown purposes. To people who had been clamoring for real change in how we work and consume, how we live in the world and with one another, this retreat to the failed policies of the recent past was stunning. No other president in our history had so thoroughly spurned his political base in so short a time....
"The party that claims to represent all progressive interests in this country proceeds with its impervious, self-interested agenda. The administration's stated priorities for the near future are to balance the budget before a deep recession has abated and to commit the nation to a long-running war in a dysfunctional Asian country that we neither understand nor care about--thereby promising to repeat, simultaneously, the two worst mistakes made by liberal presidents in the past seventy-five years. As for the long term, the White House will form a commission bent on cutting 'entitlements,' such as Social Security and Medicare, that are the bedrock of retired Americans' prosperity...
"It is increasingly clear that [Obama] never intended to challenge the power structure he had so skillfully penetrated....There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in our politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it."
Translation: Game over, folks!
Baker comments on Obama's West Point speech of 1 December 2009, in which he first said that we have to limit our troop commitment in Afghanistan, because our own priorities come first, and then announced that he was sending 30,000 more troops there. He continues:
"How could this be? It was the question that Obama's most fervent supporters had been asking themselves for months, as their candidate discarded almost every vision of a new America, a new world, that he had described during his campaign. By the time of his West Point speech, health-care 'reform' had already been transformed into yet another scheme to transfer wealth to the richest corporate interests in the country. The stimulus program had been botched, the promised money delayed and diverted from badly needed public projects into unhelpful tax cuts. The banks had been bailed out but not the people, and any significant proposals for repairing our infrastructure, addressing climate change, re-regulating the financial markets, or rebuilding New Orleans were generally acknowledged to be dead letters.
"Now, with the president's decision on Afghanistan, our foreign policy settled back into its familiar pattern of endless war for unknown purposes. To people who had been clamoring for real change in how we work and consume, how we live in the world and with one another, this retreat to the failed policies of the recent past was stunning. No other president in our history had so thoroughly spurned his political base in so short a time....
"The party that claims to represent all progressive interests in this country proceeds with its impervious, self-interested agenda. The administration's stated priorities for the near future are to balance the budget before a deep recession has abated and to commit the nation to a long-running war in a dysfunctional Asian country that we neither understand nor care about--thereby promising to repeat, simultaneously, the two worst mistakes made by liberal presidents in the past seventy-five years. As for the long term, the White House will form a commission bent on cutting 'entitlements,' such as Social Security and Medicare, that are the bedrock of retired Americans' prosperity...
"It is increasingly clear that [Obama] never intended to challenge the power structure he had so skillfully penetrated....There is no longer any meaningful reformist impulse left in our politics. The idea of modern American liberalism has vanished among our elite, and simply voting for one man or supporting one of the two major parties will not restore it."
Translation: Game over, folks!
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