Month: November 2018

I went through an extraordinarily cool passage from Lucian’s Alexander, or the False Prophet the other day.  To give some context, the essay in question chronicles the career of a religious pretender, the founder of a successful cult whose relics and statuary are still coming out of the ground today; Lucian aims to discredit the titular Alexander, apparently, by airing his dirty laundry and revealing the tricks he employed to convince people that he really was transmitting oracles from Apollo (via a giant snake muppet with Trump-style hair.)  It’s a deeper text than that, as everyone always says, but the surface story is one of the funniest longform anatomies of a con man that has ever been written.

Well, here’s the passage in question, which records the reasoning that leads Alexander and his accomplice to try to establish a fake oracle in the first place:

“As Thucydides would say, the war began then and there.  For, when these two men most evil and daring and eager to do wrong got together, they easily observed how human lives were ruled by these two tyrants, hope and fear, and that anyone who was able to use each of these as necessary would very soon become rich.  For they saw that knowledge of the future was most necessary for both of them – that is, the hopeful man and the coward – and most desired, and that, of old, Delphi and Delos and Klaros and Branchis had all gotten rich and renowned that way, since men frequented temples and begged to know what was to come and sacrificed hecatombs and set up golden statues on account of those tyrants which I mentioned before, hope and fear.”*

The framework, and the hope-fear opposition, is Thucydidean, but Lucian links it to the universal quest for knowledge about the future in what I believe is an original way.  Thucydides takes hope and fear to be what drives human action, supposing that we act either to secure an advantage we hope for or to avoid a harm that we fear – as Athens and Sparta do, respectively, in the opening stages of the Peloponnesian War.  Lucian, by contrast, treats hope and fear as objects of a therapeutic concern, sad passions which humans try to suppress not by acting – since that would only reproduce the conditions under which they first emerged – but by knowing.  Hope and fear thrive on uncertainty; knowledge about the future, says Lucian, will quell them both.

The critical suggestion here, that oracles are a means of dealing with risk and its associated anxiety, is one that has been profitably addressed by Esther Eidinow in a volume on the anthropology of risk among the Greeks.  What struck me about Lucian’s argument, though, was not so much its explanatory value for the history of Greek religion as a certain concinnity with an idea of Lacan which I also recently encountered.  In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (and maybe at greater length elsewhere), he posits that the conscious mind is in the position of an observer with respect to its own thoughts, which come to it, not as it wishes, but as the subconsscious supplies them – or, better, in a kind of interplay between the conscious and unconscious that mirrors the productive, homeostatic conflict of the pleasure principle and the reality principle.

I wondered, reading Lacan after having read this Lucian, whether this relationship that constitutes our thoughts might founder on the future, a temporal domain where uncertainty renders the claims of the reality principle liable to all kinds of doubt and criticism.  The reason I thought this was because I’m always wrestling with a kind of thought-pattern that you’ll probably recognize.  For instance: I imagine what would happen if I run into a racist at the grocery store, maybe while he’s hassling the checkout person.  Of course, I intervene aggressively, and this fantasy provides a deep libidinal satisfaction.  But what if the reality isn’t like that?  What if, for instance, I get owned by some dumb cracker in the checkout line?  What if I stutter?  What if I faint?  Well, the only solution for that is to rewind the fantasy and run it from the beginning, so that I get to the pleasurable part again.  But then, inevitably, I hit the same log-jam of doubt, which means I have to start again, and meanwhile I’m getting jittery from all the adrenaline.  This cycle can go on for hours.  It’s now the leading cause of insomnia for all members of my household except the cat.

The thing that keeps it going, I think, is an egocentric desire on the part of my conscious mind, the part that identifies as myself, to know what will happen, and more importantly to know what I will do.  In this instant, I’m tyrannized by hope and fear with respect to the thing over which I ought, in theory at least, to have more control than over anything else: namely, how I’m going to turn out to be.

That’s pathetic, but time more or less normal for people living in these stupid, stupid times.  The same mental process would turn pathological if, in the face of this cycle, I took the coward’s way out by positively asserting, aloud or in print, that I would act the way that my libido drove me to imagine myself acting, and that my performance would get results.  You can see people doing this online after any mass shooting; they’ll post saying that they would have stood up to the shooter and stopped him, that they wouldn’t have run or gotten shot.  In saying these things, they’re delivering false oracles about themselves, to themselves, using the public as a kind of masturbatory prop.

* with apologies for the poorly-integrated accents: καὶ κατὰ τὸν Θουκυδίδην ἄρχεται ὁ πόλεμος ἐνθένδε ἤδη. Ὡς γὰρ ἂν δύο κάκιστοι καὶ μεγαλότολμοι καὶ πρὸς τὸ κακουργεῖν προχειρότατοι εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ συνελθόντες͵ ῥᾳδίως κατενόησαν τὸν τῶν ἀνθρώπων βίον ὑπὸ δυοῖν τούτοιν μεγίστοιν τυραννούμενον͵ ἐλπίδος καὶ φόβου͵ καὶ ὅτι ὁ τούτων ἑκατέρῳ εἰς δέον χρήσασθαι δυνάμενος τάχιστα πλουτήσειε ἄν· ἀμφοτέροις γάρ͵ τῷ τε δεδιότι καὶ τῷ ἐλπίζοντι͵ ἑώρων τὴν πρόγνωσιν ἀναγκαιοτάτην τε καὶ ποθεινοτάτην οὖσαν͵ καὶ Δελφοὺς οὕτω πάλαι πλουτῆσαι καὶ ἀοιδίμους γενέσθαι καὶ Δῆλον καὶ Κλάρον καὶ Βραγχίδας͵τῶν ἀνθρώπων ἀεὶ δι΄ οὓς προεῖπον τυράννους͵ τὴν ἐλπίδα καὶ τὸν φόβον͵ φοιτώντων εἰς τὰ ἱερὰ καὶ προμαθεῖν τὰ μέλλοντα δεομένων͵ καὶ δι΄ αὐτὸ ἑκατόμβας θυόντων καὶ χρυσᾶς πλίνθους ἀνατιθέντων.

There are really only two kinds of societies: the ones based in consensus, and the ones based in slavery.  Every other difference is pretty much window-dressing.  Do I need to say which of these needs a heavily-armed and wildly-overstaffed police force, the kind that we have in America, the kind that, if we saw it in a movie, would tell us right away that we were watching dystopian sci-fi?   But nobody would invent a police force like that for no reason.  We have those police because somebody has to defend a wildly-unequal distribution of wealth that is, from a moral or rational point of view, indefensible.  You obviously couldn’t convince anyone with a sense of how big a number 125 billion dollars really is that Jeff Bezos “deserves” that kind of money.  I’m not just talking on a national scale, though: if you live in a city, there’s probably more dramatic inequality of means within a mile of you than there was within the entirety of the Roman Empire.   In American, wealth and poverty rub shoulders: they have to, because wealth in America comes from paying your neighbors starvation wages or gouging them for rent and medical care.  Odds are, you can stand on your roof and see someone whose net worth is a thousand times higher than yours.  Do they deserve it?  If you think they do, you’re a sucker, and if you think they don’t, then the logical next step is to redistribute the wealth.  Thus, cops: they exist to make us submit to a distribution of wealth that we’d never agree to if there weren’t a policeman with a gun on every streetcorner.

A little historical awareness is all you need to see how weird this situation is.  Did Athens have police?  Did Republican Rome?  No, they did not.  The various institutions that some historians have misrecognized as police forces – Scythian Archers at Athens, various adjuncts of the Praetorship at Rome – just kept order in the public square and protected the constitution.  The property-protecting, protective and punitive functions of a modern police force were accomplished by the community at large, defending norms that had the support of consensus behind them.  The same has historically been true of every approximately egalitarian society (and “approximately” has to embrace an awful lot, since Republican Rome was almost as unequal a society as the modern USA).

No, the police are a modern invention – created in England and France in the 18th century to replace the shriveling private justice of the great lords, metastatizing to govern by force the urban masses who could see for themselves how unequally distributed were the benefits of industrialization, and finally so embedded in the fabric of the modern state that most people find it hard to imagine their absence.  Their existence, on the other hand, is an admission on the part of the wealthy that their wealth is indefensible on any other grounds that at gunpoint.

The really difficult question, given this, is why so many people not only accept the inevitability of policing, but identify with and actively support the police officers who serve as our slavedrivers and work at our expense.  It isn’t enough to answer this question by pointing to the heroization of cops in films and other mass media, though this tendency is doubtless poisonous in its own way  and doesn’t exactly produce great entertainment.   Despite that steady diet of indoctrination, people know from experience that most cops are highway bureaucrats, that most police spend their working hours handing out parking or traffic tickets, and certainly nobody thinks that the policemen who get caught on body cams planting evidence or cursing people out before shooting them are heroes.

The “blue lives matter” crowd doesn’t genuinely believe that police are heroes.  They say it, not because they mean it,** but because they feel like the designation “hero” is a token of submission they can give to an authority figure to whom they believe that all obeisance is due.  The imaginary policemen to whom they offer this tribute is not the policeman who does his job scrupulously, who enforces the law, who protects and serves.  For these people, the true policeman is the one who pillages and destroys the community that’s been entrusted to his protection.  They embrace that kind of cruelty, that savage exercise of power, because it’s what they want for themselves but lack the strength, courage or uniform to take.  What’s more, they assume that the rest of us are just like them, and they imagine that the police are the only thing preventing a Hobbesian war of all against all.

Where do people like that come from?  America, I guess – in particular, the America of Reagan and after, where everyone’s a cowboy and no one works together, and additionally, for sure, the America where racism lets crackers with “blue lives matter” bumper stickers feel sure that the people cops taze or kill will always be someone else’s father, mother, son.  That flag – you know the one I mean, the one that drains all the color out of the American flag except for one blue stripe – is the emblem of a probably incurable mental disorder, a fantasy of cruelty that’s just waiting for permission from the proper authorities to play itself out.

Are these people curable?  I think so, but there’s only one way to do it: we have to abolish the police.

*All Cop Fans Are Bastards.  Maybe ACAB too, but that’s a rap for another day.

**or else, without being aware of it, they mean “hero” in something like its original Greek sense: “an asshole who does whatever he wants and kills anyone who gets in his way.”