Month: May 2019

Near the end of my Sanskrit textbook, I find the following selection from the Baghavad Gita:

Krodad bhavati sammoha/sammohat smrtivibramah/smrtibramsad buddhinaso/buddhinasat pranasyati.

“From anger arises total delusion, from total delusion unsteadiness of memory, from unsteadiness of memory destruction of intelligence; because of destruction of intelligence, he perishes utterly.”

This is part of a sequence of stanzas that inspired Yoda’s “from fear comes hatred” etc. monologues in Phantom Menace, surely one of the most faux-profound things in the Star Wars canon. However that may be, I thought this stanza was pretty cool – not just because of its content, but because of the way in which it shows how some things about the ancient anger-management tradition that seem obvious to us are actually idiosyncratic and culture-bound.

First things last: the Greco-Roman analysis of anger is primarily non-cognitive, involving our minds (for the Stoics at least) only so far as it takes for them to give assent to the initial angering impulse. From that point onward we’re out of control, like witnesses at our own performance. Non-cognitive components of the mind or body take over and force us, like an injured animal (one of ancient writers’ favorite points of comparison), to pursue revenge against whoever or whatever angered us in the first place.

The BG text proceeds differently, describing the hold anger has over us not as a temporary surrender on the part of the hegemonic soul, but as permanent damage to our intelligent mind. That gives us an “internal” reason for avoiding anger that most Greco-Roman accounts, which focus on the external dangers of letting yourself go (it’s that western illusion of human nature again), are missing or grasping after.

How could anger produce delusion and, consequently, weakness of memory? To make sense of that, we’d first need to invert (or at least complicate) the etiology of anger as it appears in a text like Seneca’s De ira. First, we perceive something that is of the sort to make us angry; then, we either assent to an angry response or refuse it. The rightness of the initial perception is never in question, only our response to it. In the BG, by contrast, it seems as though one of two things is true: either anger is causally independent of perception and warps our perceptions so as to create its own cause, or else anger is causally dependent on perception but warps subsequent perceptions (and our memories, too) by way of sustaining itself. The second of these accounts seems more plausible, especially considering claims made elsewhere in the BG for the therapeutic value of withdrawing our senses from perceptibles. The premise that emotional states can cause us to perceive things wrong is one that both accounts have in common.

I think this approach is actually better than the Greco-Roman one for understanding certain brain-melting aspects of modern political anger. My anger towards Republicans and towards Trump in particular has led me into delusion before and would do so again in short order if I let my guard down. Certainly it works the other way too, and I would say this is a skid into which the modern Republican party has swerved. An anger that distorts reality to feed itself is potentially a powerful weapon: it produces infinite engagement and the kind of frantic loyalty that any politician would buy if he could.

One wonders if that means that the BG has an accurate cognitive model of anger, or just because the internet (by serving us algorithmically with stuff we’ll click on, which usually means stuff that makes us angry) simulates the perception-distorting properties that the BG hypothesizes. In the latter case, it’s a question about the internet rather than about anger as such. Should we, as the BG advises, withdraw from the internet entirely? Or is it possible, as the Greco-Roman tradition suggests, to mainline a feed designed to trigger us and not even be mad?

I find that I’m often misinterpreted for failure to speak directly. Something like this happened at the conference I attended this weekend, where someone (actually a respected scholar on the topic) stood up to say that my paper on Vergil’s Georgics had really been about “creative destruction:” you have to destroy something if you want to make something new. Far from it! In fact, the Georgics are about (among other things) how this is basically impossible. It’s not that you can’t create – which people do all the time, especially in the last book of the poem – but that destruction is impossible. What you kill (i.e. Orpheus, Eurydice) always remains somewhere, even if only in memory. Sometimes the preservation is more literal. Say, if you kill tens of thousands of your countrymen to make an empire out of a republic, tempus veniet when all those weapons and giant bones will come out of the ground again, much to the confusion of future farmers. It’s as Timothy Morton says: there’s no away for things to go.

Creative destruction is a modern trope with a modern trick. It’s an advertising slogan, designed to get you to notice one thing and distract you from something else. What’s eye-catching is the “creative” part, which everyone can get behind. It’s an adjective applied to a noun; the noun’s what you take for granted. You’re supposed to think, “hmm.  I love it when  people create!  Definitely worth a little destruction, if that’s what it costs!” You’re not supposed to think about whether destruction is possible, but you should. After all, if it’s not, do you really want to tether your creative process to it?

Actually, I think the Georgics are a lot more on the ball about this than Friedrich Hayek is. Or maybe Hayek’s contemporary and countryman, Freud, is the right citation: the mind is like Rome, except that the ruins are all still intact. It’s a layering where the layers intersect with one another. If you think you’ve actually destroyed something, you’re in trouble: it’ll get back after you like a ghost jedi, forcing you to recognize that the past isn’t past. Hayek dreamed of the unleashed forces of capitalism, destroying old structures and industries to replace them with the latest, greatest thing. That’s what we thought we were doing, 1996-2016. As it turned out, though, we hadn’t actually destroyed the old structures (manufacturing, racism, whatever), we’d just given them an identity, as old. Trump, the archetypical cranky, sponge-brained geriatric, gave them something to organize around. It’s the shock of the old.

The other problem with creative destruction is one that I hinted at before, which is that it makes actual creativity impossible. The big “disruptive” innovations of the past decade or so have been things like Uber (Uber for laundry, Uber for euthanizing your pet, whatever). Uber isn’t actually anything new; it’s just a different, worse way of ordering a cab, where the driver isn’t a professional and doesn’t get any money. Amazon isn’t anything new; it’s just a mail-order catalog with the cash on hand of a small nation-state. Facebook isn’t anything new; it’s just socializing, but with extra psychopaths. The logic of creative destruction means we’re stuck “disrupting” stuff by making worse, more profitable versions of it. That’s good for someone, but odds are it’s not you.

I don’t mean to say that mantras like “creative destruction” actually have a causal force when it comes to making the world shitty. But they do set up a permission structure. They’re excuses for bad, boring, dumb behavior. What’s worse, they’re excuses you make on behalf of other people. Destruction sounds good in theory, but it isn’t happening in practice. Maybe next time, we can build on top of something rather than blowing it up.

I went to a conference this weekend that got me thinking about what Classics still has to tell us at the end of the world. The most basic point, I guess, is the one that Lucretius makes at the close of book two of De rerum natura, which is that things don’t really end: they just keep getting worse.* If the world did end, we’d be lucky.

One of the oldest Greek poems we have comes at the problem with a certain directness. In his myth (or theory?) of the four ages, Hesiod describes the opposite of progress: we’ve been headed state down from the start, from gold through silver and bronze and the heroes (a brief upturn) to iron, which is where we’re at now. The age of iron is a punitive era, where justice – which once was internal to the world – now has to be imposed from outside against a race of men that only wants to kick against the pricks. Eventually, once things get bad enough, Zeus is going to blow us up – and we’ll deserve it. Hesiod was maybe the first law-and-order voter.

Hesiod, Vergil (in the Georgics) and Lucretius are all agreed that the Earth used to be a lot more fertile, too. The fact that we live in latter days also explains why we have to work so damn hard just to eat: “pater ipse colendi haud facilem viam esse voluit.” And that’s just going to get worse, too, unless, as Vergil advises, we trade our crops for honey-making bees – a strategy some U.S. farmers have actually employed in recent decades. You can make a lot more money gathering nectar from other peoples’ crops than by growing your own.

But we can’t all join the busy bees of the financial sector: if we did, there’d be nothing to make honey out of. Most of us are going to be stuck grinding crops out of the unwilling Earth through the rest of this long (perhaps endless) age of iron. Or perhaps it is a gilded age after all, a new age of gold, which is, as Ovid points out, “ferro nocentius.” Even gold gets turned to evil in the age of iron.

This wasn’t what most of the people at the conference had in mind, though. They were thinking of Trump and global warming – really more a fortuitous conjunction than a causal pair, but they’re both hitting at the same time, so there you go. The classics have a lot to say about Trump-like figures, but nothing useful: the closest anyone comes is probably Tacitus, who throughout his work takes a caustic attitude towards the kind of performative #resistance that leads to an ambitiosa mors. As to global warming, well, nobody could conceive of it – except, weirdly, Gregory the Great, who thought that parts of the world were getting hotter as the end times approached because the furnaces of hell were kindling up.

*Lucretius does of course think that the mundum we inhabit is going to disappear some day, but it’s more like getting old than sudden death. Cosmic cataclysms are for Stoics.

This is the last (I hope) in an ongoing series of posts about the lamest of the many miracles chronicled in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. The fourth book has, unlike the other three, an overarching argument, which is the soul is real and persists after death. Gregory proves that point partly with apodictic arguments (“Angels are invisible, and everyone believes in those, so why can’t the soul be invisible too? That’s faith!”) but mostly with ghost stories. If anyone is a ghost, hears a ghost, sees a ghost, smells a ghost, etc., that’s good evidence that the soul can exist outside the body.

There’s an interesting inconsistency between that position and the one held by earlier theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, and John Cassian, all of whom tell us that we shouldn’t talk to ghosts because they’re demons in disguise. The difference may mark Gregory’s comparative lack of theological accuity or, more likely, a drift away from mortalist theories of the afterlife to something more like the modern view.

Whatever the explanation is, Gregory’s use of ghost stories as proofs gives him plenty of chances to share more of the goofy miracles that are his stock in trade. My favorite of these has to do with a certain Stefanus, escorted to heaven from his deathbed by an array of saints and martyrs (ghosts!) But that’s not a privilege just anyone gets. Stefanus is extra-holy. We know this because (once upon a time), somebody burned down his haystack and he didn’t even get mad. It’s a miracle!

In light of what I’ve already written about the importance of hunger for the moral universe of the Dialogues, this is actually less dumb than it sounds. In Gregory’s world, food is hard to come by, so someone who can let it go without getting upset has really learned not to value worldly goods. The thing is, that kind of asceticism isn’t itself particularly valued elsewhere in the Dialogues: most of Gregory’s saintly types recognize the value of worldly goods all too well, which is why they give to the poor and needy rather than hoarding for themselves. I think that Stefanus belongs to an older character type, the Roman Stoic, for whom externals really are indifferent. Stefanus’ quip when he hears that his crops have been burned – “You think it’s bad for me? Well, think about the other guy!” – tends to confirm this guess: a key part of stoic anger-management therapy is learning to feel pity for people you otherwise would have gotten mad at. The evil deeds of your enemy are symptomatic of an ulcer in the soul that’s far more painful that whatever (purely external) losses you may have suffered.

The last book of the Dialogues brings a lot more lay-types onto the scene. As such, in this book there’s a wider diversity of character than in the three proceeding: we’re no longer stuck with Gregory’s relatively uniform and even monotonous models of holiness. In this context, what Stefanus shows us is that Gregory’s sense of virtue might be little more big-tent than we’d thought. Intriguingly, it also suggests that at least a fragment of stoic ethics could, in the person of an Italian landholder, survive the end of philosophical education as such in the 6th century. The story forces us to ask: how much of ancient philosophy ends up getting mulched under and composted into the folk wisdom of the Middle Ages?

I’m trying to read Iamblichus’ Mysteries of Egypt, a Neo-Platonic philosophical treatise masquerading as a letter from an Egyptian priest. It’s slow going, not least because Iamblichus shares with many of his contemporaries a tendency not to tell you what the point or the payoff of an argument is until he’s finished making it.

So you don’t really know, for instance, why you’re supposed to care – and why Iamblichus’ authorial persona cares so much – about the thewn idiotetes, the distinguishing characteristics of the gods. Iamblichus’ point seems to be that the gods don’t have idiotes in the same way that we do, since that would imply limitation. The gods are everything at once, actually – as, in some sense, is everything except the somatic matter that sits at the bottom of Iamblichus’ hierarchy of being.

Well, the payoff of all that is this. Iamblichus’ rival, Porphyry, defines gods, demons, heroes, etc. by their place in the cosmos, by the elements with which they associate: ether for gods, air for demons, etc.. That’s their idiotes. Iamblichus argues that that’s putting an inappropriate limit on the infinite nature of the divine, and, what’s worse, making it impossible for humans to influence or commune with the gods. Iamblichus clearly thinks this relationship, which the rest of Mysteries teaches us how to manage, should be personal or at least manipulable.

You can’t talk to a deus absconditus, let alone subject him to your will using magical statues. Iamblichus needs his gods to be right here, not removed to the outer reaches of the universe. This means deterritorializing them: they can be right here, with us, because in some sense they’re nowhere. They don’t have a local habitation, just a name.

The way this works, or at least the way that Iamblichus wants us to conceptualize it, is on analogy with the sun: it’s somewhere – that is, out in space – but at the same time everywhere, since its light penetrates the whole cosmos. Since Iamblichus thinks of that light as a kind of instant emanation, we’re licensed to see it as the sun’s way of being as it were outside of itself. Like the sun, Iamblichus’ gods don’t keep their being to themselves (idios). They’re not abstract or nebulous, nor are they Morton-style hyperobjects that saturate the world. They’re radiant, at once near and far.

There are other things it might be useful to think about this way. Most websites are radiant, showering us with their being from a distance. This is extra true of social media sites that, like Iamblichus’ gods, at least give the appearance of obeying our commands. By way of that mediation, individuals are radiant now. So are countries. We could for instance think of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as radioactivity, an unwanted radiance with unvelcome consequences.

Actually, so much of what makes it annoying to be alive right now is that kind of radiation. Distance used to be a pretty reliable buffer against people we can’t stand, but it’s hard to be indifferent to assholes when they’re constantly glowing at us. If you try to protect yourself by unhooking from twitter or nytimes.com or whatever, the people around you are still getting dosed. You can be a sane man in a society of mutants, which sounds even worse than getting blinded by the light.