Month: August 2019

What I mean is that you can see a picture, and you can also see yourself in a picture. When it comes to regular old perception, you never see yourself in the picture unless, 1.) there’s a mirror, 2.) you have a doppleganger, or 3.) you’re losing your mind. In this sense, seeing yourself in the picture is a stock trope of horror movies and/or a diagnostic criterion for certain serious delusions. On the other hand, we screen films in our head that feature us all the time; this is a normal part of imagination, the medium that allows us to think through a future that features us. That distinction is a way of signposting where the ego should be: absent in the real, present in the imaginary.

Are the law and politics real, or are they imaginary? Both, in a democracy: that’s what makes democratic politics so psychologically difficult. The law is something real that’s also subject to the rule of the imagination. We’re both there and not there. An attractive alternative to maintaining that suspended judgment is just to come down on one side or another. For most of America’s history, the contest has been between progressives, who can hold both ideas in their minds at once, and conservatives, who take the shortcut of equating the law with the real, legal with just.

There’s always been a strong counter-fantasy on the right that frames individual believers as knights in shining armor, defending the law from people who want to revise it. That’s the law-and-order type, basically, inside every one of whom is a tiny James Earl Ray struggling to get out. Only in the 90’s and 2000’s did this counter-fantasy turn into the central tenet of right-wing politics, and since 2016 it’s spread everywhere.

What does this mean, in practice, for how we think about politics? Here’s what it’s meant for me. Instead of thinking about how to make political change happen in a realistic way, with a frequency justified by the lackadaisical pace of electoral politics in the USA, I imagine politics as a debate between me and one or more individuals from the opposite party. Sometimes, violence breaks out. Politics is a film that I star in. Like all mind-movies, this one is hard to stop watching, but it also generates anxiety because of the unresolved tension between what it predicts and what may or may not actually happen.

That’s politics as pure imaginary. You put yourself in a picture where you don’t belong: the accompanying delusion is that you, as an individual, can or should make a difference to the politics of the nation as a whole. For some people, that’s actually true, but you and I know we’re not one of them. So we imagine politics as the kind of contest in which we can make a difference, and, if we’re deeply psychotic, we try to make that dream come true by putting aggressive bumper stickers on our cars, etc.

What’s the solution? Don’t buy bumper stickers, unless you’re supporting Ego Death for President 2020. On a personal level, remember that thinking you matter for politics is a compensatory fantasy for not mattering. The alternative to that fantasy is actually doing things, not by yourself but as part of a collective that actually does matter. The most practical things, like voting and supporting political campaigns, may seem unappealing because you get the opportunity to do them so rarely. But is whatever you’re “doing” in the abstract when you vote and campaign actually something you want to be doing all the time? Every four years, the nation gets a hole ripped in its mind. Why would you want to repeat that multiple times a day?

The big ego trauma – the experience that creates the ego, actually – is supposed to be our discovery that the world doesn’t respond to our desires in the same way our body does. Major mediators of this trauma are language and, through language, the law. The law just exists to tell you you can’t do that: it takes the lessons you learn as a child from trying to fly or eat a live dog and turns them into examples of, or better yet metaphors for, what happens when you jaywalk or steal. Studies show that children can’t tell one kind of “can’t” apart from the other.

If politics is thinking about the law, then, you’d expect most people to experience it as a kind of ego death, and that’s (probably) been true for most of history. Scipio’s dream at the end of Cicero’s De re publica sets the model: encountering the law means annihilating your own subjectivity, watching yourself dissolve in the bigness of a universe that is mostly not you. The law is something you learn about or discover, not something you make, even if it is (obviously) made and enforced by humans. That’s the parado that Kafka leans on for thrills and chills.

Kafka comes from a different world. His was the last generation anywhere to come of age in an honest-to-god, non-constitutional monarchy. For us, the strangeness of Kafka is in large part the strangeness of that experience. We live in a democracy and, as such, have a much more secular view of the law, which we see that anyone, even roadkill-eating goons like Mitch McConnell, can have a part in making. The democratic ideal is that we’re all supposed to take part in making it. How is our ego supposed to relate to that? You spend your whole childhood learning, via the law, that the universe is separate from you, and then you discover, around age 18, that actually the law is one thing over which you do have control. You’d go crazy. That’s a good plot for a Kafka story.

Americans constantly finding themselves in that position probably does explain a lot of our national weirdness, our grownups not-quite-grown-up by comparison with their European contemporaries and yet, in other ways, super-competent. It also seems to me like this part of the project has gotten, for lack of a better word, “thematized” in recent years as a tool of mass political motivation. I’d like to meet the psychologist who figured that one out.

What I mean is that we’re increasingly encouraged to think of ourselves not only as participating in making the law, but as somehow responsible for the whole thing. A law I don’t like isn’t just something I should work to overturn, it’s a direct attack on my ego. My honor (read: the coherence between my ego-ideal and reality) is at stake, and I need to respond as though it were a personal affront.

If I had to guess, I’d say that this framing got its start as an advertising strategy for firearms, since the world of gun nuts is one in which it’s particularly thrived. In the American ideolect, there aren’t many clearer ways to say “I don’t accept this” than to reach for your gun, a gesture that means you’re done talking (and, it follows, done with “politics” as usually understood). That’s mostly a performative gesture, except when it’s not, as for instance in El Paso and Pittsburgh and Las Vegas.

It’s always the right-wing nuts who pull that shit because they’ve been subject to this kind of marketing for longer. The RNC saw an opening in the outrage that a certain segment of the population felt at the sight of a black president; the “resistance” politics of Obama’s second term was essentially about organizing people around that personal affront to their honor as (white) Americans. Trump, the world’s most easily-offended man, did this act better than any of the party avatars he was running against. Voters who’d been taught to think about politics as an attack on their egos saw a man whose ego was always on the defensive and said, “he understands me.”

That’s a speculative way of framing the last election, but there’s concrete evidence to support it. Michael Anton’s editorial, “The Flight 93 Election,” probably the single most widely-circulated (non-hacked, stolen or faked) written document in right-wing circles leading up to November, 2016, is basically a fantasy rewrite of Trump’s campaign in which his supporters get to imagine themselves as passengers rushing the cabin on the hijacked flight which crashed near Pittsburgh on 9/11. The editorial worked because it transformed political subjects into egos, because it crystalized the “not on my watch” resentment of white nationalists under Obama into a simple, heroic narrative. It worked so well that nobody cared about how flight 93 ended up crashing, killing everyone on board.

Well, the election happened, and now we’re all crazy. I chalk that up in part to trump’s campaign playbook, which involved actually affronting progessives at every opportunity, and in part to Clinton’s desperate last-minute attempt to mobilize voter turnout via “it can’t happen here” rhetoric that tried to convince us we were personally on the hook for stopping a trumpian dictatorship. No one inside the Clinton campaign had the courage to say, “actually, Madame Secretary, that’s your job,” so Clinton lost and we shouldered the blame.

Did I sometimes “do politics” by having arguments with imaginary people in my head before 2016? Yes, I’ll admit it. Does that happen more than once a day now? It does, and it’s profoundly draining. It also blocks me from doing the medium-scale things, like organizing with other people, that might actually be effective between now and when trump gets shuffled off to a nursing home in January, 2021. Like a lot of psychoanalytic lessons, “politics isn’t about you” is something you can know, cognitively, without it making much difference. The ego’s still there, responding to every perceived slight. That’s why I’m now supporting another candidate with a down-scaled version of Giant Meteor’s program: Ego Death for president, 2020.

Because current events are still making me lose my mind, I googled and then read an article reassuring me that the carbonization of the Amazon Rainforest won’t lead to the collapse of the global oxygen supply. Mind you, this isn’t because the Amazon won’t be carbonized; it will, it’s just that no particular forest has much of a net impact on global oxygen levels one way or the other. That’s because forest ecosystems decompose as much as they grow, and so absorb about as much oxygen as they produce: in terms of the composition of our atmosphere, the Amazon is a wash. What matters is the rate of burial of organic carbon from plants in places where it’s cut off from oxygen and can’t decompose. The Amazon makes a big contribution to that by sending wood down its namesake river and out to sea, but annual rates of addition are so small compared to the overall amount of oxygen in our atmosphere that we won’t notice the change for millennia.

The atmosphere is, however, changing. Increasing carbon dioxide concentrations make the air harder to breathe and will, given time, make us stupider; even at the 400 ppm level, which we’ve now shot past, carbon dioxide demonstrably slows down human problem solving. It also makes things hotter, of course, changing the physical properties of the atmosphere so that, for instance, aircraft have a hard time taking off and (on a smaller scale) people have a hard time dissipating excess heat. Ever-lengthening fire seasons blot out the sun over major cities for days or weeks at a time.

So much modern technology – from air conditioning to the Haber-Bosch Process to chemical warfare – takes the atmosphere for granted, as a resource or as a dumping ground or just as a breathable default that will always be big enough to dissipate whatever we put in it. The atmosphere has been so kind to us that we’ve even evolved to ignore it, our strongest senses – sight, hearing, touch – basically treating the atmosphere as if it weren’t there. The atmosphere is so necessary for us that lack of it sends the body into immediate, death-avoiding panic. Yet, now that the atmosphere is being methodically destroyed, there’s no sense of general worry to mirror that reflex response.

What if the global supply of oxygen really were about to collapse? Could we do anything about it? Would we want to? Or would we “adapt,” carrying oxygen tanks with us everywhere like emphysema patients – oxygen tanks we’d be paying for, probably further enriching the same tycoons who made bank off of burning down the Amazon in the first place? Would rich people live in hermetically-sealed dwellings with central O2? Would we mind the death of the outdoors, or would we secretly be thrilled that nobody could tell us to go play outside anymore? Would the market for drones take off?

It’s easier for me to imagine our putting up with this complete involution of nature than it is for me to conceive of action being taken, on any timescale, to protect the atmosphere. That’s a consequence of where politics are right now: thirty years ago, the whole world got together to ban CFCs, but now – despite their well-established ozone-destroying effects – CFCs are somehow having a comeback. Politics used to be at bottom about survival; now it’s another profit stream for the rich, with all the dangerous knock-on effects that implies.

When did “representation” start to belong to the vocabulary of media rather than politics? I couldn’t tell you where the usage comes from, but I started noticing it about a decade ago. How early it penetrated your thought-world probably depends on where you stand in the map of American culture. By now, though, it’s part of the public discourse. You have to be a real nerd to care about whether people in Puerto Rico or Washington, D.C. are getting adequate representation in Congress, but anyone can have an argument about whether giving representation to more genders and races made Star Wars worse (a deceptively good question if you take the prequels into account, and one that I’ll try to answer by the end of this post).

Some people are pushing for representation in media that reflects the actual diversity of the world; other people want every show to be as cis/white/straight as Friends. Both sides are working from the super-dubious assumption that “representation,” per se, is good. The pro-diversity crowd wants that good to be distributed more fairly, while the white-supremacist crowd wants to keep it all for themselves and people who look like them. It doesn’t seem to have occured to anyone that, actually, being associated with Friends should be deeply embarrassing, and that’s just the start of the trouble with a discourse where the possibility of misrepresentation gets suppressed.

There are reasons why things work this way, or at least beneficiaries. Both major political parties benefit from keeping their constituents’ concerns about representation focused elsewhere and from keeping even the notion of misrepresentation out of our heads. The Democrats probably have it slightly worse right now (we’re not supposed to be asking practical questions about Obama’s legacy, especially whether his “representation” of Black America actually worked to its benefit), but the Republicans are going to get it just as bad whenever Trump’s supporters stop assuming that he represents them and ask themselves in what conceivable world Trump might represent the interests of anyone but himself.

Everyone in the political mainstream has an interest in reminding us that what matters is our seeing ourselves onscreen, not what our mirror images do there or whether they really resemble us. White people have actually worked on those assumptions for years, molding themselves in the hollow image of (say) the cast of Friends rather than being shocked that anyone could imagine white people acting that way. You get the sense that these happy mimes would be lost without fictional characters to imitate, which might be why some of them seem to get so triggered by the notion that a Jedi might be a woman.

Well, what about the pretext that most of these crackers hide behind, the claim that diversity detracts from plot, that Finn and Rey have somehow “ruined Star Wars?” That’s a claim you could only make by deliberately forgetting Return of the Jedi, a much worse movie than either of the sequels, both of which (I’d bet, someday) are going to end up near the top of the Star Wars canon. With respect to the sequels, the trolls don’t have a leg to stand on.

They could have made a better case re: the prequels, which, even at the time of their release, were criticized for basically trafficking in blackface. Would the prequels have been better without the Trade Federation, Jar Jar Binks, or the living anti-Semitic tropes from Tantooine? Unquestionably. I think that the groups supposedly “represented” by those figures wouldn’t miss them either. What we have here is a clear-cut case of misrepresentation, one made easier to recognize by the fact that the “representatives” were CGI, not members of the races or ethnic groups they were supposed to represent.

We yearn for simpler times. The problem of misrepresentation has only gotten more insidious as we lose our language for talking about it. Eli Valley surely speaks for more American Jews, but Ariel Sobel and (ugh) Meghan McCain are better at the rhetoric of representing a Jewish identity that somehow turns out to be identical with Zionism, so Valley gets ignored when he’s lucky and slandered as an anti-Semite when he’s not. We have a language for attacking McCain – she’s “appropriating” an identity that doesn’t belong to her – but what about Sobel? She really is Jewish, so does that make her representative?

With that example, I may seem to be reverting to a political meaning for representation. All the figures involved, though, belong to a media landscape that (I wouldn’t be the first to observe) people now approach via something more like fandom than political partisanship in the classical sense. From that point of view, Sobel’s claim to “represent” is unquestionable – but that just goes to show that representation isn’t reality, and that it’s not always a good thing.

I wrote before about how models of what society looks like can differ radically between societies, so much so that there are some societies for whom society can really be said not to exist. Thinking about that further, I’m reminded that models of society can differ even within a society, sometimes with deleterious results. The classic case comes from Levi-Strauss: low-status people in a certain tribe see society as divided into two equal halves, us the commoners versus them the elite, while high-status people in the same trible see society as a series of concentric circles – elites, naturally, occupying the inmost ring.

There’s probably so much diversity in contemporary American social diagrams that it’s not even worth the trouble of trying to categorize them. The contrast that emerged among Levi-Strauss’s informants probably also holds at some level between the rich and the poor in America. How many of the 99%, though, really see the rich as the opposite moiety? It’s minorities or illegal immigrants or sex perverts or lizard men or even, in a weird involution, trump voters. To a great extent – and this is really a development of the last five years – the rich have managed to disappear from the social map. This works to their advantage, since their invisibility transforms them from the objects of politics into its backroom managers. They fine-tune things to their ever-more incremental advantage while the rest of us tilt at windmills.

None of these diagrams are (or were ever) “right;” they’re metaphors, maps corresponding only roughly to a territory. To an astonishing extent, though, the metaphors are becoming more fantastic, mapping a territory that looks nothing like the fundamental conflicts blocking social progress in this country. That’s partly the fault of cable news and youtube for offering as many social diagrams as can be monetized. Supply creates demand. But not just as it likes. Why are we reaping this harvest now, as opposed to a decade ago when all the media players were already in place?

One possibility is that the kinds of actual difference that grounded the social diagram of a decade ago have disappeared in the meantime, transferring the burden of ethnogenesis onto the social diagrams themselves. We think we’re more divided than ever, but an alien observer would see us as united by a monoculture of looking at screens. The behavioral landscape is monotonous and offers no grounds for differentiation. Instead, we have to differentiate ourselves by reference to what we believe about the social landscape. What does it look like to us when we see a crowd of people staring at their phones?

The narcicism of small differences can have big effects. A hundred years ago, Europeans got so much alike that they had to start World War 1. But that’s nothing compared to the uniformity that’s coming to be. At the moment, a cause for optimism is that the diversity of social representations from which people can choose has yet to coalesce into one big consensus, which means we can still plump for Marxism over fascism as the final destination of that consensus. Key to that will be making the wealthy visible again, as cause and beneficiary of our current crisis.

Following close on yesterday’s post, I ran across something in the Rig Veda which reminds me of something I wrote before about Augustine and the problem of credulity. This is the last stanza of the Hymn of Creation, RV x.129:

Iyam vistrshtir yata ababhuva/ yadi va dadhe yadi va na/ yo asya adhyaksha parame vyoman/ so anga veda yadi va na veda.

“Whence came about this creation, whether he made it or not, he who is its surveyor in the utmost heaven, he alone knows – or else he doesn’t.”

What Augustine reminds us is true for each of us as individuals, that we don’t know where we came from, the RV claims is true for us collectively as well. We weren’t there when the universe came into being. It’s here now, though, so we have to believe it got here somehow. Does that mean need to take it on faith? Or have any belief about it at all?

The scriptural religions all seem to think so. Most of them, at one point or another, make a big deal about how they’re filling in the gaps in what we know about the beginning of time. I think that’s a way of fetishizing the evidentiary quality of written texts, which offer what must have been (at the time of their introduction) an exciting and unprecedented tool for looking into the past. If a written text can tell you your great grandfather’s name, why can’t it tell you where the world came from? And why not with the same degree of reliability?

This telescopic quality of the written document was enough of a commonplace by the time of Muhammad that the Qur’an struggles to disclaim dependence on documentary evidence. Its early audience assumes just such a dependence, describing Muhammad’s warnings as “asatir al-awalin” – usually translated “tales of the ancients,” though “inscriptions of the ancients” would be more accurate. Later critics accused him of borrowing from other scriptures, particularly the bible and the torah – a trend in Qur’anic criticism that continues today, sometimes in more a polemic than a scholarly vein. Writing, once the technology of revelation, has become a disenchanting alternative to it.

Secular modernity, fully acclimated to this disenchanted view of the written tradition, purports not to need answers to the sort of question which the RV characterizes as unanswerable. That’s a bit of a shell game. A Hans Blumenberg points out in The Genesis of the Copernican World, we grow more confident in the face of such questions by undoing their unanswerability. After Copernicus, the next great cosmological dislocation decenters us in time as well as space: we now see that the universe, far from orbiting around us, isn’t even contemporary with us. When we look over distance, we also look back in time. We do the impossible, seeing back before our own (individual, species) existence. We compensate ourselves for our exile from the center of the universe by reimagining ourselves as the RV’s surveyor in the utmost heaven.

A basic question: are people stupid for believing things? Are they gulls? Are they dupes? Or is there no way of knowing that gets past belief?

It’s a political question, or at least a question that conditions your response to politics. If you follow Plato in distinguishing between doxa (tired) and episteme (wired), then you’re going to have a hard time watching people make political decisions. That’s because political debate always involves various prosthetic attachments to logic, “as-ifs” like enthymemes or the utilitarian calculus that let us debate incredibly complex issues as though we were talking about the same thing, even as we disagree about the fundamentals. If, as in the USA right now, people decide to keep the fakery but lose the consensus, it can get downright infuriating. The truth is out there, so why is everyone happy watching trump tweets projected on a cave wall?

You can lose your mind trying to figure that one out. Plenty of people have, which is why MSNBC is now pulling in ratings about on par with Fox’s among politically-attentive oldsters. MSNBC joins CNN, the Washington Post, and plenty of second- or third-rate political writers in appealing to that truth-obsessed demographic, not by solving the conundrum that’s melting their brains – that’s bad business, since you can only do it once – but by selling a kind of martyrdom. It’s true what you think, that half the country is living a lie. You’re one of the smart ones, the good guys, that sticks to the truth. So truth and knowledge of the truth, which begin as the most profoundly hubristic claims that humans have ever made upon the world, end as a marketing plan. Nietzsche wouldn’t mind!

The alternative, paying more attention to how truth works, is something I’ve advocated on this zero-reader blog since day one. It wouldn’t hurt if we could learn to see what’s happening now as just one more turn of the screw, rather than as a world-ending catastrophe. Part of that means recognizing what a world is, and the extent to which every world – whether it belongs to us or them – is built around forms of ungrounded belief.

I’ve seen these ideas cropping up elsewhere lately, too, in a kind of delayed response to the trump campaign that’s finally something other than an immune reaction. One sign of the times in Emily Ogden’s Credulity, just released, which looks marvelous and which I haven’t gotten my hands on yet. Another is D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic, an illuminating study of the modern UFO cult that unfortunately also suggests we’re not out of the woods yet. I’m glad to see Pasulka reveal technology for the cult that it is by laying out the homologies between our attitude towards it and UFOlogy. I’m now convinced that UFOlogy too, cult or not, deserves a fairer hearing than it’s gotten: it’s probably the only religion with a chance of being right about its god. I was nauseated, though, by the book’s final episode, in which the sophomorically-pseudonymed Tyler Durden, a wealthy UFO expert whose story makes up the backbone of the book, converts to Catholicism. Wittingly or not, Pasulka paints a portrait (which may also be a self-portrait) of someone who gets off on his own credulity. “I want to believe,” not as a coy expression of skepticism but as a straightforward statement of desire.

The tiresome thing is that Pasulka’s subjects generally take their beliefs as seriously as the truth. That’s a danger that faces anyone who thinks that truth and belief as clearly separable, because the easiest way to make that separation is to say that what I have is truth, while what you have is belief. We thus make ourselves at once sanctimonious and psychotic, two nasty flavors of human that taste worse in combination.

Robert Pfaller had a good idea about the Greeks, which is that they didn’t take their beliefs too seriously. I think that’s basically right and can be extended to most non-Western societies; Christians were the ones who fetishized truth and then tried to make everyone else do the same. Now every truth looks like a hill to die on. Is it too late for us to become like the Greeks in at least this respect?