Becker—The Denial of Death (vi)

Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Psychology and Religion:
What Is the Heroic Individual?

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[259] I am talking matter-of-factly about some of the surest giants in the history of humanity only to say that in the game of life and death no one stands taller than any other,... My point is that for man not everything is possible. What is there to choose between religious creatureliness and scientific creatureliness? The most one can achieve is a certain relaxedness, an openness to experience that makes him less of a driven burden on others. And a lot of this depends on how much talent he has, how much of a daimon is driving him; it is easier to lay down light burdens than heavy ones. How does a man create from all his living energies a system of thought, as Freud did, a system directed wholly to the problems of this world, and then just give it up to the invisible one? How, in other words, can one be a saint and still organize scientific movements of world-historical importance? How does one lean on God and give over everything to Him and still stand on his own feet as a passionate human being? These are not rhetorical questions, they are real ones that go right to the heart of the problem of "how to be a man"—a problem that no one can satisfactorily advise anyone else on, as the wise William James knew. The whole thing is loaded with ambiguity impossible to resolve. As James said, each person sums up a whole range of very personal experiences so that his life is a very unique problem needing very individual kinds of solutions. Kierkegaard had said the same thing when he answered those who objected to his life style: he said it was singular because it was the one singularly designed to be what he needed in order to live; it is as simple and as final as that.

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[262] [Norman O.] Brown is not the first to claim to see that evolution of the human animal is some kind of mishap; he has prominent predecessors... , and now he has to be included with them for the nonsense as well as the good things they have written. How can we say that evolution has made a mistake with man, that the development of

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the forebrain, the power to symbolize, to delay experience, to bind time, was not "intended" by nature and so represents a self-defeat embodied in an improbable animal? The ego, on the contrary, represents the immense broadening of experience and potential control, a step into a true kind of sub-divinity in nature. Life in the body is not "all we have" if we have an ego. And the ego represents, as far as we can judge, a natural urge by the life force itself toward an expansion of experience, toward more life. If the urge toward more life is an evolutionary blunder, then we are calling into question all of creation and fitting it into the narrow mold of our own preferences about what "more-life" ought to be. Admittedly, when evolution gave man a self, an inner symbolic world of experience, it split him in two , gave him an added burden. But this burden seems to be the price that had to be paid in order for organisms to attain more life, for the development of the life force on the furthest reach of experience and self-consciousness. Brown claims that the "reunification of the ego and the body is not a dissolution but a strengthening of the human ego." But this one phrase in passing rings hollow because it is truly empty chatter that avoids facing everything we know about the ego. To talk about a "new man" whose ego merges wholly with his body is to talk about a subhuman creature, not a superhuman one.

The ego, in order to develop at all, must bind time, must stop the body. In other words, the kind of new man that Brown himself wants would have to have an ego in order to experience his body, which means that the ego has to disengage itself from the body and oppose it. That is another way of saying that the child must be blocked in his experience in order to be able to register that experience. If we don't "stop" the child he develops very little sense of himself, he becomes an automaton, a reflex of the surface of his world playing upon his own surface. Clinically we have huge documentation for this character type whom we call the psychopath; phenomenologically we have understood this since Dewey's Experience and Nature. Brown's whole thesis falls, then, on a twin failure: not only on his failure to understand the real psychodynamics of guilt, but also his turning his back on how the child registers experience on his body: the need to develop in a dualistic way in order to be a rich repository of life.

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For a thinker of Brown's breadth and penetration these failures are rather uncanny, and we realize them with a sense of reluctance, of unwillingness to find such glaring lapses in what is really a thinker of heroic dimensions. I am less upset when I find similar lapses in Marcuse, who is a much less daring reinterpreter of Freud but who puts forth a similar call for a new kind of unrepressed man. On the one hand Marcuse calls for a revolution of unrepression because he knows that it is not enough to change the structure of society in order to bring a new world into being; the psychology of man also has to be changed. But on the other hand, he admits that unrepression is impossible, because there is death: "The brute fact of death denies once and for all the reality of a non-repressive existence." The closing pages of his book are a realistic and regretful admission that the ego has to spread itself beyond the pleasures of the body in order for men to be men. But the dedicated social revolutionary who wants a new world and a new man more than anything else can't accept the reality that he himself sees. He still believes in the possibility of some kind of "final liberation," which also rings like the hollow, passing thought that it is. Marcuse even turns his back wholly on living experience and gets carried away by his abstractions: "Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion [by the new utopian society]." As if men could ever know that,...

Why do brilliant thinkers become so flaccid, dissipate so carelessly their own careful arguments? Probably because they see their task as a serious and gigantic one: the critique of an entire way of life; and they see themselves in an equally gigantic prophetic role: to point to a way out once and for all, in the most uncompromising terms. This is why their popularity is so great: they are prophets and simplifiers . Like Brown, Marcuse wants a sure indicator of alienation, a focal point in nature, and finds it in the ideology and fear of death. Being a true revolutionary he wants to change this in his lifetime , wants to see a new world born. He is so committed to this fulfillment that he cannot allow himself to stop in midstream and follow out the implication of his own reservations on unrepres-

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sion, his own admissions about the inevitable grip of death; fear of death is obviously deeper than ideology. To admit this would make his whole thesis ambiguous—and what revolutionary wants that? He would have to put forth a program that is not totally revolutionary, that allows for repression, that questions what men may become, that sees how inevitably men work against their own better interests, how they must shut out life and pleasure, follow irrational hero-systems—that there is a demonism in human affairs that even the greatest and most sweeping revolution cannot undo. With an admission like this Marcuse would be an anomaly—a "tragic revolutionary"—and would dissipate his role as a straighforward prophet. Who can expect him to do that?

There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression. No one has argued this impossibility with more authority and style than Philip Rieff in his recent work, and so far as I can see it should lay the matter to rest. He turns the whole movement on end: repression is not falsification of the world, it is "truth"—the only truth that man can know, because he cannot experience everything. Rieff is calling us back to basic Freudianism, to a stoical acceptance of the limits of life, the burdens of it and of ourselves. In a particularly beautiful phrase, he puts it this way:

The heaviest crosses are internal and men make them so that, thus skeletally supported, they an bear the burden of their flesh. Under the sign of this inner cross, a certain inner distance is achieved from the infantile desire to be and have everything.

Rieff's point is the classical one: that in order to have a truly human existance there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible. He quotes Marx's defiant revolutionary phrase: "I am nothing and should be everything." For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile unconscious speaking. Or, as I would prefer to say with Rank, the neurotic consciousness—the "all or nothing" of the person who cannot "partialize" his world. One bursts out in boundless megalomania, transcending all limits, or bogs down into

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wormhood like a truly worthless sinner. There is no secure ego balance to limit the intake of reality or to fashion the output of one's own powers.

If there is a tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively. As Rieff put it: "Character is the restrictive shaping of possibility." It all boils down, again, to the fact that the prophets of unrepression simply have not understood human nature ; they envisage a utopia with perfect freedom from inner constraint and from outer authority. This idea flies in the face of the fundamental dynamism of unfreedom that we have discovered in each individual: the universality of transference. This fact is hardly lost on Rieff, who realizes that men need transference because they like to see their morality embodied, need some kind of points of support in the endless flux of nature:

Abstractions will never do. God-terms have to be exemplified. . . . Men crave their principles incarnate in enactable characters, actual selective mediators between themselves and the polytheism of experience.

This failure to push the understanding of psychodynamics to its limits is the hurdle that none of the utopians can get over; it finally vitiates their best arguments. ...

...[in seeking to "abolish death," e.g.] the modern utopians continue the one-sided Enlighten-

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ment dream. Condorcet had already had the identical vision in 1794:

. . . . a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers: and that the duraion of the interval between the birth of man and his decay will have itself no assignable limit.

But Choron offers a caution on this vision that goes right to heart of it and demolishes it: that the "postponement of death is not a solution to the problem of the fear of death . . . there still will remain the fear of dying prematurely." The smallest virus or the stupidest accident would deprive a man not of 90 years but of 900—and would be then 10 times more absurd . Condorcet's failure to understand psychodynamics was forgivable, but not Harrington's today. If something is 10 times more absurd it is 10 times more threatening. In other words, death would be "hyperfetishized" as a source of danger, and men in the utopia of longevity would be even less expansive and peaceful than they are today!

I see this utopia in one way resembling the beliefs of many primitive societies. They denied that death was the total end of experience and believed instead that it was the final ritual promotion to a higher form of life. This meant too that invisible spirits of the dead had power over the living, and if someone died prematurely it was thought to be the result of malevolent spirits or the breach of taboos. Premature death did not come as an impersonal accident. This reasoning meant that primitive man put the highest priority on ways to avoid bad will and bad action, which is why he seems to have circumscribed his activities in often compulsive and phobic ways.

It's impolite but unavoidable to observe here a certain resonance with the ultra-modern, politically centrist Progressive, with scientific rationality standing in for "primitive" animism, to be sure, but leaving all else here, somehow, intact. The point being (donning Becker's hat for a moment) not that rationality is no better or no different than irrationality but that the human motivations underlying the relationship to death remain unchanged under either (or any other) epistemological regime.

Rationality per se is, in this instance, merely another vehicle in the desperate lurch to outrun fate, this time not by abandoning control to spirits and demons but by forcibly wresting control from nature. The only problem being that human beings are not good stewards even of perfect rationality: we "satifice" for the nearest-at-hand way too often. And Becker has mentioned and explained this too, earlier on, reaching similar conclusions as Kahnemann et al by way of totally different scientific (pseudoscientific?) avenues.

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[275] The fusion of psychology and religion is thus not only logical, it is necessary if the religion is to work. There is no way of standing on one's own center without outside support, only now this support is made to seem to come from the inside. The person is conditioned to function under his own control, from his own center, from the spiritual powers that well up within him. Actually, of course, the support comes from the transference certification by the guru that what the disciple is doing is true and good. Even reconditioning body-therapies like that of the once-noted F.M. Alexander today liberally sprinkle their therapy with ideas from Zen and cite their affinity to people like Gurdjieff. There seems no way to get the body to reintegrate without giving it some kind of magical sustaining power; at least, there is no better way to win full discipleship to a religion than by making it frankly religious.

...

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...there is no need for us to take up the metaphysical aspects of this problem. It is now the center of a passionate and at the same time coolly intellectual review by some of our best minds... It can all be summed up in the simplest and sharpest terms: how can an ego-controlled animal change his structure; how can a self-conscious

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creature change the dilemma of his existence? There is simply no way to transcend the limits of the human condition or to change the psychological structural conditions that make humanity possible. What can it mean for something new to emerge from such an animal and triumph over his nature? Even though men have repeated such a notion since the most ancient times and in the most subtle and weightiest ways, even though whole movements of social action as well as thought have been inspired by such ideas, still they are mere fancy...

If psychotherapists and scientists lapse into metaphysics so easily, we should not blame theologians for doing the same. But ironically, theologians today are often the most sober about immanence and its possibilities. Consider Paul Tillich: he too had his metaphysic of New Being... But Tillich had fewer illusions about this New Being than most of the psychotherapeutic religionists. He saw that the idea was actually a myth, an ideal that might be worked toward and so partly realized. It was not a fixed truth about the insides of nature. This point is crucial. And he so honestly put it: "The only argument for the truth of this

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Gospel of New Being is that the message makes itself true." Or, as we would say in the science of man, it is an ideal-typical enjoinder.

I think the whole question of what is possible for the inner life of man was nicely summed up by Suzanne Langer in the phrase "the myth of inner life." She used this term in reference to the experience of music, but it seems to apply to the whole metaphysic of the unconscious, of the emergence of new energies from the heart of nature. But let us quickly add that this use of the term "myth" is not meant to be disparaging or to reflect simply "illusion." As Langer explained, some myths are vegetative, they generate real conceptual power, real apprehension of a dim truth, some kind of global adumbration of what we miss by sharp, analytic reason.

I am developing a fondness for this general idea. Tellingly, I am most fond of it regarding the things I know the least about. Meanwhile, everyone is an expert in the experience of music , and so it is the same old dim truths of the essentially literary orientation that are clung to dimly. This gives me pause. More to the point, perhaps, Rank himself drops plenty of bread crumbs that lead away from the pillars of literary epistemology, so there is a peculiar irony that the exaltation of the vegetative "myth" would merely lead us back to where we started.

Most of all, as William James and Tillich have argued, beliefs about reality affect people's real actions: they help introduce the new into the world. Especially is this true for beliefs about man, about human nature, and about what man may yet become. If something influences our efforts to change the world, then to some extent it must change that world. This helps explain one of the things that perplex us about psychoanalytic prophets like Erich Fromm; we wonder how they can so easily forget about the dilemmas of the human condition that tragically limit man's efforts. The answer is, on one level, that they have to leave tragedy behind as part of a program to awaken some kind of hopeful creative effort by man. Fromm has nicely argued the Deweyan thesis that, as reality is partly the result of human effort, the person who prides himself on being a "hard-headed realist" and refrains from hopeful action is really abdicating the human task. This accent on human effort, vision, and hope in order to help shape reality seems to me largely to exonerate Fromm from the charges that he really is a "rabbi at heart" who is impelled to redeem man and cannot let the world be. If the alternative is fatalistic acceptance of the present human condition, then each of us is a rabbi—or had better be.

But once we say this, once we make a pragmatic argument for creative myth, it does not let us off the hook so easily about the nature of the real world. It only makes us more uncomfortable with the therapeutic religionists . If you are going to have a myth of New Being, then, like Tillich, you have to use this myth as a call to the

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highest and most difficult effort—and not to simply joy. A creative myth is not simply a relapse into comfortable illusion; it has to be as bold as possible in order to be truly generative .

Well, sure. The literary imperative is far too comfortable . But for a time it was radical. We can't just keep trying to outrun the old ideologies with newer, bolder ones.

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[281] the second great problem raised by the therapeutic revolution, namely, So What? Even with numerous groups of really liberated people, at their best, we can't imagine that the world will be any pleasanter or less tragic a place. It may even be worse in still unknown ways. As Tillich warned us, New Being, under the conditions and limitations of existence, will only bring into play new and sharper paradoxes, new tensions, and more painful disharmonies—a "more intense demonism." Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing, they would have even less peace that we oblivious and driven madmen have today. Besides, can any idea of therapeutic revolution touch the vast masses of this globe,...? When one lives in the liberation atmosphere of Berkeley, California, or in the intoxication of small doses of unconstruction in a therapeutic group in one's home town, one is living in a hothouse atmosphere that shuts out the reality of the rest of the planet, the way things really are in this world. It is this therapeutic megalomania that must quickly be seen through if we are not to be perfect fools.

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[283] The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it,...

Science and religion merge in a critique of the deadening of perception of this kind of truth, and science betrays us when it is willing to absorb lived truth all into itself. Here the criticism of all behaviorist psychology, all manipulations of men, and all coercive utopianism comes to rest. These techniques try to make the world other than it is, legislate the grotesque out of it, inaugurate a "proper" human condition. The psychologist Kenneth Clark...[recently] called for a new kind of chemical to deaden man's aggressiveness and so make the world a less dangerous place. The Watsons, the Skinners, the Pavlovians—all have their formulas for smoothing things out. Even Freud—Enlightenment man that he was, after all—wanted to see a saner world and seemed willing to absorb lived truth into science if only it were possible. He once mused that in order to really change things by therapy one would have to get at the masses of men; and that the only way to do this would be to mix the copper of suggestion into the pure gold of psychoanaysis. In other words, to coerce, by transference, a less evil world. But Freud knew better, as he gradually came to see that the evil in the world is not only in the insides of people but on the outside, in nature—which is why he became more realistic and pessimistic in his later work.

The problem with all the scientific manipulators is that somehow they don't take life seriously enough ; in this sense, all science is "bourgeois," an affair of bureaucrats. I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation,

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of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know—with Rilke—that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow? Manipulative, utopian science, by deadening human sensitivity, would also deprive men of the heroic in their urge to victory. And we know that in some very important way this falsifies our struggle by emptying us, by preventing us from incorporating the maximum of experience. It means the end of the distinctively human—or even, we must say, the distinctively organismic.

The Matthew Douglas Effect

The Matthew Effect in Science
Robert K. Merton

character structure and an acquired set of high standards often lead these outstanding scientists to discriminate between work that is worth publishing and that which, in their candid judgment, is best left unpublished though it could easily find its way into print. The laureates and other scientists of stature often report scrapping research papers that simply did not measure up to their own demanding standards or to those of their colleagues. ...a referee’s incisive report on a manuscript sent to a journal of physics asserts a relevant consequence of a scientist’s failure to exercise rigorous judgment in deciding whether to publish or not to publish: “If C——— would write fewer papers, more people would read them.” Outstanding scientists tend to develop an immunity to insanabile scribendi cacoethes (the itch to publish). Since they prefer their published work to be significant and fruitful rather than merely extensive, their contributions are apt to matter. This in turn reinforces the expectations of their fellow scientists that what these eminent scientists publish (at least during their most productive period) will be worth close attention. Once again this makes for operation of the Matthew effect, as scientists focus on the output of men whose outstanding positions in science have been socially validated by judgments of the average quality of their past work. And the more closely the other scientists attend to this work, the more they are likely to learn from it and the more discriminating their response is apt to be.

Indeed, if D—— D———— would put out fewer records, I would listen to more of them.

Lasch—Tolerance and Indifference

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

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Our twentieth-century experience of imperial rivalries, international competition for markets, and global wars makes it hard for us to share the Enlightenment's conviction that capitalism would promote world peace. The comsopolitan ideal articulated by the Enlightenment, although it remains an essential ingredient in modern liberalism, strikes many of us today as at once arrogant, in its contempt for the unenlightened masses, and naive. "Benevolence," moreover—the universal love for humanity assumed to follow emancipation from local prejudice—presents itself to us as a singlularly bloodless form of goodwill, founded more on indifference than on devotion. We can appreciate Rousseau's mockery of "those pretended cosmopolites, who in justifying their love for the human race, boast of loving all the world in order to enjoy the privilege of loving no one." Paine's self-congratulatory humanitarianism, on the other hand—
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"my country is the world, my religion to do good to mankind"—leaves us a little cold.

It is important to remind ourselves, therefore, that cosmopolitanism and "benevolence" commended themselves, in the eighteenth century, as an alternative to the fierce partisanship now blamed for two hundred years of religious warfare. Religious tolerance may have reflected a growing indifference to religion, but at least it held out the hope of peace.




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Burke attacked "these new teachers continually boasting of their spirit of toleration," just as Rousseau attacked those who professed a love for all mankind, on the grounds that such professions really revealed a certain indifference. "That those persons should tolerate all opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no true charity."

...

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ambivalence was a more appropriate response to progress than unyielding opposition or wholehearted approval. Indeed it was the only appropriate response, when progress was identified so closely with fate; and there is a certain heroism in the classical sociologists' determination to face unflinchingly facts that could not be altered, in their view, and to "bear the fate of the times like a man," as Weber put it. Weber's conception of the scientific vocation may have conceded too much to the view that science demands a rigorous abstention from moral judgment, but his warning against "academic prophecy" remains indispensable. "In the lecture rooms of the university," Weber insisted, no other virtue holds but plain intellectual integrity." It is impossible not to acknowledge the force of this, even for those who have seen Weber's ideal of heroic detachment degenerate into the familiar academic accommodation with political power that sides with the status quo, in effect, while disclaiming any intention of taking sides. "Science as a Vocation" and its companion, "Politics as a Vocation," have been put to purposes Weber himself would have disavowed, serving to excuse moral and political complacency, to rid scholarship of "value judgments," to reinforce the notion that ethical judgments are completely subjective and arbitrary, and finally to banish them even from politics itself, leaving politics to the managers and technocrats. Far from encouraging "intellectual integrity" or protecting the university from political interference, a misconceived ideal of scientific objectivity has brought about a rapprochement between the university and the state, in which academic expertise serves to lubricate the machinery of power; and it is important to remind ourselves that Weber, often invoked by those who wish to limit both scholarship and politics to purely technical matters, never endorsed such a trivial conception of either.

Tensions, Releases, Unities

Christopher Lasch
The Minimal Self (1984)

The fundamental importance of the distinction between self and not-self—the source of all other distinctions, it has rightly been said—might suggest that it serves as the first principle of mental life, the axiomatic premise without which mental life cannot even begin. In fact, however, it is a distinction that is accepted, in the infancy of life, only with the greatest reluctance, after fierce inner struggles to deny it; and it remains the source of our existential uneasiness, as well as the source of our intellectual mastery of the world around us.
(p. 163)


[it] presents itself, at first, as a painful separation from the surrounding environment, and this original experience of overwhelming loss becomes the basis of all subsequent experiences of alienation, of historical myths of a lost golden age, and of the myth of the primary fall from grace, which finds its way into so many religions. Religion, like art at its best, seeks precisely to restore the original sense of union with the world, but only after first acknowleding the fact of alienation, conceived as original sin, as hubris followed by divine retribution, as existential loneliness and separation, or in the arts (especially in music, which conveys these experiences at their deepest level), as the rhythm of tension and release followed by inner peace.
(p. 164)

Haraway—Situated Knowledges

Donna Haraway
"Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Persepctive"
Feminist Studies 14/3 (1988)

on the "strong" social constructionist theory of scientific (non-)objectivity:

So much for those of us who would still like to talk about reality with more confidence than we allow the Christian right when they discuss the Second Coming... We would like to think our appeals to real worlds are more than a desperate lurch away from cynicism and an act of faith like any other cult's..." (577)

This itself is just rhetoric, but it's refreshing anyway. The more recent Intersectional emphasis on Local Knowledge Claims seems to me, seeing as it is yet more Local than what DH is discussing here, to be a yet more volatile maneuver: some of the most pervasive/insidious prejudices (especially racial ones) are propagated through Local Knowledge Producers, and it remains unclear to me what the epistemological distinction is between these racists and the antiracist Intersectionalists.

the further I get in describing the radicial social constructionist program...the more nervous I get. The imagery of force fields, of moves in a fully textualized and coded world...is, just for starters, an imagery of high-tech military fields, of automated academic battlefields... Technoscience and science fiction collapse into the sun of their radiant (ir)reality—war. It shouldn't take decades of feminist theory to sense the enemy here. (577-578)

This is a brilliant insight, as well as, I would add, a sort of left-becomes-right moment. From "the strong social constructionist perspective," "all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as power moves, not moves toward truth." (576) DH can see that this orientation treats the world as irremediably hostile, confrontational, and subject to (at least potentially) the rule of might-makes-right; and she ever so delicately implies (I am reading between the lines here) that the apparent absence of any genuine reluctance among such theorists could itself suggest motivations/agendas, i.e. a desire to see the world this way whether it is accurate or not.

Feminists have to insist on a better account of the world; it is not enough to show radical historical contingency and modes of construction for everything. ... Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well... In traditional philosophical categories, the issue is ethics and politics perhaps more than epistemology. (579)

Indeed, ethics/politics and epistemology are quite mutually interdependent and dynamically linked, but ultimately it is ethical behavior out-in-the-world which is the goal, the question on which the success or failure of all other epistemological endeavors hinges. Feminists have too often blanched when science turns up knowledge we'd rather not know (B. Thorne and L. Eliot's books on boys/girls spring immediately to mind); but DH leads us out of the dark here, I think, with the insight that bedrock ethical principles enable us to pursue knowledge without any fear of how it might be used.

We are not immediately present to ourselves. Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. Self-identity is a bad visual system. Fusion is a bad strategy of positioning. The boys in the human sciences have called this doubt about self-presence "the death of the subject" defined as a single ordering point of will and consciousness. That judgment seems bizarre to me. I prefer to call this doubt the opening of nonisomorphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of the master subject. (585-586)

So, the subject has not died; it lives, but it is no longer "isomorphic," which is to say that it no longer resembles its (same)self in all times and places; which is to say that in time and space the subject is not of a fixed/constant nature but rather undergoes changes. I'm inclined to embrace this part (perhaps because I can actually understand it). There are ways in which this is (for the most part unfortunately) revolutionary in its simplicity. Just ask politicians who claim to have learned and evolved since their younger days only to thereby invite epithets like Wishy-Washy or Flip-Flopper. ... On the other hand, it only seems to solve the problem raised by bell hooks of individual subjectivity being questioned just as the subjugated have arrived to claim it. Indeed, "we are not immediately present to ourselves," and "self-identity is a bad visual system." Hence the "subjugated" subject who arrogates to speak as such in fact commits the same commutative/associative fallacy as does the ignorant outsider who asks "What do YOUR people think?"

[from a notebook, probably late 2017]

COVID Confessional—On Maintaining Just the Right Amount of Skepticism

Among the many challenges of the past thirteen months has been the everyday-epistemological challenge of staying grounded and vigilant in an environment of ever-polarizing opinion. Recent conversations with two valued friends reveal the danger of the post-COVID world bifurcating absolutely into sheep and denialists. I hasten to insist that these are not the only two options.

I am someone who will not even take a pain killer except in the most extreme of circumstances. I am willing to accept science while reserving the right to limit my exposure to scientific error. Science has given me a few new sets of front teeth over the years, no small matter in my case, and yet I shudder to think what toxins I may have ingested this way (and may yet ingest again). I am an enthusiastic but late adopter of technology in something like Mumford's mode, seeking to enhance life through machine use and to avoid outsourcing life to machines. I don't like to change, but in a pinch I am often surprised at just how adaptable I can be. I think this is a fine way to live. The pandemic is, nevertheless, something of a challenge to this outlook. Like a really bad headache or a baseball to the chops, the pandemic forces the issue. It also forces us to consider how our decisions affect others in a way that literal aches and pains, being perhaps the exceptional "individual" problems, do not.

Somewhere between an "abundance of caution" and "throwing caution to the wind," I would posit a workable middle-ground location, something like a "minimum of caution," meaning: take all the precautions that don't cost you anything; prioritize the basics. I speak now somewhat in the language of N.N. Taleb, who, with a much greater technical and practical arsenal at his disposal, handles these sorts of epistemological questions brilliantly and in precisely the way I, albeit supremely lacking in such technical and practical equipage, have often tended to think about them, especially in the realms of ingestion and vaccination. I confess that my inner "negative empiricist" tends to rather selectively conjure himself in matters of ingestion and vaccination. I am also guilty of focusing too exclusively on downsides and of underrating upsides, as Kahneman and colleagues have shown is endemic to our "fast" brain. (I accept this science!) And I know much, much less than any committed consumer of news likely does about the granular details of vaccine ingredients and reactions. Taleb, Kahneman, and others have curated for lay consumption the quite troublesome phenomenon of more information leading to worse decision-making. I don't know that the vaccination question truly falls into this category, but I am very comfortable applying the "minimum of caution" heuristic to it, because that is the heuristic I apply most everywhere else. So, given my membership in the new untouchable subcaste of "workers who can't work from home," I decided to get vaccinated without thinking too hard (okay, without thinking at all) about ingredients, reactions, science, or politics.

There is a third branch of the barbell which Taleb, bless him, promises to take up but never really does (or not to my satisfaction), this being ethics and morals. With COVID we have a perfect irritant for this epistemological wound: the various corrective measures, from the least to the most intrusive, are really more about protecting others than about protecting ourselves. My "minimum of caution" works well for decisions which affect only me, but it is not such a simple proposition here.

Masking and distancing seem to me like archetypal barbell propositions: most of the benefit can be had this way without costing us much. The more onerous, top-down measures further limiting what masked, distanced people are allowed to do are, on the other hand, very costly, and more importantly, they are differently and inequitably costly. Some curious rhetoric has come out of this sagging barbell. Late last summer I heard a scientist-commentator claim, in response to the proposal that restictions be eased for low-risk groups on grounds of limiting economic damage, that the science on risk factors was not conclusive enough to permit such a policy. Perhaps so, but then much policy had already been made based on this fairly crude science. During the period where grocery stores blocked off the early morning for high-risk groups to shop, I never heard anyone waiting in line at Whole Foods invoke the ultimate uncertainty of science so that they could get in faster; and yet this tack was enthusiastically taken by a well-established scientist in order to avoid litigating a bedrock ethical/worldview conflict. This I find frustrating.

I draw a very different conclusion from uncertainty: if all science is to some degree uncertain, then moral urgency is always already part of how we use science, and this is where the real action is. In the moral framework I am calling a "minimum of caution," we do not treat science as certain until we are forced by circumstances to do so. When we are forced to confront a life-threatening injury or to bring a serial rape suspect to trial, we behave as if we are certain of the science even if in reality we know we cannot be; and then, implicitly at least, we consent to live with the possibility of being wrong. The notion of degrees of certainty, of whether we are 50%, 90%, or 99.99% confident in a given piece of science, is, I want to argue, quite easily and quite often rendered irrelevant by extenuating circumstances, and this more often than we would like to think. Put another way, for each of these percentages there is a countervailing degree of moral urgency which can dictate quick and dirty adjustments, adjustments which are quite unscientific but not at all irrational. If this were not the case, all science would continually be moving halfway toward usability without ever arriving. Colloquially speaking, in the end we are either "in" on some given piece of science or we are "out" on it. In deed if not in word, the percentages are always either zero or one hundred. Because of ultimate uncertainty, it is safer for the ego to be "out" on it all! Especially if, like Taleb, your personal success heuristic ("not being a sucker") is sensitive to the small-minded judgments of others¹. But it is not possible to get out of the game entirely. The pandemic has enabled us to be certain at least of that.

For the aforementioned scientist-commentator, then, I am left to think that the moral urgency of long lines at Whole Foods was low, while that of general containment of the virus was extremely high. The preliminary and crude understanding of risk factors was good enough for one and not for the other. She was not going to be certain of her results unless forced to (or, more to the point, allowed to) by circumstance. I accept this reasoning. But this is not the reasoning that came out of her mouth. It is not the reasoning that laypeople like me, who already were ignoring the news even before we read Taleb's diatribes against following the news too closely, were accosted with that day upon daring to come up for epistemological air. Only sheep and dinosaurs can survive on such meager rations.

There are a few reasons why I have become fixated on this single instance. One is that, admittedly, skepticism comes easily when you've been cut off at the knees. Another is that I previously associated the uncertainty card only with the rightest of climate deniers and the leftest of social constructivists. In those cases too, litigation of the science is more interesting intellectually than it is morally necessary for laypeople. Pollution and waste were already killing us a thousand other ways (even my old roommate the climate denier did not deny this); similarly, perfect knowledge of the genetic-social nexus is neither necessary nor sufficient when it comes to how we interact with others. Even where the science itself is pursued with perfect disinterest, it might as well still be called ideological science. The wider world makes it so.

One area where we need science most is when the consequences of our actions are otherwise hidden from us. Some such things are perfectly transparent though, and others can be made transparent rather easily, without formal scientific intervention. I suspect it is the things we have learned this way that have always shaped how we use science more so than anyone's notion of scientific certainty. If we can stay open, honest, and yes, just slightly skeptical, this is precisely as it should be.

1. Taleb is best read for general thrust and not for small details. He himself has noticed as much, and he's right. That said, I think the construction of the "sucker" heuristic has a transparent epistemological flaw which is pragmatically significant, even in Los Angeles. The "sucker" heuristic may work brilliantly in the realm of global trading, but it does not work well at all in, say, a 5-on-5 basketball game. The defender who tries the hardest and looks the worst is often the best defender on one team, who is customarily tasked with guarding the best scorer on the other team. On the professional level, the try-hards more often get "posterized" by spectacular dunkers while the deadbeats simply get out of the way and start jogging up court. The advent of Analytics has somewhat exonerated the "suckers" here, at least in the eyes of their employers; fans of course are another matter, and fans ultimately are very important to revenue. At the recreational level, since I am often the tallest, I have been the try-hard "sucker" many times. I also have observed and participated in many games amongst young men for whom "not being a sucker" was almost as important as winning, and a few where it was transparently much more important than winning. This is how I learned what it feels like to "win" while also being a "sucker." It is not a good feeling! Different from losing, but just as bad. There is nothing absolutely wrong with any of this vis-a-vis mere recreation, but needless to say it is a rather extreme departure from the archetype "basketball." It is also, I would contend, a strong indication of trauma given the near-universality of competitive play among men and the lengths to which men typically go to win even in the recreational realm.

I am reasoning by induction here, which a true negative empiricist wouldn't allow. Perhaps I should reformulate: basketball is a single counterexample which disproves any conceit that "not being a sucker" has universal applicability to zero-sum games. (At least if you like to win. Even in Minneapolis.)

Compression

This is the promised follow-up to yesterday's post

In his lecture, Treasure asserts that compressed audio makes listeners tired and irritable, and that cheap headphones pose a greater risk of damaging hearing because listeners are apt to simply turn the volume up in order to compensate for the lack of clarity. I listen to a lot of compressed audio, usually on the cheapest headphones I can get, and to me, the listening environment has a lot more to do with the volume I listen at than the sound quality does. The middle of the day is the worst time for me to listen because that's when there's the most background noise, both outside and inside; morning and evening are much more conducive.

Whereas it has been observed that some people damage their hearing by continually turning the volume up throughout a listening session as their ears adjust to the new level, I find that the opposite is also possible. If things are relatively quiet, I'm able turn down the volume as the session goes along. I try to proceed this way whenever possible; it's not just healthier, but begets more focused listening. It also means that the levels at which I listen to highly compressed audio, while they may be higher, are not so much higher that I'm putting myself at risk.

All of this aside, the bit about our brains trying to imagine the missing data in a compressed file is laughable. The human brain is not capable of "sampling" at the rates of even the lossiest audio; if it was, we would actually hear the holes in the sound. And even if this was possible, it might be unpleasant, or it might not. It might be heard as a disfigurement of a great work of art, or it might be heard as a new kind of art. The truly dangerous aspect of what Treasure is putting forward is the direct attribution of various psychological effects to particular sounds in utter disregard of social and cultural context. If what he's saying is true, it would seem to preclude the very possibility of art music, most of which makes occasional (if not copious) use of the types of sounds he labels as inherently harmful. He's the first coming of the anti-Cage, if you will, and hopefully the last.

In fairness, Treasure had to squeeze his talk into an exceedingly small time frame imposed by TED; deep in the comments, he refers to, "the rather stressful experience of cramming a TED talk into 7 minutes" as an explanation for a minor omission. In this article, presumably not written under those kind of constraints, he's more rational, granting that different listeners will find different things soothing and irritating. Even so, his advice to avoid listening to too much rap and death metal because they convey anger is codgerly at best. Some people listen to these musics when they're angry precisely as a way to let it all out and get it over with quicker, which would seem to fit with the kinds of things he's advocating; but that point aside, I think it is, again, presumptuous to conclude that music which conveys anger and that which is made out of anger are necessarily the same thing, or that all listeners will necessarily perceive a nexus in the same works, whether there is one or not. And as I opined yesterday, the construction of a system for evaluating the healthiness of music based on something as subjective as the emotion it supposedly conveys is an outright dangerous idea, and invites 1984-ish dystopian visions in anyone who claims fealty to musical modernism.

An interesting test case here would be Messiaen, who often used birdsong he transcribed himself in his music, and whose sacred music could never be labeled as having been written out of anything but love; yet even so, there is much harsh dissonance in his music, and while it is clearly more accessible than many composers of the era, it still might as well be Webern to many people. I wonder if "good intentions" truly transcend style for Mr. Treasure?

The invocation of the term "schizophonia" is also bothersome. The "dog barking at the speakers" doesn't know what a speaker is or why it emits sound; it doesn't have a lifetime of social conditioning to help it understand when it's time for barking and when it's time for aesthetic contemplation; and it doesn't inherit an immaculate, centuries-old tradition of art music from its canine ancestors. One would think that the dissociation of sound from its original source is something humans are well-enough equipped to deal with, most especially if context is considered. Of course hearing a gunshot fired from behind you is scary! To compare this with listening to an iPod on a bus is completely absurd. Schizophonia is a big scary word that resembles the name of a common and devastating mental illness, yet it seems to refer to an exceedingly transient, externally imposed condition rather than a chronic, internal one (and one which is, ironically, imposed on us several times over in the TED lecture, notably by the crack that suddenly appears in the "schizophonia" graphic itself ca. 2:40; apparently it wasn't enough of a deterrent to warrant sacrificing some visual accoutrements). Besides, according to schizophonia's hilarious entry at Urban Dictionary, there's nothing to worry about.

Finally, consider that Treasure is a businessman. He has a book out. He runs a consulting firm. Some of this is so ridiculous that it almost seems like a publicity stunt. If you Google him, you'll see that it's working, as well as (frighteningly) finding some sympathetic followers. I'd otherwise be inclined to ignore it, but let's face it, if I in my very occasional sampling of only the most esoteric of music blogs managed to stumble on one of his lectures, then he's getting over. (And here I am giving him more publicity.) In any case, if you want to talk about making sound harmful, about abusing its properties, using it to manipulating people's emotions, or sullying its natural beauty, I can't think of a more distasteful use of sound than for the ends of Treasure's firm. It's an interesting pose he's striking.

Oppression

I'll follow up on this tomorrow, but for now, just let this TED talk soak in and see if it doesn't make your skin crawl just a little bit:



The bit about compression causing your brain to work harder to fill in the missing data is just plain funny; the bit about music which is "made with love" being beneficial is no laughing matter, though, especially when an organization as influential as TED is giving someone a platform to state it as a scientifically proven fact. It seems that there are an awful lot of people working awfully hard to come up with just about any reason they can to prove goddammit that contemporary music is the devil's spawn. It's not hard to imagine a dystopian society where such "scientific" evidence is wielded as a McCarthyistic bludgeon against musicians whose source material is judged by some bureaucrat to have been written out of hate. Let's hope it doesn't get that far.

Hidden Tracks (ii)

As long-time MFEDI readers know, I've been fixated for some time on the question of the inherent value of art considered apart from it's content. This comes as a direct consequence of the frequency with which I encounter people, institutions, theories, philosophies and public policies alike that take art to be an inherently positive thing simply by virtue of its being art. The most obvious flaw in this idea is that we, collectively, cannot seem to agree on what is and is not art in the first place, and hence, a rational debate is impossible because we cannot agree on a definition of our terms. But what if we could define our terms, proceeded to have the debate, and reached the conclusion that all art is, in fact, wholesome, constructive, and valuable (i.e. the way many seem to have concluded anyway, but which I personally disagree with)? Where would that leave us?

More recently, what fascinates me about this idea is the matter of supply and demand. How much of a good thing can we have before that good thing becomes a mediocre thing, or even a bad thing? Is there anything about art that would lead us to expect it to be immune to this mechanism (other than the fact that because we can't define what it is, we can't really know the answer)?

Supply and demand is an economic principle, but there are parallels to this idea in every conceivable facet of life. There's the physical aspect of it, seen in the principle of diffusion; the geographical/migratory aspect of it, seen in people going where the jobs are, where the resources are, or simply trying to get farther and farther from each other (i.e. suburban sprawl); the biological aspect of it, where practically any element in its purest form is toxic to living things, where we know it is possible to die from drinking too much of the substance most essential to survival (water), and where overpopulation ultimately leads to near extinction.

I lack the formal Philosophical grounding to know if there's an established global term for this idea outside the realm of economics, but one can clearly see that it is everywhere, both in nature and in society. It is not only possible to have too much of a good thing, it is virtually always the case that having too much of a good thing is 100 times worse than having just barely enough, and only marginally better than having none at all. Hence, even if we cannot define art, it would be silly to believe that its case would any different. And so I worry about it. A lot.

Art is everywhere. There's more music available for free online than a person could listen to in a thousand lifetimes. It would be a chore to find a vacant storefront in a bad neighborhood to fix up and turn into an art space because most all of them have already been bought up and turned into art spaces. And then there's the relatively recent idea of finding beauty in everyday objects or sounds (i.e. from Cage, et al), something which I embrace wholeheartedly, sometimes against the complaints of acquaintances and colleagues, but which also scares the living crap out of me as an artist because it would seem to render my work irrelevant, even to myself.

Digging even further, there's the "music is for everybody" issue. There's scarcely a saying I feel more conflicted about than that, since, while I (and everyone else) would just love to believe it solely for it's power to validate what we do, we all know it's not true. Speaking in absolutes is a death wish in rational debate, and this saying manages to do it not once but twice, first with "music" (i.e. ALL music? Music generally? What?) and, more obviously, with "everybody." More relevant to the present discussion, though, is that us musicians are literally putting ourselves out of business with this phrase. This is a brutal irony considering that it is most often trotted out as a marketing tool aimed at getting more kids involved in music, and hence yielding more income both for the music teachers who teach them and for the performers whose concerts it is assumed they will then attend for the rest of their lives. I've bellyached before about the soulless cynicism inherent in that thinking, so I'll leave that issue alone for now. The point is that in aiming to create more and more of a good thing, we inevitably create too much of it, and that it's equally inevitable that this will leave us worse off in the long run than we were before.

Some would (and do) argue that we're not creating the same good thing here, since the vast majority of these students don't become professional musicians, and hence don't offer a competing product (i.e. "professional level" performances). In a world with any justice whatsoever, that would indeed be the case, but we do not live in such a world, for in practice, audiences don't choose "professional level" performances over less-than competent performances; they're more interested in their friends' bands than anyone else's band simply because it's their friends, and they largely can't tell the difference in musicianship anyway where there is one. The retort to that is that more music education creates more astute listeners who can tell the difference. Perhaps, but it also creates more friends who continue to perform at a less-than-professional level as adults, creating a product that friendless professional musicians simply can't compete with, no matter how good they are. Further, it is demonstrable that more and more of these students are pursuing professional careers insofar as that entails majoring in music in college. That's the crown jewel of the "music is for everybody" battlecry, and one which is responsible above all else for its exceptional power to induce the opposite of its intended outcome.

Why the extreme cynicism? Because if there's one thing I wasn't prepared for when i left school, it was what audiences everywhere do and don't notice about musical performances. We've all had the experience of playing a less-than-stellar show and subsequently receiving a warm compliment from an oblivious audience member who couldn't tell the difference. That's not really what I'm talking about, though. I'm thinking more of identity: age, gender, dress, manner, politics and social group all seem to have more to do with success than musicianship does. I won't even tack on the seemingly obligatory "...these days" to that last statement, since "these days" are the only ones I know. Who can say if it's ever been any different? I do have a theory, though, which is that the age of musical plenty we live in has made this even worse than it could possibly have been before. Indeed, it would mark a rather momentous break with countless observable phenomena in nature and human society alike if this were not the case.

It's fun (and very blogospheric of me, I must admit) to list off economic, geographic and biological principles as if I know something about them, whereas in truth, I have only a cursory understanding of each phenomenon I listed. Nonetheless, allow me to attempt to spin this cursory understanding into a halfway compelling recommendation for the way forward. As I understand it, the word "sustainability" is on the tips of a lot of people's tongues these days. This is because we're slowly realizing that economic growth is not mediated solely by our desire to make it happen, but by factors beyond our direct control, like the non-renewability of certain natural resources, or the impossibility of technology replacing more workers than there are left to replace. Hence, instead of continued economic growth benefitting everyone, we are finding that the costs of maintaining a certain rate of growth are so severe as to defeat its utilitarian purpose.

It's more than a stretch to lump modern-day arts advocacy in with fascistic global capitalism, but I don't think it's debatable to say that growth-for-growth's-sake describes the philosophy of one as well as the other, or that there's a tipping point right around the corner in both cases. As we know, too much of something portends that thing's imminent starvation or diffusion or migration or explosion. So-called sustainability isn't so much about surviving that endgame as it is about achieving a kind of equilibrium that prevents the situation from ever getting quite so dire in the first place. So what does sustainability mean in the economics of art? A good start would be to abandon citing extrinsic benefits as the primary method of establishing art's value in the public arena. Nothing could be less sustainable than that smoke and mirrors act. A related action would be to embrace the idea of exposure over that of proselytizing, or in other words, to present music one believes strongly in to new audiences without a hint of superiority or moralization. This ensures a sustainable (if small) influx of new listeners who haven't merely been fooled or seduced into showing up. And last, of course, is to abandon the conceit of music being for everyone.

How could I write such a thing? Besides knowing it not to be true, the idea terrifies me, and not because I'm some elitist snob who'd rather be poor and unknown if it means getting the better of my aesthetic enemies. Sign me up for fame and fortune yesterday, but I'm afraid that what's keeping me from getting there isn't a lack of a musical awareness in the world at large, but rather a heaping, volatile, unsustainable pile of it that just keeps on growing, rendering my contribution to it more meaningless by the hour.

A Bit of Cutesy Philisophy

Popular discourse makes a distinction between an art and a science, the latter being applied to any pursuit that is empirical, objective and/or quantifiable, and the former being used to indicate that the rules of engagement are somehow vague, undefined, and/or subjective. Dating, it might be said, is an art in that there's no quantifiable recipe for success; conversely, bicycle maintenance could be called a science in that there is more clearly a right and a wrong way to do things. Hitting a baseball or a golf ball are good examples of tasks that might appear to fall somewhat in the middle: some great players may appear to have wildly erratic or idiosyncratic swings, your coach might say, but they all do a few crucial things exactly the same way.

This widely understood distinction notwithstanding, abstract art and the hard sciences do have at least one thing in common, along with athletics as well: they afford human beings the opportunity to cultivate, demonstrate, and freely exercise their understanding of and control over their physical environment. The hard sciences may be empirical, logical, and rigorous, but they are also expressive in this way; and abstract art, while devoid of literal meaning and hence ensured of the most subjective of receptions from its audience, is not created randomly, but by being in touch with physical reality in a way that can only be called scientific.

Accomplishments such as calculus, the slam dunk, and The Rite of Spring are all brash displays of a certain level of control over and understanding of the parameters of our physical environment. In my view, this is every bit as much an inherently artistic or aesthetic concept as it is a scientific one.