The European Rationalist – In Reason We Trust

An overview of Ken Wilber’s book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Shambhala, 1995) by Roger Walsh

Roger Walsh (MD) is a Professor of Psychiatry, Philosophy and Anthropology, Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior, University of California College of Medicine, Irvine.

Scientific disciplines have been suffering from an embarrassment of riches. As data accumulate and disciplines fragment into subdisciplines, the search for some comprehensive synthesis seems both more appealing and more hopeless. Take psychology for example. From its humble beginnings at the end of the nineteenth century it has now exploded into a cacophony of competing schools and therapies. The cries and handwringing over the need for synthesis have grown increasingly distraught. Consequently it is not surprizing in that the appearance of a book in 1977, The Spectrum of Consciousness, which seemed to offer just such a synthesis, was greeted with great excitement–even though written by a young unknown author, Ken Wilber, who was not formally trained as a psychologist. Indeed, in some ways Spectrum did more than had been hoped for because it offered a synthesis of not only Western psychologies but Eastern ones as well.

Other equally encompassing books by Wilber soon followed, such as The Atman Project. Here, Wilber integrated diverse developmental theories, again of both East and West, into a unified view that traced development from infancy into normal adulthood and then into post conventional stages “beyond normality” described by diverse contemplative disciplines. In Up from Eden he used his developmental model as a framework to attempt to map the evolution of human cognition and consciousness. Other works on sociology, religion, philosophy and physics soon followed. By 1987, Wilber had created an interdisciplinary collection of rare scope and integrative power.

Then followed a painful silence of more than five years. These were hardly uneventful years for Wilber. Ten days after their marriage, his wife Treya discovered a breast cancer and the next five years were devoted to helping her manage the disease and eventually to die. A further two years were devoted to mourning and to writing a moving book Grace and Grit chronicling her life and death. Now Wilber has burst out with another major work, by far his largest to date, and what he describes as his first “mature work”.

The story of the book’s origins is amusing. In 1991 Wilber published a brief article on gender differences which evoked a critical letter from one woman. Wilber, in turn, began writing a letter to the editor in response. That opened the floodgates and the years of dammed up thinking poured out. Four years later, after reading more than 300 books on feminism, 300 on ecology, and more than another 400 on various topics such as anthropology, evolution and philosophy, Wilber offers Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution, a massive 800-page work which is volume one of a planned three volume series. Heaven help us if Wilber ever starts to write an article.

The aim of the book is to trace evolution–physical, biological and human–and to set it within the context of the perennial philosophy: the common core of wisdom at the heart of the great religious traditions.

The scope of the work is extraordinary. Only a handful of thinkers, such as Aurobindo in the East and Hegel in the West, have assembled such vast evolutionary visions. Yet Wilber’s view is unique in grounding that vision in contemporary research in fields such as cosmology, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and ecology.

This vast scope and scholarship comes at a certain cost. To say the least, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is daunting to mere mortals. In addition, its scope makes it difficult to grasp and retain the gestalt. This is not because the book is obtuse or badly written. On the contrary, considering the profusion, and novelty, of the ideas, the writing is remarkably smooth and lucid. Rather, the problem is that the sheer number of novel ideas means that those early in the book tend to be pushed out of memory.

The major purpose of this article is therefore to offer an overview that may give a sense of the gestalt or vision and thereby provide a framework allowing easier and more retentive reading. Consequently this is more an overview than a detailed critical review.

The book covers so many topics that probably no one person could hope to give informed critiques on all of them. I suspect that this book will be the topic of specialized critiques by disciplinary experts for several decades. What follows, then, is the central thread, shorn of numerous intriguing offshoots.

Our Fractured Worldview

Wilber begins by drawing attention to our ecological crises. Ecological movements usually assume that these crises reflect a disastrously fractured worldview; a worldview often damned as dualistic, mechanistic, atomistic, anthropocentric, patriarchal and pathologically hierarchical; a worldview that fragments humans from nature, mind from body, and spirit from everything. Consequently, movements such as deep ecology and ecofeminism advocate a new worldview which is said to be more holistic, integrative and relational.

Wilber explores the nineteenth century scientific origins of this fractured worldview when the “two arrows of time” were first recognized. Paradoxically it was discovered that according to the second law of thermodynamics the physical universe seemed to be running down toward increasing entropy, whereas the discovery of evolution showed that life appeared to be moving toward greater complexity and differentiation (negentropy). The physiosphere and the biosphere, the physical sciences and biological sciences, therefore seemed irrevocably divorced and although there were a variety of theoretical attempts at integration–for example, materialistic reductionism, phenomenalism, epiphenomelanism–none were wholly satisfactory.

Only in the late twentieth century did science finally offer a firm basis for reunification when it was discovered that matter has a potential for producing greater order and complexity. For example, as the Nobel laureate chemist Ilya Prigogine discovered, certain biochemical systems called “dissipative structures” can grow in chemical complexity, in apparent defiance of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. This defiance is thought to provide a possible basis for the origin of life.

From this reunification, in part, were born the various system sciences of complexity such as general systems theory, cybernetics, nonequilibrium thermodynamic systems theory, and evolutionary systems theory. Some of these, such as evolutionary systems theory, specifically claim that similar patterns of process and evolution can be identified across the physical, biological, and noetic spheres. The key point is that there is now significant scientific evidence for a self-organizing, self-transcending process in matter, life and mind.

Before he can proceed with developing his theory, Wilber needs to rehabilitate the concept of hierarchy, a concept central to his theory and that of many other evolutionary researchers. Hierarchy has become somewhat of a dirty word in some circles and critics claim that all hierarchy necessitates ranking or dominating that oppresses, marginalizes or destroys. It is not uncommon to hear that we need to do away with all hierarchies. However, as Wilber points out, this is not only impossible but an example of what philosophers call performative contradiction since the preference for nonheirarchies over hierarchies is itself a hierarchical value judgement. Qualitative distinctions are an inevitable part of human experience.

Moreover, systems sciences argue that hierarchy is essential for integration, wholeness and systems functioning. Understood in this context, hierarchy is simply a ranking of phenomena according to their holistic capacity. As such it does not necessarily entail value hierarchies, domination or oppression.

Having rehabilitated the concept of hierarchy, or holarchy as he prefers to call it (adopting Arthur Koestler’s term), Wilber next turns to the common principles and processes that hold for systems and phenomena across the three great realms: physical, biological and mental. For Wilber the fundamental category is the holon, a term introduced by Koestler, which implies that every entity and phenomenon in the universe it neither merely a whole nor a part but both simultaneously.

Using the concepts of hierarchy and holons, Wilber is able to clarify the nature of various hierarchies and their misuse. For example, most popular general systems theories of ecology and ecofeminism are based on some version of a holarchy of being, a kind of web of life. Humans are usually inserted into this web as one strand in or part of the biosphere or Gaia. At first glance this move seems very neat, organic and egalitarian.

However, in what is perhaps the most intellectually challenging part of the book, Wilber demonstrates that things are not quite this simple. Hierarchically ordered structures and emergents (properties or capacities that emerge de novo at certain levels of hierarchy) cannot be interpreted simply in terms of, nor considered as parts of, lower order phenomena. For example, when atoms of hydrogen and oxygen combine, the result is a molecule of water with novel emergent properties, such as wetness. These emergent properties are totally unpredictable from the properties of its constituent atoms and cannot be described in terms of atoms–and, of course, the water molecule is not contained within its atoms.

So too life, or the biosphere, is not simply contained in, reducible to, or explicable simply in terms of, the physiosphere: the realm of pure matter. Life has emergent properties not found in the properties of its chemical constituents. Life, in other words, has properties and capacities that seem to defy description in terms of the movements of the mere molecules. Likewise, the noosphere (the realm of sentient life) emerges from and is not simply in the biosphere. That is, the noosphere is not a component of the larger whole called biosphere but is an emergent that in some sense transcends it. Ontologically, the noosphere thus cannot be reduced to, or considered merely as, a strand of the biosphere. And humans are compound individuals comprised of all three “spheres” or levels; we cannot be regarded simply as strands of the biosphere which comprises only the physical and biological levels.

This is a difficult but important argument which can only be sketched briefly here. It appears to resolve a number of puzzles that have plagued ecological thinking such as how one can accord greater value to some forms of life, including humans, than others while simultaneously honoring all life. Wilber argues at length that this perspective is not antiecological, as it might appear at first glance. Rather, he insists that it naturally results in an enhanced concern for life and the environment which are now recognized as parts of one’s own compound individuality.

The Four Quadrants

The schemes and hierarchies considered so far all deal exclusively with exteriors since general systems theories try to be empirical. Hence they almost entirely overlook interiority or subjectivity. Systems theories are essentially theories of surfaces or exteriors.

To understand interiors–subjectivity, experience and consciousness–requires another approach, namely empathy, introspection and interpretation. In short, systems theories have given us a very valuable but very partial view of systems and evolution. This in itself is not bad. However, major troubles ensue when systems scientists claim, as all too many of them do, to be mapping, or at least capable of mapping, all domains of reality.

Wilber wants to expand this view. He argues that comprehensive approaches need to include objective studies not only of the external behavior of individual holons but also of social or group holons and, in addition, the interior or subjectivity of both individuals and groups. He therefore introduces what he calls “the four quadrants” model, with individual and social holons in the upper and lower halves respectively, and exterior and interior in the right and left halves respectively.

Reductionism can seem reasonable since all holons do in fact have both left- and right-hand quadrants and empirical data can be so obvious. However no quadrant is wholly reducible to another and both gross and subtle reductionism can be destructive. This can be insidious in the case of systems theorists, for example, because these people believe that they are truly embracing all reality in a holistic manner and seem quite unaware of just how much, and how much of value, is often missing from their worldview.

At this stage Wilber has laid the conceptual groundwork for tracing development and evolution, especially human evolution, across all four quadrants. This he proceeds to do.

Human Evolution

Wilber uses the maps devised by cognitive developmental psychologists, such as Jean Piaget, to trace the psychological development of individuals–which he ties to social and cultural evolution from early hominids up to present society. Wilber argues that through history there has been an evolution of both individual cognitive and cultural unfolding. Each evolutionary and historical epoch has been associated with a specific stage of individual cognitive development together with correlative socially shared worldviews and moralities.

The general idea is that cultural evolution and individual development go hand in hand. Societies tend to foster individual development up to their normal level and hinder development beyond it and there is a relatively close correlation between an individual’s expectable psychological development and a culture’s “developmental center of gravity”.

Wilber pays particular attention to the evolution of gender relations and the human relationship to the environment at each historical stage. In particular he points out, drawing on a significant body of feminist research, that, contrary to popular assumptions, the historical inequality of women cannot be attributed solely to male domination and oppression. Rather it is also attributable in part to biological factors such as differential strength, to economic-productive factors such as types of tools and modes of food acquisition, and to developmental stages and worldviews in which equality was not a salient feature or moral imperative. This allows him to view the emergence of liberation movements as a partial reflection of the emergence of rationality (and liberation from mere biological determinants of evolution), and to interpret the previous gender inequalities as a function of more than merely the male malevolence and female “sheepness” implied by some feminists.

It also allows him to draw some chilling conclusions about the possible nonegalitarian and gender divisive effects of new information technologies which are currently so male dominated. I had simply assumed that women’s liberation was a largely irreversible evolutionary dynamic. Wilber, however, points to the power of a culture’s techno-economic base in determining its social hierarchy, and argues that there is no guarantee that future technologies will necessarily foster equality, a concern which seems to have been largely overlooked by feminists.

Transpersonal Development

Piaget’s “formal operational” stage of individual cognitive development and the rational worldview are the highest individual and cultural levels that are widely recognized by conventional mainstream science. However, Wilber goes on to point to evidence for the existence of higher stages and potentials latent in each of us. The first of these he calls “vision-logic”, which is a kind of network logic able to envision multiple relationships among individual concepts simultaneously. Of course Wilber is not alone here; several developmental researchers–such as Brunner, Flavell, Arieti and Gebser–have suggested a similar stage. Wilber is unique, however, in recognizing a similar stage in the developmental maps offered by contemplatives such a Plotinus and the great Indian philosopher-sage Aurobindo.

Beyond vision-logic, for Wilber, lie a further four major stages which he calls psychic, subtle, causal and nondual. These are transpersonal stages inasmuch as the self sense now begins to expand beyond the personal–what Alan Watts so picturesquely called “the skin encapsulated ego”–to encompass aspects, or even the whole, of humankind, life, the internal and external universe, and consciousness itself.

Wilber associates his psychic, subtle, causal and nondual stages with four types of mysticism: nature, deity, formless and nondual, and suggests as exemplars of each of these Ralph Waldo Emerson, St. Teresa, Meister Eckhart and Ramana Maharshi.

“Psychic” seems an unfortunate choice of term, being loaded with so much semantic baggage. However, as Wilber uses it, it has nothing to do with ESP or other psi phenomena. Rather, it refers to an initial transpersonal stage at which experience is still largely somatically based, such as in the experiences of kundalini energy or of the divinity of nature.

By the time the subtle levels have emerged, experience is more interior and concerned with subtle experiences of light and sound (shabd and nad yoga) or archetypal imagery, for example, the shaman’s power animals, the Hindu’s Ishta Deva, the Christian contemplative’s sacred figures. At the causal level all form and experiences drop away leaving only pure consciousness, such as the Buddhist’s nirvana, the Vedantin’s nirvikalpa samadhi, the Gnostic’s abyss. Finally, at the nondual culmination, phenomena reappear but are immediately and spontaneously recognized as projections, expressions, or manifestations of consciousness and as none other than consciousness. This is the Hindu’s sahajsamadhi and Zen’s “form is emptiness”.

Thus far, Wilber has traced evolution from early humanoids to postmodernism, and individual development from infancy to the nondual, and has correlated these with the developmental/ evolutionary profiles of a host of related phenomena such as worldviews, morality, identity, gender relations and ecological relations, among others. Clearly it seems time to finish the book and have a beer. Not so! For Wilber this is only part one of the book and only half the picture: namely the ascending half or “the path of ascent”. In part two he traces another movement, “the path of descent”. And it is the divorce of these two that Wilber claims to be one of the most fundamental of all Western dualisms.

Ascent and Descent

For Wilber, the two Western exemplars of philosopher-sages who have integrated the paths of ascent and descent are Plato and Plotinus. Plato, for example, maps out a path of ascent toward “the Good” in The Republic and The Symposium. From this perspective the Platonic Good is a direct mystical experience of the causal realm–beyond qualities and manifestations, and therefore transrational and transverbal–beside which the physical world is merely a cave of shadows. This is a classical description, perhaps the classical Western description, of ascent to the causal level. And this ascent and escape from the world became the archetypal Western goal.

Many critics assume Plato was only an ascender. However, a more careful reading reveals that Plato maps out both the paths of ascent and of descent. Having ascended to the Good he then reverses course. The world is now seen as an expression or an embodiment of the transcendent and indeed at its consummation: “a visible sensible God”. The Self-sufficing perfection of the Good is also a Self-projecting, Self-emptying fecundity. The Good is therefore not only the summit and goal of life but also the source and ground of the world, with which it is co-essential. And the source is made “more complete” by manifestation. Plato therefore integrates ascent and descent in the classic nondual stance found in both East and West which Wilber summarizes as:

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Flee the many, find the One\r\nEmbrace the Many as the One

In the East, disentangling oneself from the world and realizing the One is equated with wisdom. Subsequently descending and returning to embrace the Many is equated with compassion, and the integration of ascent and descent is “the union of wisdom and compassion”.

From this nondual perspective, the world and the flesh are not evil or degraded. However, becoming entranced by them, that is, becoming entrapped in maya, illusion–what psychologist Charles Tart calls the consensus trance–and thereby losing awareness of the transcendental domains and our unity with them is disastrous. Once lost, the challenge is to regain this awareness through a discipline of “recollection” that opens “the eye of the soul” (Plato), “the eye of the heart” (Sufism) or “the eye of Tao” (Taoism). The goal is an illusion-shattering wisdom that recognizes our true transcendental nature and is variously known as Hinduism’s jnana, Buddhism’s prajna, Islam’s marifah and sometimes as Christian gnosis.

The Platonic integration of ascent and descent was continued by Plotinus, in whom, according to St. Augustine, “Plato lived again”. He created a vast synthetic vision drawing on diverse traditions and grounded in his own mystical experience. His was the first comprehensive version of the great chain of being, a view that sees the cosmos as a vast hierarchy of existence extending from the physical through various subtle mental realms to the realm of pure consciousness or spirit.

As Wilber makes clear, what is crucial is that the systems of Plato and Plotinus, and similar Eastern philosopher-sages such as Aurobindo, are not primarily philosophies or metaphysics. Rather they are descriptions of direct replicable, phenomenological apprehensions arising in people who have developed to requisite stages. However all too often they have been interpreted as “mere metaphysics”.

For Plato, Plotinus, and Aurobindo, during developmental ascent each stage subsumes or envelops lower stages. The process of ascent, according to Plato, is driven by eros, the drive to find greater and greater unions. Complementarily, for Plotinus, at each stage of ascent the lower has to be embraced so that eros is balanced with agape (love and concern for the lover). The vision of a multidimensional kosmos, as the Greeks originally called it, interwoven by ascending and descending currents of love, would be a central theme of all subsequent neo-Platonic schools and would exert a profound influence on thought up to an beyond the Enlightenment.

But according to Wilber both eros and agape can go astray when they are not integrated in the individual, ideally by direct experience of the causal One.

Wilber suggests that the great Sigmund Freud represents a paradigmatic example of this divorce of eros and agape. Freud himself finally postulated two drives–eros and thanatos–and suggested that the aim of eros is “to establish unity.” For Freud much human misery results from the battle or conflict between the powers of ascent and descent. But Freud did not carry ascent to its transpersonal conclusions in union with the One. In fact he denigrated and pathologized such attempts as neurotic immaturities, thus confusing transpersonal progression with prepersonal regression, a confusion that Wilber calls the “pre/trans fallacy”. Hence he gave us a truncated vision of human possibilities and his prognosis for humankind was eternal conflict.

The misunderstanding or even pathologizing of development beyond conventional levels to transpersonal stages is tragically typical of the West. In much of the East, causal and nondual realization were recognized and acknowledged as the summit of psychological-spiritual development. Sages such as Nagarjuna and Shankara elaborated these realizations into highly sophisticated philosophies of madhyamika Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta respectively, which co-existed and harmonized with mythological interpretations. Individuals could thus draw inspiration from either philosophy or mythology or both according to their interests, capacities and development. However in the West, mythic-level Christianity became institutionalized and dominant as “The Church” which declared its own mythic-level interpretations alone as true, and higher transrational interpretations as blasphemous.

This is a specific example of the general principle that stages higher than one’s own tend to be misunderstood, pathologized and viewed as threatening. Wilber focuses on Christianity, but similar confusion and ambivalence toward mysticism seem characteristic of other traditions which fix final authority in a historical text and are therefore embarrassed by breakthroughs of new mystical insights. Thus Judaism has largely downplayed its mystical dimensions for centuries while there has long been tension between conventional Islam and its mystical wing of Sufism.

There are now growing efforts to revitalize contemplative practices and wisdom in each of these traditions. However, this revitalization comes at the end of a millennium in which the possibility of awakening was effectively blocked in the West and to this day mysticism remains widely misunderstood in Western culture.

Of course, the drive to transcendence could not be completely overwhelmed. Periodically there arose spectacular individuals–St. Augustine, Meister Eckhart, Dame Julian, St. Teresa, the Rhineland mystics and more–in whom transcendence triumphed over institutional barriers and who thereby faced themselves and the Church with the difficult and dangerous task of reconciling conventional mythology with transconventional realization. However, despite the profound insights of such mystics, the power of conventional myth (for example, Church dogma) largely reigned supreme until the rise of modernity and the empirical scientific outlook during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Ego and Eco Perspectives

For Wilber modernity is marked by two major trends which represent the good news and the bad news of this period. The good news, from the viewpoint of modernity, is the superseding of myths by rationality and the demand for empirical evidence. The bad news is that assent was equated with the mythic and the cry of “no more myths” became effectively “no more ascent”.

With the denial of the possibility of the developmental ascent, attention turned downward to the world; instead of an infinite above, there was now a horizontal infinite ahead. The universe was no longer seen as a great multidimensional holarchy of being. Rather it became an “ontological flatland” or great interlocking order, to be investigated by merely empirical (right hand) approaches only. This overlooking of the left-hand internal quadrants and reducing phenomena to their right-hand external dimensions alone constitutes what Wilber calls subtle reductionism. With the left-hand quadrants gone, so too are the grounding and validity of subjective phenomena such as values, meaning and purpose. The result is a barren meaningless flatland that has also been described as a “dedivinized”, “disqualified” or “disenchanted” world.

This worldview presented philosophers with a problem, the so-called central problem of modernity: namely the nature of human subjectivity and its relation to the world. The rational ego might say it was merely a strand in the great web of life, but that reduced the subjective to the empirical–reduced the left- to the right-hand quadrants. Now the question of the good life was whether to seek either autonomous agency of the rational ego generating its own morals and aspirations separate from the brute drives of nature, or on the other hand to seek communion with the natural world by connecting and communing with nature including its vital, sensual and sexual elements. This tension Wilber refers to as the conflict between the ego camp and the eco camp.

Immanuel Kant is the exemplar of the ego camp. For him the rational ego, the moral subject, is free only to the degree he or she disengages from the pulls of egocentric desire and of lower social forces, and becomes effectively autonomous. Thus arose the subjective part of the enlightenment paradigm, the so-called self-defining subject, the autonomous ego, disengaged self, philosophy of the subject, or self-sufficient subjectivity.

The problem with the cruder forms of the ego camp was their over-emphasis on the right-hand empirical representation of knowledge which focuses on surfaces, ignores interiority, and avoids dimensions of meaning, value and purpose.

The eco camp on the other hand felt, quite reasonably, that this paradigm of knowledge left the subject split from and alien, monochromatic world. The eco camp therefore argued for a return to nature so that the “living sources” of human existence could be recontacted and renewed. Consequently the appropriate mode of knowing was held to be not disinterested thought but powerful feeling, and the best means of expression and enhancing participation with nature were felt to be poetry and art.

The problem for the eco camp was just how to insert the self back into the stream of life without losing the benefits of reason. This proved particularly problematic since these thinkers tended to confuse differentiation and dissociation. Thus the developmental and evolutionary differentiation of the prerational fusion of self and world was seen not as a necessary development phase allowing subsequent higher order integration–but rather as a pathological process leading to paradise lost.

As with all things, both the ego and eco projects eventually faltered under the weight of their own limitations. The rational ego camp sought freedom from egocentric motives, natural impulses and conventional social domination. However, in doing so it often alienated, repressed and dissociated other goods including transpersonal experiences and the prepersonal domain of élan vital, body and sensuality.

The eco camp, however, sought freedom from excessive objectivity, autonomy and instrumentality. However, it ended up overvaluing emotional, irrational impulses and effectively saw nature as the source of sentiment rather than as the embodiment of Spirit as had Plato and Plotinus.

The Spirit of Evolution

The ego-eco conflict, expressed as absolute subject and absolute object, was a major intellectual project around the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Wilber, the resolution of this conflict was provided by the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling. For Schelling, the Enlightenment had differentiated mind and nature, but had largely forgotten the transcendental ground of both. Thus for Schelling, nature is objective Spirit, mind subjective Spirit. These two can be seen as totally unrelated, as the ego and eco camps had tended to do, but these two “apparent absolutes” are synthesized in the third great movement of Spirit.

According to both Schelling and Hegel, Spirit goes through three major phases. It first emanates or manifests as objective evolving nature. It then awakens to itself in subjective mind, and finally recovers its original identity in nondual awareness in which subject and object, mind and nature are unified. These idealists seem to have managed genuine glimpses of the nondual and some of its manifestations and implications. But the German idealism of Schelling and Hegel barely outlived its founders. Shortly after their deaths it was dismissed on logical and philosophical grounds as “mere metaphysics”.

However, Wilber suggests that its failure may lie more in practical than in purely philosophical causes. He emphasizes the enormous difference between obtaining spontaneous glimpses and securing sustained vision or even obtaining significant glimpses at will. Many contemplative traditions speak of two distinct tasks: first, of obtaining an initial, transient breakthrough glimpse–a “peek” experience–and second of being able to reproduce this glimpse at will and even stabilize it as an enduring vision. The challenge is to make a spontaneous experience a voluntary experience, to extend a peek experience into a plateau experience, or as the religious scholar Huston Smith put it so eloquently “to transform flashes of illumination into abiding light”.

This transformation requires a rigorous, authentic contemplative discipline and the German idealists had none. Consequently they were unable to offer a means by which other explorers could reproduce their insights which were thus largely unfalsifiable. By contrast, Asian idealists such as Shankara and Yogacara Buddhists offered both an art of transcendence by which practitioners could glimpse and then stabilize an experience of the nondual, and idealistic philosophies that have endured over centuries to articulate the insights that emerge.

Darwinian theory also exerted a chilling effect on the German idealist vision of evolution. Natural selection allowed science to deny any sort of eros or transcendent/emergent drive in nature. More recently this denial has been called into question because it is now apparent that although Darwinian natural selection may account for microevolution, it cannot account for macroevolution: the great evolutionary leaps and breakthroughs such as the production of eyes or functional wings.

In addition, the mind stretching investigations of the Big Bang are now pushing knowledge back to the absolute temporal limit dictated by Planck’s constant, which is the first 1043rd of a second. These findings indicate that the laws of physics were operative form the earliest conceivable instant. Materialistic explanations have a very hard time accounting for this, so the Big Bang has changed many reflective people into philosophical idealists. In light of all this, it is therefore not surprising that Wilber regards the creation of an adequate idealism as one of the essential challenges for the contemporary West.

The net result of these cosmological and evolutionary discoveries is that many philosophers of science now acknowledge some sort of self-transcendent drive in evolution. One of the major effects of Darwinian theory was thus not that it discovered a mechanism of macroevolution–it did not–but rather that for so long it obscured the recognition that an authentic evolutionary theory must acknowledge some self-transcendent drive akin to eros in the cosmos.

Wilber suggests that this self-transcendent drive is beginning to move increasing numbers of people beyond the conventional developmental level of rationality into transrational, transpersonal stages. He argues that the evolution of this process can be facilitated or hindered by the degree of sensitivity with which these intuitions of transpersonal stages are unpacked. All interiority and subjectivity must be interpreted, and the quality of this interpretation is vitally important to the birth of successive depths of that interiority. The types of error to which this unpacking and interpretation are prone can be categorized according to which of the four quadrants they emphasize or overemphasize.

Many people intuit higher stage experiences in purely upper left-hand quadrant (individual, subjective) terms. This interpretation focuses on subjective phenomena such as the “higher self”, “pure awareness”, omitting the lower left-hand and both right-hand quadrants–namely the cultural and social, and all objective manifestations. This effectively omits from consideration appropriate types of community activity and service demanded by higher stages and the appropriate techno-economic infrastructures necessary for supporting them.

A particularly unfortunate result can be the assumption that higher stage realizations free one from concern with the world. By contrast, deeper insights and understanding make clear that higher development necessarily entails embracing and serving the world which is no longer seen as separate from one’s Self. The challenge therefore is not just to contact the higher self but to see it “embraced in culture, embodied in nature, and embedded in social institutions”.

On the other hand, others interpret their higher stage intuitions primarily in objective terms, describing spirit as the sum total of all phenomena or the great web. This right-handed systems interpretation results in a descended flatland worldview that tends to ignore the left-hand quadrants of “I” and “we” dimensions. Consequently, while this view urges the embrace of all life, it usually does not understand the degree of inner transformation essential for this embrace, let alone the transformations required for union with the Good and the recognition of the world as “a living sensible God”. An unfortunate result is a descendent worldview that confuses Spirit with the sum total of shadows in the cave.

Thus for Ken Wilber, further individual development, cultural integration, ecological preservation and recognition of our true nature require appreciation of the possibility of development to transpersonal stages, a practice to realize them, and use all four quadrant to express them. Only by such a comprehensive vision, he says, can the spirit of evolution reach its fulfillment in us and through us. Though it will doubtless be amended and refined, Wilber’s vision seems a major contribution to this process.

Notes & References

1. K. Wilber, The Spectrum of Consciousness (Quest, 1977).

2. K. Wilber, The Atman Project (Quest, 1980).

3. K. Wilber, Up From Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution (Doubleday, 1981).

4. K. Wilber, A Sociable God (McGraw-Hill, 1983). K. Wilber, Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm (Anchor Doubleday, 1983); K. Wilber, Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World’s Great Physicists (Shambhala, 1984); D. Anthony, B. Ecker & K. Wilber (eds.), Spiritual Choices (Paragon House, 1987); K. Wilber, J. Engler, & D. Brown (eds.), Transformations of Consciousness (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986).

5. K. Wilber, Grace and Grit (Shambhala, 1991).

6. For another excellent discussion of contemporary criticisms of hierarchies and possible responses see D. Rothberg, “Philosophical Foundations of Transpersonal Psychology: An Introduction to Some Basic Issues”, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 18(1986):1-34.

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Over the next set of articles (and iterations thereof) we want to cover the structure of financial and world markets, models of democracy, and look at rationality of such endeavours so as to try to make some sense of world dynamics. We welcome articles and comments from all those who want to contribute to this dialogue, debate, and understanding in the context of rationality. 

As the dominant discourse would have it, the economic world is a pure and perfect order, implacably unrolling the logic of its predictable consequences, and prompt to repress all violations by the sanctions that it inflicts, either automatically or -more unusually – through the intermediary of its armed extensions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the policies they impose: reducing labour costs, reducing public expenditures and making work more flexible. Is the dominant discourse right? What if, in reality, this economic order were no more than the implementation of a utopia – the utopia of neoliberalism – thus converted into a political problem? One that, with the aid of the economic theory that it proclaims, succeeds in conceiving of itself as the scientific description of reality?

This tutelary theory is a pure mathematical fiction. From the start it has been founded on a formidable abstraction. For, in the name of a narrow and strict conception of rationality as individual rationality, it brackets the economic and social conditions of rational orientations and the economic and social structures that are the condition of their application.

To give the measure of this omission, it is enough to think just of the educational system. Education is never taken account of as such at a time when it plays a determining role in the production of goods and services as in the production of the producers themselves. From this sort of original sin, inscribed in the Walrasian myth (1) of “pure theory”, flow all of the deficiencies and faults of the discipline of economics and the fatal obstinacy with which it attaches itself to the arbitrary opposition which it induces, through its mere existence, between a properly economic logic, based on competition and efficiency, and social logic, which is subject to the rule of fairness.

That said, this “theory” that is desocialised and dehistoricised at its roots has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true and empirically verifiable. In effect, neoliberal discourse is not just one discourse among many. Rather, it is a “strong discourse” – the way psychiatric discourse is in an asylum, in Erving Goffman’s analysis (2). It is so strong and so hard to combat only because it has on its side all of the forces of a world of relations of forces, a world that it contributes to making what it is. It does this most notably by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relationships. It thus adds its own symbolic force to these relations of forces. In the name of this scientific programme, converted into a plan of political action, an immense political project is underway, although its status as such is denied because it appears to be purely negative. This project aims to create the conditions under which the “theory” can be realised and can function: a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives.

The movement toward the neoliberal utopia of a pure and perfect market is made possible by the politics of financial deregulation. And it is achieved through the transformative and, it must be said, destructive action of all of the political measures (of which the most recent is the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), designed to protect foreign corporations and their investments from national states) that aim to call into question any and all collective structures that could serve as an obstacle to the logic of the pure market: the nation, whose space to manoeuvre continually decreases; work groups, for example through the individualisation of salaries and of careers as a function of individual competences, with the consequent atomisation of workers; collectives for the defence of the rights of workers, unions, associations, cooperatives; even the family, which loses part of its control over consumption through the constitution of markets by age groups.

The neoliberal programme draws its social power from the political and economic power of those whose interests it expresses: stockholders, financial operators, industrialists, conservative or social-democratic politicians who have been converted to the reassuring layoffs of laisser-faire, high-level financial officials eager to impose policies advocating their own extinction because, unlike the managers of firms, they run no risk of having eventually to pay the consequences. Neoliberalism tends on the whole to favour severing the economy from social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory, that is a sort of logical machine that presents itself as a chain of constraints regulating economic agents.

The globalisation of financial markets, when joined with the progress of information technology, ensures an unprecedented mobility of capital. It gives investors concerned with the short-term profitability of their investments the possibility of permanently comparing the profitability of the largest corporations and, in consequence, penalising these firms’ relative setbacks. Subjected to this permanent threat, the corporations themselves have to adjust more and more rapidly to the exigencies of the markets, under penalty of “losing the market’s confidence”, as they say, as well as the support of their stockholders. The latter, anxious to obtain short-term profits, are more and more able to impose their will on managers, using financial directorates to establish the rules under which managers operate and to shape their policies regarding hiring, employment, and wages.

Thus the absolute reign of flexibility is established, with employees being hiring on fixed-term contracts or on a temporary basis and repeated corporate restructurings and, within the firm itself, competition among autonomous divisions as well as among teams forced to perform multiple functions. Finally, this competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualisation of the wage relationship: establishment of individual performance objectives, individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual salary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and of individual merit; individualised career paths; strategies of “delegating responsibility” tending to ensure the self-exploitation of staff who, simple wage labourers in relations of strong hierarchical dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales, their products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were independent contractors. This pressure toward “self-control” extends workers’ “involvement” according to the techniques of “participative management” considerably beyond management level. All of these are techniques of rational domination that impose over-involvement in work (and not only among management) and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities (3).

In this way, a Darwinian world emerges – it is the struggle of all against all at all levels of the hierarchy, which finds support through everyone clinging to their job and organisation under conditions of insecurity, suffering, and stress. Without a doubt, the practical establishment of this world of struggle would not succeed so completely without the complicity of all of the precarious arrangements that produce insecurity and of the existence of a reserve army of employees rendered docile by these social processes that make their situations precarious, as well as by the permanent threat of unemployment. This reserve army exists at all levels of the hierarchy, even at the higher levels, especially among managers. The ultimate foundation of this entire economic order placed under the sign of freedom is in effect the structural violence of unemployment, of the insecurity of job tenure and the menace of layoff that it implies. The condition of the “harmonious” functioning of the individualist micro-economic model is a mass phenomenon, the existence of a reserve army of the unemployed.

This structural violence also weighs on what is called the labour contract (wisely rationalised and rendered unreal by the “theory of contracts”). Organisational discourse has never talked as much of trust, co-operation, loyalty, and organisational culture as in an era when adherence to the organisation is obtained at each moment by eliminating all temporal guarantees of employment (three-quarters of hires are for fixed duration, the proportion of temporary employees keeps rising, employment “at will” and the right to fire an individual tend to be freed from any restriction).

Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief – the free trade faith – not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it. For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks. And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses.

Economists may not necessarily share the economic and social interests of the true believers and may have a variety of individual psychic states regarding the economic and social effects of the utopia which they cloak with mathematical reason. Nevertheless, they have enough specific interests in the field of economic science to contribute decisively to the production and reproduction of belief in the neoliberal utopia. Separated from the realities of the economic and social world by their existence and above all by their intellectual formation, which is most frequently purely abstract, bookish, and theoretical, they are particularly inclined to confuse the things of logic with the logic of things.

These economists trust models that they almost never have occasion to submit to the test of experimental verification and are led to look down upon the results of the other historical sciences, in which they do not recognise the purity and crystalline transparency of their mathematical games, whose true necessity and profound complexity they are often incapable of understanding. They participate and collaborate in a formidable economic and social change. Even if some of its consequences horrify them (they can join the socialist party and give learned counsel to its representatives in the power structure), it cannot displease them because, at the risk of a few failures, imputable to what they sometimes call “speculative bubbles”, it tends to give reality to the ultra-logical utopia (ultra-logical like certain forms of insanity) to which they consecrate their lives.

And yet the world is there, with the immediately visible effects of the implementation of the great neoliberal utopia: not only the poverty of an increasingly large segment of the most economically advanced societies, the extraordinary growth in income differences, the progressive disappearance of autonomous universes of cultural production, such as film, publishing, etc. through the intrusive imposition of commercial values, but also and above all two major trends. First is the destruction of all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine, primarily those of the state, repository of all of the universal values associated with the idea of the public realm. Second is the imposition everywhere, in the upper spheres of the economy and the state as at the heart of corporations, of that sort of moral Darwinism that, with the cult of the winner, schooled in higher mathematics and bungee jumping, institutes the struggle of all against all and cynicism as the norm of all action and behaviour.

Can it be expected that the extraordinary mass of suffering produced by this sort of political-economic regime will one day serve as the starting point of a movement capable of stopping the race to the abyss? Indeed, we are faced here with an extraordinary paradox. The obstacles encountered on the way to realising the new order of the lone, but free individual are held today to be imputable to rigidities and vestiges. All direct and conscious intervention of whatever kind, at least when it comes from the state, is discredited in advance and thus condemned to efface itself for the benefit of a pure and anonymous mechanism, the market, whose nature as a site where interests are exercised is forgotten. But in reality, what keeps the social order from dissolving into chaos, despite the growing volume of the endangered population, is the continuity or survival of those very institutions and representatives of the old order that is in the process of being dismantled, and all the work of all of the categories of social workers, as well as all the forms of social solidarity, familial or otherwise.

The transition to “liberalism” takes place in an imperceptible manner, like continental drift, thus hiding its effects from view. Its most terrible consequences are those of the long term. These effects themselves are concealed, paradoxically, by the resistance to which this transition is currently giving rise among those who defend the old order by drawing on the resources it contained, on old solidarities, on reserves of social capital that protect an entire portion of the present social order from falling into anomie. This social capital is fated to wither away – although not in the short run – if it is not renewed and reproduced.

But these same forces of “conservation”, which it is too easy to treat as conservative, are also, from another point of view, forces of resistance to the establishment of the new order and can become subversive forces. If there is still cause for some hope, it is that forces still exist, both in state institutions and in the orientations of social actors (notably individuals and groups most attached to these institutions, those with a tradition of civil and public service) that, under the appearance of simply defending an order that has disappeared and its corresponding “privileges” (which is what they will immediately be accused of), will be able to resist the challenge only by working to invent and construct a new social order. One that will not have as its only law the pursuit of egoistic interests and the individual passion for profit and that will make room for collectives oriented toward the rational pursuit of ends collectively arrived at and collectively ratified.

How could we not make a special place among these collectives, associations, unions, and parties for the state: the nation-state, or better yet the supranational state – a European state on the way toward a world state – capable of effectively controlling and taxing the profits earned in the financial markets and, above of all, of counteracting the destructive impact that the latter have on the labour market. This could be done with the aid of labour unions by organising the elaboration and defence of the public interest. Like it or not, the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost of a few mathematical errors, from the vision of accountants (in an earlier period one would have said of “shopkeepers”) that the new belief system presents as the supreme form of human accomplishment.

UTOPIA OF ENDLESS EXPLOITATION: The essence of neoliberalism. What is neoliberalism? A programme for destroying collective structures which may impede the pure market logic. Pierre Bourdieu

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Controversies, such as the Freedom of Speech debate at the Oxford Union, always brings people back as to what is truth, what are ethics, and whether they relate to each other in any critical manner. To this extent, we have, on The European Rationalist, written and reference a number of previous articles on the subject: How Could I Be Wrong? How Wrong Could I Be?; Delusions, Beliefs; Theism, Atheism, and Rationality;  Science and Truth; etc. At the level of general public debate we begin to think of issues such as to whether free speech (and consequently as to what we believe and why we believe it) has an envelope beyond which it becomes unacceptable to the current norms and metrics. The only problem is who decides – the media barons, big business, religious groups, powerful minorities?

I came across the book True to Life, and found a quite good review by Kieran Setiya of it that I think is worth reading to start off with.  

 

In True to Life, Michael Lynch sets out to defend “four truisms about truth”: truth is objective, a “cognitive good”, a worthy goal of inquiry, and something valuable in itself. On the back cover, Nussbaum says that the book “performs a major public service”.  

 

The argument of the book is intricate, though it is presented with an enviably light touch. It begins with the platitude that a belief is correct if and only if its object is a true proposition; deduces that, if p is true, it is good to believe p, other things being equal; interprets this as final or non-instrumental value; and concludes that truth is itself a normative property, and, given Moore’s “open question argument”, an irreducible one: “If truth matters, reductive naturalism is false.”

In a different context, it would be interesting to engage with these steps, each of which is controversial. Here, my focus is rhetorical. Who is Lynch writing for, and what are his chances of convincing them?

I think he cannot be writing for the post-modernist “enemies of truth” alleged to inhabit our English Departments. They will rightly feel that they are not taken seriously here. There is no mention of Derrida, and only a page or two on Foucault. In any case, the whole operation will seem to them naïvely unhistorical. To engage with them, one has to sink, or rise, to their level – as in Literature Against Itself.

Perhaps the aim of the book is prophylactic: it is meant to forestall the attractions of subjectivism and the cynical equation of truth with power. But if this is his persuasive task, Lynch has adopted an unfortunate strategy. Arguing that one cannot accept the value of truth without Moorean non-naturalism is bad salesmanship, even if is sound. It is not just the post-modern crowd who cannot stomach Principia Ethica: most philosophers find its commitments incredible.

The effect of True to Life, if it carries conviction, will thus be to enmire the truisms about truth in a swamp of metaphysics, to retrench the suspicion that those who believe in the possibility and the value of objective truth inhabit a Platonic jungle. As I said, that might be so – I haven’t tried to engage with Lynch’s arguments – but it would be terrible news. This truth might be one of those we do better not to believe.

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It seems right to begin with Kierkegaard – acknowledged as the father of existentialism. In his first book Kierkegaard gave a description of three philosophical positions or ways of life: i) a cultured form of worldly hedonism; ii) a life of a judgmental, dutiful moralist; iii) a spirituality which transcends both worldly hedonism and the rules of social morality or ordinary justice.

He called the book Either/Or. For he contended that, as such positions are discrete and self-contained, based on their own unique values, and as reason and logic can’t prove which position is objectively more true or superior, a subjective either/or decision, a free leap of faith, is required to adopt any one and commit oneself to it. Free choice here means choice in the face of the inability to establish the objective rightness of the decision; hence, choice taken in irresolvable uncertainty; hence, choice begetting angst -anxiety that we are completely wrong.

Kierkegaard rejected the Hegelian philosophy dominant in his day. It claimed that by use of reason we can all see how a position evolves out of previous ones and represents a rational advance. Reason can compare and assess positions. If we follow the logic of cultural evolution we make a smooth transition from one to another and eventually arrive at a shared final conclusion: the ultimate position objectively superior to all others. We won’t need a leap of faith. Reason will guide and assure us we’ve arrived at the highest truth. Then we can all go home.

Nietzsche and postmodernism similarly reject the idea that reason can establish objective truth and that positions or ways of life can be compared to see which one is ultimate. Nietzsche is famous for his perspectivism, ie, his argument that philosophies reflect different perspectives on reality and that all such perspectives are founded on diverse culturally relative assumptions and values. We can’t prove objective truth since the criteria for the truth -for what gets called true in a particular culture -vary relative to historical time and place. There are no independent criteria by which we can judge between positions. Moreover, behind logic stands evaluation: eg, that one values being rational, or questioning, or reflective, or analytical, or dialectical, or that one is bothered about non-contradiction, logical determinations of reality, and the like. After all, a late-medieval like Martin Luther can declare that reason is the devil’s whore -ie, that reason is a corrupt faculty, part of our fallen and sinful nature: not a reliable faculty to use in pursuit of truth. It will seduce us away from truth, which can only be found, says Luther, in a God-given scriptural revelation.

So, the value of reason appears relative and can be put in question. Other cultures have not valued it as much as we have in modern times. Nietzsche raises the question why we want truth at all rather than illusion and suggests it is only a kind of imperialism, or piece of moral naiveté, to assume truth is worth more than myth or appearance. Moreover, what we call truths are just our more triumphant fictions: ie, certain fictions, simplifications, and the like, come to the fore at a certain point in time and if they triumph they get called truths by most people in that culture. Thus, truth is basically a concept expressing a people’s incapacity to think otherwise. It reflects limitation, a degree of disempowerment. Our convictions are our prisons. At the same time, though, the temptation of truth is that it promises a power, viz, the security and superiority of feeling we live in the truth or possess the truth -as against others who are in the wrong. So, Nietzsche famously analyses truth and philosophy in terms of an underlying will-to-power.

Postmodernism is close. Foucault also analyses what’s called knowledge in terms of power -eg, that a group which successfully portrays itself as having knowledge thereby acquires power and that such knowledges arise via discrepancies of power in society between so-called experts and those not in the know: between the haves and the have-nots in society, the dominant and less dominant in education. It is the dominant elites which determine what gets to be called the canon of knowledge -shoring up their privileged positions and passing the canon down to future generations. There’s no guarantee the canon, or dominant regime of discourse, is truth rather than a temporarily triumphant fiction serving certain vested interests. (This may have crossed one’s mind before!)

Also close is Lyotard, who calls the many positions grand narratives, or stories of truth, and refers to them as language games. The games are discrete and circular, for they are founded on their own unique set of values and contain within themselves their own game rules or criteria for truth, knowledge, evidence, proof, right method, and the like. There is no objectively true game, since there is no independent position from which you could judge between the games to decide which one is best. Hence, the games are said to be incommensurable -ie, they can’t be measured or compared for their real truth-value. Truths and values are relative to the game you are playing. To say one language game is intrinsically or objectively superior to another would be as absurd as saying that soccer is intrinsically or objectively better than cricket. Games are simply different, not inherently better or worse.

Also similar to Nietzsche is Baudrillard’s notion of simulation and seduction. We don’t live in the real as such, he says, but in our cultural simulation of reality. In late-Capitalist consumer society, where mass media dominate, the mainstream cultural simulation is selected and mediated over and over again. It is reinforced through endless repetitions: hyper-mediated, hyper-realized. The simulation thereby becomes the hyperreal, the realer-than-real: an overdetermined simulation which appears natural, normal, an obvious truth.

Meanwhile, the real itself is a void, a nullity, a desert of the real, as Baudrillard puts it. All cultures are seduced by their truths. Moreover, seduction is not rational, or it is pre-rational, more basic than the rational. For to be rational already presupposes one has been seduced by the ideals of reason. Hence, Baudrillard seems to be in agreement with Nietzsche that behind reason stands evaluation or the mysterious non-rational -the other of reason -which Baudrillard calls seduction. However, Baudrillard, unlike Nietzsche and Foucault, is uncommitted to the view that seduction operates through power or a will-to-power, or even through desire, as some others would have it. Hence, he says we should forget Foucault -presumably Nietzsche too, at least on this point.

How then does seduction operate if not through power or desire? Actually, this is undecidable. For to analyze seduction in terms of power, or desire, or some other factor, be it psychological, psychoanalytic, natural and empirical, or supernatural and non-empirical, would already presuppose a seduction, ie, that one has been seduced by this or that discourse or perspective. Rather, the ultimate sources of seduction remain mysterious, a kind of secret rule of the game. We find ourselves seduced, we know not how or why. One thing remains though: whatever position or way of life we are seduced by, there is no way we can establish its objective or essential truth. It has value only relative to our seduction. To say our seduction is objectively best would be as absurd as Romeo saying Juliet is objectively best. He may feel she is, but he can’t establish this as a truth for others. So the implication of seduction theory in particular, and postmodernism in general, is that beauty and truth is in the eye of the beholder. Hence, it’s said that truth is dead in postmodernity -ie, essential truth, objective truth, is an outmoded notion, a concept from a dead language game of the past.

So, in the light of Kierkegaard and existentialism, Nietzsche and postmodernism, philosophical positions and ways of life now appear as perspectives, simulations, or discrete and discontinuous language games; or in more dramatic terms: at the end of the millennium, truth is dead. But was Kierkegaard right to say free choice or a leap of faith is required to jump the gaps? Is there free choice here? Is there even a self which is free to make such a choice? Does it have the free will? On these questions we find Nietzsche and postmodernism part company with Kierkegaard and existentialism. Let’s consider.

Descartes is the father of modern philosophy or what’s called modernity by postmoderns. Emphasis is on self and related concepts, such as autonomy, responsibility, accountability, free will, free choice, individuality, and the like. It begins with the Cartesian “I think therefore I am”. Several things are implied: that there is a self, that the self is a causal agent, that the self can control thought and action through free will, that the self is a free moral agent -ie, accountable and responsible. Philosophers like Descartes, Kant and Hegel, stressed the rationality of self and said the self is most free when most rational. Kierkegaard and existentialism object. Nevertheless, they still concur on free self, free choice, deliberation and decision, responsibility and accountability. Therefore, we have to say that existentialism belongs to modernity.

Now, what about Nietzsche? He rejects the “I think” in no uncertain terms. It is arbitrary to assume the “I” creates or controls thought and action. After all, thoughts, beliefs, actions, decisions, and the like, can be generated by underlying and unconscious agencies. This, of course, connects to will-topower. Will-to-power can operate in us at levels below the level of conscious awareness or control. The sense of having a free subjectivity, a free self, is itself an illusion generated by will-to-power in the human organism. Moreover, Nietzsche declares: the doctrine of free will is “a hangman’s metaphysics” -ie, a fiction invented by certain resentful and vengeful groups in the past so that others -criminals, conquering tribes, masters -can be held accountable and responsible and duly condemned, punished, or damned. Belief in free will thus serves to rationalize and legitimate righteous indignation and revenge under the fiction of justice and desert. The idea caught on.

Similarly, postmodernism decentres the self, ie, it undermines the ideology of the free self by pointing to factors which condition who we are, what we can think or say or believe, or what we can do. One catch-phrase is: the self does not speak language, but language speaks the self -ie, the cultural language or language games we are brought up in conditions our sense of subjectivity and the possibilities of thought. We may think we are free agents, but actually we are speaking and acting in accordance with our historical conditioning and cultural limitations.

So Nietzsche and postmodernism differ radically from Kierkegaard and existentialism in so far as the latter rely heavily on an assumption of free subjectivity reminiscent of Descartes. There can be no existential free choice, or free and accountable leaps of faith, if self is merely a simulation of selfhood, as Baudrillard might say, determined by modernity’s cultural code. Moreover, in the light of this, Nietzsche is surely not an existentialist and existentialism is not the heir to his thought; rather postmodernism is. Indeed, postmodernism could well be described as kind of neo-Nietzscheanism.

In sum: Kierkegaard the existentialist argued that positions can’t be compared by reason alone and that objective truth is impossible, then declared that a responsible, accountable, free leap of faith is required. He assumed the reality of free will or free subjectivity as the final ground of our action and commitment. Nietzsche and postmodernism object. Underlying factors, such as power, desire, cultural conditioning, language limitations, regimes of discourse, seduction, and the like, must be taken into account. Existentialism is itself a version of the hangman’s metaphysics. Are we speaking at a hangman’s society?!

What now of Max Stirner? Where does he stand? Stirner was writing at much the same time as Kierkegaard, in the 1840’s, and in a similar intellectual environment. Like Kierkegaard he rejected the dominant Hegelianism in which he was schooled. So in some ways he is similar to Kierkegaard, especially in that he too provides a sustained critique of rationalist metaphysics and objective truth. Moreover, at first glance he seems to be arguing in favour of free subjectivity, the free self or free ego, and free individualism. Thus, he might seem to belong in the existentialist camp. However, this is rather misleading. If we look more closely we find he is not committed to the idea of a free self or ego, and that, contrary to initial appearances and to his critics and commentators, he is not advocating individualist egoism at all.

Well, this needs some explaining. Stirner certainly argues against objective truth arrived at through reason, proposing instead that positions have been adopted in the past for underlying egoistic reasons of self-interest. Desire had more to do with it than reason. However, as with will-to-power, this egoistic will did not always operate at the conscious level of deliberation or control. Most of the time people have been unconscious or involuntary egoists, as Stirner puts it, ie, they may have thought they were choosing a position purely because of its truth, but since no position can exhibit its truth, the real motives were psychological, egoistic in the sense of being self-serving or apparently advantageous.

This is summed up in Stirner’s saying, “Nothing is sacred but by my bending the knee.” -meaning: nothing is simply given as sacred or true or right or valuable in itself, but only acquires this appearance of value by our elevating it to this sublime status, disempowering ourselves in relation to it. We project its value, declare it sacred, untouchable, inviolable, thereby losing the capacity to take back its value again, or annul it. We do this because we feel, however dimly, however unconsciously, it is advantageous to be aligned with the sacred.

However, Stirner argues we are, rather, disadvantaged in the process. For we become addicted to the sacred truth, and, as Stirner sees it, a better -more empowering, more reliable, more immediate, more liberating -mode of happiness, a happiness of non-addiction, can be found by undermining and annulling every sacred truth. We achieve this through realizing nothing is sacred of itself but only appears sacred via our projection -by our bending the knee. Seeing it is not sacred or inviolable in itself, we find we can violate it, ie, take back its value and annul it, thus letting go of it.

Example: consider people who fall romantically in love. At one level they feel it is advantageous to be thus enthralled -and so they pursue it: their own thralldom, their own servitude. The other becomes a sacred object or idol to which one becomes addicted, attached. One becomes emotionally dependent. There are certain highs involved, to be sure, which explains the temptation.

But there’s the down side. We are subservient in that our sense of emotionalwellbeing is vulnerable to the other’s will or changeability. As Stirner would say, we have fallen prey to tributariness -ie, we pay the other too much tribute, give the other too much weight, value or power. In short, we make the other sacred by bending the knee. This is the pattern of idolatry. The same applies to everything -eg, God, truths, faiths, beliefs, ideologies, reason, discourse, thought, and even the self or ego. We can make an little idol out of anything.

Do we possess our objects of belief and desire or do they possess us? For Stirner, re-phrasing Hamlet, to possess or be possessed -that is the question. Possessing them without them possessing us means we retain the capacity to take back value any time and cancel, suspend or annul it -ie, we can absolve ourselves of the thing, we can let it go, be non-attached and independent in relation to it. We can, for example, let that old lover go, let that old God go, let that old truth go, let even life itself go -let everything go. To be able to have and enjoy things without them having you, describes the non-attached condition Stirner calls Ownness. We come into our own, we develop maturity, when we can have and not have in this way.

God and the truth is dead for Stirner in that he can let them go. He is radically uncommitted. Indeed, he is not concerned for anything except “the self-enjoyment of life” -akin to what the Greeks called “eudemonia” -ie, philosophical good spirits. To attain and enjoy good spirits is Stirner’s purpose. Attainment comes via the realization that nothing is sacred except by our bending the knee and exercising the capacity to take back all things and annul their value or power over us. This implies we annul all the objects of belief and desire, hence, all the objects of hope and fear and time. What then remains? Only what Stirner calls “creative nothingness” -ie, the ongoing unfolding of life itself here and now without names, conceptualizations, divisions, limits. For these are all objects of belief or desire, potential idols. And we take these back and annul them. So it is no longer a matter of fear and hope, of time, of mediation. The immediate self-enjoyment of creative nothingness is realized where there are no idols left standing to block it. It is the free creative act of life-affirmation, of life affirming itself in and through us: a life-enjoyment without reason, that is, for no reason except itself because, well, enjoyment is enjoyable -which seems obvious.

Now, is this egoism? I say not. For ordinary egoism is the pursuit of enjoyment in time via the objects of belief and desire. And self-enjoyment is precisely not this. On the contrary, self-enjoyment is the radical alternative to ordinary egoism. But is it not egoism at least in the sense that Stirner believes in the free ego or individual self of egoism, as the commentators say? No, again. Stirner is not attached or committed to self or ego, since self or ego is simply a concept, an object of belief or desire, one more potential idol. He annuls it along with the rest. Note that Stirner’s motto throughout the book is not “I have set my affair on the ego or egoism”. His motto is, “I have set my affair on nothing.” Creative nothingness is the last word in his discourse, and on the last page of the book even the idea of the ego or owner is taken back, annulled, returned to the creative nothing from whence it came.

Stirner doesn’t belong in the existentialist camp because he is not committed to key existentialist notions: eg, self, free will, authenticity, accountability, responsibility. He would absolve himself of all such notions. He would not make an idol of them. Well, then, shall we say Stirner is more like a postmodern? After all, he was one of the first to use the term “modernity” to describe the previous period of philosophical culture, and he says that his own position -ownness, or self-enjoyment -comes after this, and so by implication is post-modern. In fact, a good case can be made that he was way ahead of his time, that critics and commentators have failed to understand him, and that he anticipated many themes of postmodernism a hundred and fifty years ago.
However, what Stirner most resembles, it seems to me, is Taoistic Zen. After all, Taoistic Zen is also all about radical non-attachment to any objects of temporal desire or belief and a contemplative openness to and appreciation of the Tao, understood as the nameless, the unconceptualized, Way of reality. As the first line of the Tao Te Ching says, the Tao or Way that can be named is not the real Tao or Way itself. Thus, the Tao is akin to Stirner’s creative nothingness and the contemplative appreciation of the Tao is akin to Stirner’s practice of immediate self-enjoyment.

What about similarity between Taoistic Zen, Stirner, and postmodernism? Well, in so far as postmoderns are committed to discourse itself, or the terms of their discourse -whether power, or desire, or deconstruction, or simulation, or seduction, etc. -and make a sacred idol out of them, then there would be little similarity. However, in so far as ironic detachment from discourse is hinted at in some texts -notably in the case of Baudrillard -then there may be a similarity. In Baudrillard, in his rather extreme brand of postmodernism, there is an ongoing unresolved ambiguity or equivocation over whether his discourse is to be taken as a serious or sacred truth about the real or whether he is instead engaged in a kind of provocative and ironic game with the reader. The former is suggested by his description of himself as a moralist and metaphysician. The latter is suggested by references to his text as theory-fiction and by pronouncements that the secret of theory is that there is no longer any truth in theory. In short, Baudrillard prevaricates on this crucial issue. And so, in the end, one must forget Baudrillard.

Stirner privileges the calm contemplative self-enjoyment of creative nothingness above all and he seems rather scornful of other pursuits. He prefers aloof retreat from the world and he seems to have gone on to live the rest of his life this way. Same goes for mainstream Taoistic Zen. However, postmodern writers, including Baudrillard who at least flirts with the void and contemplative silence, tend to privileged discourse or writing as such, and so churn out endless books -even if they are books of theory which argue we can’t write books of theory any more. This seems to be the state of play in philosophy as we approach the end of the millennium.

Which leaves me with one last question to address tonight. Is there a way forward from here into the next millennium, a way beyond the positions outlined so far, a way beyond even postmodernism: a post-postmodernism perhaps? Is there life after theory? This strikes me as being the primary research question in philosophy at the present time. And to judge by the number of books and compilations with the word “after” in the title, I wouldn’t be alone.

I’ll advance the following conjectures. If the first millennium, the medieval millennium, pre-modernity, can be categorized as the Age Of Faith -ie, where religious faith, piety, theology, supernaturalism, etc. increasingly preoccupied cultural life; and if the second millennium, the modern millennium, can be categorized as the Age Of Reason -ie, where theorizing, reasoning, science, humanism, critical thinking -eventually leading to late-twentieth century postmodern irony, ambiguity, and nihilism -increasingly preoccupied cultural life; then perhaps the next millennium might be characterized differently from both and be called the Age Of Art. This would be an age after theory, an age which is post-religious and post-rational -or in sum, post-truth, and, therefore, also post-irony, post-nihilism, even post-Baudrillard, even post-postmodern: an age where art and artistic effects come to the fore and preoccupy cultural life.

Art existed in previous ages, of course. However, each age has a dominant principle which other interests serve, and in those ages art served the dominant principles of faith or reason. So, in medieval times reason and art were pressed into the service of faith: faith went in search of understanding through reason in theology and in search of aesthetic self-expression through religious art. In modern times, faith and art are pressed into the service of reason: faith becomes either a rational faith, faith within the bounds of reason alone, as Kant had it, or a faith in reason itself; and art becomes rational, humanist, realist, socialist, critical, avante garde, etc., following the evolving trends of critical theory.

What I envisage, then, is an age where art really comes into its own, ie, artistic creativity and effect, aesthetic quality and interest, becomes the dominant principle and faith and reason is pressed into its service. Faith becomes faith in art as a way of life: an artistic faith -in art and imagination we trust, rather than in God we trust (or in science). Reason and its associated qualities logical argument, order, proportion, method, clarity, coherence, concision, discursive elegance, etc. -is employed in so far as it contributes in a work to its aesthetic quality. The latter, then, is what counts, not reason itself. So good or bad in such an age is not decided by a dominant religion or piety, nor by a dominant rational methodology or science, but by degree of artistic appeal.
For example, consider theory -ie, the old representational language game: ie, a game purporting to contain knowledgeable propositions truthfully representing reality as it is -eg, God exists, electrons exist, the self exists, freedom exists, etc. However, representational language turns on epistemology ie, the study of knowledge, which claimed to give the logos or knowledgeable account of knowledge, the truth about the truth. It claimed to know what knowledge is and exhibit its possibility. This always was an absurd undertaking, however, founded in a paradox. For to know what knowledge is presupposes we already know what knowledge is in claiming to have knowledge about knowledge. Put another way, to say a criterion of the truth is a true criterion of the truth either presupposes the criterion already and so begs the question, or else sets up an infinite regress by bringing in another criterion. The upshot is simple: epistemology is impossible; hence, knowledge and truth is impossible; hence, the age-old representational language game of theory is impossible; hence, we need to move beyond representational language and the claim that theory contains statements as true representations of reality.

We cease prevaricating and unambiguously drop the pretense that theory is really saying anything about reality at all. But what then can it be doing? Is there another way of intending or understanding a text? There surely is. Literature, creative writing, fiction, theatre, poetry -do not have to claim to be representing reality. They can be an alternative to the representational language game of truth. A novel, for instance, might be a complete fabrication from beginning to end, an exercise of the artistic imagination, a fantasy work. However, it can still have merit, ie, in an aesthetic sense if it succeeds in generating aesthetic arousal and interest in the reader. So theory, after theory, must be understood this way: as creative writing, literature, prose poetry art. This still allows there can be good and bad theory, but good and bad is not determined by criteria such as truth-content, representational correspondence to reality, or verisimilitude, but by aesthetics.

In short, in the blink of eye -perhaps we should make it at the stroke of midnight bringing in the year 2000? -everyone becomes an artist. Thus: philosophers, theologians, fundamentalists, mystics, scientists, sociologists, critical thinkers -all artists, all exercising their creative imaginations, expressing themselves, inventing theory. No longer any ambiguity about it: theory is theory-fiction. We start from there. We drop the irony and pretense of truth and switch over to a purely aesthetic paradigm. We all become artists, artists all the time, even in our own heads. For thought -ongoing internal discourse -no longer represents reality either. Everyday thinking itself is art, is imagination, is story-telling. Of course, we can be relatively good or bad artists. The criterion is not representational truth, if truth is dead, but turns on aesthetics: broadly speaking, on the degree to which whatever is generated is pleasing or interesting.

Here are some dictionary synonyms for the word “interesting” -absorbing, arousing, amusing, appealing, attractive, compelling, curious, engaging, engrossing, entertaining, gripping, intriguing, novel, original, provocative, stimulating, thought-provoking, unusual. These and related aesthetic terms, such as, beautiful, sublime, elegant, inspiring, moving, etc., now take over from the old terms associated with the dead language of representation, such as, truth, knowledge, correspondence, coherence, pragmatism, probability, proof, evidence, demonstration, verification, falsfication, legitimation, etc. So observe that, where once Lyotard reported there is a legitimation crisis regarding theory there is no longer a legitimation crisis, since, after theory, theory no longer makes claims which require legitimation. Rather, whatever value theory-fiction has turns on its aesthetic merits. The quest, therefore, is no longer a quest for the truth -which always was an impossibility -but, rather, the point of theory and every other aesthetic creation is simply this: to make life more interesting!

Observe those who are down, depressed, dull, in the doldrums, those for whom life has lost its spice, for whom life seems meaningless, who may even contemplate suicide. Life shows no interest. What they need is arousal -that which would enable them to find life more interesting. That is where art comes in. Art is therapy. Art is the endless capacity of the human imagination to create and re-create interest in life, and thereby, meaning and value. And it comes in all shapes and forms: not just books, paintings, films, music, but also: religion, science, mythology, philosophy, debate, psychoanalysis, politics, Zen meditation, whatever. Everything is theatre. Go to a church or ashram or zendo -or for that matter, a parliament -and the theatricality is obvious. Less obvious, but no less theatrical, are our therapy rooms, science labs, and lecture halls. Note the costumes, the props, the role plays, the standards of good and bad form, the rules of procedure -the stage directions, in other words. There is no truth to be found in any of it. Nevertheless, it can be extremely interesting. What’s more, it keeps us all alive and kicking.

All we need do now is create more art as best we can -more inventive art, more pleasing art, more arousing art, more comprehensive art -art for its own sake, where art is the dominant ethos and everything else, eg, faith, reason, virtue, is subservient to the aesthetic principle. Moreover, it is no longer a matter of saying one art form is inherently better than another, eg, that one religion is better than another, or that science is better than religion, or vice versa, or that meditation or contemplation is better than intellectual work or an active life in the world. For they are all equivalent as art forms, and to say one is superior would be like saying horror movies are inherently better than tragedies or comedies. It is merely a matter of what makes life seem more fascinating to you. So generate and enjoy! After theory, this can be done more freely and with a clear intellectual conscience. For truth is no longer a constraint. If it interests one to think there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, then one can entertain the thought, and thereby entertain oneself. After all, this is no more or less true than that there is a God or an electron at the bottom of the garden. Indeed, perhaps fairies ride about on electrons and angels still dance on pinheads. As for the Big Bang, that’s a particularly stirring form of science fiction -however, a fashion which, quite possibly, will be outmoded in fifty or hundred years.

But at this point perhaps we need to consider two typical objections to life as art. First: that it is escapist. However, to claim devotion to art is mere escapism from reality presupposes one can prove what is reality. And after theory, this can’t be done. Moreover, after theory, any theory of reality is itself art. Thus, the objection is outmoded. That’s why entertaining fairies at the bottom of the garden is just as valid as entertaining electrons (if electrons are entertaining). Second: life devoted to art is morally irresponsible. This again presupposes truth, this time a truth of morality. Moreover, after theory, moral theory is itself an art form, as is the ethical self. That is: one finds a type of character attractive, hence one is drawn to those who exhibit it, more-or-less, and one tends to create it as a preferred self-image. Thus, in an age of art, ethics turns on aesthetics, rather revamping the “beautiful soul” idea -except it is no longer claimed beauty has an objective or universal standard or that we ought to conform to one. Beauty is contextual, as is morality. However, if we are concerned as artists to be aesthetically appealing the likely way is to become more beautiful and interesting whether in appearance or character. A pain in the bum is a poor artist in the medium of morality. Of course, one may be good in some other way. But if the ideal in an age of art is maximum comprehensive artistry, it behoves us to develop our artistic talents in as many mediums as possible, as best we can, including the medium of morality. In this way, we become eclectic artists, somewhat Renaissance-like. So virtue is included in an age of art, as is faith and reason, under the dominant aesthetic principle.

If there is anything to avoid it is simply that which usually makes for bad art hence, such as: the ugly, the displeasing, the inelegant, the irritating, the banal, the clichéd, the commonplace, the stereotypical, the repetitious, the overdone, the long-winded, the unoriginal, the uninspired, the dull, the boring, the superficial, the inept, the poorly crafted, the technically unproficient, the juvenile, the unripe, the jaded, the stale, etc. We apply such criteria when adjudicating things in context -eg, a play, an academic essay, a poem, a painting, a scientific paper, a thesis, a political manifesto, a dance, a sermon, a news report, a character, a song, and so forth. Experienced judges usually find themselves in agreement with other experienced judges in the same field. Still, judgments are subjective in reflecting and expressing one’s lack of interest or pleasure in the work, a deficit of aesthetic arousal.

We might note that the disturbing, the unsettling, the occasionally discordant or displeasing, is not always an objection to a piece. It depends on how these elements fit into and complete a whole which overall may be aesthetically pleasing.

Which leads to my penultimate point tonight. People have no idea what reality as a whole is. Indeed, it is quite comic when they think they do. At such times they appear as perceptive as the soap box they’re standing on (which is entertaining in its own way). At any rate, things appear thus after theory. This opens a strategy of re-enchantment. For whenever some discord arises in life, some painful episode, to avoid disenchantment we just have to realize that within the whole this discord may play a positive essential part. It may be a fine artistic touch, a piece of finesse lending grace to the total picture, even if grace is currently incognito. In other words, in an age of art after theory, it is easy to entertain ourselves with the idea that reality itself is an artistic work and that this is how our sufferings can be justified and accommodated. After all, the truth of the idea is no longer relevant. All that matters is that it be a re-enchanting idea to engage with. One just needs to contemplate reality in this fashion, as a perfect aesthetic Whole or Way or Tao, to defuse the blues.

Finally, it will no doubt have occurred to the perceptive person that my discourse tonight must be, according to its own lights, beyond truth. This is so. It is only an argument. An argument could be completely convincing to everyone who hears it, and yet still be false. So what has it to do with truth? My discourse, therefore, is merely intended as a piece of creative writing which may or may not provoke a lively aesthetic effect. It’s sole purpose is to interest or re-enchant, at least its author. If nothing else, it has achieved that.

 

Existentialist Society Lecture. 2nd Nov. 1999.

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As a society we are further from turning off the porn than we have ever been. Pornography is everywhere – it masquerades as “gentlemen’s entertainment” in the form of clubs, it infiltrates advertising and there are even plans to send it to mobile phones. 

In the US, with the pornography industry bringing in up to $US15 billion (£8 billion) annually, people spend more on porn every year than they do on movie tickets and all the performing arts combined.

Each year, in Los Angeles alone, more than 10,000 hardcore pornographic films are made, against an annual Hollywood average of 400 movies.

Pornography is not only bigger business than ever before, it is also more acceptable, more fashionable, more of a statement of cool. From pieces “in praise of porn” in normally sober magazines, to Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton’s book, published last year, about making a porn film, to the news that Val Kilmer is to play the part of pornography actor John Holmes in a new mainstream movie, there is a widespread sense that anyone who suggests pornography might have any kind of adverse effect is laughably out of touch.

 

 

Coren and Skelton, former Erotic Review film critics, focus on their flip comic narrative, scarcely troubling themselves with any deeper issues. “In all our years of watching porn,” they write, in a rare moment of analysis that isn’t developed any further, “we have never properly resolved what we think about how, why and whether it is degrading to women. We suspect that it might be. We suspect that pornography might be degrading to everybody.”

With pornography, it seems as if the sheer scale of the phenomenon has, in time-honoured capitalist fashion, conferred its own respectability; as a result, serious analysis is hard to come by. Only occasionally is there broadcasting that gives any kind of insight.

The British documentary Hardcore, shown two years ago, told the story of Felicity, a single mother from Essex, England, who travelled to Los Angeles hoping to make a career in pornography.

 

Danni Ashe’s website is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. Reuters

Arriving excited, and clear about what she would not do – anal sex, double-vaginal penetration – she ended up being coerced into playing a submissive role and agreeing to anal sex.

Felicity – the vicissitudes of whose own troubled relationship with her father were mirrored by the cruelty of the men with whom she ended up working – eventually escaped back to Britain.

Hardcore offered a rare, unadorned look at the inside of the industry, as did Pornography: The Musical, albeit in a more surreal form, with actors interrupting sex to break into song.

Yet what about the millions who consume pornography, the men – for they are, despite pornographers’ claims about growing numbers of female fans, mostly men – who habitually use it? How are they affected? Is pornography, as most these days claim, a harmless masturbatory diversion?

There are suggestions that a heavy diet of porn might encourage men inappropriately to expect sex. Is that true? And what about more profound effects? How does it affect relationships? Is it addictive?

Does it encourage rape, pedophilia, sexual murder? Surely tough questions need to be asked.

First, though, some definitions. According to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, the word “pornography” dates to 1864, when it described “the life, manners, etc of prostitutes or their patrons”.

More recently, it has come to signify material, in the words of Chambers, “intended to arouse sexual excitement”. Its most common themes, however, are power and submission. By contrast, “erotica”, which is pretty hard to find now, carries additional connotations of “amorousness” and is far less concerned with control and domination. No, it is pornography plain and simple, from venerable “wrist mags” such as Playboy, to the almost daily bombardment of teaser pornographic emails, that confronts all of us ceaselessly.

The received wisdom, pushed hard by mass-market magazines such as FHM, is that men derive a pretty uncomplicated enjoyment from pornography. That, certainly, is the argument put forward by such proponents as the British food writer A.A. Gill, who has directed his own pornographic film, and the musician Moby, who once said in an interview: “I like pornography – who doesn’t? I don’t really trust men who claim to not be interested in porn. We’re biologically programmed to respond to the sight of people having sex.”

Danny Plunkett, then features editor of Loaded, takes an equally relaxed view. “We know that a lot of people enjoy it and take it with a pinch of salt. We certainly don’t view it as dangerous.”

But is it as simple as this? One of my best friends is a man for whom pornography has apparently never held even the slimmest interest. Moby may choose to distrust him, but his sex life otherwise has always seemed to me perfectly robust. He is, however, so much in the minority as to seem almost an oddity.

For most men, at some point in their lives, pornography has held a strong appeal and, before any examination of its effects, this fact has to be addressed. Like many men, I first saw pornography during puberty. At boarding school, dog-eared copies of Mayfair and Knave magazines were stowed behind toilet cisterns; this borrow-and-return library system was considered absolutely normal, seldom commented upon and either never discovered by the masters or tacitly permitted. Long before my first sexual relationship, porn was my sex education.

No doubt (though we’d never have admitted it then) my friends and I were driven to use porn through loneliness: being away from home, we longed for love, closeness, unquestioning acceptance. The women over whom we masturbated – the surrogate mothers, if you like – seemed to be offering this but, of course, they were never going to provide it.

The untruths it taught me on top of this disappointment – that women are always available, that sex is about what a man can do to a woman – I am only now, more than two decades on, finally succeeding in unlearning.

From men everywhere come similar stories. Nick Samuels, 46, an electrical contractor – now, with a wife and four children, the very image of respectable fatherhood – says he first discovered the power of pornographic images at the age of 16, when he found a copy of Mayfair in his father’s garage. “I can even remember the picture. There was a woman walking topless past a building site and the builders were ogling her from the scaffolding. It was pretty soft stuff, but it heightened my senses and kicked off my interest in pornography. Before long, I was reading Whitehouse and then, through a friend at my squash club, I was introduced to hardcore videos.”

Si Jones, a 39-year-old north London vicar who regularly counsels men trying to “come off” pornography, admits that, for him, too, it was his introduction to sex. “As a teenager, I watched porn films with my friends at the weekend. It was just what you did. It was cool, naughty and everyone was doing it.” Set against today’s habit of solitary internet masturbation, Jones’s collegiate introduction to porn seems peculiarly sociable.

Today, boys no longer clandestinely circulate magazines after school; nor do they need to rummage through their father’s cupboards in search of titillating material. Access to internet pornography has never been easier, its users never younger, and the heaviest demand, according to research published in the New York Times, is for “‘deviant’ material including pedophilia, bondage, sadomasochism and sex acts with various animals”.

At its most basic level, pornography answers natural human curiosity. Adolescent boys want to know what sex is about and porn certainly demonstrates the mechanics. David Morgan, consultant clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Portman Clinic in London, which specialises in problems relating to sexuality and violence, describes this phase as “transitional, like a rehearsal for the real thing. The problem with pornography begins when, instead of being a temporary stop on the way to full sexual relations, it becomes a full-time place of residence”.

Morgan’s experience of counselling men addicted to porn has convinced him that “the more time you spend in this fantasy world, the more difficult it becomes to make the transition to reality. Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in. This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else”.

For most men, the way pornography objectifies sex strikes a visceral emotional chord. Psychotherapists Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon, in their book Raising Cain: Protecting The Emotional Life of Boys, suggest that objectification, for boys, starts early. “By adolescence, a boy wakes up most mornings with an erection. This can happen whether he is in a good or bad mood, whether it is a school day or a weekend . . . Boys enjoy their own physical gadgetry. But the feeling isn’t always, ‘Look what I can do!’ The feeling is often, ‘Look what it can do!’ – again, a reflection of the way a boy views his instrument of sexuality as just that: an object.

“What people might not realise when they justly criticise men for objectifying sex – viewing sex as something you do, rather than part of a relationship – is that the first experience of objectification of sexuality in a boy’s life comes from his experience of his own body, having this penis that makes its own demands.”

But the roots go back further still. Research has shown that boy babies are treated more harshly than their female counterparts and, as they grow up, boys are taught that success is achieved through competition. In order to deal with this harsh masculine world, boys can learn not to trust their own feelings and not to express their emotions. They become suspicious of other men, with whom they’re in competition, after all, and as a result they often feel lonely and isolated.

Yet men, as much as women, hunger for intimacy. For many males, locked into a life in which self-esteem has grown intrinsically entwined with performance, sex assumes an almost unsustainable freight of demands and needs. Not only does the act itself become almost the only means through which many men can feel intimate and close, but it is also the way in which they find validation. And sex itself, of course, cannot possibly satisfy such demands.

It is into this troubled scenario that porn finds such easy access. For in pornography, unlike in real life, there is no criticism, real or imagined, of male performance. Women are always, in the words of the average internet site, “hot and ready”, eager to please. In real life, by contrast, men find women are anything but: they have higher job status, they demand that they be sexually satisfied, and they are increasingly opting to combine career and motherhood.

Men, say psychologists, also feel threatened by the “emotional power” they perceive women wielding over them. Unable to feel alive except when in relationships with women, they are at the same time painfully aware that their only salvation from isolation comes in being sexually acceptable to women.

This sense of neediness can provoke intense anger that, all too often, finds expression in porn. Unlike real life, the pornographic world is a place in which men find their authority unchallenged and in which women are their willing, even grateful servants. “The illusion is created,” as one male writer on pornography puts it, “that women are really in their rightful place and that there is, after all, no real and serious challenge to male authority.”

Seen in this light, the patently ridiculous pornography scenario of the pretty female apartment-hunter (or hitch-hiker, driver with broken-down car, or any number of similar such vulnerable roles) who is happy to let herself be gang-banged by a group of overweight, hairy-shouldered couch potatoes makes perfect psychological sense.

The porn industry, of course, dismisses such talk, yet occasionally comes a glimmer of authenticity. Bill Margold, one of the industry’s longest-serving film performers, was interviewed in 1991 by psychoanalyst Robert Stoller for his book Porn: Myths for the Twentieth Century. Margold made no attempt to gloss over the realities. “My whole reason for being in this industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically don’t care much for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldn’t have when they were growing up. So we brutalise a woman sexually; we’re getting even for lost dreams.”

As well as “eroticising male supremacy”, in the words of anti-porn campaigner John Stoltenberg, pornography also attempts to assuage other male fears, in particular that of erection failure. According to psychoanalytical thinking, pornography answers men’s fetishistic need for visual proof of phallic potency. Lynne Segal, professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, writes: “Men’s specific fears of impotence, feeding off infantile castration anxiety, generate hostility towards women. Through pornography, real women can be avoided, male anxiety soothed and delusions of phallic prowess indulged, by intimations of the rock-hard, larger-than-life male organ.”

Pornography, in other words, is a lie. It peddles falsehoods about men, women and human relationships. In the name of titillation, it seduces vulnerable, lonely men – and a small number of women – with the promise of intimacy, and delivers only a transitory masturbatory fix.

Increasingly, though, men are starting to be open about the effect pornography has had upon them. David McLeod, a marketing executive, explains the cycle. “I’m drawn to porn when I’m lonely, particularly when I’m single and sexually frustrated. But I can easily get disgusted with myself. After watching a video two or three times, I’ll throw it away and vow never to watch another again. But my resolve never lasts very long.”

He has, he says, “seen pretty much everything. But once you start going down that slope, you get very quickly jaded”.

Like many men, McLeod is torn. Quick to claim that porn has “no harmful effects”, he is also happy to acknowledge the contradictory fact that it is “deadening”. Andy Philips, a Leeds art dealer and, at 38, a father for the first time, says there have been times when he has been “a very heavy user”. His initial reaction, like that of many of the men to whom I spoke, is studiedly jokey: “I love porn.” Yet, as he grows more contemplative, he admits: “I’ve always used it secretly, never as part of a relationship. It’s always been like the other woman on the side. It’s something to do with being naughty, I guess.”

Again and again, despite now being married, he is drawn back. “You can easily get too much of it. It’s deadening, nullifying, gratuitous, unsatisfying. At one point I was single for three years and I used a lot of porn then. After a while, it made me feel worse. I’d feel disgusted with myself and have a huge purge.”

Extended exposure to pornography can have a raft of effects. By the time Nick Samuels had reached his mid-20s, it was altering his view of what he wanted from a sexual relationship. “I used to watch porn with one of my girlfriends, and I started to want to try things I’d seen in the films: anal sex, or threesomes.” Sometimes, he says, this was OK – “she was an easygoing person”. At other times, “it shocked her”.

Married for 15 years, he admits he has carried the same sexual expectations into the marital bedroom. “There’s been real friction over this; my wife simply isn’t that kind of person. And it’s only now, after all these years, that I’m beginning to move on from it. Porn is like alcoholism; it clings to you like a leech.”

Psychoanalyst Estela Welldon, author of the classic text Mother, Madonna, Whore, has treated couples for whom such scenarios spiralled out of control. “A lot of men involve their partners in the use of porn. Typically, they will say, ‘Don’t you want a better sex life?’ I have seen cases in which first the woman has been subjected to porn and then they have used their own children for pornographic purposes.”

When couples use porn together – a growing trend, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by – there is, says Welldon, “an illusory sense that they are getting closer together. Then they film themselves having sex and feel outside themselves. This dehumanising aspect is an important part of pornography. It dehumanises the other person, the relationship, and any intimacy”.

Even when in a loving sexual relationship, men who have used porn say that, all too often, they see their partner through a kind of “pornographic filter”. This effect is summed up eloquently by US sociologist Harry Brod, in Segal’s essay Sweet Sorrows, Painful Pleasures: “There have been too many times when I have guiltily resorted to impersonal fantasy because the genuine love I felt for a woman wasn’t enough to convert feelings into performance. And in those sorry, secret moments, I have resented deeply my lifelong indoctrination into the aesthetic of the centrefold.”

Running like a watermark through all pornography use, according to Morgan at the Portman Clinic, is the desire for control. This need, he says, has its roots in early childhood. “A typical example might be a boy with fairly absent parents, either in emotional terms or in actual fact.” The boy, wishing his parents were more present – more within his control, as it were – can grow up wishing “to find something over which he can have control. Pornography fills that space”.

But the user of pornography is also psychologically on the run, Welldon adds. “People who use pornography feel dead inside, and they are trying to avoid being aware of that pain. There is a sense of liberation, which is temporary: that’s why pornography is so repetitive – you have to go back again and again.”

Lost in a world of pornographic fantasy, men can become less inclined, as well as increasingly less able, to form lasting relationships. In part, this is due to the underlying message of pornography. Ray Wyre, a specialist in sexual crime, says pornography “encourages transience, experimentation and moving between partners”.

Morgan goes further: “Pornography does damage,” he says, “because it encourages people to make their home in shallow relationships.”

Jan Woolf believes it might also prevent a relationship getting started. A former special needs teacher, she lasted only six months as a film censor in 2001. During this time, she watched hundreds of hours of hardcore videos. At the time, she was single. “If I’d been in the early stages of a relationship, it would have been very difficult, because I’d have been watching what I might have been expected to be doing, except it would never have been like that.” She left the job because the porn was starting to make her feel “depressed – I wanted my lively mind back”.

The more powerful the sense of pre-existing internal distress, the more compelling becomes the pull towards pornography. For John-Paul Day, a 50-year-old Edinburgh architect in his first “non-addictive” sexual relationship, the experience of being a small boy with a dying mother drove him to seek solace in masturbation. He says he has been “addicted” to pornography his entire adult life. “The thing about it is that, unlike real life, it is incredibly safe,” Day says. “I’m frightened of real sex, which is unscripted and unpredictable. And so I engage in pornography, which is totally under my control. But, of course, it also brings intense disappointment, precisely because it is not what I’m really searching for. It’s rather like a hungry person standing outside the window of a restaurant, thinking that they’re going to get fed.”

Day, who has attended meetings of Sex Addicts Anonymous for 12 years, says, “pornography is central to my own sex addiction in as much as sex addiction has to do with the use of fantasy as a way of escaping from reality. Even in my fantasies about ‘real’ people, I am really transforming them into pieces of walking pornography. It is not the reality of who they are that I focus on, but the fantasy I project on to them”.

Like drugs and drink, pornography – as Day has realised – is an addictive substance. Porn actor Kelly Cooke, one of the stars of Pornography: the Musical, says this applies on either side of the camera. “It got to the point where I considered having sex the way most people consider getting a hamburger. But when you try to give it up – that’s when you realise how addictive it is, both for consumers and performers. It’s a class A drug, and it’s hell coming off it.”

The cycle of addiction leads one way – towards ever harder material. Morgan believes “all pornography ends up with S&M (sadomasochism)”. The infamous Carnegie Mellon study of porn on the internet found that images of hardcore sex were in far less demand than more extreme material. Images of women engaging in acts of bestiality were hugely popular.

The mechanics of the pornographic search – craving, discovery of the “right” image, masturbation, relief – makes it, says Morgan, work like “a sort of drug, an antidepressant”.

The myth about porn, as a witness told the 1983 Minneapolis City Council public hearings on it, is that “it frees the libido and gives men an outlet for sexual expression. This is truly a myth. I have found pornography not only does not liberate men, but on the contrary is a source of bondage. Men masturbate to pornography only to become addicted to the fantasy. There is no liberation for men in pornography. (It) becomes a source of addiction, much like alcohol. There is no temporary relief. It is mood-altering. And reinforcing, ie, ‘you want more’ because ‘you got relief’. It is this reinforcing characteristic that leads men to want the experience they have in pornographic fantasy to happen in real life”.

In its most severe form, this can lead to sexual crime, though the links between the two remain controversial and much argued-over. Wyre, from his work with sex offenders, says: “It is impossible not to believe pornography plays a part in sexual violence. As we constantly confront sex offenders about their behaviour, they display a wide range of distorted views that they then use to excuse their behaviour, justify their actions, blame the victim and minimise the effect of their offending. They seek to make their own behaviour seem normal, and interpret the behaviour of the victim as consent, rather than a survival strategy. Pornography legitimises these views.”

One of the most extreme examples of this is Ted Bundy, the US serial sexual murderer executed for his crimes in January 1989. The night before his death, he explained his addiction to pornography in a radio interview: “It happened in stages, gradually . . . My experience with . . . pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality is that, once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction, I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder, harder, something which gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far . . . It reaches that jumping-off point where you begin to wonder if, maybe, actually doing it will give you that which is beyond just reading about it or looking at it.”

Bundy, as damaged as he was, stopped short of blaming pornography for his actions, though it was, he believed, an intrinsic part of the picture. “I tell you that I am not blaming pornography . . . I take full responsibility for whatever I’ve done and all the things I’ve done . . . I don’t want to infer that I was some helpless kind of victim. And yet we’re talking about an influence that is the influence of violent types of media and violent pornography, which was an indispensable link in the chain . . . of events that led to behaviours, to the assaults, to the murders.” In the understated words of Wyre: “The very least pornography does is make sexism sexy.”

The average man, of course, whatever his consumption of pornography, is no Bundy. Yet for those who have become addicted, the road to a pornography-free life can be long and arduous. Si Jones advises accountability. “Make your computer accountable, let other people check what you’ve been looking at.”

And the alternative to pornography, says Morgan, isn’t always easy. “Relationships are difficult. Intimacy, having a good relationship, loving your children, involves work. Pornography is fantasy in the place of reality. But it is just that: fantasy. Pornography is not real and the only thing human beings get nourishment from is reality: real relationships. And, anyway, what do you want to say when you get to the end of your life? That you wish you’d spent more time (masturbating) on the internet? I hardly think so.”

Guardian

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The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet By James B. Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright. Pilgrim, 233 pp., $20.95.

In late 1997, an unusual story about the discovery of a”God-spot” in the brain began to appear in newspapers and newsmagazines. In a series of tests, epileptic patients with heightened brain activity in the temporal lobe showed hypersensitivity to religious words and phrases. Some news services announced that scientists had discovered the source of religious experiences. On Internet discussion groups, atheists crowed that religion had been proven to be nothing more than a dysfunction of the brain. Some theists countered, equally glibly, that God had designed our brains to be receptive to the divine; consequently, atheists seemed to be missing a vital piece of equipment.

Researchers had indeed found a region of the brain that could be linked to religious experience, but they neither claimed that this region was the cause of all such experiences nor sought to disparage or “reduce” religion or religious experience. What they had discovered, rather, was that what goes on in the brain is profoundly connected to what goes on in the mind, even in the most sublime of all experiences. They also demonstrated that neuroscience is becoming increasingly important for thinking about some of the basic claims of religion.

James Ashbrook and Carol Rausch Albright seek to break new ground in the dialogue between religion and science. They also hope to demonstrate that neuroscience is not only the appropriate but the preferred partner in that dialogue.

There has never been a better time to make this argument. President George Bush and the U.S. Congress declared the 1990s the decade of the brain, and it has lived up to that declaration. Spurred by the development of advanced scanning techniques such as PET (Positron Emission Tomography) and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), neuroscientists are getting glimpses of the brain in action. These maps allow them to observe the brain as it never has been seen before.

This culmination of more than 100 years of serious brain research is finally allowing us to ask some truly interesting questions: Where do emotions come from and why do we have them? How do we think and learn? How does the three-pound, gelatinous mass that we call the brain produce our identities? Though final answers are still a long way off, it is significant that we can now begin to frame such questions in a scientific way. In some cases, the answers seem startling. Far from endorsing a simple reduction of mind to mere neurons, many neuroscientists are embracing paradigms that emphasize the holistic character of brain function and the ways that reason and emotion interplay to make up a self.

This book is neither a neuroscience textbook nor a systematic theology. Rather, it is a working-out of theology through the lens of the neurosciences. Ashbrook, who before his recent death was a pastoral theologian and professor emeritus of religion and personality at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary, and Albright, executive editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, seek to develop a “neurobiology of faith.” To do so is possible because the brain holds a peculiar place in the universe-and, more specifically, in our universe. We ourselves, in a sense, are brains. To study the brain is to study ourselves, but in a way that makes us both subject and object. It is as if we were trying to look both in and out of the window at the same time.

Furthermore, to study ourselves, the authors claim, is to study God. Ashbrook and Albright’s introduction states that “God-talk is really human-talk, since it is we who are conversing.” That is, because we can experience God only as human beings, in the process of learning about human life we will necessarily learn something about God as well. Even more than this, understanding the human brain can be the key to understanding God.

It is worth taking this startling claim seriously. Asked to name the most exotic thing in the universe, most of us would mention either the very large (black holes and supernovas) or the very small (all those spooky little particles). But the most incredible structure in the entire universe may be what is sitting behind our eyeballs. Inside our heads is the most complex and sophisticated device in creation.

Every brain contains approximately 100 billion cells called neurons. Neurons connect with one another to form complex communication networks that, among other things, enable us to walk, talk and breath without thinking about it. There are a staggering 100 trillion neuron connections in the brain. As anyone who uses a comparatively simple desktop computer can testify, it seems a miracle that such a complex system could work without crashing. Yet the brain smoothly, day in and day out, enables us to perceive objects in color, distinguish the year and place of a wine by taste, and (sometimes) understand calculus. Black holes seem boring by comparison.

The Humanizing Brain: Where Religion and Neuroscience Meet – Review, Christian Century,  Jan 27, 1999  by Greg Peterson

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We all spend a great deal of time criticizing those in and out of power for their conduct and exercise of leadership or lack thereof, but rarely do we try to elucidate the qualities that we would like to see in a leader. It is important that we do this.   Politics is the acquisition and exercise of power, and real harm can come when people who are unsuitable for the job attempt it.  Here are some starting points for such a discussion.

In his important lecture “Politics as a Vocation”  the eminent German sociologist and political economist Max Weber identified two kinds of  “deadly sins” in politics: a lack of objectivity and a lack of responsibility.  In an essay early last year DHinMI discussed the latter sin, irresponsibility, in connection with Ralph Nader.  This essay discusses the need for objectivity, or “seeing clearly.”  The qualities that Weber sees as necessary in politics are very similar to qualities that Chinese sages hundreds and even thousands of years ago also counseled and trained leaders to develop, no doubt reflecting Weber’s extensive studies of Eastern thought.

Weber delivered his lecture in 1918 to a group of students as Germany was undergoing the revolution that ended the rule of the Kaisers, a moment when careers in politics and political participation would be open to a far greater number of people.  Toward the end of the lecture he discussed the inner enjoyments a life in politics could provide and the personal conditions or traits needed for such a vocation.  Along with passion, which Weber stressed was not “sterile excitement” but deep devotion to a cause or purpose, and a sense of responsibility, a politician or activist needs a sense of balance and proportion. 

Weber states,

This is the decisive psychological quality of the politician:  his ability to let realities work upon him with inner concentration and calmness.  Hence his distance to things and men.  ‘Lack of distance’ per se is one of the deadly sins of every politican. . . . For the problem is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul?  Politics is made with the head, not with the other parts of the body or the soul.  And yet devotion to politics, if it is not to be frivolous intellectual play but rather genuinely human conduct, can be born and nourished from passion alone.  However, that firm taming of the soul, which distinguishes the passionate politician and differentiates him from the ’sterilely excited’ and mere political dilettante, is possible only through habituation to detachment in every sense of the word.  The ’strength’ of a political ‘personality’ means in the first place the possession of these qualities of passion, responsibility and proportion. 

Weber notes the perils and seductions that accompany the striving for power. Power can never become an end in itself.   “The sin against the lofty spirit of his vocation, however, begins where this striving for power ceases to be objective and becomes purely personal self-intoxication, instead of exclusively entering the service of ‘the cause.’”    A politician

is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the ‘impression’ he makes.  His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power. . . . The mere ‘power’ politician may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless. . . . In this, the critics of ‘power politics’ are absolutely right.  From the sudden inner collapse of typical representatives of this mentality, we can see what inner weakness and impotence hides behind this boastful but entirely empty gesture.  It is a product of a shoddy and superficially blase attitude towards the meaning of human conduct; and it has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge of tragedy with which all action, but especially political action, is truly interwoven.

So how does one cultivate Weber’s objectivity or what i would call “seeing clearly,” and find balance?

Seeing clearly, the product of deep listening, is the fundamental prerequisite to all effective action.  This means above all seeing the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be or fear it is.  True clarity is neither excessive optimism nor a paralyzing pessimism.  Seeing clearly means not being blinded by by unresolved emotions, especially anger, fear, greed (self-seeking) or ambition.  Not being preoccupied with our own needs.  Not bringing so much baggage to a situation that we cannot appreciate nuance and small changes.  it means really listening to what someone else is saying, not immediately jumping to conclusions and reacting to what we think they are saying.  It means treating each situation freshly, reacting to the actual conditions that are presented, not reacting based on what happened in the past or what we assume to be the case.

As Weber noted, this requires a kind of detachment, or more properly non-attachment.  Part of being able to see clearly is avoiding being caught by distractions, desires, emotions and ambitions.  It is learning to find the stillness in the midst of the noise and activity all around us, and in that stillness, listening to our own intuition, our own cultivated judgment, our own inner ethical sense.  It also requires sufficient independence and integrity to avoid being overly beholden to supporters and patrons.  Seeing clearly often reveals avenues of action that might not have been initially apparent.  it is often the only way to see chinks in the opponent’s armor, and novel ways to resolve problems or extricate self, party or country from a difficult situation. 
Finding balance and proportion.  Like the Greeks’ concept of the golden mean, Chinese sages teach us to find a balance between extremes.  In the Eastern concept of yin and yang, symbolized by the familiar interlocking design, opposites are seen as complementary halves of an integral whole, with each one partaking in some measure of the other.  Good contains within it elements of bad and vice versa.  No position is wholly correct or incorrect.  Neither side can, or should, absolutely prevail; attempting to bring that about only caused the tide to turn back toward the other pole.  There is always a higher vantage point in which opposites, necessary for navigating the relative world, are transcended.  Being able to step back from the conflict of the moment and to see things from a broader vantage point is necessary if one is to maintain a sense of proportion and not be crushed by setbacks and individual tragedies.  Balance also means caring for ourselves enough so that the self can ultimately become less important than the cause.  But while one should give oneself wholeheartedly to a cause, in the end what is important is not who wins but that the system and ultimately life continue. 

Ethics and Politics.  Because politics involves the use of power and often requires difficult choices, a particular kind of ethical sense is needed.  Only a very principled and disciplined person can hope to properly make those difficult choices,  because only such a person is free of the self-seeking and fatal blindness that prevent one from seeing clearly.  Only one who maintains a sense of balance and distance can appropriately determine whether and when dubious measures are ever justified in pursuit of worthy goals and when a sense of responsibility dictates that they are not justified.

Someone unwilling ever to compromise or to use force or dubious means shpu;d not become involved in politics, says Weber, but neither should someone who lacks the selflessness and ethical sense to know that some means cannot be justified because their use will irretrievably damage the cause, and perhaps also the whole country, humanity or the planet.

Finally, politics requires not only discipline but toughness, what Weber called “the trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life, and the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.”  Speaking in 1918, at the birth of the infant German Republic and only two years before his own death, Weber was under no illusions about what might lie ahead.  “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness, no matter which group may triumph externally now.”   

He concluded,

Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards.  It takes both passion and perspective.  Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth-that man would not have attained the possible unless time and again he had reached out for the impossible.  But to do that a man must be a leader, and not only a leader but a hero as well, in a very sober sense of the word.  And even those who are neither leaders nor heroes must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes.  This is necessary right now or else men will not be able to attain even that which is possible today.  Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point if view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer.  Only he who in the face of all this can say ‘In spite of all!’ has the calling for politics.

Potentially facing our own dark night, those who care seriously about politics must demand no less of ourselves, our colleagues and our leaders.

Politics and Ethics, By Mimikatz

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Any consideration of consumer society has to begin with recognizing its enormous success, including the exponential expansion of the middle-class and the extension of ma ss-produced cultural products in global markets. Yet despite its practical success, consumer society, and the market economy that makes it possible, has never been without its critics. The paradox here is that an economic system dedicated to fulfilling desire still generates substantial dissatisfaction, even from those who benefit the most from this system.Modern critiques of consumerism and the mass media can be found in the recent popular movie The Truman Show (1998) and Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939). Both these works express, in very different ways, the cultural anxieties created by consumer society. But while The Day of the Locust offers us valuable insights into the problems posed by mass culture, The Truman Show gives a mythic perspective that fundamentally distorts our modern situation. I present here an anthropological analysis of consumer culture that will reveal the limitations of the neo-Marxist critique of consumerism expressed in The Truman Show. The Day of the Locust, on the other hand, poses the more serious question of whether consumer society is capable of containing the violent resentments that it generates, a question which the second half of this essay will consider at more length.

1. The Truman Show

While Marx criticized capitalism as an impersonal machine that consumes labor and then discards workers, the more recent criticism is that consumers are manipulated by huge corporations into buying an endless stream of trivial products that must be soon discarded when the next hyped item for consumption arrives. In this view, the freedom and prosperity we enjoy, incredible by almost any historical standard, are illusory, for we remain enslaved to multi-national corporations.

While Marx criticized capitalism as an impersonal machine that consumes labor and then discards workers, the more recent criticism is that consumers are manipulated by huge corporations into buying an endless stream of trivial products that must be soon discarded when the next hyped item for consumption arrives. In this view, the freedom and prosperity we enjoy, incredible by almost any historical standard, are illusory, for we remain enslaved to multi-national corporations.This critique of consumer society finds its paradigmatic allegorical expression in the popular movie The Truman Show. The main character, Truman Burbank, played by Jim Cary, lives literally in a giant bubble, a climate-controlled dome where every moment of his life in secretly filmed and broadcast as a reality show to a world-wide audience. Life in the bubble appears to Truman as free but is actually governed by the show’s producer Christof. Truman’s day-to-day life is in reality a series of advertisements: his friends and family (all actors of course) are constantly touting the benefits of various consumer products to the show’s audience while they simultaneously play their roles in Truman’s life. Truman believes that his desires are freely chosen, but in fact they are scripted, predetermined by the producer, including his choice of wife, career, friends, and so on. We find out, through a series of flashbacks, that as a teenager he met a woman Lauren who offers him the possibility of true love, but because she has not been scripted as his future wife, she is whisked off the show despite anything they can do. A more conventionally beautiful blonde named Meryl is chosen as his wife, but she only pretends to love him.

The movie portrays Truman’s discovery that a world outside his bubble exists, a world which the movie suggests is more authentic or “real,” free from the manipulations of Christof, the show’s producer, whose name suggests the biblical Antichrist. If Truman could only get outside the bubble, outside the mimetic manipulation of Christof, he could desire authentically, find his true love, and live a real, unmediated life. The movie ends with Truman leaving the dome, refusing the safe yet empty fantasy world offered by the producer.

The Truman Show is a modern Pilgrim’s Progress.  In John Bunyan’s classic allegory, Christian, an everyman, discovers with the help of the Bible that he lives in the “City of Destruction” and is accordingly doomed. He must leave his friends and family and set out on the pilgrim pathway, where he encounters various obstacles, temptations, and setbacks. He perseveres, however, and finally arrives at the Heavenly City. The book ends with him crossing the “River of Death” and entering heaven. Likewise, Truman lives in a fool’s paradise until he discovers that his life is a mere sham. He sets out to leave his friends and family and encounters various obstacles; but he perseveres, and the movie ends with him stepping outside the dome to a brave new world of unmediated desire.The movie has been universally interpreted as an allegory of the sinister influence of the media upon our lives. According to a website devoted to the movie, “It is a story that reveals an essential truth about what is happening to society in the 20 century, . . . [i.e.] how the media and corporations have begun to surround us with a universe of illusions” (Sanes). In this reading, Truman Burbank is an everyman, a “true man,” analogous to each one of us. As the website puts it,

 

Thus does the movie offer us a metaphor for our own situation. The fake landscape Truman lives in is our own media landscape in which news, politics, advertising and public affairs are increasingly made up of theatrical illusions. Like our media landscape, it is convincing in its realism, with lifelike simulations and story lines, from the high-tech facsimile of a sun that benevolently beams down on Truman to the mock sincerity of the actor he mistakenly believes is his best friend. (Sanes)

In this allegory, “the producer-director of this stage-set world, who blocks Truman’s effort to escape, is the giant media companies, news organizations, and media politicians that have a stake in keeping us surrounded by falsehood, and are prepared to lure us with rewards as they block efforts at reforming the system” (Sanes).If the movie is criticized at all, it is for being insufficiently radical in its critique of the mass media. René Girard’s theory of mediated desire, however, suggests a rather different interpretation. Truman thinks his desires are his own, but he discovers that in fact they are all mediated by his mimetic rival, Christof, the show’s producer, who is mythically demonized as virtually all powerful and evil, a tempter figure comparable to Milton’s Satan. (When Truman tries to escape the dome by boat, Christof ruthlessly risks Truman’s life in a terrible storm which almost drowns him.) René Girard, in his seminal theory of mediated desire, argues that human desire (as distinct from mere appetite) is essentially imitative; that which we hold most private and personal, our desires, are not really our own: we imitate the desires of others. Put crudely, we want what others want, because they want it. Rather than a spontaneous expression of selfhood, desire is mediated by the model. The mediation of desire, however, remains generally unconscious; the stubbornly held belief that our desires are our own, and that the desired object or person is the key to our transcendent happiness, is what Girard call the mensonge romantique, the romantic lie or illusion. In Eric Gans’s analysis of this relationship, the repression of the mediation of desire is the origin of the so-called Freudian unconscious, not some repressed “event or fact” (Signs of Paradox 124). Rather than expressing our deeply held needs and wants, desire actually reflects our competitive and conflictual relationship with others; for this reason, desire is never really satisfied, as our mimetic relationship with others is an on-going given of our condition as social animals. Desire leads to conflict with the other, because the self and model both desire exclusive possession of the same object. Girard characterizes the desiring subject as the “disciple” and the mediator as the “model.” Describing the ambivalent relationship between disciple and model, he writes, 

 

 

 

The impulse toward the [desired] object is ultimately an impulse toward the mediator; in internal mediation [i.e., the mediator belongs to same group or social sphere as the subject] this impulse is checked by the mediator himself since he desires, or perhaps possesses the object. Fascinated by his model, the disciple inevitable sees, in the mechanical obstacle which he puts in his way, proof of the ill will borne him. Far from declaring himself a faithful vassal, he thinks only of repudiating the bonds of mediation. But these bonds are stronger than ever, for the mediator’s apparent hostility does not diminish his prestige but instead augments it. . . . The subject is torn between two opposite feelings toward his model-the most submissive reverence and the most intense malice. This is the passion we call hatred.Only someone who prevents us from satisfying a desire which he himself has inspired in us is truly an object of hatred. The person who hates first hates himself for the secret admiration concealed by his hatred. In an effort to hide this desperate admiration from others, and from himself, he no longer wants to see in his mediator anything but an obstacle. The secondary role of the mediator thus becomes primary, concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated. 

 

Now the mediator is a shrewd and diabolical enemy; he tries to rob the subject of his most prized possessions; he obstinately thwarts his most legitimate ambitions. (10-11)

 

 

Since the mediator competes with the self for the same object or person, the model becomes an “obstacle,” a hated and feared rival who blocks the fulfillment of desire. Despite the hatred that emerges between self and rival, the self remains ambivalently attached to the rival, since it is he who gives value or “authenticity” to the self’s desires. The rival is akin to the “other” in psychoanalytic terminology. An “internal” mediator is essentially comparable to the self, but the self’s vanity requires that his desires remain authentic, his “own”; therefore the rival is often demonized as an all-powerful obstacle that blocks the paradise of fulfilled desire. This distorted version of the mediator is the portrayal of The Truman Show.In The Truman Show, the original role of the mediator as model has been obscured, “concealing his original function of a model scrupulously imitated,” as Girard puts it. The movie rather begins with the premise that Christof, the mediator, is “a shrewd and diabolical enemy.” The movie therefore functions in exactly the opposite way from the realist novels of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, and Dostoevsky, whose works form the original framework for Girard’s theory (see Deceit, Desire, and the Novel). These novels reveal the mystifications of mimetic desire; the reader is able to witness how and why the revered model is transformed into a “diabolical enemy.” At the end of these novels, the protagonist typically undergoes a quasi-religious conversion which creates a new and revelatory understanding of his past for both reader and protagonist. 

 

The Truman Show recognizes on some level the anthropological truth that human desire is mediated, but the mediator of desire is mythicized as all-powerful and evil, rather than a human being similar to ourselves. Rather than accurately representing media influence, the movie misrepresents the media as the all-powerful controller of our desires. The portrayal of Christof reflects the distortions of mimetic rivalry rather than the actual power of the media in our lives.Life outside the bubble is also mystified as the realm of authentic desire. Most readers of this journal will recognize that life outside the bubble is just as mythic as life inside. The movie’s fantasy is that we can somehow get outside the situation of mimetic desire. The movie therefore has to end before Truman actually faces the reality of life outside the bubble, or the movie would degenerate into either bathos or a simplistic fantasy world easily recognized as such. A charming fairy tale the movie may be, but not a serious critique of consumer society.The disturbing part of the movie’s ideology is not its childish fantasy of being the universal center of attention, but the projection of responsibility onto a demonic other. Instead of helping people to take responsibility for their use of the media, the movie encourages a regressive projection of blame that evades the true issue.

The problem of mimetic rivalry is real, constitutive in fact of the human species. What distinguishes the human species is that the main threat to our existence is other humans, not the environment (Gans, OT 2). In Gans’s “originary hypothesis” language first emerged to mediate (and ameliorate) our relationship to other humans-not, as commonly thought, to mediate our relationship to the environment, that is, to describe the world. The threat of mimetic conflict is therefore ongoing as a function of the social nature of our existence. The potential for human violence must be continually deferred; this is the “work” of language (and by extension culture), its original, ethical function. All solutions to the problem of human violence are therefore temporary, since mimetic desire is the phoenix which is continually reborn from the ashes of satisfaction. Gans, therefore, rejects all utopian solutions, including those of the quasi-Marxist critics of the mass media. Girard, in contrast, takes a religious perspective on the problem of human violence; in Girard’s view, the only answer to our dilemma is to make God or his incarnation our model of desire, to choose absolute love over sacrificial desire. This can be a satisfying solution at the level of the individual, but it doesn’t work at the level of society. Girard fails to recognize the constructive role of consumer products in ameliorating mimetic conflict, a point to which I will return.The leftist critique of consumer society is based on a similar fantasy as The Truman Show. Christof, the show’s producer, is a Hollywood version of what Theodor Adorno calls the “culture industry.” He writes, “The more strongly the culture industry entrenches itself, the more it can do as it chooses with the needs of consumers: producing, controlling, disciplining them” (115). Consumers are completely passive in this model: “Capitalist production hems them in so tightly, in body and soul, that they unresistingly succumb to whatever is proffered to them” (Adorno 106). Just as in The Truman Show, Adorno seems to believe that if we could only get rid of these huge corporations, we could desire authentically and, hopefully, more tastefully. Certainly we would devote more money to the study of great literature, music, and art (as defined by Adorno and his colleagues). As Gans writes, “Esthetes object to the reign of money: wealth does not guarantee good taste, neither individual wealth nor the aggregate wealth of the masses” (Chronicles #25).

The neo-Marxist critique of consumerism depends upon a false distinction between authentic desire and the inauthentic desires created by a consumer culture. But what, we must ask, distinguishes between them? Most of the daily goods we take for granted in America, people living in third world countries manage to do quite well without. In fact, all of culture could be classified as superfluous. As Shakespeare pointed out long ago, culture is by definition that which exceeds “true need.” “Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is as cheap as beast’s” (King Lear 2.4.266-269). The superfluous is the essential when it comes to culture. But culture is superfluous only in the sense that the ethical is superfluous. What King Lear recognizes is that the existence of the human community may be humanly necessary but is not inevitable, “natural.” Culture, as the basis of civilization, is contingent upon our continual efforts to renew and reaffirm it. The human community is always in danger of extinction. This is the moral imperative that authorizes mass culture, however distasteful we may find its products.

What is at the root of the academic hostility to consumerism, the media, and the market in general? In part, as I’ve argued above, this hostility is based on the mystification of desire. Our vanity requires that our desires remain our own, even if we must demonize the rivals of corporate advertising. Contemporary psychoanalytic theory is in agreement with mimetic theory that the perceived integrity of our identity always requires an “other”; capitalism, consumerism, and the mass media are all versions of that “other” by which intellectuals often define and defend themselves.

Capitalism is an inevitable outgrowth of a free market. Gans points out that the market is not a thing, but the collective result of the individual decisions of all of its participants (Chronicles #8 and #34). “Reification” has become the bogeyman of recent literary theory, yet the reification of capitalism is still accepted without hesitation. There is no evil demiurge of capitalism, no “producer”: the system expresses the choices of individuals. When we criticize consumer society, what we are really criticizing is the consumer choices of our fellow citizens. At bottom, this is an aesthetic issue. The academic hostility to the market is fundamentally aesthetic. My point here is not original: Gans argues insightfully that “culture” is hostile to the market because traditional culture requires “effective mimetic models, good shows. The market is not about shows, but about the organization of human efforts toward satisfying our desires and generating new ones, in the unceasing, and, we hope, unending effort to stay a step ahead of the resentments it generates” (Chronicles #25).

Intellectuals want people to consume more tastefully, in ways closer to themselves. But this criticism misses the whole point of consumption, which is to distinguish oneself. We cannot all be the best, but we can each be different; this is the meaning of the modern valorization of self-expression, the omnipresent aestheticization of our existence.

Virtually every personal decision is on some level an aesthetic decision, from the clothes we wear, to the food we buy, to our choice of career. Our very identity is the subject of aesthetic self-fashioning. Our ability to be different, if not the best, is the key to modern culture. As Girard has pointed out, humans are essentially mimetic, which means competitive and conflictual. What each of us requires fundamentally is an arena in which we can successfully compete and be recognized as such. The aesthetic is one such arena available to virtually every modern individual. As it was recognized long ago, De gustibus, non est disputandum. In matters of taste there is no dispute. The primary ethical function of consumer society is to aestheticize our daily existence, thereby deferring the resentments created by social/economic inequalities.

Consumerism, and the mass culture that accompanies it, is a necessary evil of a mass democratic society. All societies require some structuring principle to prevent unrestrained conflict and competition. Past societies, ancient, medieval, and Renaissance, were structured along more hierarchical lines. One’s place in the hierarchy was maintained in part by sheer force, as exemplified by drastic punishments for minor thefts. Public, communal rituals and ceremonies were also effective in creating a powerful sense of divine awe for political and ecclesiastical authorities. But Protestant iconoclasm, in collaboration with Enlightenment rationality, has eroded our sense of “divine” authority. In modern democratic societies, power is relatively decentralized, and authority, always vulnerable to suspicion and resentment, is limited by market forces. As Adam Smith recognized, a free market incorporates widespread competition as a positive force, rather than limiting it by rigid hierarchical distinctions. The modern world defers the potential violence of unrestrained competition by allowing each person to create individual difference, which is to say, sacrality.

If we are unique, then nobody can compete with us. The post-modern drive for diversity is built on this principle. We need as much diversity as possible to defuse the competition that threatens to destroy us. We advocate accepting each person as he or she is. Each person is special, unique, and uniquely valuable. It becomes imperative to believe this in a world without the sacral guarantees of religion. Girard underestimates the contribution of consumerism in deferring violence. The constructive function of consumerism is in facilitating individuation, or differentiation, apart from open conflict, which when unrestrained results in rigid hierarchies ruled by the most powerful and violent. Instead of killing others, we recognize their difference, asking them to recognize us in return. Consumer products, which enable this differentiation on a mass scale, are what make a mass society possible. To argue against a consumer society is to argue against a mass society. And to argue against a mass society is to dispute the legitimacy of the modern world as such.

In pragmatic terms, we don’t want to do away with our consumer society; we want to buy the things we want at the cheapest possible price. That’s why so much of the leftist criticism of the consumer society is hypocritical, since the critics themselves enjoy the fruits of this society. Furthermore, they don’t offer any realistic alternative. Corporations can and should be regulated, and of course they are already are. But these political corrections to the free market can be handled within our existing political framework. The advantage of our system is that it allows these kind of corrections to made peacefully, through political negotiation.

From an anthropological perspective, if we can truly understand the workings of mimetic desire, we can also rationally ameliorate its destructive potential. Of course, we can never completely step outside the mimetic circle, but realizing that we live within it can transform our social interactions. The postmodern era brings an increasingly widespread self-awareness of the mediated nature of desire, even apart from the influence of Girard’s mimetic theory. In fact, consumerism is often celebrated in the postmodern world, despite the efforts of humanities professors.

Recent critics, even on the left, have recognized that consumption is an active process. Michel de Certeau argues,

 

 

In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called “consumption” and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless and quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed upon it. (31)

There is an “art” or a “Practice of Everyday Life,” as Certeau puts it. While Certeau seems to romanticize consumption as potentially “subversive,” Jean Baudrillard sees it as more sinister, while still recognizing its active nature:

consumption is surely not that passive process of absorption and appropriation which is contrasted to the supposedly active mode of production, thus counterposing two oversimplified patterns of behavior (and of alienation). It has to be made clear from the outset that consumption is an active form of relationship (not only to objects, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system. (199)

Baudrillard recognizes insightfully that consumerism is not really “about” acquiring physical objects, but rather making a positive, aesthetic statement to the world (see below). As a neo-Marxist, he characterizes both consumption and production as forms of “alienation,” but the historical failure of Marxist economics in the 20th century places the burden of proof on him to offer a better system. Despite his hostility to the market, Baudrillard recognizes how consumerism transforms traditional expressions of social and economic competition:

That same ideology of competition which formerly, under the banner of ‘freedom,’ constituted the golden rule of production has now been transposed without restriction into the realm of consumption. Thanks to thousands of marginal distinctions and the often purely formal diffraction of a single product by means of conditioning, competition has become more aggravated on every plane, opening up the immense range of possibilities of a precarious freedom-indeed, of the ultimate freedom, namely the freedom to choose the objects which will distinguish one from other people. (182).It is quite possible for each person to feel unique even though everyone is alike: all that is needed is a pattern of collective and mythological projection-in other words a model. (183-4) 

 

Moreover, the ideology of competition is now giving way everywhere to a ‘philosophy’ of personal accomplishment. Society is better integrated, so instead of vying for possession of things, individuals seek self-fulfillment, independently of one another, through what they consume. The leitmotiv of discriminative competition has been replaced by that of personalization for all. (184)

 

 

Baudrillard recognizes that individualized consumption restructures the ideology of competition, the attempt to be the “best.” He emphasizes, however, the paradox that we distinguish ourselves by the consumption of mass produced products. But it is debatable that “everyone is alike,” as he puts it. On one level this is true, because we are all subject to mediated desire. But on another level, people really are different. Even something as seemingly trivial as the car we choose to drive is ethically significant to the extent that this choice is recognized as significant by others. What matters is not that all people are on some deep level unique, but that this system works to defer resentment and violence, even within the pressure cooker of a mass society. Baudrillard’s critique is founded on the utopian presupposition that freedom from mediated desire is possible.From the perspective of Gans’s “Generative Anthropology,” the paradox of consumer society is the basic paradox of the sign. The same sign which defers desire by substituting for the desired object also stimulates desire, by making the represented object more attractive. The products we consume are all “signs” that both defer and stimulate desire. Because desire is mediated by the other, it can never be completely satisfied. When we achieve the object of our desire, we are often ambivalent or even resentful towards it because it fails to resolve the mimetic situation which created our initial desire (see Girard, DDN 88-89). Rather than recognizing that it is not the poor object’s fault, we tend to blame the object itself, discarding it in favor of some other object. The ultimate object of desire is to be the center of everyone else’s desire, but even this satisfaction is unstable, because once we achieve centrality, we immediately become the object of the others’ resentment and hostility. 

 

The resentment felt towards the object is articulated at the origin of the human in the moment which Gans calls the “sparagmos” (Signs of Paradox 133-36). We destroy and consume the object, not out of simple appetite or even desire, but out of resentment towards its failure to deliver the promised transcendence. We consume the object, thereby destroying or sacrificing it. We cannot eliminate sacrifice, but we can make it more rational in expression. And consumerism is perhaps the most rational form of sacrifice.

2. The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West’s novel is addressed to the problems created by the mass media rather than consumption as such. If, however, we consider that the images and slogans of the mass media are themselves objects of consumption, then this novel indeed falls within the subject of this essay.

Nathanael West’s novel is addressed to the problems created by the mass media rather than consumption as such. If, however, we consider that the images and slogans of the mass media are themselves objects of consumption, then this novel indeed falls within the subject of this essay.The question raised by West in this novel is whether the resentments created by consumer society can continue to be contained and deferred by the system which creates them. The paradox of the sign is exacerbated in modern society because signs are proliferated endlessly. A general cynicism, a disillusionment with the promise of transcendence emerges.

The Day of the Locust tells the story of a young artist, Tod Hackett, who comes to Hollywood to work as a set designer. The novel is rather picaresque in structure, narrating Tod’s various adventures with the outsiders and hangers-on of the movie industry, and taking us to a variety of Hollywood locations; it does come to a climax, however, in a riot that erupts at a Hollywood movie premiere and which provides the apocalypse promised by the novel’s title.Hollywood as West describes it is a hodgepodge of cheap and tawdry appearances which hide an inner emptiness rather than corruption as such. The homes are an incongruous jumble of “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles, “all composed of “plaster, lath, and paper” (61). The residents of Hollywood are similarly surreal: 

 

 

A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. . . . The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office; and the girl in slacks and sneaks with a bandana around her head had just left a switchboard, not a tennis court. (60)  

 

 

The rococo homes and clothing, no matter how tasteless and absurd, reflect the basic human desire for romance and adventure, the need to transcend the mundane banality of everyday life; this desire however has assumed monstrous form due to the mediation of the movies and radio. As West comments in another novel,  

 

 

Men have always fought their misery with dreams. Although dreams were once powerful, they have been made puerile by the movies, radio and newspapers. Among many betrayals, this one is the worst. (Miss Lonelyhearts 39)  

 

 

In Day of the Locust, everyone is essentially an actor, and virtually everyone Tod comes into contact with is literally an aspiring actor or actress. Hollywood or mass culture deforms people into grotesque forms. Harry Greener, for example, an old vaudeville performer trying to adapt to Hollywood, is literally a face with no head:  

 

 

Harry, like many actors, had very little back or top to his head. It was almost all face, like a mask, with deep furrows between the eyes, across the forehead and on either side of the nose and mouth, plowed there by years of broad grinning and heavy frowning. Because of them, he could never express anything either subtly or exactly. They wouldn’t permit degrees of feeling, only the furthest degree. (119)  

 

 

As a result of mass culture, people are severely alienated, not so much from their environment, which they faithfully mirror, but from themselves as whole human beings. Homer Simpson, a middle-aged man directed by his doctor to retire to California for his health, is brilliantly described as disconnected assemblage of human parts:  

 

 

He lay stretched out on the bed, collecting his senses and testing the different parts of his body. Every part was awake but his hands. They still slept. He was not surprised. They demanded special attention, had always demanded it. When he had been a child, he used to stick pins into them and once had even thrust them into a fire. Now he used only cold water.  

 

He got out of bed in sections, like a poorly made automaton, and carried his hands into the bathroom. He turned on the cold water. When the basin was full, he plunged his hands in up to the wrists. They lay quietly on the bottom like a pair of strange aquatic animals. When they were thoroughly chilled and began to crawl about, he lifted them out and hid them in a towel. (82)

 

 

Tod, the protagonist, is the closest thing in the novel to a whole human being. He has compassion for others and seems capable of real love; but he is surrounded by a culture in which love is not really possible. As an artist, Tod tries to resist the allure of Hollywood, but he is finally caught up in it.  

 

The foremost object of Tod’s desire is the 17-year old aspiring actress Faye Greener, who epitomizes the ephemeral glamour of Hollywood.

 

 

Tod grunted with annoyance as he turned to the photograph [of Faye]. In it she was wearing a harem costume, full turkish trousers, breastplates and a monkey jacket, and lay stretched out on a silken divan. One hand held a beer bottle and the other a pewter stein.  

 

She was supposed to look drunk and she did, but not with alcohol. She lay stretched out on the divan with her arms and legs spread, as though welcoming a lover, and her lips were parted in a heavy sullen smile. She was supposed to look inviting, but the invitation wasn’t to pleasure. . . .

Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of skyscraper. You would do it with a scream. You couldn’t expect to rise again. Your teeth would be driven into your skull likes nails into a pine board and your back would be broken. You wouldn’t even have time to sweat or close your eyes. . . .

If she would only let him, he would be glad to throw himself, no matter what the cost. But she wouldn’t have him. She didn’t love him and he couldn’t further her career. She wasn’t sentimental and she had no need of tenderness, even if he were capable of it. (67-68)

 

 

The men of the novel all compete for Faye’s favor in classic Girardian fashion, and they come to blows in two scenes (117, 170). Even though Tod understands the nature of Faye’s appeal, he is unable to govern his desire for her rationally. As the above description of Faye’s sexual “invitation” indicates, underneath Faye’s contrived appearance lies a curious violence, and the relationship between violence and mass culture can be considered as the main subject of the novel.  

 

The problem with mass culture as described by West is that it consists of images and figures that promise everything, but which continually frustrate by their inability to deliver any satisfaction. Hollywood thus incites to violence, and the ending reflects the supposed inability of mass culture to defer the (desiring) violence that it feeds upon. West’s description of the crowd which gathers at a movie premiere makes this point explicit:

 

 

All their lives they had slaved at some kind of dull, heavy labor, behind desks and counters, in the fields and at tedious machines of all sorts, saving their pennies and dreaming of the leisure that would be theirs when they had enough. Finally that day came. They could draw a weekly income of ten or fifteen dollars. Where else should they go but California, the land of sunshine and oranges? Once there, they discover that sunshine isn’t enough. They get tired of oranges, even of avocado pears and passion fruit. Nothing happens. They don’t know what to do with their time. They haven’t the mental equipment for leisure, the money nor the physical equipment for pleasure. . . .  

 

Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment. Every day of their lives they read the newspapers and went to the movies. Both fed them on lynchings, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars. This daily diet made sophisticates of them. The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing. (177-178)

 

 

The anthropological content of West’s novel is that he reveals the underlying violence of consumer desire. Desire is fraught with violence; this insight is not exactly new, but West applies it to a modern context in which this message is not always apparent. In the movie theater, at home watching TV, and so on, we feel ourselves insulated from the threat of violence. West warns us that the potential for violence remains real, hidden behind the images that surround us.  

 

The unstated problem of The Day of the Locust is the lack of any sacred which would defer the violence of desire. West elaborates on this lack in his earlier novel, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a newspaper advice column writer. Miss Lonelyhearts (the only name given him in the novel) has an “ivory Christ” hanging on his wall, and he reads Father Zossima’s sermon on unconditional love from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Miss Lonelyhearts wants to offer this message to his readers, but he is unable to believe in it himself. Surrounded by absurd suffering undignified by any tragic pathos, he finds himself incapable of true faith. Miss Lonelyhearts lives in a modern world in which faith or love have become impossible. The very idea of absolute love is absurd and doomed to failure.

At the end of the novel, the protagonist seemingly undergoes a Dostoyevskian conversion in which he dedicates his life to God. In his first act of Christ-like love, he attempts to embrace a cripple: “He would embrace the cripple and the cripple would be made whole again, even as he, a spiritual cripple, had been made whole again” (57). But the attempt to express Father Zossima’s unconditional love ends only in more violence, as the cripple misinterprets the gesture and shoots him in a farcical struggle. Miss Lonelyhearts thus embodies the failure of religion to provide meaning and happiness in the modern world. This failure results in violence. The Day of the Locust continues West’s critique of modernity, but he turns from the failure of religion to the failure of art as a means of transcendence.

In traditional culture, high art teaches the deferral of desire as well as providing diversion: “to teach and delight” in classical aesthetics. But modern art, like Tod Hackett, has been prostituted to the movie industry. At best, serious art can only record the failure of mass culture, as Tod records “The Burning of Los Angeles” in the painting he works upon, and West records the same in The Day of the Locust. Mass culture exists on the model of pornography, much as Faye, as a figure for mass culture, attracts through her mediated sex appeal. As such, mass art teaches the wrong message, that desire can be satisfied. It makes the consumers impatient for more and more. At the same time, through the very repetition and juxtaposition of its messages, the promise of culture is revealed as empty because the ubiquitous images have lost their potency even as promise. West’s favorite technique is to juxtapose the various images of mass culture, thus revealing the arbitrary and illusory nature of cultural representation (see for example Tod’s surreal journey through a Hollywood movie lot, 130-35). As a result the consumer becomes jaded and cynical, impatient. The images which are meant to substitute for reality have lost their believability; at the same time, there is nothing to take their place. The main function of culture, to transcend the violence of desire, is thus frustrated.

West’s critique of modernity agrees in many respects with Girard’s. In Girard’s interpretation of Western history, the revelation of the Gospel text places humankind in a unique predicament. The Passion story confronts us with our own violence; we can no longer blame the sacrificial victim. The sacrificial mechanism can work only as long as it is disguised and mystified. According to Girard, “the effect of the gospel revelation will be made manifest through violence, through a sacrificial and cultural crisis whose radical effect must be unprecedented since there is no longer any sacralized victim to stand in the way of its consequences” (THSFW 203). In an increasingly secular world, without the protection afforded by myth and sacrificial religion, humans are in imminent danger of destroying themselves. Because of the Gospel revelation, we can no longer plausibly believe in the sacrificial myths that traditionally protect society from its own violence. We are forced to choose between “apocalypse now” or unconditional forgiveness. As Guy Lefort puts this point,

 

 

In a world where violence has been truly revealed and the victimage mechanisms have ceased to function, humans are confronted with a dilemma that is extraordinarily simple: either they renounce violence, or the incalculable violence that they set off risks annihilating them all, ‘as in the days of Noah’. (qtd. in Girard, THSFW 201).  

 

 

For Girard, this situation constitutes the crisis, but also the challenge and opportunity of modernity.  

 

The ending of The Day of the Locust presents a classic Girardian crisis of undifferentiation, complete with angry mob and scapegoat victim (Homer Simpson). A woman in the crowd claims that the riot began because “A pervert attacked a child,” and the crowd “agreed vehemently” (183). Ironically, this same group of people then goes on to demonstrate just how they perverted they themselves are, when one of the men takes advantage of the crunch to start groping a woman with the group’s approval. In other words, there is no meaningful difference between victim and crowd, just as in Girard’s description of the sacrificial crisis. The lack of any organized rituals of sacrifice in the modern world results in a crisis of undifferentiation which threatens the community with self-destruction. The main difference between Girard and West on the problem of modernity is that West does not apparently see Christian love as offering a viable solution.

It might be argued that West’s novel is anachronistic, since he wrote at the dawn of consumer society, in the late 30s, before the post-war economic boom. But in many ways, his novel is prescient; although consumerism delivers more now, it also promises more, so that dissatisfaction always stays one step ahead of satisfaction.

The most obvious problem with West’s critique is that consumerism marches on, becoming more and more efficient in both creating desires and recycling consumer discontent into more consumerism. Dissatisfaction is recycled back into the system as a positive force. There is no shortage of products available to express one’s dissatisfaction with consumerism. Like Marx, West failed to consider the efficiency of the free market.

But West’s point is not just that the system doesn’t work, but that it works in ways which should be rejected. Consumer culture focuses on appearances at the expense of inner reality, thus distorting people and making them into less-than-whole human beings. In some ways West’s critique harkens back to the traditional distrust of appearances in favor of inner reality. The locus classicus of such criticism is Hamlet’s rejection of “seeming”:

 

 

 

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play.
But I have that within which passes show;
These but the trappings and suits of woe. (1.2.76-86)  

 

 

 

 

For Hamlet, then, the inner reality is incommensurable with any form of representation. No one can “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery” (3.2.364-5).  

 

West goes beyond Shakespeare however, because in The Day of the Locust there is no inner reality with which to oppose the superficial appearances. The charge is that consumer culture focuses on appearances so drastically that inner reality is emptied out. There is no true substance to turn to. Even Tod’s ideals, or Miss Lonelyheart’s, are arguably self-delusions. People are deformed, incapable of love or faith, and capable only of violence, or at best an artificial life of romantic illusion, as we see in Faye’s romantic fantasies which seems to satisfy her (104-5). This is a charge which is more specific to the 20th century and typical of literary modernism, as for example in T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. To make this point, however, West gives us, for the most part, caricatures rather than realistic characters. It’s not clear that modern individuals are really as bad as West makes them out to be. In any case, it’s not safe to generalize. The other problem is that this criticism assumes the existence of some prior golden age when people were whole and complete, which is not a safe assumption. The prosperity of the 20th century arguably allows more freedom for love and faith.

The problem that West points to is real, but the solution is in this case would be worse than the problem, since any cure must trample on the freedom we rightly hold as our highest value. It’s not at all clear that there is any alternative to consumer society that would be more hospitable to morality and beauty, not to mention personal freedom.

3. Conclusion

West’s critique of mass culture shares the problem of the neo-Marxist critique: they both exaggerate the problems of mass culture, and they both implicitly assume that some viable, utopian alternative exists. The only alternative to consumerism is an oppressive government that drastically limits personal freedom, telling people what they should desire. Girard’s mimetic theory should alert us to the impossibility of regulating desire. The claim of The Truman Show that a free market enables a repressive regime of corporate media power is based on an unjustified distortion of media power. The products of consumer society are not always beautiful and elegant, but they effectively serve to differentiate individuals, enabling the human community to continue. Any political/economic system can be justified only as the lesser of two evils. Giving up utopian dreams is a sign of maturity that effectively forestalls the appeal of autocratic politics.

West’s critique of mass culture shares the problem of the neo-Marxist critique: they both exaggerate the problems of mass culture, and they both implicitly assume that some viable, utopian alternative exists. The only alternative to consumerism is an oppressive government that drastically limits personal freedom, telling people what they desire. Girard’s mimetic theory should alert us to the impossibility of regulating desire. The claim of that a free market enables a repressive regime of corporate media power is based on an unjustified distortion of media power. The products of consumer society are not always beautiful and elegant, but they effectively serve to differentiate individuals, enabling the human community to continue. Any political/economic system can be justified only as the lesser of two evils. Giving up utopian dreams is a sign of maturity that effectively forestalls the appeal of autocratic politics.The anthropological problem posed by consumer society is, how can a society exist without an absolute sacred? In historical terms, modern society is anomalous. But the sacred has not disappeared; it has rather been integrated into the fabric of our culture, integrated so profoundly that we hardly recognize it as such. We don’t have any overarching, generally accepted, public sacred, but we do have a whole host of private sacreds. Each individual creates his or her own sense of the sacred, in part through consumer products. The great advantage of this system is that it differentiates people without the need for rigid hierarchies, thus maximizing personal freedom.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. 1947. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.

Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. . 1947. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002.Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects. 1968. Trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1996.

Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Randall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.

Gans. Eric. Chronicles of Love and Resentment. 1995-2004. 5 Aug. 2004. .

—. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993.

—. Signs of Paradox: Irony, Resentment, and Other Mimetic Structures. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997.

Girard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1965. —. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1987.Sanes, Ken. Truman as Archetype. Transparencynow.com. 1996-2001. 29 July 2004. .

Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Ed. David Bevington. New York: Bantam, 1988.

West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions, 1962.

 

Anthropoetics 10, no. 2 (Fall 2004 / Winter 2005), Consumer Society and its Discontents: The Truman Show and The Day of the Locust, Peter Goldman, Department of English, Westminster College, Salt Lake City, Utah 84105, http://web.archive.org/web/20071103170809/http://www.westminstercollege.edu/, pgoldman@westminstercollege.edu 

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The following article is adapted from “The Simpler Way: Working For Transition From Consumer Society To A Simpler, More Cooperative, Just And Ecologically Sustainable Society.” by Ted Trainer, P. O. Box 184 Panania, Australia 2213, And Social Work, University Of NSW, Kensington 2052. Although, as a rationalist I do not see it as a soluion, it covers some aspects and perspectives of present day society that many will find useful. “The Simpler Way” referred to in the article is covered at http://web.archive.org/web/20071103170809/http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/ 

With the grossly unsustainable and unjust nature of our society, radical changes are required. There must be extreme changes in lifestyles, the economy, the political system and the geography of settlements.  However the biggest problem we face is the culture of consumer society.  It is built on some strong and largely unrecognised values and ideas that are mistaken – that are driving us into rapidly increasing global problems and will soon lead to our destruction if they are not abandoned.
 
The changes we must make in the economy, the political system, the geography of our settlements and our technologies, are huge and radical but could be made quickly and easily — if people in general understood that they are necessary for our survival, and that they would enable a better quality of life than we have now.  At present there is almost no understanding of any of this among governments or people in general, and therefore it is difficult to be anything but very pessimistic about our chances.  There is almost universal obsession with affluence and economic growth among economists, politicians, media and ordinary people. These goals are seen as the way to solve problems when in fact they are the basic cause of our problems.  For fifty years a few have been trying to draw attention to this fundamental cause of our problems, with almost no success because no one is prepared to even think about any challenge to the limitless pursuit of wealth.
 
The basic factors driving our society into increasing difficulties have been deep within Western culture for several hundred years.  This makes clear how huge and difficult the transition has to be – we will not get through the coming century in reasonable shape unless we scrap and remake much of Western culture.  (There are of course many elements in it that culture that are admirable and need not be changed.)
 
The following passages indicate some of the main values and ideas we must rethink.  
 
1.  VALUES.
 
 With respect to values, there are three crucial clusters.
 
1.     AFFLUENCE,  WEALTH,  MATERIAL CONSUMPTION
 
Above all else, the urgent global problems facing us are due to the fact that we in rich countries have rates of per capita resource consumption that are far beyond those that all people could have, or that can be kept up for us for long.  The limits to growth analysis of our global situation shows that we should be trying to reduce these rates to something like 10% or less of their present rates, and that we should completely abandon any idea of increasing “living standards” over time, or economic growth. (See The Limits to Gowth.)
 
However raising “living standards” and the GDP is the supreme commitment in virtually all countries.  People are fiercely obsessed with wealth.  They want more money to buy more things, they want bigger houses, more expensive cars and clothes, and travel.  They define identity and status by reference to the expensiveness of their possessions.  They want new and luxurious things.  All this has become much worse in recent decades as increasing affluence have become accessible to more people.
 
We now have a large middle class and under them a larger “aspirational” class who want to move up (and those below them with little chance are no less eager for more wealth).  Obviously the top priority for the capital-owning class is that sales must constantly increase. All this ensures that governments must take as the supreme national goal the limitless increase of economic output.
 
It is no exaggeration to say that the quest for affluence is by far the most important cause of the world’s many alarming problems.  Because people are trying to live with much higher resource demands than are possible for all, there is resource depletion (see The Limits to Growth Analysis), ecological damage (see The Environment Problem), the deprivation of the Third World via the “development” that allocates its wealth to the rich countries (see Third World Development), and the need for rich countries to maintain the global empire (see Your Empire).  It is also the main factor generating armed conflict and war in the world.  As all scramble for the dwindling resources it will inevitably become a more dangerous world in coming decades.  (See Peace and Conflict.)
 
So no factor is more important in our predicament than the value put on material wealth, yet there is in effect an adamant refusal to think about whether this is a problem.
 
The required alternative.
 
It must be emphasised that what is required to defuse global problems is not acceptance of “living standards” that are so low that there must be deprivation and hardship.  The Simpler Way is about frugal, non-affluent lifestyles, but these can be perfectly sufficient for material comfort, hygiene, etc., while enabling a higher quality of life than most people have now.  The Simpler Way solves the problem of affluence by offering values and satisfactions that are “rich” but do not require many non-renewable resources.  (See The Rewards in The Simpler Way.)  Consider having to work for money only two days a week, living in a beautiful landscape crammed with artists, craftsmen and gardeners, with fabulous musicians and actors, with many festivals and celebrations, and with a strong and supportive community.  Consider especially the fact that all would be secure from unemployment, poverty and loneliness, and would have a valued contribution to make.
 
A major reason why there is such obsession with consuming at present is because there is not much else to do.  In The Simpler Way all people have as many interesting and worthwhile things to do all day as they can fit in, including the working bees and concerts, participating in art and craft activities, committees, being involved in governing, and “working” in their own household economies.  There are far more important and satisfying things to do than go shopping.
 
There can be much satisfaction in living frugally and self-sufficiently, in repairing and keeping things going, in saving and recycling and using up wastes, in making things.  When one understands the scarcity of resources it can be a source of satisfaction to know that you have been able to keep a jumper or rake handle going for years.  Old and worn, patched and cheap things become valued, attractive, and new and expensive things can become seen as problematic, distinctly unattractive and to be avoided if possible.  Above all there is the satisfaction from creativity, making things; growing perfect food, cooking, making furniture and clothes, works of art…and houses!
 
Of course this is far from the way most people see things.  They idolise and desire the most lavish and expensive and luxurious things, and status comes from having them, so it will probably be very difficult to reverse these powerful tendencies.  The coming era of increasing scarcity will help us to make these changes, but it is important that we portray them not as undesirable steps that must be reluctantly taken to save the planet.  They should be seen as part of the move to a much more active, productive, cooperative, worthwhile and enjoyable way of life.  (More detail on this theme is given in The Way I Live.)
 
Finally, affluence is not good for you!  It undermines sensitivity and appreciation, and the ability to enjoy simple everyday things.,  Consider Kerry Packer, Australian media mogul, who bet $4 million in one sitting once.  Anyone who must go to such an extreme for a thrill is not psychologically, spiritually well.  Compare with the little old lady I knew who got great delight from roadside flowers or birdsong (see The Spiritual Significance of the Simpler Way.)  Being increasingly able to purchase increasingly expensive, luxurious, spectacular things and experiences debauches; it desensitises.
 
 
2. COMPETITION.
 
Our society is intensely, indeed pathologically, competitive!  The economy is organised in terms of firms competing for sales and people competing for jobs.  Government is largely about groups struggling against each other to get into power, and groups struggling against each other to get favours from government.  We go about disputes via an adversarial legal system (e.g., with little emphasis on conflict resolution or mediation.) “Education” is competitive; it is about striving for the best credentials to get into the best jobs.  People compete for status.  And sport is intensely competitive.
 
The problem with competition is that someone wins!  This is a winner-take-all society, and with the triumph of the neo-liberal ideology the winners are racing away from the rest of us at an accelerating rate (See Inequality.)  We accept arrangements which pit the strong and the weak in ruthless competition “..on a level playing field” (especially when all have to bid in the market place), then we docilely accept the few who are richest and strongest taking most of the available wealth.  This is not the way a civilized society functions!  In a satisfactory society, such as a normal family, the overriding principles determining what is done are cooperation and a concern for the needs of all.  You make sure that those who are weakest or in most need get first priority, and you make sure we cooperate to do what is necessary.  If you don’t have this attitude then the urgent needs of those least able to compete, and of the environment, will be ignored.  This is obviously the situation in our present society.
 
The conventional view is that “…competition brings out the best in us.  People work hard to improve the goods and services they are selling, and workers strive to improve their skills to get the available jobs.”  This is quite misleading.  Firstly any benefits of competition, such as effort and efficiency, might be achieved by other means.  We don’t run households on competitive principles.  Secondly the benefits are often outweighed by the costs, losses and damage that competition brings.  In general it is much better, far more “efficient”, far more socially desirable and far more pleasant to organise things cooperatively!  There is abundant and clear evidence on this.  (See especially the book by A. Kohn, No Contest!, .)  This evidence shows that if you want an inefficient way to organise personnel within a firm, make them compete against each other, and if you want an inefficient way to organise learning, make students compete against each other.
 
Kohn points out that when people compete much of their energy goes into worrying about and disadvantaging the others, as distinct from into performing the task at hand.  When people cooperate in learning each benefits from the insights of others.  It is much better if all people in a firm are thinking about each other’s task and feeding in ideas and assistance and support.  In an economy there are huge costs from competition, including the wastage in all the business failures, the legal conflicts, and the zero-sum “marketing” warfare aimed at taking sales from each other.  In this economy almost all compete against each other to try to sell something – when in a sane economy we could all live well on a small fraction of all that effort and resource use.
 
At the global level competition fuels the predatory domination of Third World countries by the rich world – the struggle for markets, resources and wealth that the rich win, thereby condemning billions to poverty and inappropriate development.  And what are the chances for global peace when all poor countries want to join India and China in competing their way to rich world living standards?
 
Even if cooperation was less “efficient” than competing, it would be much nicer if we could all work cooperatively.  The right focus and climate for human societies is working together, mutual aid, helping and nurturing.  Competing is infantile, not morally acceptable, and indeed pathological.
 
It is important to recognise that cooperating implies giving way from time to time, being willing to let someone else have what you could have taken.  It means that those who could have won in competition are willing not to take more than their fair share.  This is quite foreign to the mentality of winner-take-all society.  The strong do not want to have to accept only their fair share; they want the freedom to take as much as they can get.  People in general think this way, even though most of them are far from rich or able to be winners.  They think that those who are rich deserve their privileges, because they got to the top in competition, those who win deserve the prizes, and the losers would also eagerly be winners and takers if they could.
 
Another way of talking about this theme is in terms of the distinction between individualism or Liberalism on the one hand, and collectivism on the other.  The philosophy of Liberalism advocates that we compete as individuals seeking to maximise our own advantage or self-interest.  It claims that the individual should have much freedom to do what he wants and that this will benefit society because individuals have a strong incentive to set up firms which will produce things people want, etc.
 
While it is in principle desirable that individuals have much freedom to do what they wish, it is not possible to have a society without many restraints on freedom, e.g., it is not satisfactory if all have the freedom to drive on whatever side of the road they prefer.  A major cause of global problems is the fact that at present the rich and powerful have far too much freedom, especially to take the markets and livelihoods of others. Again just glance at the Inequality documents to see what this freedom is leading to.
 
In other words it is not possible to have a satisfactory society unless people have a strong collectivist outlook, i.e., unless they put much value on things like the common good, the welfare of others, the public interest, standards, the welfare of the least fortunate, public assets, institutions and traditions.  These values are weak in consumer society, and they are being undermined by the triumph of Liberalism.  It is not possible to have any society made up of individuals motivated only by desire to maximise their own advantage.  Society is something in addition to individual self interest; if there is no value put on public goals, assets, standards, practices, or the welfare of others, then there is no society.  There is little doubt that in recent decades people have become more greedy, self-interested, callous and indifferent to civic affairs. (See Human Nature.)
 
“But isn’t human nature selfish and competitive?”   Humans have a nature that enables them to develop values, habits and ideas that are intensely selfish or intensely cooperative.    It all depends on the culture they grow up in.  The Amish are extremely peaceful and cooperative, the tribal Mundugamor and Maori were extremely aggressive.
 
One element in the competitive syndrome is the obsession with success, achievement and status in Western culture.  Success in life is defined in terms of beating others in the competition for wealth and position.  People slave to “achieve” in school and in the company to “get ahead”.  People admire the achiever, even when the achievement is some trivial thing like a sporting prize or record.
 
There are powerful forces in consumer-capitalist society driving us to individualism.  We have no choice but to struggle as individuals to survive if not win.  In The Simpler Way this will be reversed.  The conditions, especially our intense dependence on each other, on our local social systems and on our local ecological systems will make us think and behave much more collectively.  There is no reason why this needs to interfere with important individual freedoms.  To call for a much more collectivist outlook is not to advocate big-state or authoritarian centralised control.  It would result in taking more social control of economic affairs, because that’s the only way good but profitable objectives can be achieved.  However this can be done via participatory means at the local level.
 
The coming era of scarcity will help us to overcome this problem syndrome, because people will be forced to see that their chances will be much better if they cooperate in developing more self-sufficient local economies.  They will realise that they must have local gardens and bakeries and that they will not develop a satisfactory economy unless they discuss and plan and work together.
 
The second thing that will help us is the fact that people will (re-) discover the satisfaction that comes from cooperating.  The Simpler Way involves strong community.  People are thrown together in committees and working bees and they will find that this is much nicer than competing as isolated individuals.
 
Again it is appropriate to emphasise that we will be helped by our acute awareness of our dependence, on each other, on our local social systems, and on our local ecosystems. The Simpler Way requires but also reinforces mutual assistance and concern to see the other flourish, because all will be acutely aware that their own welfare depends entirely, not on their own talents or wealth, but on whether the local community, economy, political system and ecological system are working well.  Whether all live well will depend on whether their locality looks after its bakers and musicians, etc.  All will therefore have a strong incentive to think about the welfare of others, and to contribute to it.
 
Easily overlooked are the synergistic effects here.  If I beat you to a parking space you feel bad and are more likely to treat the next person badly. Competition results in worse than zero-sum outcomes. But when one person helps another that person is more likely to be nice to the next person, and the goodness multiplies. 
The main concern in The Simpler Way will be to nurture, to do things that help others to flourish.  We will understand that this reinforces conditions we benefit from. The “prosperity” and happiness of others is not only not achieved at my expense, it will lead them to do nice things for me, and it will make me feel good to have made them feel good.
 
Why will we think this way?  Do we all have to become saints before this is possible?  Again, we will be like this because a) we will be in a situation where helping each other is obviously the best way to survive , b) we will realise that cooperating is nice!
 
Individualism.
 
The competition theme is closely related to individualism.  Whereas tribal cultures are very collective, western culture emphasises the freedom for individuals to pursue their own interests.  This has its origins in the long and painful struggles against rule by autocratic kings, the French and English revolutions and the emergence of Parliamentary rule.  Obviously there are valuable elements here but the neo-liberal triumph is making individualism into a socially destructive force now.  It in effect endorses the quest to maximise self interest and it neglects and de-emphasises collectivism, i.e., concern for the public good, and especially for the welfare of those least able to win in the competitive struggle.  It accepts that the individual’s welfare depends on the individual’s capacity to provide for himself.  It denies the importance of public wealth in enabling a high quality of life for all, and of the importance of all taking collective responsibility for the welfare of all. 
 
What we want here is not any imposition of greater state control over individuals, reducing their freedom.  We simply want to see greater concern for the welfare of others and for the public good; i.e., a more “collectivist” outlook.
 
3.  PASSIVITY, APATHY -LACK OF CITIZENSHIP
 
In consumer society there is widespread and increasing political apathy. People tend not to be very concerned about social issues, and there is little interest in critical thought about society.  There is acquiescence with the way society works and little or no significant dissent, let alone call for radical system change.  People do grumble, e.g., about politicians, but they accept things like the existence of unemployment and the distribution of wealth and power.  Above all they accept being governed; they have no concept of governing themselves.
 
Ivan Illich discussed this in terms of the passivity that come with consumer society. The individual’s role in such a society is as a “passive consumer of pre-packaged goods and services”.  It is crucial for capitalism that the individual produces little for himself but purchases as much as possible.  Therefore things are done for you by corporations, governments and professionals.  Subsistence and self-sufficiency are seen as backward, characteristic of tribal and primitive societies. People even leave their own health to doctors, knowing little about diet, fitness or first aid, and just go to the doctor to be fixed up when something is wrong.
 
At the global level there are many extremely serious problems that would be solved very quickly if people cared enough to demand action, such as banning the use of landmines or depleted uranium weapons.  The grotesque injustice in the global economy would be eliminated quickly if even a few were as annoyed about it as all should be. All this can be put in terms of a lack of social responsibility. (For a detailed discussion, see Social Responsibility; The Biggest Problem of All?)
 
In a good society and a world which had solved its big problems citizens would be highly socially responsible.  They would understand, be interested in, care about and seek to fix their social systems.  We are a very long way from such a situation.
 
There are powerful forces at work in consumer society generating this situation.  Many are busy and stressed and have little time or energy left for civic afairs.  Neighbourhoods are dormitories, designed without community in mind.  Corporations want you to do nothing but self-indulge and consume.  Governments do nothing to stimulate community or local self-reliance.  Councils and professionals do everything for the individual so there is no need to get together to fix or run things in the neighbourhood. People watch 3 to 4 hours of TV each day.  The “hidden curriculum” of school teaches people to do what they are told, take no initiative and take no responsibility for what they are learning (teachers make all the important decisions).  Media give superficial accounts so it is impossible to form a confident understanding of issues.  Academics self-indulge in their specialisms and contribute little to the clear and simple overviews that would enable people to follow public issues.  The media and commerce work hard at confining minds to consuming.  They spend $550 billion p.a. on their marketing” effort.
 
The term “Postmodern society” has been applied to the situation many believe we are in; a condition of stupefied preoccupation with trivia, especially created by the electronic media.  People are focused on TV, sport, fashion, celebrities, popular music, spectacles such as football grand finals, Olympic games, fantasy etc.  The attention span is very short, trained to the fleeting thrill or image momentarily attended to then dropped for the next one.  Experiences are ephemeral and fractured, unconnected.  One meaningless but attention-catching image or experience is followed by another, so there are moment to moment preoccupations, but no enduring meanings.  It’s throw away experience, a parade of transient, trivial, mildly attention-getting trashy experiences.  Products are used up and dumped and one moves on to the next.  Self-indulge; consume now, have fun. Sensitivity is blunted. Identity comes from symbols, brand loyalty, designer labels.  One does not attach to lasting causes, values, commitments.
 
There is little sense of what is important and what is trivial.  There is no anger or radicalism.  There is discontent, but it is with personal situations and experience and not with the social conditions or forces causing individual hardship or anxiety.  There is no concern with global injustice.  There is no concept of oppression, no dissent, no thought of challenging the system.  Hence authorities have no need to expend effort to put down resistance…there isn’t any.  Indeed what do discontented postmodern people do…that’s right, go shopping!
 
The situation seems to be getting worse.  Evidence  (e.g., from Hugh McKay) indicates people are increasingly disenchanted with politics and are retreating into their private concerns.
 
All this is to be expected from capitalism late in the day.  It generates the mindless consumption of trivia, firstly by taking away purpose.  People have no need to take responsibility, think about their community or public issues, because they live as individuals not members of any community, and everything is done for them by some corporation or bureaucracy.  Their role is to work and then consume.  They do not have to think about getting together to manage the village commons or run the local co-op or aged care facility.  Capitalism has taken most functions from people, and will happily provide them for a fee. It has cast large numbers into struggling to cope, into boring jobs, and no jobs.
 
The Alternative.
 
The Simpler Way cannot work without a great deal of social responsibility.  It requires active, conscientious citizens.  This is because the local community must run many things, so they must make the decisions, organise the committees and working bees, run the water and energy systems.  These things will mostly not be done by councils or distant governments.  In the coming era of intense scarcity we will not be able to afford much government.  Therefore the necessary steps will not be taken unless people discuss issues, think carefully and critically and come to meetings and take responsibility for their own community.
 
The history of human emancipation can be seen in terms of the development of social responsibility.  For over the last 12,000 years, since beginning to leave tribal ways, humans have suffered countless tyrannical kings and regimes, which they could have thrown off at any time had enough people decided to do it.  Today it is unbelievable how tiny elite classes can dominate, taking most of the wealth and privileges, while exploited and deprived masses just accept their miserable fate.  In many situations brutal action keeps elites in power while people acquiesce in arrangements which they could easily get rid of if they chose to.  Ghandi said of the British colonial domination of India, “If Indians just spat the British would drown.”  In present society the domination is much more obscure and subtle, but it is extreme. (About 1% of Americans have 33% of wealth, 80% share 14% of it.)
 
Humans will not have achieved political maturity until ordinary people cease to accept being governed and take responsibility for governing themselves.  This is the basic principle in Anarchist political philosophy.  People should never be governed – they should govern their own communities through participatory processes.  No person or institution should have any power to rule over anyone else, including elected officials or political “representatives”. When some have the power to rule over others, even as elected representatives, they are very likely  to start ruling in the interests of the rich and powerful.  We will have achieved political maturity only when we have thrown off all elements of “being ruled”, of some having power over others, and have learned to rule ourselves cooperatively via a participatory democracy of equals. 
 
 
2.  IDEAS AND WORLD VIEW.
 
Following are some of the ideas in Western Culture which are contributing to our problems. (These merge with values.)
 
 Progress”, “development”, expansion and growth.
 
The idea that progress is possible and that it is desirable is only about two hundred years old.  Before that people didn’t expect to see any change in their society over a lifetime.  They would have hoped for emancipation in the afterlife but it was not expected on earth.   However we are now used to “progress” and we think it is important and inevitable. 
 
Progress is mostly defined in terms of scientific and technical advance, and increase in material living standards and GDP, as distinct from improvement in quality of life of “social capital”, citizenship or moral standards.
 
Expansion; growth is good.  Set up branch plants, spread, take over, conquer, build a bigger corporation, build an empire, get richer… there is no concept of sufficiency or stability.  Limitless economic growth.  The Simpler Way is about stability, zero growth.
 
Modernisation for the Third World.  “Development” means scrapping tribal and traditional ways, especially “subsistence” production for self-sufficiency, and entering the market to produce only for sale.  Let the market determine all…attract foreign investment…that will maximise growth and GDP, which equals “development”.  Modernisation means adopting consumer lifestyles.
 
Bigness is good.  Big houses. Big corporations.  Big cars.  Big complex systems.  The Simpler Way alternative accepts that “Small is beautiful”.
 
Cleverness, intelligence is admired; We “can do.” There are no limits to knowledge or human technical capacity…someday we will colonise the planets.  Hubris…we humans can master and control nature.  Rationality, technique…we can make battleships …(but we do not have the  wisdom to avoid using them.)
 
Control of nature.   Science in seen as conquering nature, forcing her to reveal her secrets and to do things she would not choose to do.  Humans are seen as separate from and in control of nature.  We do not focus on accommodating to nature’s ways and seeking to live humbly and appreciatively in harmony with them.  Permaculture tries to work with nature, whereas modern agriculture is a battle against nature, seeking to force her to do things she is not inclined to do (e.g., keeping “weeds” out of our fields.) Science dissects nature, takes it apart to see how it works, in an effort to master and control it.  Western culture has little sense of “earth bonding”, a concept central to tribal and peasant societies. Nature exists for us to exploit; it is OK to rip up and use up forests and mountains.  Yes we think about conservation…but mainly so that there will be resources left to exploit later.  There is little acceptance of the “Deep Ecology” idea that nature has rights.
 
Hierarchy, Domination, Power, Privilege, Status, Inequality
 
One of the strongest tendencies in the Western mind is the readiness to accept hierarchical systems.  We organise society in terms of ranks of people who have power over those below them.  Those on top take it for granted that they have the right to boss those under them, and those underneath willingly accept orders.  This makes bureaucracies and armies work but the same dispositions are also through just about all of society’s institutions.  We do not see people as equals in status and power.  We think of some as of higher status and rightly having more power than others.  This is the form taken by schools, governments, and firms.  Most people find it impossible to imagine any other way…”How could you have equality of power in a school?”
 
Significant differences in wealth and privilege are accepted.  It is alright that some are very rich and can own mansions and newspapers while others have too little for comfort.  We do not have rules which prevent some from becoming very rich.  People like power, like to be on top, like to dominate.  They see power differences as normal.  There are leaders.   We must have a President.  Some are born leaders.”  Even thoroughly detestable tyrants and kings are tolerated. Most people accept royalty and see nothing repulsive about the idea that some people claim this kind of superiority, power and privilege.  Status is a matter of rank, level of power or wealth, as distinct for example from being a matter of one’s quality as a person or citizen.  Much effort goes into pretending, trying to give the impression that one is of high status via clothes, property, style and manners.
 
Inequality is therefore accepted.
 
People accept the fact that a few are obscenely rich, many are very rich…and many are quite poor.  They do not say “This is outrageous!  Let’s get rid of such a disgusting situation.”  Even people who are very poor do not seem to object.  All seem to think the rich deserve to be rich and the poor had their chance.  All want the opportunity to rise to be among the rich few.  How many would say, “I do not want to be part of a society in which there are rich and poor people – it is disturbing that some can be very rich while some go without necessities.”  lf many thought like this something would be done.  It is a winner-take-all society. It is OK that some can take far more than they need, and most people want to be one of the winners.
 
Tribal people are wise enough not to want or tolerate inequality.  Mostly their “leaders” are only like chairmen, unable to get their way unless everyone agrees with their proposals.  They are not interested in becoming rich and status comes from reputation, for instance as a hunter or musician or herbalist.  Many tribes have rules and customs which prevent a few from becoming rich.
 
Elitism
 
The Anarchist philosophy emphasises that no one should ever have any power over anyone else, and that we should organise social institutions on this principle.  They want groups to practice participatory democracy whereby all discuss and make the decisions.  They do not accept that leaders, heroes and saviours are necessary.  We ordinary people can and should get together to solve our problems and run things well. Yes some people will come up with more good ideas than others, but no one should have more power to say what we will do.  We will make sure everyone shares chairing the meetings, partly because that’s good for personal development, it increases our community’s stock of skills, and most importantly, it asserts the principle of as much equality in power and status as is possible.  In the new communities of The Simpler Way everyone will have an important contribution; even bringing in the firewood is helpful.
 
In The Simpler Way the strength of our community will depend on the extent to which we can all come together to take responsibility and work out what to do and get the job done.  It will not be strong if all are not included and if all do not feel they have a valued contribution to make.  Only this climate can bring out the productive power of all, which will be needed. So the most able will always try to help others to develop their capacities and foster a cooperative effort, rather than take control of the situation.
 
 This will feed into our attitude to heroes and winners…we will not have any!  We will not be interested in them and we will not need them.  We will seek to avoid competitive situations where someone will be the winner. We will not be interested in records or grades or who won… that’s infantile.  Nor will we value saviours or great leaders.  We do not need superior individuals to solve our problems because we know that ordinary people can work together to solve problems.  It is not good for us to idolise the expert, elite, winner, guru, great leader, record holder, or those who stands out as superior.  That contradicts collective strength and de-values the worth of the ordinary person.   Expertise and skill are important in The Simpler Way, but being “the best” isn’t.  Status is a matter of reputation and respect, built up from long acquaintance within the community.  It is not a matter of rank.  There is no point pretending, because people know you well, they know how well you can fix a windmill, how often you turn up to working bees, are helpful, can persevere, be cheerful when there’s a problem, and what skills and qualities you have.  Even the smartest engineer in town will know he can’t bake a dinner as well as granny.  We all have our different but crucial contributions to make to a happy community.
 
In hierarchical society there is a readiness to accept domination and exploitation,  The concern is to take advantage of others if possible and to force them to do things they do not want to do.  If someone has to sell cheaply it is alright to pounce on a bargain. The incentives are for one to get ahead at the expense of the other. These are not nice, friendly ways of thinking or acting.  Again the conditions of our new small self-governing communities will push us to be cooperative and equal.   People will see that if they try to retain elitism then the cooperative ethos that is essential for our town’s survival will be damaged.
 
Takers
 
One of the most disturbing strands in Western culture is the readiness to take what others had.  Stealing and thuggery are supposed to be wrong, but consider our record.  Westerners throughout history have found it very easy to push others off their land and simply take it.  Consider the expansion into the Third World starting with the brutal conquest of the Americas 500 years ago.  In a short time native American populations were almost entirely killed off.  The British fought 72 colonial wars to take more than half the world as their empire.  They didn’t think twice about taking Australia from its native people.  The Americans pushed the Indians off their land.  The Western mind seems to have had no difficulty doing such things.
 
Consider the history of international relations.  This has basically been little more than the history of attempts by one nation to dominate others, to conquer, to take the wealth of others, to plunder.  Western international relations and foreign policy today are not far from the morality of the thug.  Relations are often polite and without physical aggression, but they are usually about using weight to get as many of the available resources, markets, territory etc. as possible.  Consider the chaos, warfare, and likely future of the Middle East and Central Asia, the arena in which the West is now locked in struggle against Russia and China to control the world’s dwindling oil supplies.
 
This connects with the readiness to brutality, vindictiveness and aggression that is easily triggered in the Western mind, especially if righteous indignation can be summoned.   People eagerly consume brutally violent movies.  Computer games are saturated with slaughter.  “Make my day”.  People can quickly take the opportunity to attack, injure, destroy, vanquish.  The Christian ethic is supposed to be to turn the other cheek, not to hit back, to love one’s enemies.  But to do business in a market is to risk predation.  People are likely to take advantage of you, cheat you.  It is OK to “make a killing”, and to try to drive competitors into ruin by taking their business.  Law is about contests where one party wins in absolute triumph, not about sitting down to look for a sensible win-win outcome, or compromise. (In The Simpler Way there are village elders who mediate between people with a problem.)
 
The limitless acquisitiveness in Western culture also connects with these brutally predatory elements. Take as much as you can get.  There is no concept of sufficient.  Winner take all is OK, don’t worry about the “losers”.  There is in rich countries close to no concern at all with the way their affluence and comfort help to cause the deprivation and misery of billions of other people.
 
Eisler’s book The Challice and the Blade argues that for 1500 years an “Old European Civilization” thrived in the Eastern Mediterranean, with a very peaceful, equal and participatory culture, and a strong environmental sensitivity evident in the worship of Gaia the Earth Goddess Mother.  This culture was eventually overrun by a dominator culture, which Eisler says we still suffer in the West. 
 
The conditions of The Simpler Way will sweep all this away.  We will realise that we must be cooperative, helpful, nurturing, or our societies will not survive, and we will find these ways rewarding.
 
In “participator” society the basic concern will have to be to cooperate with, help and nurture the other.  It will not be a zero-sum situation where what I get you can’t have.  If we are so silly as to compete for individual advantage out town will die.  But if I help you then you will help me and others and then others will help me. Synergism works its miracles.  Goodwill multiplies.  And above all, helping and working cooperatively with others not only builds community solidarity – it is enjoyable!
 
Work
 
Some of the silliest unexamined assumptions and habits in Western culture are do with work.  Firstly far too much of it takes place!  In a sane economy we would live well on about one third as much as is done now.  Yet work time is increasing and work conditions are deteriorating.  (In 2006 40% of Americans work for the below-poverty line income of $5.15 an hour.)  Work has been largely destroyed in capitalist society.  For many it is not a source of enjoyment or personal growth.  In the new economy it will be both.  In consumer society people firmly believe in the moral worth of working hard.  They despise laziness, even though we need a lot more of it.  In consumer society work is mostly seen as an unpleasant means to a valued end, e.g., earning the money to spend on something nice.  Thus most people are probably wasting about half their waking lives in the effort to enjoy the other half. 
 
In the Simpler Way there will be far less produced and consumed, and producing will be enjoyable.  Working hours will be short.  Work will be at a relaxed pace, under the control of the producers.  Work will be highly varied for the many who desire that, and making many different contributions throughout the day.  There will be no drudgery.  Much work will be cooperative, e.g., on working bees.  Most work will be in homes, in gardens, in kitchens and community cooperatives.  Much will be in craft mode of production.  The distinction between work and leisure will collapse; people will enjoy producing and will do a lot of producing during their “leisure time, e.g., in gardens and crafts.
 
The importance of enthusiasm.
 
Perhaps the worst aspect of consumer-capitalist society is the gulf between the zest for life and enjoyment all could experience, and the stunted, stressed, spiritually impoverished lives most people are forced to endure, in even the richest countries.  Again depression, stress and mental illness are at epidemic levels.  Americans average 4 hours TV watching per day.  These phenomena are due to lack of purpose, lack of enthusiasm, lack of worthwhile things to do.
 
About the worst thing that can happen to a person is to lose purpose.  What matters above just about all else is having things you want to do, are interested in, hope for.  To a large extent consumer-capitalist society has taken significant, worthwhile purpose from people.  Consider Aborigines, homeless, tribal people, impoverished, unemployed, disabled and aged people.  Most of them have nothing to do, no role, no contribution, no status or respect from their contribution.  There is no interest in designing a society that would give these people important things to do (that would detract from the amount corporations could supply).  Indeed this economy prides itself on the way the smart powerful few, the Wal-Marts, can take business and livelihoods from many others and dump them into boredom and purposelessness.  No surprise that we have ever-increasing problems of depression, drugs, crime and self-destruction.
 
Thus the main reason why people devote themselves to Postmodern mindless trivia, TV, sport, celebrities, hedonism fantasy…and shopping, is because there isn’t much else to do.
 
The Simpler Way solves all this, automatically.  All have important things to do, in a supportive community, full of artists and gardens, all know that their welfare depends on keeping the locality in good shape, and all are respected and valued for their contribution to this end.  All will be acutely conscious of their beautiful surroundings, the landscape, the community, well run systems, their powerful political system, their institutions, the fact that they have built and that they run an admirable society, a society to be proud of.
 
It would be difficult to estimate the power, energy and creativity that will be released by this change in the situation individual’s experience.  At present huge amounts of potential energy, time, skill, responsibility and are locked up in those people sitting watching TV, when they could be thrashing around their town doing things, helping, discussing, building, creating, caring for others and thinking about what would improve their town.  What miracles could be perform in our neighbourhoods and to the quality of life there if we released 28 hours enthusiastic effort per person per week!
THE VALUES AND WORLD VIEW OF CONSUMER SOCIETY; THE BIGGEST PROBLEM. http://web.archive.org/web/20071103170809/http://socialwork.arts.unsw.edu.au/tsw/
 

THE SIMPLER WAY: WORKING FOR TRANSITION FROM CONSUMER SOCIETY TO A SIMPLER, MORE COOPERATIVE, JUST AND ECOLOGICALLY SUSTAINABLE   SOCIETY. Ted (F.E.)Trainer, P. O. Box 184 Panania, Australia 2213, and Social Work, University of NSW, Kensington 2052.

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