Notes of An Underground Humanist
Notes of An Underground Humanist
ISBN 978-1-60145-765-3
BookLocker.com, Inc.
2013
Second Edition
Notes of an Underground Humanist
Chris Wright
This book is dedicated to all who resist authority, in whatever guise
it may assume.
Table of Contents
vii
Preface to the First Edition
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now than ever before, but as their numbers increase their influence
seems to decline. They become less relevant, less respected. Less
culturally central. Their place is taken by movies, computers, the
internet, television, magazines, video games, which, unlike books,
serve to atomize people and attenuate culture itself. American
culture is defined more and more by the negation of culture,
namely interpersonal fragmentation, immediate gratification, the
fetishizing of technology, bureaucratic routinization, universal
commodification. Broadly speaking, in short, social life is too
atomistic, too materialistic for anything esoteric to really matter.
You disagree? Look at the state of contemporary literature. V.
S. Naipaul, surely an authority on the subject, has said that the
novel is dead, and Philip Roth thinks it’s dying. (T. S. Eliot even
said it had ended with Flaubert and James.) Fiction can no longer
be called very culturally relevant. The first thing to go was the art
of narration, of telling stories, in the manner of Balzac, Dickens,
Hugo, and so on. Modernism and postmodernism abandoned it as
hopelessly old-fashioned, since it seemed to presuppose that life is
comprehensible—even simple, “linear”—that there is such a thing
as truth and authentic selfhood. “There is something inauthentic for
our time,” wrote Lionel Trilling in 1969, “about being held
spellbound, momentarily forgetful of oneself, concerned with the
fate of a person [namely, the main character of the narrative] who
is not oneself but who also, by reason of the spell that is being cast,
is oneself, his conduct and his destiny bearing upon the reader’s
own. By what right, we are now inclined to ask, does the narrator
exercise authority over that other person, let alone over the reader:
by what right does he arrange the confusion between the two and
presume to have counsel to give?”1 In retrospect, the modern
contempt for narrative necessarily prefigured a contempt for
fiction, given that the essence of fiction throughout most of history
1
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1971), p. 135. I cannot refrain from saying that this little
book is remarkable. It is lucid, a pleasure to read, yet challenging—
thought-provoking as few books are.
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has been narrative. Ergo: fiction itself has come to seem inauthentic
and somehow frivolous to most people, though they may still read a
novel now and then as a momentary diversion.
Poetry is in the same position. It’s everywhere, like fiction, but
there is a macrocosmic sense of “Who cares anymore?”
Or look at the state of theory. Philosophy, psychology,
sociology, economics. Far from being very original or ambitious,
they often are not even readable anymore! Philosophy has
deteriorated into “research,” in the process becoming so technical
and tedious that it’s a terrible bore to read. (I should know: I have a
Master’s in Philosophy.) In some ways I love academia, but I fear it
has become an incestuous and largely irrelevant little community.
If from one perspective academia appears comical or superfluous,
that isn’t entirely the fault of academics: it’s because “the life of the
mind” is less culturally valued now than it seems to have been long
ago.
In a moment of sadness once I wrote this:
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For those of us who keep pace with the march of history, the
illusion of immortality or “existential meaning” has dissipated,
whether temporarily or permanently. Perhaps the situation will
change in the coming decades or centuries as social structures
continue to evolve, but as of now, the anguished existentialist way
of thinking remains timely.
In light of all this, why have I written this book? If I no longer
have any illusions about the power of writing in generating social
change, what’s the point? Well, actually, I didn’t have to do much
writing for this project: I simply culled my journal for “maxims and
reflections” (in Goethe’s phrase) and arranged them as a book. The
product could easily have run to 600 pages, or 900; maybe I’ll use
the leftovers in future books. As for my motivation: like many
people, I’m bored. Tired of endless reading, endless thinking,
endless journal-writing; I’m 26 and I want my fifteen minutes of
fame. It would distract me, at least, from “existential nausea.” We
all want recognition, and some of us chase it through writing.
I was about to say that this book is my answer to Pascal’s
Pensées and Nietzsche’s works, but that wouldn’t be quite right: it
isn’t intended to break new philosophical ground. Originally I
wanted to include substantive analyses of the self and society, but
that would have become academic in tone. Nevertheless, I have
included a semi-academic paper I wrote on John Brown because it
ties into the themes that have guided me in this endeavor, namely
the apparent demise of “humanism,” the inhumanity of the modern
world and the self’s struggle to persevere. I wanted to celebrate the
individual. The unphilosophical nature of the project is how I
justify the many “self-contradictions” scattered throughout the
book, the changes in tone, in emphasis, in ideas. The reader should
keep in mind, moreover, that, being taken from an intellectual
journal, it’s all experimental and hypothetical. (The hypothetical in
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xiv
Preface to the Second Edition
The world has changed since 2007, when I wrote the preface
to the first edition of this book. That was still the age of capitalist
triumphalism, of glacial politics in the U.S. and the Despair of the
Activist. Cultural ennui—personal ennui for me. Aimlessness.
Since 2008, though, and especially since 2011, life has taken on a
new coloring. Horizons have opened; the world is in tumult, even
more than it was, and nothing seems permanent anymore. Things
have continued to get worse for most people and will continue to
do so for decades, but now at least in activist circles there is the
sense that the old world is crumbling and a new one is beginning its
laborious birth.
In other words, between 2008 and 2012 the world, particularly
the West, began the long transition from an age of sick
individualism to an age of healthy collectivism. Social movements
began their long march back into the mainstream—social
movements against economic injustice, the most fundamental kind
of oppression. The recent evolution of economic power-
structures—the institutions around which society pivots—is
responsible not only for the brute material horrors of increasing
class polarization and the global immizeration of billions but also
for all the social atomism that has grown in the U.S. since the
1970s (or really the 1940s), the privatization of life, the human
alienation, the destruction of public spaces and public discourse,
the erosion of civil society so that now churches are practically the
only functioning institutions that have some kind of positive
relation to popular empowerment. Society has been gutted, because
that has been in the interest of certain segments of the capitalist
class. (Marx’s historical materialism, in its essence, is merely
common sense.) The task for human beings now, as opposed to the
capitalist beings who have brought us to the brink, is to
reconstitute the public, the social. That is the way to save the
world. And that is what Occupy Wall Street began in the West,
with its tentative moves toward remaking public spaces and
reminding the U.S. of class oppression.
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xix
Chapter 1
Detached Thoughts
*
The naïve idealist’s despair.— “Philosophy! My eyes glisten at the
sight of your death throes! What treasures the Greeks and Romans
bequeathed to us, and the ancient Indians and the Europeans!—
what treasures have we buried! The vast thoughts of the
Upanishads echoing through millennia, echoing in the orotund
voice of primeval civilization, reverberating insights into our
origins from beyond time’s chasm. The pioneering logical rigor and
skeptically confident idealism of Plato. The heroic struggles of
Nietzsche to overcome the nihilism attendant upon God’s death by
creating edifices of ideas couched in luminous prose. The noble if
quixotic attempts to scale the vault of heaven and look Creation in
the eye. The sheer desperate determination to plow on in the face of
all odds and pierce the veil of Maya just to catch a glimpse,
however fleeting, of truth—propelled not by any utilitarian
consideration but simply by the obsession to consummate this
Wonder that is practically coextensive with consciousness. The
taming of the turmoil of experience into a Weltanschauung and the
brief triumphant respite as the thinker contemplates the world he
has created, knowing full well that soon his Homeric restlessness
will reassert itself, the prospect of adventure will tantalize him, and
he’ll set solitary sail on seas of uncharted peril. He may not reach
his destination, but the quest is what electrifies and justifies him.
He needs nothing else; and if he is deprived of it he is nothing, in
his eyes and the world’s. He is ignorant of the force that compels
him toward his Faustian destiny, but it acts on him as the wind acts
on a leaf.
“His spirit has dissipated in postmodernity. Now we have the
hordes of scribblers scribbling critiques of critiques of dead
philosophers’ ideas from their spiritual cubicles and receiving a
paycheck in return. Immersing themselves in the sacred texts but
unable to imbibe the Dionysian essence that wafts from the words
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*
What is philosophy?— One could write an entire book in answer to
this question. Here I’ll say only that philosophy, as I understand it,
is not what it has become. It is not logical symbolism or
formalization; it is not occupied purely with methodology or
linguistic analysis; it does not consist in shallow discursiveness or
logical exercises, and certainly not in the trivial questions that
occupy so many academics now. Rather, it is something that the
intelligent, informed layman can comprehend, something he can be
moved by. It is nothing more nor less than an intellectually honest
engagement with the perennial questions of life. It ought to inspire;
it ought to broaden one’s vision, impel one to think on one’s own,
for it is man’s original and instinctual attempt to assimilate the
world—his primordial impulse to ask questions. To bring order out
of chaos. All the sciences emerged from it. They are extensions of
it.
Philosophy is, in fact, the broadest of human endeavors. Every
curious child asking his parent why the sun sets is a pure
philosopher; every great poet and scientist is in a direct line from
Plato. Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, Milton, Shakespeare, Whitman,
even Wilfred Owen—analytically they weren’t rigorous thinkers,
but the spirit animating their writings was philosophical. Wonder,
awe, despair at universal absurdity, joyfulness in living, the drive to
understand. The true philosopher has a mind so expansive that he is
often dissatisfied with himself; and his dissatisfaction drives him to
push the boundaries of thought and life. He might be called a
“genius,” but he is really just a thoughtful person who, because he
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*
Wonder vs. knowledge.—
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*
The intellectual virtue of humility.— The fact that intuitively we
find it a complete mystery how our limbs move—“miraculously”—
when we “will” them to proves the hopelessness of our trying to
understand ourselves. Consciousness is sunlight glancing off the
ocean’s surface.
*
To be or not to be?
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*
The sovereign of nature.— A case can be made that the human
brain, or certainly the human body, is the most complex structure in
the universe.
*
Majesty in the ‘microscopic.’— The universe’s most awesome
achievement is to have created a being capable of contemplating
the universe, and of partially understanding it! A being that can
even pass judgment on the universe! Star-dust contemplating stars.
Humans are so wondrous that even they cannot fathom how
wondrous they are.
*
Experimental thoughts.— Though Hegel was, in some ways, an
intellectually dishonest thinker (which didn’t prevent him from
being one of history’s greatest philosophers), one of his
fundamental intuitions was right: humanity is nature’s self-
consciousness. In our attainment of power over nature, nature has
achieved power over itself. –That’s commonly understood, in an
abstract way, but rarely is it imagined. Intuited. Think about this:
when you study neurology, billions of cells in your brain are, so to
speak, trying to understand themselves. They’re looking at pictures
of themselves, they’re learning how they operate—they’re learning
that dendrites are stimulated by neurotransmitters released into the
synapse, that action potentials traveling along axons are sped up by
a myelin coating on the cell—and then they cooperate with each
other to feel collective amazement at the fact that these impossibly
intricate biological processes are occurring inside them, and then
they reflect that despite all this newly acquired knowledge they still
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*
Nature’s desire for recognition.— Had humanity not been created,
what a ridiculous comedy the universe would be! All this
pageantry, all these spectacles, all this beauty for nothing! It would
be a play performed for no audience, with no purpose. The beauty
of the sunset, of New Zealand’s landscape, of an evolutionary
equilibrium that is an artistic masterpiece would have no observer,
no Other to appreciate it! It would not exist; it would be dead. A
brute fact opaque to itself. Humanity created it. In nature’s creation
of humanity, nature created itself.
2
See chapter three for more thoughts on the “self” and its illusory nature.
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*
On value.— One reason I’ll never be truly happy is that there isn’t
a God. There isn’t a “Truth” in matters of value (moral value,
aesthetic value, personal value).3 No such thing as greatness or
genius, because these concepts are, implicitly, values made into
objective truths, which is impossible. Predicating greatness of
someone is not like predicating some value-neutral quality like
“featherless biped”-ness of him, predications that can be simply
true. But that’s what I unconsciously strive for, greatness and
genius. So I’m plagued by this cognitive dissonance, this disjunct
between my more primitive ambitious side, which can’t be
reasoned with, and my knowledgeable side, my reason (which tells
me that my desire to be “objectively valuable” is impossible
because the notion of objective value is meaningless). If there were
a God I could strive for his approval, which would be approval
from Reality and would thus objectively confirm my value. But
because there isn’t, I’m destined to be restless and unsatisfied.
Similarly, the absence of God, or of objective truth in matters of
value, means that there is no point in seeking fame if it’s done for
the sake of confirming your value to yourself (which, of course, it
is). Recognition (or fame) proves nothing, because there is nothing
to prove. In short, there is nothing outside of self-respect, no
“reality” that one’s self-respect can correspond to or be justified by.
One’s belief in one’s value is neither true nor false. But we all think
it’s true or want it to be and act accordingly, trying so very hard to
prove our worth, or bolster or confirm our self-esteem by bringing
our self-image in line with notions of the ideal human being.
Value-talk is an illusion, but it’s a psychologically inescapable one:
hence the “Wise Man’s” cognitive dissonance.
All there is is people respecting you or you respecting yourself
and so on. There is only subjectivity here, no objectivity. There are
only attitudes—attitudes and more attitudes, no firm ground
3
To say it in an illustrative way: no scientist will ever discover by
investigating nature that murder is wrong. In philosophical jargon,
“realism” about values is mistaken.
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*
Cognitive dissonance.— Here’s the paradox: people say and do
things that make you, e.g., contemptuous of them, but you say and
do those things yourself—or you could do them while remaining
essentially the same person you are. If a driver on the highway cuts
you off you think “Jerk!”, and you’re convinced of your judgment.
But you could do and probably have done the same thing, even
though you know you’re not a jerk. So why is he a jerk and you’re
not? Maybe you’ll retort, “My opinion that he’s a jerk is an
outgrowth of anger, and I don’t really mean it.” But no, you do
mean it. In the moment when you think it, you’re sure of it. You’re
disgusted and dismissive of him. “He’s a jerk!”: that’s what he is,
that and nothing else. He doesn’t merit further thought because he
is inferior. You’re wrong, though, as you recognize when your
anger has subsided.
Similarly, in thinking that George W. Bush is a bad person
because of his actions and beliefs, you’re making a mistake. Aside
from the fact that “bad person” and “evil man” have little
meaning—because they’re value-judgments, or subjective reactions
that project themselves into supposed objective facts—you’re
writing him off as “this, and only this.” You’re ignoring his
individuality, his humanity, treating him as a thing, before trying to
understand his position or the experiences that have led him to it.
You’re wrong. To understand is, in some sense, to “forgive.” –And
yet I, more often than most people, feel palpable contempt for
political conservatives. That implies that I’m treating them as
“things,” as fixed, immoveable, as though it is of their essence to be
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*
The Dalai Lama as role-model.— The source of fanatical
inhumanity is certainty in value-judgments. The cure to such
inhumanity is to recognize that value-judgments are basically
meaningless—reifications of attitudes of approval or disapproval—
and relative to some set of standards, not “absolute.” Compassion
and tolerance are not only humane but true;4 hatred and intolerance
are not only horrible but false.
*
The greatest error.— Human life revolves around the illusion of
objectivity.
*
Value-judgments are always relative to something, not
absolutely true (not just “true, period”). A person is not intelligent,
period. He is intelligent relative to someone or to some standard.5
Hitler was not bad; he was bad relative to certain standards (and, in
4
Strictly speaking, the attitudes themselves are not “true,” since attitudes
aren’t the sort of things that have truth-values. Rather, compassion is more
compatible with a recognition of the relative unfoundedness of value-
judgments than hate is, because hate is premised on impassioned belief in
someone’s “badness.”
5
Actually, “intelligent” may be more descriptive (value-neutral) than
evaluative. I’ll leave aside such terms.
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6
Contrast “This patch is yellow” with “This painting is beautiful.” The
former is “objective” and non-relational in a way that the latter is not,
however much it appears to be. The painting is beautiful to me, or relative
to my preferences.
7
The only way it would be incoherent is if happiness is defined (emptily)
as that which a person desires or values. But the common definition is that
it’s a pleasurable, conflict-free state of mind—and it’s coherent for one to
prefer pain and conflict.
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*
Value characterizes a relation between a subject and an object.
It is incoherent to say that an object (or a person) is valuable in
itself, i.e., with no reference to a subject (a subject’s purposes,
attitudes, etc.), because this contradicts the nature of value. But this
is basically what one is doing when one makes a value-judgment.
The statement “That painting is beautiful,” by virtue of its form,
ascribes intrinsic value to an object, i.e., considers it valuable “in
itself”—without reference to a subject—which is incoherent. The
meaningful way of expressing the same sentiment is to say
something like “I find that painting beautiful,” or to list the criteria
by which one judges aesthetic merit and then say that that painting
fulfills the criteria.
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meaningless. Thus, the human project, viz., the urge for self-
confirmation, is, from at least one perspective (in fact several),
fundamentally deluded. It presupposes that there is some value in
“confirming” oneself, in objectifying one’s self-love, in making it a
part of reality so to speak, which itself presupposes that reality or
the world has some sort of “objective value,” which it doesn’t. In
any case, the notion of objectifying one’s self-love is nonsensical,
because freedom and value are necessarily subjective things.8
*
“Meaning.”— A purpose, a goal, a project, self-transcendence,
community, recognition, self-confirmation in the world, the
realization of self-ideals, purposive self-projection into the world,
making a contribution, changing something, making lasting change,
devoting oneself to something “other,” love, commitment, faith,
hope, spiritual “ordering,” “centering” oneself, awareness of
connection, transcendence of atomizing self-consciousness,
transcendence in various ways of the merely “given,” immersion in
the other, passion, truth, authenticity, spontaneity, affirmation.
*
More thoughts on values.— I don’t understand how a criticism or a
compliment of me can be true—or, more accurately, I don’t
8
More exactly, from one perspective it is nonsensical to “objectify” or
“confirm” your self-love. From another perspective, though, it isn’t; we
do it constantly. We project our self-love into, and through, our activities
and interactions with others, thereby in some sense actualizing it or
objectifying it. But the goal of putting your self-love, your self, into the
world so that it stays there, so to speak, i.e., so that the world from then on
necessarily reflects to everyone “John’s value!” or something like that—
something that can be read into the world—is nonsensical, though we all
desire it (implicitly). What we desire, in other words, is to overcome the
boundaries between self and world, self and other. That’s what it all boils
down to, the desire for meaning and everything else. But it is impossible,
indeed meaningless.
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*
It’s hard for me to take seriously people’s responses to me,
whether positive or negative, because in different circumstances
they would have responded in the opposite way. It is never just you
to whom people respond, but you in such and such conditions. An
indefinite number of external factors enters into people’s attitudes
toward each other. (It’s true that these attitudes are rarely
groundless. They are merely not as grounded as they pretend to be.)
*
Admiration.— To admire is to misunderstand. It means to pick out
and simplify certain traits or acts, abstracting them from the
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*
It makes no sense to praise someone for something over which
he has no control. Since people have very little control over who
they are, it makes little sense to praise someone for his personality
or his “noble mind” or his wit or his talent or his natural propensity
to work hard or any such quality. And insofar as his acts express
his propensities, it is senseless to praise or condemn him for them.
In fact, similar reasoning probably leads to the conclusion that any
act of condemnation or praise is, in a sense, misguided. (Other
chains of reasoning also lead to that conclusion. For example, if the
principle is that an act ought to be praised insofar as it is motivated
by concern for others, then no act ought to be unreservedly praised,
since all acts are motivated by at least as much self-regard as other-
regard. Or, rather, they—at best—implicitly express both self-love
and other-love. There is no “purely unselfish,” or “purely unself-
ish,” act.) The paradigm for all these value-judgments, their “form”
and real meaning, is revealed in something silly like the implicit
approval that people project towards a good-looking person. It is a
cognitively senseless9 emotional reaction. Properly speaking, it has
the form “I like” or “I am impressed,” not “You deserve” (even
though for the admirer—i.e., in the phenomenology of his mental
state—the form is the latter, the objective statement, not the former,
the subjective statement). When we judge people’s worth we’re
trying to say something about them, but, ultimately, the more
meaningful—and sensible—thing is what we’re saying about
ourselves, such as the implicit statement “I don’t like him” or “I am
in awe of him” or whatever.10
9
As in both “meaningless” and “not sensible.”
10
Insofar as our judgment, however, incorporates a description as
opposed to an evaluation, it is meaningful. For example, the statement
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*
Having finished reading Albert Camus’s The Fall, I feel
obligated to myself to make a few observations on the book’s
relation to me.
The narrator’s successful, happy, easy life was interrupted one
day when he realized that he was not as virtuous as he pretended to
be. —On second thought, no, I don’t feel like laying it all out for
you. The point is that the narrator experienced a crisis when he
realized he was not “an innocent man” but a guilty one, and that
everyone is fundamentally guilty. The problem was, how could he
live his life under the glare of this knowledge? How could he live
in an unhypocritical way, in such a way that he could go on judging
people as always, as everyone must (in order to justify his implicit
self-love), without deserving to be judged by them at the same time
and for basically the same reasons that he judged them? He wanted
to have a clear conscience, to believe he was superior, as he always
had, but by rights he couldn’t. For a while he struggled with this
problem, until finally the solution came to him: if he judged
himself with sufficient severity (“J’accuse—moi!”), he could go on
judging others and dominating them with a good conscience. If,
from time to time, he “profess[ed] vociferously [his] own infamy,”
he could go on permitting himself everything (for example, the
duplicity that he couldn’t help practicing, being a modern man).
The point seems to be that by repenting periodically, accusing
himself, he salvages the craved conviction of his superiority
(presumably because he knows that other people don’t accuse
themselves, and so to that extent at least he is better, or more honest
and insightful, than them). “The more I accuse myself, the more I
have a right to judge you.”
This is all very similar to what I’ve said many times. All these
paradoxes, all these ironical self-justifications, are classic me. The
difference between us is that we adopt different “solutions.” (Mine,
needless to say, is better.) While the narrator, Jean-Baptise
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*
Reading Hannah Arendt’s classic On Revolution (1963). In her
analysis of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, she remarks
insightfully that “The sin of the Grand Inquisitor was that he, like
[the French revolutionary] Robespierre, was ‘attracted toward les
hommes faibles,’ not only because such attraction was
indistinguishable from lust for power, but also because he had
depersonalized the sufferers, lumped them together into an
aggregate—the people toujours malheureux, the suffering masses,
etc. To Dostoyevsky, the sign of Jesus’s divinity was his ability to
have compassion with all men in their singularity, that is, without
lumping them together into some such entity as one suffering
mankind.” Yes, reification, depersonalization, is really the origin of
“evil,” and to the extent that even “good” people reify others
they’re not far removed from “bad” people. So, in a way, the hero
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*
It’s paradoxical that what makes us human, the ability to
abstract from concrete things, from the concrete “other” (a capacity
that accounts for self-consciousness), is what makes possible not
only the concept of morality but also the horrors of Nazism, of
hating an abstract thing called “the Jew” and wanting to kill
everyone who instantiates this thing. Gandhi and Hitler are made
possible by the same human capacity of mediation, of abstracting
from the immediate and subsuming people under categories.
*
“What goes on behind the scenes?”— In most cases, “essence”
differs from “appearance.” Truth has to be uncovered
painstakingly, dug out hour by hour, year by year. Like a miner
digging through a mile of granite for a nugget of silver. The
essence of our thinking and behaving is false, deluded. For
example, the self—what is the self? Not some sort of “spiritual
substance,” a “soul,” a personal entity or self-identical thing like
“Chris Wright”—what deceptive things are names!—or me or you
or something metaphysically real. The self is, in a sense, an
illusion—yes, the Buddhists are right: at its core it is nothing but
self-consciousness, consciousness looking at itself, consciousness
of consciousness. I…am a will-o’-the-wisp, an ignis fatuus, a mere
fold in consciousness, a brain-produced, brain-controlled, invisible
glint in its (the glint’s) own eye. There is a body, yes; memories,
yes; consciousness, yes; a name, yes—a name to enhance the
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*
An example of the above, from Marxism.— According to Karl
Marx, capitalism functions in such a way that its appearance differs
from its essence. What happens in the marketplace conceals what is
happening in the sphere of production. His theory of “commodity
fetishism” elaborates on that claim, and it leads to the theory of
“reification.” Both are sketched below.
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the seller may well demand more of the product from its
manufacturers (so as to sell more of it and make a higher profit),
who will therefore either raise its price or move proportionately
more labor into its production than into the production of other
goods. Hence, in the economy as a whole, a change may take place
in the allocation of labor. The higher price of the product expresses
the higher value of the labor that goes into producing it—that is,
the now-greater social necessity of employing labor in production
of this particular commodity. So its price is basically a monetary
expression of the changed relation between spheres of labor, and
between individual laborers, even though it seems to express only a
relation between things themselves.
Thus, in a capitalist society relations between people are
reified into relations between things. And these thing-like relations
are seemingly subject to their own laws of movement. The result is
that “a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into
a commodity which, subject to the nonhuman objectivity of the
natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man
just like any consumer article.”11 Social activity in general acquires
more and more this alienated character, this character of being
determined by strange forces outside the individual’s control. One
can’t find a job in a certain sector, so one has to enter another until
something happens and one gets laid-off, etc.; relations between
friends and family members are conditioned by the impersonal
functioning of the economy, and one feels increasingly like a cog.
One is compelled to take jobs one doesn’t want; one desires
mindless entertainment and release from the unpleasant “realm of
necessity” (hence the love of video-games, television, “smart
phones”); and one’s relationships become increasingly
dysfunctional. Ultimately, “just as the capitalist system
continuously produces and reproduces itself economically on
higher levels, the structure of reification progressively sinks more
deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness
11
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: 1971), p. 87.
23
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
“The human harvest.”— Peter Marin: “Kant called the realm of
[human] connection the kingdom of ends. Erich Gutkind’s name
for it was the absolute collective. My own term for the same thing
is the human harvest—by which I mean the webs of connection in
which all human goods are clearly the results of a collective labor
that morally binds us irrevocably to distant others. Even the words
we use, the gestures we make, and the ideas we have, come to us
already worn smooth by the labor of others, and they confer upon
us an immense debt we do not fully acknowledge.” When you talk
or think, you are channeling the past and other people. When you
put on your clothes or drive your car or use your computer, you are
relating yourself to a global network of people. We are all indebted
to each other.
*
Excerpts from 2006. (Juvenilia.)— American society, and
increasingly the whole world, comprises, arguably, more schisms
than any in history. Even societies torn by civil war have not had as
many schisms as ours does. Theirs have simply had more dramatic
12
Ibid., p. 93.
24
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
13
This is partly why some Muslims embrace “jihad.” They resent
America’s cultural imperialism, i.e., the erosion of traditional ideologies,
and so they fight it. Ultimately they’re impotent, though: nothing they can
do (short of nuclear war) can stop globalization.
25
CHRIS WRIGHT
14
See also Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: W.
W. Norton & Company, 1979), pp. 34–43—or, indeed, the whole of
chapter two.
26
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
27
CHRIS WRIGHT
15
Quoted in Karl Marx, Capital (London: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 618.
28
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
29
CHRIS WRIGHT
30
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
31
CHRIS WRIGHT
16
The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Kamenka (New York:
Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 136, 137. The thoughts in that passage are
dramatized by many pop-cultural creations, for example the popular show
“The Office.”
17
Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, p. 32.
32
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
33
CHRIS WRIGHT
18
Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, p. 66.
19
David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New York: Doubleday Anchor
Books, 1953), p. 37.
20
Ibid., p. 41.
34
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
35
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
It’s a cliché but it’s worth repeating: one cause of modern
loneliness is the attitude of treating people as means to an end,
namely happiness. “If a person doesn’t entertain me or stimulate
me,” people implicitly think, “I’ll end my relationship with him.”
Relationships have become conditional on stimulation and the
achievement of satisfaction. But what’s needed is commitment.
You commit to someone as an end in himself, as you commit to an
end. Commitment should be conditional, if at all, only on the
other’s respect for your humanity, on his treating you as an end.
(No physical abuse, etc.)
Why does the modern attitude cause unhappiness? Because
happiness comes from the interaction between oneself and a
significant other. Happiness is relational: “happiness was born a
twin,” said Byron. The interaction between two equals, not between
a lesser partner (a means) and a greater partner (an end). You
necessarily desire recognition from someone you respect as you do
yourself, because only someone fully human can fully affirm or
confirm you. But we tend not to respect others as we do ourselves,
i.e. as ends, which means we can’t have a significant other (in the
truest sense) in our lives. –One of the reasons for our lack of
respect for others is that this is (unconsciously) a defense against
rejection. If we don’t let ourselves truly respect them, or if we don’t
get very attached to them, we won’t care if they reject us. Perhaps
we interact with them in a friendly, affectionate way, but we don’t
really allow them to become a part of our psyche. Unfortunately
this is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we withhold true
respect for people out of an unconscious fear of rejection, our doing
so will cause them to reject us precisely because they can probably
sense our lack of engagement with them. –Well, that’s a
simplification. Many people are fully engaged when they’re with
their acquaintances but can’t develop deeper relationships anyway.
This isn’t mainly their fault; it is because society as a whole has
instilled in people an underlying emotional distance (atomism), a
36
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
What does it mean to treat someone as an end? Literally it
means to adopt that person as a goal, as something you want to
bring about. That is to say, you want to (help) bring about his sense
of self, his desires, his “objective interests”—all of which, in the
end, amount to his freedom, or his self-confirmation (as a free
being). A person essentially is the urge or the movement toward
self-confirmation, and self-confirmation is, by definition, a matter
of freedom, because it’s self-confirmation (the self’s achievement
of itself). So, Kant’s formulations of morality in terms of both
autonomy/freedom and treating others as ends do, in a sense, entail
each other, as he thought. And they both entail specific
commitments with regard to the organization of society.
37
CHRIS WRIGHT
21
Snobbery: not deigning to associate with certain people, considering
oneself too good for them, because they’re “nobodies.” Usually it operates
on an almost unconscious level.
38
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Morality, a prerequisite for happiness.— Strictly speaking, humans
are not “ends in themselves,” i.e. intrinsically valuable, because
nothing is. The notion doesn’t make sense. (“Ends” are relative to
values and desires.) But they are, or can be, valued for their own
22
See Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital: The
Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1974).
23
Fascism, too, and Soviet “Communism,” eventually improved standards
of living for most people. Does that mean they were good ways of
organizing society?
24
The elite’s hostility notwithstanding.
39
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
A revaluation of values.— The quality of being a “natural leader” is
not particularly admirable. For one thing, it usually entails that one
tends to be overbearing, to act inimically to the collective exercise
of spontaneous democracy. For another, “charisma” is not in itself
a moral quality. It is neutral, neither praiseworthy nor
blameworthy. Third, a person who aspires to lead others aspires
thereby to have power over them, which is an amoral goal at best.
The kind of involuntary respect that leaders usually command is
subhuman.
*
To sum up.— The problem is that we tend to judge someone’s
worth, at least implicitly, on the basis of his intelligence and
confidence, not on the basis of his thoughtfulness and how he treats
people. That makes sense from an evolutionary perspective but not
an ethical one.
*
Immoral socializing.— It requires a special kind of cruelty, albeit a
common one, to ignore a person.
40
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Unavoidable immorality.— I can’t escape the impression that for
me to be happy when others are unhappy is morally repugnant. If a
friend of mine is depressed, what right do I have not to be
depressed with him or her? What right do I have to forget his
depression long enough to have fun with people, to hang out with
them and have a good time? How can I be happy while he is
miserable? The callousness is breathtaking. How can I walk past a
hungry homeless person in the street and continue my conversation
with my friend as though the hungry person does not exist? I must
be a monster. We all must be monsters. In every minute of our lives
we show how little other people mean to us.
*
Ultimately, the things people do are done essentially, on some
basic level, for themselves. Necessarily. In that half-empty sense,
everyone is “selfish.” The moral project is to incorporate others
into oneself—as deeply as possible—and to incorporate as many
others into oneself as possible, so that in acting for oneself one is
also acting for others, ideally for humanity as a whole. That is
morality, and that is how morality is possible.
*
L’enfer, c’est les autres?— If hell exists, it is not other people. It is
the absence of other people. An eternity of not being reflected in
another. After a while, in fact, the self would simply dissolve for
lack of something to contrast itself with and define itself in relation
to. The “abstract Other” in its consciousness, which is essentially a
half-conscious or unconscious residue of the totality of the self’s
experiences with other selves (including their expressions in books,
television, magazines, etc.), would eventually lose whatever
determinateness it has, which means that the self would lose its
opposition to itself (in losing its internalized Other), thereby losing
its self-consciousness. One would revert to an animal state.
41
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Clues to human nature.— It’s the little things people do that are
most revealing, the unnoticed things that reveal humanity. Like in
the park today when the woman talking to her friend sitting on the
picnic-blanket burst out laughing very hard, tipped backwards and
raised her legs in the air and kicked them gleefully in a vertical
sawing motion for a few seconds. I saw that and thought to myself,
“That’s a very natural, fun thing to do when you’re sitting on the
grass and laughing. Kick your legs up in the air! It doubles the
pleasure of laughing. But why? Why exactly did she lean
backwards and kick her legs in the air? It wasn’t a considered,
intended act; it was a spontaneous expression of glee. But why does
glee express itself in that way? Waving your limbs about, running
around, jumping up and down, just moving your body senselessly
in any way can be a joy. Why? Because that’s the way humans
were meant to be: to be animals that take joy in their living, in their
physical activity, in their throwing themselves into the world,25
acting on it wildly like the wild frolicking animals they are.” A
whole world, a whole worldview can be contained in the simplest
act of a woman on a picnic blanket in the park.
*
Innate humanism.— When you watch a young child dancing and
singing along to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or a child inquiring
about the world’s causes and life’s purpose, or a child painting a
picture vibrant with color, you realize that the higher things in life
are not taught to people but taught out of them.
*
The essence of humanity.— The human spirit (the self) has three
spontaneous manifestations, which are experientially united but can
be analytically distinguished: to freely create, to freely understand,
25
Take that, Heidegger, you pessimist! [Heidegger emphasized man’s
“thrownness.”]
42
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Against Poeian pessimism.— Edgar Allan Poe thought that the
desire to do mischief is buried deep in the human psyche. To do
evil, like carve out a cat’s eye with a knife (as in “The Black
Cat”)—there’s a fascination with it and a suppressed desire for it.
But can it really be somehow innate in the psyche? Surely not. Poe
was wrong. It isn’t a spontaneous upsurge of the human spirit. It is
but a reaction to circumstances. It arises, in fact, from boredom and
depression. Poe’s “imp of the perverse” is a manifestation of
boredom—and curiosity, of course. It can have more pathological
causes too, but insofar as it exists among millions of people
nowadays it’s mainly a sublimation of boredom, or rather of the
instinct for life in conditions of boredom. Yes, it actually arises
from the desire to affirm life, to be creative!—but at the same time
from the desire to deny life, namely this particular boring life. It’s a
revolt against alienated modern life, that’s really all it is. This
fascination with the dark side isn’t an eternal fact innate in the
psyche. —Well, no, the fascination itself may indeed be such a
fact, just insofar as the “dark side” is very different from ordinary
life; but the desire to actively descend to the depths is not, and
that’s what Poe was talking about. This desire is a historical
creation.
The passion to negate is but a perverted expression of the
deeper passion to affirm, to reach out and remake the world in
one’s own image.
43
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Life for its own sake.— The universal fear of death shows that in
life itself is a profound, though profoundly subtle, pleasure.
*
My hope.— History is so full of treasures, cultural and intellectual
treasures, jewels of humanism scattered all over the earth—and I’m
worried they will be buried in time! So much might be lost to
future ages! Our traditions are so rich, there is simply too much to
assimilate. So it will all be scattered, with some people admiring
this jewel, others that jewel, and most forgetting most of them.
What a tragedy! It cannot be. So I have made it one of my missions
to collect all my favorite jewels—suitably re-cut and re-polished—
and store them in my journal, to salvage them and pass them along
to posterity. I want there to be one place to which people can go, an
index, as it were. They will read about this and that, this artifact
and that idea, and they will seek them out for themselves. And our
tradition will reach a few more people (as will, incidentally, truth,
of which the journal is a repository).
*
Technology in the service of humanism.— If someone like
Friedrich Nietzsche had been told that in a hundred years there
would be an electronic network around the world allowing billions
of people to share information at rates of speed measured in
fractions of a second—and that this network could store nearly
infinite amounts of data, including millions of books, and that it
could all be accessed with a few movements of one’s fingers—his
reaction might have been to shudder with joy and envy at the
thought of the vast education one could acquire by not even
budging from one’s chair. The internet has made it possible for
humans to be exponentially more knowledgeable than they have
ever been. Funny that it often has the opposite effect (a
consequence of the consumer-capitalist structures in which it is
embedded).
44
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Our collective tragedy.— Think about the poignancy of this
situation.— In a civilization where communities have been
shredded by technology, millions of young people find ways to
construct artificial communities by using this very technology.
They spend hours every day interacting electronically. They
become virtual zombies, obsessed with the tenuous human
connections they’ve made in cyberspace. This is what communities
have been reduced to.
*
Humanism in Vietnam. (Journal-istic jottings.)— One of my first
impressions of Vietnam: people don’t make love here. They don’t
do something as beautiful and romantic as making love. Instead
they rut. Animal-like. In the dirt. The heat, the filth, the poverty,
the masses teeming like maggots. It’s a rutting culture.
But first impressions are one-sided, often meaningless. Hanoi
is… I don’t know. What is Hanoi?— Thousands of motorcycles on
every street weaving and dodging pedestrians who are weaving and
dodging motorcycles. Drivers chasing tourists yelling “Hello!
Motorbike?”—most taxis aren’t cabs. Vendors beckoning you
incessantly to rip you off if they can. Opportunistic friendliness.
Few English-speakers. A sprawling confusing Old Quarter from
colonial times with crumbling European architecture—kept nice-
looking in parts—and narrow streets and few traffic lights.
Organized chaos. Every man for himself—good luck not getting
run over! Astonishment at the ability of this city to function. —The
invisible hand guides human pawns even here.— Sultry weather
that doesn’t deaden the vitality that seeps from their pores like
sweat. Great palpable crystallized love of life around every corner
in the gutter and the wrinkles on the elderly and the cigarette
smoke. A determined optimistic carpe diem character like Lisbon’s.
I’m staying in the Old Quarter—haven’t been anywhere
else—don’t care to see ugly communistic capitalism—living on a
street with lots of vendors selling toys. A man nearby is playing
45
CHRIS WRIGHT
with a wooden life-like snake on the street; two girls screeched and
jumped when they saw it. People here are fascinated by toys.
What seem to be peasants walk with their conical wicker hats
carrying a device over their shoulders—a stick with rope from each
end on which hangs a bucket on each side that they put fruits and
vegetables in. Men pedal things like rickshaws alongside cars
(which are rare) and motorcycles. Old Europe in the buildings and
new/old Vietnam in the streets. –This country is a collision of
worlds.
[....] Took an overnight train Monday evening to the coastal
town of Hoi an. Met a Malay and two Brits at the station. Friendly
people but typical budget travelers: pushy, rude to natives, and
maniacal about saving a buck. I followed them around the hotel
neighborhood for an hour as they sniffed out the cheapest place.
Had I been alone I’d have chosen the first one I saw, as I usually
do. Haven’t seen them since we got our rooms. Wanted to be alone;
didn’t like their control-freakish style. Uneventful evening. Didn’t
explore much of the town. –By the way, the reason Hoi an is worth
seeing is that it used to be the main international port in Southeast
Asia, five hundred years ago. So it was a crossroads for the
Chinese, Portuguese, French, etc. cultures. The old section is
famous and why I came. –At night the Vietnamese had their
autumn festival—a two- or three-day celebration around the
country—good timing for my trip because the festival is a unique
chance to see the Viets let loose. I saw it in Sapa and Hanoi, and
now here. As I was eating dinner some guys playing drums and
cymbals marched past, an elaborate dragon composed of two
costumed men dancing in front of them. Several dragons, actually.
They stopped walking and performed for a crowd, impressively
twirling and jumping and rearing like horses. The guy in the front
was the head and neck, the (crouching, hidden) guy in the back the
arse. Wearing golden, red, blue, green… cloths. The Vietnamese
crowd just ate it up. They liked it more than the tourists did! For
hours the show went on—actors taking turns to catch their breath—
the procession (with its huge entourage) marching ten steps, then
performing for ten minutes (drumming and dancing), then
46
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
marching ten more steps and so on, making its way around the
town. The daredevils climbed onto each other’s backs until there
were three levels, the top being the head half of the dragon twisting
and barely keeping his balance, potentially falling face-first onto
the cement. But the dangerous part was a different set of acrobats
nearby breathing fire out of their dragon costume. You know, that
thing you’ve seen a hundred times with the torch and the gasoline-
drinking and the spitting it at the fire. The spectators were
enthralled like no one I’ve seen in the West. They were most
delighted when the dragon head caught fire and the spitter threw it
down from his perch on shoulders into the crowd, where, still
flaming, it was kicked around and trampled on by bare feet and
could have caused a tragedy. The people laughed and cheered and
didn’t give a hoot that it was fire they were kicking at each other.
Then it was doused and the danger started all over again, the mask
eventually catching fire and being thrown into the crowd. No
policemen around. The behavior of the masses was exactly the
opposite of what it would have been in all but the most insane
Western social gatherings. Even grandmothers were screaming
with glee. I was like ‘Hey people—that flamy orange stuff there—
that’s, um...—that’s fire—ya might wanna stay away from it.’ But I
learned that at the heart of this culture, despite poverty and
oppression and the past, is a carefree Latinish love of fun and
pushing the boundary. (I guess that used to be at the heart of our
culture too, sort of, but in this age of litigation and political
correctness it’s been mostly killed.) Developing Southeast Asian
countries tend to have that optimistic character.
Ultra-heat today. I walked through the Old Town drenched.
Extraordinary number of art galleries. On the river, boats similar to
the one in Apocalypse Now that has the puppy and the Vietnamese
who are killed by Martin Sheen’s gunners floated, waiting for
tourists. As always, everybody wanted to sell me something and I
had to say no to each person ten times—you think I exaggerate—
before he’d leave me alone—and as it was I gave away a lot of
money out of compassion. Saw some Chinese architecture—two
communal buildings or meeting places or temples or something—
47
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
American anti-intellectualism.— The contempt in which
intellectuals are held by most Americans is not necessarily
contemptible. I’m inclined to think it is partially justified, though
doubtless it takes crude and stupid forms. Intellectuals, in general,
are parasites on the productive work that others do. They tend to
lead privileged, comfortable, isolated lives, and they unjustifiably
consider themselves superior to others. Most of the work they do is
basically irrelevant and masturbatory, and they usually don’t do it
very well anyway. They pride themselves on their independent-
mindedness despite being arguably the most indoctrinated and least
independent-minded group in society. If the average American
gave these reasons for his contempt, I’d have to conclude that
“American anti-intellectualism” is healthy and good. On the other
hand, insofar as it arises from the emotional fascist ideas that
“intellectuals aren’t ‘one of us,’ they’re unpatriotic, they’re
liberal,” anti-intellectualism is stupid and potentially dangerous.
*
Fame.— People who are famous are overrated, and people who
aren’t famous are underrated. Indeed, ambition itself is by no
means the virtue people think it is. I’m more inclined to respect
those who don’t thirst for stupid fame or money, who don’t care
much about social status but just live unassumingly like human
beings and devote themselves to family and friends and the
48
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
“Success.”— The more one experiences the world, the more one
understands how difficult it is to be “successful” and have integrity
at the same time. Maybe most successful people don’t have much
of a “core self” to begin with; they’re just malleable, their essence
from youth is malleability. Few convictions, certainly no courage
of whatever convictions they have. Depending on which institution
it is you want to succeed in, such things as pleasantness,
obsequiousness, continual obedience, a willingness to narrow
yourself, and a willingness not to challenge are required.
Conventional behavior is, from a sort of “human” perspective,
despicable. Most people understand this, and yet the successful are
respected anyway. Why? In itself—other things being equal—
success is more like something contemptible than something
admirable. Yet frequently I hear people expressing near-reverence
of this person or that person, this respected mainstream academic
or that respected mainstream journalist, apparently forgetting
momentarily what they acknowledge at other times, that success
tends to be more like something negative than something positive.
And insofar as it isn’t negative, it’s based largely on luck, on
institutional connections and so forth. Some things that deserve
respect are kindness, moral and intellectual integrity, activism on
behalf of the downtrodden, contempt for authority as such, the
challenging of conventions; talent as such deserves no respect
(since one is, to a great extent, born with it), and mainstream
success usually deserves even less.
For these reasons, by the way, I can’t escape residual doubts
about the integrity of famous political radicals. Have they not had
to “sell out” in order to become successful and famous? What deals
have they made with the devil? It’s true that this preoccupation
with integrity and honesty can be taken to absurd extremes, for it is
impossible not to live in modern society without morally and
49
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Thoughts on integrity.— I’m reading my dad’s old philosophy
dissertation, Being Oneself: Its Meaning and Worth (1979). “When
somebody tells me to be myself,” he says, “what does he or she
mean and why should I do it, and when somebody charges me with
not being myself, what is it that I have been charged with and why
does it matter? These are the questions which I try to answer in this
book.”26 After laborious phenomenological investigation of a
variety of ordinary situations, he decides that not being oneself
usually involves letting one’s concern for the opinion or approval
of others guide one’s conduct, such that one puts on airs. The
reason this is bad is that it jeopardizes or destroys one’s integrity,
“and as that slips away from us, so does the respect both of others
and of myself, to which I am otherwise entitled by virtue of being
myself.” But, again, why is it so good to be oneself? Why does it
deserve respect? He continues: “The source of this respect lies
simply in the good of dealing openly with each other and the
expectation that at least at certain times nothing less is acceptable.”
That’s a reasonable answer. It’s definitely part of the explanation,
26
Notice that, unlike most “philosophers,” he asks questions that actually
have some relevance to life and are not mere academic exercises.
50
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
but I suspect that another part is the even more “primitive” respect
people have for a self that is certain of itself, that is full and
confident. It is virtually a biological response. (Compare the
obvious “respect” that higher mammals have for the dominant male
in their group.) People naturally respect and are drawn to a self that
is whole and spontaneously self-projecting, i.e., a person who has
“more of a self” than others.27 This, I think, is the essence of
charisma. —On the other hand, there are plenty of charismatic
people who lack integrity. So, evidently there is a distinction to be
made between types of “self-certainty,” the moral type (integrity)
and the “social” type (charisma).
It’s interesting that integrity is a moral ideal. To have a self in
the fullest sense, to be a self, a self with an “incorruptible” core, a
self that has “integrity” like a physical structure that won’t
collapse—i.e., to have authenticity, to be an authentic self—that’s a
moral ideal. Why? It seems less like an example of other-oriented
morality (except on the margins, e.g. by making you honest and
sincere in your dealings with people) than an example of self-
oriented morality. By lacking integrity you’re betraying yourself
first and foremost. People don’t really get angry at you for lacking
integrity, as though you’ve done them some wrong; they have
contempt for you. They see you, at least implicitly, as not a whole
self, not a fully developed or mature person, an actor, someone
with a deep emptiness at his core.
On the other hand, insofar as the statement “He has no
integrity” is thought to be almost synonymous with “He has no (or
little) morality,” the crime is not only a crime against oneself but
against others. It means that the person doesn’t evince moral
respect for others, he uses them opportunistically as means to his
ends. So I guess that to lack integrity is in equal measure a crime
against oneself and against others. When we say that Bill Clinton
has no integrity we’re communicating contempt for him on the
basis of his lack of morality, honesty, “principles,” respect for
others in his dealings with them, sufficient respect for himself to
27
See chapter three.
51
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Mainstream laziness.— Nothing is easier than to be agreeable.
What one should strive for is to be “disagreeable”—to provoke
people out of their shallow role-playing.
28
That isn’t entirely fair. He took stands on measures that benefited big
business, such as NAFTA.
52
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
The self-identity of banality.— Mediocre minds think alike even
more than great minds do.
*
Does “certainty” always indicate close-mindedness?— You
should remember that there are two kinds of certainty: Sarah
Palin’s kind and Noam Chomsky’s kind. The one is founded on
unquestioning acceptance of the beliefs one has been trained to
accept; the other is founded on continuous critical analysis of one’s
beliefs. It’s the certainty of close-mindedness versus the “certainty”
of open-mindedness. The certainty of unreason versus that of
reason. These two ideal-types intermix in everyone, but some
people are more rational than others.
*
Two urges: to enforce equality, and to idolize.— He who aims to
rise above the crowd faces opposition from all sides, which,
however, has a common source: the universal desire to keep him at
one’s own level, not to let him step out of line or think he is
“superior.” The most extravagant means will be employed to keep
at bay his ambitions. But if he perseveres and triumphs, he is
revered as a god.
*
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”— Most blogs and other
postings on the internet, such as the comments posted under
YouTube videos or news articles, are like portals into the heads of
ordinary people, into their thought-processes. Unfortunately, the
world into which one steps through these portals is not well-
lighted, has shadows everywhere, and is very, very frightening.
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*
Dangerous intelligence.— The greatest danger for the perceptive
observer of humanity is that he’ll become convinced of the
smallness of life, and will thus retreat from a life of action into
passive resignation.
*
The mind-body problem.— Watching people interact, the
impression is inescapable that they truly are beings of matter.
Earth-bound beings with muddy souls. And one returns to the
realm of spirits with relief....
*
Functionaries of the mind.— In L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution
(1856), Tocqueville points out again and again, in astonishment,
that nobody foresaw the French Revolution, even on its very eve.
He opens his book with this sentence: “No great historical event is
better calculated than the French Revolution to teach political
writers and statesmen to be cautious in their speculations; for never
was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past,
so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen.” A hundred forty years
later, Walter Laqueur, the political scholar, devoted much of his
book The Dream that Failed to the question of how it was possible
for Western academics to have failed utterly to predict the fall of
the Soviet Union, even after glasnost and perestroika. Specialists
on the USSR, people who devoted their lives to studying it, had no
inkling whatever of what was about to happen. The enormous
industry of scholarship on the USSR had not a single word to say
about a REVOLUTION!!! or even the COMPLETE
DECREPITUDE OF SOVIET SOCIETY!!! until after the fact!!!
Fifteen years later, similarly, almost no economists foresaw the
Great Recession. —The moral of the story, kids, is that the
academic community is not to be taken seriously. The “analyst,”
the “expert,” who has real insight is an incredible rarity. These
people are just intellectual bureaucrats.
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*
“Absurdity” in philosophy.— As I was reading Camus: A
Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Germaine Brée, an amusing
image struck me. I imagined hundreds of chimpanzees in their
jungle, dressed in clothes, wearing glasses, huddled over
manuscripts they were writing having to do with one chimp in
particular, who had died decades ago. They were describing what
he was like, describing his oddly contemplative character, his un-
chimpish personality, his gentleness toward his fellow chimps, as
well as certain discoveries he had made about the futility of life in
the jungle, the dangerous animals that lurked in shadows, the
forbidding height of certain kinds of trees, the absurdity of
swinging gaily on vines and jumping from branch to branch while
screaming like monkeys. All these chimpanzees sitting in trees
silently, scribbling praise of this other chimp who had, like them,
sat in trees away from his playmates scratching his head while
watching the action below, occasionally baring his teeth. And I put
the book down.
29
Chomsky: “One reason that propaganda often works better on the
educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so
they receive more propaganda. Another is that they have jobs in
management, media, and academia and therefore work in some capacity
as agents of the propaganda system—and they believe what the system
expects them to believe. By and large, they’re part of the privileged elite,
and share the interests and perceptions of those in power.”
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*
Present philistines, future scholars.— What does it say about
people that the most popular thinkers and writers in their time are
usually not the most popular ones centuries later? It says that, in
general, the recipe for success in life isn’t genuine merit judged on
the basis of transhistorical standards of reason, creativity,
originality, beauty, etc., but skillful, “talented” obedience to the
cultural and institutional norms of one’s day. It says that most
people don’t know how to judge real merit if it exists among
them—and maybe don’t even care, since what matters is fitting into
institutions and the dominant culture. However, they are better able
to judge past merit, because institutional and cultural norms
constrict their thought in relation to the present more than the past.
They are supposed to apply to the living more than the dead—and
so the dead are allowed to step outside the bounds of institutional
respectability.30 Also, the withering away of older norms and the
rise of new ones means that works that successfully embodied the
former are no longer celebrated.
*
One way of describing the dissonance that disturbs me is to
note the discrepancy between grandeur and smallness. Hegel,
Nietzsche, and Heidegger thought in grand terms, as did Plato,
Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and dozens more. Some of them were more
deluded than others (read: Heidegger), but they all strove for epic
heroism. “God is dead!”—“I have destroyed metaphysics!”—“I am
Spirit’s knowledge of itself!”—“I will be the Philosopher-King, the
Divine!”—“Two things fill me with awe: the stars above and the
30
That also has to do with the arrogance of the present: a person who
reacted (creatively) against the “quaint” or “benighted” old traditions of
his day is seen as anticipating the more sophisticated present. By
appreciating the past rebel, the present is proving to itself its open-
mindedness, generosity, capaciousness of thought, superiority over the
past. Moreover, it flatters itself by appropriating the brilliance of the rebel.
“It wasn’t until we came along that Nietzsche could be appreciated.”
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moral law within!” And people have revered these men. But on the
other side…humans are ants. Minuscule, microscopic insects
proclaiming their immensity, their immortality. It’s a damn
laughable farce. “Few people have dared to climb the mountain of
Nietzsche’s thought!” says one commentator. Give me a break.
Nietzsche was a man. These people leap unthinkingly into the
delusion of transcendence, they live in transcendent denial of the
mundane world, Nietzsche most of all. It’s comical.
*
I feel bored only sometimes. But my whole life itself is
infused with boredom—because I long for transcendence,
perfection, but am trapped in a world of which I am the center yet
in which I am insignificant. That’s the dissonance: I’m the center of
my world but I mean nothing to the world. The knowledge of this is
what I’m escaping when I watch TV or go to bars. In the distant
past, by contrast, people were both the center of their world and
central to the world. (The sun revolved around the earth, etc.)
*
Hero-worshipers coping with an irreligious society.— Was
Nietzsche’s animating spirit not merely a more profound and
severe incarnation of Carlyle’s and Emerson’s?
*
A phoenix out of the ashes.— This thinker’s mind is in a ferment;
this society’s mind is in a ferment as well. But there is a difference:
the second is the ferment of decline, the first that of ascent.
*
On profundity.— Nietzsche had the good fortune to be miserable.
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*
From the outside.— A being not from our species observing a rock
concert would conclude that we are creatures who operate on the
level of instinct and have no notion of free will. When we watch a
community of monkeys scream and go berserk in the excitement of
a hunt we think, “How bestial!”, forgetting that their excitement is
based on utilitarian concerns and is thus rational, while ours—in a
rock concert—looks equally bestial and is senseless to boot.
*
Unity of opposites.— A woman nursing her baby feels as if that
animal act is the pinnacle of her humanity. —We are certainly
mistaken to posit a categorical difference between ourselves and
other animals.
*
Etymology; or, the profundity of language.— You can gain great
insight into the human condition, into the nature of the mind, by
studying the evolution of words. For example, what’s the
significance of the fact that words like illusion, elude, allude, and
delude are variations on the Latin word for ‘play’? Johan Huizinga
discusses this in Homo Ludens....
Or think of the word ‘interest.’ As Hannah Arendt says,
“something is of interest to people [insofar as] it inter-est, it is
between them.” It draws them together. “Philosophy is inter-
esting.”
Arendt again: the word ‘sensible’ means, among other things,
“capable of receiving sensory impressions,” a definition that leads
to “receptive to external influences” (cf. ‘sensitive’), which leads to
“having, containing, or indicative of good sense or reason.” In The
World As Will and Representation, Schopenhauer notes that the
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*
Among the profoundest concepts is that of repetition. It
fascinates me, and many other thinkers. Freud made productive use
of it—it led to his theory of the death instinct; Nietzsche was
dazzled by it; Aristotle and the ancient Stoics (and other cultures)
believed in eternal repetition; Hegel recognized the importance to
spiritual development of a sort of transformed repetition; an entire
philosophy of history is premised on it; Kierkegaard wrote a book
called Repetition. Throughout the cosmos, in fact, repetition is
woven. Biologically it is of the utmost importance, from the
infant’s rhythms to the very workings of DNA and RNA. Music is
based on repetition, not only rhythmically but melodically and
harmonically. –The concept is both the most commonplace and the
most profound of all concepts.
Think of this: “Be constant in thy love.” (From my Book of
Joe.) That means be faithful in your love. Con-stant: stand with,
stand firm (constare). Stand firm in your love, stand with your
loved one. But how does that manifest itself? Through repetition.
You constantly, as it were, in every moment repeat the act of
loving. (The connection between the two meanings of ‘constant.’)
Incidentally: how do you acquire the ability to stand firm
(constare)? By standing with (constare). You get strength from
your with-ness.
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*
Tragic comedy.— It’s significant that when a stand-up comic gets
no laughs he says later, “I died. It was like death out there,” while
when the audience loves him he says, “I killed!” A semi-Hegelian
struggle for recognition. (Absence of recognition = death of the
self. Either the comic or the audience wins the struggle.)
*
Hero-worship and other puzzles.— It’s easy to understand why I
admire, say, Howard Zinn. But why do I like admiring him? Why is
it emotionally gratifying? It isn’t a mutual fondness; he doesn’t
even know of my existence. For some reason, liking and, to an
extent, admiring people is in itself pleasurable. That means that in
some sense it’s self-affirming, self-confirming. But that doesn’t
explain much. My admiration is a kind of self-activity, self-
initiated activity, and so is satisfying. But again, that formulation is
at best suggestive. Maybe it’s actually misleading, in that liking
someone is not so much an act as a state, the state of being
impressed (half-consciously) by a person’s “validation” of your
own proclivities, your personal likes and dislikes, thoughts, beliefs,
sense of humor, etc. You like someone insofar as you implicitly
recognize yourself in him or her (even if “objectively” the two of
you might appear to be quite different), whether because he values
you and acts accordingly or because his behavior reflects what you
value, such as your political beliefs or your sense of humor.
Similarly, you admire someone to the extent that he embodies your
values (and thus, so to speak, you) perhaps better than you do. The
“better than you do” is the part that can lead to envy and conflict;
the “embodies your values” (thereby “validating,” “confirming,”
“reinforcing” them) is what explains the subtle pleasure that exists
in admiration.
*
Some varieties of philosophical “eliminativism” intrigue me.
Is there really a fact of the matter about whether I admire Occupy
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Wall Street activists? Even if I say I do, and even if in the moment
I say it I believe it, do I? Maybe half-consciously I’m just saying it
because I know the other person will appreciate my statement.
What is it to “admire” someone anyway? Or to hate someone or
have contempt for him or love him or respect him? In one moment
you say you hate him; in the next you correct yourself and say you
only dislike him; in the next, you say that, well, okay, he’s not
acting in malice and he means well, and maybe you just pity him.
What the hell! There’s no “reality” here! You’re just talking. And
yet there is some mental state, some vague sort of attitude toward
the person in question, backing up your talk. But the mental state
isn’t “determinate” in any way. It’s just a sort of nebulous
disapproval coloring your thought of the person. Most of the
intentional content is in your words, not in your mind itself. The
role of your mind is just to assent to the words coming out of your
mouth in the moment you say them. So to return to the question
about whether there is an underlying “fact of the matter,” I guess
all that can be said is that my attitude toward OWS activists is such
that I’m fairly comfortable saying I admire them. But then you
retort, “Do you really admire them, though?” Um, yeah, I guess.
But you know, these kinds of words themselves don’t have very
determinate meanings, and the more you dig into them, the less
there is. I don’t know what the broader lesson is.... It’s possible,
too, that I’m conflating several issues.
Maybe part of the puzzle I’m groping at is that universals like
‘admire’ seem as though they should have an “essence,” a
determinate, substantive meaning, whereas often they don’t.
There’s an incongruity between the impressive-sounding
universality and apparent determinacy of ‘admire’ and the lack of a
comparable referent in my mind, as well as, once you investigate,
the lack of real determinacy in the concept itself. It’s not
determinate in the way that ‘bachelor’ is.
*
Another question.— Why is facial beauty (feminine and masculine)
important in attracting mates? What evolutionary advantage does
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such beauty have? If you’ll say that people unconsciously make the
connection between a beautiful mate and beautiful children (the
implication being that they want attractive children, so they can
find mates), you’re begging the question. Beauty isn’t like the
feminine instinct for nurturing or the masculine tendency towards
aggression, which serve obvious purposes; universal ugliness
would surely not be disadvantageous in the way that a universal
absence of the maternal instinct would. In fact, it would have no
practical effect whatsoever. —The solution to this problem may be
that we unconsciously associate a good face with healthy genes
(which can be passed on to our children). This, in turn, may be
because (1) beauty projects self-confidence, which itself suggests
healthy genes; (2) a pretty face may, for whatever reason, be
unconsciously interpreted as directly signifying health and good
genes; and (3) the good body that often comes with an attractive
face does directly signify healthy genes. Moreover, such a body has
clear functional benefits: for example, large breasts are maternal,
and, in the case of a man, a muscular body is related to the ability
to protect and dominate. Also, beauty is associated with youth,
which is associated with health and the ability to impregnate/be
impregnated.
*
On beauty.— Facial beauty cannot be described or conceptualized.
Recognition of it is solely intuitive. If you try to describe an
attractive person by saying, “She has prominent cheekbones, full
lips, tanned skin and sultry eyes,” you have not explained why
she’s beautiful. Any of these features is compatible with
unattractiveness—even all the features together. Beauty is holistic:
it consists not in an aggregate of isolated features but in the totality
of relations between them—relations which, to repeat, are not
conceptualizable or denotable. We grasp them in an instantaneous
intuition, but cannot reproduce them in words.
Indeed, this is true of every kind of beauty: musical, poetic,
architectural, natural… To say that the beauty of some given thing
consists in symmetry, or in vibrancy of color, or in a perfectly
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*
We must not let “humanism” die.— That the questions I’m asking
may already have been answered by other people is not a reason for
me not to ask them. As humanists, we must never cease
independent thinking, no matter how much science has explained
or how superfluous such thinking might seem. Insofar as it
cultivates the self, it is valuable. Insofar as it prevents the self’s
dehumanization in this alienated age, it is necessary.
*
Does the world exist?— The millennia-long debate about radical
skepticism about the external world can never be settled. There are
two ways of thinking about consciousness: either consciousness is
in the world, or the world exists only in (or for) consciousness. In
the final analysis, there is no way of adjudicating definitively
between these positions. Common sense and the “Other-oriented”
nature of experience tell us that consciousness is in the world, that
there is an external, mind-independent world; on the other hand,
this external world is represented in, or to, consciousness and that
is the only way we know of it. Everything we know is in
consciousness, by definition. So, to ask George Berkeley’s
question, why postulate an external world? Any number of reasons
can be thought of, but ultimately none can do away with the fact
that, from one perspective, everything we experience by definition
exists, for us, only in, or “as apprehended by,” our consciousness.
So you have skepticism (Berkeleyan or a milder form) and you
have realism, and you adopt one view or the other on the basis of a
“Gestalt-switch.” In one moment I’m a skeptic or an idealist; in the
next I switch my perspective and I’m a realist. Neither perspective
can be definitively established or refuted because consciousness
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*
A puzzle about the self.— Here’s a paradox: from one perspective,
you could have been another person, or even another kind of
animal. You didn’t have to be the person you are; you could have
been born someone else a hundred years later, or you could have
been a lion or a chimpanzee or whatever. This is why it made at
least some sense for Plato to be thankful he was born a man and not
an animal. From another perspective, though, you couldn’t have
been anyone else, because you just are who you are. One entity
can’t be another entity; it is itself, that’s all. So how do you
reconcile these contradictory intuitions? What you have to do is
distinguish between two aspects of the self. Specifically, from one
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*
The irreconcilability of subject and object.— My existence. Here,
now, at this moment in history. The facticity of it. Billions of years
of my nonexistence…then me…then trillions more years of my
nonexistence… It’s totally arbitrary that I was born when and
where I was, yet at the same time it’s absolutely necessary, because
I, after all, could not have been anyone else but had to be myself,
this self at this point in time. “By definition,” so to speak. This
body had to be this body; for it to be any other is…meaningless.
The problem is that it’s “absurd” to accept that one is simply
an object in the world like all others, an object in history no
different from those that one reads about. One tends, necessarily, to
assume a position outside of history, the endless flux of unfortunate
creatures determined by larger forces of which they’re unaware. I
31
I.e., the self is consciousness. And insofar as other animals can be said
to have a self (which they can to the degree that they’re self-conscious), it,
too, is their consciousness.
32
That statement is ambiguous. But of course I don’t mean we have in
common my consciousness.
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*
The problem of free will amounts to the problem that there are
two ways of describing people’s actions: that which involves the
“autonomous” self, its desires and reasons, and that which treats the
person not as a self but as a sort of machine, or a product of
innumerable factors. From the inside, so to speak, one chooses
one’s acts; the self’s desires and reasons are what explain behavior.
From the outside, scientifically as it were, it’s theoretically possible
to explain behavior without essential reference to the self. Or, if
there is such a reference, as in psychoanalysis, the point is that it
treats the self not as autonomous but as formed and influenced by
factors outside its control. And with biology you don’t even have to
refer to the self at all; you just talk about stimulus and response,
chemicals and electrical impulses. So, the problem is really that
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there are two levels of reality, the first-personal and, in the final
analysis, the deterministic. There seems no way to reconcile these
two levels: they’re absolutely opposed. Each is the negation of the
other. And yet each exists! I am free, that seems indisputable. (I’m
freely moving my fingers right now. My intentions are what make
them move.) But I am determined, that seems indisputable too.
(I’m an assemblage of cells interacting in such a way that these
fingers are caused to move in the ways they’re moving.)
So the free will problem is sort of a restatement of the mind-
body problem. Two kinds of reality; the question is how they
relate.
*
Notes (from 2006) for a paper on the mind-body problem
33
Quoted in Barbara Montero, “Post-Physicalism,” Journal of
Consciousness Studies, Vol. 8, No. 2 (2001): pp. 61-80.
34
See Colin McGinn, “Can We Solve the Mind-Body Problem?,” in The
Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, eds. Ned Block, Owen
Flanagan and Güven Güzeldere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), pp.
529–542.
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35
Timothy O’Connor and Hong Yu Wong, “The Metaphysics of
Emergence,” Noûs, Vol. 39, No. 4 (1990): p. 660.
36
See, e.g., his article “Quining Qualia,” in Block et al., The Nature of
Consciousness, pp. 619–639.
37
See his paper “Mind-Body Identity, Privacy, and Categories” (1965).
He argues there that sensations don’t exist, and that the only reason we
think they do is that to eliminate talk about them from our language would
be “impractical.” In other words, when he feels pain he doesn’t feel pain,
but it’s useful to talk as if he does.
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38
David Lewis, “An Argument for the Identity Theory,” in his
Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
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42
Campbell and Bickhard, “Physicalism, Emergence and Downward
Causation,” p. 25.
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43
Jaegwon Kim, “Making Sense of Emergence,” Philosophical Studies 95
(1999): p. 28.
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44
Quoted in O’Connor, “Emergent Properties,” p. 24.
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45
Mark Bedau, “Weak Emergence” (1997), p. 3, at
http://people.reed.edu/~mab/papers/weak.emergence.pdf.
46
O’Connor, “Groundwork for an Emergentist Account of the Mental,”
PCID 2.3.1 (October 2003): p. 4.
47
Ibid.
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However true those ideas may be, they leave the basic mystery of
the mind-body problem unsolved. They don’t help to bridge the
gap between the private and the public. Nevertheless, it would be
wrong to reject emergentism for that reason. For it isn’t as though
the emergentist says nothing. His theory is not totally
uninformative. While it cannot resolve the intuitive paradox of the
mind’s emergence from matter, no other theory can either. But its
advantage over other theories (one of its advantages) is that it
acknowledges its limitations, unlike, say, functionalism, which in
effect—by denying the significance or existence of the “private”
dimension of experience—pretends that the basic mystery doesn’t
exist.
This mystery, as I said earlier, will probably remain forever
unsolved. It will always be inexplicable why the holistic state of
neural interactions in a relatively simple system is not
consciousness, while the holistic state of such interactions in a
complex system like the human brain is consciousness. The fact
that a change in quantity, so to speak, can in this way become a
change in quality is impenetrable. It may even be the case that
scientists will never fully understand why some neural pathways in
the brain do not produce consciousness while others do. Still, none
of this invalidates emergentism.
I have not yet said very much, though, about what the theory
entails. Unfortunately this question is difficult—precisely because
the relationship between consciousness and the body is difficult to
48
Quoted in O’Connor, “Emergent Properties.”
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independent causes that operate at the same exact time. One cause
does all the work necessary.
Similarly, it’s absurd to say that the mental state somehow
directly causes the neural events on which it supervenes. This form
of downward causation is incoherent. It is literally senseless, for it
entails causal circularity.
So then are mental states epiphenomenal? Are they mere side-
effects of underlying neural processes, possessing no causal powers
of their own? O’Connor tries to avoid that conclusion in “The
Metaphysics of Emergence.” He provides the reader with an
elaborate diagram meant to show the (probable) relationship
between mental states and neurophysiological events, according to
which diagram a given mental state is the result of a complex array
of neural events and mental states that somehow “work together” to
produce the state in question. “As a fundamentally new kind of
feature, [an emergent state] will confer causal capacities on the
object that go beyond the summation of capacities directly
conferred by the object’s microstructure. Its effects might include
directly determining aspects of the microphysical structure of the
object as well as generating other emergent states.”49 Thus, an
emergent state (says O’Connor) can be responsible for another
emergent state as well as for the microphysical events on which
such states supervene.
In his paper “Emergent Individuals” he describes his position
as follows:
49
O’Connor and Wong, “The Metaphysics of Emergence,” p. 665.
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50
Ibid., p. 670.
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51
Sperry, quoted in “Making Sense of Emergence,” p. 26.
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*
More thoughts on the mind-body problem.— Reading parts of
Chomsky and His Critics (2003), a collection of essays and
responses to them by Chomsky. Philosophy and linguistics, not
politics.
Chomsky: “I see no reason to question the general conclusion
reached long ago that thought is ‘a little agitation of the brain’
(Hume), or a ‘secretion of the brain’ that should be considered no
‘more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter’ (Darwin).”
Right. Gravity is mysterious, and thought is mysterious. That is to
say, matter itself is just as mysterious as the relationship between
“mind” and “matter.” But that doesn’t mean there is little point in
discussing the conceptual mystery of the connection between mind
and matter, as Chomsky seems to suggest.
He argues that the category of the mental is not fundamentally
different from any other physical category in nature, such as the
electromagnetic, the optical, or the organic. These are all just
distinctions among various aspects of the world. But it seems to me
that the “mental” has a special status. Simply stated, it is matter’s
experience of itself. It therefore introduces an element of reflexivity
or self-reference. This is what gives it its “private” character, which
is unlike the electromagnetic or the organic as such. So Chomsky is
right that mind is not a different substance than matter, but he is
wrong that it is strictly comparable to such categories as the
mechanical and the optical.
As I said years ago when formulating my version of
emergentism, the mental is physical but in a different way than the
non-mental is. The latter is just unproblematically physical, and it
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52
(Well, neurons and atoms are that as well, but my point is that they are
also forms of matter itself, unlike consciousness.)
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CHRIS WRIGHT
how the mental could arise from the non-mental.53 The best you
can say is that certain physical processes in the nervous system can
be considered from two perspectives, the “serial” or “atomistic”—a
series of electrochemical events—and the “holistic” or “emergent,”
which is the mental state. After that, it’s all a damn mystery.
*
On rationalism.— In Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (2004), Neil
Smith says the following: “The part of his work for which
[Chomsky] is most famous, infamous according to some, and the
one for which he has been most vociferously criticized, is his
argument that a substantial part of the faculty of language is
genetically determined: it ‘is some kind of expression of the genes.’
[Horror of horrors!] The simplest formulation of this claim, which
recalls the rationalism of Descartes, and explicitly juxtaposes this
with the empiricism of Quine, is that ‘Language is innate.’ The
claim is so radical [?], and so counterintuitive in the face of the
existence of close on 10,000 different languages in the world, that
it is necessary to summarize and evaluate the evidence.... [The
evidence Chomsky cites includes] the speed and age-dependence of
acquisition, convergence among grammars, analogies to vision and
other modular abilities, species-specificity, the ‘over-
determination’ of language acquisition in deaf or blind, or deaf-
blind, children, but above all the existence of universals on the one
hand and poverty-of-the-stimulus arguments on the other.”
It’s just astounding. Academics actually consider these ideas
controversial, even “radical”! Why is there such aversion to the
clearest common sense, and to the biological perspective?? Why
the aversion to the hypothesis of innateness?? Why the centuries-
long commitment to empiricism?? Honestly, it fascinates me. And
why the ridiculing of the idea that the human mind has limited
cognitive capacities, that it can’t necessarily understand everything
53
To clarify: science can demonstrate that phenomenal experiences, for
example, arise from certain neural events, but it can’t conceptually explain
how that’s possible.
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about the world, for instance free will and the emergence of the
mental from the non-mental? Every other species has limited
capacities, so why not us? We’re not angels, to quote Chomsky;
we’re defined, determined, organic beings, whose minds are not
blank or infinite at birth. From my teenage years I’ve considered
these rationalist ideas too obvious to discuss. But I guess people
don’t like to believe there are limitations to their powers or
freedom or ability to mold themselves and understand everything.
Childish delusions, residues of infantile narcissism.
*
After reading Heidegger and commentaries on him, I can see
the extent to which he influenced a whole variety of thinkers: not
only the existentialists, phenomenologists, and poststructuralists
but even theologians like Paul Tillich and eccentrics like Martin
Buber. All the talk about “being” and “presence” and “anxiety,”
and much more, largely comes from Heidegger (and, through him,
from Husserl and a few other phenomenologists). On the other
hand, that doesn’t mean he was wholly original. Far from it. He
belonged to a large group of thinkers who were reacting against the
Cartesian tradition, including Marx, William James, John Dewey—
Heidegger took a lot from pragmatism—Nietzsche, even Hegel in
some ways, Wittgenstein, and thinkers in other disciplines, e.g.,
psychoanalysis and anthropology. The humanities were inexorably
heading away from Cartesianism, away from dualism and the self’s
“absolute freedom” (the chasm between mind and matter),
emphasizing humans’ social and natural embeddedness. At the
same time, unsurprisingly, the individualistic perspective showed
up in new ways, “spiritual” and “existential” ways, as social
atomization intensified. (And in analytic philosophy, Cartesian-
Lockean ideas inspired Russell, the logical empiricists, etc.) What
resulted was a schizophrenic intellectual culture.
There is validity in all these approaches, from Descartes to his
later antipodes. Cartesianism has a lot of truth; so does the nearly
opposite tradition of the twentieth-century Continentals. It’s all a
matter of emphasis. You can emphasize our embeddedness
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*
Marx contra Heidegger.— There are a number of ironic similarities
between Heidegger’s thought and Marx’s. For instance, the partial
rejection of the entire philosophical tradition. The criticism of
theoria, the “artificial” and derivative theoretical stance, in favor of
praxis, or being-in-the-world. Man is essentially involved; his
habits of thought and so on grow out of his situation. The rejection
of “metaphysics” (though for different reasons). The emphasis on
alienation and inauthenticity, concepts that are related. The holistic
approach to their subject-matter. The historicism and quasi-social
constructivism. The existentialist view of human nature: man’s
essence is his existence, he is his acts. The rejection of the language
of consciousness in favor of that of “[social] being.” The
distinction between appearance and that which lies underneath, is
54
Sartre’s system, however, is confused. It contains logical tensions or
contradictions, such as the tension between a public and a private
approach to the self.
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55
Needless to say, Marx and Heidegger interpreted all these doctrines in
very different ways.
56
The very questions that Heidegger spent his life trying unsuccessfully to
answer, namely “What is the meaning of being?” and “Why is there
something rather than nothing?”, etc., are well-nigh meaningless.
57
Indeed, Heidegger claimed that Being and Time adhered to the
“principle of phenomenology”—i.e., Husserl’s method—more faithfully
than Husserl himself did. And Heidegger’s account of time borrows a lot
from Husserl’s. In any case, Husserl himself attempted a
“phenomenological ontology,” a clarification of the being of entities in
general, before Heidegger did.
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*
Existentialism’s “embeddedness.”— In their fetish of radical
(“terrible”) freedom and the essential meaninglessness of life, some
of the French existentialists strayed pretty far from Heidegger. It’s
practically the opposite of his emphasis on our embeddedness. But
that’s the difference between old Germany and France: cultural
embeddedness, national and racial pride, rootedness, fascism, as
opposed to France’s atomism, individualism, liberalism, its revolt
against the past (from the French Revolution onwards).
*
I’m in the navel-gazing mood to discuss Sartre’s analysis of
“bad faith” in Being and Nothingness. I’ve always been intrigued
by that work, however flawed and infuriating it is. I have to agree
with Roger Scruton when he remarks in his book From Descartes
to Wittgenstein: A Short History of Modern Philosophy (1981) that
many of Sartre’s phenomenological analyses are “terrifyingly
persuasive.” The psychoanalyst R. D. Laing was also impressed by
Sartre, going so far as to adopt some of his ideas and his method.
To refresh your memory: according to Sartre, bad faith
consists in a “refusal to come to terms with the ambiguity of the
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*
“Intellectual impostures.”— That’s the name of a book by Alan
Sokal and Jean Bricmont exposing the, well, intellectual impostures
of postmodernists. I’ll probably never read it, since postmodernism
is generally a waste of time, but there are excerpts on the internet.
For example in this review of the book by Richard Dawkins:
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*
Making sense of Foucault?— C. G. Prado’s book Starting with
Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy (2000) is good, but in the
end it succumbs to the inadequacies of its subject-matter. For
instance, in expositing Foucault’s notions of archeology,
genealogy, ethics and so on, Prado returns half-a-dozen times to the
question of whether Foucault’s claims about truth are cogent. The
problem is that, given his disavowal of the project of understanding
“objective” truth, how are we to interpret Foucault’s own ideas?
Are they not supposed to be true? Are they, as he seems to suggest,
merely alternative “fictions,” or narratives meant to undermine
prevailing power-structures, or “problematizations of established
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*
Reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. One of the reasons
for his fame is the quality of his writing: there’s a creativity, a
forcefulness, a style that probably overawes a lot of academics who
are willing to be impressed by that sort of thing when it’s
manifested by one of their own.
But there is also the fact that Foucault’s obsession with power
relations, his obsessive insistence that they permeate every facet of
society and even the individual’s mind, and that the subject is a
product of subjection, can be contagious. It really drives the point
home. Even the academic reader can start to think, “Hey, yeah,
power! And discourses, and disciplines, and the fusion of power
and knowledge—and hey, I’m an intellectual, so that’s great for
me—and all these cool terms like ‘political technologies’ and
‘political anatomy’ and ‘vectors of power’ and ‘micro-physics of
power’! What a magnificent theoretical vision!” It helps that
Foucault avoids talking about business and class relations, which
means that society’s central power-structures have no particular
reason to be very hostile to him. It’s striking how un-original it all
is, though (and truistic). E. P. Thompson’s work shows how the
modern subject has had to be disciplined—for the direct or indirect
sake of capital accumulation, which Foucault tends to ignore; and
then there’s Gramsci (whose ideas themselves are pretty obvious),
and Freud, and Nietzsche, and Marx, and a galaxy of lesser-known
thinkers who have dissected the workings of power. But Foucault
had a gift for self-promotion, so he became a celebrity.
And what’s all this blather about “the body”? He goes on and
on about how important the body is. Yes, I agree, bodies are
important. And they’re objects of power, etc. Again, the reason this
jargon became so popular among academics is that feminism and
the sexual revolution turned society’s attention to the body—to
women’s (lack of) power over their bodies, to cultural
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interpretations of the body and sexuality, etc. Also, this kind of talk
is conveniently un-Marxist, which is always good for having a
smooth and successful career. It’s basically a middle-class
preoccupation—as most things “subjective” are—something that
middle-class people have the luxury to think about, wondering
what their attitude is toward their body, whether it’s healthy or
whatever, how society has influenced and perverted their
relationship with their body. Actually, this intellectual turn toward
subjectivity and the body is a symptom of the feminization of
society since the 1960s, as decadence has set in (to quote Susan
Sontag). With ultra-atomization has come a preoccupation with
subjectivity, the self’s insecurity; hence feminization.
By the way, a nice thing about reading Foucault is that his
prose is so prolix you can skim through a lot of it without missing
anything substantial.
Another nice thing, though, is that he is more interesting and
substantive than his fellow postmodernist “pioneers.” He actually
has things to say, although it takes a lot of intellectual digestion to
see what they are. The problem, again, is that his writing is diffuse
and abstract, consisting of a strange stream of reflections on, in this
case, crime and punishment and their evolution. It isn’t really
philosophy, as it’s sometimes called, but it isn’t anything else
either. It’s uncategorizable. It’s like a bunch of notes to himself on
how to understand the “meaning,” given particular social contexts,
of various crimes and punishments. Some of it makes me think of a
historical phenomenology, while at other times I simply have no
idea what’s going on. “What is this stuff?” It is so abstract and self-
indulgent you can’t really pin it down, and after pages of reading
you remember absolutely nothing of what you just read.
Meaningless words passing under your eyes. It’s comparable to the
feeling of “zoning out” for a few minutes. (Not all of it is this bad, I
should say.)
Another obvious problem is Foucault’s idealism. He fixates on
the opinions of reformers, philosophers, politicians, scientists, only
occasionally descending to earth to note how things actually were.
He’s pre-Marxist, like most postmodernists. Or, if not exactly pre-
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*
A short book review.— The first volume of Foucault’s History of
Sexuality is interesting but not excellent. It doesn’t deserve all the
praise it has received. The theme running through it is opposition to
a “straw man” argument, namely that for the last few centuries sex
has been repressed, mainly for the sake of preventing society’s
labor capacity from “dissipating itself in pleasurable pursuits.”58
What a crude functionalist position! Obviously it’s a simplification,
desperately in need of elaboration and supplementation. But
Foucault’s book itself contains plenty of simplistic hypotheses.
Moreover, he constantly finds himself compelled to admit, without
saying so, that the “repressive hypothesis” is partly, if not wholly,
true. For instance, he repeatedly acknowledges that after the
sixteenth century, sexual prohibitions were severe, and propriety
demanded that one maintain a certain silence about sex, and so on.
More importantly, “the multiplication of discourses concerning
sex” that took place in “the field of exercise of power itself”—the
“institutional incitement to speak about it, and to do so more and
more; [the] determination on the part of the agencies of power to
hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit
articulation and endlessly accumulated detail” (he discusses at
length the significance of the confessional, and of the new theoretic
discourses concerning women’s sexuality, childhood onanism,
population control, sexual “perversities” like homosexuality and
sodomy, etc.)—this “steady proliferation of discourses,” which
demanded that individuals and families monitor themselves,
discipline themselves, divert their sexual energies into normal
reproductive functions, surely fostered a tremendous anxiety about
sexuality. Whether the anxiety was caused by enforced
58
In general, this setting up of straw man arguments is the
postmodernist’s method of choice. Attribute a simplistic position to your
opponent and then argue that it’s wrong.
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*
Foucault’s value.— While I’m not a great admirer of him, I’ll
admit that Foucault can be useful as a symbol of certain intellectual
tendencies, somewhat like Marx is. The latter was not totally
original, but he is useful in having brought together a mass of
important ideas, some of which were already in circulation before
him. Foucault is like a pale version of that. He draws attention to
the modern state’s regulation of the body, of sexuality, of
discourses, of social deviants and their punishment. More
generally, he highlights the social construction of various features
of life,59 and the pervasion of power-relations throughout society.
To an extent, all these ideas are truistic; moreover, they predate
him. And his expositions of them are confused, obscure, and
sloppy. Nonetheless, sure, it can be useful to associate them with a
single thinker.
59
Let’s not forget to take this postmodernist logic to its self-defeating
conclusion: the image of Foucault as enormously important, as very
original, etc., is itself a social construction, in fact a myth. The academic
discourse about him is indeed a much purer example of the tainted social
construction of knowledge than contemporary science is! Magnificent
irony.
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*
Science, religion, and arrogance.— Postmodernists and other
religious people—for postmodern political correctness is a kind of
religion, a fundamentalism, like free-market ideology and strains of
Islam—are fond of accusing reason’s partisans, such as scientists,
of arrogance in relation to other ways of reaching “truth.” It is
ironic, therefore, that from one perspective scientists are actually
the humble ones, Christians, Muslims and so forth the arrogant
ones. For humility is the very essence of science. It is the humility
of the scientific method that explains its power, and justifies its
proponents’ “faith” in it. Religious faith, on the other hand, is very
arrogant, since, by definition, it isn’t subject to continual testing
and revision in the light of new evidence. It is a projection of the
believer’s desires and hopes into absolute truth.60 In other words,
the believer takes himself—his hopes, values, desires—as the
measure of truth, whereas the scientist’s method is devoted
precisely to suppressing his subjectivity.
*
Here’s Jean-François Lyotard speaking in 1987 on his famous
little 1979 book (The Postmodern Condition) that brought the term
“postmodernism” into general circulation: “I made up stories, I
60
In the case of (much) postmodernism, the matter isn’t quite so simple.
Rather, the existence of “cross-cultural” truth is denied; the rigorous
search for evidence is abjured, which effectively allows the believer to
believe what he or she wants.
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CHRIS WRIGHT
61
For the philosopher-casuists: I know the logical positivists didn’t self-
identify as idealists. But they wanted to avoid the “metaphysical” question
of the existence of mind-independent matter, so they recognized only
sensations, sense-data, logical constructions out of the latter, etc., which
means effectively that they were idealists of a peculiar sort. (Bracketing
the external world, admitting only consciousness, sense-data, language,
logic, mathematics, and trying to construct a philosophical system around
sense-data as if “matter in itself” didn’t exist.) This is all silly, by the way,
because the success of science is inexplicable except on the assumption
that there really are such things as atoms, electrons, etc. Moreover, it is
the postulation of such entities that makes scientific hypotheses
explanatorily powerful.
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*
Postmodernism yet again. (Sorry.)— It irks me when in class we’re
told that someone like Joan Wallach Scott has been hugely
important to the historical profession, and is widely admired,
because of her theoretical arguments that extend Derrida and
Foucault and “the linguistic turn” of the 1980s into the discipline of
history. Arguments like “We [historians] need to scrutinize our
methods of analysis, clarify our operative assumptions, and explain
how we think change occurs. Instead of a search for single origins,
we have to conceive of processes so interconnected that they
cannot be disentangled. [Truism.] ...It is the processes that we must
continually keep in mind. [Truism, idiocy.] ...To pursue meaning,
we need to deal with the individual subject as well as social
organization and to articulate the nature of their interrelationships,
for both are crucial to understanding how gender works, how
change occurs. [Truism, idiocy.] Finally, we need to replace the
notion that social power is unified, coherent, and centralized [—
Who has ever been stupid enough to think that social power is
unified, coherent, and centralized?] with something like Michel
Foucault’s concept of power as dispersed constellations of unequal
relationships [utter truism], discursively constituted [?] in social
‘fields of force’ [pretentious, unilluminating metaphor].” Etc. This
is what happens when people trained in history try their hand at
theory, seduced, probably, by how profound and philosophical it
makes them feel. But “the poverty of theory” is most evident when
a Joan Scott wades into it.
*
On the history of theories of language.— The prehistoric
understanding of words as possessing magical power, as being
means of conjuring gods and controlling nature, has analogues all
through history. For example, as Benedict Anderson notes in
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*
I can’t help stating the obvious: I’m thrilled that the age of
primarily “post-materialist” activism is coming to an end. Finally!
All those elite postmodernists in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s
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*
A meditation on John Donne’s Meditation XVII.— “…No man is
an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a
part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the
less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy
friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me,
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CHRIS WRIGHT
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117
Chapter 2
History, Capitalism, and Marxism
*
Anger.— I read an article about a middle-aged Lebanese man who
had lost his wife, daughter and granddaughter in an Israeli airstrike
[in 2006]. “Mr. Samra had been sitting with friends elsewhere. He
raced to the building and frantically began to dig. He found his 5-
year-old daughter, Sally, torn apart. Her torso and an arm lay
separate from her legs. Another daughter, Noor, 8, was moving
under the rubble. His granddaughter Lynn, not yet 2, had part of
her face smashed. His wife, Alia Waabi, had died immediately.”
After reading an article like that you have three options on how to
live the rest of your life. You can accept that these things happen
but detach yourself from them; you can spend every day until you
die in rage and despair, from a too-deep knowledge that John
Donne’s 17th Meditation expresses timeless truth; or you can
emotionally detach yourself from the knowledge but devote
yourself to fighting against war. When you remember that the
article pointed out that the demolished building was the main office
for the city’s emergency workers, and that it was targeted because a
single Hezbollah official was suspected of living there, you’ll
probably be tempted to choose the second option—with the
emphasis on rage, though. Still, the only option you can choose
with a good conscience is the third.
Ehud Olmert is a monster. The problem with him and most
people in power is that they are bureaucrats. Bureaucrats and
technocrats. Living in their bureaucratic bubble, they forget their
responsibilities and let their egos seduce them into ignoring the
“unpeople” and overseeing crimes against humanity. Like
European monarchs in the 18th century, they see politics and war as
games—extremely serious games, involving clever maneuvers for
the sake of power and respect. One could draw parallels with chess.
The world of these people really is nothing but a stage, and they are
among the most dehumanized individuals on the planet.
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*
When East meets West.— One of the lingering effects of the
Vietnam War is the health disaster caused by Agent Orange, which
was sprayed by U.S. forces during the war. The U.S. government,
of course, denies responsibility and even contests the link between
Agent Orange and severe health problems. But there are millions of
remaining victims, and the massive cleanup is only just beginning.
Many of the more recent victims are children who have ventured
into contaminated waters or eaten contaminated fish. The
Washington Post published an article in 2006 that described the life
of one five-year-old girl who can’t go to school because her
appearance frightens the other children. “She has an oversized head
and a severely deformed mouth, and her upper body is covered in a
rash so severe her skin appears to have been boiled.” The parents’
mistake was to eat fish from contaminated canals, thus passing on
the toxin’s side-effects to their then-unborn daughter. “‘I am not
interested in blaming anyone at this point,’ the soft-spoken Nguyen
[the girl’s mother] said on a recent day, stroking her daughter’s
face. ‘But the contamination should not keep doing this to our
children. It must be cleaned up.’” Officials estimate that the
cleanup will cost about $60 million, of which the U.S. has, as of
2006, pledged to contribute $300,000.
I’ve always found it striking that poor people in Asia tend to
have more humanity and compassion than most Westerners. They
aren’t full of resentment or anger at the way life has treated them,
at the way they’ve been treated by their governments and the
Western powers. Indeed, they often seem happier than we
Americans. We are greedy, petty, mean-spirited, concerned to
blame others, to become fixated on our problems, while they accept
their lot in life, live “communally” and understand the necessity of
simple pleasures. Sometimes I envy them. –But then I remember
that we are constantly exporting our suffering, the pollution in our
souls, and I no longer envy them.
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*
The virtue of the vicious.— To feel kinship with people because I
grew up under the same government as they? Because I must abide
by the same laws as they? Because we’ve been taught that we have
a “common history,” whatever that means? Because a line has been
drawn between the expanse of land we live in and the expanse of
land “other people” live in? Am I really expected to place my hand
over my heart and give a solemn oath to renounce reason?
*
The no-civil-liberties state.— After attending a talk by Glenn
Greenwald, I’m struck that Hannah Arendt’s classic definition of
totalitarianism is starting to apply, at least in a very approximate
way, to the U.S. That’s starting to be the ideal, the ideal of power-
structures. It’s the logic of their policies, though fortunately it will
never be realized. The surveillance and “national security” state—
the police state—is doing all it can to make impossible human
interactions that aren’t mediated or at least observed by power.
Several billion hours of surveillance tape are produced every day
around the country, and that amount is increasing. The National
Security Administration apparently has intercepted and stored
about twenty trillion electronic transactions. Drones are being
deployed to spy on the domestic population. (Historically,
militaristic experiments abroad are often used on the domestic
society after they have been perfected. Impoverished foreign
countries are the laboratory.) Cyber-warfare is becoming more
sophisticated, eventually to be used on leftist groups among the
citizenry. The tactic of instilling fear in people, intimidating them
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through police brutality and so on, is being pursued all across the
political spectrum, not only by the right. These are long-term trends
that will intensify as the ruling classes sense that they’re losing
control over the world.
*
The proper way to think about Republicans and Democrats is
as follows. The Republican party is just a slave to conservative
sectors of big business. As Chomsky says, it isn’t any longer even a
true party, a coalition of diverse interests; it is just a tool of the very
wealthy (who are often religious conservatives—which is the
“other” set of interests the party is commonly thought of as
representing). The Democratic party is not quite a slave to big
business; it is more like a serf, who on the day or two when he
doesn’t have to slave for the lord can do some work on behalf of
the other interests he is supposed to represent, such as women, the
poor, minorities, immigrants, workers, consumers, the youth, future
generations (hence environmentalism and nuclear disarmament),
the rule of law, and the cause of internationalism. Most of the time
these other interests get short shrift, but every so often the serf will
throw them a bone, like he would to a dog.
*
Contemporary conservatism.— Republicans have, it is true, some
things superficially in common with earlier conservatives, who
espoused the positions, more or less, of classical liberals (while
having forgotten the nuances, and to an extent the spirit, of
liberalism). That is, Republicans want small government, like
earlier conservatives—but only in relation to taking care of the
population, unlike earlier conservatives. They want the death of the
people’s welfare state but the growth of the corporate welfare state.
No state for the people, statism for corporations. And that flatly
contradicts turn-of-the-century conservatism. Or, to be even more
precise, Republicans are not satisfied with a state in the service of
corporations; they want corporations to become the state. They
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*
The state of our society and its trajectory since the 1930s are
revealed in a simple juxtaposition: in the 1930s the government’s
message was “We have nothing to fear but fear itself”; nowadays
the message is “We have nothing to fear but a lack of fear itself.”
*
The farce of “progress.”— Aside from during World War II, there
has probably never been more suffering among the human species
than there is now. And this statement will continue to be true for
decades hence, each year seeing the aggregate level of suffering
rise.
*
Slavery and capitalism.— We look back now at slave societies in
astonishment, wondering how it was possible that it was seen not
only as necessary but as good that some people were forced to sell
themselves to other people just to survive. It doesn’t occur to us
that what we have now operates on the same principle: people are
forced to rent themselves to others in order to survive. If it is
morally wrong to (be forced to) sell oneself, it is morally wrong to
(be forced to) rent oneself. The Lowell mill girls in the 1830s were
wiser than our elite liberal intellectuals now; they understood that
wage-labor is essentially wage-slavery. Whether a black slave was
treated well or badly by his master did not affect the principle of
the thing; similarly, whether an employee makes a lot of money or
a little doesn’t obviate the moral horror of having to rent oneself in
order to survive.
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*
Parasitism in pre-capitalist and capitalist forms.— I don’t see
much difference, in principle, between ownership of capital and
ownership of land: in both cases one derives unearned income from
the bare fact of owning property. Others do the work that makes the
property productive; the owner does nothing but supply some of the
means by which the work is done (because he happens to have
gained possession of these means, i.e., excluded others from
possessing them; not because he has produced them). In principle
he can lie on some beach and sip mint juleps as he collects the
profits of others’ labor. And that is appalling. Unearned income,
unless it is distributed among the people, is appalling.62
*
Contrary to nature.— Throughout history it has been the parasites
who have had the most power and wealth.
*
Pigs.— The role of police officers is not so much to protect people
as to protect order, i.e., power-structures. First and foremost, they
are agents of the ruling class—a truism that is borne out even by
considering the origins of modern police forces in the U.S. and
Britain (between the 1820s and 1850s).63 To ensure people’s well-
being is at most indirectly and derivatively related to the cop’s
vocation, as shown by the regularity of police brutality, their
62
That many owners of capital do various kinds of productive work—
managerial, technical—is not essential to their ownership of capital
considered in itself. It is from this whence they derive their profits.
63
As David Whitehouse, associate editor of the International Socialist
Review, says, “To put it in a nutshell, the authorities created the police in
response to large, defiant crowds—that was strikes in England, riots in the
northern U.S., and the threat of slave insurrections in the South. So the
police are a response to crowds, not to crimes.” You can hear his talk at
http://wearemany.org/a/2012/06/origins-of-police (accessed November,
2012).
124
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*
Irony #973.— It’s perverse that selling yourself as a killing-
machine to semi-capitalist institutions that send you across the
world to slaughter people you don’t know for the sake of the profits
and power of people you don’t know—whose minions indoctrinate
you into complete ignorance of what exactly it is you’re doing—is
considered praiseworthy, in fact heroic.
*
Upside-down.— People love the servants of power, the policemen
and soldiers, for supposedly giving us our freedoms and protecting
them, while they hate the radicals, the socialists, the workers, the
feminists, who, because of their past struggles, are the real reason
we have any freedom at all. What confusion! Worshiping authority
for ensuring freedom, the one thing it violently opposes! The
confusion is predictable, though: indoctrination works wonders,
reason-defying miracles.
*
On WikiLeaks.— In general, if something is bad for power, it is
probably good for people.
*
Anarchism.— “Anarchism” is a fancy name for a simple thing, a
commonsensical thing that has been around for thousands of years
among billions of people. Chomsky is right that it is not so much a
worked-out political theory as a deep impulse in human thought
and behavior. People don’t want to be subordinated to power-
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*
The last will be first.— One of the ironies of history is that it’s the
poor and oppressed, the workers, the slaves, the marginalized, and
not the middle class or the privileged, who carry on in their
struggles the exalted tradition of the Enlightenment, with its ideals
of freedom, universal rights, humanity, and progress.
*
Forgotten truisms.— The awesome power of business propaganda
is revealed in the fact that most Americans scorn the idea of
socialism, which is really just common sense. Essentially all it
denotes is the ideal that working people should have control over
their work, they shouldn’t have to rent themselves to
multimillionaire bosses for eight or twelve hours a day in order to
make more money for the boss. It is nothing but economic
democracy, opposition to human exploitation; in this sense, even
the mainstream American philosopher John Dewey was a socialist.
As was Martin Luther King Jr., especially in his late years when he
turned his attention to the economic oppression of both whites and
blacks. The central intuition of socialism can be fleshed out in
many ways, from anarchism of various kinds to democratic state
ownership and operation of the means of production, but as long as
the overriding principle is workers’ control of their economic life,
it can be called socialism. Worker cooperatives, for instance,
exemplify socialism on a small scale.
Communism is, if anything, an even more obvious moral
principle than socialism, for it denotes the structuring of human
126
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127
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
An excerpt from my Master’s thesis.— The capitalist mode of
production, with its natural extension the “self-regulating” market
economy—self-regulating in that the price mechanism tends to
equilibrate supply and demand, so that public control and
regulation of the economy are secondary to private competition—
does not permit a socially efficient allocation of resources.
Resource-allocation is determined by the twin structural
imperatives of having purchasing power (on the demand side) and
of chasing profit (on the supply side). If one has a need but lacks
64
He distinguished between two phases.
128
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
65
Deward Clayton Brown, Electricity for Rural America: The Fight for
the REA (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).
129
CHRIS WRIGHT
déluge,” is not only risky but essentially adds no jobs and no real
wealth to the economy, which tends to stagnate—or to contract,
after it finally becomes evident that all these financial transactions
have been grounded in “the baseless fabric of a vision” (to quote
Shakespeare). So, millions more people are thrown out of work as
capital withdraws itself from further investments, and government
initiatives are required to set the economy on track again—for more
risky financial investments and more stagnation, as opposed to
contraction.66
However, even prior to the orgies of neoliberalism it was
obvious that capitalism, or the market economy, is not socially
efficient. Market failures are everywhere, from environmental
calamities to the necessity of the state’s funding much socially
useful science to the existence of public education and public
transportation (not supplied through the market) to the outrageous
incidence of poverty and famine in countries that have had
capitalism foisted on them.67 All this testifies to a “market failure,”
or rather a failure of the capitalist, competitive, profit-driven mode
of production, which, far from satisfying social needs, multiplies
and aggravates them. This should not be surprising. An economic
system premised on two irreconcilable antagonisms—that between
worker and supplier-of-capital and that between every supplier-of-
capital and every other68—and which is propelled by the structural
necessity of exploiting and undermining both one’s employees and
one’s competitors in order that ever-greater profits may be
squeezed out of the population, is not going to lead to socially
harmonious outcomes. Only in the unreal world of standard
66
See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Monopoly-
Finance Capital and the Paradox of Accumulation,” Monthly Review 61,
no. 5 (October, 2009): 1–20.
67
Naomi Klein documents recent examples in The Shock Doctrine: The
Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007).
68
Capitalists may indeed reach a modus vivendi to alleviate the mutually
harmful consequences of competition, for instance by fixing prices, but
the potential always remains for the antagonism of interests to reassert
itself.
130
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Irony #1048.— Cooperativism and quasi-“state socialism,” which
help rectify the myriad market failures of capitalism, are what
sustain the capitalist world-system, by keeping it relatively stable.
For example, according to the International Cooperative Alliance,
over 800 million people worldwide are members of cooperatives
and three billion depend on them for their livelihood.
*
On neoclassical economics.— Milton Friedman wrote a famous
article in 1953 called “The Methodology of Positive Economics,”
in which he argued that in science, the less realistic or more
idealizing the model, the better.69 A typically simplistic argument.
But for a neoclassicist it served the function of making a virtue of
necessity, thus allowing him to continue to believe his theories:
since neoclassical economics is the most unrealistic, most
idealized, most counterintuitive economic model of all, it’s the
best! This Friedmaniacal methodology therefore lets economists
retort to criticisms regarding the inability of their models to explain
what happens in the real world, “That’s just because of the
messiness and imperfections of reality! It doesn’t prove that our
models are wrong. You policy-makers simply have to make reality
69
“Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have
‘assumptions’ that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of
reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more
unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense).” Alan Musgrave refuted
Friedman’s arguments in his 1981 paper “Unreal Assumptions in
Economic Theory: the F-Twist Untwisted.”
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CHRIS WRIGHT
*
On Milton Friedman.— On the one hand you have Gandhi: “The
movement against war is sound. I pray for its success. But I cannot
help the gnawing fear that the movement will fail if it does not
touch the root of all evil—human greed.” Ideas we instinctively
recognize as good and noble. On the other hand you have Milton
Friedman, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and all the other ideological
hacks doing the bidding of big business by defending greed, saying
it’s inevitable and good, selfishness makes the world go round,
everyone is necessarily greedy and should be. Reducing human life
to a cost-benefit analysis, as vulgar and inhuman, anti-humanist, as
the behaviorist ideology of stimulus-and-response. It would be a
horrible thing if these deniers of humanity and compassion,
creativity, love, solidarity and cooperation, were right. Fortunately
they’re wrong. The world is not what their ideology implies it is, a
dystopia of frenzied individualism. That sort of anti-paradise has
been approximated only in Nazi concentration camps and such
environments of sub-animal existence. Greed and selfishness—
unless the concepts are broadened so much as to be meaningless—
are in fact of marginal importance to human life. Ordinarily they’re
recognized as pathological. They have no place in family life or
between friends or lovers. Generosity is infinitely more common on
132
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*
One of the ironies about Ayn Rand is that her philosophy of
extreme selfishness and individualism would, if taken to its logical
conclusion and realized in the world, result in a society that bore
resemblances to the totalitarianism she fled when fleeing Russia.
Let’s leave aside her stupid love of laissez-faire capitalism, an
impossible economic order that, to the extent it could be
approximated, was responsible for the Great Depression and
thereby the rise of Nazi collectivism. ....Or, on second thought, no,
let’s look at this laissez-faire capitalism, since it is one
manifestation of her vision. If a pure version of it were possible, it
would be something like Murray Rothbard’s “anarcho-capitalism,”
which, to quote Chomsky, is “a world so full of hate that no human
being would want to live in it.”70 As someone once said, the closest
70
The footnotes to Chomsky’s Understanding Power have excerpts from
one of Rothbard’s “libertarian” books: “Abolition of the public sector
means, of course, that all pieces of land, all land areas, including streets
and roads, would be owned privately, by individuals, corporations,
133
CHRIS WRIGHT
134
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Chomsky speaks.— “In a market system, your dollar is your vote.
You have as many votes as you have dollars. If you have zero
dollars, you have zero votes. Unborn generations have zero dollars,
so what happens to them is of zero significance in a market system.
What’s done today, they have to live with. If we destroy resources,
they have to live with it. So to the extent—the limited extent—that
market systems are allowed to function, they’re just guaranteed to
self-destruct. That’s why if you take a look at modern history, in
countries that were more or less organized and functioning they
never allowed market systems to function. In Britain there was an
experiment with laissez-faire around the 1860s and 1870s, but it
was called off very quickly by the business world because they saw
it was going to wipe out communities and the environment. What
they instituted in its place was a kind of social democratic system.”
See Karl Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation.
*
Thoughts inspired by Naomi Klein.— An obvious truth you’ll
never encounter in the mainstream media: “Chicago School
economics [is] particularly conducive to corruption. Once you
accept that profit and greed as practiced on a mass scale create the
greatest possible benefits for any society, pretty much any act of
personal enrichment can be justified as a contribution to the great
creative cauldron of capitalism, generating wealth and spurring
economic growth—even if it’s only for yourself and your
colleagues.” Why else do you think neoliberalism is orthodoxy?
Because of its truth or intellectual integrity? Ha. Even if it were
true or had such integrity, that would have nothing to do with
whether it would become “the Washington Consensus.” It is simply
the best system of ideas ever devised to justify an elite’s orgiastic
135
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136
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Fighting against global warming
*
Why has America always been such a fearful country? So
afraid of the Other! Far more so than most countries. Whether it’s
been the Indians, the British, the blacks, the Chinese, the Germans,
the Communists, the Japanese, the atheists, the Mexicans, the
terrorists, or whoever, Americans have always been terribly afraid
of some group. It must have something to do with the
unstructuredness of the social fabric, the atomism that has
characterized American society from the very beginning (after the
Revolution), which was so different from Europe. Paranoia is
fostered in such conditions. Think of the paranoia of the 9/11
Truthers, and the conspiracy theories that have always been popular
in this country. Distrust has always pervaded the society, especially
distrust of authority (hence conspiracy theories) and of any “new”
group that is seen as unusually cohesive and thus threatening.
Paranoia, mass distrust and fear, insecurity, xenophobia, are natural
attitudes in an atomized society of few “civil-society” institutions
or modes of association and a relatively fluid class structure, not to
137
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138
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Summer activism
apathy-baked blisters
popping open
in the leaden heat of tradition-drenched climates
across the swamp of American suburbia,
neighborhood-wide blisters
that ooze “no”s and “I don’t care”s and
such polluted cynicism.
knocking on doors and opening pores
that seep fetid
selfishness—smellable
selfishness
in the curled snarls
on the fat and aging faces, gargoyles
twisted into the woodwork.
splintered faces—blistering.
*
The throes of transition.— A society in which a Glenn Beck can
become a sensation is dying, and deserves to die.
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*
On Andrew Jackson.— With him, for the first time, you see the
baleful essence of the political appeal to the “common man,” i.e.,
the common conservative white man (who might also happen to be
a white woman). Later on the same phenomenon would underlie
modern conservatism, as in Reagan and Bush 2—except that this
time the rhetoric about simplicity and old-fashioned values would
disguise a servility to big business, which is very anti-Jacksonian.
In fact, the real meaning of the appeal to the common man would
change: with Jackson it was relatively sincere, and there was a
genuine aversion to big, undemocratic power-structures as
symbolized by the Bank of the United States. Jackson and his
Democrats were also ambivalent about capitalism; they were not
disguised servants of capital. They were like Jeffersonian
Republicans, not Hamiltonians. (In that respect, as in others, their
ideology was reactionary and doomed. The future was in wage-
labor.) Modern conservatism, however, is more ambiguous than
Jacksonian democracy. Among the people, it taps into a real, albeit
unconscious and confused, ambivalence about modern capitalism
and a nostalgia for traditional security and hierarchy; among the
powerful, it is a tool of big business and profit. But elements of
Jacksonianism are nevertheless used in business propaganda (i.e.
conservatism) because of the implicitly authoritarian, pseudo-
democratic, demagogic, racist, obfuscatory, divisive, scapegoating,
anti-government nature of the Jacksonian creed.71 Almost any
ideology that favors the white man above all is useful to business.
*
What is fascism?— Populist conservatism.72
71
See Daniel Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of
America, 1815-1848 (2007).
72
That’s the essential core, but classical fascism manifested it in quite
specific ways, relatively “pure” and “complete” ways. Note that, as a form
of populist conservatism, American religious fundamentalism has the
same essence as classical fascism. It has similar social and political
140
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
A celebrated bureaucrat.— In the library today I happened to pass
Harry Truman’s memoirs. Picked the book up and flipped to the
pages on the atomic bomb. “…General Bloodlust [or whatever his
name was] wanted to drop the bomb on Kyoto, but Secretary
Stimson argued that Kyoto was an important cultural and religious
shrine.” Stimson had spent his honeymoon there and had fond
memories of it; hence, it was saved. Because of a honeymoon. A
treasure-trove of history and culture saved because one guy said
“No” because of his honeymoon. And then you tell me there’s a
God!
Upon receiving the telegram reporting that the bomb had been
dropped on Hiroshima, Truman “was deeply moved. I turned to the
sailors I was having lunch with [on some battleship somewhere]
and said, ‘This is the greatest thing in history. We’re going home.’”
Yes, he said it was the greatest thing in history. And–the next page
is on a different subject. No reflections on the meaning of
Hiroshima or the decision to use the bomb; just…it was the greatest
thing ever, and then on to his negotiations with Stalin. The man
was amoral. An arch-bureaucrat, an amoral machine, like
Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and most heads of state in history.
How that level of unreflectiveness is possible, I don’t know.
Years afterwards, as he’s writing his memoirs, he doesn’t stop to
reflect on his decision to kill more than 200,000 (with the after-
effects) civilians. He takes it for granted that American lives are
more valuable than Japanese lives, and that it’s better to kill
hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians (women, children) than
to let fewer American soldiers die. Had the Japanese not
surrendered, he and his generals would have gone on dropping as
141
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Institutional evil.— Skimming Gar Alperovitz’s book The
Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, and the Architecture of an
American Myth (1996). Truman calling the bomb “merely another
powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.” Absolutely
jubilant upon hearing news of Hiroshima. As for Nagasaki, even
Alperovitz’s scholarly excavations unearth no rational reason for its
bombing so soon after Hiroshima, before giving the Japanese
significant time to respond. It seems to have been only a result of
the determination to end the war before the Russians, who had just
declared war on Japan, had a chance to enter Manchuria.
(Obviously the Americans wanted to keep them out of the east.)
The decision to use the bomb at all was militarily unnecessary, as
high-level generals and advisers stated years later and argued in
private at the time. In fact, the war could have ended weeks earlier
if the Americans had simply assured the Japanese, who were
desperate for peace, that the emperor could remain on the throne (a
request that was later granted, after the bombs). But Truman and
Byrnes, the secretary of state, wouldn’t make this concession.
Why? Probably because their knowledge of the bomb gave them an
“ace in the hole” at the 1945 Potsdam conference, and they wanted
a chance to demonstrate the bomb to the Russians. So, from this
perspective, far from shortening the war, the bomb may have
lengthened it by a few weeks, by motivating Truman to reject
Japan’s overtures for peace. (Yes, he rejected them, in July!) But of
course once the Russians declared war on Japan, the Americans
wanted peace immediately. At any rate, the evidence is conclusive
that the bomb didn’t save American lives, since alternatives to
142
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
What if Stalin had been the one to drop the bomb and had
justified it by saying it probably saved Russian lives? Would we be
defending the decision? No. We’d be saying, rightly, that the use of
the bomb was horrifying, that in itself it enshrined Stalin as one of
the arch-villains of history.
*
On mainstream American liberalism.— Richard Goodwin, one of
the Best and the Brightest, speechwriter and adviser to John F.
73
For instance, given that Japan was on the verge of collapse anyway, a
weeks-long wait, combined with the shattering blow of Russia’s
declaration of war, might have resulted in victory.
143
CHRIS WRIGHT
144
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
145
CHRIS WRIGHT
believe what you have to believe in order to fit into your chosen
institution. Thus arises the phenomenon of apparently brilliant
people who you suddenly notice have this gigantic blind-spot in
their mind that underpins their brilliant maneuverings.
*
Thoughts on Marxian common sense.— An example of
intellectuals’ need to make everything more complicated and
difficult than it has to be is the unending debate over the meaning
and validity of the Marxian claim that the economy is the relative
foundation of society, that production relations (which presuppose
given levels of “productive forces,” i.e., technology, scientific
knowledge, etc.) are ultimately the most important kind of social
relations. One would have thought this claim to be
commonsensical, but apparently it isn’t. Its basic meaning and truth
are revealed in the single consideration that the institutions and
institutional actors with the greatest access to resources are going to
have the greatest influence over society. Fewer resources, less
influence. Institutions directly involved in the production and
accumulation of resources—of money, capital, technology—are
naturally going to have the most direct access to these resources,
i.e., the greatest control over them. The people who control these
institutions, then, are going to have more power than other people,
and they will seek to make other institutions throughout society
“compatible” with their power or subservient to it. Which means
making them compatible with the form of organizing relations of
production in that society that has the most control over the most
resources. In other words, the “dominant mode of production.” In
non-prehistoric societies, the class structure and implicit class
struggle, which are defined by the relations between antagonistic
positions in the mode of production, will therefore be central to
social dynamics. The more exploitation of the producing classes,
the more power there will be in the hands of the exploiting classes,
i.e., those who occupy the dominant positions in the dominant
mode of production. (Their dominant position is a function of their
control over the resources necessary to force others to produce for
146
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
It’s funny that people often deprecate Marxian materialism as
an explanation of society and human behavior, given that virtually
147
CHRIS WRIGHT
no one cares much about ideas. People think they do, but basically
they’re wrong. They insist that ideas, ideological motivations, and
spiritual matters are very important to people....but then proceed to
ignore them in their lives. Just listen to humans talk and you’ll see
they’re essentially unfamiliar with ideas and don’t think about them
very often. Their understanding of the world is utterly superficial;
their ideological commitments exist mainly on the level of words;
quotidian personal interests are what preoccupy them. Food,
money, success, power, relationships, entertainment, etc. Every so
often religion or politics will come up in conversation and people
will get strangely animated for a few minutes, but that isn’t very
significant. Anyway, most of the time a person’s commitments to
certain ideas, such as they are, derive from their reflection of his or
her interests, or their being a sublimation of his or her interests.
Some selflessness might be involved—and with many people that’s
a very important element—but even then, of course, the ideas are
merely abstract reifications of concrete interests or feelings or
modes of interaction with others. “Material” realities, that is. But
I’ve strayed from my original point.
I’d also note, incidentally, that often when people object to
“ideas” they’re really objecting to changing their way of doing
things. Religious conservatives oppose liberal reformers in large
part because they’re used to doing things (rituals) a certain way,
and the thought of changing that makes them profoundly
uncomfortable. The human mind/brain, after all, like that of other
animals, is a pretty “conservative” thing: it finds comfort, so to
speak, in patterns, habits, routines, rituals repeated again and again,
such that encountering or doing new things can be very disturbing.
Not always, especially not in the case of children (although observe
how they react upon meeting strangers or when their parents force
them, for whatever reason, to change some habit or discard some
toy they’re used to). Curiosity and learning can be a source of great
pleasure. But changing one’s behavior or attitudes is hard,
sometimes impossible. Sartre notwithstanding, the self is not “free”
in this way. Therefore many people object to the “idea” of gay
marriage, because it hasn’t been a part of their routine. It isn’t how
148
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
People usually think of religion as an example of the
importance of ideas, and to an extent that’s true. But not to the
extent that is commonly thought. Religion is not only ideas, after
all, but also institutions. Social roles. Modes of interaction. And
simply an excuse to get together with people once or several times
a week, to socialize and act out rituals that reaffirm community.
These kinds of behavior, as opposed to mere thinking about various
transcendental ideas, are the most important aspect of religion for
most people. And one reason why religion is so tenacious in the
modern world is that institutions are tenacious, especially
institutions with a lot of power and resources backing them up.74 It
isn’t only “ideas”; it is generation after generation being socialized
into institutions, to respect power-structures centered around priests
and bishops and reverends and pastors and so on—an especially
easy thing to do because such respect gets people communal
affection and allows them to participate in a significant part of
social life. In the light of so many satisfying and self-affirming
communal rituals molding one from one’s childhood, it is easy to
understand why millions would believe in God and try to act as he
wants (because that means acting as the community wants). “Ideas”
are in this case, as in most others, little more than reflections or
residues of social behavior. By being influenced by the idea of
God, one is being influenced by social structures that one has
internalized.
*
A riposte to an idealist.— I can imagine that a contemporary
“idealist” might defend the importance of ideas and ideologies by
74
In the U.S., for instance, since the 1970s conservative business sectors
have subsidized the propagation of fundamentalist religion.
149
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
You, nationalist, are an idiot.— You can say whatever you want
about the importance of nationalism and its challenge to Marxism;
in the end, the fact remains that class, or economic and
environmental situation, is more immediately important to people
than “nation,” which is an imaginary construction and took
centuries of warfare and indoctrination just to be recognized by
ordinary people. Peasants have always been more concerned with
survival and their immediate situation than “nationality”—even
since the 19th century, when they were finally made aware of the
principle of nationality. Serfs were always more invested in their
struggles against the nobility than in some educated elite’s
preoccupation with “national identity” or whatnot. As for the
thousands of years of tribal wars and barbarian invasions and
imperial clashes and all that shitheap of history, that was mostly a
150
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Class, race, and gender.— The significance of each of these is
multidimensional. Class, however, seems to have a unique
sociological importance insofar as class structures, or economic
structures, constitute society’s essential “infrastructure,” the
skeleton that is fleshed out in culture, politics, ideological trends,
etc. Race and gender, by contrast, are primarily subjective
identities, not objective structures rigorously defined and enforced
in the ways that capitalist class-relations are.75 In imagination, one
can picture rearrangements of the occupants of positions in class
structures; black people could occupy capitalist positions and
whites occupy wage-earning positions, or the current relative
places of most women and men could be reversed in the same way.
And society would continue to have basically the same institutional
configuration it does now, with lower wage-earners viciously
exploited—only these would be white men. In fact, blacks and
women have made advances along these lines, even as the real
sources of mass oppression have barely been touched due to the
lack of institutional change. To change the institutional structures
75
To be more accurate, race and gender are “objective structures” to the
extent that they more or less coincide with economic relations. Forms of
racial oppression fit into forms of class oppression.
151
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Concentration of power and resources has, from the very
beginning, been the overwhelming source of the world’s ills. (Not
religion, as Richard Dawkins et al. would have you believe.)
Abolishing it is the sine qua non for establishing a humane society.
–Yes, it is that simple. All the sophisticated analyses of historians
and economists and philosophers boil down to the fact that it’s
imperative to abolish the concentration of wealth, and therewith the
concentration of power.
*
The Barbarous Legacy of Capitalism in Latin America. (A
short academic paper.)
152
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
76
Steve J. Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish
Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1982), xv.
77
Ibid., 128.
153
CHRIS WRIGHT
78
Ibid., 153.
79
Ibid., 185.
154
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
80
Emilio Kouri, A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in
Papantla, Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 278-
280.
81
Ibid., 283.
155
CHRIS WRIGHT
156
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
82
Suzana Sawyer, Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational
Oil, and Neoliberalism in Ecuador (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), 96, 97.
83
Ibid., 102.
84
Myrna Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the
Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2006), 195.
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and the fields needed to be cleared and replanted during the dead
season leading up to the next harvest.”85 (Burned cane had to be cut
and milled within twenty-four hours lest it lose its sucrose.)
Burning cane also made it easier to cut, and it improved working
conditions in the fields. In certain contexts, such as times of
political repression, burning fields could also be a revolutionary
act, a means of protesting colonialism and elite rule. Undertaken on
a sufficiently large scale, cane fires were an effective form of
economic sabotage and a way to spread revolution. Their political
importance was summed up by one of Fidel Castro’s comrades:
“Revolution in Cuba means burning sugarcane—it did in 1868,
1895, and 1930-33, and it did for us.”86 Through this sort of
resistance at the point of production, i.e. at the fulcrum of society,
workers turned their daily subordination and dependency on its
head: they showed that in fact capital and its social order were
dependent on them, that they had the power to shut society down.
They could even install political leaders who promised to
overthrow the rule of capital, as in the case of Castro.
Again, though, the balance of power under capitalism is such
that it is usually capital, not labor, that wields violence and remakes
the world in its image. The history of Latin America is one long
confirmation of this. Consider the 1980s, for example. The violence
of that decade in Central America was largely due to capital’s
attempts to suppress leftist insurrections by means of death squads
and U.S.-backed paramilitary forces. Jeffery Paige makes it clear in
Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy in
Central America (1997) that a major impetus behind the
reactionary savagery in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala
was the coffee-growing landed elite, which had a greater interest
than the “agro-industrial” class in controlling labor. “The
revolutionary crises of the 1980s,” he argues, “were crises of the
85
Gillian McGillivray, Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and
State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2009), 3.
86
Ibid., 264.
158
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
coffee elites and the societies they made at the end of the
nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.”87 As
usual, therefore, the supremacy of a specific export commodity, or
rather of capital as invested in the production of this commodity,
brought hardship and even death for peasants and workers in Latin
American countries. A similar thing happened in the 1930s, when
uprisings against elites in El Salvador and Nicaragua were bloodily
crushed by military force. The hubris and inhumanity of capital are
on full display when tens of thousands of campesinos and laborers
are slaughtered for the sake of maintaining complete capitalist
control over society.
A bourgeois apologist might argue that capitalism as
manifested in Latin America has had more positive than negative
consequences for the environment and the majority of people, but
that would be a hard argument to make. Examples can be
multiplied almost without end of environmental and human agony
as capital has steamrolled the continent. Since commodity
production is the foundation of the social structure, Indians and
workers have had most success at softening their oppression when
interfering with production itself. For instance, when Pastaza
Indians in 1989 threatened seismic crews working for an oil
company and confiscated their equipment, a presidential advisor
flew in with company representatives to discuss indigenous
grievances.88 Interference with production could not simply be
ignored. Nevertheless, even such minor victories as this have been
rare compared to the number of defeats—the constant stream of
defeats, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, from Mexico
to Argentina. How long this sad history will continue is an open
question, but one can expect it not to end until capitalism itself
does.
87
Jeffery Paige, Coffee and Power: Revolution and the Rise of Democracy
in Central America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5.
88
Suzana Sawyer, Crude Chronicles, 64.
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Irony #2853.— The U.S.’s drug war, which really began in the
Progressive era of the early twentieth century, used to be directed
against drugs. The suppression of the drug trade was the goal. Its
dramatic intensification in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with its
catastrophic failure, which coincided with its unqualified success as
determined by a new set of standards. Aside from being an
excellent way for the powerful, especially conservatives, to frighten
the public, increase their authoritarian control over society, and get
more votes—which it had always been, to some extent—the drug
war became a wonderful excuse to do two things: throw
economically redundant people (mostly black men), potential
troublemakers, into prison, which then allowed corporations to
profit off their cheapened labor; and intervene in the affairs of
Latin American countries so as to suppress rebellious political
movements under the guise of fighting the drug trade. This latter
function also had the benefit of giving the U.S. government
revenue, through arms sales.
*
Mumia Abu Jamal is right to refer to America’s “prison-
industrial complex.” Prisons may be America’s most dynamic
growth industry, at least until very recently. Communities want
prisons to be built in them because they provide jobs. Prisoners are
the raw material, so to speak, on which employees work; and
corporations make fantastic profits off the construction of prisons
and the exploitation of cheap prison labor. At the same time,
sending millions of black and Hispanic males to prison for minor
offenses rids society of an economically superfluous population
that, as it grows, threatens the stability of corporate capitalism. So
capitalism has accomplished the impressive feat of making a
business of getting rid of people whom the system has made
economically redundant and politically dangerous. Finding a way
to make profits off the redundant and unprofitable, precisely by
protecting capitalism from them—that’s genius. Satanic genius.
That it happens to destroy millions of lives is an unfortunate
externality.
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*
Deindustrialization.— The causes of America’s deindustrialization
are complex, involving heightened international competition and
declines in the growth-rates of manufacturing profitability and
investment. The basic story can be stated in one sentence, though:
greater international competition (since the late 1960s) and
diminished growth of profitability have necessitated feverish cost-
cutting, which has meant more automation, employee layoffs,
wage-cuts, and offshoring of production—which in turn, by
reducing purchasing power in the domestic economy, have in the
long run reinforced trends toward lower sales and profits, which
have themselves reinforced the need to cut costs, thus creating a
vicious circle of American “de-development.” This seems to be the
story as many critical economists see it (such as Robert Brenner),
although of course it has to be embellished.
*
Why is deindustrialization bad for the economy? Is it bad for
the economy? A lot of mainstream economists actually argue that
there’s nothing wrong with a decline in manufacturing
employment, that it’s a sign of progress, in particular of the higher
productivity in manufacturing than in the service sector.
Manufacturing productivity in America has become so high that we
need very few workers to produce an equivalent level of output to
the 1960s. The employment lost in manufacturing can be
compensated by higher employment in the services. Etc. There is
some superficial plausibility to this view, but a bit of sensible
thinking shows it to be false. One major problem with losing
manufacturing employment, I suspect, is that it entails a loss of
powerful unions, thus a loss of high wages in the core economy
(the “standard-setting” economy), therefore a stagnation or decline
in the standard of living and a shrinking of effective demand. With
lower demand, the service sector can’t grow sufficiently to stably
employ the tens of millions who would have had manufacturing
jobs if the industrial sector had continued to grow instead of shrink.
161
CHRIS WRIGHT
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NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
One of the many sources of instability in the world today is
the immense surplus of labor. Hundreds of millions of people who
don’t have an integral economic role. Just subsisting at the margins.
There are two primary ways of dealing with this reserve army:
either absorb it by giving it things to do, or repress it. Since the
1990s, China’s main strategy has been to absorb it (through
infrastructural projects and so forth);89 the U.S.’s has been to
repress it (and to give it meager welfare benefits). Neither of these
strategies will prove sustainable for a long time, though.
Keynesianism cannot last for many decades anymore, and
repression will eventually face insurmountable resistance. Both
strategies will start to meet their limits in the next ten years or so,
though the repressive option will continue to be used for a very
long time. Things are about to get interesting....
*
The fulfillment of the prophecy.— As capital has become more
mobile internationally since the 1970s (the era of globalization),
undermining national boundaries and cultures, and has accumulated
in ever-larger concentrations, undermining the “relative
independence” of the state and producing a global proletariat (or
“precariat”), the world has approximated ever more closely the
pure model of capitalism that Marx described in Das Kapital. The
West slowly sinks to the level of the Rest, and the Rest slowly
approaches the industrial-capitalist condition of the West. The
latter deindustrializes and eventually sees its infrastructure
deteriorate, the former industrializes and sees its infrastructure
build up a bit, though not sufficiently. Class polarization in the
West approaches levels in the Rest. Conditions everywhere tend to
equalize, with a hyper-elite set against an enormous reserve army
of labor. A revolutionary situation ripens as the world becomes
89
Needless to say, repression hasn’t been absent.
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more uniform and the Western middle class, that historical bastion
of conservatism, disintegrates.
*
Here’s a simple way to think about the downfall of capitalism:
for over a century, oppressed people all over the world have risen
up again and again, year after year, decade after decade, to
overthrow institutions either integral to or, if residual from the
feudal past, temporarily strengthened or made harsher by
capitalism. And people will continue to do so, each generation
continuing the fight. Their prospects for revolutionary success,
however, have been limited as long as the core of capitalism in the
West has had a fairly stable social structure and intact civil society.
As long as the richest states have not faced insurrections
themselves but have been able to intervene (usually successfully)
whenever such insurrections threatened elsewhere, global
capitalism has been more or less safe. Only when, finally,
insurrections elsewhere coincide with massive revolutionary
movements in the core—resulting in part from the decline of an
integral civil society—can capitalism fall. This condition wasn’t
really fulfilled even in the 1930s. Only now is it beginning to come
to fruition.
Moreover, the necessity that civil society decay means that
capitalism’s fall has to coincide with that of the nation-state, which,
historically speaking, matured symbiotically with civil society. The
latter’s decline entails the former’s.
*
The Tortured Demise of the Nation-State
164
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
90
David Held, “The Decline of the Nation State,” in Becoming National:
A Reader, eds. Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 415.
91
Quoted in Liisa Malkki, “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples
and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and
Refugees,” in Becoming National, 435.
92
Anthony Smith, “The Origins of Nations,” in Becoming National, 107.
93
Ibid., 109, 110.
165
CHRIS WRIGHT
94
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 44.
95
Ibid.
166
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
96
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve
the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998), 88.
97
Robert Dreyfuss, “Chongqing: Socialism in One City,” The Nation,
November 18, 2009.
167
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These trends are even more evident when one considers the
impact of video games, cell-phones, computers, the internet, and
such “social media” outlets as Twitter and Facebook. A society in
which most people spend an inordinate amount of their time sitting
in front of TVs, playing video games, shopping online, searching
for soulmates through internet dating, imbibing bits of information
in short bursts from an endless variety of global news and
entertainment sources, and electronically “chatting” with
acquaintances or strangers located anywhere from the next room to
the other side of the world—such a society does not have much of a
tangible national culture, and its “imagined community” is indeed
imaginary, a mere abstraction with little basis in concrete reality. In
short, the individualistic, passive, and consumerist nature of a
capitalist society saturated by electronic media98 is interpersonally
alienating and destructive of civil society, hence destructive of a
shared national consciousness.
At the same time, because electronic technology makes
possible nearly instantaneous communication across the world, the
kind of community it fosters is global rather than national. One
may start to feel more affinity for people ten thousand miles away
than for one’s compatriots. Global social movements become easier
to coordinate; things like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street
can emerge to break down national barriers and birth a global
consciousness.
Electronic capitalism has also helped make possible the
hegemony of transnational corporations, which have their own role
to play in the destruction of the nation. First and foremost, their
actions tend to bring about the equalization of conditions between
countries. As corporations seek cheap labor abroad, impose ever-
poorer working conditions on domestic employees, deindustrialize
Western countries in part by obsessively pursuing productivity
advances that make possible shrinking workforces, and fight to
dismantle economic regulations and the welfare state, they cause a
98
And by “print versions” of such media, for example magazines devoted
to celebrity gossip and instant gratification of whatever sort.
168
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
99
For some of the reasons behind these developments, see Robert
Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist
Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (New York:
Verso, 2006).
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CHRIS WRIGHT
100
See, e.g., Arthur Rizer and Joseph Hartmann, “How the War on Terror
Has Militarized the Police,” The Atlantic, November 7, 2011.
101
The short-term interest, that is. See the final paragraph below.
170
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
2011 vs. 1968.— Despite what people are inclined to think, 2011
was in many ways more globally revolutionary than 1968.
Everything that happened—the Arab Spring, the Wisconsin
protests, Occupy Wall Street, protests all over Europe,
demonstrations in Russia—it was all just the beginning of
something very big; 1968 was basically the end, or at least the
climax. 2011 was a manifestation primarily of elemental economic
grievances, even in the Arab world; 1968 was a manifestation
102
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (New York: Verso,
1994).
103
See Peter Kropotkin, The State: Its Historic Role (London: Freedom
Press, 1997).
104
David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011) discusses these obstacles in detail.
171
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Thoughts on socialist revolution.— In retrospect it’s obvious that
something like socialism couldn’t have happened until the nation-
state system had disintegrated (which it’s starting to do now),
because the nationality principle conflicts with the class principle.
Marx thought the latter was more powerful and important than the
former, and in many ways he was right. But not in the way he
wanted: business tended to be more loyal to class than to the
nation, and it used the idea of nationality to divide the working
class. Only when capitalism and the nation-state began to decline
together according to their internal dynamics and not due to some
voluntaristic, opportunistic Leninist coup from the outside would
the wage-earning classes have the chance to supersede capitalism
and its instrument the nation-state.
To say it more simply, Marx’s main mistake was not to
foresee the twentieth-century apotheosis of the nation-state period
of history. He didn’t foresee the welfare state. He overestimated the
power—at least in the short run—of capitalism’s class-polarizing
tendencies; he didn’t understand that other tendencies would for at
least a hundred years be able to mitigate class inequality,
tendencies such as that toward the assimilation of the working class
into the dominant order, toward “pure and simple trade-unionism”
105
See, e.g., Chris Harman’s The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After (1988).
172
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
173
CHRIS WRIGHT
174
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
106
See the writings of the dependency theorists, such as Andre Gunder
Frank’s important work Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin
America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (1969) and Walter
Rodney’s classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Anthony
Brewer’s Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (1980) is a
good overview. The fundamental point is that every country that has
successfully industrialized has done so through protectionism—a fact that
directly contradicts classical and neoclassical economics. See also Robin
Hahnel’s The ABCs of Political Economy: A Modern Approach (2002).
175
CHRIS WRIGHT
176
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177
CHRIS WRIGHT
178
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
179
CHRIS WRIGHT
180
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
You know about all the oligopolistic stuff that was happening
in the early 1900s, so I won’t go through that. All through the
1920s, trade associations and mergers and a permissive federal
government ensured that competition was, “to a very considerable
extent,” controlled. That’s the way things tend to be under
corporate capitalism. Capital did very well in the 1920s—but “the
increasingly promotional and financial basis of [the] merger
movement indicates a surplus of funds seeking speculative profits,
as opportunities for productive investment profitable enough for the
corporate sector were waning.” Remind you of anything? For
example, our economy’s financialization over the last thirty-five
years, as “opportunities for productive investment profitable
enough for the corporate sector” have waned? Yes, we’re on the
verge of another great depression. Or at least a very protracted
slump.
Also, just like in recent decades, retail chains (characterized
by low wages) did unprecedentedly well in the 1920s.
“What were the forces making for a sustained economic
expansion [in the 1920s] that finally pulled the nation out of the
doldrums of 1907-1915?” Boff’s answer is simple: “The energy
behind a vigorously growing market economy comes chiefly from
a core of dynamic young industries. Between 1917 and 1929
electrification and automobiles provided the key investment outlets
that came to fruition after World War I. They overrode the
depressive tendencies of the oligopolistic investment mode, at least
long enough to allow the economy to expand for several years
without significant interruption.” The statistics he gives for
electrification prove the stunning importance of this new industry
to economic activity in that era. The statistics for, and in general
the importance of, automobile manufacturing, however, are simply
mind-boggling. As before with steam power and railroads, “the
accumulation possibilities opened up by automobiles invigorated
the whole economic machine.” Think of all the “forward and
backward linkages,” the many industries stimulated and created,
the proliferation and expansion of roads and billboards and filling
stations and garages and truck driving and suburban communities
181
CHRIS WRIGHT
182
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
183
CHRIS WRIGHT
184
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
107
Economic and ideological opposition to government programs that
“compete with private capital or encroach on its domain” prevents the
federal government from directly funding sufficient public works on
infrastructure and so forth, so it has to take the indirect route through the
Pentagon, which is less efficient than the alternative (something like the
WPA or the TVA of the 1930s). See Chomsky’s Understanding Power.
185
CHRIS WRIGHT
186
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
187
CHRIS WRIGHT
suggest that the lower aggregate demand was partly a result of the
low profits.108 Business had to cut costs to compete with intra- and
inter-national competitors, which meant lower wages and less
employment, which meant less effective demand. Which meant
more excess capacity, which reinforced tendencies toward reduced
growth of investment, which meant lower productivity growth, etc.
A vicious circle. Heightened international competition wasn’t the
only trigger, but it was an important one. Boff might say that it
ended up reinforcing—ironically—the stagnationist tendencies of
America’s oligopolistic economy (by encouraging greater cost-
cutting....which didn’t result in the “shakeout” of less-productive
firms, as would have been the case in a more “purely competitive”
economy, because of all the ways that oligopolistic firms in modern
America have of staying in the game, including by relying on debt,
on the government’s military Keynesianism, on corporate tax cuts,
on financial speculation, on investments in real estate, etc.).
So recessions got more severe. Boff notes, however, that
recessions are functional for capitalism, and since the mid-1950s
have always to some degree been policy-engineered. From the
perspective of capital, they do “curative work” for the economy.
They reduce inflation, assure adequate supplies of compliant labor,
and “check speculative financings” that can imperil coordinated
expansion of a market economy. Recessions can restore conditions
for profitability. Government’s role is to “allow a recession but to
stop it short of catastrophe.”
Boff has a deprecatory attitude toward Reagan’s supply-side
economics. He doesn’t even think it was particularly new.
“Regressive tax legislation and assaults on labor were nothing new
in U.S. history, but now they were reinforced by ‘deregulation’—
the decontrol of regulated industries and the gutting of regulatory
agencies that protect workers and consumers.” Another new
development of those years was that “as deficit spending
encouraged consumption to race ahead of domestic output, imports
filled the gap and foreign savings financed both the budget and
108
Of course in the long run it has contributed to them, too.
188
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
189
CHRIS WRIGHT
190
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Reading A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), by David
Harvey. The inflation of the 1970s, as you may know, resulted
largely from government attempts to keep the Keynesian, labor-
accommodating state going in a poorer economic climate, an
environment of slower economic growth than the two postwar
decades. The high inflation manifested the crisis of the Keynesian
state. Double-digit inflation couldn’t go on forever; it had to end,
surely, in more or less the way it did, with the turn to restrictive
monetary policies that facilitated the destruction of unions and
other conservative attacks on the population.
Harvey’s observations on finance are interesting. The OPEC
oil price hike of the 1970s placed vast amounts of money at the
disposal of oil-producing states; the Saudis, under U.S. pressure,
191
CHRIS WRIGHT
192
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
193
CHRIS WRIGHT
194
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
195
CHRIS WRIGHT
111
Insofar as the last twenty years have been economically dynamic, that
has been due in large part to the rise of China. And China’s “state
capitalism” departs from the free-market neoliberal model in many ways.
196
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
the first wave.) As it was going on, the victims of capitalism sought
to maintain their old rights and/or acquire new, governmentally
protected ones. At length they succeeded to some extent, and new
public goods were consolidated under the 20th-century Keynesian
welfare state. This was probably a nearly inevitable development,
because, as Karl Polanyi said in The Great Transformation,
marketization and privatization will, if unchecked, eventually cause
the total destruction of society. So popular resistance, aided by sane
elements of the upper classes, succeeded in regulating further
depredations and temporarily saving society after the Great
Depression. But technology kept progressing, capital mobility
increased, global integration continued, populations kept growing,
and the “public” and politicized nature of the Keynesian state
started encroaching too much on capitalist class power. Finally the
masses got out of hand, got too politicized, too powerful—all those
crazy ideas of democracy in the 1960s!—and there was a capitalist
backlash, made possible by (and making possible) ever-more-
globally-integrated markets, elite institutional networks, and
extreme capital mobility worldwide. The inflationary consequences
of popular empowerment in a context of economic stagnation (the
1970s) were tamed, namely by destroying popular empowerment.
That is, the second wave of privatization occurred, after the 1970s:
public goods were again dismantled and “accumulation by
dispossession” began anew (though, in truth, it had never really
stopped). This time, the old nationalist Keynesian solution to the
horrors of privatization wasn’t available, since the world had
become too integrated and nations themselves were deteriorating,
due to the post-1970s capitalist onslaught. So transnational social
movements were necessary. But would they prove strong enough to
save society?? Stay tuned!
Anyway, you see there’s a logic to it all, a “dialectical” logic.
*
Saving Marxism from Lenin.— Peter Kropotkin’s essay “The State:
Its Historic Role.” L’état, c’est la guerre. One of the state’s historic
roles, of course, has been to transplant the peasantry from the
197
CHRIS WRIGHT
198
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
Union, even its earliest phases.112) But this truth is also implicit in
Marx’s dictum that politics follows in the wake of economics. A
post-capitalist social revolution can’t be politically imposed,
because in that case economic relations are not ripe for it. The new
relations have to have already “matured,” at least somewhat, under
the old political regime, as happened during the transition from
feudalism to capitalism. Rightly understood, then, Marx was a kind
of modified anarcho-syndicalist—or rather he should have been,
logically speaking.113 From his premises, the proletarian
112
Christopher Read has a good account in From Tsar to Soviets: The
Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917–21 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
113
Anarcho-syndicalists believed that workers had to create in the womb
of the old society the institutions of the new. Socialism, they thought,
would be structured around workers’ councils and unions that had
developed in the later stages of capitalism. They also rejected the idea of a
“workers’ state,” proclaiming it to be impossible, and believed that the
general strike was the most effective tool of revolution—two respects in
which Marx would have disagreed with them. But arguably he shouldn’t
have. From his perspective there is no good reason to disavow the use of
the general strike. Even his support for the idea of a workers’ political
party, which anarcho-syndicalists rejected (because they rejected all
politics), is not particularly “Marxist,” since political parties are usually
forced to work within the confines of the parliamentary system and thus
make compromises that blur the antagonism between labor and capital, in
the end leading to the co-optation of the labor movement as a prop for the
stability of the system. This was a danger that Marx and Engels were
aware of, but they didn’t take it seriously enough. Marx also should have
made more explicit his support of direct action, which anarcho-
syndicalists of course advocated. Nothing is more “Marxist” than direct
action (which, like Marxist theory, tends to privilege material social
relations over high-level politics). —On the other hand, I have to admit
that Marx’s advocacy of political activity was in some ways more realistic
and less “utopian” than the anarcho-syndicalist position. But it was either
Scylla or Charybdis for him, and for the working class: either the
syndicalist route, which didn’t truly succeed in any country for a variety
of reasons, or a workers’ party that would attempt to seize control of the
199
CHRIS WRIGHT
dictatorship’s task could only be to finish the job, not to start it, as
Lenin (and Stalin) tried. Workers’ groups would have to do much
of the societal restructuring beforehand; their subsequent political
decrees would formalize and consolidate the institutions that the
workers had already begun to create. Otherwise, given the
foundation of the political in the economic, the new government’s
acts would inevitably have the taint of capitalist, bureaucratic
structures that still survived. More than the “taint,” in fact.
In short, despite himself, Marx knew that the attempt to
politically will new liberatory institutions into existence wouldn’t
succeed (as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao tried). They have to emerge
slowly, through popular struggle; otherwise they’re artificial,
“inorganic,” bureaucratic, and coercive, since economic conditions
aren’t ripe for them.
*
A book review, sort of. (Repetitive of the above.)— The Food Wars
(2009), by Walden Bello, presents both a damning indictment of
the neoliberal world food system and a vision of an alternative
system based on small-scale agriculture, which Bello argues can be
more efficient, socially responsible, and environmentally
sustainable than capitalist industrial farming. Indeed, according to
Via Campesina, such alternative agriculture (and hunting and
gathering) is responsible for most of the world’s food.114 Not only
is it an ideal, therefore; it is an incredibly important reality.
However, Bello does not really theorize the hoped-for supplanting
of corporate monoculture by what he calls “peasant” agriculture; he
state but in the process would inevitably make compromises and finally
succumb to a moderate reformism and bureaucratism, as happened all
over Europe. (Alternatively, if it didn’t become reformist, it would
become ruthlessly authoritarian and bureaucratic, as most Communist
parties did.)
114
Via Campesina, “Sustainable Peasant and Family Farm Agriculture
Can Feed the World” (Jakarta: September 2010), p. 5, at
http://viacampesina.org/downloads/pdf/en/paper6-EN-FINAL.pdf.
200
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
115
Available at
http://scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=
masters_theses.
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116
I.e., before any final “seizing of the state.”
202
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117
Leninists defend their hero against charges of elitism and so on by
pointing to his historical context. Fine. Maybe most of his tactics were
necessary given the political situation; the point is that the Bolshevik party
was basically authoritarian, bureaucratic (as even Lenin admitted), and
conspiratorial, as in its October 1917 coup.
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*
Another summary of scholarship.— The history of the American
city is worth knowing. It is analyzed thoughtfully in Marxism and
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205
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Around the same time, especially from the 1920s on, central
business districts were created and expanded. “Downtown office
space in the ten largest cities increased between 1920 and 1930 by
3000 percent. Tall skyscrapers suddenly sprouted....” Why did it
take until the 1920s for central business districts to flower?
Apparently because “large corporations were not yet ready for
them before then. Huge corporations had not consolidated their
monopoly control over their industries until after World War I.
Once they gained stable market control, they could begin to
organize that control. They were now large enough to separate
administrative functions from the production process itself, leaving
plant managers to oversee the factories while corporate managers
supervised the far-flung empire.” They chose downtown locations
because of agglomeration economies (the advantages of being near
other headquarters, banks and law offices, advertising agents).
Incidentally, Daniel Burnham’s famous 1909 Plan of Chicago
proves that even at that early date, the commercial business
community was preparing for a “post-industrial” future. It’s a
strikingly modern plan, prioritizing urban beautification, the
development of highways, new parks, railroad terminal
improvements, civic and cultural centers, a more systematic
arrangement of streets, and the gradual eviction of industry from
the central city by means of zoning regulations and an increase of
property values. The plan was partially implemented in the
following decades.
Another major change that began with the transition to
corporate capitalism was the political fragmentation of urban areas,
i.e., the rise of “political suburbanization.” A sort of primitive
suburbanization had already been going on for quite a long time,
but until the end of the nineteenth century, central cities had
continually annexed outlying residential districts. Suburban
residents usually opposed this, preferring autonomy, but they
couldn’t do much about it. Until the turn of the century. The last
urban annexations (in old cities at least, not newer ones like Los
Angeles) happened between 1890 and 1910. The reason for this
cessation of annexation activity, it seems, was that the power
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208
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118
Patrick Ashton notes that in 1929 the population of suburbs was
growing twice as fast as that of central cities. In 1900, about 10 percent of
the U.S. population already lived in suburbs.
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119
It’s true that other factors were operative too. Another author writes,
“The growing scale of [industrial] operation discouraged central [city]
location where land was scarce. The wave of mergers around the turn of
the century created giant bureaucratic empires which needed headquarters
in which to coordinate their far-flung operations. Thus office activities
began crowding out manufacturing from the central business districts....”
120
Remember, too, that from the 1930s on, federal policies effectively
subsidized the expansion of suburbs, because they were very good for
capital.
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*
A lot of mainstream people would criticize me for immersing
myself in leftist scholarship and journalism, which they would say
is a close-minded or partisan thing to do. They would say I should
expose myself to all kinds of writing, not only the leftist variety.
Actually, such a criticism is silly because I do read writings from a
variety of viewpoints. In my classes, for example, I have to read
mainstream scholarship, and every day when I browse the internet
or read my roommate’s copy of The Economist I’m exposed to
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121
Some of which is pretty good. Much of the business press has good,
factual reporting (the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Business
Week—though rarely the Economist, which is ideological pablum)—but
often such reporting, even in the business press, is precisely leftist in its
implications and orientation. More leftist than anything you’ll read in the
New York Times. Some of it could appear in ZMag or Dollars & Sense.
122
On the other hand, if you’re Chomsky, your careful citing of masses of
evidence will be ridiculed as intellectual bullying or as “his customary
blizzard of citations.” Ultimately, the only way you can satisfy the
guardians of mainstream orthodoxy is by espousing their own
conventional ideologies.
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the better that these tend to be the human stories, the concrete,
factual stories, stories about workers striking against corporations,
people protesting wars, billions living in sprawling slums, public
services breaking down everywhere, women being sold into sex
slavery, governments colluding with corporations, arms being
shipped from the U.S. to governments that use them to suppress
labor movements, governments ignoring the popular will
(demonstrable from polls), economic polarization reaching new
heights every year, or the fact that democracy and the middle class
have historically been born from the efforts largely of the working
class and the labor movement, etc. All this and more is true; the
writings of a Milton or Thomas Friedman, or an Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. (in his Kennedy years), or a William Buckley, are transparently
superficial and partisan, even dishonest.
Ironic that it’s the leftists who have always been accused of
being ideological and biased! They’re doing little but reporting
facts and putting self-evident interpretations on them;123 it’s the
centrists and conservatives who tend to be ideological and
flagrantly biased (towards authority).
*
False consciousness.— Leftists are sometimes criticized for being
condescending toward the masses, for arguing that they are prone
to displaying false consciousness in their political values and
beliefs. But what is false consciousness? If you examine the notion
rigorously, you’ll see that, on at least some understandings, it can
make perfect sense and is often applicable. All you have to do is
assume that people have certain basic values and interests, such as
being economically well-off, living in integrated communities,
having political power, and having control over their work. Given
such values, it is perfectly legitimate to criticize “secondary” values
and strategies like opposing labor unions, civil rights, health-care
reform, and government regulation of business. A different kind of
false consciousness is exhibited in mistaken factual judgments,
123
I don’t mean all leftists.
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*
Thoughts on the first half of the twentieth century.— The
catastrophe of the second “Thirty Years’ War,” from 1914 to 1945,
had many causes, but right now let’s consider the ideological ones.
Nationalism, racism (as a systematic philosophy), and antisemitism
were both reactions against and sublimations of the atomized,
competitive, depersonalized capitalist society of Europe at the time,
with its implicitly Social Darwinist structure. But even earlier in
the nineteenth century, ideological reactions—relatively benign
ones—existed. Romanticism and Transcendentalism, for example:
escaping from the ugly, selfish, competitive world of early
industrialism into quasi-mysticism, idealism, art, exalted
morality....but also a transformed individualism (hence the
“sublimation” aspect). At the same time, for the masses there was
religious revivalism—which, in its manifestations, sort of fused
communalism and individualism, as most mass ideologies of the
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last two centuries have. So there were these early “reactions and
sublimations,” which didn’t last. (There were also, of course, early
workers’ movements, but right now I’m considering “existential”
movements and ideologies, not rational-interest things like fighting
for higher pay and better working conditions. On the other hand,
such movements can serve an existential purpose too, by allowing
people to immerse themselves in a collective cause.) After the
middle of the century, it seems that existential movements faded
away for a while (except among pockets of intellectuals and
students, and maybe in parts of Eastern Europe)—only to reemerge
with a vengeance in the 1880s and afterwards. This time the
ideologies were more political, and some of them related not only
to emotional and intellectual needs but also to “rational” social
interests. So, socialism and Marxism spread, and Populism in
Russia, and varieties of nationalism, some of them genuinely
concerned with social justice (as well as, in Eastern Europe,
political independence and democracy). But among nationalists it
became difficult to serve two gods at once, the nation and social
justice, so the camps split apart around the 1890s (in Poland, for
example), one committed primarily to socialism—although also to
the nation inasmuch as it identified the “real” nation with the
proletariat and/or other oppressed classes—and the other to
national unity and greatness.124 This latter camp became
increasingly attracted to an “aesthetic” morality rather than a
“justice” morality, taking inspiration from Social Darwinism and
vulgarizations of Nietzsche.
Anyway, I already made the point I wanted to make in the
second sentence of this section. Fin-de-siècle nationalism and
antisemitism were uniquely powerful ideologies, accepting as they
did the realities of power and struggle in the modern world,
exalting authority, hierarchy, Social Darwinistic struggle, even
hatred (of the national enemy)—thus proving useful to power-
structures, effectively legitimizing them and their ever-greater
124
See Brian Porter, When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining
Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (2000).
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*
Finally reading E. P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the
English Working Class (1963). Query: why was England so
impervious to social and political reform in the early 19th century,
during the Industrial Revolution? Answer: in part because in the
1790s “the French Revolution consolidated Old Corruption by
uniting landowners and manufacturers in a common panic [over the
Revolution]; and the popular societies were too weak and too
inexperienced to effect either revolution or reform on their own.”
It’s like 1919 in the United States, when the Russian revolution, by
terrifying mainstream America, helped consolidate the power of
business as against workers. -For several reasons, in the long run
the existence of the Soviet Union was the best thing that could have
happened to Western capitalism.
Reading further into the book, I just had a minor epiphany.
(Sometimes something you’ve sort of known for a long time
suddenly sinks in or you appreciate its implications with utmost
clarity.) One of the most commonplace sociological facts about
pre-industrial or transitioning-to-industrial or newly-industrial
societies is that the labor force or even independent artisans do not
have a “Protestant work-ethic,” a disciplined work-ethic
appropriate to industrial capitalism. Employers and the like
complain about the laziness, indolence, indiscipline, etc. of the
lower classes and obsess over how to get them to follow
mechanically the rhythm of the clock and the overseer. So you get
the sheer physical brutality of the Industrial Revolution, the
constant cumulative struggle on the part of employers to increase
their minute control of the work-process and deprive workers of
every shred of autonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific
management, Henry Ford’s and others’ attempts to “socialize”
workers into being good moral religious un-alcoholic dutiful
citizens, and so forth. Wherever industrial capitalism is in its early
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CHRIS WRIGHT
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CHRIS WRIGHT
*
On late-nineteenth-century decadence and its sequel.— What is the
significance of the fact that in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries certain sections of the middle and upper classes
in Western society started obsessing over heroism, manliness,
strength, military virtues, and, conversely, society’s increasing
effeminacy, “neurasthenia,” desiccation, decadence, etc.? It was
indeed a near-obsession, and it helped make possible fascism. What
brought it about? Obviously imperialism helped foster the
glorification of manly struggle, racial vitality and so on, but people
genuinely perceived a decline in the vigor and health of their
culture. Why? Again, imperialism breeding racism intensifying
nationalism led to a fixation on the supposed dilution of the
nation’s purity through immigration and the presence of Jews, a
concern ostensibly borne out by increasing crime rates, urban chaos
and filth, social dislocation, etc. But I think that to a great extent all
the worries and fixations were also a product of the traumatic
contradiction between collective memories (still embedded in
culture) of relatively unrepressed, unregulated, un-atomized, semi-
peasantly “spontaneous,” “carnival-esque,” semi-uproarious (see E.
P. Thompson’s book), only semi-business-structured societies and,
on the other hand, the new evolving repressive, atomized etc. social
order. Western civilization was in the later throes of its transition
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CHRIS WRIGHT
vitality had worn thin and people had finally become accustomed to
modern atomized life,126 and anyway national power-structures had
learned to integrate and coordinate with each other more effectively
so as to prevent another conflagration. So the old progress of
“privatization” and repression continued, until in the 1960s and
1970s another Western middle-class revolt against atomism and
dehumanization occurred (coinciding with more elemental revolts
all over the world, including in America’s South). It was crushed,
but its “instinct”-liberating grievances and tendencies were taken
up by business for the sake of profits, with the indirect result that
no such “liberatory” cultural uprisings would occur again because
they had become less necessary.127 The economic system had
managed to make room within itself for some degree of (degraded)
instinctual liberation, even as social atomization and regulation
continued apace. So here we are now, with business more powerful
than ever, society more atomized than ever, culture more
desiccated than ever (although it has given people instinctual
outlets, thus fostering social stability), and popular resistance to the
ongoing destruction of civil society in almost as bad a shape as
ever. What is to be done?
*
Bureaucratic fanaticism.— It might seem wrong to maintain, as I
have repeatedly, that the modern predominance of bureaucratic
social structures and their ethos—for which industrial capitalism
(broadly defined, including the Soviet Union and even
“Communist” China) has been largely responsible, in that it is an
anti-personal social order in which people tend to be treated as
instantiations of such categories as “wage-laborer” and “capital-
126
Television played a huge role in thus reconciling the middle classes to
their generous allotment of free time, material comfort, boredom,
communal fragmentation, cultural repression, and their patterns of passive
consumption.
127
After the 1970s, “identity-politics” movements continued but with less
disruptive potential than the earlier movements.
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*
A strange change.— The approaches of the Western working class
and the middle class to raising children seem to have undergone
near-reversals over the last hundred years. It used to be that middle-
class parents were overly strict and repressive with their children,
especially in the Victorian era, while working-class parents were
more laid-back and permissive. Now, the latter tend to be cruel and
strict with their children (think of lower-income mothers loudly
scolding and slapping their children on the bus), while the former
spoil theirs. When and how did this change take place? To be fair, I
should acknowledge that contemporary working-class parents seem
to fluctuate between negligence—perhaps somewhat like their
forebears—and authoritarianism. Was the middle class still
relatively authoritarian in the 1930s? Probably the 1960s and 1970s
caused the decisive change in that regard, from mild
authoritarianism to permissiveness, “liberation,” etc. But things had
already changed drastically between the 1910s and the 1940s. Mass
public education and the welfare state must have played a role in
undermining paternal and parental authority. World War I probably
also undermined strict Victorian norms and puritanism, middle-
class propriety, repression of the instincts—and then the Roaring
Twenties, the Jazz Age, the advent of mass advertising, movies, the
128
Note: In that paragraph I confused two issues, a bureaucratic etc.
society as an essential condition for the emergence of totalitarianism, and
extreme bureaucracy etc. as the most important and most destructive
manifestation of totalitarianism. Both claims are true, I think. Mass
ideological commitment is more important in the “movement” stage than
in the “state” stage of totalitarianism.
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*
To say it again, one of the fascinating things about the Great
Revolution is the essentially simultaneous ascendancy of two very
different ideologies, liberalism and nationalism (between which,
you might say, lies the concept of democracy). Individualism,
atomism, “liberty,” as opposed to the unitary general will, national
community, popular sovereignty, the “direct” democracy of “the
people.” To speak simplistically, it’s the 1789 Declaration of the
Rights of Man versus the 1793 Terror, the “democratic,”
nationalistic Terror. Or, again, it’s the Legislative Assembly versus
the insurrectionist Paris Commune of 1792.129 -As I just suggested,
though, between these two extremes, connecting them, is the notion
of democracy. For, while the ideology of popular sovereignty or the
general will can be perverted into totalitarianism, it is also not
wholly opposed to liberalism, since the safeguarding of
individuals’ rights is surely one manifestation of “Power to the
people!”
The best concept of all these is socialism, since, in its classical
form, it is an unambiguous fusion of liberalism with popular
democracy. Economic democracy, workers’ power over their work
and lives, leaves no room for anything reeking of totalitarianism;
nor is it merely a half-empty equality under the law, as liberalism
can be thought of.
By the way, the explanation for the rise of both liberalism and
populist nationalism isn’t hard to think of: the former, which
129
Of course, the big Terror and the little terror of the 1792 Paris
Commune weren’t “popular” in the sense of being supported by a
majority of the country, but they were egalitarian, nationalistic, and
democratic inasmuch as they were “formed under pressure from the
sansculotte movement,” to quote François Furet (in Revolutionary France
1770-1880 (1995)).
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triumphed in the long run, was bourgeois, while the latter belonged
more to “the people.” In all classical revolutions, from the English
civil war of the 1640s to the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917,
this duality has manifested itself. The bourgeoisie and “the masses”
have risen up together against the ancien régime, but the alliance
has always been temporary because different classes have different
interests. Economic and political liberalism were what the
bourgeoisie wanted (and ultimately got), but the masses wanted
more: true democracy, social equality, food, jobs, popular power.
They’re still waiting for these things.
*
Marxism and the French Revolution.— Let’s grant that the French
Revolution was precipitated more by the nobility’s grievances than
the bourgeoisie’s. And let’s grant that it had definitely un-
bourgeois phases, such as Robespierre’s Terror and his obsession
with “civic virtue,” republicanism, the general will, a phase that
briefly approached totalitarianism. Let’s also grant that people from
the bourgeoisie were not the main actors in the Revolution. None of
this implies that the Revolution was not ultimately in some sense,
or several senses, a largely “bourgeois” event, or that the Marxist
emphasis on class is inapplicable to it. First of all, class dynamics
can be fundamental to an event even if its actors don’t interpret
their actions in class terms or don’t seem to be motivated by
material interests. The sansculottes may have been consciously
inspired by ideas of republicanism or resentment of the rich or
status-envy, but mild self-deception isn’t exactly an unknown
thing. It’s quite possible that an important motive—even if they
didn’t like to admit it to themselves—was their desire for greater
material comfort, greater economic power, less living-on-the-
social-and-economic-margins. What “republicanism” meant for
them, in fact, was more power, more power over their political,
economic, and social lives. Questions of motivation don’t matter
much, though. The point is that economic relations, economic
conditions, are significant determinants of people’s acts, especially
groups’ acts. What your position is in production relations
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130
If you take a really long-term perspective, as Furet does in his above-
cited book—all the way up to 1880, which is when he thinks the
Revolution finally ended—then its bourgeois nature is undeniable.
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*
More reflections on the Revolution.— An endlessly thought-
provoking event. Parallels with both fascism and Soviet
Communism. On fascism: think of the resentment, the desire for
revenge, against aristocrats felt by the lower middle class of Paris,
similar to the desire for revenge against Jews felt in Germany later.
An old society dying, throwing up enragés, the “mob,” with their
“passion for punishment and terror, nourished by a deep desire for
revenge and the overturning of society” (p. 131 of Furet’s book but
reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism), a
desire that led to the massacring of aristocratic Others, enemies to
the Nation, outsiders corrupting the body politic—“strangers in our
very midst” (quoting Abbé Sieyès)—instantiations of nearly the
same category that Jews instantiated in Germany in the 1920s and
1930s. French nobles in the 1790s, German Jews in the 1930s—
classes of people who had already lost most of their power and so
were socially/economically/politically expendable (as Arendt says),
hence the perfect scapegoats for social misery. Symbols of the old
regime that had smothered the “mob’s” pride, spat at it, but now
powerless and so contemptible. The chaos of an old semi-urban
civilization in transition, everything in flux, wage-laborers joining
with artisans joining with shopkeepers in burning resentment. And
the necessity for Bonapartism (Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler)
because of the government’s inability to transcend and subdue
230
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131
Admittedly, there are differences here between France and, on the
other hand, Germany and Italy.
132
Furet states that “one of [France’s] most powerful passions” in the
1790s was “national greatness inseparable from glory.” Sound familiar?
As in, fascist?
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economic structures, had far more power and more resources than
its (or their) enemies. Unlike in Russia in 1917.
I’ve said it before, but here it is again: all these national
convulsions were primarily, from a long-term perspective,
capitalist revolutions.133 Not socialist, not post-capitalist. They
were stages in the transition to a society structured around capital.
That was always the inevitable outcome, because of long-term
global economic dynamics. In Russia, or the Soviet Union, and
China there was the detour through ultra-state-planned economic
authoritarianism (and remember that capitalism itself is nothing but
relatively fragmented economic authoritarianism), but in a world
globalizing around the dynamic of capital, such an anti-market
economy was slowly going to be hemmed in on all sides,
challenged, eroded (by black markets, etc.), until it either fell apart
(as with the Soviet Union after perestroika) or adapted itself (as
with contemporary China). Marx himself would have predicted
these outcomes, and effectively did predict them. “Socialism in one
country” is impossible.
*
“A people’s tragedy.”— It is a curious thing that an event as
consequential as the Russian Revolution, which ultimately
determined the destinies of hundreds of millions, can depend in
large part on a few personalities and a lot of luck. This is the
inescapable conclusion of A People’s Tragedy: The Russian
Revolution, 1891-1924 (1996), by Orlando Figes. There was no
“iron necessity of history” or unstoppable Marxian dialectic leading
133
At the same time, though, they were to some extent popular
revolutions, since capital’s undermining of the ancien régime gave the
masses relative freedom (and causes (such as intensified exploitation and
communal breakdown)) to rise up against their age-old oppressors. In
some places, such as Russia in 1917 and China in 1949, the popular
revolution temporarily got the upper hand of the bourgeois revolution. But
that was bound not to last in the long run. (In a sense, it didn’t last at all:
new “Communist” elites took control immediately.)
232
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134
“Socialism” means workers’ power, and that was exactly what Lenin,
despite himself, was effectively fighting against by creating a
bureaucratic, terroristic, authoritarian state. Similarly, a revolution that
relies essentially on peasant support is not a Marxist, or “post-capitalist,”
revolution. It is more like an anti-feudal revolution.
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135
See Chris Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and
Possibilities in the United States (2010).
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CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Excerpt from a paper.— Marx completely misinterpreted early
radicalism, not only the radicalism of the heterogeneous Parisian
masses who manned the barricades in 1848 but even the radicalism
that flared up in the 1871 Paris Commune or in America in the
1870s and 1880s. These battles, too, were fought by a
heterogeneous people, some of them, like the artisans and
craftsmen who felt themselves besieged by this terrifying new thing
called industrial capitalism, “reactionary radicals,”136 and others
proletarians in the classic Marxist sense, but whose miseries could
have been more effectively meliorated by reform than revolution. It
was not a proletarian army “disciplined, united, and organized by
the process of capitalist production”137 but a disparate mass of the
lower classes with disparate interests—some progressive, some
reactionary—temporarily thrown together by the sheer chaos of
early industrialism. It has been said before that Marx confused the
birth-pangs of industrial capitalism with its death-throes; and while
136
See Craig Calhoun, “The Radicalism of Tradition,” American Journal
of Sociology 88, no. 5 (1983): pp. 886–914.
137
Marx, quoted in Murray Bookchin, The Spanish Anarchists: The
Heroic Years, 1868–1936 (San Francisco: AK Press, 1998), p. 281.
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237
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
On the emergence of the modern world.— The evolution of early-
modern European royal absolutism, not surprisingly, was ironic.
Initially it was useful to the rising bourgeoisie, as the latter was
useful to it, in both the bourgeoisie’s and the monarchy’s struggle
against the feudal aristocracy. The monarch could act in the interest
of merchants and other capitalists in order to increase his tax base
and wealth (through trade and budding industry), as well as to
diminish the power of feudal interests relative to his own and to
that of bourgeois classes opposed to feudalism. In fact, you could
probably say that absolutism depended on large-scale mercantile
activities and the latter (on a large scale) depended on absolutism,
138
See www.ica.coop.
139
Quoted in Ethan Miller, “Other Economies Are Possible!”, ZNet,
September 9, 2006, http://www.zcommunications.org/other-economies-
are-possible-by-ethan-miller (accessed May, 2010).
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*
Random thoughts on the American Revolution.— From the famous
historian Bernard Bailyn:
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It seems to me that too much ink has been spilled on the “meaning”
of the American Revolution as opposed to the French. Its
radicalism or conservatism, etc. Sure, it was less radical, in a way,
than the French, just because the French revolutionaries had
centuries of feudal traditions and institutions to sweep away, and
240
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140
Again, certain stages of the French Revolution were far from
bourgeois, but ultimately its bourgeois characteristics prevailed.
Especially after Napoleon came to power.
241
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243
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
A radical critique of academia.— Reading Jesse Lemisch’s little
book On Active Service in War and Peace: Politics and Ideology in
the American Historical Profession, presented as an essay at the
lively 1969 convention of the American Historical Association but
published later (by an obscure left press because it wasn’t
mainstream enough to make it into establishment journals). In his
introduction, Thomas Schofield explains that in 1969 Lemisch was
“a historian who had been dismissed from the University of
Chicago because ‘his political concerns interfered with his
scholarship.’ In what may [have been] the most telling and
fundamental critique presented before the AHA he proposed that
the supposedly unpolitical stars of the profession (Allan Nevins,
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Samuel Eliot Morison, Oscar Handlin,
Daniel Boorstin and others) were implicit cold warriors who sought
to use history as a vehicle in the fight against communism.
Lemisch’s paper....argued persuasively that what so many object to
is not that a scholar should take a political position but that he
should hold views contrary to establishment shibboleths.” Duh. To
argue that mainstream scholarship is “free from bias” is and was so
wildly naïve as to be laughable. The guardians of every mainstream
institution in history have been certain they’re right and
“unbiased”; it’s one of the most predictable things in human
existence, and one of the most ridiculous. Everything—or nearly
everything—is political and “biased”; there are political and social
relations, and political and social value-judgments, implicit in
every (or nearly every) act. When you ignore a homeless person on
the street, that’s implicitly a political act. When you write
scholarship that is sympathetic toward the powerful and ignores the
powerless, that’s political. When you spend your evening drinking
with your friends rather than volunteering at a shelter for battered
women, that’s political. The way a man treats his wife is political,
as is the way she treats him. Society is saturated with power
244
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245
CHRIS WRIGHT
246
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247
CHRIS WRIGHT
141
As a result, student dissenters in the 1960s were denounced—
paradoxically—as “undemocratic,” in that they upset stability and
equilibrium.
248
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*
A Critique of Current Historical Scholarship
249
CHRIS WRIGHT
142
See Thomas L. Haskell, “Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs.
Practice in Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream,” History and Theory, Vol.
29, No. 2 (May, 1990): pp. 129-157.
250
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
251
CHRIS WRIGHT
143
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions
and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2005), p. 4.
144
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party
Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 96.
252
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Ironically, one can object to idealism not only morally but also
by invoking the “disinterested” rational standards that scholars are
so concerned with. For a materialism and “institutionalism” along
Marxian lines is singularly plausible too, as contrasted with the
various types of idealism manifested in much political history (e.g.,
The Global Cold War), postmodernist cultural history (e.g., Joan
Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History (1999)), and a fair
amount of social history, the “humanism” of which tends to have
factually incorrect implications. To quote the political scientist
Thomas Ferguson: “That ordinary people are historical subjects [as
social historians assume] is a vital truth; that they are the primary
shapers of the American past seems to me either a triviality or a
highly dubious theory about the control of both political and
economic investment in American history.”145 The point is that one
can overemphasize the historical importance of ordinary people’s
experiences and self-interpretations, and that many historians do
this. The simple fact is that in the history of capitalist society, large
business interests or corporations have vastly more sway over
society than ordinary people do. They have incomparably more
historical agency by virtue of their access to material resources—
surely a commonsense truth. Thus, if historians want to explain the
dynamics and trajectories of societies, they would do well to
emphasize economics, moneyed interests, and class structures far
more than they do. Furthermore, as stated above, this would have
the morally desirable effect of highlighting the injustice of current
institutional arrangements, thereby bolstering popular struggles.
The intellectual’s moral and scientific responsibilities, which
arguably are not being fulfilled by much contemporary historical
scholarship, can be reduced to the responsibility to challenge
conventional wisdom. Intellectuals are in a unique position to do
this, having the necessary skills, leisure, and access to enormous
amounts of information. Instead, they are usually the guardians of
conventional wisdom, not its challengers. Most of their work
reinforces the notion that class relations, which determine
145
Ibid.
253
CHRIS WRIGHT
146
This paper is not an appropriate place to set forward all the arguments
for “materialism”; the best I can do is give examples of scholarship that
shows its true power. Thomas Ferguson’s above-cited book is one
example. Others are Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The
Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Beacon Press,
2001); Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable
Chomsky (New York: The New Press, 2002); Robert Brenner, The
Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies
from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 (New York: Verso,
2006); Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso, 1985); and Charles
Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United
States (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913).
254
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
255
CHRIS WRIGHT
147
See, for example, Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global
Turbulence; Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates, The ABCs of the
Economic Crisis: What Working People Need to Know (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2009); John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff,
The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2009); and Robert Brenner, The Boom and the
Bubble: The US in the World Economy (New York: Verso, 2002).
256
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257
Chapter 3
Experimental Thoughts on the Self
*
Notes on the nature of the self. (Juvenilia.)— Few issues are more
prone to confusing philosophers than questions surrounding the
nature of the self. Questions like “What is the self? Is there such
thing as a self? Does each person have only one self? What is the
relation between the present self and the past self? Is there any
substance to the notion of ‘authentic’ selfhood, as opposed to
‘inauthentic’ selfhood?” Consider Daniel Dennett, the ludicrously
respected philosophaster at Tufts University. This man occupies the
dubious position of trying to explain away our sense of self without
knowing he is doing so—specifically in his annoying book
Consciousness Explained (1991), which is almost unreadable
because of its cutesy, verbose style. Somewhere in that thicket of
verbiage he manages to say that he thinks there is a self—indeed,
that it’s obvious there is a self, for, after all, someone (namely, the
author) is wondering right now whether there is a self—but that it
is neither some kind of spiritual substance nor something corporeal:
it is one’s “center of narrative gravity.” It is “an abstraction defined
by the myriads of attributions and interpretations (including self-
attributions and self-interpretations) that have composed the
biography of the living body whose Center of Narrative Gravity it
is.”148 The self is an abstraction, an idea, a narrative nucleus. Since
Dennett is a clever sophist, he is able to hide the fact that he has
effectively defined me, and you, as a metaphor. I....am nothing but
a metaphor, a center of narrative gravity. This person who is
writing, who has thoughts. I am not active, as my intuition tells me
I am; I’m an abstraction, a concept, literally a metaphor. –If you
find this idea at all coherent, I commend you.
148
Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991),
pp. 426, 427.
258
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
149
Galen Strawson, “The Self,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 5.6
(1997): 405–428.
259
CHRIS WRIGHT
150
In his Treatise of Human Nature he states, “For my part, when I enter
most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some
particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or
hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a
perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” “The
soul,” he says, “so far as we can conceive it, is nothing but a system or
train of different perceptions.”
260
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
261
CHRIS WRIGHT
quote Bishop Berkeley. But then what is this sense of self we have?
I can see that I exist; but what am I? I made light of Dennett’s
definition of the self as a metaphor, an abstraction, because it
neglects the self’s active nature. It is one-sided. All definitions of
the self as some kind of idea suffer from this deficiency. They
avoid Berkeley’s and Descartes’ mistake of attributing to the self a
substantiality (which would imply an implausible mind-body
ontological dualism), but they sacrifice the insight into the self’s
essential activeness. As Berkeley wrote in the Third Dialogue
Between Hylas and Philonous (1713), “I my self am not my ideas,
but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives,
knows, wills, and operates about ideas.” This active thing is what
we should analyze first.
In his Principles of Psychology (1890), William James gives a
multifaceted definition of the self. The part I want to mention now
is what he calls the “I,” as opposed to the “me.” The I, or the “pure
ego,” is the “active principle” in oneself, i.e., “that which at any
given moment is conscious.” But what is this if not “the entire
stream of personal consciousness” itself?—or, at any rate, the
present segment of it. What else can be conscious but
consciousness itself? “The I is a thought.” “The consciousness of
self involves a stream of thought, each part of which as ‘I’ can
remember those which went before, [and] know the things they
knew....”151 James is adhering to the principle of theoretic
economy: rather than positing a cumbrous division between
thought and thinker, or activity and substance, he is fusing the two.
The I is not separate from thoughts; “the thoughts themselves are
the thinkers.” If this fusion does the work that we need a
philosophical theory of the self to do, then it should be accepted as
true.
But what exactly is James saying? The self, the I, is a thought,
the present thought in a continuous stream of thoughts. But which
thought is it? It can’t be the entire stream of consciousness, for the
151
William James, Psychology (New York: The World Publishing
Company, 1948), p. 215.
262
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
263
CHRIS WRIGHT
152
Quoted in Kathleen Wider’s The Bodily Nature of Consciousness:
Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1997), p. 146.
153
Cf. Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre (New York: Meredith Corporation,
1970), p. 97: “The self posits itself, and by virtue of this mere self-
assertion it exists; and conversely, the self exists and posits its own
existence by virtue of merely existing. It is at once the agent and the
product of action; the active, and what the activity brings about; action
and deed are one and the same, and hence the ‘I am’ expresses an Act....”
264
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His probing of his consciousness was too deep: he searched all its
nooks and crannies (his perceptions, his memories, etc.) for some
obscure thing corresponding to an entity called the “self,” when in
fact it was right there in broad daylight. One cannot “search
carefully” for the self without thereby passing right through it. Self-
consciousness attends every thought; it is the human mode of
consciousness, such that to look “within” oneself is effectively to
look past self-consciousness, and hence the self.
[....]
I’ll distinguish between four main categories of the self’s
relation to itself and the world, but the reader should keep in mind
that these categories, as such, are simplifications, merely heuristic
devices intended to simplify my discussion. There are no mutually
differentiated “categories” in concrete consciousness; everything
exists in an immediate holistic unity. Indeed, this is the case with
regard to any object of analysis, be it in economics, psychology,
biology or whatever: the object is always a unity, so to speak, its
analytically differentiated facets thoroughly interrelated and
interpenetrating, each empirically presupposing the others. The act
of distinguishing them is an act of theoretic violence, which,
however, is necessary if we are to understand the object. For
understanding consists in placing concepts in such relations to each
other that they “mirror” the object of analysis in fundamental
respects.154
154
Richard Rorty criticizes the correspondence theory of truth in
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), but his account is, I think,
incoherent. The notion of knowledge as accuracy of representation, or of
truth as correspondence with reality, is implicit in all theorizing.
Propositions “reach out” towards a “transcendent” reality; they are
intended to portray or “picture” this reality. (Are the hypotheses of natural
science not supposed to accurately represent nature, or those of the social
sciences not supposed to be true of society?) In any case, when Rorty
enjoins us to “see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social
practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature,” he overlooks the fact
that these conceptions are not mutually exclusive.
265
CHRIS WRIGHT
155
David Minter, ed., The Sound and the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), p. 238.
266
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
156
The comedian Bill Maher was once attacked by the politically correct
media for saying that a mentally retarded person is in some ways like a
dog. He was more right than he knew.
157
McInerney, Time and Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1991), pp. 98–100.
267
CHRIS WRIGHT
268
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
158
Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenological Approaches to
Self-Consciousness,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006
edition), Edward N. Zalta ed., at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/self-
consciousness-phenomenological (accessed May, 2007).
269
CHRIS WRIGHT
159
Wider, The Bodily Nature of Consciousness, p. 122.
160
Ibid., p. 129.
270
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
161
I’m not saying that consciousness has a physical location. It doesn’t. It
isn’t the sort of thing to which the predicate of “location” applies.
Nonetheless, the head is in some sense (perceived by it as) its “home.”
271
CHRIS WRIGHT
272
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
273
CHRIS WRIGHT
162
Magda King, Heidegger’s Philosophy (New York: Dell Publishing
Company, Inc., 1964), pp. 77, 78.
274
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
163
Kathleen Wider, The Bodily Nature of Consciousness, p. 52.
275
CHRIS WRIGHT
276
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
277
CHRIS WRIGHT
167
Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 205.
278
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
168
Partly included in which consciousness, I have noted, is the body, or
awareness of the body. Its sensations, feelings, etc. are in consciousness,
and so the latter experiences the body as somehow a part of it, though also
something external to it.
169
There are other causes of this self-reification. I’ll note here only that
the assigning of a name to each person at birth is well-calculated to coax
his consciousness eventually into self-reification. He will see himself as
something that coheres around his name—“I am Chris. Chris Wright. That
is who I am, that entity called ‘Chris Wright’”—and will thus see himself
as a “substance,” a substantival self.
279
CHRIS WRIGHT
170
“The ego [e.g., ‘Chris Wright’] is an object apprehended, but also an
object constituted, by reflective consciousness.” Sartre, The
Transcendence of the Ego (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957), p. 80.
171
Ibid., p. 81.
280
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
172
See below on the distinction between its active and passive aspects.
173
Ibid., p. 79.
174
Ibid., p. 83.
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CHRIS WRIGHT
fusion of activity and passivity. It sees the ego as the self;175 and
since it also sees itself as the self, it sees itself as the ego. Which
means it sees itself as not-itself, or rather as more than itself. [....]
*
The great difficulty of elucidating the nature of the self arises
from the profoundly mysterious nature of human consciousness.
Consciousness, in turn, is mysterious to us in part because we’re
too close to it; we can’t attain a sufficiently clear, distanced
perspective to describe it adequately. Said differently, most of what
is “in” a person’s consciousness is merely implicit, as any
phenomenologist or psychoanalyst can tell you. Despite what
Sartre thought, only the surface of consciousness is transparent; it
requires painstaking work and incredibly subtle powers of
introspection and intuition to make explicit what is half-conscious
or implicit. And the resulting analysis will often seem
incomprehensible to the reader because of the self-referential and
just plain paradoxical character of consciousness. You can’t
reasonably deny, after all, that self-consciousness is self-referential:
it relates itself to itself, it is aware of itself, it is its own object, and
that is something of a paradox. Consciousness incorporates other
dualisms too, as I said above: it identifies itself with “its” body, but
it also implicitly considers itself something other than its body.
There is, in addition, the strange dualism between oneself (one’s
consciousness) and people with whom one identifies: one
internalizes them such that they are somehow a part of one, while
at the same time they are other. And then there is the dualism, or
rather the difference, between consciousness and the “person,” this
idea with which it identifies. I have been the same person, “Chris
Wright,” from the day of my birth to the present, and this idea of
175
Reflectively, the self takes the form of oneself. Which is just to say that
it takes the form of the ego. Hence, the sentence “Reflective self-
consciousness sees the ego as the self” can be rephrased as “When I
explicitly think about myself, I see myself as Chris Wright, an unchanging
self (an ego, a person) extended through hours, days, years.”
282
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
283
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
One of the sources of confusion in talking about self-
continuity is that selfhood and personhood are not quite the same
thing. And both are ambiguous (though “personhood” more so).
They both incorporate subjective and objective criteria, “internal”
and “external” criteria; but the idea of the self nevertheless relates
to one’s subjectivity more closely than the idea of the “person”
does. For the self is just one’s sense of self, one’s self-
consciousness. Consider someone who undergoes electroshock
therapy that erases his memories and changes his personality.
Because he doesn’t recognize himself in “his” past, we are willing
to say that he now has, or is, a different self than before. He has a
new self-identity. But is he a different “person”? From one
perspective, yes: there are major psychological discontinuities
between his past and his present. He has changed; “he’s a different
person,” as we colloquially say of someone who acts very
284
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
176
Parfit, Reasons and Persons, pp. 199, 200.
285
CHRIS WRIGHT
177
I.e., he isn’t a mere “clone” but the real thing.
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*
I have a Buddhist friend who spent a year in a monastery in
India. He describes it as a life-changing experience, but says that in
the end he had to leave because his awareness of the illusory nature
of the self was becoming too frightening. He felt himself
disintegrating. So he returned to civilization and its pleasures, of
love, play, immersion in daily life.
Think of the implications of abandoning a personal outlook on
the world. It isn’t psychologically possible to completely abandon
it, but you can at least imagine what that would entail. To live in
such deep truth would probably mean not feeling emotions
anymore, because those grow out of the “personal” mode of
experience. “You” would no longer be attached to things, to
possessions or even personal desires. There would be a kind of
overcoming of the separation between you and others; you would
feel an identity with all living things. You’d achieve a profound
equanimity, but on the other hand life would cease to be exciting
and fun. Everything would be impersonal, which, to me, sounds
like death or something like it. (Buddhism has a sort of anti-
humanistic quality.)
I’m fond of romantic love, for example. But it’s disturbing to
know that this person I love is just a social construction, that “she”
is little but a mysterious psychological unity among memory-
fragments and sense-perceptions and bodily states and desires a
few of which periodically well up into consciousness. I have to
287
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
A paradoxical implication of the idea that the self is bare self-
consciousness is that everyone is (or has), in a sense, the same self.
We all share the same essence, insofar as we are all self-conscious.
It’s true that the full empirical character of each person’s sense of
self in a given moment differs from others’, in that we have
different thoughts, feelings, memories, bodies, etc. The core of the
self, however, which is merely an implicit “consciousness of ‘this’
consciousness in its particularity,” is absolutely the same in
everyone and can be analytically distinguished from the empirical
totality of one’s mental states. Without this self-consciousness,
after all, we would be unconscious, and so there would be no “I,”
no self. So we all share it, and in that respect we are identical to
each other.
*
How can (self-)consciousness be its own other? What are the
phenomenological “mechanisms” of that self-separation? There has
to be something that “gets between” consciousness and itself,
something that injects otherness into it. Since consciousness is what
one might call a “concrete particular,” the thing that injects
otherness into it has to be “abstract” and “universal.” And that’s
what the “abstract other” is (as I’ve called it), a general diffuse
otherness that implicitly permeates self-consciousness. What makes
it possible for people to talk to themselves or to have inner
dialogues in their heads is that they are always half-conscious, or
288
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
178
I capitalize the word to emphasize its abstract character.
289
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
How is it possible for a person to identify with others, be they
friends or merely members of an abstract community (say, a
religious one) in which the person includes himself? How can one
internalize other people like this? The only way is if the individual
is his own other. His self-conscious particularity has to be fused
with a universality, an internalized generalization of the sort of
opposition-to-himself that other people are. As past thinkers have
shown, this internal “abstract” other arises in the context of the
child’s separation from the mother, and of his increasing use of
“verbal gestures” (to quote George Herbert Mead), and of his
participation in, first, spontaneous play, and then in organized
games in which he internalizes and can anticipate the participants’
reactions to his behavior. Etc. I have nothing new to add to the
account of what is empirically involved in the ontogenesis of the
internal other, i.e., of self-consciousness. Originally the infant’s
world, in particular his mother, is experienced as a part of the
infant. There is no other. Then mother and child become less
dependent on each other and move towards relative independence.
The child becomes aware of himself as a separate being to the
extent to which he becomes aware that other people are separate
beings. But this evolution proceeds on the basis of—or rather is
inextricably connected with—the distancing of the child from
himself, which means the internalization of the opposition-to-itself
that other people represent. This internalization is not merely
“opposed to” but is included in the child’s (self-)consciousness. So
now when he develops an affective attachment to another person,
his experience of this person literally becomes a part of his sense of
179
When I reread this and other things I’ve written on the self, they sound
very Hegelian. They’re products of my absorption of Hegel’s way of
thinking—though I don’t know to what extent Hegel would have assented
to any of my ideas.
290
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*
Today I received a very nasty email from an acquaintance, and
it bothered me a bit. But I quickly saw that insofar as her email
affected me, it was because I unconsciously thought of its attacks
as judgments from the general other (in me) rather than simply a
single pitiful individual. That is, if we’re talking about the restless
desire for self-esteem and self-contentment, the opinions of one
person qua one person—one external being among all external
beings—cannot hurt much. Rather, the judgments of one person
180
There is an ambiguity in the idea of the “abstract other,” or at least in
how I use it: sometimes I imply that it is a pure interiorization, a
“structure” in consciousness, while other times I imply that it is an
objectively oriented projection of this interiorization. The distinction
between the two uses is incredibly subtle, virtually imaginary, but it’s
analytically necessary. For example, in the sentence in the text I have in
mind the “projection” when I say that a person is experienced as an
instantiation of the Other, while I have the “interiorized” meaning in mind
when I say that the Other is a part of self-consciousness. (The importance
of the distinction is evident when you consider that a person cannot be
experienced as an instantiation of one’s own self-consciousness—because
I myself am the only instantiation of myself—while he can be an
instantiation of a “projection” of one’s self-consciousness.) The reason I
said the distinction is virtually imaginary is that, in the individual’s
immediate experience, there is no clear distinction. The only time there is
is when a person “focuses” the projection (without knowing he is doing
so) into a single abstract entity, like “God” or “mankind.”
291
CHRIS WRIGHT
can hurt your self-esteem only to the extent that that person is
unconsciously seen as an instantiation of the general or abstract
other, i.e., of you yourself (given that you are your own other). This
is, indeed—to say it one more time—how a person makes his way
into your psyche, how your psyche “appropriates” him; this is the
link between him and you (as well as the source of the separation
between you, the otherness that comes between you). He becomes a
part of you—i.e., is important to you—insofar as you
unconsciously (or half-consciously) identify him with the Other
that is directly a part of your consciousness. Again, this Other isn’t
so much a mere concept as a fundamental feature of the
phenomenology of self-consciousness. It isn’t really “out there”;
it’s in you.
Thus, when you feel the need to defend yourself against
someone who has criticized you you’re not, on the most basic level,
arguing directly against him; you’re arguing against yourself. His
criticisms have seeped into you, “gotten under your skin” by being
associated with the Other in you, as if the Other itself has made
these criticisms or might possibly agree with them; and since the
Other is a part of you, you’re basically trying to convince yourself
by defending yourself. After all, it’s likely that you’ll be satisfied
simply if you have a good comeback to his insult, whether or not
your comeback actually elicits an apology or retraction from him.
And this could be the case only if the one you’re trying to convince
is you, not him.
Incidentally, I think that one of the reasons why
phenomenological discussions like this are so difficult is that
concepts are simply not adequate vis-à-vis consciousness. They are
clumsy, ill-defined, vague. This inadequacy isn’t something that
can be rectified; it is inherent in the nature of concepts. For
concepts are hammered out in interactions between people, and so
they are appropriate only to the public, shared world. But I’m
trying to apply them to the “private” world, the inner essence of
consciousness, so they’re bound to be inadequate and confusing.
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It should be clear from all I’ve said that the self and the
internal(ized) abstract other are totally inseparable. Even
analytically they cannot really be separated, because self-
consciousness is self-otherness, which entails that there is an
abstract sort of otherness in consciousness. All this is fine, but it is
disconcerting to think about deeply. When you react to something,
for example, it isn’t simply “you” reacting. It is also the Other in
you. You have spent your whole life internalizing people’s
behavior, such that when you act or react it is partly the
internalization of all these people that is acting. You have learned
what is appropriate in various situations, so you act in appropriate
ways, in ways you think others will appreciate or as they might act
themselves. Even in solitude your behavior is conditioned by
others’, and it is largely the Other in you that is acting, or that is
determining how you act.
And yet in all your acts there is also a “spontaneous” element,
a primitively “authentic” or “purely you” element. There has to be,
because you are a concrete being different from others. Maybe this
element is what George Herbert Mead meant by the “I,” as opposed
to the “me.” It is only implicit; you cannot be purely aware of it,
because your awareness incorporates the Other in you.
On another level, though, your whole self-expression in every
moment—every act, feeling, etc.—is genuinely, authentically you.
It is, after all, your self-expression. If you feel alienated or you feel
as though you’re always only acting and not being yourself, that is
authentically you, it is an expression of who you are at that time. It
is impossible not to be yourself. -But in another sense—or other
senses—it is definitely possible not to be yourself. I described one
such sense above. In a way, we’re never just ourselves; we’re also
others, having internalized people’s behavior. Sometimes in social
situations you can be so self-conscious, so aware of others and
eager to please them, that you actually feel like you’re not being
yourself. You’re not being “natural.” This happens when the Other
in you, as instantiated in and an internalization of the people
you’re with, takes over your consciousness to such an extent that
the “you” in you, the natural, spontaneous element, cannot express
293
CHRIS WRIGHT
294
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
certain people seriously because they don’t fulfill it, maybe because
they seem like fools or buffoons or whatever. The relation between
this “tendential conception” and the general abstract other in your
consciousness is not entirely clear.... Another kind of internal other
is the psychological and biological “legacy” of all your experiences
with people, especially in your formative years, experiences that
helped shape you into who you are, that helped form your
psychological constitution. All these kinds of “others” probably
merge into one another in your mind. They are part of you but not
all of you.
*
Thoughts on self-love and self-confirmation.— In a sense, self-
love, or self-regard, is the foundation of the self. La Rochefoucauld
was right about that, though he expressed the insight in
unnecessarily negative and cynical ways. In wanting recognition or
self-confirmation, which is the self’s essential urge, what you want
is objective confirmation of your implicit self-love. This
achievement, by definition, has to be mediated by the other, first
and foremost by the abstract otherness in your consciousness. Thus,
you yourself, “your” (self-)consciousness, is the fundamental
mediator of the fulfillment of your own urge to “prove” your self-
love (to test it and confirm its truth). You undertake this self-
imposed project through self-activity, in every moment of the day.
If your self-activity is “successful” (as judged by you, hence by the
otherness in your consciousness), your self-love continues or
increases (at least momentarily)—though quite possibly only on a
half-conscious level, because ordinarily all this stuff is merely
implicit. Generally speaking, your constant self-activity is more or
less constantly effective to some degree; you achieve your
purposes, you act on and in the world, you communicate with other
selves, and your reality and effectiveness are proven. To the extent
that all this is stable, your self-love is stable.
Because people instantiate the otherness in your mind, your
self-otherness, their reactions to you condition your reactions to
yourself. What’s interesting is that certain people’s reactions matter
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more to you than others’. That is, these people are relatively
“significant” others to you. What determines whether someone is
such a “significant other” (not necessarily in the romantic sense)?
There are a few obvious causes, such as whether he or she has
played or plays an important role in your life, or whether you know
each other well. In this case, the time you’ve spent together has
caused you to internalize him to some degree, such that your “idea”
of him is closely associated with the Other in your mind. (For
instance, you might imagine what he would think of some act
you’re contemplating, as you consider what you’re about to do
from the perspective of an other watching you.)
More interesting is the question of what determines whether
you respect someone. This question is made more difficult by the
fact that there are different kinds of respect, for instance the kind
that you might spontaneously, half-consciously feel and act on
when in the presence of a charismatic person (someone with a
“strong presence”), as opposed to the more reflective kind that is a
product of your contemplating his virtues and coming to the
conclusion that he is admirable. What I find the most
psychologically intriguing is the first kind, or more generally the
kind that involves your attributing value to someone such that you
want to impress him and thereby bolster your own self-regard.
What this “bolstering” means, again, is that you more deeply sense
your own reality, the truth and reality of your self-regard. Your
hitherto “imaginary” self-love has become, to some extent,
“objective,” confirmed through the other’s recognition; the implicit
divide between the world and your self has thereby, at least
momentarily, been partially overcome. You are more a part of the
world (in projecting yourself into it) and the world is more a part of
you (in its recognizing you, your self-love).
So, one way to achieve this goal is to secure the approval of
someone with a strong presence. People tend to ignore the person
with a “weak” personality and try to get the attention of him with a
“strong” personality. For example, last night I was playing Yahtzee
with some acquaintances and was struck by the way they treated
their friend Bill. He isn’t particularly good-looking and doesn’t
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*
At the risk of repetition....— If you fail to get recognition from
some person or group of people, you respond by denying that
person recognition. You get yourself to have contempt for him, or
you ignore him or whatever. What exactly is going on here? It’s a
defense-mechanism, but what does that mean? Well, it’s pretty
simple: you want to deny that the offending person is important to
you, because the more important he is—i.e., the more valuable he
is, or the more recognition you give him—the more painful is his
lack of respect for you. You want to push him out of your
consciousness, out of the Other-part of you, the part you want
recognition from because you recognize its value, its supposedly
absolute value, its transcendence relative to you. When you
recognize or value someone you are, to that degree, treating him as
an instantiation of the (transcendent) Other in you; therefore you
want recognition from him in turn (to that degree). If he doesn’t
give it to you then you withdraw your recognition from him as a
way of preventing a lack of recognition towards you from the
Other, which is (experienced as) a terrible thing.
There is always a danger in these phenomenological
investigations that the language I use can be misleading, arising
from the fact that the Other is both transcendent and immanent in
you. Obviously you don’t want recognition from your own
consciousness, insofar as your own consciousness is you. What you
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*
The puzzle of self-abasement.— What explains “the voluptuous
pleasure of cringing and self-contempt,” as Marx says in the
context of a discussion of Christianity? How can self-contempt be
pleasurable? Well, I think it has to do with bringing your self-
conception in line with the other’s, or the world’s, supposed
perception of you. What the self wants, after all, is harmony
between the inner and the outer. If there is a great difference
between your sense of self and people’s reactions to you,
181
Incidentally, there are other ways of expressing it—other
“vocabularies”—for instance in Freudian terms, involving cathexes and
whatnot. But Freudian language is more mechanistic, less “subjectivistic,”
and thus, for humans, less interesting, less compelling, less “in-our-own-
terms,” less of an explanation. An explanation of the self and its behavior
should be in terms explicable to the self, intuitively graspable, using
concepts that can be intuitively related to experience. It shouldn’t use
mechanistic concepts.
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these people who ignore you or laugh at you are wrong, that
actually you’re strong and valuable. Struggling with yourself,
tormenting yourself like that, being full of self-tension due to the
contradiction between your desire to love yourself and people’s
contempt for you—that can be horrible. It’s much easier, like a
relief, to accept yourself in your shameful little essence. And then
you thereby are able to find new pleasures, new vindictive,
revengeful pleasures, as by imagining bringing people down to
your level, plotting petty tricks on them, thinking malicious
thoughts like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. Imaginary wish-
fulfillments, putting you and your enemies on the same level or
raising yourself above them, as by physically torturing them (in
imagination at least) or provoking them to act in petty ways like
you.
Religious self-abnegation or “self-contempt” can be very
different from all this, though. It can entail raising yourself up to
try to commune with God, to love him and be loved by him. You
have scorn for your base physical nature but love your higher self.
But what about severe self-flagellation? I.e., outright masochism
(emotional and physical). How do you explain that? The starting
point for an explanation is that masochism is, or often is, an
expression of self-love—self-love perverted into self-violence. In at
least some cases, physical self-flagellation is a way of confirming
your reality to yourself, a kind of intense self-assertion. Extreme
self-affirmation, paradoxically. It takes an extreme form because, at
least in comparison to God, you feel extremely dead, empty,
nonexistent. Its use in ascetic religious sects is understandable,
then, given that these people spend their lives obsessing over their
nothingness and worthlessness as compared to God. When they
“flagellate” themselves, the contrast between their ordinary sensory
deprivation (and self-deprivation, mental deprivation) and sudden
over-stimulation, extreme self-activity, might well launch them into
some twisted ecstasy. Their sudden perception of self-reality, so
real that it’s painful, can probably approach mystical ecstasy.
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182
Marmeladov is a character in Crime and Punishment, a drunken, self-
contemptuous buffoon who lets his wife beat him and insists that he
enjoys these beatings. In the end he is killed, possibly by suicide.
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better, and he’ll feel better. There will no longer be the barrier
between them of his shame and her resentment; he will no longer
have to rebuke himself or feel bad about himself, at least to the
same degree, because she will no longer hate him (for he has
accepted and shown that he agrees with her anger and disgust,
which makes her feel better about herself). In short, his acceptance
of her anger makes her feel better about herself (because, after all,
his prior actions seemed to express contempt for her) and restores,
to some extent, her fondness or love for him (maybe she “forgives”
him), which makes him feel better about himself. Moreover,
because he loves her and cares about her happiness, he simply felt
guilty about causing her pain. By showing contrition and letting her
cause him pain, he is equalizing things again, so that she will not
have to feel bad about herself (which she did implicitly, if not
explicitly).
*
Losing yourself in love, love of God or of a person, fully
believing in your worthlessness compared to this being, this being
that has given you grace through no merit of your own—
submerging your individuality, your sense of self, in this being,
being filled with love and gratitude, exalting the other at your own
expense, breaking down the distinction between self and other in a
self-humbling way. Certain mystical experiences, states of mystical
rapture, are like this; I suspect that ordinary passionate love is
related to mystical rapture. Despite appearances, this self-debasing
person is glorifying himself, partaking in the glory of the radiant
other who has deigned to recognize him. By exalting the other he is
exalting himself—he is merging himself with the other—for, in
being loved by an exalted other, one is exalted oneself (however
much one “doesn’t deserve it”). The way to recognition here is,
paradoxically, through self-effacement; it is through self-
degradation, for the less you are, the less self you have, the more
the other is, this other who loves you and in whom you are merged.
(And therefore the more validating is the other’s love.) Moreover,
the less self you have, the more you can lose yourself in the other,
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*
An embarrassing incident.— I missed my flight today from
Budapest to New York, so now I have to pay $700 to change to
another flight tomorrow. It was a silly mistake: I thought the flight
was at 12:55 instead of 11:55, so I lost myself in reading and
writing at the airport as I waited for the plane. At 11:45 I realized
what time it was, learned that the flight was leaving in ten minutes,
ran to the gate, and wasn’t allowed on. I suspect my parents won’t
be happy when I tell them, since they’ll have to help bail me out.
Stupid, stupid mistake. Now I’m at a cheap hostel in Budapest.
In the aftermath of defeat I half-decided not to stay at any
place tonight and instead wander the city or sleep on a bench. I
thought I deserved it. It was my way to atone. The prospect even
pleased me a little, for some reason. I wanted to do it. But how do
you explain that? I had no idea why I wanted to experience a
sleepless and uncomfortable night; all I knew was that “part of me”
had that desire. Its causes were unconscious, like the causes of
Marmeladov’s desire to be beaten by his wife. The starting-point of
an explanation is that obviously I half-consciously expected such a
night to make me feel better, to wash away my self-frustration. It
would be my way of atoning. By so atoning I would restore things
to normal, restore the equilibrium, compensate for and so
effectively “erase” my past stupidity. “I made an incredibly stupid
and expensive mistake; well, okay, I’ll spend tonight on the streets.
That will satisfy me.” The point, I think, is that by punishing
myself I would be “enacting,” so to speak, my self-respect, my self-
regard. By subjecting myself to a stern justice, or a
compensation....well, but how does that realize my “self-love”?
This is a difficult problem.
It reminds me of the fact that sometimes murderers who get
away with their crime can’t live with their having escaped
punishment and finally turn themselves in. It is the Raskolnikov
syndrome. (And maybe the Marmeladov syndrome too, come to
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183
After all, he seemed to lose his burden of guilt after he was exiled to
Siberia and had the love of pure devoted Sonia. What he wanted all along
was that people and society forgive him, so he could (thereby) forgive
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*
On the “abstracting” mind.— I, like all humane people, have
profound pity for the human species. Strictly speaking, though,
such pity isn’t entirely rational. For in pitying humanity one is
pitying an abstract entity, which is senseless. To feel sorry for the
species…is to feel sorry for an idea. Humankind doesn’t have a
Hegelian Spirit; there are only individuals. Some people are happy,
some are unhappy. It’s the same fallacy as that involved in hating
Jews or women, or in obsessively seeking fame: the collective
entity that is one’s intentional object doesn’t exist. It is but a
confused projection of the Other in oneself. –Of course, the drive
for recognition (or confirmation) itself is based on a confused
projection of this Other. It is the self’s lifelong quest to reach itself
and unite with itself.
himself. -On the other hand, his compassion and pity for Lizaveta
probably did entail an element of “altruism” in his guilt, genuine and
profound regret for brutally killing this poor girl. Most guilt must
comprise a mixture of egoistic and altruistic elements.
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*
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”— The
question “Why do I exist now and here rather than at a different
time and place?”, which bothered Pascal and has bothered me for
years, is puzzling precisely because it’s unanswerable. This can be
seen clearly if you ask the same question of, say, a dog or a plant.
Why does this particular plant exist now and here? “Well… It just
does! There is no reason. The seed just happened to produce this
plant rather than another.” Same with people.
There is something unsatisfying about that, though. The
question is meaningless, but not completely meaningless. For
example, it surely was possible that my parents’ first son would be
not me but someone else (say, if a different sperm had reached the
egg). Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that this other son
would have had a personality nearly identical to mine. So if you
compare the actual world to this possible world, my parents can’t
distinguish between the actual me and the other possible son. He
could have been me, or I could have been him, without their being
any the wiser. In fact, for all they know, I am him, and not myself!
For I might not have existed even as someone with an identical
personality did (“in my place”).
This is all very weird. Ultimately this thing called the self will
never be fully understood.
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*
Why does the feminine as such seem to be more prone to
insecurity about itself and its place in society than the masculine?
There are many reasons, of course. One of them is suggested by
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The body tends to be more “other” for women than for men, even
as women have a more intimate relationship with it. It asserts itself
against their will, it has its own cycles and rhythms, it bleeds and
leaks and swells and gets pregnant and determines moods. In
general, one can say that women are their bodies more than men
are, because their bodies are so much more insistent. This,
combined with women’s relative physical weakness and smallness,
causes them to feel, at least implicitly, more “passive” and weak
than males as such. Firmness, leanness, muscular tautness, as in
young men (but also in certain women, for example female
bodybuilders), is experienced as signifying things like fighting
against enemies, being active and confident, dominating, being
mobile and strong; softness, plumpness, weakness, pregnant
immobility, do not foster a dominating self-confidence relative to
the opposite sex.
A second obvious answer to the question I posed above is the
ubiquity of the “male gaze.” It seems to be a biological fact that
male sexual arousal operates largely by virtue of the look, the look
at a beautiful woman, a naked woman, a scantily clad woman.
Women tend to be aroused by touch, emotional intimacy, male
assertiveness and strength; men are aroused, in large part, by sex-
objecthood in the woman. So there are strong biological tendencies
for the male gaze, and hence for some degree of objectification of
women, to be an ever-present element in most or all societies. This
will, first of all, tend to make women relatively self-conscious. And
it will not typically be a healthy, prideful self-consciousness—
although it sometimes will—because “the look” is dehumanizing.
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*
The essence of women’s clothing.— A woman who wears high-
heels has already, in a sense, subordinated herself to men. (It’s self-
objectification.)
*
From Simone de Beauvoir.— “The advantage man enjoys....is that
his vocation as a human being in no way runs counter to his destiny
as a male. Through the identification of phallus and transcendence,
it turns out that his social and spiritual successes endow him with a
virile presence. He is not divided. Whereas it is required of woman
that in order to realize her femininity she must make herself object
and prey, which is to say that she must renounce her claims as a
sovereign subject.” Well said, and true.185 To be a fully realized
human being means to be active, to be free, to “create” and express
oneself, to actively seek recognition by impressing oneself on the
world and others. But this is also, in a slightly different way, what
it means to be masculine, due to biological tendencies in the sexes.
185
The only thing I’d change is to say that women don’t just make
themselves “object and prey.” Humans, after all, are not self-caused; they
are made more than they make themselves.
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*
I was watching Conan O’Brien’s late-night talk show; his
guest was some beautiful actress. She was wearing a dress that
exposed her ample bosom, and at one point she caught him looking
down. “Focus, Conan [on my eyes, not my breasts],” she said with
irritation. Then she laughed, as the audience did. While laughing,
she brushed some strands of hair off her right breast, thereby giving
Conan and the audience a better view of the two lovely things she’d
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*
Against politically correct stupidity.— According to a scientific
study conducted by Heino Meyer-Bahlburg, women with
congenital adrenal hyperplasia “as a group have a lower interest in
getting married and performing the traditional childcare/housewife
role. As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging
in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for
infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and
motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and
having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age
186
Feminists implicitly acknowledge this truth when they argue that
“autonomy” is an impoverished ideal—i.e., that women live fuller lives
insofar as they are less “independent” than men—and when they oppose a
feminine ethic of care to the masculine Kantian ethic of autonomy and
duty.
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*
A corrective to postmodernism.— This is from a New York Times
article:
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*
Female sexuality.— People who insist that most women are just as
interested in sex as men, in fact are usually more sexual than men,
are right. Because female sexuality is relatively passive, though, its
187
Popular expositions of the biological differences between the sexes
include Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain (2007) and The Male
Brain (2011), Anne Moir and David Jessel’s Brain Sex: The Real
Difference Between Men and Women (1992), and Marianne Legato’s Why
Men Never Remember and Women Never Forget (2006). These books
have flaws, but they are certainly suggestive.
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188
Kierkegaard, no idiot, expressed the insight in a sexist 19th-century
way: “Woman has neither the selfishly developed conception of the self
nor the intellectuality of man, for all that she is his superior in tenderness
and fineness of feeling. [Her] nature is devotion, submission, and it is
unwomanly if it is not so.... [A] woman who is happy without devotion,
that is, without giving herself away (to whatever it may be she gives
herself) is unwomanly. A man also devotes himself (gives himself away),
and it is a poor sort of a man who does not do it; but his self is not
devotion..., nor does he acquire himself by devotion, as in another sense a
woman does, he has himself; he gives himself away, but his self still
remains behind as a sober consciousness of devotion, whereas woman,
with genuine womanliness, plunges her self into that to which she devotes
herself…” While qualifications are always necessary when making
generalizations, there is much truth to Kierkegaard’s thoughts (from The
Sickness unto Death).
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*
Why do many women enjoy “rough” sex? To a being
uninitiated into the secrets of the human psyche, this fact might
seem paradoxical. After all, what’s so great about being treated like
a piece of meat? On one level, the explanation is simply that
heterosexual women like “masculine strength.” They like watching
half-naked muscular male bodies fighting or playing sports; they
like touching and caressing their man’s muscles, they’re fascinated
by male assertiveness and physicality. They’re attracted to them, to
male dominance and the dominant male. So it’s not surprising they
often like half-violent sex. A deeper explanation, though, is that
women’s subjection to a frenzy of “powerful masculine desire”
irresistibly validates them as women. Far from its being
experienced as degrading, their reduction to something like an
object affirms them (in that moment at least), confirms their value
and reality, as R. D. Laing might say. Through the man’s powerful
desire for them, they sense their reality. (Similarly, men are
validated through women’s desire.)
In addition to all this is the simple ecstatic pleasure of release
from self-consciousness, self-control, inhibitions, similar to the
pleasure people get from wild partying or indulging in any kind of
189
See the writings of, e.g., Luce Irigaray, who might have been a good
erotic novelist had she chosen that career path. “Woman’s pleasure does
not have to choose between clitoral activity and vaginal passivity, for
example. The pleasure of the vaginal caress does not have to be
substituted for that of the clitoral caress. They each contribute,
irreplaceably, to women’s pleasure. Among other caresses.... Fondling the
breasts, touching the vulva, spreading the lips, stroking the posterior wall
of the vagina, brushing against the mouth of the uterus, and so on.” (From
chapter 2 of This Sex Which Is Not One.) This titillating sort of feminism
is easy to mock, but insofar as it doesn’t ignore the body, it’s more
sensible than a lot of Anglo-American feminism.
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*
The coquette.— I’m reading an eighteenth-century American novel
called The Coquette, by Hannah Foster. It’s a true story about a
woman who was seduced by “a libertine of vicious character,” like
so many women of the time, only this one died giving birth to his
still-born, illegitimate child.
One problem with modern society is that it gives young
women a surfeit of opportunities to indulge their romantic whims.
That’s unhealthy for everyone. Alexander Pope was not wildly off
the mark when he opined, “Every woman is, at heart, a rake,” a
thought that has been modernized in the song “Girls Just Wanna
Have Fun.” Giving young women free rein to pursue their crushes,
their lusts, their momentary desires, their fetish of the wealthy or
the charming libertine, has led to the ruin of millions of them.
Freedom is a dangerous thing; some people apparently can’t handle
it. You might even say that a society of arranged marriage, as long
as the two future spouses have some choice in the matter, can be
preferable to a society obsessed with romantic love. Love is
moody, after all; feelings are fleeting, and they lead many women
astray. Respect can be a surer foundation for marriage than
youthful romantic love. Unfortunately, among all the suitors of a
pretty woman, it is often the least respectable with whom she falls
in love.
*
Why nice guys finish last.— Being a “nice guy” (in the pejorative
sense) to a woman means not projecting sexuality. Politeness
doesn’t touch the reptilian, sex. If a woman shuns a nice guy it is
because a merely good man does not affirm her self-conception,
which is as a sexually desirable and desirous female.
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*
An old cliché that still rings true.— Women and children embody
the aesthetic virtues as opposed to the moral ones. Innocence,
empathy, simple trust, sensitivity to new experiences, an affinity
for (and with) beauty, a delight in simple pleasures, an ability to
lose themselves in the moment, in laughter, in love. Men, on the
other hand, are expected to do what is right, to follow their duty, to
soberly guide their lives according to reason. This is morality,
morality in its strictest, fullest, Kantian sense; the other path is
humanity, instinctual and beautiful, caring. The ancient dichotomy
between these two principles still holds true. Doubtless there are
exceptions—in fact, as I’ve said, everyone is both masculine and
feminine—and these principles are biologically grounded only in
approximate ways, but their vaguely “human-natural” validity is
shown by the fact of nearly every culture’s implicit assent to them
as well as the potency of our own intuitions in these matters. As
history has progressed and the species has objectified its latent
potentialities in ever-diversifying ways, we have deepened our
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*
A politically correct mistake.— It is not an argument against a
belief to call it sexist. Labels are not arguments; neither are value-
judgments. There is no reason to think, in any case, that truth is
necessarily politically correct.
*
Essentialism, a revolt against postmodernist “cultural
imperialism.”190— The difference between social-constructivists
and me is that I think there must be some hidden truth in the eons-
old essentialist thought of rich cultures, from China to India to
Greece to Rome to Europe to Native American tribes and
elsewhere. I have reverence for ancient wisdom. More generally, I
respect the insights of non-contemporary-Western societies.
*
On sexism.— Feminists are fond of laying the charge of “sexism!”
at society. I agree with them. Society is sexist, intensely so. When a
man opens a door for a woman, he is being “sexist.” When he looks
at her, he is being sexist. When he hears her voice, he hears it in a
sexist way. As soon as he wakes up in the morning, “sexism” is
implicit in his consciousness. And the same is true of the woman’s.
It is certainly the case, however, that many manifestations of
sexism are deplorable. Nature dictates only that the sexes won’t
treat each other identically, that most women will want to be
190
(Postmodernists like to argue that the West is culturally imperialist—
which it is—but ubiquitous irony is the iron law of history.)
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*
Racism vs. “sexism.”— Chomsky argues in “The View Beyond:
Prospects for the Study of Mind” that there is no legitimate
scientific reason to be interested in differences between people
arising out of their different races or sexes. Suppose it turns out, he
says, that “a person of a particular race, on the average, is likely to
have a slightly higher IQ than a person of another race. Notice first
[he continues] that such a conclusion would have null scientific
interest. It is of no interest to discover a correlation between two
traits selected at random, and if someone happens to be interested
in this odd and pointless question, it would make far more sense to
study properties that are much more clearly defined, say, length of
fingernails and eye color. But here, it is clear that the discovery is
of interest only to people who believe that each individual must be
treated not as what he or she is but rather as an example of a certain
category (racial, sexual, or whatever). To anyone not afflicted with
these disorders, it is of zero interest whether the average value of
IQ for some category of persons is such-and-such....” He is
perfectly right with regard to race. Even if there are slight
differences (say, in athletic ability) between “average” people of
different races, that is of essentially no interest.192 Race shouldn’t
even really register with you in your daily life. It does,
unfortunately, with everyone, but the less it does, the better. In any
191
The assertiveness, confidence, physical bulk, and physical strength that
are (in part) a product of male rather than female hormones have always
been taken, half-consciously, to indicate that a person “has value,” or
rather has a “strong presence” and “commands respect.” That socialization
is not solely responsible for our valorization of those traits can be seen by
the fact that all mammals and all human societies valorize them.
192
I have to admit, though, that I can imagine an evolutionary biologist
speculating on the natural-selective reasons for the average black male’s
greater athletic ability (if indeed he has it) than the average white’s.
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*
Male: external; female: internal.— One way to express the
differences between how men and women tend to experience
sexual attraction is by saying that for men it is usually more
“external” than “internal,” while for women it tends to be more
internal than external. This corresponds to the fact that masculine
minds are externally oriented—observing the world, inquiring into
it in an “external” (“intellectual”) capacity, treating it (acting on it)
as an object, not primarily feeling or empathizing or identifying-
with or appropriating-into-the-self—whereas feminine minds are
less objective in this separation-between-self-and-other way. Thus,
masculinity wants to have sex with someone who looks beautiful,
whereas femininity wants to have sex with someone who provokes
certain feelings. External vs. internal, metaphorically speaking.
Moreover: insofar as, or if, there is a natural basis for the
unevenness in scientific, mathematical, and philosophical
achievement between the sexes, it is related to the contrast between
the masculine orientation to the objective and the feminine
193
It’s unfortunate and ironic, however, that a large proportion of women
are attracted to the kind of man who doesn’t treat them respectfully.
326
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*
The determination of feminists and other postmodernists to
see veiled value-judgments in claims that are strictly factual, and in
particular to see attacks on themselves or some group of people
with which they identify or sympathize, is indicative of a somewhat
totalitarian mindset. To quote Chomsky again (from a different
context): “The sign of a truly totalitarian culture is that important
truths simply lack cognitive meaning and are interpretable only at
the level of ‘Fuck You,’ so they can then elicit a perfectly
predictable torrent of abuse in response.” The totalitarianism of
radical postmodernists is beautifully ironic, and beautifully
predictable. -But these people, after all, are a product of their
culture, their paranoid, hypersensitive, suspicious, atomized
culture. So their eagerness to be offended at the drop of a pin is
humanly understandable, though comical and pitiable.
*
The mind is more attuned to selves than ideas.— It is
psychologically interesting that people tend to argue ad hominem—
327
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Why are women sometimes attracted to “innocent” young
men, “pure,” “sweet” boys? A 34-year-old friend of mine has a
crush on a 24-year-old boy, although she doesn’t want to date him
because he’s too young. “For some reason,” she says, “I keep
having feelings for him. He is so darling!!! I think the reason I like
him is that he’s always very innocent, simple, pure like a crystal.”
To say it’s their “mothering instinct” doesn’t explain much. I want
to know the phenomenological mechanisms. What exactly is going
on in their consciousness? They find “sweet,” “cute” young men
irresistible (sometimes)....but what is this “sweetness” and this
328
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
329
CHRIS WRIGHT
330
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Pornography.— Feminists often say that pornography, even the
“clean” kind, is misogynistic. If you understand “misogyny” in a
broad sense, that’s true. But really it’s a naïve judgment; porn is
actually just a reflection of male desire,194 as a female columnist for
Salon.com wrote today. There are pathological, violent, and extra-
degrading kinds of pornography, but those aren’t what I’m talking
about. Most men naturally want to, and do, dominate women in the
sex act, so porn usually involves male domination of women.
Misogynistic? If so, then nature is misogynistic. And so are
women, because most enjoy being dominated during sex. As the
psychoanalyst Theodor Reik said, “A woman always likes to be
treated with respect by a man except in one place: in bed. When he
shows respect for her there, she loses all respect for him.” That
statement shouldn’t be taken too literally, but there is some truth to
it.
It must be said, however, that while pornography as such is a
socially conditioned expression of natural desires and need not
express misogyny in the strict sense, it does not promote healthy
attitudes toward sex or women. It takes the natural masculine
objectification of women to an extreme, turning them into little
more than vulgar sex-objects. Any sort of denial of humanity is
always unhealthy. One can argue that sex itself has a tendency to
reduce women momentarily to their bodies (insofar as they are
194
And female desire too. According to one study, a third of viewers of
porn websites are women.
331
CHRIS WRIGHT
being acted on, acted in, “done to”), but then to that extent it is in
tension with recognition of their full humanity and dignity. The
same is true with regard to men who enjoy being the submissive
partner. To be a self is, ideally, to be active, free, creative, self-
determining—not passive, degraded, submissive. Needless to say,
life is full of ambiguities and this sort of “liberal idealism” can only
be approximated in real life; nevertheless, it is the moral ideal.
Power dynamics can never be done away with in human
relationships, or in humans’ experience of “the other,” but we
should always try to return to a recognition of the other as an
autonomous person in his or her own right. So, while enjoyment of
pornography (depending on the kind) is in itself not unnatural and
need not indicate misogyny—for if it did, nearly everyone would
be a misogynist—it is best to think of porn as a sort of “temporary
escape” or “guilty pleasure” and not let it influence how one treats
people.
*
There is no question that the vast majority of pornography is
degrading to women. What is disturbing—and revealing—is that
the vast majority of people enjoy watching it.
***
A LYRICAL INTERLUDE
***
332
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darkness
333
CHRIS WRIGHT
Madness
A modern 23-year-old.— Nights are hard for me. All the pain
that’s repressed during the bustle of the day pushes its way to the
surface. And there’s nothing I can do. Can’t sleep, can’t write,
can’t think except to regret and panic. My problem is neither that
life is unbearably light nor that it’s unbearably heavy: it’s both. It’s
heavy because it’s my only life—every moment is heavy because
it’s gone—it’s irrevocable—and I feel under constant pressure to
live; but life is light because it’s all luck, contingency, it’s
meaningless; and its lightness makes it even heavier, increases the
pressure on me, highlights the burden of time and the necessity but
impossibility of triumphing over chance. I have the feeling that no
matter what I do after I leave Korea—and I really haven’t any idea
where I’ll be two months from now—I’ll regret it. Milan Kundera
is right that life is essentially a rehearsal for itself, which is the
comedy and the tragedy of it.
My ambitions, which are as boundless as the sky and as
undefined, have always conflicted with my knowledge of my own
limitations. That adds to the weight I have to bear. Basically my
existence is founded on conflicts and schisms—within me, between
me and the world, and between the world and itself (I internalize
334
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
Hollow
335
CHRIS WRIGHT
336
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
Double life
time
grimly
pressing on,
on, on, on, on,
mowing down our love
of love and life and self,
impersonal, disdainful,
proud, yet life-uncomprehending,
lonesome in its omnipotency,
pitiful in its self-destructive zeal
fueled by self-hate, rancor, envy
of unmechanical beings
who have knowledge of passion—
a lingering moment
whose memory is
forever and
overcomes
337
CHRIS WRIGHT
deathly
time
birth
of love
turmoiling
in a death-heart
bled dry of wet hope
and tears and all feeling
pleasure-killed by brutal life
a universal murderer
is a violent shocking redemption
that dissolves the calluses on my soul
painfully in a deluge of tears
wetting the face of love’s midwife
holding my new newborn heart
in her caressing hands
caressing new life
from old stale death
which has died
in re-
birth
338
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
Salvation
339
CHRIS WRIGHT
The Blessed
340
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
341
CHRIS WRIGHT
to a kiss because her every thought is not of this girl whose voice
sounds like love, or how love must sound.......one is glad that there
is such a thing as sleep, and that someday there will be a longer
sleep, a very long and happy sleep without dreams....
Memory
342
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In an evil hour.— You think about this world and you have to
laugh, because you have nothing to do with it. You had no part in
creating the universe. What right—what right did the universe have
to create me? To violate my individuality like that? To steal from
me self-determination? It is beyond disrespectful, beyond
presumptuous: it is immoral. To conjure me out of the darkness:—I
did not give my permission! But it sits up there, out there, laughing
at me, at what it did to me, laughing at the little trick it pulled.
Nero’s sadism was child’s play, crude and embarrassing: Nero was
no Universe. What fascinating sadism… To create a being and give
it just enough insight so that it knows it is worth nothing, it will die
and be forgotten, but not enough to understand why; and to make
this being so that it is obsessed with an unattainable happiness, and
an unattainable togetherness, with stifling distaste for the universal
isolation in which it must live.
The Storm
343
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
The Caterpillar
344
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
345
CHRIS WRIGHT
***
RETURN TO SOBERNESS
***
346
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
notice all the ways I am self-centered and careerist and not true to
standards and values that transcend my own petty interests, and feel
like I’m not one of the good ones. But then I countenance the fact
that at least here I am worrying about it, noticing all the ways I fall
short of integrity, and I imagine that maybe people without any
integrity at all don’t notice or worry about it; so then I feel better
about myself. It’s all very confusing. I think I’m very honest and
candid, but I’m also proud of how honest and candid I am—so
where does that put me?” These sorts of paradoxes, the paradoxes
of self-consciousness, I was writing about long ago and finally
stopped caring about one or two years ago. Being self-conscious on
a second level, then being conscious of that level, then being
conscious of this fourth level, until you lose all sense of yourself
and conclude that self-determinations determine a vacuum and
hence are vacuous. But then what? Then you stop thinking and go
outside and play and know who you are again, unconsciously.
Wallace’s curse was that he couldn’t stop thinking.
Just think: he craved the label “genius” but couldn’t accept it
when it was conferred on him. He knew it didn’t mean anything.
His friend Mark Costello called him once: “He was talking,” says
Costello, “about how hard the writing was. And I said,
lightheartedly, ‘Dave, you’re a genius.’ Meaning, people aren’t
going to forget about you. You’re not going to wind up in a
Wendy’s. He said, ‘All that makes me think is that I’ve fooled you,
too.’” An honest person in this age can’t accept that he’s a genius
and then go on with his life in the certainty that he’s a genius,
comforted eternally by that thought. He knows it’s false, even if it’s
true: he’s not an object, not a brilliant rock or something like that;
he’s a person who changes from moment to moment, of whom it’s
meaningless to predicate the stable, static, lustrous quality genius.
Wallace couldn’t believe he instantiated a concept, since his mind
had motion (self-consciousness)—and he knew, anyway, that if he
did, the concept was basically meaningless. He craved self-
confirmation but couldn’t achieve it because the greater one’s self-
consciousness, the more quickly and completely one transcends
one’s objectifications. In the end, therefore, once he stopped taking
347
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Negative freedom.— An intelligent and self-aware person
sometimes finds it hard to know who he “really” is. He feels at
times as though he is merely putting on an act—even for himself—
and he suspects that he could be a very different person than he is. I
remember moments in my life when I’ve felt sad or hopeless....but
then in that moment I’ve wondered whether I was just entertaining
myself and perhaps wanted to feel hopeless, maybe because of how
“poetical” or profound it made me feel. Maybe I liked the mood
and wallowed in it. But I certainly seemed to want to be happy and
get out of that mood (which sometimes lasted for weeks), and in a
sense I clearly was miserable. But was it not “easy” to remain
unhappy, to languish in energylessness? On the other hand, why
should I make a supreme effort of will to transcend depression, to
force myself out of it—assuming that was even possible!—before
my melancholy had spent itself? Maybe it was healthier and more
natural just to let the psyche evolve of its own accord. Etc., etc. I
didn’t know what was real and what was false.
Debilitating self-consciousness. I could be whatever I wanted
to be, do whatever I wanted to do....I just had to choose. Would I
continue to live in “miserable ease,” pleasantly having a pleasant
life conventionally with everyone else, refusing to confront the
dark side that everyone represses, or would I embrace the
underworld for a while at least and debauch myself like Jean Genet,
“Saint Genet”? To know the truth, the “worm in the heart of
being.” Freedom fascinated me, my own nothingness obsessed me
before I’d read Sartre....the nothingness of consciousness. The real
and the false self? No, there was no real self, it was all false!
Everything was a charade.
But see, while there is some truth to this despairing
existentialist perspective, it’s exaggerated. It is possible to “be
oneself”—there is a self to be. There are differences between my
character and yours; we have proclivities, attitudes, skills, talents,
348
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
On the meaning of John Brown. (An essay on the concept of
authenticity.)
349
CHRIS WRIGHT
195
See David Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed
Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York:
Vintage Books, 2005).
350
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
196
Ibid., p. 340.
197
Ibid., p. 332.
351
CHRIS WRIGHT
352
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
198
Throughout this paper I am using the word “authenticity” in a non-
moral sense. I don’t mean to imply that “inauthentic” people or cultures
are thereby inferior or somehow immoral; the term is purely descriptive,
not evaluative.
353
CHRIS WRIGHT
199
From Emerson’s lecture “Courage,” delivered on November 8, 1859.
200
Benjamin Quarles, Allies for Freedom (New York: Da Capo Press,
2001), p. 12. The quotation is from an autobiographical letter Brown
wrote to Henry Stearns in 1857.
201
Ibid.
354
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
202
Quoted in Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, p. 354.
203
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), p.
113.
355
CHRIS WRIGHT
204
From Emerson’s essay “Heroism.”
356
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
205
See Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the chapter entitled “Self-
alienated Spirit.” See also Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity,
which is an illuminating discussion of all these themes.
357
CHRIS WRIGHT
206
Notes from the Underground, chapter 1.
207
Comparisons between Thoreau’s journal and his “Plea for Captain
John Brown” support that point. In the journal his wording was often
stronger than in his speech, evidently because he thought his audience
wouldn’t appreciate his more strongly worded sentiments.
358
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
359
CHRIS WRIGHT
208
Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, p. 32.
209
Ibid., p. 36.
360
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
who he is. Emerson and Thoreau probably did not suffer from this
pathology, but their emphasis on the individual’s need to “trust
himself” shows at least that they were not strangers to the modern
problem of a loss of identity.
Brown, however, was a stranger to this problem because he
was not formed by the social structures of American city-life. His
identity was forged on the frontier, where it was unnecessary to
adopt a plethora of identity-confusing “roles.” He was raised by
strict Calvinists and he became a single-minded Calvinist. His
world was not ambiguous.
To be sure, his innate psychological endowment obviously had
a lot to do with his character. But so did his background. It is not
unreasonable to suppose that the differences between his
background and Emerson’s (and Thoreau’s) partly determined the
differences between their characters.
The foregoing reflections have a number of implications that
might stimulate further thought. For instance, it would seem that
societies, at least as “ideal-types,” necessarily evolve in the
direction of encouraging greater and greater inauthenticity among
their denizens, inasmuch as they tend to proceed from a relatively
primitive, “natural” state of little social differentiation or “role-
playing” to an increasingly “civilized” state of economic and social
coercion in the form of interwoven norms and roles—roles that
emerge from the evolving state of technology, of the division of
labor, of urban centers, of social structures. It would make sense,
then, to call a society “self-conscious” or “inauthentic” to the
degree that its institutions and social relations are such as to
promote these traits in its inhabitants, i.e., to encourage the latter to
adjust their behavior in the light of how they see themselves and
think they are seen by others (which is just to put on an act210).
210
The act may deceive the actor himself, but it nevertheless retains some
of its ‘act-ive’ character as long as the actor adjusts his behavior—perhaps
involuntarily—in response to a discrepancy between how he perceives
himself and how he wants to be perceived (by himself and others).
361
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
How is mass inhumanity possible?— When I ask myself how it’s
possible that so many white Southerners used to support slavery
even on moral grounds, as having a “civilizing” influence on
blacks, I’m led to the conclusion that it is very easy for humans to
invent and believe in ideologies which justify activities that bring
material benefit and social recognition to them. Arguments can
always be thought of for both sides of an issue, even moral
arguments. Most of the time you’re going to subscribe to
philosophies and values that permit you to affirm yourself in the
way you’re accustomed to, because your most fundamental values
are relative material comfort and social recognition. Given your
environment, whatever values are consistent with these deepest
values are probably the ones you’ll subscribe to. It’s not just
intellectual laziness, either. It’s also the fact that the way you live
structures your perception of the world, even determines the data
that enter your consciousness. Living amidst a certain class of
people in certain physical and economic conditions, not being
exposed to other conditions, will naturally lead to your adoption of
362
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
the views of this social group. You’ll see certain things happening
and not other things; you’ll encounter certain types of behavior and
not others, which may well cause you to make unsound
generalizations about human behavior or the behavior of particular
ethnicities. Your social circumstances may end up distorting or
suppressing your innate human commitment to kindness, fairness,
compassion, solidarity. Other people, due largely to their different
social conditions, may more nearly approach a realization of these
human values than you; they may have a clearer understanding of
the nature of society’s present configuration and of its
(in)compatibility with human values. Certain types of social
organization are relatively conducive to prejudice; other types are
relatively conducive to rationality.
*
An immoral morality.— Oh the stupidity of condemning people
like John Brown and accepting “righteous wars” or cheering them
on! The nonsense morality! Neutrality, inaction, is far more
morally repugnant in extreme cases than violence is. The
disinterested reasoning and distant action of a McNamara or a Dick
Cheney or every State in history offends the moral sense far more
than immediate and violent insurrection against oppression does.
The latter is human, the former not. (Bureaucratized violence—
impersonal violence—is not far removed from totalitarianism, the
superfluity of the individual.) The morality of The Wretched of the
Earth makes more sense to me than the morality of “following
rules.”
*
Homo economicus.— Today I was eating a sandwich on the edge
of a pleasant stone courtyard in front of an office-building
downtown. Standing there harmlessly, next to the sidewalk, eating
a sandwich. A guy wearing a suit, maybe coming back from lunch,
passed by me but stopped to ask if I was waiting for someone.
“No.” “Okay, this is private property,” he said. I looked at him,
363
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
The modern slave.— A good test of a person’s worth—that is, of
his humanity, his free-spiritedness, his kindness and mental
independence—is whether he is willing and able to examine rules
critically in the light of reason and either obey them or not obey
them based on their reasonableness. The modern slave is the one
who does what he is told by authorities, who accepts their rules and
orders unquestioningly even if they are irrational or they hurt
people. The typical bureaucrat is the perfect slave. Only a liberated,
humane person picks and chooses his rules for himself, guided by
reason and compassion. Genetically speaking, everyone or almost
everyone has the capacity to be a mere bureaucrat, a consistent
follower of orders. It does seem, however, that some people are
more comfortable with playing such a role than others. Remember
the Milgram experiments in the 1960s? Most of the participants
were willing to obey orders and inflict the maximum amount of
pain on the victim, blindly trusting the authority-figure’s
reassurances—but some did refuse. For whatever reason, obedience
(a terrible thing) came less naturally for them than for the others.
One of the most important goals of a humane system of
education and socialization would be to teach people not to obey
automatically. This is the opposite of what our current educational
system teaches, though, because of the necessity of universal
obedience in a capitalist society.
*
After reading about Thomas Thistlewood and Jamaican
slavery in the eighteenth century—reading alone in a dark and
empty apartment at night—one has to clean oneself with the slow
movement from Beethoven’s Archduke piano trio. Thistlewood the
364
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
slave master who kept a diary of his practices but didn’t comment
on them, didn’t reflect on his feelings or those of his slaves, just
matter-of-factly recorded daily events without self-consciousness.
Considered himself a man of the Enlightenment, was interested in
botany and horticulture, read books. But the punishments he meted
to his slaves—no different from the punishments other plantation-
owners visited upon their slaves in this probably most brutal of
societies in history—are not light reading. Of course the daily
floggings and the sexual predations on his female slaves and all
that. But also his invented tortures, like having a slave defecate into
another’s mouth and then wiring the mouth shut for hours. How do
you reconcile these practices with Thistlewood’s self-conception,
his civilized Britishness, his intelligent ordinariness? The answer is
obvious, but it says a lot about humanity. It’s all about categorizing
people. One feels sympathy, compassion, empathy to the extent
that one identifies with another, categorizes him as an extension of
one’s self. Blacks were seen as not fully human, etc. The human
capacity for abstraction, for mediation—that most lethal and
magnificent capacity, which has led to humanity’s villainies and
glories—allowed whites to mediate their experiences/“internal-
izations” of blacks with the ideas of inferiority, filthiness, semi-
subhumanity, dirty otherness. Hence, no self-identification of
whites with blacks occurred, and so no pity or compassion. Blacks,
while acknowledged to be human, became for whites effectively
objects (of a nasty sort), like Jews in Nazi Germany. Whites could
do whatever they wanted to them while still retaining in their own
eyes a civilized humanity.
*
The authoritarian personality.— One problem with the average
political “conservative” (or neoconservative; the distinction is no
longer as clear as it once was) in the U.S. is that he has an
emotional attachment to the idea of America, its greatness, so that
if anything is said that might be interpreted as critical of his country
he feels the need to disagree with it and defend America. He is
more committed to his belief in the greatness of his country, a
365
CHRIS WRIGHT
366
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
*
The notion of “stupidity” seems purely polemical and without
substance, but that’s wrong. It is a necessary concept in order to
explain things about people that would otherwise be inexplicable.
Lack of (self-)critical intelligence, lack of talent for abstract
thinking, lack of social awareness or empathic understanding of
people and situations—these are what is usually meant by
“stupidity.” Everyone exhibits stupidity sometimes, but in some
people it is more common than others. A disproportionate number
of political conservatives, for example, are more or less stupid, as
you’ll see if you talk to them. They have trouble understanding
arguments, the rules of logic; they’re less open-minded than
liberals tend to be, less able to understand opposing arguments or
consider facts relatively disinterestedly. Scientific research
confirms this.211 It has to do with the old idea of the authoritarian
personality (which exhibits more stupidity than a relatively “open”
personality does). Another way to say it is that the average
conservative is less objective, rational, empathetic, etc. than the
average liberal. Again, that’s a scientifically demonstrated fact, not
just an insult.
As for radical leftists, they often fall into one of two
categories: the left version of arch-conservatives with whom you
can’t argue, and something that approximates the open-mindedness
211
See, for example, the website
http://2012election.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004818
(accessed October 10, 2012), which has links to twelve peer-reviewed
articles. From the perspective of conservatives, one of the less insulting
findings was that “In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative,
curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly,
conventional, and better organized.”
367
CHRIS WRIGHT
*
Film criticism.— However talented filmmakers are, film itself is
inherently an inferior art form—like photography, though for
mostly different reasons. Theodor Adorno said that “Every visit to
the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and
worse than before.” In part that was directed against the
shallowness of “sociability,” but it applies to film itself too. In a
word, the problem is that when one sits in the dark watching
images and sounds flit by, one is forced to be relatively passive.
And there is something “instantly gratifying” in a vulgar way about
fleeting sounds and images. Even the best movies are....unreal,
separated from the viewer—a flat screen of stuff happening as you
sit there looking at it. There is something more interactive and
more real about theater than film. Also, film is by necessity more
atomizing than other art forms. People sitting in the dark, each in
his own world, looking at electronic images and having noise
blared at them, no performers present, no watching the art enacted
right in front of one, an inorganic-ness....a “splicing together,” an
artificiality about the situation and the art itself. And then the
experience is over and you rub your eyes and try to become active
and whole again. It’s different from watching plays.
More generally, a society saturated by electronic interactions
tends to produce a population of less-than-high intelligence. The
atomism, passiveness, instantaneous absorption of sound-bites,
neglect of sustained reading and of genuine interpersonal
interaction, churns out people who suffer from mental stuntedness.
The increasing incidence of ADD, autism, Asperger syndrome, etc.
is evidence of this, as is the epidemic of shallow, stupid thinking
(especially as regards politics) that seems to get worse year by year.
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The vulgar art form.— Even movies that are supposed to be “real,”
“cool,” “realistic,” like, say, High Fidelity, have little in common
with reality. It’s something about the nature of movies, even
unglamorous ones: they glamorize life. They make it seem better
and more exciting than it is, even if they explicitly set out to show
its gloomy, grimy side. They make you think you’re missing out on
life. After watching High Fidelity right now I feel strangely
depleted and estranged from things, because life just isn’t that
special. That glossy camera-film with the cinematic sheen on it that
Hollywood uses, that special kind of film or those special kinds of
cameras that make everything look so much more glamorous than
homemade videos—it estranges the viewer from his own decidedly
unglossy life. And women and men….women and men are not the
way they are in movies, nor is sex movie-sex (even if the moves are
the same). And seeing how irrational and ordinary real life is makes
you hate it; the idiocy and randomness of who gets whom or who’s
attracted to whom, based as it is on moods, circumstances, lighting,
clothing, timing, drinking… Real life is chance and mundanity;
movie life is, usually, “necessity,” narrative, a telos, fun
meaningfulness, beautiful women, excitement. One wants to escape
one’s life and enter the movie world.
*
The cynic speaks.— This life is not worth a potato, as Byron said
(and Plato, Solomon, Dante, Cervantes, Luther, Rochefoucauld,
Swift, Wesley, Rousseau, and countless others). Think of the
professions, for example. To become (and then to be) a medical
doctor or a lawyer you have to be not “intellectual” but an obedient
drudge. To be a politician you have to be a liar, a panderer, and
driven by power-hunger. To be a successful academic you cannot
challenge institutional conventions—as is true of every other job.
To be a corporate executive you have to be obsessed with cost-
cutting and money-making, and you have to be able to turn your
back on humanity in a hundred different ways. To be a soldier you
have to give up independent-mindedness and let yourself become a
killing machine for hire. To be a scientist you have to be willing to
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*
The silliness of ordinary life. (From 2005.)— Today was an
“adventure,” if you understand that word in a loose sense. It’s a
good story. A long story....
Nancy Goldstein is the head of my internship program. She’s
the one who found me my job at the newspaper. She lives across
the street, though we interns don’t see her often. The first time I
ever saw her was on Hanukkah. She’s Jewish, as are many of my
housemates, and we had a quiet Hanukkah celebration together.
From our phone-conversations I’d expected Goldstein to be a
dominating, confident, modern businesswoman who wears a suit all
the time. I couldn’t have been more wrong. She’s a short, frumpy,
pudgy, unattractive bohemian type, socially unperceptive, an
incessant talker. That was my first impression. Today I was able to
fill out the portrait. Rebecca works for her; two days ago she asked
me if I wanted to pretend to be a Washington Internship Program
staffer for an afternoon. “Uhh… Huh?” She said that Goldstein had
to make a presentation to representatives from the Korean
government who were thinking about sending two hundred interns
to her program. It was a very big deal. Goldstein wanted to give the
best impression possible, which involved renting office space
downtown for the day, pretending it was hers and showing it off,
and hiring fake staffers. Yes. That was her plan. (It’s like
something out of The Sting!) She judged rightly that the Koreans
wouldn’t be impressed with her real headquarters way out in the
suburbs, in her house where dog-stench clings to the furniture. So
she hired John and me to be her accomplices, in addition to
Rebecca and a few other real employees. I went to her house at
around 1:00 today. Her presentation was set to begin at 2:00. She
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*
Cosmic insects.— Yesterday as I was walking through a suburban
neighborhood I heard a chorus of cicadas. It started off slow and
quiet, then crescendoed to an almost deafening roar while
quickening its tempo, and finally sank to a whimper and stopped. It
was an unintelligible noise, insistent and annoying, but brief.
Suddenly I realized that the furious sounds of man’s own history
must seem like the cicadas’ chorus to Earth.
*
The big picture.— Someday, many millennia from now, people
will not distinguish between what we call antiquity and what we
call the modern world; they will both be called “ancient,” as we
call both the Sumerian and the Roman civilizations ancient. The
modern world-system will be the subject of archaeological
excavations. Future historians will write, “Around the time of the
birth of what was called ‘capitalism,’ there were two massive wars
that affected the whole world. Millions of people died. During the
second war, it seems that there was even some sort of elaborate
genocidal system set up to exterminate a group of people called
‘Jews.’” –How vain life seems in the face of time!
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*
God as Shakespeare.— My love for humanity is not admiration of
beauty; it is pity for a tragic hero.
*
The prerequisite for lovingkindness.— Nothing assuages
unhappiness like the thought that others are unhappy too.
Conversely, nothing more delights the happy person than the
thought of others’ happiness.
*
Existentialism as therapy.— It’s ironic that understanding life’s
absurdity can actually ease your pain if you have a lot of it.
Knowing that everyone is in the same metaphysical position as I,
and that time steals everything, helps me tolerate somehow the
emotional pain in which my sense of self is grounded.
*
The origin of hypocrisy.— It’s very easy to judge someone. It’s
very hard to do so and not be a hypocrite.
*
The lament of the ADD-sufferer.— A mere pebble on the tracks
can derail my train of thought.
*
Don’t “love life for its own sake.”— Every great achievement has
its origin in a lack of love for mere life.
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*
Return to an earlier theme.— The Nietzschean, Heideggerian
worry that everything will become unbearably light in the modern
world is only partly right. In a sense, yes, things are “lighter” now
than they were four hundred years ago, which is to say that nihilism
has crept up on us behind our backs. Moreover, this is an essential
component in the unhappiness of the modern person. But this sort
of thing doesn’t last forever; mankind rebounds, it always has. And
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*
On existentialism.— The existentialist emphasis on “anguish over
the inevitability of death” as a cause of humanity’s malaise is
mistaken. Most people feel little anguish at the thought of death. As
for the ones who think they do: they misinterpret their anguish.
While the thought of death no doubt disturbs them, perhaps even to
the point of obsession, their fixation on it is just a symptom of their
fixation on themselves. This is the real problem. This is the real
source of their anguish. A person thoroughly integrated in a
community, so that he is not preoccupied with death. At most, he
occasionally contemplates it and becomes sad for a moment. But
his communal activities ensure that he is mentally healthy,
confident and happy.
Likewise, the emphasis on humans’ knowledge of the
absurdity of existence, of its contingency, is misguided. This
knowledge is not what causes neuroses or any other psychological
ailments. A preoccupation with what may, admittedly, be an
“objective truth” of contingency and “absurdity” is symptomatic of
a deeper sickness: the loss of community. The preoccupation with
absurdity does not cause this loss, as many people think; it results
from it. Goethe was right that too-deep thinking betokens a kind of
sickness;—it is the dwelling on absurdity, not the absurdity itself,
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*
Insights from literature on how to live.— The Unbearable
Lightness of Being is unlike other novels I’ve read. I like the
philosophical digressions that aren’t really digressions because they
fit so well into the self-consciousness of the book and its being a
“novel of ideas” rather than characters and plot—or characters only
insofar as they illustrate ideas. And the end is touching. The two
main characters find happiness—they wish for repetition,212 which
(wish) is how Kundera defines happiness—wish for the repetition
of their life in the countryside, its eternal repetition, because they’re
together and away from the vagaries of chance and they’ve finally
found peace. So Kundera says that although we cannot live again
and again eternally and thereby have a “weighty” life, if we desire
this situation forever we’ll escape from unbearable lightness and
find meaningful happiness. (Cf. Nietzsche.) And he says also that
although the path our lives take is horribly contingent, contingency
can lead us to happiness, as it did Tomas and Tereza, even if it
forces us to abandon what seems to be the “Es muss sein!” of our
fate, as Tomas was forced to give up his destiny of practicing
medicine by a series of chances that started with Tereza’s arrival in
his life. Indeed, such chances can conceivably make us happier
than following our inner imperatives can—as Tomas was unhappy
being an “epic womanizer,” even if he was addicted to it. But T.
and T.’s life together was governed not only by lightness but also
weight, by constant doubts about each other’s love, by unbearable
pain (in Tereza) and unbearable compassion (in Tomas)—and
hence both lightness and weight were essential in guiding them to
happiness. On the other hand, Sabina the coquette was forever
unhappy with her “light” life, her betrayals and lack of lasting
attachments—and Franz, her lover, was unhappy with the weight of
his loyalty to Sabina’s memory, the weight of his love, and in the
212
That’s the meaning of the butterfly flying in circles around their room.
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*
On Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning.— Frankl
(the founder of logotherapy) writes that when he lost the
manuscript of his nearly completed book in Auschwitz he asked
himself if his life was thereby rendered meaningless. After all, if he
died in the camp, which he thought he would, he would leave no
mark on the world—no books, no children. But he realized that the
remainder of his life could still be meaningful if he treated his
imprisonment as a chance to live his thoughts instead of merely
writing them down. Auschwitz became for him a challenge, a way
to test himself, and that’s how he reconciled himself to it. When I
read that I thought about my own desire to leave something behind
me after death and understood for the thousandth time how
pointless it is. To seek any kind of immortality through recognition
(which is the only way humans can achieve “immortality”) is
misguided;—or, rather, to think that only thereby is one’s life
meaningful is misguided. It doesn’t matter if one’s achievements
are lost when one dies or if they endure for millennia, influencing
all of history; the point is that, no matter what, they will eventually
be forgotten. When that happens is irrelevant. Whether right away
or in a million years, the event means the end of immortality; and
when it happens, all the fame one has already achieved means
213
But it’s a “light” meaning, not a heavy one. A simple acceptance and
love of the way things are. Living according to a “mission” (such as
Tomas’s medical vocation) would be a heavy meaning, and Tomas
condemns the idea.
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*
A final thought.— As a result of last night’s entry [directly above]
(which meant more to me than to you because I intuited it), I’ve
realized that I crave understanding not primarily for the sake of
communicating it (i.e., for fame or out of altruism) but for my own
sake. If I were alone in the world I would in fact work harder to
understand it than I do now, rather than give up from my awareness
of death and futility. –That’s the test of the true Yes-sayer to life:
that he try to achieve as much as possible despite knowing that
upon his death all he has done will be forgotten. For then he’s
living his whole life in life, not comforting himself by imagining a
Beyond (whether in Heaven or on an Earth that will continue to be
occupied by people in whose memories he hopes to live).
Nietzsche’s test—viz., that one desire eternal recurrence—has more
of the precision of a categorical imperative, but it’s also impossible
to live up to—so that no one (including himself) is a Yes-sayer by
his standards, except in certain moments. Moreover, it creates the
debilitating burden of feeling the need to affirm everything, and to
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ask oneself in every instant “Do I will this eternally?” Amor fati—
amor fati has nothing to do with eternity. It has to do with self-
respect, compassion, love, and living life to the fullest.
381
Chapter 4
On Christianity
Dear God
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*
“God is dead.”— Anyone who disagrees with Nietzsche has one
foot in the Middle Ages. (Religion is residual.)
*
Nietzsche said it best.— “When we hear the ancient bells growling
on a Sunday morning we ask ourselves: Is it really possible! This,
for a Jew, crucified 2000 years ago, who said he was God’s son?
The proof of such a claim is lacking. Certainly the Christian
religion is an antiquity projected into our times from remote
prehistory; and the fact that the claim is believed—whereas one is
otherwise so strict in examining pretensions—is perhaps the most
ancient piece of this heritage. A god who begets children with a
mortal woman; a sage who bids men work no more, have no more
courts, but look for the signs of the impending end of the world; a
justice that accepts the innocent as a vicarious sacrifice; someone
who orders his disciples to drink his blood; prayers for miraculous
interventions; sins perpetrated against a god, atoned for by a god;
fear of a beyond to which death is the portal; the form of the cross
as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and
ignominy of the cross—how ghoulishly all this touches us, as if
from the tomb of a primeval past! Can one believe that such things
are still believed?”
*
A very strange idea.— I’d like to know who first conceived this
notion.— Science and religion are compatible: one is concerned
with reason, the other with faith. They have two separate mental
“spheres” that are unrelated, and hence their claims can be believed
at the same time without the believer’s being embroiled in
contradictions. It is consistent to believe both that the world was
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created six thousand years ago and that it was created fourteen
billion years ago—that a man named Jesus Christ was once
resurrected and that resurrection is impossible—that a woman
named Mary gave birth to a child without having had sex first and
that sex is necessary for a woman to give birth to a child—that
there is a place where we reside after death called “heaven” and
that such an idea is senseless. Reason rejects ideas that faith
salvages merely by virtue of naming them “objects of faith.” If
they’re “objects of faith”…then it is inconceivable for anything to
be wrong with them! By applying the magical phrase “object of
faith” to any idea, one can raise it to such a level of intellectual
respectability that even to argue against it is futile. –Even some
scientists and philosophers subscribe to the belief!
*
Remarks overheard in the subway.— Two men sat down next to
me, clearly of the blue-collar class—probably from a slummy part
of the city—one of them holding a copy of a newspaper on which
was printed a giant, unflattering photograph of Joe Ratzinger. The
man looked at it. “That the new pope?” “Yup.” “He ain’t gonna last
long.” “They keep picking these dudes that ain’t gonna last long.”
Then they talked about basketball. —I realized that, sometimes, the
less education one has, the more sensible one is.
*
On Christian irrationality.— Once in a while I read a blog post or a
letter-to-the-editor by Richard Dawkins. He takes it upon himself to
use rational argumentation to try to convince Christians that they’re
wrong. I would suggest to him that he give it up. Let history deal
with Christians; philosophers and scientists will get nowhere with
them. How can you argue with people the premise of whose belief-
system (insofar as they really believe it) is that evidence counts for
nothing and blind devotion is the highest virtue? The “blindness”
part is absolutely essential to Christianity—not because one has to
be blind in order to believe in it, but because faith is supposed to be
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*
On women’s affinity for religion.— In The Rise of Christianity
(1997), Rodney Stark notes that “women in many different times
and places seem to be far more responsive than men to religion.”
For example, in early Christian times women were more likely than
men to convert to the new religion. In modern times, it has been
reported that two-thirds of the Shakers were women, 75 percent of
Christian Scientists in the early 20th century were women, 60
percent of Theosophists, Swedenborgians and Spiritualists were
women, and the majority of new Protestants in Latin America are
women. So, why is this the case?
The answer isn’t hard to think of. First of all, new religions,
especially the religions that succeed, tend to promote equality, in
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*
In the Piazza of San Marco in Florence is a church in which
lies the dried-out corpse of Saint Antonino from the fifteenth
century, his hands folded on his chest in a well-lit glass tomb. The
sight is macabre. Above and behind him and all over the church are
models of Jesus’s crucifixion, this man being tortured to death on a
wooden cross with blood pouring from his hands and his pierced
ribs. The church is cavernous and dark, with heavenly art and
stained glass windows lulling the beholder into a state of awe
intensified by the enforced silence, the whispering, the candles, the
pews for praying on your knees with your head lowered and your
hands clasped, and the “mass-iveness” of it all. And there are the
rituals, the imbibing of wine (Christ’s blood) and the wafer
(Christ’s flesh), and numerous such otherworldly, morbid rituals.
And you realize that Catholicism is a religion of death. It is
immersion in the past, preservation of the past and the dead,
worship of the sphere of after-death, rejection of the worldly and
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*
Religion and wonder.— I don’t understand the popular belief that
religion encourages a state of wonder in the believer. If I thought
there were a God I would lose my wonder, or most of it. I’d think,
“Oh well, an intelligent being designed all this, so it isn’t that
amazing after all.” God himself would remain something of a
mystery, but not a very exciting one. His status as an intelligent
being would mean that he is just me, on a grander scale. My awe of
him would be little more than glorified respect. Moreover, knowing
that someone else understood the universe—that he had created the
universe—would sap my wonder of grandeur. It would no longer
implicitly glorify me, because I would know that I was absolutely
inferior to someone. (Part of the excitement of feeling wonder is
that it half-consciously places the wonderer on a pedestal in his
own mind, as someone capable of a rarefied intellectual emotion. If
he knows that his object of wonder has been intentionally designed,
there is not an implicit contrast between him and an inferior brute
force called “chance,” and so he cannot implicitly respect himself
by virtue of this contrast.) My place in the cosmos would be
demoted to that of a little being who was too insignificant to
understand his Master: my awe would amount to the plea, “Tell
me, please, Excellency, how you did all this! I’m exceedingly
curious and very impressed.” In general, everything would be less
miraculous than it really is: it would be explainable in terms of
intelligence and design and other such mundane concepts.
*
Religion as a hypothesis.— Atheists may, after all, be wrong. God
may be laughing at me even as I write this. “Ha!” he chuckles.
“Guess where you’re going in sixty years!” But I laugh right back
at him, “Even if you exist, we don’t need you! At this stage of
history you’re an afterthought. We’re doing a fine job of
understanding the world without having to invoke a Divine
Paradox. Science has proven its power; religion has no arguments
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in its favor, being indeed by its nature opposed to the search for
evidence. We might as well ignore it.”
*
Religion as a Platonic “Noble Lie.”— People sometimes say that
religion is necessary to ground morality. Without it, anarchy would
reign. People would have no reason to behave morally; everyone
would be selfish, and life would be nasty, brutish, and short. –Now,
in the strict sense of “morality”—as consisting of duties or
imperatives (“It’s absolutely wrong to lie, wrong to kill,” not
merely “bad”)—they’re right that morality cannot have a granite
foundation without God or some such concept. Imperatives are
half-meaningless if they don’t have some sort of categorical or
metaphysical necessity. (The only two alternatives to God as a
solid foundation of morality are Kant’s categorical imperative and
the idea that morality consists of “objective truths” about the world,
but they fail for reasons I won’t go into.) Without such necessity, it
makes perfect rational sense for moral imperatives to be debated
endlessly and qualified and modified so much that in the end
morality deteriorates into a morass of conflicting intuitions and
over-subtle arguments of the kind that fill thousands of volumes of
philosophical literature. So we do need God, or something similarly
compelling, in order for there to be obvious, absolutely binding,
true moral imperatives. But we don’t need him for social order.
Only someone with no knowledge of anthropology could think
otherwise. There are such things as communal sanctions on actions,
communal rewards and punishments. Do you really think most
people are so desperate for God’s approval that they live morally
only for his sake? Do you think that if, by some miracle, Americans
suddenly acquired the capacity for reason and realized they
shouldn’t believe in God, they would all start dancing around the
streets vandalizing and murdering and—sin of all sins!—having
sex? I think not. Most people care infinitely less about abstract
metaphysical concepts than social approval. They’ll always
basically pay heed to social norms, if only because they don’t want
to spend their lives in literal or metaphorical solitary confinement.
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*
The “God gene”; or, religion as biologically innate.— Idiocy.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world profess not to
have a religion. The ones who do are mostly hypocrites who pay
lip-service to God for the sake of social acceptance or money and
power. (Politicians come to mind.) It may be that there is a kind of
“spiritual” consciousness or hope ingrained in us—something like
the need for “existential meaning”—but this can be manifested in a
variety of ways, many of them irreligious. In fact, I think that what
this spiritual desire amounts to is the need for community. Life
seems meaningless when one has insufficient recognition from
others; it seems meaningful when one is sated with love and
respect. The human need for community (belongingness) often
goes unfulfilled in “civilized” society, which is why substitute
transcendent communities were born in religions like Christianity
and Islam.
*
The greatest country in history.— Americans fetishize all seven of
the deadly sins. Greed: look at Wall Street and the rest of corporate
America and politics. Sloth: television is no longer just the masses’
opiate; it is, in a sense, reality. Gluttony: Americans are fatter than
any people in history. Vanity: women have become nothing but
creatures of their bodies, and the cult of appearance is corrupting
men too. (The obsession with “working out.”) Lust: pop culture
revolves around sex. Envy: movies, magazines, individualistic
ideologies all encourage interpersonal comparisons and
dissatisfaction. Pride: Americans as such are at least as arrogant as
Romans were in their day. –No wonder Christians have their
persecution-complex! They can see that their religion has become
irrelevant.
*
A misadventure.— At lunch in the campus center I saw a flyer
advertising an event tonight having something to do with dating
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and sex. I thought ‘Sure, why not’ and went to it. Maybe I’d meet
somebody. Turns out it was a meeting for members of some weird
underground cult that does nothing but preach about how inferior
we all are to some guy named “Jesus Christ.” I felt like Indiana
Jones in that scene in The Temple of Doom when he observes the
ritual of the Thugee cult—the zombies intoning meaningless
sounds as a human is sacrificed into the fire pit. “No one’s seen
anything like this for a hundred years!” That’s what I was thinking.
It began innocently enough. I walked into the large room,
which was absurdly empty (evidently the cult isn’t very popular),
and stood there wondering what I’d got myself into. I didn’t yet
know it was a Christian Conference, but I could tell I was about to
be underwhelmed. Some girl involved with the show came up to
me and started a conversation. Quite pleasant. We were both
friendly; I was starting to think that maybe this wouldn’t be so bad
after all—when, in answer to my question about what all the
musical instruments on the stage were for, she said “We’re going to
start out with some worship music.” A single thought flashed
through my mind: ‘Uh-oh.’ “Worship music?” I asked. “Well,
no....” she said, “just some music.” Hm. A few minutes later
another guy came over and introduced himself—very friendly
again—and then two other guys—very friendly. I was getting
suspicious. After I’d heard a few references to Christianity, my
suspicions were confirmed. “So....this is sort of a religious thing?” I
asked. “Yes!”, with an amused smile. Then it took off. I was told
all about this little group that goes around spreading the Word, and
I was told to go to Bible study tomorrow at noon, and there’s a
fancy dinner tomorrow night, and etc. Then the pastor came over
and we talked. Finally the production began—with half an hour of
songs and prayers about how unworthy we are of God’s love. It
was a sing-along; we stood up and clapped along and sang to the
lyrics on the video screen in front of us. (It was a Powerpoint
presentation.) Guitar, synthesizer, bongo drums, accompanists with
microphones. Ugh. Those songs lasted forever! Each was at least
eight minutes long. And there were only about two verses to each
song, so we sang each verse about ten times. Audience members
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were closing their eyes, raising their hands to the heavens and
keeping them suspended in air for minutes at a time, bowing their
heads and saying “In Jesus name! In Jesus name!” as the rest of us
kept the melody going. Twenty-five minutes into it I got to thinking
that it wouldn’t be so hard after all to come to believe in this stuff if
it was regularly pounded into you like this. Still, I could see that
they meant well, and that they were good people. ‘These are the
good Christians,’ I thought, ‘the ones it’s easy to forget about.’ -
That was a rather naïve opinion, as I came to realize.
It all stayed innocent and somewhat charming for a while
longer. There was a mimed drama that portrayed Jesus (dressed in
white with a red paper-heart stuck on his chest and paper hearts
taped to his palms that you could see when he raised his arms in
that expansive “I love all of you”-way) saving four tormented souls
(dressed in black with masks on their faces;—I didn’t catch the
symbolism)—by slapping hearts onto their chests, which caused
them to jump up and down with glee and whisk their masks off and
dance around the stage. ‘At least their intentions are good,’ I
thought again.
Then it was time for the entrée. Our guest speaker was going
to talk about sex and love in our sinful society—“Is true love still
possible?” etc. (I’ll spare you the suspense: yes.) Skilled
speechifier that he was, he started off with jokes to lighten the
mood. Here’s a sample: There were two brooms in a closet. They
were getting married. So there was a bride broom and a groom
broom. (That drew laughs.) They went to a party shortly before
their wedding; the groom broom made some remark that I’ve
forgotten (it had something to do with asking his betrothed if he
could “whisk her away”), to which the bride broom responded with
“Are you kidding?! We haven’t even swept together yet!” Har-har.
That provoked the universally accepted reaction to bad-pun jokes: a
collective good-natured “Awwwhh!” (like: “Oh man that was bad,
ha ha, but it was funny too, ha ha”), a few chuckles, and a lot of
turning-of-heads-to-neighbors-and-shaking-of-heads while
smiling;—“Aww, that mischievous ol’ guest speaker with his bad-
pun jokes!”
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but obviously missionary zeal was not foreign to them. And what
else is missionary zeal but intolerance of dissent? That’s clearly the
motivation behind it most of the time—the desire to impose oneself
on the other. In the 1920s these people would have lived in
Heavenly Hillsboro and happily thrown the free-thinking heretic
into jail. All because of their infinite love, their eternal love. It was
all right there below the surface. This absolute faith in their own
rightness.... And yet they were so agreeable as conversationalists,
and I could see they were fundamentally kind! This is the paradox
that has always disturbed me. The intermixture of good and bad, a
mixture so perfect that there’s really no distinguishing between the
good and the bad. The bad exists in the good and vice versa.
Equally frightening: I can sense the rudiments of hateful
missionary zeal within myself. As I walked home tonight, feeling
so corrupted—almost physiologically corrupted—that I could think
of little else but the Mozart I’d be listening to in a moment, I could
tell that I had the potential for atheistic fanaticism. I knew that the
only reason I’d never succumb to fanaticism is that I’m aware of
my fanaticism. My self-consciousness is what prevents me from
sliding into the pit of disguised jihadism.
214
One reason Christianity is so powerful is that it first burdens people
with guilt and then gives them the means to overcome it. It separates
them from the community (with God, etc.) only to draw them more
closely into it. (Guilt is just a form of isolation, of self-fixation.) That is, it
creates a community by promising that only through this community can
one reach the ideal, eternal community—by at least partially transcending
one’s original guilt (“sin”), which is essentially one’s original
individuality or isolation. For sin is just the stain of original separateness.
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*
The true “anti-Christs.”— It’s ironic that Christians, who pride
themselves on being the most righteous people in the world, think
that the existence of God is a necessary postulate for there to be
morality. For what they’re saying is: “I live morally only for the
sake of God, i.e., because I want to go to heaven.” Atheists, on the
other hand, don’t think that God is necessary for morality. So, what
they’re saying is: “I live morally not for the sake of going to
heaven but because it’s the right thing to do.” –And Christians
think they’re more “righteous” than atheists!
*
Christianity updated.— One of the many ironies about
contemporary Christians is that they tend to be supportive of
capitalism. This isn’t surprising: from the time of Emperor
Constantine, the Church has been allied with established power-
structures, which have found it useful as a way to keep the masses
obedient. So Christianity accommodated itself to the Roman
Empire, then to feudalism, then to royal absolutism in early modern
Europe, and then to modern capitalism. Nothing surprising in this;
ideologies adapt themselves to material realities. It is, however,
strictly absurd for a Christian to ally himself with business or “the
market” and loathe the ideas of socialism and communism. On the
one hand you have a society that valorizes greed, ruthlessness,
profit-making at the expense of human welfare, exploitation of
billions, and the accumulation of wealth, none of which is
particularly consistent with Jesus’s love of the poor, of the cast-off,
and his admonition that it is easier for a camel to go through the
eye of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. On the other
hand you have socialism, the idea of economic democracy, a
society in which working people control their own economic
activity. Or communism, a society organized by the slogan “From
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*
A moment of charity to Christianity.— Karl Marx once said, “After
all, we can forgive Christianity much because it taught us to love
children.” Almost unbelievably, the factual part of that statement is
right. Christianity did have such an effect on the Western world.
Throughout antiquity, children had been thought to have little or no
value. In Rome, fathers had absolute authority over their children:
they were legally permitted to kill them for any reason, even on a
whim. Infanticides were rife all over the Mediterranean. Children
were regularly sold into slavery. I can’t think of any references in
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*
I attended my first Episcopalian service last night. It was
Maundy Thursday, so we did the whole foot-washing thing and
then the Eucharist, etc. Endless singing and antiphonal rituals,
responses, prayers. A certain pungent beauty in the foot-washing,
beautiful symbolism. But how foreign it all is to the spirit of the
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*
Civilization and the Jews.— Monotheism is the predominant form
of religion today. Aside from Zoroastrianism, which basically died
out long ago, Judaism is the oldest form of monotheism.
Christianity was conceived by Jews, and Islam was inspired by the
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*
Anti-Comte.— Polytheism is, in some ways, more civilized than
monotheism. Egypt, Rome, Greece, and the other polytheistic
civilizations never fought wars for the sake of religion, as
Christians, Muslims, and Jews have. Instead they fought for the
more sensible motive of acquiring territory and wealth. They
lacked the moralistic fanaticism of the Judaic tradition, probably
because, first, it is hard to associate a single morality with a
heterogeneous community of gods and, second, these gods,
perpetually misbehaving, are not great role-models, as are Allah
and YHWH and Jesus Christ. They are reflections of humanity and
its weaknesses, and so to fight for the sake of spreading their creeds
would be senseless. Polytheism is therefore, in some ways, more
humanistic, life-affirming, and—ironically—peaceful than
monotheism.
*
India, birthplace of philosophy.— I have great respect for the
Hindu tradition in religion. It is far more profound than the Judaic
tradition. Reading the Vedas, especially the Upanishads, and the
Bhagavad-Gita and other such works is intrinsically ennobling; one
feels as if one is communicating with the ineffable. All the
grandness and mystery of man’s origins are printed right there on
the page. The Ganges flows under one’s eyes, the Himalayas are
created anew. A magnificent naïveté somehow stretches the
sentences into infinity, to a comparable vastness with the universe
(read the books yourself and you’ll see I’m not exaggerating)—a
perception attributable to the poetic refrains, the pithiness of the
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*
When East first met West.— It is well-known that Christianity was
not a particularly unique thing in Hellenistic times, that it was just
one of the many mystery religions that proliferated in the time of
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CHRIS WRIGHT
*
In the light of history, it seems downright immoral to believe
in God. In order to honor the memory of the billions who have
lived and died horribly, the least we can do is to give up the idea of
a just and merciful God. —The Holocaust happened and people
still believe in God! It’s appalling.
*
The danger of religious faith is that it’s supposed to be—or it
can be seen as—above morality. Witness the story of Abraham.
Faith justifies anything: “I have faith that it’s all for the best. I have
faith in God and eternity.” The road to hell…
Kierkegaard’s “teleological suspension of the ethical.” “Faith
is the paradox that the single individual is higher than the
universal.” According to his Fear and Trembling, the ethical has to
do with the common good; faith has to do with the individual’s
salvation, which is so little related to ethics that it can prescribe
absolutely unethical courses of action. But if this is faith, then
Osama bin Laden is an exemplar of faith, like Abraham. He is the
logical conclusion of Abraham’s philosophy of faith. (Or, if not bin
Laden, since there are differences between his situation and
Abraham’s, then someone who murders his family and all his
friends for the sake of God and his own eternal salvation.) Contrary
to Fear and Trembling, I think that true faith, the good kind, does
not involve a suspension of the ethical. On the contrary, it is little
else but a transcendentally motivated consummation of the ethical.
Abraham’s faith is not Jesus’s (as Fear and Trembling seems to
imply); it is a degrading, submissive, slavish faith. A philosophy
not of love but of submission.
*
Nietzsche was right. Again.— Anyone who is strong enough to
accept suffering should not accept Buddhism, or any other religion.
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*
A whisper from the divine.— People sometimes wonder why God
is silent. They devote themselves to him, they supplicate tearfully
for the sake of a beloved one, but he doesn’t answer. In their agony,
in their loneliness, they may come to doubt his existence. But I say,
“Take heart, faithless one. Listen to the Adagietto from Mahler’s
fifth symphony. God will be speaking to you. And he will heal
you.”
405
Chapter 5
On Music
*
On orchestras.— The image of an orchestra playing the third
movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony brings tears to one’s
eyes. Imagine a multitude of musicians playing in such exquisite
synchronicity that they are one being, one supra-human being,
composed of sounds as humans are composed of cells, a being that
exists only in its self-expression, that vanishes when the
instruments are put down but is vitally alive when they are picked
up, that is the pure movement of a divine mind externalized.
Imagine the cooperation, the sensitivity, the feeling for the sublime
without which this being could not exist. Imagine the discipline
necessary to submerge oneself so completely in collective
harmony....
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*
No joy without sorrow.— The heights appear as such only when
you look at them from the depths. To test the truth of that
hypothesis, I suggest you listen to pop music (in the ‘Britney
Spears’ sense) for a few minutes; then listen to Franz Liszt’s piece
Les Préludes. If you have a poetic soul, the sudden change from
ingesting dirt to imbibing a vintage wine will intoxicate you. Your
appetite for life will grow tremendously. You may not be able to
contain your enthusiasm; your heart will leap to your throat and
you’ll start shouting senseless noises of jubilation. The finale of
Liszt’s piece may give you a heart attack: the notes rushing to their
climax, pounding on your ears like drums, and then the single horn
that blares a single note (—that note which is both a call to battle
and a signal of victory!—) as the rest of the orchestra continues its
climb to the final triumphant chords… You’ll realize that pop
music is redeemed by virtue of its function as a reminder of the
muck that humans can and must rise above in order to achieve
moments of immortality.
215
His monumental human dignity demands that he be called by his whole
name.
216
He even has something for heavy metal, not to mention jazz.
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*
Pop vs. classical.— The problem with most popular music is that
once you hear it…you’ve heard it. It’s all right there, in the open,
buck-naked, indiscreet and immodest, lacking all subterranean
methods of persuasion. It says, “Here I am! Take me or leave me,
but be quick about it!” With the best classical music, on the other
hand, when you hear it you’ve only just begun to hear it. There is a
world beneath the sound. Secrets compounded on secrets, a
tormented and profligate past, a creation of order out of chaos, an
instinctive knowledge of mathematics that’s tastefully hidden,
rhetorical devices unknown to the listener but dominating him—all
of which are concealed behind a simple and spontaneous idealism.
In a sense it’s more life-affirming than popular music.
*
A prerequisite for aesthetic appreciation.— Why do most people
not like classical music? I’ve never understood it. I’ve even tried to
imagine being another person just to imagine not liking Chopin.
People say it’s because such music is “boring,” or because it’s “too
quiet.” But this is precisely what I don’t understand. Much of it, I
admit, is indeed ponderous—Wagner comes to mind, and Richard
Strauss, and some Brahms—but how can such pieces as
Tchaikovsky’s first piano concerto not thrill the listener, or such
pieces as Chopin’s Nocturne in D-flat (Op. 27, No. 2) not transport
him to a realm of aristocratic delicacy of feeling, or such pieces as
the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony not make
him want to dance around the room? I suppose part of the answer is
that, regarding any kind of music, you must first become
“acclimated” to it through repeated contact before you know how
to interpret it—before you’re “open” enough to it to allow it to
govern the way you feel while listening. You have to have
assimilated it. This is why I truly enjoy a piece of music only after
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*
From a YouTube comment on Bach’s “Art of the Fugue.”— “It’s
amazing that one man could write this, another perform it, and yet a
third could design cluster bombs disguised as children’s toys to be
dropped by the USAF in Iraq.”
*
Ferruccio Busoni’s piano transcriptions of Bach are
magnificent, but Glenn Gould may have been right that they also
represent corruptions of the original pristine structures, the
musical-logical structures. They romanticize the music,
sentimentalize it, aggrandize it, exaggerate it, thus depriving it of
its pristine classical quality. I love Hélène Grimaud’s version of the
Chaconne (you can watch it on YouTube), but I almost feel as if I
shouldn’t love it. For what exactly do I love about it? The epicness,
the emotionalness, the sublime besottedness—intoxicating. And the
loudness. The dynamic contrasts; it’s all about the dynamics. But
that ain’t Bach. Bach wasn’t all about the dynamics, or thick, lush
sound. The Chaconne is for solo violin! It’s melodic, contrapuntal;
but with Busoni, everything’s harmonic. It’s “Wagner meets
Bach.” Insofar as there is anguish in Bach’s Chaconne, it is subtle
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*
Bach vs. Beethoven.— Glenn Gould was probably right that
Bachian polyphony and contrapuntalism is on a higher spiritual
(and intellectual) plane than later homophony, be it in Mozart,
Beethoven, Schubert, or whomever. It’s more pure, less
emotional—less tainted by association with the earthly.
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*
On the proper way to listen to music.— The second movement of
Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, the passage from measures 86 to
90.217 It makes me think of Matthew 26: 36-46 and 75—not of the
words but of the situation. The mortality of beauty. The sorrow of
love, and the long sighs; yet the serenity—the serenity of
forgiveness. But only if my headphones are of good quality: I’m
pressing them hard against my ears, the volume on maximum; my
teeth are clenched because I have never encountered anything quite
so painful as this music. Repeating it ten times, twenty times.
Crying, of course. The violins descending in broken thirds, the
violas sympathizing with them, and the flutes and oboes agreeing
pithily, and then the gentle pluck of the bass after its silence,
conscious that the resonance of its contribution consists in its
laconic authority; but the oboes and flutes are swept up in the
current and, satisfied no longer with passive assent, converse
together lyrically, the violins too murmuring trills, sweet and light;
the bassoons and clarinets are aroused to song, exhorting their
companions with their poetry, and as the bass is carried away by
this love for all that is, all is submerged in a purple cloud of
harmony. A melody would disrupt the balance; harmony is
everything, and there are no individuals.
217
Pierre Monteux’s interpretation.
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999
the Prelude to
a minor sadness
guitar-strummed Bachishly
in my wraith-like, waif-like soul
that shudders on the major third
after minutes of minor sadness
and thinks of the virgin’s quiver in her
expectant naked lover’s silent arms,
the soundlessness of Venice at dawn,
the flap of the butterfly’s wing,
the dying gasp of Jesus,
the sweet surcease of strife
and we are at one
in the forlorn
999
*
Aufschwung
Schumann,
like Icarus,
flew too close to the sun;
his sanity melted and he
died young.
*
The death of a magnificent human being.— From a book of
reminiscences on Tchaikovsky: “Tolstoy says, ‘Tchaikovsky’s
dead’—and two huge tears rolled down his great cheeks.” (My
italics.) I just listened to the Sixth Symphony, which was
Tchaikovsky’s farewell to the world. Without exaggeration, it’s the
most devastating piece I’ve ever heard. (Even on my miserable
little headphones.) When I first heard it years ago I didn’t like it,
and it’s taken me awhile to get used to it, but now that I have I love
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it. The first movement in particular affects me. The passage in the
middle that starts with the epic crescendo on the timpani and
continues on to the furious trombones and/or tubas—dum duuuum,
dadaaaa!—that passage is colossal. Paralyzing. I want to buy a
stereo-system just to listen to it. It sounds like the end of the world.
And then the romantic melody with the glissando in the strings,
after the world has ended.... And finally the plucked diatonic
descent under the cadence in the brass and woodwinds, capacious
as joy in sorrow....
The end of the last movement is quite shattering too. The dead
pulses in the double bass, and the dark stabbings of life’s last
flickers, and the final four heartbeats, and then death. Those pulses
sound like time, the tickings of mortality—death calling
you....“bump bump, bump bump, bump bump....” The two lines in
the music, the underworld tickings and the descending melody, are
death and life, inevitability and the final hopeless succumbing to it.
Those ticks really do sound like inevitability. They just keep going,
undisturbed by the drama playing out above them, patiently waiting
to claim their own.
Tchaikovsky knew life, and he knew death.
*
A note for historians.— The music of each era characterizes that
era’s attitude toward life. (Think of Baroque music, the most virile
ever written. Handel’s “Arrival of the Queen of the Sheba.” The
magnificent vitality of the age is reflected in its music.)
*
Criteria for musical worth.— Just as I judge, broadly speaking, the
degree of worthlessness of a pop song by the degree to which I can
hear “Money!” (or “Kitsch!”) shouted through the music, so I
consider the spiritual worth of a piece of classical music to be
inversely proportional to the music’s expression of boredom and
aimlessness. There is no boredom in Beethoven; impressionism, by
contrast, is saturated with it. The whole-tone scale is musical
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*
Leonard Bernstein on the history of modern music.— Watching
videos on YouTube of Bernstein’s Norton Lectures in 1973.
Excursions into music theory, history, and appreciation. He makes
a lot of good points in the first lecture—for example, that the
reason for twelve notes in the chromatic scale is that the circle of
fifths, which arises out of the harmonic series (overtones—you play
C, there’s a G overtone, etc.), gives you twelve tones. (C, F, B-flat,
E-flat, A-flat, D-flat, G-flat, B, E, A, D, G.) It’s fascinating that
both the diachronic and the chromatic—and of course the
pentatonic—scales have their source in the nature of the harmonic
series. Bernstein is right that, just as humans have a Universal
Grammar, so they have something like a Universal Musical
Grammar, so to speak, which can be expressed in different
“languages” (different types of music, types of scales, modes,
harmonies). Obviously the parallel with language isn’t perfect, but
it’s suggestive.
In the succeeding lectures, Bernstein takes the analogy with
language too far. Goes into Chomskyan linguistics, tries to apply it
to music, and things get a little silly. And it goes on with his
incredibly extensive application of literary devices—metaphor,
alliteration, anaphora, repetition, etc.—to music. Everywhere he
sees “transformations,” as in deletions, augmentations, inversions,
and so on—and those certainly do exist, indeed are of the essence
of good music, but to call them “Chomskyan” transformations is a
stretch. He is right, though, to place repetition at the foundation of
music.
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CHRIS WRIGHT
218
“Phonologically”—‘What key are we in?’—and “syntact-ically”—
‘What’s the meter? Where’s the first beat?’ And “semantically” too, I
guess. But I wouldn’t take these linguistic terms too seriously.
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Liszt, and many others. They would play around the edges of
tonality, bring rootlessness to bear on rootedness.
Of all the serialist composers, Alban Berg was the most
successful at writing music that could appeal to people. He
sometimes managed, unlike Schoenberg and the others, to reconcile
or fuse the twelve-tone system with tonality (tonal intervals, regular
rhythms, etc.) in such a way that his music could be emotionally
compelling to at least a fraction of the public. It helped that he had
a greater dramatic sense than other composers, as manifested in
Wozzeck and his violin concerto.
Bernstein’s thoughts on Mahler are typically illuminating. I’ll
quote only a few. “....I had hoped to reach the essence of the tonal
crisis through examining [Mahler’s] non-resolution of tensions [in
the 9th symphony], his reluctant attempts to let go of tonality—all
of which does shed further light on the inevitable split that was to
occur between Schoenberg and Stravinsky. And so I picked up the
score again after some years away from it, filled with the sense of
Mahler’s torture at knowing he was the end of the line, the last
point in the great symphonic arc that began with Haydn and Mozart
and finished with him.... But while re-studying this work,
especially the final movement, I found more answers than I’d
expected, as we always do when we return to the study of a great
work. And the most startling answer, the most important one
because it illuminates our whole century from then to now, is
this—that ours is the century of death, and Mahler is its musical
prophet....” Great eloquence follows on the tragedy of the 20th
century. And Mahler, he thinks, hypersensitive Mahler,
instinctively foresaw it all.
But to return to Schoenberg vs. Stravinsky. “While
Schoenberg was dedicating himself to saving music by continuing
that great subjective tradition, the chromatic, romantic tradition,
Stravinsky was presiding over a wholly new movement heralding a
brilliant new group of composers.... What the great Igor did over
that forty-some-year period was to keep tonality fresh by one
means or another.” In particular, he reacted against the “almost
morbid subjectivism” of German romantic music from Wagner to
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CHRIS WRIGHT
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219
To sum up, art should not be alienating. It should, to a great extent, be
democratic—as should everything in life, because “democratic” means
“human.” The elitism of most 20th-century classical composers was
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*
Art and beauty.— Franz Schubert, the melodist par excellence,
was incredible for another reason besides his melodies: his later
pieces change keys more often than those of any other composer.
He was, indeed, an ancestor of the atonalists. The difference
between him and them is that his concern throughout was to create
beauty, while theirs was to create something intellectually
interesting. He was guided by instinct; they were guided, to a great
extent, by self-consciousness. Ironically, this fact in itself makes
their music less interesting than his. For in his we hear something
unconscious speaking to us: phrases are organically interconnected,
growing out of one another almost as steps in a mathematical proof
grow out of one another. (Bach’s music is an even better example.)
A world beyond our ken speaks to us, a mathematical and physical
world. With atonalism, on the other hand, there is not the same
inner order; there is instead a stitching-together, a self-conscious
patching of phrases onto one another. We hear a composer trying to
rouse us from musical complacency, to expand our musical
horizons. We don’t hear a composer’s subconscious instinctively
following the dictates of beauty, of profound and rewarding sound.
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*
A soldier speaks on Schubert.— Under a YouTube video of the
Andante from Schubert’s Piano Trio D. 898 is this comment (from
a Scandinavian): “i suffer from post traumatic stress disorder and
the only thing that calmes me is schuberts music, no joke it's... yes
it's the best. it's my medication... my friends would die laughing
seeing this comment but God bless you and may you rest in ‘piece’
you chuppy little austrian fella!” I can well imagine that this piece,
this piece of divinity, would soothe someone with PTSD. One of
the most soothing pieces in music caressing away a soldier’s pain.
*
Listening, for example, to the 4th movement of Beethoven’s
5th symphony, it occurs to you that what makes Beethoven
Beethoven is the naïveté of his enthusiasm for life. The childlike
sincerity, the directness, of his enthusiasm for life. It is this that
speaks to billions of people. It is this that keeps the music
perpetually fresh. Or, rather, the music’s freshness is synonymous
with its childlike sincerity; and Beethoven’s whole art consists in
the attempt never to let anything hackneyed or didactic or
formulaic get in the way of the direct and spontaneous expression
of emotion and thought. Most timeless art, in fact, has this “naïve”
and “spontaneous” quality, but none more so than Beethoven’s.
How he managed to convey it through the manipulation of sounds
is a mystery, because music itself is a mystery. But it is clear that
even the music’s “flaws,” such as its occasional coarseness,
vulgarity, and orchestral imbalances, contribute to its childlike
vitality and hence its power.
*
Zerlina’s aria “Vedrai, carino” is one of my favorites in Don
Giovanni. For most of the song she sings coquettishly about her
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magical salve for Masetto’s pains, a medicine that will surely cure
him, hinting at its power and effectiveness, and you’re convinced
she’s referring to sex. Thus, you listen to the enchanting music with
an amused grin, charmed by its translation of a lover’s
flirtatiousness into the most sublime beauty. Yet there remains a
slight doubt in your mind as to whether you’ve guessed the remedy
correctly, and you wait for the libretto to confirm it somehow. But
suddenly there’s a pause in the music, followed by a pulsating cello
(?) that heralds an event of excruciating serenity. A flute is fused
with it, pianissimo and legatissimo, whetting your anticipation.
Gently Zerlina places Masetto’s hand on her chest and says to him
“Feel it [i.e., the medicine] beating”—and you realize you were
wrong; she was referring not to sex but to her love, her heart. In an
instant the aria has been transformed from a fetching exercise in
innuendo to a pure expression of undying love.
*
Against postmodernism.— If you want a simple criterion for
artistic greatness, here it is: the artist who manifests longevity in
both popular and critical approbation is truly great. -That excludes
most postmodernists, who don’t appeal even to educated popular
audiences, only to super-educated, or super-indoctrinated, “critical”
ones.
*
After hearing Berio’s “Sinfonia.”— The problem with much (not
all) postmodern art, whether in music, drama, literature or the
plastic arts, is that its self-consciousness doesn’t extend far enough.
This is all the more artistically damaging in that its chief merit, its
most distinctive feature, is supposed to be its self-consciousness.
From Beckett to Berio to Cage and beyond, postmodern artists
have set themselves in opposition to un-selfconscious artistic
dogmas, to every un-selfconscious commonplace about art—such
as the exaltation of naïve “beauty,” the idea that artists should work
within certain boundaries, even the idea that art itself constitutes a
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CHRIS WRIGHT
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220
Notice I wrote “tends to…” At its best, postmodernism can be
extremely thought-provoking. Duchamp’s Fountain, which at least
anticipated postmodernism, is profound—not “in itself” but because of
the social context in which it was produced. However, Minimalism in the
1970s or 1980s was not profound, because the social context had changed.
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and the art fails to connect with its audience. In the end, it is merely
a testament to the composer’s solipsistic self-indulgence.
In the third movement of the Sinfonia there are echoes of the
scherzo from Mahler’s second symphony. “If I were asked to
explain the presence of Mahler’s scherzo in Sinfonia,” Berio has
said, “the image that would naturally spring to mind would be that
of a river running through a constantly changing landscape,
disappearing from time to time underground, only to emerge later
totally transformed. Its course is at times perfectly transparent, at
others hard to perceive, sometimes it takes on a totally recognizable
form, at others it is made up of a multitude of tiny details lost in the
surrounding forest of musical presences.” –Wow, that all sounds
very lofty and philosophical. However, especially in contrast with
the incoherent surface-structure of the piece, it is unbearably
pretentious. And comical. An art that is in this way a self-parody
fails as art.
In short, there are (or were) many problems with
postmodernism. While it is indeed “art,” it is rarely great art, for
great art appeals to both the affective and the cognitive modes, and
doesn’t rely on philosophical clichés to justify its existence, and is
true to life—it resonates with the average intelligent person’s
experience, with his spiritual strivings and doubts—and it isn’t self-
contradictory in such a way that it deteriorates into self-parody.
Nevertheless, it’s good that art went through its postmodernist
period, for now it can return to its earlier grandeur but on a higher,
more self-conscious level. For there is a kernel of truth in every
historical movement, as Hegel saw. Modernism and
postmodernism freed art from the naïve and dogmatic emphasis on
beauty, pleasantness, conventionality. Postmodernism in particular
remade art in the image of modern life, with its chaos, ugliness,
self-doubt, exaggerations, thereby performing an invaluable
historical service. That it amounted to a denial of most things that
are good in life does not mitigate its importance. What is left to us
now, though, is to transcend its implicit negativity—to synthesize
(i.e., reconcile) the awareness of life’s absurdity with love of life,
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*
An artist who isn’t.— The typical postmodern artist (and critic)
confuses greatness with the fostering of controversy. He seems to
think that the purpose of art is to produce controversy—to be
“original.” Originality, no matter how it’s manifested, is seen as an
end in itself. In reality, though, it is only a means. Great artists have
always understood this.
*
Susan Sontag against herself.— It’s significant that even someone
like Susan Sontag, who for a while was adamant in her support of
postmodernism and formalism, finally admitted that the
postmodernist attitude contains the seeds of cultural destruction. In
her famous book Against Interpretation and Other Essays,
published originally in the 1960s, she defended contemporary art
221
Some postmodern artists might object that that is exactly what they
saw themselves as doing. Many of them, after all, rejoiced in casting off
old rules and denying life’s meaningfulness. The nature of their work,
however, belies their optimistic self-interpretation: insofar, e.g., as it
exalts controversy for controversy’s sake, or is intentionally puerile and
ridiculous, or is impenetrably solipsistic, the essence of their work is
negative rather than positive. It bespeaks the despairing fragmentedness of
its society.
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*
The significance of art.— The overture to Fidelio would violate
artistic principles in its shamelessly unsubtle glorification of life
were such glorification not the most important principle of all.
*
The significance of music.— On the way home from work today,
while I was on the subway, an Asian man standing near me broke
into song. He just…started singing. A nicely dressed, normal-
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looking fellow. He was reading the words from a book; they were
in a different language. It was weird at first. A man sitting next to
him, a crotchety old guy with a surly expression seared onto his
face, instantly covered his ears. His reaction, in fact, may have
been stranger than the actual singing: he didn’t look surprised, he
didn’t look puzzled, he didn’t look disgusted; after the first two
notes he simply put his fingers into his ears and kept them there.
Later he walked away. No one said anything for the duration of the
(long) song; I observed everyone’s reaction, and it was, almost
without exception, blank. The situation struck me as surreal. But
after the first two minutes, in which my one thought was “What the
hell?”, I started to enjoy it. The fellow had a good voice. This a
capella performance on a subway where everyone else was silent,
everyone in his own world, thinking his own thoughts—steered by
music into a virtually preordained vein:—it was moving. We were
all the same distant atoms as usual, but we were drawn together. I
sensed the walls between us dissolving; I sensed my own quietness
dissolving; and I wanted to sing myself, or at least speak to
everyone as a brother. I realized…‘We’re just people…they’re just
people…what’s the point of all this isolation?’ The meaning of the
song was appropriate: in answer to a question, the man said it was a
prayer, and that each day he prays as often as he can.
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Chapter 6
Dusk in Vietnam
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“It’s a cold one,” the American said. The two girls whispered.
“But what a view.” The girls giggled. “What’s your name? I’m
Clyde.”
“Martin,” he said.
“My name is Midori,” said one girl, “and she is Hiroko.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“Are you from Japan?”
“Hai. Yes. Konnichi wa.” She giggled.
“Konnichi wa.”
“How long have you been in Vietnam?”
“Only one week.”
“It’s beautiful here.”
“Yes very pretty.”
“But too cold.”
“I hope it warms up.”
“Hanoi was warm, but up here I guess we’re higher up.”
“Yes.”
“Are you girls in college?”
“Yes.”
“What do you study?”
“Drawing. She study painting.”
“I bet you’d like to paint this scene, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh yes. So beautiful.”
“I wonder where our guide is.”
Tribal children from tiny villages in the valleys congregated
around them, dressed in handmade and hand-dyed indigo cloth,
speaking English, offering handmade necklaces and bracelets to
anyone who would pay one dollar. The friendly ones shook hands
with the Westerners, their small Vietnamese hands and dark
Vietnamese skin callused from years of inclemency pressing
against the cold white skin of the tourists. The weather didn’t seem
to touch them. They ran happily along the streets in the drizzle, into
and out of internet cafés and restaurants and hotel lobbies without
self-consciousness, banging their palms against the windows of
buses arriving with fresh loads of tourists, yelling “Hello! Where
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himself looked blank: his eyes staring sightlessly ahead of him, his
fingers the only part of his body that moved. He was just standing
there mechanically. Martin continued to watch his fingers for want
of anything else to do.
Suddenly he realized that those wiry fingers were the real
music behind the notes. They were the theme, the melody. If they
and the man himself were ignored, the sound could not be
understood. It did not exist in a vacuum, unfolding impersonally
through a mathematical logic that determined the proper chord-
progressions and the nature of the climactic moments and the
resolutions in the cadences; it was an expression inseparable from
what was being expressed. In a flash, as he listened to the whispers
rasping sweetly from the carved piece of bamboo, Martin saw that
this music was not supposed to be “pretty.” It was supposed to be a
way of life. It was how the peasant conversed with nature, how he
sublimated and humanized the forces he confronted daily. These
tones that sounded so artificial and dissonant in a bar would have
sounded harmonious if played among rice paddies beneath a starry
sky.
Martin sat back and closed his eyes. He still did not really
enjoy the music, but if he imagined it under the night sky it calmed
him. Its very unpredictability and dissonance settled him. A
moment ago he had been acutely conscious of his surroundings. He
had scrutinized people’s faces, he had wondered if the performer
was nervous, he had wondered if the children were bored, he had
ogled the two young women. He had told himself he needed a few
shots of vodka to appreciate this music. Now, it seemed, none of
those things mattered. He felt quiet not having to follow a melody.
There was nothing in the world except darkness and rustic
harmonies…
A minute later the man picked up something that looked like a
banjo and placed a green leafy thing into his mouth. Without
waiting for the applause to die down he started strumming the
banjo and blowing into the leaf. The result was a noise that, under
normal circumstances, would have so offended Martin’s aesthetic
sensibilities as to make him flee the room. The whistle shrieking
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from the leaf tried to follow the pitches being plucked on the
banjo—successfully, most of the time, at least to the
undiscriminating ear. The strings seemed out of tune, though: some
were flat, some were sharp, and when their tones lingered a
moment they sank. The melody sounded improvised. It wasn’t even
much of a melody, more like a repetitive series of notes in an exotic
minor mode. The ensemble struck Martin as amateurish and
childish, more than the preceding had.
When the man finished his song, another performer joined him
in front of the audience. A young woman. She was holding a long
bamboo flute, longer than the first one. No one noticed, however;
all eyes were riveted to the girl herself. Something about her was
transcendent. She was petite, probably just over five feet, frail, her
skin opaquely translucent. Her body, while not emaciated, was
unnaturally thin. Her bony arms were lined with shadows of her
veins. Smiling, she nodded to her companion, who nodded back
respectfully. The audience waited. Then, as the girl raised the flute
to her lips, Martin realized what it was that gave her such an
ethereal look: she was deathly pale! Her face was wan and sickly
beneath its beauty. The angular cheekbones, which may have been
visible due to malnutrition, gave her sharp, defined features that
seemed to express a strong character. Yet she looked sickly,
undoubtedly: the contrast between her dark costume and her skin
color was appalling. It made her luminous, however; he felt as if he
were in the presence of an otherworldly being. The impression was
strengthened when he heard the first sounds emanate from her
flute.
They were in a high register, the range of the piccolo—but
with a full tone, reflective of the instrument’s size. Not shrill, not
harsh, but soft and gentle. Fluttering, from frequent tremolos.
Feathery. They seemed to mimic a bird-call, though one with an
exquisite timbre and an exceptional range. The melodic thread they
spun was bright and pleasant, neither major nor minor. Again
Martin felt that he was listening to something being played in a
milieu alien to it, before an audience spectating stony-faced,
approaching it with a critical Western eye; it belonged outside in
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“So sorry…clubbing?”
“I mean, like you’re going to dance in a nightclub in Tokyo.”
“Oh!” Hiroko laughed. “Yes. It was bad choice.”
“You look like Britney Spears!” he said. They giggled,
interpreting it as a compliment. “Do you like Britney Spears?”
“Oh yes. Very sexy. She so good dancer. I like American
stars.”
“Me too,” interjected Midori.
“Ah. Yes,” Martin said, “American music is popular
everywhere.”
“So, many Japanese listen to it. And try to play like them.”
“Japanese people watch MTV?”
“Oh yes! Very much. Very cool!”
“You actually like it?” he asked, skeptical.
“Of course,” said Hiroko.
“You’re not just saying that to be polite?”
The girls laughed. “No! Very cool.”
Martin stared at them. He was about to follow up with more
questions when a clearing appeared in front of them. No more
trees, no more houses obstructed their view of the valley. They
were silent as they contemplated the scene.
It was like New Zealand, Martin thought, but on a larger scale.
The terraces on the hills covered in amber stalks of rice added a
human element to the grandeur. They were geometrically regular,
as if God had hired an architect to build a stairway to heaven, who
had soon quit for lack of materials. The golden carpet of rice-stalks
on the surface of each step lay at a hundred-degree angle to the
green grass growing vertically, so that a color sequence of gold-
green-gold-green undulated its way around the hillsides up to the
summit. “Earth-waves,” Martin whispered to himself. “Frozen
waves undulating upwards.” Periodic human figures waded through
the gold fields to harvest the rice, which was then carried to the
base of the valley, near a narrow river, and placed in shallow
baskets that were shaken in the wind to separate the chaff from the
grains. The whole scene, thought Martin, was from a different time,
an epic time, though rumblings of tractor-trailers and jeeps and
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“Hard. Many part. Make paddy, put water in, clean it…then
make dry…use animal—buf’lo—make it flat and wet, make ready
for rice, put seed…and many other part. Difficult to tell.”
“It sounds like back-breaking work.”
“Very hard and long time.”
They continued walking. Hmong women passed them with
baskets on their backs full of hemp or indigo plants or stalks of
rice. They all wore the same dark blue clothes, the same large silver
earrings, and some had colorful, intricately woven armbands.
Midori took pictures of them, picture after picture, pictures of the
male children bent low under stacks of wood, of the female
children carrying infants on their backs, of elderly women
hunchbacked like question-marks. Hiroko, too, was an appendage
of her camera, pointing it at every plant and every person she saw.
When they walked by a dilapidated school-building near an open
field she ran inside to take a picture of the dark and empty interior.
Martin, for his part, was lost in thought, wondering what it
would be like to live here where life was seasonal and cyclical and
nature was a spirit to be worshiped. A place where the rhythms of
life were the rhythms of nature and had been so for hundreds,
thousands, of years, changing not with the centuries but with the
seasons. What would winter be like here? What would it be like to
construct terraced paddies year after year and plow them with
buffalo and tend them for months until it looked as if they had been
created not for one’s sustenance but for purely aesthetic reasons,
being as beautiful as anything Martin had ever seen? What would a
sunset look like here, with warmth shining on warmth, gold on
waves of gold, as vermilion streaks stretched across the sky from
the sun low over the mountains? It would be a hard life, yes, and he
did not envy these people; but it would have a simple beauty, a
Tolstoyan simplicity. To the Western mind, in any case, the
thought of being one with nature in the shadow of mountains had
shades of sublimity.
And what was the mindset of these distant villagers? How did
they experience life? Having lived in the pure air of the mountains
in northwest Vietnam all their lives, closer by miles to the clouds
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Martin liked watching her talk. But he didn’t know what else
to say.
“How often do you go to the town?” he asked.
“Every weekend. I sell blankets that my mom weaves and I
play music for people.”
“Do you enjoy it?”
“Yes, I do.” She smiled with her eyebrows wrinkled in
puzzlement. Martin was starting to feel foolish and self-conscious.
Why was he talking to her? What had he hoped to accomplish?
He looked around. Duong and the Japanese girls were off
behind a hut talking to some women; Clyde was lying on the grass
with his face exhausted from the strain of the hike. Men were still
threshing rice hundreds of yards away even though dusk was
approaching; some were singing, the wind carrying their voices to
the village. Their songs had no recognizable melody and seemed to
interfere with each other, but somehow that was perfect. Any other
way of singing would have seemed out of place. This was
mountain-music, Martin thought—the spirituals of North
Vietnamese peasants. Neither plaintive nor uplifting, they were a
musical expression of the harvest.
Martin felt the rice wine he had been offered a few minutes
ago swimming in his head. He hadn’t had much but it was strong,
stronger than Western wine. He turned to the girl again and looked
at her thin face. That’s why he had wanted to talk to her, he
remembered: he wanted to say, for some reason, that she looked
different from everyone here.
“What’s your name?”
“Dào,” she said.
He paused. He couldn’t tell why he was so curious about her.
“You live in a very beautiful place, Dào,” he said. “You’re
lucky.”
“I think so.”
“Is this your village?”
“Yes, I live here with my parents.”
He was attracted to her, to her aura of separateness and
aloofness. Suddenly he was sick of the pleasantries, the fakeness;
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456
modern age, he could not have
written it. And it certainly would
not have been read with pleasure
by anyone. They would have
Chapter 7 considered it absurd. The time
The Book of Joe has long passed in which
I222 something like “Job” could have
been written: the epic era of
marvelous Hebraic naïveté has
222
I feel compelled to write a irrevocably vanished. Nowadays,
brief apology for having written satire is the only purpose for
this ambitious work. To write which this most “sincere” and
something that has the structure un-self-conscious of literary
of the Book of Job but is a styles can be used. And even
complete reversal of its spirit is then it is a risk, for the style in
brazen enough; but to attempt to question is essentially tragic,
write it in a style similar to that while satire is comical. The
of the original, yet sufficiently satirist must dispense with lofty
different from it so as not to sentiments and their lofty
invite charges of expressions except when they are
“derivativeness” or (even worse) meant to contrast with
“plagiarism,” is downright mediocrity, and in such a way
foolhardy. Of course, had it even that the latter is emphasized.
been my intention, I would have (Incidentally, it will be evident to
been unable to write in a style the reader that “The Book of Joe”
adhering consistently to the is not a pure satire, in that it has
miraculous prose poetry of the thematic overtones that aren’t
Book of Job and the Psalms; I comedic.) Therefore, even had I
have not the talent. Nor, indeed, the talent, I could but rarely have
has any person alive, or any afforded to rise to the tragic
person in the last five or ten grandeur and style of “Job,” for
centuries. –But “talent” may be fear of adulterating the satirical
the wrong word here (although, element more than I already had
in my case, it is also the right by the inclusion of philosophy,
one): circumstances have so idealism, and, in short, sincerity.
changed since “Job” was written To give an example of
that, even if, say, the author had the latter: while Joe’s
been reincarnated in a more interlocutors remain self-parodies
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And, repentant, they have set Thus Joe bade his messengers
forth on a life of charity and depart and returned to the
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Jim! said Joe, Say thou thy Let them be broken and
point; and Bob, hold thy shattered upon collision with
peace. the iron dictates of the market.
Joe, said Jim, we have sat Let not his lust for lucre be
with thee for seven days, and slaked; neither let his greed
our minds wax restless; our for power suffer consum-
stomachs rumble with mation; but let his demon
hunger’s void; and we weary consume him.
of thine interminable sobs.
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Let his obdurate will guide Let his creditors hound him,
him to the brink of destruc- as the lamb is hounded by the
tion; wolf;
For I was that man: I was that Why were the loins that I
fool; and for that have I been enjoyed full of crabs? Why
punished: and for that I curse the breasts that I kissed not
myself. full at all?
And lo, if I must suffer, then (For then might I have had
must all men! It were unjust ample memories to succor me
otherwise. Wherefore I say, in my wretchedness.)
Let calamities befall the
wealth-mongerer, equal in Howbeit, my lot then outdid
number and greater in my lot now; for I am denied
intensity than mine own! the touch of woman, who
despiseth me.
Let his children be fetters unto
him; let his wife persecute Alas, that fruit was sweet! its
him hourly, and give him no nectar nourishing, its scent
peace; ambrosial! Dearly I miss it.
My days are as years without
224 it.
“den of shame”: John Milton,
Paradise Lost, Book 2, line 58.
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226
Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto
225
Ecclesiastes 2:10. 1, stanza 217.
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the poor in spirit (like thee); But this time, I promise thee,
above all, God loveth our it will achieve its object; even
republic and its citizens; thy rehabilitation.
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229
See Shakespeare, Timon of scene also inspired a few of the
Athens, Act IV, scene iii. This following lines.
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With luck, His reign of fear Yea, ye are like unto the man
will end, and, more impor- who revileth that which he is,
tantly, we shall become rich and becometh what he feareth
men! most.241
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The good man is outcast; the He is both the fly and the
truthful is slandered; but the mantid which consumeth it;
charlatan is celebrated: for he prayeth as he partaketh
in filth.242
For vain motives move men.
Yea, vanity is the star which He is a contemptible thing,
guideth man’s orbit: useless and vain, rough-hewn
from animate dirt.
History is but a spiral around
vanity, ceaseless and without Behold, in these seven days
meaning; vanity alone is its have I unlearned the notions
lodestar. of the rabble; in their stead I
have been filled with truth:
Lo, I have lost my taste for
the company of man, for it is Truly, all is vanity! Men
insipid; I avert mine eyes trouble themselves over
from his face, for it is ugly: trifles, and life is empty strife.
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the petal’s hue upon her Apollo stole her from her
cheek, the pistil’s spire that of native Arcady, smitten with a
her hair, the inmost blush beauty that out-Daphned
within her eye. Daphne.246
She is a nymph, a Naiad, who and was the home of the Muses
dwelleth ’midst the tarns on (daughters of Zeus).
246
Mount Parnassus:245 for Daphne was “the first and
fairest of [Apollo’s] loves,” a
nymph who spurned his
245
In Greek mythology, Mount advances. See the story in Ovid’s
Parnassus was sacred to Apollo Metamorphoses, Book 1.
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What are you doing now? The voice was that of Dud,
Painting some street Jen’s brother. He also had
Somewhere with dancing- come forth from the car.
in-the-night? Singing
Your sunny soul from off As thou spewest thy mawkish
some night-drenched rooftop? slobber, he said, we are
Or are you laughing with missing “Fear Factor” on TV.
your sister like
A butterfly, a monarch (Tonight they shall eat
sipping life’s nectar? spiders, I verily believe!)
Perhaps you’re looking at
the rain like me, We have already missed “The
Quiet like me, thinking of Simpsons,” but behold, it was
me… We a rerun, thank God.
Are all there is, we and this
lonesome night Later is a new episode of
(Scented like an autumn “Trading Spouses”; though it
fog). –And when is an infantile show, I enjoy it,
I think of all my past, and for I like passing judgment on
all I’ve suffered, pathetic losers.
And all those years I longed
for rest or death, Yea, for this reason do I
I listen to the calming rain, cherish all reality television.
drumming
Like a massage, and I We also must see “Law &
contemplate Order”; and afterwards we
The window-rivulets, which shall rent a movie, perhaps
move and melt Dude, where’s my car?
Together, and I sit here
silently Lo, I nearly forgot! The
And think only of you, only Knicks are playing the Bulls
of you. tonight! That hath priority
over all else!
XVIII
Shut thy noise-hole, Rob! I cannot savor the spectating
experience without beer,
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who knoweth not himself, and art indeed mighty and merc-
is in doubt. iful;
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And I loathe him, for he hath (A man in the crowd said, Lo!
lived a life of venality. He is not God! He is but the
creator of an internet search-
He despiseth the claims of the engine; blame not the world’s
multitude; he loveth nought ills on him!
but his greed.
No one listened, however, for
He hath funded tyranny, all were lost in thought of
founded new kinds of their rage.)
exploitation, played friend to
the vilest of men. Yea, when the poor have
cried, Joe hath not wept, for
The earth seethes, battles rage, he is ambitious: he heedeth
solely on his account! only his morality of power.
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love like to the moon’s love Yet I see, Rob, thou lovest her
for Earth, and the lion’s love not the less for that. Thou art
for her cub, and the tulip’s generous of thy love, as I was
love for the bee. never generous of my wealth.
I see that I have lived in vain, Thou art even as a saint who
for not till now—yea, not till loveth man in all his spotted-
this moment, forged in pain— ness, and hath compassion for
do I know what it meaneth to all the world below.
live.
And truly thou hast shamed
And verily, I have thee to me, as love must ever shame
thank, Rob! Thy love-song sick despair.
turned mine eye from sorrow:
I say to me now, Look upon
For in the weakness of this boy’s cloudless brow,
despair, and in the chaos of serene like the dawn; look at
despair, I clutched at the his full eyes, placid like the
beauty of thy words, dawn:
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251
An allusion to Plato’s myth of
252
the cave. This whole passage, by Schopenhauer called time and
the way, echoes Buddhism and space “the principle of
Taoism. individuation.”
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253
A Nietzschean term. See
section 9 of the Prologue to Thus
Spoke Zarathustra.
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For the blood was real, the Yea, it was good, it was
bullets were real: and the noble—but most of all, it was
death-shrieks in the dark were exhilarating! I felt alive,
real. surrounded by death!
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Fondle now thy loins like an and can thy breath level
investor in the throes of empires?
speculation; for I will depict
the power of Mammon. Hath love for thee alone made
men blast granite quarries,
Where wast thou when I and bridge Alaska with an oil
planted empires across the pipeline?
earth? Truly, thou wert not a
speck in nature’s eye. Did love-of-Joe create the St.
Lawrence Seaway, or impel
Where wast thou when Sumer the conquistadores to heights
sprang forth from an econo- of heroic cruelty?
mic surplus, like Athena from
Zeus’s head? No! Love of money, love of
power, is alone responsible
Who built the pyramid of for everything.
Giza, or the Great Sphinx? No
pharaoh, no slave, but I alone. For my sake only do men
subjugate the earth and
For whose sake are wars slaughter their fellows; and I
waged, or dynasties founded; give them strength to subdue
and who breathed inspiration their own humanity.
into great Alexander?
I can give a mouse the power
My stage is world history, of a lion, wherewith to bend
from the nomads of Asia to men to his will: behold Rupert
the oligarchs of America: thou Murdoch, and Donald Trump,
art brief like an insect. and other such mice-become-
lions.
Thy works have the weight of
dust in the wind, and they I can alter hierarchies of
contend with a grain of sand nature, and make great what is
for insignificance. small; I can reverse the order
of things, and make order
Canst thou with thy breath from chaos.
plant railways, or grow cities?
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For I am the one god, the sole And I ask for nought in return
god men believe in: I, but that he shun idols, be they
Mammon, the Eternal One— named Compassion, Love,
the Will to Possess. Generosity, or whatever.
Thou wert indeed right, Joe: Then the fate of mankind shall
life is absurd, and history is not burden him; the deathless
absurd: it hath no meaning but cycles of pain shall not
me. oppress him: for he shall have
bought his happiness.
Ye are blades of grass, ye
humans, and I am the wind And as the walls of civiliza-
which stirreth you; and I am tion fall around him, and the
the foot which trampleth you; bleatings of the downtrodden
rain as from the heavens, he
And I am the sunlight which shall be unencumbered:
sustaineth you, and the soil
wherein ye are planted. In his stately pleasure-dome
in Xanadu he shall perch
There is no telos of history, as himself, aloof from the tears
there is no rest from me: for I of the blighted.
am the way, the truth, and the
life; XXX
But thou, Joe, thou trafficker
And behold, the truth shall in pity, thou hast cursed me to
make you free, should ye my face, and transgressed
follow it as Rupert Murdoch against me.
hath done (in whom I am well
pleased). Flightless insect, thou hadst
temerity to mock my law,
He who walketh in my which is hoary as Hammur-
footsteps, with will and abi’s Code.
knowledge, shall be as the
mighty eagle, which owns the My law is as durable as
heavens in its solitary Stonehenge; thinkest thou it
grandeur.
507
CHRIS WRIGHT
508
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
509
CHRIS WRIGHT
Men arise and pass away like And Mammon restored Joe to
leaves, but greed and self- the oligarchy, giving him
ishness have no end. twice as much as he had
before.
¶ And it was so, that after Joe
had spoken these words, the Then came unto him all his
Lord said to Jim the brethren, and all his conc-
Politician, Bob the Intell- ubines, and all his former
ectual, and Jon the Preacher, friends: and they secretly
bemoaned his good fortune,
I have contempt for you, but comforted themselves that
because ye have neither he had been miserable for a
knowledge nor dignity; time: everyone also bribed
him, which sealed their
And while Joe, too, hath not friendships.
dignity (for that he is a man),
at least he hath knowledge. After this lived Joe a hundred
years, due to the wonderful
Therefore ye shall be the healthcare his riches bought,
servants of Joe the Capitalist, and he saw his sons and his
like all your brethren, and sons’ sons be raised up like
offer up your minds to him. their forebear. One of them
even became president of
And if ye stray from your America, although by then the
appointed paths and disobey country was a province of
my commandments, ye shall China.
be exiled from society and
forced to live in a bathtub, So Joe died, being old and full
like Diogenes the Stoic. of vice.
510
Coda
I’m writing this the day after the shooting massacre on
December 14, 2012 at a school in Newtown, Connecticut. On a day
like this one isn’t in a particularly “humanistic” mood. The satirical
newspaper The Onion sums it up in an article entitled “Fuck
Everything, Nation Reports. Just Fuck It All To Hell.” Obama, the
president who hasn’t lifted a finger to promote gun control, tears up
in a press conference in which he suggests that “meaningful action”
is necessary. One isn’t holding out hope.
A society of isolated, bitter, angry, and frustrated people is the
natural consequence of government’s being taken over by special
interests such as the NRA, the military industry, the insurance
industry, and the financial sector. More generally, a system that
values profits over people is not going to take “meaningful action”
to make society healthy. What’s going to happen, instead, is that
the current privatization crusade will continue; government
programs that help people but not corporations—including, in the
U.S., Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—will continue to be
dismantled ostensibly in order to address the manufactured “fiscal
crisis”;260 mass economic insecurity and assaults on workers’ rights
will escalate as more wealth is siphoned to the top; society, in
short, will be torn apart, and atrocities of every sort (including
political atrocities like the expansion of right-wing militias) will
become more frequent. All this is nearly inevitable, unfortunately.
It grows out of the logic of contemporary history, the logic of
unfolding social dynamics. Current trends cannot be halted in their
tracks; history’s “dialectic” doesn’t work that way. Malign
260
The crisis is real in some respects (not as regards Social Security,
though), but elites have planned it since the 1980s—by lowering tax rates,
increasing military spending, and so forth—in the anticipation that
eventually a fiscal crisis would provide an excellent excuse to slash
popular New Deal-era programs. The economist Dean Baker has good
entries on the crisis at his blog “Beat The Press,” at
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/beat-the-press/.
511
CHRIS WRIGHT
261
The unionization rate in the U.S.’s private sector is less than 7 percent,
having declined from a peak of about 35 percent in 1954. In Europe, too,
unions are under savage attack.
262
“Trans” means through; “inter” means between. A hundred years ago
capitalism was international: nation-states were entities of great vitality,
and there were innumerable economic links between them. Nowadays,
capitalism has much less respect for, and much more power than, the
nation-state as such, operating through it and around it. The nation no
longer has the vitality it once did.
512
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
513
CHRIS WRIGHT
263
“Overview: Municipal Enterprise,” Community-Wealth.org,
http://www.community-wealth.org/strategies/panel/municipal/index.html
(accessed December 15, 2012).
264
Ellen Brown, “Banking for California’s Future,” Yes! Magazine,
September 14, 2011. She observes that “The bank has contributed over
$300 million in revenues over the last decade to state coffers, a substantial
sum for a state with a population less than one-tenth the size of Los
Angeles County.”
265
See http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/.
266
Jamie Raskin, “The Rise of Benefit Corporations,” The Nation, June
27, 2011.
514
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
267
Emily Kawano, “Report from the 1st Solidarity Economy Social
Forum & World Fair, Santa Maria and Porto Alegre, Brazil—Jan 22-29,
2010,” SolidarityEconomy.net,
http://www.solidarityeconomy.net/2010/03/15/solidarity-economy-vision-
blossoms-in-brazil/ (accessed May, 2010).
515
CHRIS WRIGHT
268
Carl Davidson, “‘One Worker, One Vote:’ US Steelworkers to
Experiment with Factory Ownership, Mondragon-Style,”
SolidarityEconomy.net, October 27, 2009, http://www.zcommuni
cations.org/ steelworkers-plan-job-creation-via-worker-coops-by-carl-
davidson (accessed May, 2010).
269
Gar Alperovitz, “A New Era of Employee Ownership?,” Yes!
Magazine, July 11, 2012. See also Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond
Capitalism (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005) and
Chris Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and
Possibilities in the United States, AK Press, forthcoming.
270
For example, the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives was founded
in 2004, and other such organizations have been formed since then.
516
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
271
Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander, “On the Front Lines of a New Pacific
War,” The Nation, December 14, 2012.
272
See the National Intelligence Council’s report Global Trends 2030:
Alternative Worlds (December 2012), at www.dni.gov/nic/globaltrends.
As for the dangers of multipolarity, consider that when Britain was the
hegemonic power in the nineteenth century, relative peace prevailed in
517
CHRIS WRIGHT
Europe. This came to an end when Britain became merely first among
equals from the 1880s onwards: destructive imperialism and two world
wars were the result (in particular of Germany’s efforts to be the next
hegemonic power). After World War II the U.S. was the supreme
superpower, and there was a Pax Americana. Now that the U.S. is about to
become merely first among equals, we are in danger, again, of
catastrophic imperialist competition. (Nikolai Bukharin’s Imperialism and
World Economy (1915) is a classic analysis of the dynamics that still
govern the world economy. J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism: A Study (1902) is
also excellent.)
518
NOTES OF AN UNDERGROUND HUMANIST
Thinking about the pain of the parents who lost their children
in Connecticut, or the pain of families who lose loved ones
everyday to the violence of a system that knows no humanity, one
doesn’t feel like “affirming life.” One is only stricken. The horrors
that lie ahead for our poor species....it is almost too much to bear.
But then one remembers there are things that redeem life: music,
creativity, freedom, love, hope. “Humanism.” One looks around
and sees strong people persevering, embracing life despite terrible
hardship. Karl Marx once said that “life is struggle”; but the other
side of that truth is that life is hope. We must keep fighting, keep
living, keep hoping, and never give up on humanity.
519