Author: Greg Loewen

The Truth-Value of Truth

The Truth-Value of Truth (William James and the unveiled world)

            Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Out thoughts and beliefs ‘pass’, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash-basis whatsoever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other’s truth. (James 1907:207-8).

            Nietzsche was not above cheap shots. Kant and cant, the old woman as the old truth about women and whips, and a Nazi favorite, that infamous comment about Polish Jews. But it was his critique of Schleiermacher’s perception of the world, quite literally, as the ‘veil maker’, that interests us just here. For James, perhaps unknowingly, is riffing Nietzsche’s legendary 1872 essay, ‘On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense’, wherein the author is at his youthful best, when James tells us, in his equally famous 1906 public lecture series entitled ‘Pragmatism’, that truth is, essentially, whatever currency that is in use at a particular juncture in human history. And if currency is to be considered legal tender, truth could be said to have accrued to it a ‘moral tender’, which most of us respect. There are sanctioned manners by which one can question the truth, of course, scientific experiment being the most clinical and formal of these, and also, in general, the least threatening. There are ways to question the currency of truth that are in the public interest, as do the whistleblowers calling out corporation or government, church or school. Here, certain elite interests are threatened, but for the most of us, the world looks a little clearer afterwards. We feel we have more of a handle on the truth of things, and there is a little more of that kind of money in our pockets.

            Indeed, James regularly uses the phrase ‘the cash value of truth’ in speaking of its practical effects in the world. “Grant an idea or belief to be true…what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential terms?” (Ibid:200). James immediately responds to his own pragmatic interrogation of truth-value, by stating that ideas which we can assimilate, corroborate and verify are true, and those we cannot are not. This does nothing to upshift truth into a non-moral sphere, that is, an ahistorical space in which the truth rests and for all time. Instead, truth is known as and through its practical effects, nothing more but as well nothing less. He adds that ‘truth happens to an idea and it becomes true, made true by events’ (Ibid:201, emphasis the text’s). The historical happenstance of truth was one of Nietzsche’s early insights, and the pedigree of this idea can be traced back to the bare beginnings of modernity in Vico, in 1725. For James, the truth-value of truth is basically the same as its use-value. In a word, the truth of truth lies in its utility.

            Nietzsche’s actual title of another early and famous essay, much mistranslated, is ‘On the Use and Disadvantage for Life of History’. The contrast in the title is key. History too, like truth, must mean something to us not only in the present, but it also must present something useful for us. This may but mean, on the shady and impoverished of the street, a political convenience. This spin on truth, attempting to become a new truth but underhandedly, is useful for this or that political desire or institutional gambit. Or it may be a more uplifting sensibility, like the idea that art represences both its original context and the transcendental means by which we today can experience another age. This kind of truth is useful as well, giving us the sense that our ancestors lived as we do, not in their customs or druthers, but rather in their essence, mortal and unknowing of destiny. But at both ends of the use-value spectrum, we encounter what James refers to ‘purely mental ideas’, which are, in addition to those ideas that can be verified by quite specific results in the world, useful in a more abstract sense and include amongst them their own descriptors, such as ‘eternal character’ (Ibid:209-10). But for James, such ‘principles’ are only true insofar as they provide useful leading connections between practicalities. They are the invisible threads from which the tapestry of daily life is woven. Such principles ‘fit’, they have engendered themselves to the ‘whole body of other truths in our possession’, and so on. They are alike to what would later be called Gestalts, the wholes, which take on a different quality than a mere sum of the quantitative parts.

            Half anticipating De Saussure by a decade, James states that names are arbitrary, but he immediately adds that “…once understood they must be kept to.” (Ibid:214). This is so due to their entire imbrication with the context at hand. In Saussure, this mutual use, even usury, is analyzed in detail for the first time. The syntagmatic chain of signifiers, along which meanings differ and are deferred, Derrida’s proverbial ‘difference’, speaks to us of language in use, or ‘la parole’; speech or speaking. But those paradigmatic tell us that there is also a language at stake which is being used; ‘la langue’, or one’s ‘natural’ language. Jamesian truth bears a close resemblance to Saussurean language. Truth is spoken into being through its use and therefore ‘becomes true’. But there is also the entire stock of historical and cultural truths that lie at its back, as it were, ready to be of service to us when necessary. And the truth we have just used could not have been used without this wider landscape from which we had apparently excerpted it. James encapsulates the relationship between truth, history, and language neatly: “True as the present is, the past was also.” (Ibid:215, emphasis the text’s).

            Yet none of this is, to use James’ term, ‘capricious’. We must find, and thence use, truths that will work, he tells us. And part of the working consciousness, present overmuch to any innovator or revolutionary alike, is how, and by how much, does any new truth agree with all of the old ones. Nietzsche’s too-obvious metaphor of woman as truth plays this problem out, and not without resentment. For James, ‘workable’ means both ‘deranging common sense and previous truth as little as possible, and leading to some sensible terminus that can be precisely verified’. (Ibid:216). Durkheim, writing and working in the same generation, was not anywhere near as concerned about the first aspect of useful truth, blithely declaring in 1897 that ‘any time science presents a new truth, it is bound to offend common sense’, and indeed this is an arbiter of its truth-value. James does agree, after a fashion, but not without adding that ‘taste’ is also a function of even scientific truths (Ibid:217). By such devices is truth ‘made’, and through such does it ‘pay’. Once again, the comparison with wealth is front and center, perhaps appealing to the well-heeled Bostonians in his audience. Wealth is merely a name for ‘concrete processes’, and does not refer to a phantasmagorical ‘natural excellence’ (Ibid:221). Just so, truth has nothing directly of nature in it, but only gains its marque by virtue of allowing us to thread nature’s labyrinth and follow our own exiguous threads back out.

            Even so, it is clear that James places a stock in truth that Nietzsche, for one, is shy of doing. More than mere ‘metaphor and metonym’, for James, truth is something that does useful work in the world. It is replicable, verifiable, and assimilable to what has been known to work over time. It has the air of common sense while being in principle opposed to it. In this, truth takes on a kind of user-friendliness which belies its radical prospectus. It directs our view away from the personal and parochial and towards the structural and historical. Its working mechanism is derived from human experience as Humean knowledge, but it also responds to the Kantian question regarding how an experience occurs; pragmatically, experience can be had only when a useful idea is present to consciousness. Though this response begs the question of the first experience, and thus the original truth, it does make useful the enquiry into the nature of experience itself: experience is the conjunction of a new truth assimilating to what has been known as the truth.

            Suppose we take up the critic’s jaded hat and state with derision, Arvo Paart killed serious music, Mariah Carey killed pop, Garth Brooks country, and Wynton Marsalis jazz. How useful would be such a series of claims? But if we instead suggested that each of these musical genres was itself dead before these figures came along, and indeed, speaking of ‘taste’, in addition said that only because the genres had exhausted themselves were such mediocre talents able to fill these respective aesthetic vacuums, we would be closer to the pragmatic vision of the ‘how’ of truth, if only because we had shifted the frame from specific individuals, who come and go, to a more discursive, or paradigmatic sensibility. One could argue reasonably that while Marsalis and Paart are guilty of nostalgic regression and Brooks and Carey of crass commercialization, it remains the case that there was space for them to enter and thence dominate, either dialing back the clock on innovation or narrowing the use of it. However this may be, the truth of the matter is that in each genre, there was a shift towards either the commercial or the nostalgic, and this kind of observation has indeed a use to it. For James, the truth exists only after the fact, as opposed to what he himself critically views the rationalist to be peddling. In pragmatism, it is action that counts, neither habit nor act. Habit, or even habitus, is that which prevents new ideas from becoming useful in the world, and act, rather than action, presumes a history of acts which have themselves become aggrandized as being within the truth due precisely to their usefulness, mostly as either a doxa or a politics. Luke does not entitle his second book ‘Actions’, as he wishes there to be a resonance of what he witnessed in the reader; Paul suffered, both from the habits and customs of those he sought to convert, and from his own bad conscience about once being a persecutor himself. Given that each of us encounters those who resist our own ideas, including our sense of self, and as well, have ‘baggage’ sundry and divers, it is the testifying to the ‘Act’ that counts as having a truth-value, and not the mere observation of an action.

            Such is the world unveiled. Instead of the hermeneutically fraught ‘prose of the world’, as Foucault describes the premodern perception of nature and history alike, veiled over with assignations and autographs, diabolical and divine in tense tandem, we have a world wherein things either work or they do not. If the first, truth is generated, if the second, falsity. This is not to say that what is judged as ‘working’ or ‘workable’ is not shot through with both contrivance and contraption. ‘Perspectivism’, another concept worked through by Nietzsche, following Vico, has of late become the fashionable home of subaltern truths which, by association with a politics of visibility from invisibility, doubles over its assault on accepted truth. In principle, this is always a healthy thing, salutary as it is to the very being-ahead of our shared human character. But James’ disquisition must always be borne in mind; what is stopping any new truth from becoming old, wearing itself out through over-use and customary assumption, and thereby losing its once freshly-minted edges, the everyday pocket tools from which the visionary sword is crafted?

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, ad well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Bring Me the ‘Head’ of Sergio Garcia

Bring me the ‘Head’ of Sergio Garcia (anomie and anonymity)

            Samuel Peckinpah’s 1974 low-budget pulp film ‘Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia’ has recently become somewhat of a cult classic. Pop culture references abound, perhaps inevitably, but truest to pedigree was the 1991 aborted attempt by the band Iron Prostate to record a song entitled ‘Bring me the head of Jerry Garcia’. Given the much more famous band the named person led, perhaps such an act would have been met with gratitude. Of course, we are not demanding the actual head of the professional golfer, but rather what is inside it. Why so?  Simply because he is an excellent example of someone who is a well enough known figure to have engendered a persona for himself. He, as with any athlete or entertainer, is someone who is both immediately recognizable and yet completely anonymous. More than this, he has publicly, earlier in his career, given fans and followers, detractors and disdainers alike, much fodder to believe that Garcia himself believes in another world which both influences this one, and yet is utterly impassive in its influence; in short, a manner in which to assuage or avoid anomie.

            Anomie is, in a word, subjective alienation. Garcia’s plaintiff, voiced especially after close shaves in major golf championships, that the ‘golf gods’ were out to get him and such-like, suggested that he was feeling anomic about his vocation, picked on, singled out. How many of us have had the same feeling, less publicly perhaps, but even so? Our very anonymity promotes it. ‘Who cares about us?’ We might well ask, on our way to work Monday mornings, along with ‘Another week killed’, on each corresponding Friday evening, but temporary relief aside, what is the meaning of it all? Emile Durkheim coined the term in his 1897 analysis of suicide, rather appropriately, and stated that according to known data at the time ‘anomic suicide’ was the most common form in European society. This contrasted with other forms, such as ‘altruistic’, where one sacrifices oneself for the group, or ‘egoistic’, where one is certain the a quick ‘goodbye cruel world’ is the best response to unfulfilled desires. Given that only about twelve percent of suicides leave notes, it is possible that this category may be under-reported, but however that may be, Durkheim found that his analysis had also generated an empty-set category, which I have elsewhere named ‘fatalistic’ to balance out his conceptions of the other three. A fatalistic suicide would be the kind to be found in an Ibsen play, for instance, or Romeo and Juliet, but in real life, they are exceedingly rare. The very opposite of the anomic, the fatalistic would occur if there were too many structures and strictures in place, prohibiting agency.

            But anomie, by contrast, implies the lack of community and thus responsibility or obligation in one’s life. It is alienation sourced in the absence of salient structures, but not in Marx’s directly structural sense where the person, especially the worker, is subjected to forces that are much more abstract, such as competition with other workers or the commodified reduction of the human being into his ‘labor power’. The anomic person loses her personhood through a lack of the looking-glass selfhood which tells her who she is to others and for others. It is a kind of externally enforced solipsism, and many young people today suffer from anomie, which is yet the leading cause of suicide for this demographic in our own time. The lack of connection, the absence of affection, the abyss of meaningfulness, all combine to threaten our sense of purpose in life. But when one does have that sense, and everything else is also in place, one can still be thwarted. And this is where the ‘gods’, golf fans or no, come in.

            Vindicated and no doubt also relieved, Garcia belatedly won the Masters in 2017. Ever since, he’s cut a different figure than in his youth. He rolls with it, even when the rock itself isn’t rolling. In a word, he has become a mature being, understanding that life is sometimes simply about ‘that’s life’, a song sung by Sinatra on behalf of everyone else who lives or who has ever lived. There has been no more talk of the ‘golf gods’, for example. All this is inherently public, and no one should claim to actually know who the professional athlete is. But personae also change over time, just as do social fact data like the suicide rate. In traditional social organizations, there was only one kind of suicide, that undertaken by the person on behalf of the collective, the one ceding ultimate moral precedence to the many who, collectively, were thought of as one thing in any case. But in modernity, the situation became more complex, and Durkheim was the first to investigate it. The first social science study to make use of statistics, Durkheim’s method-breaking analytics ultimately put forth a much more important idea than his list of categories of suicide; that of the ‘social fact’. Four years earlier, he had stated deadpan that there was ‘no other moral order than that of society’. Therefore, ‘moral’ facts, as they had been called by J.S. Mill and others, were innately social in nature, echoing Marx and Engel’s 1846 epigram, ‘consciousness itself is a social product’. But The German Ideology did not actually appear in print until 1932, so Durkheim had independently come to this similar conclusion through an inductive study, unlike Marx.

            Induction, Sherlock Holmes’ actual method pace Conan-Doyle’s terminological error, proceeds from observations netted into facts of experience. ‘I can’t make bricks without clay’ Holmes testily editorializes to Watson. Quite so, Garcia’s experience in major championships provided a bounty of clay for him to reason, perhaps gratuitously but even so, that there was another force at work, denying him his due results. For those of you who have no interest in golf per se, a bumper sticker I once saw puts it best: ‘As if life weren’t hard enough, I play golf.’ Yet I don’t think we can judge whatever was in the golfer’s mind too severely, because as stated, we have to ask ourselves how many times we might have come to a similar conclusion through this guise of induction; ‘I should have had it, made it, got it, owned it, (or him or her et al), so why didn’t I?’ The social facts that may have leaned up against our individual desires are sometimes obscure, potentially requiring, on the one hand, a full-blown scientific analysis of the kind in which Durkheim excelled. On the other, we are also sometime loathe to admit that we, as individuals, most often do not have ‘what it takes’ to beat the world at its own game. And by the world, we mean of course the very social reality in which we are enveloped from birth until death.

            It is an aspect of adolescent angst to begin to discover this swathe of social facts, mostly ranged against us given the presence of so many others in this our shared world. Before this, parents and others try to give children almost anything they might self-interestedly desire and demand. But this kind of thing can’t go on forever. Indeed, the egotist as adult who keeps faith only in his desire is at risk for suicide, because the world cannot – or in this person’s mind, will not – provide as parents once may have done. So, we hear of ‘common sense’ parenting techniques that suggest weaning one’s child away from directly met demands at the earliest age possible. Yet this is not at all a sense derived from custom and innate sensibility, but rather from none other than induction, a process of logic and reflective reasoning. Adults know from experience that most of life in mass society will be anonymous, fraught with the ever-present problem of anomie. Children must be gradually, and gently, introduced to such a world, one to be their own just as it is already ours. It is not simply a matter of a parent not wishing their child to ‘make the same mistakes’, but rather a more abstract understanding that, while it cannot pinpoint exact contexts or moments in a life that will end in frustration and even loss, nevertheless knows that such moments will occur, other things being equal. One’s singular will, no matter how assertive and confident, cannot match itself each time to that of the world’s.

            For the one who yet imagines themselves larger than life, suicide is one outcome. But homicide may well be another, such acts perpetrated by those who imagine that their will really is, after all, stronger than the world’s and that they will prove this to be so by murdering the very others who have the unmitigated gall to stand in their way, for whatever reason. This yet darker path has no apparent limits, given historical precedents such as the Holocaust and other genocides. Seen in this wider light, the suicide is by far the more ethical person; as an egotist, he wants to die, as an altruist, she dies for those who remain, but as an ‘anomist’, this person truly sees no way out and in this, he is in ethical error. Still, such a mistaken act is far better than murder, and in this induction has also played a role. In its heartfelt attempt to overcome anonymity, observation and experience combine to tell the anomic person not so much of his impending fate, but rather the way life could, even should, be lived by human beings. It is, therefore, not that the alienated individual in our time feels nothing, but rather that she understands precisely what she lacks yet does not see a way in getting it. The fates, as it were, are ranged against her. One of the lesser attributes of calling out the golf gods is, of course, that golf is a trivial pursuit in and of itself, while social anomie is a very serious condition. Garcia has no doubt realized this over time, no differently than the rest of us are compelled to do. Entertainment ‘culture’ provides for us formulaic salves, whereupon we, equally formulaically, react with a ‘you think you’ve got problems!’ after viewing this or that melodrama, fact or fancy. Just so, the artificial relief of contemporary anomie is a major function of entertainment, sport or otherwise. Part voyeurism, part ressentiment-inducing, but majority anomie-reducing, popular culture sashays ever onward simply because the relations of production in our version of social organization do not themselves change.

            But what is the upshot of all of this? One, we have the means within our own heads to utilize a logical process through which we gain a better self-understanding of both alienation and anonymity at the level of the person. Two, Anomie is not something that is inevitable, as Durkheim himself noted. Three, anonymity has its up side, for who of us, aside from the true narcissist, would want to be known by all? Given the fashionable anxiety about the erosion of privacy in modern life, anonymity may well become a kind of precious value in the day to day. Four, we know by now that ‘fate’, though still not of our individual making all of the time, is nonetheless historically conjured, and does not appear in an irruptive manner. There are no golf gods after all. Just bad shots and sometimes some bad luck as well. Given all of this, taking our own shots when best we can will go some way in inducing within our experiences the sensibility that not only can we pick our battles, we don’t need to care all that much what others think or do not think of us, as long as we support their right to try and live a human life. Our relative anonymity vouchsafes the first, our inductive sense testifies to the second. If there is anything somewhat fishy about Durkheim’s analytic, it may be that anomie is itself a kind of nostalgic category, perhaps assuming that the collective life, or even having generous and compassionate community around one at all times, is the better way to live. If so, the authentically modern person must embrace, along with her newfound sense of radical freedom, the understanding that she is by her superior character able to in fact be alone in life, and that this is, for such a person, the new godhead after all.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

My Conversations with the New Right

My Conversations with the New Right (an attempt at a dialogue)

            Over the previous seven years I have had numerous encounters, conversations, and some ongoing dialogue with ostensibly conservative leaders and pundits, including those from organizations such as James Dobson Ministries, Moms for Liberty, MamaGrizzly and various journalists and educators. I am going to refer to them as the ‘New Right’, tripling down on some intended and unintended meanings; the sense that these persons and those they claim to represent feel that they in the right morally in terms of what they value, that they are on the right along the usual political spectrum, and that they are newly correct, not morally this time but rather empirically, about their political and cultural sensibilities. The New Right can be said to be comprised of neo-conservative NPOs and NGOs and their attempts to woo whatever politician is willing to risk their career upon them. Yet every person I have spoken with is at a distance from politics proper, and on my side, I have suggested to each that they maintain that distance, simply because politicians seek only support and have no need to truly believe anything they supposedly stand for. The politician should be distinguished from the politics of values, since he himself values only one thing; personal power and the wielding thereof.

            What was most interesting about this attempt to love one’s apparent enemies, was that each person – I am going to vouchsafe the anonymity and integrity of these discussions by referencing only organizations and not specific voices – came across as someone who wished to be thought of as one thinks of oneself; in a word, ‘average’ or ‘normal’ people, who are simply concerned about this or that within the wider social scene. The problem for the New Right is not that they cannot state their case, but when asked exactly why they are so concerned about specific topics, their line falters. Indeed, I was the one who often provided responses for them, for which they were quite grateful. But the overarching issue for any subculture on the decline is the same as that of any failing national population demographic, such as that in Russia most extremely, and that is biopower. Foucault’s concept may be applied to any receding shoreline upon which are revealed the once undinal wrecks of what used to be valued. Treasure no longer legal tender, but also in which such coins as may be found are so worn as to be no longer able to hold their value. In short, the values of the bygone subculture are, for the most part, unrecognizable to the rest of us, long used to the currency of contemporary life.

            Any dialogue takes place within the hermeneutic arc. If the language of archaic values is disused, then a translation may be salient. Certain distinctions are of great import, like that between distribution and censorship. Organizations dedicated to redistributing certain kinds of materials do not advocate outright bans. The popular but mistaken sense that book banning is the same thing as redistribution is a case in point. There is a great difference between stating that certain media, including books, should not be available to certain age groups through school libraries, and stating that such materials should be banned entirely, not even to appear in public libraries. The former is what the American NPO’s concerned with such materials state, the latter, sadly, can be found for instance, in southern Manitoba, and represents a far more dangerous threat to culture and literacy than anything I have observed south of the border. It is quite reasonable to remove certain graphic sexual materials from elementary school libraries, especially since they remain available everywhere else, and, as the representatives of these specific organizations added, children and parents can decide together when and how to access them. This position by itself seems unproblematic. We have to hold our breaths as to whether or not it is the thin edge of the wedge, as exemplified by De Santis’ bill against sexual education in the schools, at first put forward for only young children, but recently extended to cover all grades. Even so, banning books per se has never been the goal of these NPOs.

            Though we cannot assume that media censorship is not an ideal of the New Right, thus far there is no real evidence for it. Politicians cannot be trusted, certainly, and the Florid Floridian spoken by De Santis is perhaps but a gentle version of the development of the T4 program of the Reich, wherein at first, those responsible were very concerned that it would be morally unacceptable to most people, even though they themselves believed in it. Politicians test their waters gingerly, as did De Santis, and when there is little or no recorded pushback, then they take the next step, and perhaps the next after that. Minors are picked on by politicians simply because they cannot vote, and pandering to parents – and by extension, parent’s rights groups – is always a good bet, since these same parents are already weary of their adolescents’ breeching behaviors. Ganging up on youth is a favorite pastime of the schools, of parents, and of politicians hoping to capitalize on the fact that most adults have no control over much of their lives, especially in their workplaces. Giving them more control over their kids is a political no-brainer, as it acts as a temporary salve against adult anomie and plays to the existential resentment all adults feel towards young people.

            I was critical of this aspect of the political dynamic in my conversations, and most of my interlocutors agreed that children should not be political footballs. At the same time, the parents of the New Right voiced a panoply of concerns about how their children were being educated. I asked after the evidence that such education, wherever and however it might be taking place, was truly alienating families beyond the usual inter-generational conflict which is a hallmark of Western demographics. In the main, they could not distinguish any additional forces sourced in institutions that added weight to the already tense interactions between adults and youths. But they did mention a reasonable point; that young people would assert their own way in any case, and didn’t need ‘extra’ bidding from media and schools to do so. The content of this ‘extra’ was not necessarily in question, just the general suasion thereof. And this too I can see, given the hyper-reliance on digital media used by young persons in our day. As the CEO of a digital media corporation which seeks to provide healthier options in gaming and wellness apps for all persons, but especially those younger, I am in fullest agreement with those who state that much media in this realm as well as in the older venues of film and TV has no merit and promotes a kind of anti-culture.

            And this brings us to the other major bugaboo with which the New Right seems so uncomfortable: alternate gendering. I put it to each person that the sheer numbers of people opting out of the normative binary dynamic was so low as to be insignificant. Admitting this by itself, they replied that this was precisely why these alternate groups appear to proselytize so strongly, coopting schools and even the State to ‘convert’ their children. Certainly, it doesn’t help matters for the alternate side of things to have queer pride parades chanting that ‘we’re coming for your kids’. This in itself seems a rather transparent advertisement for the very event imagined by anxious conservative parents, and perhaps others as well. But the use of ‘your’ betrays the attempted radicality of the non-binary movements. In fact, children do not belong to anyone. On the right, parents are encouraged to own their children as if they were chattel, but their opponents make the same ethical error, whether or not they are actually trying to convert youth to become as they imagine themselves to already be.

            Biopower is in action on both sides of this values front. The New Right’s demographics are flagging as are their pastimes, including what the social scientist identifies as ‘religious behavior’, such as attending church. Less than half of the American population now attends regularly, and this for the first time in history. But there are, in reality, so few persons of alternate gender and sexual preference that this motley community also needs more acolytes. In the meanwhile, the rest of us sail on unmolested, as it were. My interlocutors and I also agreed on a related point; that media, kindred with politicians, simply takes advantage of all of this value conflict to sell copy. The loudest and most obnoxious partisans are featured, giving the impression that the New Right, for one, is filled with hatemongering morons – which, in my experience, it is not – and their opponents are simply weirdos or at best, candidates for the Pythonesque Silly Party. But one has to ask, why are adults who enjoy costumes and theatrical performances of gender-bending apparition so keen on sharing this with young children? Who invented drag story hour anyway? And how did it become so widespread? Perhaps, after all, too curious minds don’t want to know.

These and dozens of like questions filled the conversations I have had with the New Right. Part of the motivation for them seemed simply ‘common sense’. Though this is not a conception that the philosopher employs – William James famously exhorts us to question it at every turn in his popular 1906 lecture series ‘Pragmatism’ – at once I was struck with the sense that the New Right was, after a fashion, engaging in reflective questioning of a number of phenomena that much of society seems to take for granted or at least, shrugs off. In this, I encouraged my interlocutors to continue to question fashionable flaneurs while at the same time cautioning them against appearing to front fascism or berate others, especially their own children, with barbarism. In this, there was also room for dialogue. It is important to note that in my experience, conservatives were always willing to listen to argument, even if it pressed them, while their opponents have never once given me the time of day. This is disconcerting in two ways; one, that the New Right will open themselves up, to a point, with someone like myself, someone who looks like them and has the credentials that traditional values respects, but perhaps would look awry if I were not who I was but made the same arguments, and two, that alternative values proponents take one look at myself and reject anything I might have to say to them, closing off dialogue before it even begins. The latter is by far the worse error, and in that, it does not bode well for those who seek liberation from archaic values and subcultures.

Freedom is only available for human beings through culture, ideally, its highest and most noble forms; art, science, religion, philosophy. While the New Right retains a narrow slice of each and all of these, its opponents appear to reject the lot, and to their gravest peril. That such peril is paraded as if it were the condition of any freedom-loving person is nothing more than an outright fraud, and takes its unenviable place to the left of the fascist who proclaims, though with far more culture behind him, the exact same thing.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Pride Goeth After the Fall?

Pride Goeth After the Fall? (On mistaking the ‘what’ for the ‘who’)

            In Western cosmogony, Adam and Eve discover what they are, and this leads to their expulsion from the timeless scene of paradise. Whatness is not something compatible outside of the historical, and history itself begins with the outcome of the expulsion. Within this newly human history, what one is becomes paramount, at least until our own times. It may be a member of a marginal semi-nomadic ethnicity, such as the ‘pariah community’, to use Weber’s description, like the ancient Hebrews. Or it might be more basically, male or female, man or woman, as the two naïfs in the Garden abruptly uncovered. Yet more primordially, either child or adult, as the original division of labor was that of age, not gender. Whatever one was, given the complete absence of the concept of the individual – something much of the world yet today fails to recognize – it was this what that defined one’s very being. What one was, was the same as who one was.

            Because there was no ‘who’, there was no danger of self-misrecognition. Indeed, one could suggest that Satan’s guise in Eden, that of the serpent, was an attempt on the part of the already fallen archangel to gain a new identity. Not for the purpose of subterfuge, but rather for self-understanding. In this sense, there is a double expulsion at work in Genesis. The ‘Fall of Man’ is actually an echo, or better, a resonance, of the prior fall from the firmament of God’s darker brother, so to speak. Satan has lost his identity, his whatness, and is now in search of himself. Along the way, he encounters two beings, his niece and nephew perhaps, who know not what they are. In a singular act of compassion, he helps them reveal this to themselves. Since Satan himself didn’t expect to be flung from the Garden either, we cannot presume that his act was in essence a plot against Being. It did turn out, however, that it was the first proto-historical act.

            If there was a brief moment of pride in the recognition of what the apical humans were, followed by shame, it was of course a false pride, a kind of bravado in the face of a novel and unexpected fate. Satan no doubt felt nothing of the sort. For him, pride was more simply an after-effect of certain actions in the world, now suddenly set in temporal motion. Over this new kind of time, pride then became a commodity of sorts, something to be bargained for the spiritual fellowship selling one’s soul would provide both parties. Apparently, it’s lonely at the bottom as well. In the meanwhile, pride itself took on its unashamed sensibility only after the fall, not before it. And it is this pride, equally misrecognized as magnanimity, that continues its shady career to this day.

            We find it in all places, exuded by all comers. But its essential character is that the person displaying it has mistaken the ‘what’ for the ‘who’. Unlike in antiquity and long before, this actually matters today because we do have a clear conception of the individual, even though this idea is not yet three centuries old. Today, authenticity means being a ‘who’, not a what. Certainly, the confluence of what social scientists call structural variables, some of these also referred to as life-chance variables, goes some way in forming not just what we are, but as well our personal identities, an aspect of the ‘who-ness’ of Dasein. But they are like primer, an undercoat of social circumscriptions and fraternal framings that allow us to be recognized within the odd confines of a mass and anonymous social organization. The very use of nametags at conferences or other like events is an attempt to personalize the impersonal, to allow strangers to behave more like kindred, though still in a very formal and, as is said, ‘professional’ manner. Such a thing would not have been necessary in smaller scale societies, and certainly never within this or that community, where all were necessarily kin.

            To hang one’s personal hat up on whatness is to have internalized the very anonymity from which one desperately seeks egress. To state that ‘I am’ this or that in an ever-lengthening list of impersonal pronouns and descriptors – a cisgendered white male, for instance, to cut things short for myself – is to obviate the historical essence of who I am as a person and as a being-in-the-world. It is both an ethical and a phenomenological error, and one that has profound implications for one’s own humanity. One possible reason for the burgeoning fashion to ignore one’s personhood is simply the idea that commodification has belatedly caught up with the self. Individuals are messy, even chaotic. Their singular alchemy is momentary, like the absent presence of the philosopher’s stone itself. I am, at the end of the day, only myself after all. To at once take pride in this fleeting flotsam seems both vain and in vain. Far easier would it not be to join with other ‘whats’ and thence and therefore be proud of this false identity. And yet this is the entire point: it is a lie in the face of one’s existential project to identify only and fully with the whatness of being. Only the non-historical deity, left behind after the fall – His attempt to reunite with His own children was also a failure and ended in His death – can claim to be both a what and a who in pure syncretism.

            One the one hand then, a commodification of the self, and on the other, a bravado in the face of a gnawing anonymity that questions one’s ability to actually know who I am. So, for all of those who take such pride in ‘being’ this or that without either accepting, or through avoiding, their singular humanity, Satan, who could not help but blink at our ready-mades, must as well have given up hope. Only the individual, in fullest knowledge of who he is, can gift her soul to another. And this is the further downfall of using social variables to define oneself; we cannot even begin to love one another as cardboard cut-outs taken from a sociology textbook. And if the lesson of the Garden was love at all costs, then our self-commodification desires a different kind of value; one in which I am costed out along structural debits and credits. What is the most valuable persona today, we then might ask, and thus what is the least?

            Pending context, the biracial lesbian professional female might be a fair guess at the top marque of the new humanity. She, or perhaps they, are child free, wealthy, well-educated, and yet as well somehow knowing of suffering, of bigotry, of shame. Their garden is full of haute herbs and perhaps haughty herbals as well. Certainly, in culture producing institutions such a persona would carry some cachet, the university, the publishing and entertainment media, fashion, even some political arenas. None of this is sour grapes, for after all, ‘my kind’ of persona held the top spot for overlong it appears. The first shall certainly be last. Even so, any kind of ranking of types of anonymous souls misses both the existential and ethical points. Unless we are also to believe that the very concept of the individual itself is but a DWEM conspiracy! Hadn’t thought of that. Once again, Satan blinks, his eyes widening. What next, he might well wonder. How serpentine can these humans get? Evolve a sense that selfhood should not at all be predefined by caste, labor category, family pedigree, bloodline, biological sex and the rest of it, well, that sounds like a radical freedom to me. Indeed, the Enlightenment conception of the sovereign self could well be understood as the belated outcome of exposing the what just before the fall. At long last, the what has become a who, only in a short historical period, to fall backwards into the what again! Perhaps this trend is actually more like the end of modernity itself, not at all moving into the postmodern, but rather regressing into the premodern. All of this must give any being who imagined that he could play the indefinite role of trickster-cum-devil conniptions. ‘They don’t need me’, Satan was overheard murmuring to himself, ‘Just as they don’t need a me.’

            Poor devil, we may empathize. Just proves you don’t have to be red, replete with tail and hooves, to be demonized. Just ask me. And while a popular pundit like Jordan Peterson seems not to recognize the basic historical fact that language use changes over time, and indeed does so through its usage, he does maintain an essential caveat, if I understand his work correctly: that by abandoning singularity we lose the essential link to our thrownness. As a phenomenologist, I take this most seriously, even if I am translating somewhat. And if I am critical of defining oneself in terms of social variables which are shared by millions or billions, it is because it truly is a regression to do so. It has nothing to do with awkwardness, the blinking of the eye in the face of the ‘theyness’ of these persons who abide yet in one body, or the seemingly more and more picayune distinctions made by insiders amongst versions of queerness, no, but rather to do with the question of fallen humanity. We know, at least mythopoetically, how it fell. But today, the question is rather, where did it fall? Just where is that other to self, who, in her ownmost project, will also face a most personal death as will I myself? Where is the fallen whatness that has of late been resurrected to tend its collective farm in lieu of its lost private garden? Where is the otherness that can only present itself as radical to me as a singular self, a sole soul who confronts me as she is?

            For now, at least, it appears that she is She alone, along with whatever else She imagines She is, or they are, or this could be. And if I am the only one who mourns this loss, then at once I can put it down to simply being part of my job to mourn it, as well as wonder what was missing in all of the would-have-been whos which have not waited to be elbowed out of paradise, preferring to instead, arm in arm and with a great pride and a bravado since shared, charms itself as if it were courage, stride out the front gates of their own accidental accord.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Encountering Finitude

Encountering Finitude (Coming face to face with one’s personal death)

            Three weeks ago, I almost died. After five days of inability to eat I went to the hospital at the bidding of my close friend, a nationally recognized lung cancer specialist in the USA. It turned out I had the uncommon and unfriendly ‘Necrotizing Pancreatitis’, and at that point I had but two days to live. That I am writing this now is testament to a combination of luck and solid medical care. But each day remains a subtle Damoclean existence. There is no cure and only management by diet provides some vague guarantor against relapse. That this was the seventh time I had confronted my own personal demise may seem astonishing, but this most recent experience was quite different. Each of the previous times was had in a moment, the subito of evil which Kierkegaard discusses, equally abruptly, in his book on anxiety. Mostly automobile related, one does not have time to reflect upon what is happening. The most interesting was me being taken out to sea on an ebbing tide while exploring coral reefs in Hawaii. Growing up on the ocean, I had enough nautical sense to simply begin to hold on to the corals when the swell slacked, and then I pushed along when it flowed towards the shore. It took about twenty minutes or so but I regained land to see my much-relieved girlfriend taking a picture of me straggling up on the beach.

            But in all such cases there is either a place, a time, or an event that can in the future be utterly avoided. It may be reckless driving, a specific intersection or stretch of road, or an activity, like ocean snorkelling on an outgoing tide. But with a health condition, that place is you, inside you, and there is no escape from it. One can learn to ‘manage’ it, but this is at best a practice, like yoga or meditation, and not a return to health from being otherwise. Chronic conditions present to the self a new kind of selfhood. ‘This is what I am now’, one must say to oneself, and further, more profoundly, ‘This is what I will be and will continue to be.’ In the hyletic realm, the space of the world and of the social world, health is paramount. One cannot be anything else without one’s health in hand. Even so, in the interior life, that of a consciousness which includes both conscience and self-consciousness, alterations in the vehicle of being do not fundamentally change Dasein’s elemental orientation. If anything, they heighten its proclivities, make one feel that time is short and that life is, after all, solely for the living.

            Yet it is a curious mix: one desires to accomplish this or that, but one is also wary of making plans. There is an instant contradiction between the Pauline feeling of anxious pilgrimage, where the next step may well be one’s last, and the futurity which is one of Dasein’s essential conditions of and for itself. Mediating these conflicting sensibilities is one’s presence in the present. This more pragmatic issue says to us, ‘Until and unless you hear otherwise, carry on more or less as before’. At the end of each day, this is the only thing one can reasonably do, for it is a betrayal of the will to life itself to simply stand and wait for death, while it is a mistaken interpretation of anxiety as fear to be driven to work overtime simply to accomplish some personal goal. Just as chronic illness presents itself as a fait accompli, so one must respond with one’s remaining health and reason by attempting to live, not as if one had remained unchanged, but within the full authenticity of Dasein’s unaltered existential lot. This includes resoluteness, anxiety, being-ahead, and the call to conscience, amongst a few others. And if resolute being seeks to take the fore, like the Jungian warrior who vows to protect one at all costs, one must step back a little at this juncture and remind oneself that life is not what illness says it is; in a word, render unto crisis what is critical alone.

            What then does it mean to experience finitude rather than become aware of one’s own finiteness? The latter is measurable, and for human life finds its expression in actuarial tables, suicide rates, life expectancies and mortality rates at birth, usually ‘per 100,000’ or some other such denominator. Humans too have a ‘half-life’, on average, given the presence or absence of what social scientists refer to as ‘life-chance’ variables. These include genetic markers, made manifest in family histories such as my father having the same condition, though misdiagnosed, and my maternal grandmother having the same again, diagnosed correctly. But most life-chance variables are what are commonly called ‘environmental’. Taken in its loosest sense, an environmental variable list would include level of education, family composition and birth order, poverty rate, intensity of community, rural or urban, and so on. Finiteness can never be utterly specified for an individual life, but it can be framed in a manner completely distinct from finitude. Finiteness has both an objective probability to it, as well as a fraudulent personal equivalent, as when we say to ourselves, ‘well, we all have to go sometime’. Heidegger is particularly critical of this use of ‘all’. Who is ‘all’?

            Any time we generalize death we are participating in what he calls Uneigenlichkeit, inauthenticity. We do so in order to avoid the intimate confrontation with ‘the death which is mine ownmost’. In fact, we die only our personal deaths, and indeed cannot experience death itself at all. That is, an objective death is beyond our being, and it can only indirectly be understood through the deaths of others coming before our own. Transposing finiteness as if it were an expression of human finitude is one of modernity’s’ great self-frauds. Heidegger makes intimate the confrontation between Dasein’s being-in-the-world as a thrown project and the completion of being in death. Surely, I desire to remain in this sense incomplete for as long as reasonably possible. And just as we cannot experience our own deaths – dying, yes, but this too is a life process and represents also a phase of life, not of death – we can also never understand completed being. Only the Being of the world and of the wider cosmos is of this marque.

            Coming face to face with one’s own finitude is a moment wherein the call to conscience can no longer be ignored. For me, I had to come to terms with the looming potential of no longer being, not only not alive, but being at all. My chief concern was for my wife; that she could, would, and should live on and attain a new life without me in it. But I also had to confront the part of conscience which leveled an indictment upon my character. This part literally told me that I deserved to die. This may seem outlandish, but each of us accumulates a litany of litigious libel over the life course. All of the mistakes I have made, all the others I have hurt, all the chances passed by or wasted, all of the time spent doing nothing of merit. For me, it felt like a lengthy list, and if each of us is our own St. Peter – who, we are told, himself knew very well what remorse and regret meant – then we appear before the mysterious limen before being able to pass over its threshold. In such a moment, evaluation comes to the fore and one hopes for a deeper self-understanding through its unfailing interrogation. That objectively one neither deserves nor does not deserve to die is bracketed, not as unmeaning or yet a fraud, as the cowardly use of ‘all’ connotes, but rather as a reminder that the world is itself value-neutral, and that ‘deserves got nothing to do with it’.

            Finitude is our authentic existential condition. It is both shared by all and intimately experienced by the self. Because we are historical beings, beings of language and ‘social animals’, my ownmost expression of the zoon politikon reaches back into the world, not for justification any more than for judgment, but rather in the hopes that the perspective of the world, which we are said to love as we love life, will allow us to come to terms with our own mortality. Ideas of legacy through work, of continuance through children, even of memory through the ongoingness of others whom we had known, all come from this worldly perspective. Together they make up our idea of a human future, whether or not I am to be part of it anymore. Joined to this, for many yet, is a second perspective which can legitimately be called otherworldly. This otherness to the world speaks also of a future, but a non-historical one, wherein some version of myself persists and thus exists apart from the purely human ambit. Can it be any more called speculative than its worldly counterpart? Perhaps the less so given the travails of said social world, the evils of its politics and the wider Damocles of its dark technologies and elite desires alike. However this may be, it is clear that on two fronts do we set our faces and step forward toward the unknowable Otherness which is completed being.

             It is a sign of ongoing health that we do so. The human imagination, the harbinger of all futures, is coupled with its curiosity, the presage of the present. Not that which Heidegger also includes within his analysis of entanglement, the curiosity that ‘tarries along’ and distracts, but rather that by which we involve ourselves in the world as a child of its own Being. In spite of any fear, or in my case, bad conscience, we remain curious, even about death. Our imagination seeks to frame it, not to make it less potent, but rather to come to know it in some manner, since it already and always seems to know us so well. One is given to say that death has the drop on us, which is a residue, if you will, of the Promethean gift to humanity of hiding from us the precise moment of each of our personal ends. Without this absence of perfect knowing, nothing would be possible; no human project would be begun let alone completed. In this sense, the Promethean trickster in all cultural traditions was a paragon of pragmatism. The apical metaphor is clear: I live on in the face of not living on, and I will continue to do so until or unless I hear otherwise.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Understanding and Comprehension

Verstehen und VerstÄndnis (Understanding and Comprehension)

            In my life I am confronted with both history and world. Neither of my own making, nevertheless they dominate my existence, and could be said to both originate and predestine it. History includes the tradition, all that which is customary in the sense of Hexis, which I must learn in order to function as a viable being in the social world-as-it-is. But history also includes all that has come to be known as ‘cultural capital’; the very ‘stuff’ of the human career, from ancient archaeology through to contemporary popular culture. It is an open question how much of this capital must be possessed in order to maintain social viability. To each is granted his specialties, perhaps, and in a complex organic social organization wherein each of us plays multiple social roles and thus wears many hats, the daily discourse of informal interaction is muted to the point where Verstehen, or ‘interpretive understanding’ is rarely called upon. This bracketing of interpretation is significant due not only to it being so by design, but also, and as a result of this, that each of us is left to assume that the other knows what she is about, as well as knowing what we ourselves meant by this or that interaction. In a word, we favor Deutung over Verstehen in everyday life.

            Since our very sanity is at stake, both in terms of our self-perception and that of the others, Deutung, or ‘interpreted meaning’ must indeed carry the day to day upon its presumptive shoulders. Most of us presume one another to already and always understand what is called for, and thus what is also called forth, in a great variety of social contexts. But since all of these are learned, and mostly in our childhood and youth, we cannot be certain that either we ourselves or any other person has fully comprehended every possible social context and thus knows how to act to a tee in each. The ‘social’ person used to be casually equated with the most ‘sociable’ person. The very conception of what can constitute a ‘social’ gathering might be interpreted by class and status, ethnicity or language, work relationship or family pedigree. Though all are social in the anthropological sense, the vast majority of us are not students of society in any formal way. It is perhaps ironic that though we do learn to tread on much or even most of the stages upon which civil behavior is to be enacted, very few of us choose to dive more deeply into just how all of this ‘sociality’ actually works.

            And there is, on the face of it, no good reason to do so. If all of us know the score in terms of how to act, what to say, and of course, the opposite as well – the shalt not is duly implied by the shalt – then what would be the point of expending the effort in order to take everything apart just to see how it functioned? Would there not be a risk, in reassembly, that I would then get it wrong? Taking society apart to examine its mechanics and its organics both would seem a risky, even radical act. And since there is no clear consensus on society itself being ‘broken’ – though many claim to know just where and how this or that part of it is broken and should be replaced by some other part, equally proclaimed as being ‘obvious’ – the idea of taking it all down and reconstructing from point zero seems to have little merit. Even the most astute and vigorous social scientist does not attempt such a cosmogonical feat, contenting herself with an examination only, noting the parts and how they interact, just as the ethnographer of modern culture might stalk the streets and observe actual human interactions. An examination of society generates the means by which Deutung can be performed. It does not require any consistent interpretation but rather looks more like a connect-the-dots diagram. The pieces lack order until the connections are made, surely, but just as certainly, all the pieces are present and can be ordered. And it is the resulting order that generates both customary performance but also much of the history of the world itself.

            Between Max Weber and Georg Simmel, ‘Verstehen-Sociology’ gained much traction in the first third of the twentieth century, making a deep impression upon other seminal sociological thinkers such as Alfred Schutz and Robert Merton. It faded post-war given the ascendence of functionalism, which is instructive for our topic as interpretation was just that tool of questioning that mere examination need not access. Taking it all apart and rebuilding it required interpretation, poring over it and noting its connections, as functionalism mostly did, required only already interpreted meaning. Not that this is an either/or situation. Indeed, one might argue that one would have to come to an understanding of the parts themselves before generating an overall comprehension of the whole. While interpretational understanding could do the first, it seemed only functionalism could do the second. Even so, in between these two stood social phenomenology. This third stance suggested that it was the very interactions of living persons that constructed and reconstructed the cultural parts of the social whole in an ongoing and even daily basis. In short, society itself was a performance, or better, a performative understanding of itself.

            The roots of this more active interpretation are diverse. Durkheim’s famous epigrammatic definition of organized religious belief is a case in point: ‘Religion is society worshipping itself’. No more concise editorial can be imagined. But within this pithy fruit is the very essence of performative social action. Borrowing from the older idea that in order for a deity to exist at all it must be actively worshipped, the very structure of society itself has to be borne up by our participation in its manifestations. I am a social actor, yes, but I am also a social founder through my action in the world. Similarly, and perhaps just as profoundly, history too is enacted insofar as we are historical beings. This is not to say that what is known as ‘the past’ must be reenacted – though Mesoamerican cultures have this as a benchmark understanding of human history; the most famous of these consistent performances is the re-enactment of the Columbian Conquest – but at the very least, history ‘continues’ only due to our actions in the present and our resolute being oriented towards the future.

            What is interesting for both the student and the social actor is the fact that performance requires interpretation. The customary scripts may be given and learned by rote, but there is always slippage between an ideal and a reality. The spectrum of improvisation is vast, ranging from stifling a belch during a dinner conversation to reworking a political speech given the pace of world events. Society in its mode of being-social is very serious theater indeed, and part of the fulfilling quality of actual theatrical performance, stagecraft and script, paid actors and paying audience, is that all involved recognize themselves outside of the drama and cast upon the wider social stage. We are, in our own way, not so different from the conquered cultures of Central America, though our settings are perhaps more abstract and work not so directly with historical narratives but rather with an indirect allegory. This too is by design; like the examination of the mechanisms of society without taking the whole thing apart, allegory allows each of us to take the broader view without fully imbricating, and perhaps thus also immolating, ourselves within or upon society’s reason-of-being. For if it is only the ‘moron’ who resists social custom and flouts both mores and moralities alike, most of us would rather preserve our semblance of sanity as part of our own social performance, so that we never risk the ire of others who can justifiably say to us, ‘Well, I’m doing my part to keep all this nonsense together, why aren’t you?’.

            Hence the suspicion and even aspersion cast up against all those who question things ‘too much’. The professional philosopher, who is only doing his job, is perhaps the only socially sanctioned role wherein the practitioner can legitimately say as part of his vocation that nothing is sacred. Outside of this, we are all expected to give at least nominal service to specific renditions of what the majority feels society to be, and to be about. The ‘what’ of society is the first, the ‘why’ the second. Even the thinker, in order to be judged as human at all, must bracket her radical investigations, insights, and indictments some of the time. Society is at once a performance and a comprehension. In true Durkheimian fashion, it performs itself in order to comprehend itself. But because such real drama requires ongoing improvisation and interpretation, society is also made up not so much of cut and dried mechanisms as quick-witted examinations and re-enactments. Society gives the appearance of a machine only insofar as we social actors have honed our individual and thence collective skills upon its various stages. A well-polished theatrical performance never leaves the fiction of its allegory, but a well-staged social performance upshifts itself into a stable social reality.

            The question for each of us then is, do I continue to improve my acting skills within the historical context of the culture into which I was born, in order to preserve the manner in which that culture enacts itself in the wider world, or do I pretend only and ever to be an understudy, letting others do the work which is in fact the duty of all? Or, do I walk off the stage entirely, into a hitherto obscured human drama called ‘conscience’ by the world and ‘the future’ by history? In fact, it is our shared birthright, as both gift and task, to accomplish both of these essential acts. For society as mechanism is only the resulting case, and society as performance the manner in which the present presents its case. In order for any modern culture to reproduce itself, it must eschew pure reproduction in favor of a self-understanding, a Selbstverstandnis or holistic comprehension-of-itself that is developed in history but seeks the future of and in all things. Interpretive understanding is both a tool and yet a way of life for human beings. But comprehension is the mode of being of the social whole, which means no one person can provide it, even for himself. That we are social beings tells upon us in two elemental ways: we are called to conscience by the ongoingness of the world, and we are called toward the future by the ongoing presence of history, which distinguishes the social world from the world at large. That I am myself never socially larger than that historical life is for me the Kerygma of existence.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

On the Value-Neutral Character of Life

On the Value-Neutral Character of Life (life is neither fair nor unfair)

            There are a number of commonplace errors involved in what passes for the ethical evaluation of life. Some are products of laziness, such as phrases like ‘life isn’t fair’ – levelled at our children in lieu of an authentic argument or analysis or as a salve for our own bad consciences – and ‘its just human nature’ – casually cast off between adults who have given up trying to puzzle their way through a life that has gotten away from them. In fact, life is neither fair nor unfair, and human nature is not a singular thing. ‘Fairness’ is contextual, and hence its ethical overtones, and it is culture, not nature, that animates all humans and distinguishes us from the wider nature. Both change over time and across place, and though not immediately connected to one another, our concepts of what is fair or reasonable, ethical judgments, are at length revealing of more abstract ideas such as ‘nature’ or the human condition, which are ontological constructs. From the outset, ethics sought to distance itself from metaphysics, but their affinal relationship remains intact.

            Life by itself has no value. This is because it lacks both meaning and meaningfulness. The one is inherited by us from the tradition, which we the living must confront even as we are confronted by it. The other is made by us through living-on. The ‘adventurous’ timbre to be found in Erlebnis is a casual hint that the one who seeks to live and believes that ‘life is for the living’ is on the right path regarding the hermeneutic ideal of having a new experience. The newness of any experience, one that I have never had before this moment, is what gives it its authenticity. The genuine character of lived-experience, at first as Erlebnis in the sense of it being exciting or at the least, interesting, due to its very novelty, is, after a fashion, transmuted into Erfahrung, an experience through which one has gained something. It is also instructive that in the German a distinction is made between experience in the shorter and longer terms, through the use of the same two terms. The immediacy of Erlebnis, ‘lived experience’, connotes the very living of it. ‘Gained experience’, built into Erfahrung, is suggestive of something that has been digested. This internalization of one’s experience occurs through the second phase of the hermeneutic encounter, that of interpretation. How does this new experience jibe with what I thought I already knew about her, about them, about it, about the world?

            When we ‘process’ an experience, we do so after the fact, as it were. We are now no longer in the very midst of living it but rather on the way to having it, not that it will ever constitute a possession in the usual sense. Erfahrung once had does change us, but it itself will also be changed by yet further Erlebnis over time. Meaningfulness is the result of the duet of lived and possessed experience. In this, living-on presents the most authentic contrast with the tradition, something each of us is born into and over which none of us has control. ‘The tradition’, whatever cultural druthers we quite by happenstance find ourselves swaddled in, can of course take us only so far, especially in a world moved along by accelerated paces of change and an ever-more cosmopolitan social reality. But it is not merely the sometimes abrasive and abrupt contact amongst differing cultures that promotes a sense that what I have learned as a child is not the entire story. Indeed, the majority of the tradition does not seek to cast aspersion on other cultures so much as it limits the experience of our own.

            The apical metaphor is clear enough. There are other gods after all, but they are for the others, perhaps lesser or at least, less sophisticated than we. We shalt not worship these gods as it would be tantamount to betraying our own culture. Render unto the others what is other. Today, we tend not to publicly or officially state our own cultural superiority – though privately one must wonder; such a study awaits its student, perhaps – but rather act as if we are minding our own cultural business and thus expect others to do the same. The window-dressing mosaic of borrowing one another’s food, music and clothing, or even, and more seriously, converting to another’s belief system, is not the same as becoming other from oneself. The world tends to intervene, and even in extreme cases – as when anachronistic evangelicals in Alberta kidnapped their neighbors to save them from the immanent apocalypse, stuffing them in the back of their BMW SUV only to have the RCMP ‘demons’ rescue the unwitting elect – symbolic beliefs hailing from previous ages are made both maudlin and absurd by the wider forces of modernity. I am an anti-science creationist who drives a car. I am a woman-hating rapist who is happily married. I am a Christian who helps only those in my church. I am a fascist but I control my children out of love.

            Such common contradictions cannot be put down solely to role stress. Over time, we learn to choose amongst ideals. The febrile choose only those which support their basest desires. More courageously, others confront their self-made contradictions, though many succumb to the unethical passion of choosing only in self-interest. For all these, the supposed ‘unfairness’ of life is such simply because it has gotten in their way. They thence sow their faux cynic all round their person, muting youth’s magic horn and reaping a bitter harvest late in their own paltry lives. Here, both conceptions of experience are absent. No Erlebnis is possible in such an existence because the new in principle is shunned. Hence no Erfahrung can result. Meaning has stopped at the point at which the tradition has run itself out. It is fair to mark such a moment at perhaps twelve years of age, when ideally one would encourage the nascent youth to begin her own questioning of all things. It is also reasonable to suggest that those who have received the tradition but have never, through their own experience, gone beyond it, are stuck at age eleven or so. Given the sub-cultures that alone celebrate tradition and how they do so, identifying this age seems apt.

            Of course, Erlebnis is itself a value-neutral conception. There is no guarantee that a child might not experience ‘too much too soon’, to use a conservative turn of phrase. But what constitutes both the ‘much’ and the ‘soon’ can be overdone. The very vagueness of the framing can lend itself to manipulation. The playground conflicts – speaking of eleven-year-olds – between groups of parents apparently espousing contrary ‘values’ is an ongoing example of the unthought that any cultural tradition, when taken in a vacuum, must promote. And yet the specific content of Erlebnis is not ultimately at issue. Rather it is how one interprets these experiences, what one ‘gets’ out of them in the sense of Erfahrung that will shape our character over the longer term. So, the neo-fascist of all stripes seeks to control what kind of experience is made available, to youth in particular but in their own imagination, to all of us. You must see the drag queen; no, you must not see the drag queen, and so on. In reframing specific types of potential experience, we in fact lose the quality of experience itself. All institutions seek to do this through policy, curricula, dogma and doxa, or ritual. It is fair to suggest that experiencing any of these for the first time preserves some element of the hermeneutic ongoingness of life. But institutionalized experiences are constructed to mimic their once precedent-setting content with an exactitude that takes them outside of lived time. They present to us moral spaces instead of ethical places. Only within the latter do we have consistently new experiences and thus can undertake to change or improve ourselves instead of becoming stagnant, static, staid and stiff. But confronting the tradition by taking ourselves outside of what is comfortable and convenient for us takes both courage and nerve.

            We do have solid, if naïve, role models for both in the presence of our adolescents. Courage occurs when I am faced with an unknown outcome and have time to consider an array of consequences. Perhaps in some few cases, discretion really is the better part of valor, but mostly, I must match the courage I have shown in taking on this or that confrontation with a simple nerve that tells me ‘I can do this and I’ll show you!’. To say that we have seemingly lost our nerve when it comes to confronting warmed-over traditions, most of which have little relevance to present-day life, is to say we have in the process also become cowardly. The essence of our attempts to control young people lies in snuffing out both courage and nerve; the one associated with Erfahrung and the other with Erlebnis. For we who have forsaken both, youth represent not themselves but rather a way of being; that which progresses human ‘nature’ while at once revealing the polyglot ethical stations of human life. Our collective avoidance of the value-neutral character of life can only dehumanize us, for it takes away our ability to make life meaningful. Instead, we are left with the meanings of others and of history. Though these must be the starting point for any human life, they alone cannot provide for any human future. Instead, we should work to revivify opportunities for lived experience as widely as possible, taking the risk of the self to be our guide but without assuming that all potential risks are equal. Just as wonder is the essential principle of the child that the adult needs access, nerve is the basic tenet of youth which the adult must also regain. The mature being adds a third principle, that of Phronesis, or practical wisdom. Each phase of life has something to teach the others, to remind them that a human life is at once disparate but is also one thing. In doing this, the conception of a future can once again take hold.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, aesthetic and social theory, as well as adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Experiencing Illness

Experiencing Illness (Its Uncanny Liminality)

            Perhaps the most pressing impingement on the will to life as lived is the experience of illness. Health, as Hans-Georg Gadamer aptly put it, is an enigma. We are unsure of exactly what it is without due recourse to understanding its absence. As if it were a singularly focused sense of the social, wherein we only feel the weight of society as a set of rubrics, roles and rules when we resist its presence or openly rebel against it, similarly, illness speaks to us in irruptive tones, interrupting the generally unthought experience of health. Illness, no matter how slight, is always something of a shock. ‘I felt fine, just a moment ago’, we might tell ourselves. ‘What could possibly have gone wrong in that time?’ of course, we are told that many illnesses have incubation periods, genetic markers might manifest themselves over a brief and sudden period, or injury might have resulted from being at the wrong place at the wrong time, or through a freak accident, or yet a calculated risk gone awry. Our health, the most precious thing we can be said to ‘possess’ – the love of another is a gift and not a possession, for instance – is, in one sense, constantly at risk of being lost.

            And it is not that illness is ever-present for most of us. If so, we would have no true experience of what it means to be healthy at all. Sickness and health would be subjectively interchangeable. No, it is rather the sometimes-stark contrast between them that allows us the perspective to compare and contrast such seemingly opposing states. Illness confronts us in the manner of all things irruptive. The visionary was confronted by his vision, the saint by her mission, the pilgrim by the end-times, and the artist by their muse. In all such cases, there is a ‘reality to the unseen’, which William James specifically states is a hallmark of religious experience, also irruptive when radically present, though much less so when presented through institutional lenses. This generally invisible yet real plenum, the space from which uncanny things emanate is by its character unidirectional. We, for instance, at least in our mortal and fragile form, cannot transgress its boundaries, oblique and occluded as they are when made contiguous with the everyday world. To do so would be risking all, as if we had deliberately made ourselves sick, or if we had attempted suicide.

            The irreal sphere speaks to us, but it hears us not. We too might close our ears to its glossolalia, turn our eyes from its hieroglyphics. But what we cannot do is control it from without. This at least, from the tradition that claims such a realm even exists at all. It is medicine that makes the first attempt to open up the irreal in the name of rationality and through the use of empiricising methods. The mystery of ill-health itself was to be solved, even if specific conditions remained unresolved. What medicine does is to reframe illness as a departure from a set of experienced conditions that betray their ‘normal’ state through their functional status. That the doctor often begins his hermeneutic by asking ‘How do you feel? Where is the pain? What kind of pain is it? How strong?’ and so on, betrays both its kindred nature with the investigation of any mystery, including the criminal type at perhaps one end of the spectrum – after all, the criminal role is merely a socially defined career that itself is ‘ill’ and Abnormative – and cosmology at the other; what is the nature of the universe, how did it come to be? The diagnostic criteria are themselves arranged on a spectrum of their own, gradually departing from the cut and dried as we experience the shift from physical ailments to those deemed ‘mental’. If we can say that the mechanics of proprioceptive function seem to take on their own uncanny presence – functioning in health ‘normally’ and yet also somehow miraculously – they thus exude a certain tacit charisma, as if they are the resonance of Being in creation. On the other hand, mental illness is both the truer mystery due to its ability to fraudulently present itself as if it were a kind of charismatic presence, but also and at once due to the fact that while charm can be faked, as anyone who has been on a first date can attest, authentic charisma cannot. The emotionally compromised can maintain their charm, at least for certain hours of the day, but physical illness is simply, and at best, unpleasant.

            For modern physical medicine, the discursive dues have been paid. Even if the root cause remains unknown, this idiopathy is never an epistemological problem. One always can identify the effects and perhaps also treat them. ‘Managing one’s illness’, from addiction to diabetes to pancreatic breakdown and a host of others, has become a commonplace phrase in daily life. It may be diet, it may be drugs, exercise or even meditation, but such management clearly takes the place of any outright cure. It is of interest, from the perspective of witnessing the shift from illness being sourced wholly within the irreal no matter its material effects to it being itself fully material and empirical, that illness management can claim to have the only remaining pedigree that harks back to traditional diagnostics. That is, the shaman, in countering the sorcerer, tells the victim that she must ‘live with the curse’ as there is no cure for it. But there are countermeasures, which must taken even daily, that ameliorate the curse’s effects or indeed force it into dormancy, as if in remission. For in traditional cosmology, there is no such thing as an accident; nothing occurs by chance alone.

            Nothing truly is altered by the upshifting of both magic and sorcery – the one patrolling the sunny side of the existential street, the other skulking along the shady side – into the sole purview of a god. If such a deity is given to evaluation, it issues forth its own curses and blessings, and only time will tell which is which in the end. The sourcing of the irruptive in the irreal, giving it is uncanny force and perhaps also a kind of soteriological suasion, is unchanged. It is only with the advent of medicine that illness is both brought down to earth but at once denuded of its earthy roots. Even so, such knowledge is clearly also a work in progress; everything about the subjective volatility of mental illness underscores the incomplete character of medical discourse. More than this, its own history, especially that of psychopathology itself, lends credence to the belief that applied science may have its limitations, if not in principle its limits, when confronted with a state which rests part of its status in premodern metaphysics. Like ultimate questions which only religion presumes to answer – indeed, it must do so if it is to be worth our consideration at all – mental illness proffers to the doctor a kind of abject faith, if only in itself.

            Though the medical specialist is also human and thus also can suffer ill-health, medical discourse is an objectivating space deliberately set over against the irreal, just as is modern evolutionary cosmology a bastion against creation ex nihilo. Not that the discourses of anti-transcendental metaphysics can answer to ultimate cosmogonical questions. In this, the absence of understanding precisely what health is, in its essence, is made choate only by being able to tell what it is not. Sanity thus is best framed as a practiced knowing of social customs and the presentation of self in daily living-on. Any other definition risks sliding sideways from this normative practice and becomes immediately subjective or, at the very least, introduces a ‘subjectionable’ element by having to undertake the interrogative journey of ascertaining how the patient ‘feels’ about her emotions and thoughts. The person who suffers from illness of any kind is subjected to it simply by retaining their status as a subject. I feel my illness in a manner no one else can, and so it goes for everyone else. Even the dislocation between pain receptors and pain processors in the brain is not enough to resolve this subjection of the subject to illness. Yes, some persons appear more ‘stoic’ than others, another factor amongst a myriad that the doctor must try to take into account. Some patients ‘present’ well, other badly. Some presentations little resemble clinical data, while in other cases, the data speak to relatively good health though the patient still feels badly. In a word, illness is the most salient way by which we identify health.

            One early deontological departure from the traditional sensibility that illness and therefore also mortality are functions of either evil acts or primeval fates comes to us from the Greek physician Alkmaion, who stated that humans are in fact mortal because ‘they have not learned to connect the beginning and the end’ in the way that the rest of nature has been evolved to do. I am not a perennial being, and even though my being is completed in mine ownmost death, this completion differs utterly from that which is completed by beginning once again, over and over. Insofar as the experience of illness is like a rehearsal for dying, its theatrical power emanating from a representation of both the uncanny and the charismatic in the guise of a journey from the healthy place of magic to the unhealthy space of sorcery, it alerts us to the fragility of our shared human lot. But illness is no mere metaphor, a point to which Sontag as emphatically has alerted us. However irreal it may feel, its reality rests in the material change in function and variance that often can even be measured, sometimes indirectly but always with a sense that illness’ sources, however obscure some of them may yet be to medicine, cannot be taken literally as either curse or cure.

            Thus, the experience of illness is as much something that distracts us from pursuing the most objective course while at once offering a very personal glimpse into the very ontology of health, its history and its discursive career. For mental illness, this glance may become a manner of life, though never a way of living. For in being forced into the darker reaches of mortal being, we should not think to rest there let alone remain. Illness is the lesser sibling of anxiety, which rests within us as part of our Dasein. Even so, illness as experienced allows us to more gently understand that dying has its own ethic, and that the disconnect between our origins and our ends is not so fatal to absolve us of willing a return to an enigmatic health. Only through accomplishing this return do we then also glimpse the wider miracle of nature’s self-connected being, that which our consciousness cannot so far grasp in any other manner.

            G. V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Ethics and Personhood

Ethics and Personhood: ‘you can’t have one without the other’

            There is an agentive aspect to making the distinction between a morality and an ethics. Yet just here we are already relativists, for morality was never simply one of many, but rather ‘the’ only game in town. Even the recognizance, found in the Hebrew scriptures, that there are in fact other gods – just don’t worship them – presupposes in an essential manner that one’s own morality is at the very least superior to those of the others. So, to speak of ‘a’ morality, one amongst many, is to engage an historical sensibility utterly absent during the actual epochs when morals themselves were in the ascendancy. Then, morality could command because the one upon whom it made its demands was not a fully individuated person in the contemporary sense. The shalt and shalt not of a moral code impinged not upon agency per se but rather upon one’s sanity, if saneness is thought of in the sociological sense of fully understanding what is customary.

            For the Greeks, the ‘moron’ was the one who resisted custom; mores, traditions, rituals and the like, or was akin to a child who simply did not yet understand them and thus one’s duties towards same. And though it seems somewhat amusing that the one who went against the fates was none other than the ‘hyper-moron’, for our purposes we can borrow from the pithy pop lyricist Neil Peart and reiterate with him that for us today, ‘fate is just the weight of circumstances’. Just so, circumstance for any pre-modern human being could be conceived as fate simply because of the singular presence of morality. Bereft of competition, moral principles could very well give the impression that they were good for all times and places, to the point of convincing the would-be moralist that any sane human being would hold to them. I say ‘would-be’, because though moralizing always seems to be in fashion – demarcating the fine line between righteousness and self-righteousness – to actually be a moralist one requires at least some comparative data.

            It was just this that was missing in premodern social organizations, no matter their ‘level’ of cultural complexity. It is not a coincidence that our first serious stab at ethics occurred in the cosmopolitan settings of the Alexandrian Empire. It is well known that Aristotle’s attempt to disengage ethics from metaphysics didn’t quite work, not due to the person-friendly ideas therein – his conception of friendship is still basically our own; the most noble form of love – but due rather to the lack of persons themselves. Even so, the abruptly multicultural scenes of a relatively impartial imperialism forced upon the customary the customs of the others, unheard of, alien, eye-opening. It was the beginning of perspective in the more radical, experiential sense of the term. And the origin of recognizing that one’s culture was simply one of many also prompted the incipience of imagining the possibility that a single human being might just have a slightly different understanding of ‘his’ customs than did his intimate neighbor.

            Yet this too is an abstraction. While the history of ideas presents a far more choate brevis, the Socratic citizen which gains a worldly consciousness, the Pauline persona for which each step crosses a limen between history and destiny, the Augustinian subject which redeems itself and thus adds a self-consciousness – one is responsible for one’s own past, history is also and suddenly biography – and thence fast-forwarding through Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, the process of individuation greatly augmented until the 18th century wherein we first hear of the authentic individual, the Enlightenment’s fabled ‘sovereign selfhood’. It is here, belatedly, that the ‘which’ becomes a ‘who’.

            In literary reflection, the mythic hero which is only begrudgingly human, and then only for a brief period of existence, is gradually transmuted to the person who acts heroically and thence often also dies a human death. Between the hero and the person lies the saint. Between mythology and biography there is hagiography. And while the self-styled heroic author may sometimes engage in autohagiography – Crowley is perhaps an exemplar of self-satire to this regard, though the reader is led both ways there – in general modern literature casts very much human beings into human crises. We have to turn to epic fantasy to attain the echo of the mythic, but in so doing, we also in general cast aside our shared humanity. I resist here the opportunity to provide an alternative to this lot. In any case, it is mortality rather than mere morality that retains its own de profundis in the face of anonymous social relations and mass society.

            The Socratic citizen is lesser in distancing himself from the ‘examined life’. This early Selbstverstandnis has elements of an ethics about it; the idea of virtue, the sense that one should think for oneself over against institutions and customs alike, the weighing of one’s experience in contrast to received wisdom, the questioning of authority. But I feel that it also instrumentalizes youth, seeks the vigor of the question only to enthrall it to the rigor of the argument. Inasmuch as it ‘corrupts’, it also uses youth for its own purposes. In this it feels more like a mission than a mere mission statement. Similarly, the Pauline pilgrim; one is individuated in the face of a transcendental judgment by which the mythic re-enters history through the back door, as it were. The more radical ‘you have heard it said, but…’ is muted by the sense that the objection to history is both final and ahistorical. It vaults the apodeictic into a kind of aphasia, wherein language itself is lost to Logos just as history is lost to Time. That this inability to give voice to one’s own experience is made singular through the redemption or damnation of the soul only underscores the absence of ethics in this kind of liminal spatiality. With Augustine, we are presented with a morality under the guise of an ethics. Self-consciousness is the basis for a redemptive strike; picketing sin in the knowing manner of the one who has sinned but then has broken good, for the good, and for good, in judging the self and finding it wanting. But this is a narrow understanding of the self as its subjectivity is limited to an auto-moralizing; in a word, the subject is subjected to itself.

            In this self-conscious subjection, I appear before myself as a shadow, awaiting the completion and uplifting of secular being through the death of sin. The world is itself the untended garden, its overgrown paths serpentine and thus leading one on but never out. I dwell in this undergrowth as my soul dwelleth only in the shadow of Being. There is no way in which a holistic and authentic selfhood can germinate here. For this, we have to wait for the being-ahead of the will to life to overtake the nostalgic desire for either childhood or death itself. Both are impersonal events, abstracted into Edenic paradise on the one hand, the paradise of the firmament on the other. Only in our own time does our childhood become our own – if only for a moment given the forces of socialization and marketing, schooling and State – and as well do we, if we are resolute, face our ownmost deaths, the ‘death which is mine own’ and can only mean the completion of my being. It is the happenstance of birth, the wonder of the child, the revolution of youth, the Phronesis of mature adulthood, and the singular ownmost of death, which altogether makes the modern individual a person.

            Given this, the history of ethics as a series of truncated attempts to present agency and responsibility over against ritual and duty – and in this, we should never understand Antigone as representing an ethics; her dilemma lies between conflicting duties and customs, not between a morality and an ethics – comes to its own self-understanding in the person-in-the-world. In doing so, it recapitulates its own history but one now lensed through a ‘completed’ ethics; self-reflection seems Socratic, anxiety has its Pauline mood, resoluteness one Augustinian, being-ahead its evolutionary futurism, and its confrontation with tradition its messianic medium. The presence of key moments of the history of ethics geared into our interiority – we use the term ‘conscience’ for this odd amalgamation of quite different, if related, cultural phenomena – allows us to live as if we were historical beings cast in the setting of timeless epic. Though we no longer write myth – at most, the new mythology is demythology – we are yet able to be moved by it, think it larger than life, imagine ourselves as mortal heroes. The formula for this Erlebnis-seeking is pat enough: the rebellious youth takes her show on the road, discovering along the way that some key elements of what she disdained are in fact her tacit allies; trust, faith, and love. In coming of age as a person, our heroine gains for herself an ethics, differing from the received but suffocating morality of the family compact, deferring the perceived but sanctimonious mores of the social contract. If her quest is to reevaluate all values, her destiny is to return to at least a few of them after being otherwise. The new ethics she presents to the world after conquering her own moralizing mountain is simply the action in the world obverse to her own act of being in that selfsame world.

            This is the contemporary myth, our own adventure and not that of our ancestors, however antique. Its heroes are fully human but indeed only demonstrate this by overcoming the dehumanizing effects of anonymity and abstraction the both. In short, today’s epic hero becomes human, and indeed this is her entire mission. Everyone her own messiah? Perhaps not quite that, not yet. For the godhead forced upon the youth, even though not her own, confronts her with the idea that there could be something more to life than what meets the shuttered eye. In its very parochiality, the heroine is made witness to the possibility that her world is but a shadow of the Being-of-the-world itself. It is in this realization that the adventure begins and the young halfling of a person, beset by market personas and upset by parental identities, strikes out with all of her ‘passions unabated’, as well as all of her ‘strength of hatred’, in order to gain the revolution all youth must gain. The very presence of this literary formula in media today at the very least cuts both ways; at once it is a surrogate for the real fight in which youth must engage, and thus presents a decoy and a distraction therefrom, but perhaps it also exemplifies and immortalizes that same fight, inspiring youth to take up its visionary sword and slice through the uncanny knot that shrouds our future being and history alike. If so, then with personhood comes also ethics; an agency in the world that acts as no one has ever acted heretofore. If so, then the most profound wisdom that we can offer our youth is the sensibility that what we are must not, and never, be repeated.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Distractions, Decoys, Devils

Distractions, Decoys, Devils (Gender, Family, Sports, Sex)

            As long as the chief motivations of communication are profit and reproduction, what is said and what is heard will be only what we can say and what we can hear. Our ears are too large, by Nietzsche’s idiomatic standards, as they take in too much and lack discrimination. But using a obverse image, we can equally say that they are too small, narrow as befits the narrow-minded pursuit of wealth and the status quo, or the way in which wealth manifests itself within our contemporary social structure. Chomsky has dealt with the political aspects of the ‘manufacture of our consent’ to governance and the casual responsibility the State might exercise in times of either crisis or plebiscite. But there are both wider and deeper striations of a similar hue at work in more mundane arenas of social life; those that are enacted and endured in the day to day, by the vast majority of us, and experienced hardly at all by political elites or those with authority and access to culture-producing institutions and devices. Our narrowness is not inbred, but rather bred in.

            Media does not so much love a circus as it is the big top itself. Selling an ‘issue’ means rolling up a moral panic, and then providing that snowball with enough impetus that this faux feeling of outrage becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Media is not the source of the phenomenon in question – and we shall look at four, in turn, below – but is rather the medium by which this or that facet of human experience becomes larger than life, and thus is transmuted from the base metal of raw and perplexed Erlebnis into the very gold that profit seeks. The gee-whiz genuflections surrounding gender, the fastidious fetish of the family, the speculative spins of sports, the salacious scenes of sex, are perhaps the four foremost examples of this transmutation in current affairs. Their sources are, of course, wholly human, culled from the life of a being in the world, moments of existence without essence. But let us examine them from the point of view of how they in fact obscure our shared existential lot, at first subjectively, and then, when they are taken up as ‘issues’, as projective ‘things’ with a consequential reality about them.

            W.I. Thomas, the American social scientist, encapsulates our perceptual inclination in a most pragmatic manner, following William James. His famous epigram, ‘If people believe something to be real, it is real in its consequences’, sums neatly the transition between the murkiness of supposed source material to the hard objectivity of action in the world, however baseless the motives for such action may originally have been. In turn, his generational colleague, Robert Merton, coins for the human sciences the idea of the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, some ten years later. Using the bank runs of the early 1930s as his examples, we are met with a clear exposition of the ‘if-then’ of Thomas under its own steam; people imagined the banks were going under, and so they put them under through their own actions. Just so, our current conflicts regarding gender and family, and our daily obsessions directed at sports and sex, are very similar exemplifications of both the Thomas ‘theorem’ and Merton’s conception. Let us now turn to each to try to understand their moral-to-moralizing alchemy.

            Gender: Without any sense of the defamatory, I will suggest here that the phenomena grouped under ‘trans’, ‘two-spirited’, ‘theyness’ and such-like, are the result of either a conflict of gender expectations between parents – one desires a boy the other a girl – or the absence of one or the other dominant genders in the family – the child then assumes the role of the absent mother or father without regard to their sex at birth – or again, conflicting general parental expectations regarding role and interest – one parent’s vicarious desires directed at the child are in conflict with the other’s and hence we have a ‘they’ persona, through which the child attempts to satisfy both parent’s sets of demands. If these are the social sources of the phenomena, such studies await the student. But it is well known that gender conflict occurs within the psyche of the child when parents are themselves in conflict, or when both parents desired a different gendered child than the one they ended up with, which is commonplace. Well known too are the studies in which boys are socialized much more roughly, and freely in terms of the lifting of limits, than are girls. It is known as well that what used to be called the ‘tomboy’ or even the gamin are results of girls being treated by parents as if they were boys, once again to accommodate the objectively unfulfilled parental desires.

            It is of the utmost to say that the pathology present belongs only to the parents in these cases, never the children, who are victims thereof. But this victimization is carried into the objective space of the public by the resistance other parents have to their own oft clandestine proclivities. They see in the other’s child the very child they feared they themselves would raise, and thus their bad conscience projects a vitriolic violence upon the one who has already been given a difficult start by their own parents. It is a classic example of double jeopardy, and insofar as the phenomena are real and not theatrical – in some, perhaps fewer, cases, a child may simply be trying to call attention to themselves due to the pressing and globalizing economic fact of families not being able to remain viable through a single income; in these cases there is the pathology of neglect, but no authentic transgenderedness – it represents one of the scandals of today’s domesticity. But insofar as the reaction to it is nothing more than a moral panic, it represents in turn nothing more than one tent in the for-profit media circus.

            Family: At its inception, the bourgeois family was immediately critiqued and its conception destroyed. But its self-conception lives on, shored up by entertainment delusions and advertising fantasies. Our feted yet fetid fetish for it apparently knows no bounds. The conflict over what ‘values’ it represents and reproduces has no ethical merit and little substance, which is befitting of what is essentially another form of entertainment fantasy, extant mostly in media and not at all so much in social reality. This is not the place to investigate the history of the definitions of family, though such an analysis would have to take place before one says too much about its current guises and how they were fashioned, but what can be said is that, in principle, a person emphatically avows the presence of what is in fact the most absent to him. This is done as a defensive posture against anomie in particular, and more generally, over against the perceptions the other has of the person in question: ‘What’s wrong with your family? Do you know where your children are? Don’t tell me how to raise my kids’, and so on. While social media for youth is a juvenile circus of comparative egotisms – and perhaps this is how it must be, developmentally speaking, though youth themselves appear to take it far too seriously – social media for adults is a painstaking exercise in one-upping the other’s familiality. Whether it is home décor, career, ‘look what my kids are doing!’, or even the daily dinner menu, all prepared by the woman who is half 1955 half 1985 for the man who is half 1955 half 1885, one’s face and one’s book alike mimic in subjective reality what these persons see in media. The magazines which bristle at check-outs in all kinds of stores attest in imagery to the theater that ‘you too can have’ with some dedicated, and still highly gendered, elbow grease. In its own way, women’s magazines are soft-core domestic pornography, whilst men’s are more directly the porn of virile power transferenced into machines, tools and the mechanisms thereof. The mockery directed at the post-war family is also a projection of our bad conscience, aware as it is of our lack of progress in these otherwise quotidian quarters.

            Sports: The faux drama of sports has recently been rivaled, and perhaps in the case of young men, even eclipsed, by sports wagering. Betting is a way in which one can vicariously experience the thrill of actual competition. Gambling is a sport unto itself, in this sense, but only secondarily to it being an addiction. Actual professional athletes are not in general addicted and obsessed by their vocation. They rather report enjoying it, even ‘loving’ it, and more humbly, graced by the blessing of being ‘paid for what one loves to do’, but rarely do they lose themselves in life because of it. The same manifestly cannot be said for gambling. This aside, sports, like sex, as we shall shortly see, is chiefly about money, and thus it contains the same tendencies as does media in general. Sports are platinum for media because not only do they appear apolitical, any game can become popular or at least, generate a niche market for itself. The throngs that follow golf overwhelm the audience for snooker, but they are equally riveted to the action at hand. And golf is made insignificant by North American football, football by world soccer, and so on. But in all cases, sports is at best a pastime. It in itself has no profundity, but rather a kind of false freedom in its relatively unscripted enactment, for it is artful without being art. Sports is the moral man’s pornography, the upstanding citizen’s barricade, the passive-aggressive personality’s war. As such, when confronted by the reality of the world and how most of humanity lives in that reality, it is worthless.

            And youth sports all the more so. Youth need to be helping the community, serving the weak and the poor, saving the environment from we adults, organizing politically for a human future which is in fact not ours but theirs, and learning how to love one another in all ways. In a word, not playing games. The foisting of organized sports upon youth presents both a con and a conundrum to them: ‘Teamwork’, but against a rival. ‘Character-building’, but in a non-ethical petty context. ‘Self-sacrifice’, but for the utterly trivial. No, no, and no.

            Sex: Certainly sex sells, and everyone is aware of this. Peddling our desires in flagrant flaneur has come to be an expectation of not only marketing – the presence of the beautiful girl and sometimes even the handsome young man in early advertising graphics was not only ubiquitous but oddly liberating in a time of suppressed desires – but also of media in general. The most ‘followed’ social media influencers, if they are female, must be attractive and young. The influencer persona is merely the digital live-action version of the pin-up girl, who in her turn, was merely the post-Depression guise of the Victorian-Edwardian advertising girl. What is being sold is not necessarily sex itself, but the sexualization of the commodity, including the human person and the human body. This is why we hear resistance in some quarters against portraying children in this manner. Such a call is mostly hypocrisy, as in the same cultural stroke the beauty and talent pageants flash-flesh-flaunt toddler-through-teen sex while off-stage utterly suppressing and ‘disciplining’ it. Just as we cannot take seriously pornography, the resistance to it is equally laughable. Yes, if it weren’t so dangerous to youth, and on both counts. Sexual imagery meant for profit from voyeurism of whatever stripe has such a universal market due to its expression of all that we would do to one another if we were not called to the stand in witness against our baser selves. In this deeper sense, all pornography is ‘revenge porn’. We view it with a sense of prurient satisfaction, to be sure, but more tellingly, I think, with a real feeling of vengeance: ‘I wish my wife looked like her, did what she is doing, was her.’ Not to target men, as it is well known that men and women imbibe in pornography equally, a sorry testament to both the intimate and wider relations between the dominant genders.

            Which may well be, for youth, another call-sign that binary genderedness isn’t working. Why not switch it up? What began as an effort to please conflicted parents develops into a manner of avoiding, or even denying, the reality which exists between men and women, whether gay or lesbian or neither. These two as well, alternate genders to those dominant but attracted to the same sex, challenge their human actors objectively – it is more difficult to be publicly gay than publicly straight – but, I would suggest as gently as possible, relieve these same persons subjectively. Because men and women are socialized so radically differently, every ‘cisgendered’ relationship is a constant exercise in cross-cultural anthropology. Sexual attraction is by far the easiest aspect thereof and therein. And though it is of course true that in a gay or lesbian intimacy, it is still two different people, nevertheless, a man generally knows what to expect of another man, and the converse. So, even if there is no biopower need for everyone to reproduce biologically, there remains the question of how we confront our own humanity. Is loving another like ourselves not the sexual equivalent of the lesser ethics of loving those who love us? And is the unfashionable, but still politically convenient, love of ‘the breeders’ not an exemplification of the challenging and still novel ethic of loving one’s enemies? In this other sense, it is straight people who are the truer radicals.

            Now it is part of the philosopher’s job to speak of things no one else wants to hear. To return to our small-eared imagery, the unexamined life produces a myopia in all of our senses. The eyes become accustomed to what is only at hand, the hands themselves feel what is only in hand, the nose scents the familiar atmosphere of social media dining, the tongue tastes only of the food the child adored, and the ears hear soothing sounds of soporific Sundays, when family was ‘together’, at least physically, and when nothing else needed doing. As distractions, our four examples are at their best. We cannot be working every hour, nor can we be constantly examining ourselves as if we were latter day penitents. But as decoys, we are duped into neither questioning nor changing the aspects of our shared world which are collectively doing us in. And when we reproduce those decoys for our children, we turn the decoys into devils, for to deny the chance for a child to live in a transformed world that within it holds a fairer future is nothing less than evil, incarnate in ourselves.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.