Category: commentaries

‘Meet the Parents’ Today

‘Meet the Parents’ Today (self-righteous, incompetent, vengeful)

            And yet apparently possessed of ‘rights’. But the very being of a parent – that one has children – is not itself a right but rather a privilege. Not all those who desire children can have them, many lose children whom they wished to keep, and children themselves will eventually judge their parents, and some of those will vanish from the latter’s ken for whatever perceived injustice they had endured. Even so, if we do not speak of simply having children as a right, which we cannot, perhaps there is some other meaning to the desperate and disparate call to arms that self-styled parents’ groups have of late sounded? For they gird themselves against all other social institutions and even the family, of which they are generally and inordinately so proud, is seen as no longer the family anymore. For some it is the schools, for some the State, for fewer a church, this one or that, for others the ministries of child welfare, and for some it is other parents, judged lapsed and prolapsed in their moral obligations. But whatever or whomever may be the villain in the parental imagination, the lash of this lens is never turned toward themselves.

            So, I will do it for them. At once it is sage to recall that over 95% of child abuse occurs in the home, committed by persons well-known to the victim. The litany of largesse is not of specific interest, only the social fact itself. Almost all the remainder is perpetrated by coaches, teachers, trainers, and other adults who have some intimate contact and power over the child. Sports coaches are now belatedly living the infamy they deserve, at least some of them, as well as a few ‘Christian’ educators, but the vast majority of villains escape yet. The privacy of the household remains a bulwark against both investigation and prosecution, an oversize mute shoved down the very throat of any youthful horn, a bastion of iniquity that euphemizes discipline while it euthanizes childhood. In short, parents might well be by definition abusive, even if the very best of them practice only some silent symbolic force and never bellow, shame their child with ne’er a finger laid upon, or ignore their child entirely in the name of ‘progressive’ parenting. Neo-fascists and neo-communists alike, parents straight across the political spectrum upshift their pressing incompetence into a distressing defence of ‘parenthood’ in the abstract, bereft of any detailed accounting of exactly what they do or have done in the day-to-day travails of helping children attain young adulthood.

            So let us then ‘imagine’. Parents abuse officials of organized sports, they oust teachers and coaches from school programs, they get themselves elected to school boards and promptly ban books and other media, they rail against laws that protect children – for they well know against whom these laws are directed – and they seek at every turn to justify to their bad conscience, if they maintain one at all, that in doing so, they are good parents, yes they are. Parents dictate to teens long after any need of direct dependence has passed. They place limits of time, space, association, and activity upon youth, often contrary to the legal code. They crow about their ‘experience’, their ‘life wisdom’, and how ‘they used to be a teenager’ and now they know so much better. They enroll their children in summer camps after the legal age at which young people may stay by themselves, they choose at every turn the truncated lists from which only then such youth may choose, and they threaten their own children when, perhaps rarely enough, the young person demands a rationale, a reason, a right which indeed is their shared human birthright. Summarily, in the concise words of one of England’s poet laureates, ‘they fuck you up, your parents do’.

            High time to return the favour, in my opinion. For there seems to exist no publicly purveyed position of parenting that has anything to do with the child’s best interests. On the one side we witness with dismay a seething barbarism which believes in a vapid Victorian domesticity – adult women are victims of this outlook as well, though many appear to revel in it nonetheless; there are as many Juliettes out there as Justines perhaps – and more than this, far more, this side attempts to either convert or enslave the rest of us to its dreary druthers. On the other we find a patent and oblivious neglect of the most basic understanding that children do need our guidance and our skills, whatever little wisdom we might indeed possess in a world that is no longer quite our own, and of the utmost, the idea that being an adult means taking responsibility for things even when it isn’t your fault. For every fascism the controlling possessive parent exerts, there is a corresponding anti-fascism which, in its perverse sense of ‘freedom’, teaches children to think only of themselves and to be only whatever it is they fashionably imagine they are. On the one side there is a fetish for physical abuse, on the other, a reliance upon that emotional. The playground battle that exists between these two versions of parenting is not only cliché it truly is juvenile, far more so than almost anything an actual child gets up to or believes in. And these are the role models we wish to present to our children!

            Is it any wonder that social institutions other than the family have stepped in to do, well, something or other. Psychotherapy as an industry has heard the clarion call, education as a pedagogy, government as a morality; the counselor, the teacher, the politician – most of whom as well parents, we may presume – all proffering their vested interests to the by now numb and cynical youth whose future, along with our own, is ever in grave doubt due to the wider geopolitical actions of juvenile adulthood. ‘Your family made you suicidal? Here, let me fix that.’ ‘Your family can’t teach you everything you need to know, but we can.’ ‘I’ll pander to parents since they vote and you don’t, sweetheart, but you can still trust me.’ In every direction the young person looks today, she observes reality but sees evil. Where, she might ask, is the one place I can go where there are people who will love me, accept me for who I want to be, provide for me a livable future without unreasoned fear and unjustified death? Where is the place in my human heart that I was told the family occupied?

            I am rightly ashamed, as a philosopher and an ethicist, to respond with ‘I don’t know’. It cannot be an easy thing to be told, when still a teenager, that one is basically on one’s own. That is the reality, and though value-neutral in the objective sense, one as a person still has to live in it; endure the evil, savor the good when present, suffer the sorrow and enjoin the joy. The wisest thing I can say to youth today is the same thing that was said to them 2.5 millennia ago; the unexamined life is not worth living. Insofar as our world objectively promotes self-examination at every turn, all is not lost. As for myself and my wife, who are not parents, we have the somber solace of knowing that, in not being so, we remain in excellent company.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over twenty years.

What are Schools for?

What are Schools for? (The blurry lenses of social schism)

            There are experiences that life presents to us which are shared by almost all. In modern times, these tend to be institutional. Almost all of us must work, we must shop, we must train in some manner and through some official channel. The Whitmanesque quality of life’s essential existence is covered over by the highly rationalized routines of daily living. Yes, I sleep and you sleep and the murderer sleeps as does the child, but the experiences which have more of an impact upon us are not, or are no longer, those that come from simply being the human animal, mortal and fragile, susceptible to sorrow but also joining with joy. And certain of these rationalized experiences leave more of a mark than others, given their longitudinal character when undergoing them, and the phase of life in which they occur.

            For over a dozen years when we are at are most vulnerable, we are in school. It is schooling, therefore, that is the most marking of modern life experiences. As Andy Partridge wrote, ‘You can take the person out of the school, but you can’t take the school out of the person’. Now we are no longer ‘marked by the masters, bruised by the bullies’, but insofar as an authority still judges us, and peers still mock us, the basic character of schooling remains in force. The origins of mass and thence universal schooling are well known. John Taylor Gatto is perhaps their most trenchant critic, though his own suggestions for solutions to the problems of schooling are oddly parochial and even nostalgic. At the same time, we are also as well aware of creative departures from the assembly-line school in John Dewey’s lab schools, Summerhill, Black Mountain College, and the Montessori system, to name some of the most famous. We are told that one Taylor Swift no less, was a Montessori graduate, and she herself has said in interview that its DIY pedagogy was what allowed her own musical creativity to develop. So before we summarize the pathology of the schools in rational fashion, let us pause right near the beginning and recognize that schooling and learning are likely two distinct things. That ‘education’ is too amorphous a term to ultimately be of use in any analysis, and that training is the more apt descriptor.

            Schools get us when we’re young. Born out of the Hobson’s choice between raw child labour and cooked child training, the public school is to this day a space wherein the two key lessons are production and consumption. Not only must we learn how to perform both, we must learn to do so in the correct order. Playing a game on one’s phone in class is ‘out of order’ in this more essential sense. We are consuming in the space of production, the simple converse of doing our homework whilst sitting in the back of the movie theater with our miffed date cuddled up beside us. The public school has few expectations of us; that we are semi-literate, enough to either take up a service job or move on to college; that we are semi-sociable, enough that we neither become criminals nor revolutionaries; and that we are perversely grateful, so relieved to have simply graduated that we are content just to walk away and count our blessings.

            That is, until we have our own children. Then, as parents, we finally have the chance to express our revenge against all that the schools did to us. A childlike vendetta thus emerges, and thenceforth merges with childish action: the teachers need to ‘stay in their lane’, ‘I’m the parent and I don’t ‘co-parent’ with the State’, ‘schools need to leave morals to ‘society’’, or even simply and oddly contradictory, ‘leave our kids alone’. Which calls to mind another, more famous, pop music lyric, that of Pink Floyd, which too enjoins the teacher to ‘leave us kids alone’. The phantasmagorical sequence from ‘The Wall’ which has that short song as its soundtrack has tens of millions of views on the net. Yes, I too wanted to torch my high school, kill a few of its teachers. That was the child’s eye view. But as an adult and as a philosopher, I want more than that. Much more.

            If the public schools are undemocratic – children are told what to do with no real input into the doing, mimicking as closely as possible the adult workplace – then the charter schools and private schools are inherently anti-democratic. These latter need to be shut down, their student complements combined with the rest of our kids, their elite tax bases dedicated to universal learning, understanding, experiencing, not training, not educating and God knows not schooling. This move alone would solve almost all of the issues in today’s schools. Those students who then, armed with all of the resources reserved now only for elites, enclaves, or some bastard version of parochialism, who still found learning to be too much for them, should simply be kicked out. Schools were never meant to make wine from water. But the reckless entitlement that elites reproduce in their ‘own’ schools, where their ‘special’ and ‘superior’ children engage in a well-practiced apartheid at the expense of ‘normal’ children is the scandal of our current society. We live in a political democracy sabotaging itself through the ongoing presence of a social plutocracy. And the separate school systems are the foundation of this self-sabotage.

            Paul Ricoeur, one of the great thinkers of the post-war period, reminds us that ‘The love we have for our own children does not exempt us from loving the children of the world’. Indeed, one might go so far to say that to be the child of elites is to be unloved in any authentic way, sent off to board with strangers with the sole purpose of reproducing an endogamous marriage pool so that wealth never falls into the ‘wrong’ hands. This absence of love is the truer reason why we fail, as both individuals and as a culture, to ‘love the world’s children’ in any significant and meaningful manner. Just as ‘love thy neighbor’ presumes that one does indeed ‘love thyself’, a yet more intimate experience that is positively lacking in our society today, we cannot be said to comprehend the portent of maintaining a pricey and pretentious elite while the world, including its children, goes to hell. To borrow once again from our musical commentators, if ‘just surviving’ really is such ‘a noble fight’, we may begin by asking why should we ennoble it when there is a much less romantic option at hand.

            Don’t burn down the schools, it’s a waste of infrastructure. Torch instead the boundaries which divide humanity by class, ethnicity, and credo by introducing our children to the beginning of a social and cultural transformation, and then letting them, from the earliest of ages when such ‘mature’ social divisions have yet to be learned and all are ‘naturally’ amicable to one another, take it from there.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in education, ethics, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Do You Want to Know a Secret?

Do You Want to Know a Secret? (when the individual ‘trumps’ society).

            At the beginning of his lectures on Pragmatism, William James states, rather coquettishly, that the one thing we are truly interested in with regard to another fellow human is his view of the universe; in a word, her philosophy. The outlook of institutions is, when placed beside this, a trifling matter. This is so because everyone supposedly knows where such edifices stand. Not only does their physical location attest to this position, but also do its policies, its indictments, its edicts, and its collective actions. Similarly, our cultural products and creations. A book may be read, one might say, but not so much a person. And hence the enduring interest in what the other person actually thinks about things, ideally everything. Now this does assume that the other does in fact think at all, or at least a little, from time to time. And not only does she exercise her human intellect which is our shared and universal birthright, but that they do so specifically regarding matters cosmic and profound. If it is up to the philosopher to question after the meaning of life in general, surely it is yet up to each of us to examine one’s own life for any possible or potential purpose.

            But in 1907, when James first published these legendary lectures, there was no internet, a space in which private and public are blurred to the point of being indistinguishable, there were not technologies that could, in a matter of a scant few hours, obliterate all life on earth, and there was not in existence a pressing populist sense that only the few both knew the truth, were hiding it from the rest of us, and more than either of these, were conspiring to use it for nefarious ends. Around the same time as ‘Pragmatism’, however, the very first contemporary contempt of the intellect and of that wider truth would appear in print, the so-called ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, a Czarist political tract, the contents of which were entirely fraudulent, meant to stir up Anti-Semitism in Russia, and so James’ popular lecture series at once became all the more relevant to any thinking person.

            Its relevance has not waned over the decades. When it was discovered that former president Trump had been storing a multitude of classified documents at his resort, there was an atmosphere of conspiracy in the rarified air of high office. The deeper question is of course, ‘why do such documents even exist in a democracy?’ but one searches in vain for anyone asking after this and speaking of its implications. Instead, we have a political falderal that seeks to hobble a rival’s bid of re-election, nothing more. If many fans see Trump as the fullest expression of their own angst and discontent regarding politics in particular but also authority in general, in projecting in this manner, they have perhaps unwittingly given an individual a larger-than-life persona; in another word, they have made the one into the many.

            Storing what are already institutional secrets secretly, the one has presumed to speak for the many, to safeguard their interests, to vouchsafe their collective trust. But at the same time, we may duly and reasonably inquire, are any of the contents of these myriad if secular missals truly so breathtakingly revelatory that it really matters where they are stored, and by extension, who among us happens to see them? I, for one, seriously doubt both counts. Simmel, writing at the same time as James, famously characterizes the secret as a manner in which to seal a bond between two people. It is a different thing, at least in practice, to use secrets to make intimate the trust between institutions and persons. More realistically, such a device enforces a bond that we might otherwise not ourselves have chosen. I find it almost laughably unlikely that Trump himself actually sat around and read any of these documents, filling to the brim banker’s boxes piled high in bathrooms and home theatres and the like. Aside from sheer boredom, many of these kinds of texts would be written in a highly technical manner, for ‘State secrets’ emanate from a wide variety of specialized bureaus, each with their own attendant bureaucracies in place. One would quickly tire of skimming through them, and their oh-so-important contents, presumably saving some and damning others, at least in the eyes of unelected public servants, would begin to go in one proverbial ear and out the other.

            If one protests at this juncture that all of this is beside the point, I would agree, but only if the point in question centers around the very idea of the secret in the first place. In all serious social contexts secrecy is inadmissible. It has no place in the marriage conversation, it sabotages friendship and love alike, it undermines the social contract, it sullies one’s spiritual beliefs and within such promotes the illusion of solipsism. We are quite aware that the secret should be left to childhood intrigues, where bonds which may be sealed will nonetheless be temporary and contain nothing so inflammatory that empires shall fall and Man alike. Why else would we imagine a Godhead from which one can keep no secrets at all?

            Since our ideal relationship, the one sensed as most noble and honorable the both, is one of perfect transparency – the origin of this idea in Western mythological narrative may be found in the character of the language by which the Gods themselves communicated to one another; Hermes, their messenger, spoke the Logos in such a way that no interpretation was ever required, something we humans manifestly cannot achieve – why then deliberately further depart from this condition in our merely human affairs? Trump is neither hermetic nor a hermeneut. He possesses no arcane alchemy nor does he engage in exegesis. Neither sorcerer nor philosopher, the former president is thus condemned to be a warehouse manager, not even an archivist. Beyond any of this, surely in our digital age all of these secret contents can be found any number of other places, in virtual form. Even the idea of carrying and hoarding actual paper documents seems outlandishly backdated. If there is any scandal to Trump’s actions, it is the sense that he is implying that as an individual, he may himself take on the public trust and make it private.

            But our modern State, as an institution born of, and borne on, that selfsame public trust, has, in its human minions, already committed to doing just that. Trump is a mere extension of the logic of governance and the provenience of government. And the philosophy underlying both is a narrow expression of Pragmatism. Neither idealist nor empiricist – the very use of secrecy departs from our ‘ideal’ social relations, as we have just seen, as well as obscuring a clear or ‘empirical’ view of the facts at hand, if any – a politicized pragmatism bends its sails to what the few imagine the many are feeling. If Pragmatism itself is taken to mean what C.S. Pierce, who introduced the term in 1878, meant by it; that, in a word, only our conduct matters; that the outcomes, the facts, the realities of our ideas count and the origins of such figure much less so, then we can only indict ourselves for being far too generous in our trust of the State itself.

            For the present reality we, in our shared but flawed apprenticeship of sorcery and the relative absence of any interpretive analysis of which that would elevate us beyond being mere inept pupils, have conjured, is one of faux secrets embedded in a true culture of secrecy. The latter constitutes a far more serious threat to general human freedom as well as to our imaginations – distracted and decoyed as they can be by amorphous conspiracy ‘theories’ – and to our intellects than ever does the former. Hitler was elected, Trump was elected, Putin was elected, and so on. If you want to know the secret of our political discontents, look no further than our juvenile tendency to fetishize possession and thus our desire to be the one who possesses. Trump boasted of having secrets, not keeping them. For him, and for ourselves, the secret is simply another commodity, replete with the marque of mysterious status.

            Speaking of alchemical conspiracies, the most interesting thing about the supposed ‘interviews’ of extraterrestrials to be found on the internet is their classification as secrets. There is one recorded as ‘Department of Naval Intelligence 47’; that is, a full forty-seven levels above ‘top’ secret’! We may take this more as a mark of the childhood game of secrecy, of cliques, and of the sealing of bonds amongst juvenile bands of brothers and sisters both. To any mature mind, such things are foolish at best. Pragmatically, however, they create both a sense of expectation and alienation in the outsider, a sense of propriety and entitlement amongst insiders. If the apparent content of such top of the tops secrets wasn’t itself so vacuous and irrelevant, there would be yet more serious social problems afoot. Even so, the decoy effect of such actions of our latter-day ‘Elders of Zion’ is such that it ironically, but perhaps quite purposively, makes the most glaring inequities and indeed iniquities of our contemporary social relations both at home and abroad less ideal and empirical at the same time. That which should never be secret is made more difficult to know due to the fetish of secrecy. Insofar as any of us participate in this pragmatically defined outcome, we should all be, and quite publicly so, behind bars.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over twenty years.

Tricks of the Transgendered Trade

 Tricks of the Transgendered Trade (On the liminal figure in the cultural imagination)

            Could it be that the often-vicious popular invective directed against transgendered persons and others who identify with alternate sexual orientations and gendered persona emanates from a deeper source in our still shared culture? I am going to suggest that the liminal figure has traditionally been regarded with some suspicion, even fear. Such a persona can never truly be a person, this suspicion cautions. Liminality was meant to be performed as a social role alone, and not as a selfhood. Consider the shaman, the eunuch, the court jester. Consider the representation of liminality in symbolic form, the daemon, the angel, even the joker in a deck of cards. A figure with uncertain registry, such a role-player could not be identified through gender or sexuality, though it was possessed of both. In service of society as a whole, in representing the expression of all that culture could not perform in mundane task, the liminal figure was itself unable to express anything mundane. Its ‘trans’ character is at once transient, transitive, and in translation. And what is lost in this language of the threshold, or ‘limen’, is not so much our moral compass, but rather the sense that our own identities can be vouchsafed with any ultimate certainty.

            This is a deeper source of why the contemporary liminal figure is seen as such a threat. It almost seems as if the liminal figure must shed its very humanity in order to take on the shadow of society’s self-lit lumen. From lumen to limen then, is the ongoing and repetitive passage the shamanesque character must make. But they, as a performer, and it, as a social role performed, makes that passage on our behalf. In doing so, there had always been a space, perhaps begrudging but also admired, for the liminalist. The shaman was at once a seer, medicine person, sorcerer, and spiritual leader in times of crisis. The mistake the men’s movement made with this figure was in masculinizing it. Correspondingly, the error the women’s movement made was in associating the sorceress cum midwife with the feminine.

            But by definition the liminal figure cannot be co-opted by either dominant gender. In social contract societies, the shaman was truly the only specialized role player. In such small-scale affairs, one might well expect at least one member to be outside the normative performances associated with male and female, though neither of these were especially dominant early on, when the only division of labor was based not on sex, but rather upon age. In horticultural societies, we see the beginnings of a stricter separation of men and women, but only in periods of specific passage, such as the communal menstrual hut that no male would dare invade. ‘Secret societies’ of all kinds appear only in ‘chiefdom’ organizations, and are most often gender exclusive. But the shaman could, and did, make passage amongst any and all. Its role was that of the card-playing joker, and indeed, their personality might well be said to be that of a ‘card’, to use an archaism. ‘Oscar’s Wild’, we might smirk, thinking ourselves to be clever.

            This aside, it is clear that the liminal figure’s central role was to facilitate the rites of passage. On the Northwest Coast, the shaman guided the spirit of the dying to the puma, who would then carry it to the world of spirits, or, by contrast, if it was not one’s time to pass on, scare it back down the shadowy tunnel where the shaman could then tend to its cure. Birth, puberty/adulthood, marriage, death. These four forms appear to have been universal for our ancestors, and even today they mark us, remarking upon our personal nomenclature that we are no longer inexistent, no longer a child, no longer singular, and finally, no longer amongst the living once again. The more fundamental lesson presented by such major life changes is that each of us must participate, even if only for a time, in the liminality of human finitude.

            This is then the yet deeper reason for our suspicion of the transitive person today. We feel that such transitions occur only within short periods, perhaps at most a few years, such as adolescence and engagement, sickening and dying. These periods mark themselves out from the rest of our existence, which is stable, mundane, and more certain of its identity. It cannot possibly come as a surprise then, that it is overwhelmingly youth, who are already fully imbricated in the liminal space of adolescence, for which society has not yet found an enduring place – mainly because the identity and role is itself transient – who are turning to transgenderedness as a possible way of representing this liminality. No longer a child, not yet fully an adult, why not no longer a girl, not fully a boy, or vice-versa? Even so, no society has ever existed where entire blocs of a demographic group have remained liminal in their identities or in their social role performances. In traditional cultures, a week at most for the rite of passage from child to adult, wherein one’s sexuality is discovered and perhaps performed, but only in view of reproduction, both in the physiological and social sense. In a global society where warfare is intermittent and where out-and-out conquest is mitigated by the possession of nuclear weapons, there is no need for large scale populations. In spite of labor shortages and economic stressors associated with population pyramids turning on their heads, the very fact that our contemporary world generally does not consider masses of persons to be expendable in direct conflict allows for the wider exploration of alternate genders and sexualities. In a word, biopower is on the wane, and where it is not, such as in Russia, it is a precise factor in the calculation that suggests, even if tacitly, that weapons of mass destruction, while handy to possess, cannot ever truly be used.

            The question then remains: do we accept the liminal figure as a kind of categorical third wheel in our mundane social relations, given that ’breeding’ is no longer of the utmost, neither in its sense of cultural pedigree nor in the sponsorship of additional births, or do we ourselves take on a performance which is not, and was never our own? That is, do we don the trickster’s garb and level our collective sorcery against the very source of cultural chiaroscuro? Do we state flatly that trans people are to be prescribed for the theater and the secret society alone? Or do we more gently shrug our shoulders and tell ourselves that what really matters is how one performs one’s job, one’s Samaritanism, one’s person and not one’s persona? But if we do practice an authentic acceptance, would this also entail a sense, not so much novel but perhaps suppressed, that we too, as vehicles of living change and transition, must come to terms with the human condition of not being any one thing for overlong? For in doing this, we are placed upon an existential limen far more profound than any gendered identity, a threshold which pronounces a leveling upon all of us and thence takes all across its mysterious barrier.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, education, health, aesthetics and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Ballot and Bullet Ballet

The Ballot and Bullet Ballet (America’s Danse Macabre)

            I lived in rural Mississippi for three years. The social lines were drawn sharply and there was little room for error. One was either black or white, man or woman. These two dyads generated a four-celled table of values internal to each cohort, and such values which must be honored at all costs. Social distancing was the order of the day, and mixing was possible only in the most clinical or contractual conditions. Marriage was thus an exercise in daily deportment and compact comportment alike. Men and women could never truly be friends, and neither could black and white. Communities contiguous but not convivial, these southernmost southerners coloured in their corners and painted themselves inward.

            By a murky metastasis, Mississippi is no longer an emblem for the most marginal, but rather is to be taken as an ideal, by some, for the nation as a whole. Set apart for so long, the proverbial land that time did not so much forget but rather ignored, the deepest Dixie could carry on unmolested by either history or demographics. A large and diverse country, the United States oft appears as a disunion of fractious factions, entities of enmity that provide for the modern person a Caesar’s Palace simulacra of what conflict might well have looked like in Antiquity. And this partly by design. Just as the revolutionary ethics of Christianity was an answer – even a solution if practiced with humility and by all for all – to the caste societies of the ancient Mediterranean, populated by up to forty percent slaves, a latter-day prophet might seek to embolden a resurrection of some version of these same ethics as an equal solution to the travails of today.

            I think that the unintended consequences of violation come first, the opportunistic politics of violence second. Their combined outcome is fascism, but we are not quite there nationwide. Not the presence of guns, nor the staunch belief in self-defense, not the self-reliant individual, rugged or ragged, nor the Christian soldiers nor even the race warriors, but the simple fact that the vast majority of Americans raise their children with violence, explains the presence of, as well as the apathy about, conflict and even combat in American society. Some eighty to ninety percent of Americans believe in physically punishing their children. The other great socializer, media, punishes them with visions of violence, cartoonish or no, while shying almost completely away from illuminations of affection and intimacy. Sex is taboo, killing is just fine. Compassion for children in crisis only, otherwise strict and stern disciplinary measures are the daily routine, at home, in school, and even in the workplaces wherein youth first get a taste of the lifelong wage slavery to come.

            Speaking of Antiquity then, laboring classes are not naturalized, unlike ethnic-based castes, but they are nonetheless ordered in a lockstep of heritable social traits, sometimes referred to as ‘life-chance’ variables by social scientists. Wealth begets wealth, poverty tends to repeat itself. Political freedom is mistaken for that human, equality under the law used as a guise for social equity. In the eighteenth century, when the United States was born, the true individual was idealized as one thing, the ‘sovereign selfhood’ of the Enlightenment. This citizen was not ‘two-spirited’, was content with his gender assignment at birth, and struck up the repartee of universal humanity through its European lens. As a child of the counter-enlightenment, I myself respect these ideas, as revolutionary then as were Christian ethics in their own time, but I am aware that my ‘sovereignty’ is subverted by class conflict, sometimes sabotaged by the unconscious, but also sublimated by the reaching forward towards the Overman. Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche are the postmodern trinity, replacing that of the ethical agrarian world systems with a new vision so blindingly disconcerting that we are yet some ways from coming to terms with it.

            Nevertheless, with it we have come to grips. And the United States is the proving ground of this world-historical confrontation with tradition. Always the boldest social experiment, the longing for the Great Society as a kind of cultural destiny yet animates the American political consciousness, insofar as it is alive at all. For a nation resettled with religious fanatics and peasants, the United States has come a long way, baby. Women, especially, have benefitted from this evolution which, in its longer-term Gestalt, is indeed revolutionary in its import. So why just now, when one would imagine that such a society is ready to make the next step, perhaps toward a greater freedom and equality combined, does it show such signs of falling over backwards? This is not a battle of the sexes. One third of American women apparently have no interest in equality or equity. This is not a battle of the ‘races’. Black American households are far more violent than those white, blacks far more likely to hold to revealed religion, and this in spite of their historic voting patterns. Latinos similarly, though of late we have also seen such immigration from nations ruled by once-fascist regimes and perhaps now by equally repressive authorities – Cuba is the usual example – that the successors to these refugees have swung hard in the rearward direction. This is also not a battle of the classes. Rural whites are as poor or poorer than urban blacks and yet they hold polar opposite values in the political and social spheres.

            No, the conflict in the Great Society is about differing visions of what that very greatness is, should be, or shall be. Each side is fatally conflicted about its own vision, for it knows that in order to piece together enough votes to wrest or maintain power, as the case may be, it needs ever bed many it would ever fain to wed. The neo-conservatives concoct a fake temporality which sets itself outside of history, the ‘neo-liberals’ construct history as if it were destiny in motion. In the absence of a universally shared religion – for the first time, less than half of Americans say they attend church and those who claim no religion at all are close to a quarter of the population – competing versions of ‘civil religion’ attempt to hold the day. Each ignores the vital interests of the culture as a whole. Both practice authoritarianism in the home, support it in the schools, ignore the blandishments of the relatively unmitigated exploitation of labor, presume upon the two-party system, mock the idea of representative polling, fund their machines through cronyism, and delude their majority franchises with promises unkept while they elude responsible governance with politicians unkempt, apparently unaware of the very idea of public service.

            In the avid abstraction of greatness, we as individuals are apt to forget our fragile mortality and our general historical inevitability. It is a powerful fix, to the point of becoming a fixation, to imagine oneself larger than life. Specific narcissists are certainly present on the political stage, but they are perhaps more representative of the rest of us than we, or even they, might be willing to believe. It is perhaps only because of a steep social stratification that we as well do not strut as they. As long as ethereal images of greatness, destiny, material conditions of violence against children, poverty in general, and incompetence in education remain as the core sources of conflict, any such society will fall upon its own double-edged sword of self-reckoning. It remains to be seen whether or not we are witnessing the culmination of a Rite of Winter ballet, or whether this singular dance of death will in fact carry on with no end, and thus preempt all possible new beginnings.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, education, social theory, aesthetics, health and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

An Artless Society

An Artless Society (the neo-Christian Reich)

            The Third Reich took great pride in its artistic vision. Even the death camps were seen to serve an aesthetic function; the ‘beautification of the world through violence’, as a well-known documentary puts it. And while the Reich narrowed the definition of what could constitute art by rejecting modernism in all its forms, it did preserve one of two basic elements of what art, in its essence, accomplishes; it presents for us an ideal. This ideal is at once one of form and one of content. The form is irreal in that not only does it not exist in reality – it is both an amalgam of historical types and cultural desires – it also exists beyond the real in the presence of an archetype. The content precedence given over to the plastic arts in the Reich spoke to its executives’ penchant for realizing the ‘new man’, a eugenics-inspired pastiche of Victorian cultural levels theory and organismic evolution. Between Spencer, the oft-misrecognized ‘social Darwinist’ and Tylor, the major anthropologist of non-relativistic cultural studies, the stage was set for an anthropometry of art.

            And yet while the National Socialists armed their artists with not only state funding but also a retrogressive vision of the essence of humankind – in it, it was the anatomy of sculpture that was most fascinating; during Hitler’s ‘Dyskabolos’ address he intones with all due caution that we today could not think to consider ourselves a successful race unless and until we achieve or even surpass the form represented in Greek classical art – that favored the physical ‘look’ as an expression of an inner health, we today have taken both their conceptions of health and esthetics as at least commercial ideals for all to strive towards. The ‘mongrel man’ remains with us in the guises of obesity, addiction, laziness, to name a few. And though we are certainly correct to disarm the edge of this once visionary sword while preserving the reach of its therapeutic blade, I wonder if the two can be so easily separated in practice.

            The Nazis understood half of the presence of art in society, the half that validated their own sensibilities. But by far the majority of us today share those same ideals, and this is evidenced by our reaction to any type of art that challenges them, not to mention any other challenge emanating from other cultural spheres, including that of science. Durkheim shrugged off this kind of resistance to science, just as every authentic artist does for art. But the rest of us cannot afford such blitheness. Not the least while there is a powerful political movement afoot whose sole goal is to return to Eden, the ultimate result of a logic that seeks to beautify through violence. And through their critique of other cultural forms, including art, they have a most willing audience in those of us who would never turn their way through religious suasion alone.

            Instead of proselytizing superstition, the advance guard of the neo-Christian alliance attacks aspects of culture that on the face of it, many of us would instantly agree need to be curtailed or even vanquished. Criminality, pornography, drugs, come to mind. But, as riders to these widely agreed upon human failings, the Neo-Christian will smuggle in assaults on art via pornography, addiction as an illness via drugs, poverty and class struggle via criminality. Indeed, one may well suspect that the criticism of ‘non-partisan’ social problems is seen only as a vehicle for this critic to undermine essential aspects not only of a democracy, but of the ethical society itself.

            We are receptive to these more calculated attacks because its seems, once again, on the face of it, that the rationality guiding them should be acceptable to any sane human being. We know that obesity, addiction, or the anti-social or misogynistic aspects of the sex industry are not ideals, either cultural or moral. We tolerate them without full acceptance because they express the wider marginalia of a free society. In attacking them directly, we must redefine what we understand by human freedom, trending it away from its shadowy verges which, when enacted, are always tantamount to the nth degree of having the freedom to immolate oneself upon one’s own desires. We children of the Enlightenment, our parents equally Rousseau and De Sade, embrace the joy of ecstasy with the sorrow of nothingness. Ours is a Dionysian existence made into a commodity fetish.

            To all of this the Christian would cringe with a genuine sorrow, and in this we ourselves can agree to a point. But the neo-Christian rejects this fuller human freedom by editing, moralizing, censoring, erasing. His is the faux sadness of pity, for in vice he does not see the underside of virtue but rather the leverage to promote his own wider vice. ‘If this is humanistic freedom’, he exclaims, ‘better then to be a slave!’. In their slavishness, the place of art is reduced to decoration, for while a fascist welcomes the art of the past, and particularly the forms which evolved within his own cultural antecedents, and while he also understands that art presents an ideal form for humanity to strive towards, the neo-fascist does neither. The new fascism of today, neo-Christian and neo-conservative, has no conception of art whatsoever. The nude is pornographic, just as is nakedness immoral. Puritanical in its genesis, not unique to America but having its hearthstone there, neo-fascism deliberately mistakes prudishness for prudence, neurosis for mere caution. Its desired Reich is yet lower than that previous, shockingly, given what we know. It is lower and less noble because it does not even have the half-understanding of art that the Nazis did. What it presents to the rest of us is a vision of an artless society.

            From this observation we are but one step from as well suggesting that such a society would also have no culture. The anthropological definition, in its origins begrudging and still heavily hierarchized, attains through its Boasian relativism only the sense that humanity expresses its shared essence in a multiplicity of manners and mannerisms alike. The liberating quality of cultural relativism was almost immediately used by the Reich to justify its criminal practices – ‘this is our culture after all, and no two may be judged by one another or even directly compared’ – and thus this logical entailment of relativism is now used to justify unfreedom, often chanting the shallow terms ‘morality’, ‘principle’, ‘standard’. Either way, the individual, conscious of her own potential freedom and yet also self-conscious about expressing it, is left unsupported. On the one side, relativism defeats itself by extending its logic to the death camps, and on the other, it opens itself to external defeat by declaring that its enemies also have the absolute right to their own druthers. The throw-away line ‘well, its all relative’, today represents a fatal error, not in morality per se, but rather in existential authenticity.

            The only way to resist and overcome neo-fascism is through a step-by-step advance through the dueling Herculean pillars of ideal form and adorational desire. Though it may be ironic that the purveyors of the Third Reich would view those of the Fourth as themselves a mongrel ‘race’, it is through this very viewpoint, itself fraught with risk, that we can best defeat the artless society. Once again, this is the case precisely due to the fact that the majority of us understand art the way the Nazis themselves did. This is certainly an indictment upon us – our half-hearted conception of art represents in us a genuine decadence rather than a mere desireful lust which is expressed in the pressing presence of pornography, for instance – but it is the half-step away from neo-fascism that is nevertheless necessary to avoid a sterner collective fate. The fullest comprehending of the presence of art in society is too much of a threat to that very fabric to be taken in a single step. For art does not alone represent an ideal, but rather speaks into being the oversoul of our shared humanity and thus puts the lie to any sensibility that we can remain aloof to our equally shared existential condition. The ‘scandal of art’, as Ricoeur states, balances and confronts the ‘scandal of the false consciousness’. In doing so, it oft comes across as itself not mere scandal but rather as a palpable evil. But to recognize the authentic evil in the aesthetic object would be to but give away another weapon to the neo-fascist, and one that the rest of us, in our headlong flight from our own feared freedom, would be only too willing to wield.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in aesthetics, ethics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

An Ethical God does not Exist (but a metaphysical one might)

An Ethical God does not Exist (but a metaphysical one might)

            It is customary to juxtapose the moral and the metaphysical, as opposed to the ethical and the existential, but here I am going to rewind to Aristotle’s distinction, novel in his own time; that of the ethical and the metaphysical. His attempt to separate them is one of the history of thought’s famous failures, kindred with Husserl’s half-hearted manufacturing of otherness or even the Cartesian pseudo-problem of the doubting of other minds. But such a failure is not a necessary outcome if we recast another proverbial reflective question; that of the existence or non-existence of God or the Gods.

            In general, this is seen as an 18th century question, and one that was resolved in the negative well before that century drew to a Napoleonic close. But I think within the framing of that question there has been a conflation of Aristotle’s contrasting conceptions, or, in his day, one a customary conception, metaphysics, the other a mere conceptualization, ethics. For the latter idea truly was brand new, and its Western advent, some three centuries after that in the East with the appearance of Buddhism, was at first rejected as a kind of too-private perception, akin to the ‘idiot’; or purely private ‘citizen’. Just as the one who flouted custom was the ‘moron’, surely the one who turned aside from morality and into his own self-aggrandized sense of justice had more in common with idiocy than anything else. Indeed, this was perhaps the most challenging issue Aristotle faced, when trying to cut ethics loose from an overarching morality ensconced in metaphysical perambulations and emblazoned across mythic banners. But he was in august, if yet contemporary, company. Antigone is faced with an originally moral dilemma, the loyalty between family versus the State, which she attempts to solve in an ethical manner. Does the playwright intend for us to consider her ultimate and abysmal failure a model that says to everyone, ‘all like attempts must fail’? Or is there something else to be gleaned from the action?

            If the ethical job of the artist is to bring out the chiaroscuro of the human heart by rendering it askew from the mundane life, that of the thinker is to question it quite directly. The parallax employed by the artist would be seen as disingenuous if utilized by the philosopher. And so we are left with an ongoing puzzle, even today, and one that is underscored by the continued insistence upon revisiting the question of Godhead, something that was supposedly put to rest during, and because of, the Enlightenment. Here, the artist can no longer help us, simply since the society into which that question was originally placed no longer exists. Indeed, the question of the existence of God was foreshadowed in Hellenic times, as the Greeks shifted their discursive loyalties away from mythos and toward logos. This shift was, in fact, something far more radical than even the much vaunted ‘death of God’, as it not only foregrounded its occurrence but presented it as a future inevitability. For once people stopped believing in the article of mythic imagination and turned both their worldly and self perceptions toward the project of human reason, consciousness itself was irrevocably altered.

            One might suggest that divinity was unseated by this much earlier shift, though it maintained a precarious existence until perhaps the 17th century say, with the firmer advent of scientific explanation and the ongoing and intensifying encounter the European mind was having with other cultures as well as with itself. But though this makes eminent sense historically, I would like to nominally add the idea that it was the further shift from metaphysics to ethics that hastened the demise of divinity; in the East, Buddhism rejected not only the Karmic system as it had been and thus its associated earthly castes, but also the very idea that the cosmos was originally and itself alien to human consciousness. Instead, the ethic of forbearance – to be morphed into forgiveness in the West – suggested rather that one’s actions in the world made an instant difference to human life while it was being lived. It was this sensibility that generated the idea of the neighbor, an ethical force outside of both historical custom and social role.

            If Aristotle could not identify the logical device by which to fully separate ethics from metaphysics, here was now an historical one acting in the world. With Christianity, this historical force began to gain a further revolutionary impetus; that all human beings were to be treated as ends in themselves. No longer could the person who acted outside of the normative be considered a mere idiot or moron. Here instead was an alternative that was not only free from the customary but also was presenting a new politics of action – ‘go and do likewise’ – that made no metaphysical claims about itself. Turn this novel lens upon the question of God’s existence and things begin to look a little different than what has itself become customary to the history of modern thought. Instead of the death of the ‘old god of morals’, we can say resolutely that an ethical god cannot, and has never, existed. The former due to the assumption of ethical competence in the evangelical statement that ‘God is in control of everything’ – by definition, such a God cannot be ethical given the state of the world, no matter if one places all of the blame upon human folly; an ethical God would act instantly as the archetype of the neighbor ‘action-figure’ – and the latter more simply because ethics did itself not exist in the human imagination before Buddhism.

            But in saying all of that, one cannot then also have it that a God does not, in principle, exist, or yet exist, or did once exist. This is so because we can easily imagine another kind of divinity who, though possessed with a human interest and thus also being possessed by an historical self-apperception, acts only as a metaphysical entity; as a creator and an orderer, for instance. In all honesty, even the atheist would be forced to admit that she could not answer such a question either way, and so the real response to the question of God’s existence is a twofold one; the usual ‘No’, if God is presumed to be an ethical figure, but also an ‘I don’t know’, in response to the idea of God in general. It is the same conflation that harried Aristotle which also muddies our current understanding of what may still be a relevant question for our own times. A metaphysical God is in fact quite thinkable, even by contemporary standards, and thus the evangelical sensibility comes back into more serious play, for on this side of the ‘cultural’ conflict, statements exhorting the unqualified existence of God can yet be heard, loud and clear. As with the rest of us, the faithful have also conflated these two kinds of Godhead with one another, and are thus as desperate to insist upon God’s existence as the ‘secular’ person is to deny it.

            For the thinker, all of this calumniation, to borrow Nietzsche’s term, suggests that we have not, or are unwilling to, make that self-same separation in and for our human action in the world. That is, we are hampered in our ethical action because we still desire a metaphysical reward for so acting. But I think the message of new ethics is quite clear: the neighbor figure acts without custom and outside of history, and does so not even for the sake of virtue but rather because this figure knows that within such action, the entirety of our human existence is both encapsulated and exonerated. In placing oneself in contrast to social role and cultural norm, we are expressing our most authentic selfhood, one freed from both the moral and the metaphysical not by adding a discursive ethics to the roll call of philosophical departments, but rather by performing that ethic in the world and in real time. In doing so we not only change the world but also the very character of time itself. Both are made more fully real, engendering a kind of timeless reality that is the human equivalent of cosmic time, which appears to us as infinite and undifferentiated. It is this ethical reality which turns action into act, being into community, passion into compassion, and abstract time into presence. Thus if one wants to see a certain transformation of human ‘nature’ in our shared world about which we cannot say in certain terms that a creator and cosmic God exists or doesn’t, simply heed the original ethical mandate and go and do likewise.

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

Neo-Conservative Thought

Neo-Conservative Thought

            Revelations are necessarily mythical and sub-rational; they express natural forces and human interests in a groping way, before the advent of science. To stick in them, when something more honest and explicit is available, is inconsistent with caring for attainable welfare or understanding the world. It is to be stubborn under the cloak of religion. These prejudices are a drag on progress, moral no less than material; and the sensitive conservatism that fears they may be indispensible is entangled in a pathetic delusion. It is conservatism in a shipwreck. (Santayana, 1954:484 [1906]).

                Half the world looks backward. The fact that the past can be known only incompletely allows me to fill in what is unknown with my desires. The future, by definition, should be the fuller home of the imagination, rather than the past, but because it cannot be known at all, at least ahead of time, dampens my enthusiasm for self-projection. At some further point, I shall no longer exist; I shall become a part of the past. Could the penchant for backward-looking in our time be an expression of an auto-memorial, a way in which to preserve the selfhood of what I am, a preparation for ‘mine ownmost death’?

            In Mannheim’s famous essay, ‘Conservative Thought’, he suggests that the recent history of rationalization has made the present into a series of functions, almost autonomic, and that quite literally. These ‘self-naming’ processes in fact have no precise names. The poet of the past suddenly speaks to the experience of the present. I suffer the ‘insolence of officials’ in Weber’s bureaucratic organizations, for instance. I endure the ‘slings and arrows’ in romance and in the casino, perhaps. And I am myself more outraged than fortune is itself outrageous. Mannheim explains that the ‘one-sided emphasis upon rationalism’, while it ‘repudiates concrete and vital forms of thought by no means’ extinguishes them (1953:87), and that these forms have not ‘sunk into the past’ but have rather been ‘preserved’ in some occlusive manner. But for Mannheim, simply defining conservatism as being part of a tradition and holding to certain precepts thereof is not enough, for this is something characteristic of every human being (ibid:95). Instead, ‘being conservative’ both partakes of this basal layer of consciousness, not entirely conscious of itself and certainly not usually questioned in the action of everyday life, as well as taking concrete action in an entirely new way, concomitant with our own times (ibid:94). By making myself a part of a social action in the present I reach far beyond mere tradition, even though I might be accused of reproducing something of it, either in part or, insofar as it can be known, being both a relic and reliquary, out of whole cloth (ibid:97). In doing so, I may be semi-consciously ‘retarding’ progressive social change or even retrogressing it (ibid:99). On top of this, my action of this sort in the social world depends upon my social location in a steeply hierarchical culture: “In a word – traditionalism can only become conservatism in a society in which change occurs through the medium of class conflict – in a class society.” (ibid:101, italics the text’s).

            It is by now old hat to identify conservative action among the polar bookends of hierarchical or stratified society; the elites desire to ensure the ongoingness of their status, the marginal simply desire to have a voice. Yet is this enough to fully understand the pressing political penury that conservative persons state they ‘feel’ or ‘experience’ in modern culture? An openly retrogressive movement seeks to return to a past that has been historically lived at one time or another and thus can be more or less documented as having been part of the species experience. That such an identification can be made entails that the period in question not be temporally too far afield or chronologically distant from either our present-day understandings and sensibilities. Conservative thinking demands a reckoning with the disjunction between past and present, but at least it is not making things up as it goes along.

            Not so neo-conservative thought. Its ‘enactmentality’ is not retrogressive but rather simply regressive, as it seeks a ‘return’ to a time which is wholly imaginary and never did exist at any known historical time period. That it can define itself as desiring a time out of time, either as the primordial utopia of the Garden or as a revelatory millennialism of the coming judgment, clears its conscience when it must confront the problem of otherness. Not all can be saved. Not all will be saved. Conservative thought takes action on behalf of all of us, for each of us is a product of this or that tradition, the vast majority of which is, once again by definition, both unthought – if not unthinkable given historical precedent – and relatively unconscious. There will always be something or other in a cultural tradition that appeals to me, something known and in its own day perhaps as ‘progressive’ as the forces and actions I may, in my sense of the future, take in my own time. Conservative thinking is thus wholly historical, and it only differs from even the most radical of future-oriented poses and positions because it emphasizes a wider slice of the tradition which all of us share and from which all of us gain the basic self-understanding of the present. But neo-conservative thought needs neither history nor thinking. The one is a burden upon the imagination; the neo-conservative person is moral and not historical, for history trumps morality and in all cases. The second because mythical time is unthinking, both of itself and of history; indeed, any sense of change at all has ceased to exist. When Marx differentiates his ‘atheism’ from that of Feuerbach he declares that ‘for the communist man, the question of God does not exist’, meaning that it is not the mere existence of a divinity that is proposed but the very concept thereof. In neo-conservative thought the question of history does not exist.

            This vanishing act is convenient on at least two counts: one, the future as an unknown factor can be summarily dismissed. The future is something that I am uncomfortable with; I face it with some trepidation, if not outright fear. It is the very expression of the problem change presents to me if I am intent on maintaining anything I have created or gained during my brief existence. I already know that entire civilizations have been erased from the historical record, reduced to archaeological fragments and literary figments. What am I, as a singular person, in the face of such a trans-temporal scourge? Two, change is itself expunged. If there is no history I am left only with time, a kind of inexistence or life that, in its stolid and staid counterpoint to living, needs no longer pose any existential questions of or to itself: Why am I here? Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there a meaning to my presence beyond what I can myself fathom or ferret out? Life without living, time without history, the present without presence, each of these in turn can fortify the regressive interpretation my harried haruspex requires of me. But in denying history I also deny the other.

            Even if the soteriological suasions of the newer agrarian period religions were all-encompassing – all are to be saved, come as you are – nevertheless there is a boundary to be constructed between the self-appointed gnostic and the one who appears content to live on both blithely and blindly, at once ignorant of one’s specific fate and unknowing of fate in general. It is this second absence that brands me as a person without faith and thus also without wisdom. For the neo-conservative, shrouding his own equally human senses not in the cast-off cloak of conservative thought but rather in the technicolor triage of draconian dreamcoat, a ‘modernist’ such as myself is purely earthbound, trapped in a history not of my own making and running headlong into not merely death but also damnation. And if conservative thinking raises its eyebrows at the LGBTQ2+ presence in our historically and factually diverse society-as-it-is, neo-conservative thought denies its very right to existence. And it must do so, for such otherness that cannot be so readily identified in either primordial time or paradisiacal timelessness is a threat to the inexistential imagination. At once, however, we must allow for the humanity of the neo-conservative to remain as present as possible; like myself who is future-oriented, the one who closes off his own perception of the world in favor of an otherworld, ahistorical and also non-historical, inexistential and transcendental, is expressing the basic human will to life which all of us share.

            In saying this, I am not in any way intending to shore up neo-conservative fantasy. At the same time, it courts both irony and even hypocrisy to deny the humanity of the neo-conservative simply because he has denied his own. Indeed, the duty presented by neo-conservative thought to the rest of us is to help the deluded person back into reality as it can be known. In this, we ourselves must admit that because not all of what is taken to be real can be rationally and factually evidenced in a way satisfactory to science, for instance, that we ourselves should remain open to certain aspects of the tradition out of which neo-conservative thought has extended itself. And it is in the acting and wholly historical space of conservativism that we must encounter the neo-conservative, and we must take upon ourselves that equally historical task simply because the narrowed imagination that desires the end of history presents an existential question to our shared species-essence. But framed by neo-conservatism, it is a false question, presented as a choice between morality and history. While it is the case that no single morality survives historical change, it is a much more open question as to the character of morality itself, which would include the concept of the sacred as Durkheim has defined it, and the presence or absence of Entzauberung, as Weber has defined it. All of us experience alienation in modern life, relatively few of us regress into the stunted stilted stenochoria of stale fairy-tale. The more authentic question, ‘how is morality relevant today?’ is perhaps the most pressing discussion that must take place amongst all persons, since it, with as well a more authentic irony, defines much of our understanding of our own historical epoch.

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

The Misplaced Love of the Dead

The Misplaced Love of the Dead

            We can be said to have a future as long as we are unaware that we have no future – Gadamer

                All those who yet live must accept both the happenstance of their birth and the necessity of their death. Though we are not born to die, but rather to live, living is an experience which is very much in the meanwhile, for the time being, in the interim, even of the moment, pending global context and possible crisis. We neither ask to be born nor do we ask to die, as Gadamer has also reminded us. And beyond this, these are the truer existential conditions which connect us with all other human beings, not only our living contemporaries, but also the twice honoured dead. Birth and death overtake all cultural barriers, and thence undertake to be the furtive guides which travel alongside us during that wondrous but also treacherous intermission between inexistences.

            It is a function of the basic will to life that generates both the shadow of ressentiment, especially towards youth, as well as the orison of immortality as an ideal and now, more and more a material goal. Indefinite life, a more modest version of the same will, is nonetheless radical to the species-essential experience of coming to understand human finitude. It is not enough to comprehend finiteness, as with the limits of bodily organicity, including the gradual breakdown of the brain. Because we humans are gifted with the evolutionary Gestalt of a consciousness beyond mere sentience and instinct, forward-looking and running along ahead of itself in spite of knowing its general end, we have to come to grips, and then to terms, with a more subtle wisdom; that of the process of completion.

            Dasein is completed in mine ownmost death. Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is clearly also an ethics, and a profound one, and if it is somewhat shy of the conception of the other, as Buber has duly noted, it is not quite fair to say on top of this, that it is also at risk for fraud regarding death, as Schutz declared. Such ‘phoniness’, as reported by Natanson, might be felt only insofar that death is in fact the least of our living worries, especially in the day to day. Poverty, illness, alienation, loneliness, victimization, illiteracy, hunger, all these and others authentically occupy our otiose rounds and do not, in their feared instanciation, immediately prompt us to meditate upon the much vaunted ‘existential anxiety’. Rather they compel us to act in defence of life, our own and perhaps that of others as well. So it is also part of the will to life that we truly fear such umbrous outcomes and it is commonplace to second-guess many of the decisions we thus make in our personal lives with the sole purpose of maintaining an humane equilibrium.

            But what if this balancing act breaks apart, even for a moment? For eight young women in Toronto, possessed of only the beginnings of self-understanding and equipped with none of the perspective that only living on for perhaps decades more begrudgingly bequeaths to any of us, the fragile balance of common humanity, the ounce of compassion for every weighty pound of passion, the spiritual eagle who pecks at our conscience rather than our liver, fell away. The result was the death of a much older man, needless and therefore almost evil in its import. No matter the intent, no matter the force, no matter the loyalty nor the rage, neither the desperation nor the anxiety, none of these things can vouchsafe such an act. Even so, for the rest of us, we must be most alert to not feeling so much love for the dead that we forget what the living yet require of us. That one is dead must be recognized as not even tragic, for there was no noble drama being played out. It was rather an absurdity, an intrusion upon not only civility but also upon human reason itself. That eight live on, now to be shipwrecked for a time on a hardpan atoll of their own making, is in fact where the call to conscience next originates.

            These young women clearly need our help and guidance if they are to honour the death of the one who was denied the remainder of his own challenging life. This is a far wider point for any who live in the midst of a history which is at once my own but as well so abstracted and distanciated from me that I am regularly compelled to relinquish any direct control over events or even of the knowledge of the human journey emanating from just yesterday, let alone of remote antiquity. I have no doubt that for all eight, real remorse mixed with a sullen distemper is disallowing sleep. For even if ‘the murderer sleeps’, as Whitman reminded us, the character of her sleep is not quite the same as is our own. It is thus the burden which falls upon the rest of us to help the newly-made pariah back into the human fold, for it was her original alienation from that succor which was the root cause of her vacant evil.

            In doing so, we must also remind ourselves that on the one hand, such a death could have been my own, but yet more importantly, and on the other, that I too might have killed if I had been in similar circumstances, young and enraged, desperate and anxious, alienated but in utter ignorance of the worldly forces which are the sources of my stunned and stunted condition. And in the meanwhile my wealthy peers attend yet Blytonesque private schools and though they look like me and consume the same popular culture as me and are fetishized alike by adults whose leers I must endure each day, they might as well be of a different species entire. And all the more so now that I have killed.

            Would not the parents of the privileged also kill to defend their lots? Would I, speaking now in my real self, not kill to protect my family? What is the threshold of the needless? Where do we make our stand and state with always too much unction that this death was justified and this one was not? Why would someone attack my family? Why would someone offend privilege? Why would eight young women attack an utter stranger? For the living, upon whom our love both depends and is called forth daily, this is the time to ask the deeper questions whose responses shall expose our shared and social contradictions. For the misplaced love of the dead serves ultimately only the self-interest of those who are content with the world of the living insofar as it continues to privilege they and them alone. The misplaced hatred of the others, including these eight young people, serves only as a decoy for our self-hatred and self-doubt, charged with the background radiation which is the simmering knowing that we have strayed so far from our ideals that such dark acts are not only possible but have indeed occurred.

            The only way to prevent their recurrence is to work actively for a just society, an ennobled culture, a compassionate individual, a responsible State. Those who need our love in the highest sense of the term are those who have acted in a manner that shows that they are themselves outside of human love. That each of us may descend to such inhumanity must remain the patent frame in which the love we proffer to all those affected by this event is rendered. Do not love the dead, do not hate the living. I will be the one but I am yet the other. I do not stand with the victim for he now stands beyond all human ken. Rather, however uncomfortably and even ironically, I must stand with the criminals, because they are faced with the same challenges as am I myself; to regain each day the highest expression of the will to life in spite of any descent the past has conferred upon us.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of fifty-five books in ethics, education, health and social theory. He has worked with alienated youth for three years and for a quarter century before taught thousands of young people through transformative and experiential learning. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades in both Canada and the USA. He may be reached at viglion@hotmail.com

An Interpolation of Jungian Archetypes

An Interpolation of Jungian Archetypes

            The model of genesis in modernity is contained in the relationship between genotype and phenotype. The former is Godhead, the latter humankind. In all such patterns, something innate makes itself known through indirect expressions of spirit into world, form into content. This is known as ‘manifesting’ and the object to which the spirit tends or has contrived, as a ‘manifestation’. Though the very idea of innateness may seem archaic, it is at least clear enough that consciousness has its seat in a complex neural architecture no longer so much automatically endowed with faithful reason but rather to be imbued with a reasonable faith.

            Faith in itself, for one. For Jung, our connection with the wellspring of human expression cross-culturally and universally to be found amongst individual persons hailing from every such known culture, can be traced backward, as it were, from the manifestations of archetypical conceptions of essential life and its utter limits to what he referred to as the ‘collective unconscious’. This is a different understanding than say, Durkheim had, of what could constitute shared being in the world. Durkheim’s ‘conscience collectif’ was something only innate due to the internalization of purely social forms in childhood. Its expression was moral indignation – though not, it should be noted in our days of feigned anxiety, moral panic – and its archetype was society alone, or rather the ‘ideal society’, to borrow from Santayana. In this singular ideal, the individual found herself trending upward and outward, so that her inevitably and originally small-statured person became enlarged with the life of the world itself.

            But our relationship to the collective unconscious is not as clearly defined. As with his mentor, Jung saw in both dream and myth the recurring clues to what must be something both potent and patent to the human soul. Whereas Freud looked to the trauma of birth and growth for the key to these expressions, Jung instead found in them a different kind of imagery, that of the archetypes. These are abstracted and stylized figures and forces that cleave well to Weber’s ideal types analysis, worked out during the same time period as Jung’s archetypes. Famous examples of Jung’s figural archetypes include the mother, the child, and the Syzygy and Shadow. The yet more abstract archetypical concepts, something one could refer to as ‘ideations’, include the flood as well as his famous anima and animus. I am going to choose four of the most salient archetypes to modernity in terms of its relationship to pre-modern myth and interpolate between each cardinal direction based on Jung’s ‘mandala of modern man’ (frontispiece for his 1959). But I will not be limited by his specific understanding of the relations amongst the archetypes. Instead, I will propose that for each set of archetypes there are hybrid figures which ‘occupy’ the spaces in between the cardinal points; half-way beings that are made up of aspects of both of the more basic archetypes that themselves occupy the diagrammatical spaces on either side of them.

            Though it took Jung four decades to completely work out his understanding of the innate ordering of essential human consciousness, his 1919 conception yet rings true as a basis upon which we can magnify the myriad expressions of cultural life that seem to uncannily hold together within our shared beliefs and even in our popular entertainment. It is commonplace, for instance, to read of digital media narrative being based upon archetypes such as the hero or the warrior. If one shrinks away from such realities and accuses his fellow human of a basic lack of imagination, that same one must recall to herself that for Jung, at least, our imagination is itself based upon the dynamic presence of the archetypes and their ability to be expressed ‘phenotypically’. We can pause just here, of course, to ask the immediately docketed question, ‘is it the case then that in order for humanity to mature further our set of archetypes must be altered or even abandoned altogether?’ Certainly there have been enough more recent critiques of Jung’s understanding – the most obvious being the stereotypes of gender to be found within it (but then again, are these not the realities of historical expression that are themselves to a certain extent predetermined but are by no means instinctual or ’natural’, by the dynamo of the collective unconscious?) – to issue a reasonably well defined caveat. In terms of gender, since this is itself a most fluid conception, Jung’s prefigurations adapt, I think, quite well. After all, we note the presence of female warriors throughout known history, as well as male nurturer figures. That the balance of these archetypes are represented by varying degrees of genderedness is a tendency alone, and not an essentiality. I hope my interpolations will underscore this sensibility.

            Let us first take four well known archetypes in their cardinal dyads, Mother-Warrior and Syzygy-Shadow. Figure ‘a’:

                                                Syzygy (all genders)

Warrior (masculine)                        EGO                                                 Mother (feminine)

                                                Shadow (no gender)

            Ego occupies the very center of the diagram just as it does for the mandala. We can now see how, in each quarter or corner of the proposed circle, there is a space which is occupied by a combination of the two closest archetypes already present. Filling them in with the most obvious hybrids, figure ‘a’ generates the following. Figure ‘b’:

                                                            Syzygy

            Visionary (moderate)                                   Nurturer (intimate)

Warrior                                                      EGO                                                    Mother

            Adventurer (immoderate)                           Disciplinarian (distanced)

                                                            Shadow

            As with the original four archetypes, the hybrids are situated in opposition to one another, both within the ambit of traditional gender dominance and across it. Now it is time to detail within each of the conceptions their specific and essential characteristics, beginning with the top of the diagram or stylized mandala and ending at the bottom, travelling left to right.

            Syzygy: This is Jung’s own hybrid being. In its original conception it holds within it both male and female but we can update this with a more contemporary sensibility that simply says that this archetype includes all possible genders and does not make any discrimination amongst them, whatever their total number may be. In that Jung is careful to note that his archetypes, unlike say, Plato’s ‘ideas’, are essentially dynamic – we may then ask after what they are responding to, and kindred with the dynamic between the moral and the historical, the ideal and the real, we could very well answer ‘society’ itself – it is not a logical stretch to extend and refigure the Syzygy, the ‘conjoined being’, as containing multitudes in the same manner as we shall see that each elemental archetype is more abstract than their hybrids. Along with its being, each archetype has a simple mantra. In this case, the Syzygy passionately declares its love for each and all. ‘I will love you’ is thus its fail-safe and essential Ursprachlichkeit. Hence the authentic lover, unbiased regarding form or content, is a Syzygy. Its opposite is the Shadow, the being of no gender and possessed by the absence of love given its premonitory stance towards death itself.

            Visionary: A blend of Warrior and Syzygy, the visionary being tends toward the masculinity – though not the maleness per se; recall that women and men, in Jung, each have strong traits of the ‘opposite’ gender even if one often is predominant – but is not compelled to manifest this orientation in its vocation. The visionary is the active and activated lover. It is not content to love the world as is, nor those within it. It rather seeks both a higher love and a transformed world. The artist and the philosopher are visionaries. We will see that its opposites are, as the diagram declares, both the Adventurer and the Disciplinarian, the one due to its very indiscipline – which also makes it the opposite of the other opposite, as it were – and the other in its defense of the world-as-it-is. The visionary’s mantra is ‘I will change you’. In this, it states with unction both its purpose and its goal, and the fact that along with the world, I myself as I now am is not either what I could, or yet should, become.

            Warrior: This is the quintessential masculine archetype. It, like the Visionary, is outward facing, away from Ego, since its primordial duty is to defend it against external attack. It’s mantra is ‘I will protect you’ and thus it leaves the internal workings of Ego to other figures and forces, specifically the Mother and its ‘feminine’ hybrids. The Warrior is likely the most commonplace and cliché hero, so much so that indeed heroism has been defined in certain phases of cultural development as courage in combat alone. Yet the definition of what may constitute combat is rarely so single-minded. Coming to one’s own defense, as an expression of the Warrior archetype, involves reason and rationality as well as bravery and indefatigability. It also may entail vision or a sense of adventure as well as maintaining a faith, ultimately in oneself. Thus the worker and the officer of the peace are Warrior types, as well as of course the soldier. Though the Warrior’s opposite is the Mother, both are charged with the same duty to Ego, it is just that the former extends this duty outward and the latter inward.

            Adventurer: The contemporary home of ‘toxic masculinity’, the Adventurer is, even so, not always self-aggrandizing and self-serving. It does have the tendency to exhibit Ego’s most outwardly niggardly traits, such as hedonism and narcissism. The pirate and the politician are alike adventurers, for they live for the day and their goal is status and repute. Both positive and negative attention serve equally well in this quest, and indeed, the very ignobility of the Adventurer’s questing places it in direct contrast with that of the Visionary’s. Its other opposite, the Nurturer, places compassion foremost, whereas the Adventurer idealizes passion alone. Yet its base desires framed by basic passions drive the Adventurer also to new worlds, as the Visionary is also driven, but these worlds are more simply heretofore undiscovered rather than inexistent. In a word, Ego’s outwardness is given both worldly and rootsy form through the Adventurer archetype. ‘I will desire you’ is thus its mantra.

            Shadow: Traditionally understood as the dark undersoul of humanity, one’s Shadow figure perhaps has gained a bad rap and rep alike. It is reasonable to say that though the Shadow, in its genderless and distanciated state, is the most challenging archetypical aspect of selfhood, it also represents the most basic perspective on our shared existence. Just as the Syzygy calls us to the transcendental through the love of another and ultimately, the love of all, so the Shadow reminds us of our mortal limits. Both are existential figures and they are, in this, obvious opposites. In love, human existence reaches its nadir, in death its lowest point; indeed, its completion of being in itself, whereas the Syzygy demands that we lose our being in the presence of the other. In an additional opposition, Ego loses itself in love only to another human other, but in death, it loses itself to the Other as otherness itself. The Shadow is expressed in the criminal, specifically the murderer, but also in the dictator and perhaps as well in the melancholic. If the Syzygy knows nothing but affirmation, the Shadow understands nothing but denial. So its mantra is ‘I will doubt you’; not only is my existence placed in doubt because of its mortal limit, but also each of my decisions, future-directed as they are, can be called into doubt given that, as Gadamer has eloquently put it, ‘we can only be said to have a future as long as we are unaware that we have no future’.

            Disciplinarian: This is the rule-enforcer and the defender of the normative. It is the opposite of both the Visionary, who seeks to overturn all norms and social forms, and the Adventurer, who transgresses the one and flouts the other at will and for its own device. ‘I will guide you’ is the Disciplinarian’s mantra, and like the Shadow, of which it is half composed, such a statement belies its ultimate suasion. Guidance in this case may be reasonably taken for a limited vision, the very thing the Visionary is compelled to reject. Society as formed, culture as expressed, are the Disciplinarian’s own guideposts. All authoritarians and others who are charged with reproducing society – teachers, pastors, judges, and mentors in athletics specifically – take the form of expressions of the Disciplinarian. Reproduction of the already created is the ultimate goal and duty of this archetype, as opposed to the creation the new itself in the Visionary, or the mere seeking of the novel in the Adventurer. Yet the Disciplinarian is not after all the Shadow alone, it is also composed of the Mother. So in its strict heeding of the rules and their enforcement upon Ego, it is also called to the duty of basic care. And it remains the case, no matter what genius which youth possesses, that in order to overcome something we first must understand in the greatest detail what that something is.

            Mother: One of Jung’s most famous archetypes, the Mother figure is traditionally understood to be quintessentially feminine, though once again, not necessarily female in its worldly representation. The Mother’s mantra  ‘I will care for you’, includes both the guidance of the more authoritarian oriented Disciplinarian as well as the development which, as we will immediately see, is embodied in the Nurturer. Thus the Mother figure is of the same rank as the Warrior, only taking care of the inward looking aspect of Ego rather than protecting it against forces emanating from elsewhere. In this primordial vocation, we discover the ‘care of the self’, so historically lit by Foucault, for one. The social worker or even the prostitute are examples of this archetype’s material expression. Its form of love is concernful being, and thus it expresses in its manifest duties one of Dasein’s ownmost essentialities. Ego’s very ability to exert care about its world comes from its own auto-maternal ‘instinct’. Though in opposition to the Warrior in terms of the spatiality over which it exerts its care and protection, the Mother archetype remains the ‘warrior of Ego’s inner world’, so to speak, and hence the Bourgeois contraption of placing the real-time mother as both architect and defender of the Domus.

            Nurturer: Finally, the last of the hybrid archetypes, which in this case combines the care of the Mother with the love of the Syzygy. Its mantra, ‘I will develop you’ nods in the latter’s direction by acknowledging that the love of another alters and grows our own being as Ego, and indeed one can reasonably suggest that only through the radical departure from ourselves that love requires of us on the intimate plane do we in fact develop the wider care for others and for the world around us. The Nurturer is aware of this demand and seeks to prepare Ego for its advent. For before falling in love in the passionate  and shameless grace of lovers as seeking a unified and genderless being, Ego must come to understand the compassion required to recognize that an other has both desires and needs which I might thence fulfill. It is the task of the Nurturer to engender this understanding, trending away from the purely inner care that the Mother so engenders. The artistic mentor or the friend in general are examples of the Nurturer archetype. The Nurturer’s opposites, the Visionary and the Adventurer, are both far too externally oriented to develop the compassion necessary to love other human beings instead of the abstracted world of visions and the all too passionate experiences of the one who only and always ventures forth. Even so, in its opposition, the Nurturer nevertheless prepares Ego for all worldly Erlebnisse, as well as forming the basic framework for the recognition of human suffering, which then the Visionary takes up as its call to arms.

            In sum then, each of the eight primary aspects of Ego in this new mandala of the modern person requires of us to stand centered and balanced and to not completely eschew any single figure, let alone be possessed by any one as well:

                                    Syzygy                        Loving of the other

                                    Visionary                    Changing of the world

                                    Warrior                      Protecting against the external

                                    Adventurer                Desiring of experience

                                    Shadow                      Doubting of existence

                                    Disciplinarian         Reproducing of what is

                                    Mother                       Caring for the inner life

                                    Nurturer                    Developing of compassion

            Taken together, these eight archetypes envelop Ego existentially as manifestations in cultural expression as well as essentially, as aspectual elements of Ego’s ‘primordial’ being-present. It is clear that amongst them, if all are called to as a set of balanced acts and thus as the outcome of a great variety and permutation of actions in the world at large and with and amongst others in that shared world, that Ego itself should not want for any ability and should be able to rise to any occasion, no matter the stringency of its demands. The task then for any psychological or even humanistic interlocutor is to help the patient access each of these archetypes and develop manners of expressing them. A common case in my own professional experience is the person who is attempting to leave a cult-like organization behind, replete as it is with authoritarian demands and highly structured role types. Here, Ego has suffered an absence of the Disciplinarian as well as the Visionary, opposites though they are but as in Jung, such dynamics can be imagined by envisioning arrowed lines between the relevant two figuresin each diagram that are then connected via the ‘Mysterium Coniunctionis’ which is also said to have created the Syzygy being. Hence this person has sought out, uncontrollably and with a violence toward the self, a cultural space in which both forms of demanding authority are consistently expressed. In so doing, of course, both the nobility of the authentic vision as well as the caring of the authentic rule-enforcer and reproducer are lost in the narcissism of the leader of such organizations, himself solely an adventurer at the cost of others’ autonomy and autochthony.  

            By now it should be understood that in each ‘case’, this or that Ego will be struck with an imbalance regarding these eight forces as anthropomorphized figures or cultural configurations, and it is the analyst’s duty to discover which imbalance is present and set about aiding the person in recovering that centeredness of being from which all human endeavors must begin.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of fifty-five 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.