Category: commentaries

Parental Wrongs

Parental Wrongs (statistical reality and immoral panic)

            Let it be said straight away that the family household is in fact the most dangerous place for any child. Given that upwards of 95% of all abuse, and in all four major types – that emotional, physical, psychological, and sexual – occur in the home and are perpetrated by those the child knows or knows well, almost all them family members, no other social context even comes close. I have had numerous therapeutic professionals remind me of this statistic, and to this they add that almost all of the remaining five percent occurs in educational settings such as schools, churches or training facilities of various kinds; places wherein coaches, tutors, mentors, teachers and the like are, by definition, gathered. These numbers put the utter lie to any suggestions that children are most at risk either by themselves, on the street, on the internet, or in the company of strangers. Does this mean that we should let any possible vigilance over these other spaces completely lapse? No, but what it does mean is that such same vigilance needs be applied to the family first, and then the formal educational scenes second, if a very distant second. The question which remains is precisely why the family home is the most dangerous place, given that every ideal thereof speaks the opposite.

            It is reasonable to suggest that no modern institution has, and from its very inception, been subject to such scrutiny and critique as has the bourgeois family. Towering discursive figures such as Engels, Freud, Erikson, Foucault and others have aimed their ample artillery at it. None, however, have simply used arguments from authority, such as it may be, in their vivisections. Seen variously as a cauldron of sexual tension aping the apes, a compact of production-consumption aping the aristocracy, or simply an umbrella sanction to intimately control women as servants and children as chattel, our version of the family is certainly the site of a great many wrongs, almost all of them committed by parents. It is also the case that parenting does not come into one’s life replete with detailed manuals; it is very much an improvised operation, and there are a great diversity of ‘types’ of children to be had. If one overlays this basic incompetency, which is at first no one’s fault, with the objective stressors of parent as worker, parent as consumer, and even parent as police officer, it is no surprise that the interior of the family home quickly becomes a landscape littered with acts of petty terrorism, with parents just as rapidly becoming equally petty fascists. Indeed, apparently if one seeks to parent at all, one automatically tends in these darker directions.

            The seeming price of civility in children is incivility in adults, the ransom of child obedience, disobedient parents. The eschewing of violence as a citizen requires the use of it against our own offspring. These are hard sayings, reminiscent of the ‘tough love’ advocates who hail from evangelical margins of all sorts. In fact, ‘tough love’ is a contradiction in terms, a euphemism for sadism and a vehicle for Schadenfreude. ‘Troubled teens’, another kindred euphemism, are so troubled, if at all, because of how they have been parented. One would like to say, in these cases, ‘poor’ parenting but once again, the character of the modern family is such that one cannot truly make such an assessment, utter such a judgment, promote this kind of ethical evaluation. Parenting is, in a word, what it is, given the other variables in play. If this is tantamount to saying that children can be raised in no other way than that shot through with violence and abuse of various kinds, consider both the facts and the stakes.

            The facts tell us of the sheer numbers of abuse cases, yet under-reported given the absolute stress on family loyalty and the equally naked threat of yet further violence, as well as the understaffed and underfunded resources available for children, especially youth, to which they can appeal. Many young people with whom I have spoken have reiterated the very much stock line that, ‘yes, I was abused in some manner, but the option was the child welfare system, so I stayed at home until I could move out’. The false choice between stakes in one hell and the next is not one any grown adult would likely kindly settle for, though in capital, many grudgingly do. Parents extort their teens with the ironic threat of child services protection, and they blackmail their young adults – a great many of whom, due to economic and demographic patterns, find themselves at home far past the optimum period – through the use of the steep housing and unreliable employment markets. Most parents are, by these acts, criminals, abetting yet further criminal behavior, including well-documented, if seemingly much less common, instances of physical violence against legal adults in their homes. Indeed, it is relatively easy to practice such hoodlum hoaxes against older children simply due to the primary socialization these young people have experienced as actual children. The unmitigated gall of the most zealous child abusers, in suggesting that children are not ‘real’ adults until age 21 or the like, and thus should be subject to ritual violence in the home, in direct contravention of any legal code, is a clarion clue to how bold the ‘parental rights’ propaganda has in our time become.

            In fact, from the very beginning, one does not have the right to even become a parent. Parenting is nothing other than a privilege, and one which not all can either afford, are suited for, have the opportunity to accomplish, or are legally sanctioned to attain. There are no parental ‘rights’, as such, only responsibilities. And the vast majority of these have been gifted to parents by the penurious State, which is increasingly unwilling to perform its previous responsibilities, once accomplished when it itself understood that the new conception of the nuclear family would not be able to educate its children in the manner any State required. The wrongs of the State are vast and evil, yes, but inside each middle-class suburban dwelling, the state in miniature is acted out. It is made into a simulacrum of evil, with every public source reminding children of how ‘safe’ it is to be at home, how ‘good’ it is, and how right it is. Honor thy mother and thy father. It is the State that spouts this antique nonsense, and mostly because of budget line. Focus on the family. I have seen numerous bumper stickers telling us instead to ‘focus on your own damn family’, but to no avail. The charlatan NPOs which have arisen since the birth of the bourgeois family – from the 1830s child-saving movement through to our own five-ring circus of ‘family-values’ organizations – have performed a veritable Olympiad of Oleander, hammering home the idea that a single leaf of disobedience to one’s rightful parents is not only a betrayal of their ‘love’, but as well a ‘sin’, whatever that may mean.

            Yet if the bourgeois parent is himself a contradiction in terms due to the family becoming, in modernity and through our mode of production, simply the two-horned locus of reproduction – it is both the origin of production and the destination of consumption; workers must come from somewhere, all those many commodities have to go some place – what of the bourgeois child? Even in the very best of homes, where only the wider symbolic violence is refracted by compassionate parenting – ‘I am here for you always as a resource, I will never harm you, but the world is challenging and you must learn to navigate it, ultimately on your own’ – our shared reality, in which only those with access to resources do survive, impinges in a final manner the way in which one can imagine parenting. For being a child today is mostly to be the passive object of target-marketing of all kinds and from all comers. The child is a bulls-eye; the weapon, advertising. At an increasingly young age, the child becomes a willing target, consuming non-stop, from the virtual unreality to the equally unreal social world constructed around her. This pseudo-world is filled with both fantasy and decoy: the first to conceal from herself the suffering she yet feels, the second to conceal it from others. In inevitable mimesis, the family itself becomes a fantasy of itself; has there ever been an entertainment fiction that centers around the fact of child abuse as a norm; in a word, as a normatively sanctioned reality for the vast majority of children today?

            The family as well conceals its own activities through the use of false taboo. Physical punishment is, for instance, frowned upon, officially, and is sanctioned against by all professional and scientific associations and their journals. And so it is practiced in an unspoken manner. Most parents commit such abuses, but more than this, are then committed to never talking about doing so, even with like-minded others. We read of parents in chat threads and forums who are ‘so relieved to finally find’ an ironically ‘safe’ virtual space where other child abusers viz. parents and their vicarious voyeurs congregate. The detail in which they describe their dark doings is sickening but also most revealing. The ‘open secret’ of child abuse in the family could be such a scandal that impressive resources go into, not putting an end to it, not and never that, but rather in decoying all possible scrutiny away from the family home. Some of this goes into the schools and their annexes, which, to be fair, account for almost five percent of actual abuse, as stated. But by far the most misdirection is aimed at what is essentially a fantasy; the stranger in the panel van and his hyper-modern compatriot, the internet extortionist. But low-tech or high-tech it matters not. The race is very much on to find any kind of Other, however imaginary, who can steal away the villain’s role, for children themselves are stolen at birth.

            The source of this despicable condition lies in the sheer lack of dedicated personnel the modern family allows for itself. Non-Western extended families can also be abusive, of course, but the general stress of parenting is shared by the many, instead of by the merely two or yet one. The much-hallowed Victorian ideal of universal schooling sharing the load, replete with much violence of its own, has been the option for Western cultures. It is terribly ironic that the schools are targeted by the pro-family movements, given that humane parenting simply cannot be accomplished by two persons who are at once expected and indeed compelled to be workers first. In my work with families, I always reassured parents that they had, however cliché, the most difficult job in the world. This is not an essay in parent-hating. Even so, the reality demands that we completely redesign what the family is today, rather than shoring it up with propaganda and abetting its evil behavior. Society is violent precisely because we raise our children with violence. The future is uncertain, even for some, threatening, simply because we do not provide a certain and unthreatening space for our children to become themselves, thus preparing them to shoulder the task which is that human future, as well as being able to receive its beautiful gift.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books in ethics, education, health, social theory and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades and for three years worked as an ethics consultant for families and teens.

Normalism: Our New Testament

Normalism: Our New Testament (the sacred search for belonging)

            The concentration upon form over content lends itself to an expression of self-distanciation. Formalism in the discourses speaks first about the language of symbolic forms, which takes precedence over, or ahead of, possible truth claims made by these disciplines. In mathematics there is, for example, no sense that the language of math represents truths of nature; only the symbols are ‘real’. Formalism in the arts has a varied career, but the sense that the mechanics of how art is done is more important than its specific content or even historical context is highlighted. ‘Normalism’ is thus the preference to see oneself as a type of person rather than a uniquely individuated personhood. It is a self bereft of selfhood, and ultimately, Das Man rather than Dasein. And yet the quest for alternate communities, with their own norms being constructed after the fact of both the search and the distanciatedness it must bring to the incomplete selfhood, does not escape either the anxiety or the aspiration associated with all human needs regarding belonging, or feeling that one is part of something greater than oneself. Let’s explore how this latest set of attempts at founding a ‘new normal’ has fared in both the light of those previous, and the more perennial sense that humanity proper is never not without sociality.

            Commonly inherited boundaries that have demarcated group affiliations include social class background, sex at birth, ‘race’, and geographic region as well as religious tradition or credo. To these one enjoined level of education, profession, and a variety of voluntaristic or benevolent associations, charities, foundations, or political parties. The European triumvirate of ‘class, status, party’, to which Weber and others gave so much analytic attention, has of course now fallen away, beginning so quite precipitously in the post-war period. In our own time, sex has given way to gender, class to labor group or even industry sector, and party to a myriad of political ‘identities’ which agree only in that the personal expression of self as a category should also define that person’s political suasion. There are five or six biologically defined sexes for human beings, but the number of potential genders is indefinite. There are a scant few classes in capital, but career possibilities are numerous, if still shuttered by one’s birth status and access to the resources of personal augmentation, such as level of education and indeed, source of accreditation. This last has become, if possible, even more desperately associated with social class; all we must do is recall the recent spate of college entrance scandals. It is anathema to be a child of either wealth or celebrity and yet have to acknowledge that one is a dimwit, as evaluated by the steep hierarchy of university rankings.

            Yet the ‘outs’ for children of meager intellectual or other personal means have always been afoot. Prior to the second war, the military was itself considered to be a solid career for the child whose ambitions or abilities were mediocre. Immigration was also a reasonable path. Second sons, disinherited through traditional European property laws, could ‘seek their fortune’ in the new nation-builds of the empires at large. Immigration could be combined with military service, or better, that diplomatic, which required at least a modicum of wit as well as tact. Going into imperial state service siphoned off a great deal of ‘extra’ children, as well as those deemed unfit to inherit the family business, be it the new money of industry or the old wealth of property. Woe to the family who could not place any of their children to an advantageous position. My hometown saw an extended case of such a desperate domesticity in the Dunsmuirs. Once the most powerful magnate on Vancouver Island, none of John Dunsmuir’s nine children was apparently adept at anything much – it is plausible the ninth of these was sired by a mistress, given this youngest daughter’s strikingly good looks, in absolute contrast to those of the previous six, attesting to the efforts involved in finding a worthy successor, but no matter – and thus in a scant two generations, by 1967, the entire family had died out.

            The limits traditionally placed on sexuality have blown up, rather in our collective faces, starting perhaps around 1963, with the general introduction of simply taken birth control. We are told, with a rather pedantically pedagogic stance, that there have ‘always been queer and gay people, its just that…’ and so on. Indeed, this may well be the case, but what there has never been is a society or yet a culture that recognized ‘them’ as distinctly gendered categories somehow equivalent to those dominant in the male and the female.. Verdi provides an exemplar of how the going rate of a reproductively oriented society was able to digest alternate sexualities without promoting alternate gender categories, as a number of his operas center around major historical figures known to be gay or queer, and who had to avoid exposing themselves too publicly for fear of losing their status and their power. Today, we might be ‘suspicious’ that old Joe Green was also one of them, but again, no matter, since he celebrated these lives in the context of high art, never making the error, both categorical and ethical, that their nobility in any way stemmed from their sexuality etc.. This is the fundamental problem with contemporary identity politics: that it proclaims one’s human value to be ordered by one’s life-chance variables, the list of which having been adumbrated in questionably relevant ways.

            Now, it may be said that discursively, since the Enlightenment concept of the sovereign self has become somewhat jaded, and just so, mostly with itself, that the humane thing to do is to open the door to other versions of selfhood in its stead. The law, for instance, has not yet followed along with this politics, but could be said to be observing from alongside. This ‘sovereignty’ was meant as an intellectual and a political statement: that I as an individual am not beholden to either the state or the church. This was the eighteenth century’s great political and intellectual cause. It was of course Marx who, while acknowledging the moribund character of the church and the abettor lack of character, shall we put it, of the state, nevertheless cautioned mightily against this sovereignty by reminding everyone that ‘yes, but you are beholden to your class’. To this Nietzsche added ‘and to your culture’ or lack thereof, and lastly Freud as well, soon thereafter, ‘yes, and to your unconscious’. With some dismay, I would imagine, the post-Enlightenment self had rapidly become too enlightened with itself! This was perhaps not quite what Delphi had imagined implying. Knowing thyself in modernity requires of us a somewhat more sophisticated analytic, and it is this truth which, though epistemic to be sure, has also been interpreted as being personal.

            For the Greeks, knowing thy rank, a kind of status in society but also with regard to the fates as well as in relation to the gods and their druthers, is what is meant by the ‘self’. During the transition from mythos to logos, selfhood remained an amalgam of archetype and what was imagined to be base essence, such as manhood or womanhood, adulthood or childhood, slave or citizen and so on. This was uplinked into a more ethereal tradition of mythic tropes, so that the Greek could refer to the one who went against social norms and customs – the one who was ‘abnormative’ in our language today – simply as a ‘moron’. But the one who went against the fates was a hypermoron, no less! We have, needless to say, forgotten only this second, more superlative term, simply because we no longer believe in either fates or furies. And yet, willy-nilly, the two have returned in the form of ‘feelings’ or even moods, to haunt both the annoyed ethicist as well as all those charged with defending ‘morality’. We are also told, of late, that to be queer or gay or what-have-you is akin to a form of fatedness; for it defines not only one’s personhood but also colors every interaction these so-fated persons have with the rest of us as well as with our once-shared institutional cultures. As falls fate, so falls fury, since both our reaction to the novel presence – supposedly in numbers, according to the pseudo-revolutionaries, and supposedly in threatening numbers according to the neo-traditionalists; both claims are, to my mind, utterly unconvincing if not outright vapid – and then their reaction to our reaction regularly ramps up into the furious.

            Such is contemporary life, and indeed, life with our phenomenological contemporaries, that we are forced to reckon with this ongoing reckoning, hence the copious amounts of popular analyses which pervade mainstream media as well as bastions of neo-conservatism. These latter-day evangels have made the defense of what has of late been called, rather disdainfully by those fashionably enlightened, ‘binarism’, into their own cause célebre, which is as disenchanting as the supposed source of this call to respectable arms. In contrast to any of this, one must ask oneself, ‘have I ever needed to include what is vulgar about my humanity and my character in the cast of internal heroes upon whom I call to make myself more noble?’. If we dare not answer in the negative, what we are claiming is that sexuality is the equal of the call to conscience, that gender politics is the equal of one’s being-aheadedness, that anxiousness is the same as Anxiety, and that one’s personal desires are no different than one’s personal character. As Hillerman’s Higgins would say to Selleck, ‘Oh my God, Magnum!’.

            The next step would be to investigate, scientifically and analytically, the root historical and cultural causes of this shift in self-perception. It is not enough to be disaffected with the ‘sovereign self’ and thence call off the whole project of modernity simply because it has not yet fulfilled its universal promise. A premise is just that, and only by the singularly impoverished logic of identity politics does the premise somehow equal the promise. Indeed, given what it took to get to the premise alone, we as a species owe everything we are and have to pushing this sensibility toward its existential futurity. Do we cast aside the three millennia of overcoming superstition, ethnocentrism, and misanthropy in order merely to reproduce some personalist version of all three of them? Today we are urged to celebrate nothing more than the human bereft of humanity, and beings with no conception of Being. In turn, supposedly avoiding this fetid fate, we are then urged to destroy it in the name of antique humanity; the persona bereft of personhood, the ‘thyself’ as a what and never a who. There is an alternative: the historical and existential being in the world; my ownmost selfhood which is completed in a fitting act of fate and faith alike.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Sin Agog

Sin Agog (the radical propriety of conversion)

            It is a not uncommon feature of our finitude to accrue to oneself a sense of both regret and redemption. This is, for us, primarily a Christian frame of reference, for there is but fate inexorable and penance pedantic in the Greek moral mythos, and even in that Egyptian, from which the Christian sensibility is ultimately derived, one finds that living-on produces only the ledger by which Horus judges whether or not the soul has lived up to its predetermined value, or perhaps has even exceeded it. Thus, there is no redemptive force in pre-Christian moral cosmology. But we can ask, why redemption at all? What have I done, or not done, in this life such that I would require some soteriological entry into the next? Of course, if there is no ‘next’ phase of existence, redemption becomes purely a private matter, and it would be to my own person as an expression of the call to conscience afore which I would stand and be tested. For us today, this test is no longer a moral one, but one of public ethics to which the private self must for the time being bend its will and desire.

            We have, however, a mythopoetic landscape first to tread, and like all mythic narrative, hyperbole and metaphor rule the day. Confessionals, pioneered by Saul into Paul in terms of posterity – Peter immediately felt remorse in realizing he had, in the most Greek sense, fulfilled Jesus’ simple declaration regarding denying Him thrice , but this was a private comprehension and never meant to be taken even as a Christian viewpoint; it was not prophecy in the Judaic sense nor prescient in that pre-agrarian, nor was it to be made into a foundation for a conversion event – and given an entire discourse, that of subjectivity, by Augustine. Before one is born again, one’s subjectivity is one of subjection; we have yet to object to ourselves as being mere objects in another’s eyes. The twice-born are not elites, merely those who have been enlightened; they are the to-be-saved, and form a pool of willing souls who have undergone the sternest of earthly examinations. Self-examination is also not Christian, but the entire rationale for submitting oneself to this perhaps daily evaluation shifts from the now transient Greek ground, moving from mythic and poetic thought to that historical and linguistic, scientific and aesthetic, to one of a kind of dress-rehearsal for judgment day, once again Egyptian in pedigree. One ideally would not appear before God wearing the dross of any worldly subjection, including the objection others make at our very existence.

            In order to prepare oneself for potential salvation then, one needs to undergo conversion. In the Gospels, we have but a kind of charismatic convincing or yet baptism. One, there is yet no church to which to convert, nor even a systematic set of beliefs to adopt. Two, there are no figures who preach conversion as a liminality, or as an event in its own right. One is immediately transformed in Jesus’ presence, whether the interlocutor is beset with sin or blight, disease or infamy. This is Socratic dialogue taken in its most guttural, but also radically flattened-out, manner. There is no philosophical argument to be made or accepted, no dialectic, and no evaluating audience. The thesis is how I have lived, the antithesis how I must live from now on, and there is no further Aufheben yielding a synthesis,. The entire thesis must in fact be discarded in conversion; it is the patently non-dialectical process. Jesus presents his case not as a position within discourse, but one that hails from a source beyond all human thought. Yes, he certainly humanizes the glad tidings of redemption through faith, but their contents and their force emanate entirely from a non-human sphere. Like any visionary, Jesus is met with incredulity at times, and his message finds its most receptive ears amongst the marginal, the last who shall be first in the new leaven of things. But with Paul, who has, in spite of himself, pronounced his own conversion event and thence makes it into that apical ancestor of all further such experiences – if we are to take up the faith and become ‘twice-born’ we must picture ourselves on the road to Damascus, as the very first person to be converted – not only does his name change – this hallmark is found even in social contract societies within the rites of puberty and of death and has nothing to do with religion at all – he gains repute through taking up the message of the Gospels, with a variety of political adumbrations, no doubt, but yet with a sense of keen sincerity and concern for a wider humanity, the kernel of which is first seen with Alexander and his sense of cosmopolitanism.

            This idea of ‘humanity’, so dear to us today as an ideal in spite of our reckless shunning of it in practice, is also something that can be queried. For if the road to salvation demands conversion, we must first reflect upon how our previous life, also human, does not and has not measured up to the new ethical standards of late presented to us. Youth can be baptized, but they cannot, in truth, become ‘converts’, for conversion, by its very character, must have material through which a point-by-point comparison may be made between the first born life and that twice born. This requires time served; indeed, one might suggest that conversion only is authentically itself completed by living the new life for some few years so that the comparative analysis itself may be completed. There is thus a conversion ‘event’, but this is not at all equal to conversion as an experience. The road to Damascus introduces the conversion experience, but only the Pauline epistles complete it. In them, we find references to not only how the author blanches at his previous life and the sometimes nasty actions which populate it, we also see that he widens his self-scrutiny to the cultures around him, be they Greek, Hebrew, or Roman. An ethnic chameleon himself, Paul is roused to rhetorical force in the face not so much of active resistance but rather of a placid disinterest. He is aware, as is any good orator, that resistance means that the other has begun to consider one’s arguments, whereas the apathetic or yet the diffident are much more at risk for missing their Kerygmatic content. Paul imparts the crucial idea that the new church shall not discriminate against any human being; all can convert to Christianity and indeed, all should do so post-haste.

            But the other chief sensibility that the epistles own and thus introduce to Western discourse is that of the existential anxiety. This was non-existent for the Greeks, whose fates were predetermined and whose notion of Hades included only a one-way ticket. Anxiety is today understood as an elemental aspect of the Being of Dasein, but the Pauline version specifically addresses me to attend to how I have lived and the reasons for my life. Instead of desirefully feeling agog within our sinful subsistence, we must shed the very desire for that kind of life; we must, in our newly examined life, feel agog at the nature of sin itself, and thus question why on earth I have participated in it. This intensely interested concernfulness, the very source-point of Heideggerean ‘guilt’ – a term which he takes great, but to me, unconvincing, pains to make value-neutral – is shifted, in the process of the conversion event, from reveling in sin to examining it. And it is precisely this shift which, though a politics in Paul, becomes a full-fledged discourse with Augustine.

            Yet we are not quite as fully absent from mythical narrative, even here. For Augustine consistently overdoes it, making his first born life out to be a veritable salmagundi of secularist sin. I once overheard one student who was appalled that he was having sex with a twelve-year old girl, but of course during this time period such an age was very much an adult; Mary was the same age when carrying Jesus. It is of interest that Augustine’s own audience would have found fault with different aspects of his self-examination than we today, but this makes for an enduring testament, allowing for errors of interpretation along the way. At the end of the day, however, we have no idea what Augustine did or did not get up to in his younger years, and this function of memoir in general – we must take the author’s statements at face value or, at the very least, as well-intentioned euphemisms to be used as both metaphorical models at first of – the pre-conversion life – and thence for – the newly ‘good’ life of the twice-born – is another invention of his. The essential tension which resides in subjective narrative is that it is always an amalgam of memory and imagination, of reality and fantasy, and the admixture very much depends on what kind of message one desires to communicate. The confession as part of conversion begins with Augustine and has had a great many mimics since. But as with any literary or even aesthetic form more generally, it can truly only be ‘done’ once. Given this, what are we to make of its historical appearance?

            It most forceful sensibility is one of a radical propriety. I must come to own my prior life, warts and all, and to thence possess its experience as an absolute benchmark against which my new behavior and outlook can be measured. In conserving the notion of sin, mainly past but still possible for me, I can evaluate each present action through the comparison with the perduring shadow sin casts over human outcomes. Just because I have undergone a rite of passage, that I am a convert, does not mean that I am exempt from sin, only that I have a powerful manner of adjudicating it in my life and perhaps in those of others as well, which I could not have had before the conversion event. Just so, I must also learn to own this new ability; I must exercise just as radical a propriety over self-examination in the light of redemption as I do over the haunted landscape of my sinful past life. That life is over, but sin itself remains, since it is after all its own force, and does not accrue especially to me nor does it regard me as its only vehicle. And just as I was merely another  once-born sinner, so too I now realize that in the light of a redemptive soteriology, I learn to take the human being in me as an end in itself; neither a means for other’s ends in subjection, nor as a way to judge others as fitting mine own through objectification. Thus the concept which is given the truest shift is neither that of sin nor even of action, but rather of interest; it is the orientation of my being agog that is transmuted from reveling to evaluating.

            In sum, conversion is both an event and an experience. It is a point and a series. It contains the limen of the born-again but in so doing, does not purge the actual presence of sin, but instead reorients my interest toward it. I no longer desire it as an ‘in itself’, even if I may yet sin as my twice-born selfhood, but I rather desire to examine it and evaluate it as an action in the world. In conversion I move away from the shadowy essence of sin in order to actively grapple with its existence, in my life and in that of others. In the model of which the confessional representation of conversion begins, I am all agog within sin and because of it, but in the model for with which this same narrative structure concludes, my intense interest is in sin as a space that I may live without, and that in both senses of the term. Conversion excerpts us from the sinful life but does not exempt us from examining the character of sin which remains as part of my general humanity. If we take this language in its historical and thus wider sense, our conversion ethics of today allows us to critically examine our entire way of life and how it pronounces, in part, a misery upon others. ‘Sin’ in modernity orbits round injustice and inequality and is thus no longer radically subjective in its record. Even so, we must attempt to own it as if it were my personal error; the kind of mistake reserved for those whose conscience remains once-born.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Future is Plastic

The Future is Plastic (Sculpting Fluid Change)

            With the major oil-producing nations shying away from a variety of bans on plastic use and waste, given that the petrochemical industry is facing a shortage of expanding commodity markets and such countries as India, Iran, and Russia reserve their ‘right to develop’; with microplastics in water supplies, gigantic festoons of plastic littering the remote oceans, plastic detritus on the beaches – to the point that certain crustaceans are now using plastic bottle caps and the like as makeshift ‘shells’; inventive creatures they must be – and with plastic recycling losing its trendiness, the bit character in The Graduate (1967) may have said more than he meant, in counseling the young Dustin Hoffman about the most promising careers: “The future (really) is plastic!”. This film, meant as comedy but in fact a tragedy – the culminating scenes have Hoffman playing Harold Lloyd in an updated chase sequence borrowed wholly from Girl Shy (1924), but the happy ending of Lloyd’s daredevil antics is not repeated in the more recent effort – reminds one of nothing other than the contrast between plastic items themselves, brightly colored, whimsical, toy-like, and their lingering effect upon the environment. Indeed, ‘malingering’ might be the more apt term, given their notoriously long half-lives.

            But the conception of plastic predates the actual material invention, seen yet in interwar period ‘Bakelite’ and other like artifacts as varied as vintage poker chips, early electric shavers, toothbrushes, and shoe-horns, to name a few. Plastik in German is ‘sculpture’, as in the art form. And the ability to mold this new liquid polymer-like substance into any possible shape desired could only accrue to itself the same name, Anglicized but carrying the same methodic meaning. Sculpted plastic did itself appear in the galleries soon after the war, taking its place among the modernist movement, yet also pushing it along toward pop art. Plastic as a substance is seemingly as value-neutral as it is a conception. The latter connotes change, not permanence, so there is an irony of contrast between the idea and the product, given once again the fact that plastic is so difficult to break down and few organisms in nature have, so to speak, the guts to do so. Certainly, we humans appear to lack them, as it is far more convenient to make like the crab and turn away from the world, sheltering under our very much artificial shells.

            Even so, the film’s enduring epigram also must be taken much more literally than a general suggestion to get a job in a specific and growing industry. The future is, by definition, plastic; fluid, as yet unformed, to be molded, the very outcome of present-day change which in turn is the future’s ownmost harbinger. The littoral litter of actual plastic objects and their shards and fragments does nothing to alter this profoundly existential condition. Yes, unless the world does itself become uninhabitable due to it’s becoming inundated with things made of plastic. It is not a momentary irony after all, this contrast between the conception and the object, the idea and the product, the meaningful word and passing thing. But we must ask, is the nascent drive to cleanse the earth of these cast-off remnants transmuting into gaily Lovecraftian remanants – one can imagine that Cthulhu itself, rising from the ocean depths, is after all made up of a million tons of plastic waste held together with giant fish nets – simply a matter of rehabilitating the health of the ecosystem or does it carry some other, more essential sentiment, within it?

            The idea of the future is, oddly, itself a recent invention. For the Greeks, the future was to be as tragic as the fates of the young would-be lovers in the Hoffman film, escaped from their normative prisons, yes, but then realizing, in the final frames, that they had now come face to face with an utterly unknown – and for them, seated side by side at the very back of a bus, just as unknowable – time to come. There is no being-ahead in the Greek mythos, of course, but during the transition toward logos, the mythic temporality was shed before ever was the mythic sensibility. The past was venerated, the present deplored, the future dreaded. Speaking of rehabilitation, the first light that shone from a future point appears in the resurrection of the Christian mythos; it speaks of a future that is better than what has been. This is an impressive volte face given the druthers of classical thought, and represents, through the midwifery of the Hebrews, a re-uptake of Egyptian thought concerning both personal destiny and the structure of the afterlife more generally. Perhaps paradoxically, the idea of a future being as well as world is actually an older sensibility than is the idea of decay and the overall running down of things. The future as a conception comes from the past as an actuality. What is more truly resurrected is thus not a particular culture hero but rather an entire outlook, a worldview that seeks to overcome both the torpor of the present and the ultimate breakdown of the future.

            This novel vantage presents to itself an equally unexplored panorama. That the Greeks maintained vestiges of their older temporality, a cycle in which the usual linear histories are inverted – the past was somehow ahead of them and thus could be known; this is dramatized in some of the most famous literary sequences that have survived from this period, such as those that speak of ‘predestination’ in Oedipus Rex or Antigone, while the future was ‘behind’ them and was thus unknown to the present – tells us of their abject fear of the future as a looming historical space. The ‘horror vacui’ of their Geometric period in sculpture was, for the Greeks, seemingly imported into a wider worldview. Blank space, either on the surfaces of clay vessels or in the temporal imagination, could neither be condoned nor countenanced. There is a residue of this even in our present-day imagination, since the future ‘itself’ has not changed and can itself never be present for us. Toffler’s Future Shock (1970) is a well-known popular attempt to essentially bring the future into the present, filling up the otherwise void spaces with its abrupt presence. The author speaks of urban renewal projects, where in a short space of time the entire landscape has been transformed. This is the general character of city life, in one sense, and it is no coincidence that temples remain the most enduring structures in these otherwise fluid and very much plastic spaces. Temples stand not because of their vintage if oft warmed-over architectural styles, but rather due to the worldview they represent and the morality they express, both of which are not only archaic to capital and to modernity more widely, but as well, contradict them.

            Their contrary character mimics the temporal inversion of the Greek mindset regarding history; what it was and what it meant. An urban core church tells us that the future is the past, that what is to come is actually behind us, its origins are very much its destinations and we complete our mortal being in the death of the present alone. Mythos, in its timeless and principled mannerisms, can duly afford both this contradiction – in itself there is no temporal conflict as history cannot exist in myth – and its benediction; it is rather through the logos that the future regains its promise and the present thus becomes promissory. To see the temple as a mere relic is to enforce the linearity of the very Word which the new belief and its attendant world-system have bequeathed to us. But it is a literal enforcement even so, for at once it can take refuge in the umbrella ethic, imported from the East, that earthly life was to be transcended, and thus even the places of worship upon the earth would be annulled in their meaningfulness and annihilated in their objectificity, as well as being able to hang the Logos up above its own worldly speech; to not do this second part meant to hang oneself, tethered to a world both forsaken and thus doomed: ‘my words fly up but my thoughts remain below’, as Shakespeare has it. Here, thought, a form of the Logos, is meant to itself retrieve the Being of mythos. No wonder then are we reserved in the face of any future.

            Though history can be concretized as ‘the past’, either as an official account to be found in government records like Hansard, courtroom transcripts, policy manuals, papal tracts or missals, and many other like documents, it remains fluid due to countering events such as new archaeological discoveries or historical interpretations, as well as the vicissitudes of mortal memory and even the popular culture misrepresentations of both historical cultures and otherwise well-documented events. The future is, by definition, plastic, but by redefinition, so is the past. The present lies in an Husserlian flux, even fluxion, so that its fluidity is as undeniable as is its sheer immanence. Its ‘pure presence’, however eidetic and hence rather unavailable in its tendency to be unavailing of itself, could be seen as another way in which to ‘avoid a void’, as it were. If there was a well-ensconced horror of the vacuum in spatial representation, as the logos gained preeminence, this sentiment found itself transposed to the very cosmos; ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. Today, cosmology fills in the greatest vacuum yet discovered by science, that of open intergalactic space, with ‘dark matter’ and even darker energy that shines not observably but in fact historically, refracting the ’ether’ of the Victorians. These and like efforts speak to us not of a simple accumulation of knowledge but the more so of a mimesis: that while nature might abhor nothingness, history deplores it, humanity avoids it, including my personal death, and temporality absolves itself from it. Thus to be plastic is to adopt an adeptly adaptive response to self-negation.

            The unshaped space is at best, a place-to-be. Unlived time is imminent alone, without presence. Idioms such as the ‘virgin landscape’, ‘virgin seas’, ‘untapped energy’, even inertia itself, all testify to the sense that what is the new is as well exciting, even if it might also be feared. To be the first to discover or explore something is to become a vehicle for the future. This is a metaphor of mythos, but one absorbed by the history of logos; in our very individuality we grant the safest of harbors to the idea of both uniqueness and thence the ability to be the first one to have done this or that, this specific way and no other. Simply because it is I, as an I, no one else could fill that void. Yet the goal is ever the same: to happen across a blankness and conjure forth a tapestry, to take the mute and give it voice, to transform the nothing into a something. This act is fluidity, it enacts change. Through this ability, we are able to see the future even if we have yet to fully experience it. The trick remains, however, to see in a future something which is itself different from what has previously filled such diverse voids; gaps in knowledge being perhaps the most important. Lloyd’s futurity is preferable to Hoffman’s, but between them we are called to witness the dual poles of human possibility; that I can busily color in the bald heralds of death without considering their augury and their ability to import the future into my very presence or, I can, with resolute being, step into each of them and move through them, only filling them up in passing, and thereby gaining the wisdom of that which moves all mortal life.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Now you say it, now you don’t

Now you say it, now you don’t (recanting recantation)

            What is the character of the take-back? What could have so changed for me that I am myself transformed in return? That what I stated to be the case, either for myself, for another, or for the world, was either in error, ignorant or deliberate, moral or empirical, or could never have been in the first place nearest the truth? In recanting, I must pivot, change my mind or heart, or so be changed by ensuing events, including the contents of my own experiences as a person. Of course, changing one’s tune may be enforced unethically and externally, for instance by an authoritarian parent, but these kinds of recantations are themselves false. A forced choice is in fact no choice at all. Rather, I must be convinced that altering tack is not only in my best interest but as well comes to me, and at the least, as if I had made the choice to backtrack of my own free will.

            Three modes of recantation stand out; those of remorse, regret and reserve. They have slightly different ethical inclinations, and thus as motives, carry a somewhat diverse suasion about them. Remorse may certainly be faked, but the conception itself generally has to do with a sense that I have indeed erred and that the error was one of character and not simply act. Regret, by contrast, has in it a sense that I could well feel it even if its source is me being caught out; that I regret not getting away with my error, most especially, in it not becoming a new truth and thus able to stand alone in a more longitudinal fashion. Reserve is the most objective source of recantation. It suggests that something in the world has changed, unexpectedly, or in some other way as unlikely or improbable, and my statement of the facts meant to hold into the near future is thus rendered obsolete. Reserve is built into predictions or even predications from the start, and one might even note this or that possibility as a caveat. The least sophisticated form of reserve is the ‘margin of error’ employed by predictive statistics, nodding both to the vicissitudes of sample size and the foregoing ‘history’ of the kind of test involved. Here, a take-back is also equally simple: once in a while the most probable outcome does not occur.

            Importing this sensibility into the ethical life reduces human existence to a mere game of chance. At its most base level, probability does have an agency all its own. Even so, calculating ‘the odds’ and applying them to situations where I either seek to ‘get away’ with something or other, or further, tell myself that it is unlikely I am misrecognizing my own motives by way of a reassurance that I am working for the good, is itself a form of bad faith. This is one reason why reserve is so attractive. Within its probabilistic preserve, I am neither morally nor ethically culpable. Unless the odds themselves have been misrepresented – and in this, one would already have inserted a different kind of source for potential recantation – the numbers stand alone, telling their own tale; there is no ‘school’ to be minded in such cases, and I cannot speak either inside or outside thereof. Yet in its very attraction, reserve seems to promise a way around having to face up to either authentic remorse or being compelled to exhibit regret, no matter the outcome. This is surely why those who are neither predicting the weather, election results, nor yet stock values, are temped to imagine that acts of character are no different than risk assessments.

            Reserve is, however, a possible candidate for ethical action if it is employed before any decision or statement is actually made. Though somewhat archaic, we regularly see in literature descriptions of characters who ‘act with reserve’, or who present themselves as ‘reserved’. These are understood by the reader to be observers of the human character, including their own. They neither tilt at windmills nor jump in the fire. They are associated with level-headedness, but of a moral kind and not the ‘cool under fire’ type who may well be a hothead in terms of what decisions he has previously made to place him those kinds of situations. The reserved person is also one whom others seek out for advice or even judgment. Such characters are often more conservative than their peers, but not always. To say to oneself or to another than one harbors ‘reservations’ about this or that decision is to always be ahead of the moment. One cannot be reserved either about action or within its heady movement. Just so, the person ‘with reserve’ is seen as much more likely to have come to the correct conclusion before such action duly commences. It is only when such a character begins to become too enamored of her own observations and predictions that her countenance is altered from one of quiet confidence to a more unbridled arrogance, and this is where both remorse and regret awake to the doings of the day.

            A winning record does not by itself produce this change. One can be proved right without anyone else being aware. Entire novels have centered around this type of character, often a child, whose witness to adult doings is unmarred by the accumulated politics of experience. Such a character suffers if she discloses the truth too often, or in too sensitive a condition, but nonetheless she endures as a figure of the truth. The child in literature is oft used as a guileless messiah; she is relatively newly born to a has-been world, suggesting the ‘twice-born’ status of an elect, and she thus as well has no specific loyalty to how that world is itself run, or has been run, in the past. Hence, she is unreserved in her ability to stand back and behold within reserve. She has no agency other than her bare witness, and whatever suffering she endures at the hands of adults, the narrative can either itself take an heroic stand against it, having the youthful character never blink, never break, or in a more tragic tone, gradually but relentlessly convert the child into a wholly agentive, but otherwise utterly flawed, adult.

            And herein do we ourselves witness the appearance of both remorse and regret. In the main, the hero feels the former, the anti-hero the latter. Remorse centers around our conception of the betrayal of conscience, and this may include our own as an approximation of that of the other, or, if the other in question does not in fact feel herself to have been betrayed, nevertheless I may have betrayed myself; my own standards of ethical conduct have been transgressed; I have ‘fallen below’ my better selfhood. Conscience, whatever its ultimate source, is both the origin and the destination of remorse. One might go so far to suggest that remorse is best characterized as a wholly internal conversation with oneself, as opposed to regret, which at some point must be recognized by others. The courtroom expression ‘the showing of remorse’ in order to facilitate a lighter sentence or a more compassionate judgment, lends itself to the fakery of charm. Authentic remorse only discloses itself, and that as an elemental ethical aspect of Dasein’s ownmost being; it is never simply displayed. In this, remorse cannot be ‘shown’, only expressed indirectly, either by one’s subsequent actions or yet inactions. Remorsefulness as an emotional state may precede such a disclosure and thence carry through to the point wherein the other has finally pardoned my error rather than merely corrected it – here we speak of forgiveness in the West or forbearance in the East, though the latter term seems to have a wider temporal usage; one can be forbearing in the same way as one can be reserved, for example, while the sense of ‘being forgiving’ or having a ‘forgiving’ personality is more awkward, even a misunderstanding of the concept – or it may become a more permanent fixture, pending on the scope and scale of my error. In mighty contrast to merely regretting an otherwise passing faux pas – here, we are often told by a friend or lover that ‘no one else noticed it, no worries’, or such-like – remorseful being is an ethical inclination of Dasein’s ownmost call to conscience, and indeed, characterizes this call in all of its arcs, returning to itself the very source of its phenomenological disposition as a being who acts as opposed to one who can only enact, such as a God or hero.

            While remorse utters a disquisitive discourse in which I am in turn called to confront my own actions, once taken or, for the character whose combination of both reserve and unflinching self-examination is superior, even before any action commences, regret is a concept that is defined only and always after the fact. Regret, thus rather speaks inquisitively; it is always on the make to find out as precisely as possible the chances against it; that is, how likely it is to be compelled to feel itself. Remorse does not seek to avoid its own presence, while regret’s entire predisposition is to the contrary. I do not wish to regret my actions, decisions, words or deeds, nor do I wish to regret my interactions with others, especially those whom I love. But in all this, I am self-interested and to a tee. For regret is the care of the self spoken into being by way of bad faith. Remorse is a part of my very being, an authentic ‘existentiell’ of Dasein’s concernfulness and indeed, a catalyst thereto. It is part of the character of the ‘I can do it again’ as a manner of both basic learning and ethical improvement. Regret, though at first shunning the converse phenomenological realization that ‘I cannot swim in the same river twice’, has to work to overcome itself in order to at least feel a sense of relief, let alone joy, that this is in fact the essential case for human beings. To say one thing in its favor, regret has the ability to reorient my sensibilities to that relief: ‘I do not wish to return after all, I am glad it’s over, I live for today and thence for the future, and I will not live in the past.’ Indeed, regret may be so placed; it is a resident of what has come before, and I do not wish to revisit it. Remorse, in its turn, while not compelling me to return to the source of my regret, does ever move me to consider reserve to be the superior witness as itself an aspect of being-ahead.

            Regret at length utters a recantation of itself, generally without changing our ethical character. Remorse recants any such take back, and instead settles in, in order to reshape, however slightly, the interior of our conscience. It seeks to avoid the use of recanting for not only appearance’s sake – this is another reason why it can only disclose and never display – but also as a fail-safe against human ethical error more generally. For remorseful being to work as does anxiety itself, I must orient myself not only to the futural, but as well to understand that any relevant human future can only come about if by definition it speaks no language of the past. Regret seeks the past as succor for its misery, and even remorse must eventually let go its hold over our being-concerned. Even reserve must count as one of its reservations its own self-witness, so that it does not become a simple barrier to change. At the same time, we are, as beings of finiteness and finitude alike, ethically called upon to ‘live without reserve’. How we navigate the situated conditions wherein the dynamic made of contemplation and of action wills its outcome will in turn define both ourselves and our consciences.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Decoy of Self-Improvement

The Decoy of Self-Improvement (a conflict of metaphysical expectations)

            I am a thrown project, arcing over what is at hand, stumbling through what is closest to me. I find I am a being in the world, a being which is completed only in mine ownmost death. I inherit nothing of my own, at first, and this cultural persona yet resonates with archetypes universal as well as the apical ancestry of the specific culture history into which I have come. As a boy, I had a certain set of role models after which I could shape myself: the adventurer, the warrior, the navigator, the architect, the bard and so on. The list of gendered archetypes for men is no longer than that for womankind, but it is much more projective, opening onto the world and indeed, taking the world for its own. And while it is an open question whether or not the hero’s life is still superior to that of the person’s, we are today confined by the dynamic extant between personhood and persona, an unquiet keep into which no hero can tread.

            To insert the heroic into modernity we have invented the popular discourse of self-improvement. I am not a hero, for I live in the world of humanity alone, but I may believe that I yet can act heroically, mimicking not the character of an archetype but simply some of its behavior. Each of our culture heroes, after the agrarian revolution, are figures like ourselves, augmented human beings, demi-gods due to a mixed birth, miscegenative misfits who are thus mis-aligned in both the social world and that dreamscape of the pantheon. The agrarian culture heroine is marked by her divorce from animality. In pre-agrarian societies, these beings are defined by their ability to change their incarnative presence, animal spirits who can take the shape of a human being and back and forth, as well as take on many other forms, relevant or appropriate to their task at hand. In my home, it is Raven who is the leading figure in what for us is now a most alien sensibility. Raven discovered the first people in a giant clamshell washed up on a remote beach, the metaphorical image connoting some kind of deep culture memory of the Bering Strait crossings, some 20-40K years ago. We are told that Raven was as astonished as were the people themselves, and this too is of profound import: across the pre-agrarian consciousness, humans and animals share not only a common nature, they share a common humanity as part of that nature.

            This is the metaphysics of transformation rather than that of transfiguration, which appears much later in human history. And at this later time there is as well a split, a schism, between the great irrigation civilizations of the East and those of the Middle East and West. In the former, transcendental metaphysics came into its own, with the goal of leaving this life for something that carried one’s being far beyond it. In the West, the this-world was understood as a proving ground for the otherworld, and, in passing over the evaluative limen which demarcated the two, one was transfigured. The concepts are distinct: in transformational metaphysics, it is a two-way street. One can change into something else for a time, and then change back, as the need arose. It is highly likely this idea came from the seasonal rounds subsistence societies were compelled to rigidly follow. Even the village sites changed, and in Raven’s geographic region the winter habitation sites were considered permanent, those for the summer, nomadic and temporary, shifting to follow fish, game, and plant food. The community took on a mobile form and format in the warmer months, and settled down into a rich symbolic harvest of narrative, theater, song and dance, during those colder. It was in winter that the animal spirits and others more radically Other, such as the world-transformer Kanekelak, or the Thunderbird, appeared and thence convened with Raven’s children and all of their relations. In these cultures, the mask represented this convention of Being, allowing the transformation of the hunter and the gatherer into something archetypical.

            In the metaphysics of transfiguration, there is no going back. It is strictly a one-way street, and in the West, it was the Egyptians who invented this sensibility. There were no seasonal rounds in massive irrigation societies, from the Yellow River in China, to the Indus-Harappan in India, to Sumer and Mesopotamia, through Babylon and to the Nile. Sedentism proper had taken over, writing was invented as well as slavery, large-scale warfare, and the priesthood, this last nothing more than a ‘calumniation’, according to Nietzsche. The Epic of Gilgamesh agrees with him and indeed broadens the critique, for its major ethical theme exhorts the hero to turn his back on the accumulated wealth of the new epoch and return to the garden; the world’s undomesticated larder which by itself never quite generated enough surplus for the social stratigraphy we accept as ‘natural’ to have taken hold. It is today ours to live with as best we can, but the perduring voice of the first mythic narratives still gives us pause: what if we could engender the perfect society, the best way of human life?

            If the culture hero as a figure is the frame within which I seek to improve myself, then the return to paradise is the goal. The sensibility is still agrarian, however, for I wish to become something other to myself at present and then never go back to it. It may well be that the conflict between pre-agrarian goals attained by agrarian means is what, at base, sabotages my efforts to make today’s society into an earthly Nirvana, wherein all are treated justly and all have what they need to live at a certain qualitative standard. We have yet to discover an authentically modern self-understanding, bereft of either aspects of the social contract – the idea of paradise itself – or those of the archaic civilizations – that I can transfigure myself and thus become more than I have been. There may be, in spite of these vast gulfs of both history and memory alike, still some points of contact. Raven is a pragmatist at heart. His transformational abilities are to be employed ad hoc, and never to simply gain status. It is of especial relevance that the huge surpluses that were in fact generated by the coastal chiefdoms were here redistributed through status-enhancing displays. The Potlatch, one of Bataille’s examples of the corresponding outlet for this set of cultures’ ‘accursed share’, saw both gift-giving and destruction of valuable objects, the ritual sacrifice of slaves, and alliance-marriage of young women. It must have been a lurid, outlandish spectacle, with its combination of grotesquerie and wanton vandalism, its deep cultural theater and the very presence of the transformer beings themselves, perhaps at a bit of a distance, their forms blending with the shadows of the giant conifers and the overshadows of the more distant mountains.

            For ritual too would become more staid with the advent of agriculture. Even its most grim displays – like the cutting out of a the heart of a slave or war prisoner at the top of the cultic Meso-American pyramid; in one stroke the formidable obsidian blade would slice through the ribcage, for the heart must still be beating as it was held up to the God in question – was a moment of climax. Propitiation had been altered from a simple orison to the cougar when one killed a deer or a women’s chorus on the beach willing the safe return of the whale-hunters and their canoes, to a highly rehearsed and therefore rote repetition of liturgical prayer, in the recesses of temples meant to ape mystery without their spaces actually being mysterious, such as the cave in which one of the first people witnessed the transformers’ secret song and dance. With sedentary society, highly stratified and specialized, generating uncounted surpluses of both foodstuffs and the mouths it had to feed, cosmogony gradually loosened its hold upon cosmology, and humanity itself, by shifting its sense of the temporal into an historical cycle rather than one timeless and eternally recurring, began to insert itself into the workings of the universe.

            But nowhere in human history and prehistory alike do we find the idea of self-improvement. It is a distinctly modern sensibility, even if it attempts an amalgam of more ancient sources. I am not a hero, yet I can act heroically; I have never experienced paradise, and yet I can create my own; I seek no Olympic summit but rather only to move institutional mountains. The symbolic decoy of this novel approximation of Dasein’s own authentic arc lies in its departure from our existential lot. I cannot be an allegory of myself, I cannot live as does the archetype, for indeed the latter does not ‘live’ in any real sense at all. Even here, however, such odd delusions are not fatal, for the entire worldview with which they had been associated is long past. No, the truer decoy, beyond any symbolic distraction, rests in the sensibility that only the individual person has the mandate to improve himself, and more than this, only himself. Yet further, that the individual person is the only space in which there could be improvement, implying that society as a whole is thereby bettered only because solitary persons have elected, of their own free will and perhaps goodness of heart, to better themselves. This radically inductive approach to cultural evolution is both utterly new – pace the social planners and utopianists from More to Skinner and everyone in between – as well as being oddly blind to its disconnect from the world. Its ethic – that I as a role model foster more compassionate attitudes and actions amongst other with whom I interact – is equivocal. Its light comes in the form of the neighbor, which is the most radically disjunctive of archetypes since he is fully human and yet has abandoned his humanity in a transformational manner. The neighbor excerpts herself from the bonds and bounds of all social roles, but yet returns to the world after her heroic act is completed. The world, in the interim, has not itself been altered.

            Let me suggest then that self-improvement outside of either symbolic distraction or the delusion of induction can be understood as the irruption of the neighbor, this libertine of compassion. Such action turned to act is, phenomenologically speaking, an expression of Dasein’s call to conscience; it is bereft of the self-conscious, as in its personal Potlatch it throws to the winds all possible worry and transforms concern to care, but more importantly, it is also devoid of self-consciousness, in that the sense that I must render care to myself first and foremost is also discarded. The neighbor is a presence outside of the present, it is an action becoming act, a being-within-the-worlding, and a figure without archetype. Its humanity is perhaps primordial, and only its ethic, historical. It decoys nothing, and yet it improves something, and this other-than-the-self which, in its transformation, also enacts something outside of itself and without self-reference. It allows me to become part of that which is closest to me, and, for a moment, the world is no longer simply at hand, but rather has arced itself up to meet my thrownness and take me into its essential embrace.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

A Lion in a Christian Den

A Lion in a Christian Den (My Ethnographic Church-Hopping)

            There is a well-known distinction made in the sociology of religion between religious belief and religious behavior. Ritual, that which engages in a public and thus shared manner of experiencing action in the world, with a view to integrating and maintaining community, is considered an external and thence observable set of behaviors. This is contrasted with belief, an internal sense or orientation that is in itself maintained by the faith in that said community. The most concise and accurate definition of their amalgam comes of course from Durkheim: “Religion is society worshipping itself.” Certainly, but what then of faith? In investigating this related, but different, question, I found myself over the past quarter century attending a diversity of churches in some very different geographic and cultural regions of North America. I will briefly summarize two outstanding examples below, before attempting an equally cursive analysis.

            Mississippi: For three years I found myself in the very heart of what Mencken sartorially called ‘a miasma of Methodism, a backwater of Baptism’ and so on, but in spite of appearances, these most deep southerners more endured the ritualism of their ancestral beliefs than exhibited any sheer fanaticism concerning them. As one neighbor of mine said, ‘We’re like 7-Up; you like us, we like you’. Amicable enough, but the rider to such a sentiment included the sense that one should live and let live in the very much ‘when in Rome’ style. I too was something of an appearance, even an apparition, being a stranger in the strangest land I have ever experienced. My ad hoc but abrupt criticism of people’s beliefs and behaviors could be put down to me being a foreigner, even an ‘alien’, but there is only so long a community of like persons can put up with such before inviting the interloper to take his leave. Before this inevitable moment came, however, I had been equally invited to a great number of churches, since there were not only a plethora of choices scattered round the haunted landscape but as well, I had a great diversity of contacts through my professional employ.

            I attended a Methodist church, where people of my ‘class’ – which did not merely refer to socio-economic status; not at all – and ‘race’ – self-explanatory in this region – and found it to be a convivial hearth of semi-reflective self-analysis. Much depends upon the minister, of course, his druthers and his education, and the more so, his concept of faith. These Methodists were engaged in a self-critique which did not extend fully into their society of upbringing, but preferred to lead by implication: ‘If I falter, it is not so much the sources of my character but the way in which I as a character behaves’. By contrast, the Southern Baptist Convention uttered criticism only in the direction of others. I attended an example of this denomination and found it to be in most ways the very opposite of the Methodists. It was overtly anti-intellectual, defensive in its posture, preening in its delivery, and was unconcerned about the hallmark of the distinction noted at the beginning of this piece; that people who heard the sermon could not recall anything of its content when asked promptly after service ended. It was enough to see and be seen. The Mormon students that were in my classrooms were an ingratiating bunch, and I visited their ‘spaces’ and found them to be genuinely interested in learning as much as they could about other viewpoints. These were young people, often quite literally on their youth missions, and they were, in this region, often at extreme risk for violence to their persons, as Mormonism remains the devils’ work in Baptist and Evangelical territories. I also worked with a Mormon colleague whose favorite band was Van Halen and who had taken a doctorate in the social sciences. All of this likely mediocre education had made no impression upon his beliefs, but had completely altered his behavior. I also attended the Church of the Nazarene. This community was made up of blue collar professionals who had climbed one social class above their parents. It was ‘whiter than white’, excuse the apt and oft-used regional expression, and my black students looked at me with great concern and dismay upon their faces when I related my experiences with that sect. And speaking of which, I also received invitations from Black Baptist students and these forays, simply due to my own status and the culture shock felt perhaps more by their community than by myself upon darkening their doors, made for what was by far the most genuine Christian experience of any. The Black churches were ebullient, joyful, and emotional without reserve and reservation. They certainly had their own version of the ‘false consciousness’ about them, and why not, given the circumstances of their parishioners. If salvation was unnecessary for many whites – the white churches exhibited a great self-assuredness not so much that they were in the right doctrinally but that those who accepted their sectarian sensibilities could do no wrong thus-wise – those black took up the work of being saved with great gusto and passion. In a word, the black churches were proud, the white, merely prideful.

            Cape Breton Island: An equally marginal economic and cultural region, this ‘white person’s reserve’ – again, excuse the local flavor – had unexpectedly a great many similarities to the deep south. It had been marginalized by historical and economic circumstances; all who could get out had gotten out long ago. It too had a haunted landscape, filled with relics, antique graveyards, historical sites and towns lost to time. The churches were, however, themselves mostly abandoned, which contrasted mightily with Mississippi and contiguous states. My wife and I sat inside venerable piles with less than ten others upon numerous occasions, and we were by far the youngest people present, with the exception of the pastors themselves, who were always in their twenties. The only church that was able to maintain any sort of community was that Roman Catholic, and all others were essentially extended family affairs, in perhaps a fitting mimesis to the original churches of this area, settled as it was so far back in European North American history as to have lost the ability to think itself into a future at all. The United churches had here become as had the Presbyterian and Wesleyan churches elsewhere on the continent; the last vestiges of an ailing demographic willing themselves in and out of a collective grave. Belief was sacrosanct, but in a politely delicate manner reminiscent of arsenic and old lace. There were no abandoned churches in the old south, not even museum conversions, but indeed this latter was the better fate of churches in Cape Breton.

            Whereas ritualism was mostly avoided in Mississippi and like regions, the Cape Breton churches gave the appearance of only being able to go through the motions, perhaps reflecting the very lives of their fading converts. Interestingly, tradition was cited as the chief rationale for maintaining such small parishes and this in turn implies that most active reflection upon faith itself had long been replaced instead by a rote genuflection. It was personally disturbing that the two persons who had reached out to us most intimately died almost immediately after we had begun our social ties with them, one in his 80s, but the other in her 20s. They had given us the distinct impression that they had been moved by our interest and our interpretations of their work, which made their unexpected passing all the more resonant of the general passage of the wider cultural landscape and thus religion within it. The only other kind of church in this region could be called ‘new age’, or even ‘hippyesque’, and my impression of these meeting places – like some evangelicals, they disdained the term ‘church’ and did not themselves use it – was that they had collected all of those who had no familial networks through which one gained access to either the Catholic and especially the United options.

            Yet in almost every other way of life, the deep south and the extreme maritime regions enacted the same sensibilities and nursed the same sensitivities. Though the American Civil War yet resonated in Mississippi, it was not impossible that the Anglo-French war, occurring a century and more earlier, did not still have some effect in Cape Breton. One could argue that the island never did recover from the final obliteration of Louisbourg. Its simulacra, a brilliantly executed if only slightly more profound version of Caesar’s Palace, did not, in its faux resurrection, bring any of the rest of the region with it into the very much seasonal light of a niche tourist market.

            Reflections: A small church is today simply a gathering place for those who have grown up together. It is both a surrogate and genuine family, and one cannot simply show up out of nowhere and expect to be treated as one of its own. This is what large suburban churches, such as the ‘Alliance’ network and like others, are for. Now living in Winnipeg, my wife and I have found a small church that in general acts in a Christian manner, but here too, because of my own ethnic background, a Mennonite church can afford to exhibit its ‘welcome here’. Both sides of my family are from Winnipeg, and I am myself connected to well-known scions of the Mennonite presence, even if at a generational distance. All of this is highly suggestive that due to both the utter erosion of religion’s explanatory power – its cosmogony has no such force up against scientific cosmology – and the serial scandals that plague almost all churches of whatever credo and covenant, many of them to do with sexual abuse, even the word ‘church’ has begun to accrue to itself a kind of difficult baggage. And just as, also sociologically speaking, all churches begin as cults, some also end the same way.

            At the same time, modernity has fostered its own hallmark of an absence of community, and at all levels and in all of its institutions. It is a relatively simple thing to debunk belief, and an objective history of consciousness has shown that the very concept of the soul is at the least a cultural figment, at best a place-holder for an as-yet unexplored mechanism of the human psyche. We are mostly content to have supplanted its presence with an amalgam of personal conscience and the law. We have thus successfully displaced the spirit and its mortal expression in the church, but a perduring question remains: how does one replace the human heart?

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The ‘Ambitextrous’

The ‘Ambitextrous’ (Overtone and Undertone)

            Multiple meanings in literature, marketing, politics and even within the interactions of the day to day and the face to face are nothing new. They allow for the creative person to explore the human imagination, the wordsmith to get a kick, or the passive aggressive personality to take a shot. Playing deliberately from both hands, however, the ambidextrous text presents to us a more calculated version of the double intent. The more so, such ambitexterity seeks not to be revealed, and this is its chief departure from the coincidence, pun or clever play on words. Here, the merely clever slides into the sly, the amicable wink into that of the leer. It is particularly evident in marketing and politics that the ambitextrous is being employed, but beyond any specific usage thereof, there underlies the very ability for it to be used in the social structure as a whole. While the essential polysemy of language in general presents an overtone – something that desires to be known and thus attempts to take the fore – ambitexterity occurs as a converse to this, as in fact an undertone.

            One of many possible examples of the former in popular culture, amicable, clever but in an inoffensive manner, a wink only rather than a wink followed hard on by a nod, occurs in album titles. One need only recall to mind The Who’s 1971 Who’s Next, wherein we ourselves acknowledge the sense of it being the band’s next release, perhaps the implication that they as a band were in line for something or other – given all of the famous deaths and breakups of the period, for instance – as well as the visual jape of the band members themselves urinating on a concrete pillar and having done their business, asking the simple question of the consumer. A decade later saw the release of Rush’ live album Exit…Stage Left, where no less than three possible senses may be taken; the band leaving the stage, the stage itself has been left by the band, and the stage as a space is what is left over after the band’s exeunt. Hundreds of other examples might be cited, but the point is self-evident: such overtones of polysemy are meant to be understood and quite consciously so.

            It is otherwise with the ambitextrous. Though its use might be regarded as value-neutral, its underhandedness in both its method and its goal sabotages any possible ethic that could have seen to be arising therefrom. Given that I had the idea of the concept through writing what I hoped was no flippant flop – an oversize narrative with which I took great literary pains to avoid being a novel; the end result was more of a failed novel rather than something radically new – I also realized that a calculated effort to move the reader into another space of meaning through the unmarked vehicle of a canonical prose form was nothing more than a deception, however sophisticated or no. This instance can serve as a cautionary device for those future readers of St. Kirsten ­- sub-titled ‘the last novel’; and here there was authentic polysemy; at the time it was to be the final novel I myself would write, or if not, it was that previous, the ‘last’ one, the one beforehand, and thirdly, it was meant to be the final novel ever written by anyone; a concerted conceit but also a well-advised critique of the novelist in general; in a word, after this point there could no longer be a novel written at all – due out sometime in 2025. In principle, the creative effort must remain as the most focused, but also the smallest, version of the ambitextrous.

            For its truer homeland is that of propaganda, and in all of its forms. As Zizek has suggested, ‘only when one comes to believe in the truth-value of propaganda can it itself taken for the truth’. The latter is not as important as the former; one has to value the very idea of being misled. Why would anyone so value such a force? Does it seek to ever provide a suitable and tolerable veil for an oft-intolerable reality? Not quite, as this is rather the function of the social form itself, and we have understood this general principle at least since Durkheim. He suggests that ‘the air is no less heavy for the fact that we do not feel its weight’. Point taken: socialization is the most successful form of ‘propaganda’, if we are uncharitable. But if we are more objective, we understand that in order for any society to function at all, its cultural apparatus must be accepted in the majority by the majority. Its symbolic forms betray their function when investigated by either the native speaker or an outsider – even if the tools to ply such a trade must be learned formally and institutionally and are not, and never, a part of any culture’s primary socialization – and thus there is no enduring mystery about their presence. Much of historical analysis rests on these same pinions, and it is thus but a short step from dissecting a society of the past to one extant in our own time.

            The ambitexterity of ‘society’ as an abstraction rests in its ability to maintain a loyal fellowship, not a sycophantic follow-ship. Society and its polis are thus not ‘political’ in the specific sense of them being geared into the desire for power. Society has a power over us because we grant that authority to it through upholding cultural norms and participating in their corresponding forms of life. Culture trumps society just as history trumps morality. We are vehicles, in daily life, of both the passive symbols of our shared culture as well as active expressions thereof. This is why adolescence itself has at least two functions; it hones the adult’s skill in ‘maintaining the right’ in the face of youthful challenge, but at the same time, youth allows adulthood to make necessary adjustments to the social order, and in a most ad hoc manner. In this way, culture cleaves to itself the fluidity it needs to survive historical changes. It needs rebellion as much as it needs revolution, and it is up to the adult to winnow the one from the other other since the very incompleteness of socialization to be found in the adolescent disallows such persons themselves to make that same distinction.

            So far, we have seen the ambitextrous as a false mimesis of polysemy, as a calculated creative effort, and as an effect of how society itself functions through its symbolic forms. None of this is particularly underhanded, but in each of the foregoing examples, the undertonal quality is, nevertheless, present. Now we are better prepared to examine the purely propagandistic effect of the ambitextrous; this is not only its authentic practice but as well its highest self-regard. If successful in hoodwinking us into imagining that our way of life, our manner of unthought, our sense of right and our suite of prejudices are not simply the best way but in fact the only way for human beings to live, then it has served its highest master. Propaganda is least effective to any of these regards when it is served directly from the State. We are generally aware that this or that politician seeks to gain power and thence maintain it. Secondarily, the status of being someone who actually makes decisions is also in play. The vast majority of us have no such power, no such authority, and this is the majority explanation of why we tend to treat our children, and especially, our adolescents, so badly. Contrary to a fashionable script, this includes almost all white heterodox males as well; no power, no authority. The stage is thus set for the ambitextrous to take firm hold.

            Its leading edge is advertising. No matter the product being shilled, it is the landscape into which this item is set that holds the truer sale. We see non-whites, recently in a super-abundance which reflects nothing of their demographic ratio at large, but what are they doing? They are adding a pigment to an otherwise utterly Bourgeois setting. We see non-whites driving cars that in reality they cannot afford, living in gracious executive homes that are purchased by an insignificant number of their peers, spouting off in a tongue foreign to their ears, and driving their faux children to distraction by their ambitious social-climbing, made to look second nature in ads whilst in reality being a desperation of anxiousness. Just so, in order to remind us that this social order being portrayed is after all white at heart, we are yet called to witness white people doing all of the same things but mustered up with a sense of panache that non-whites are yet to master. With a salacious Schadenfreude, parents curb teenage desires in killjoy compartments, while very much in the background a reliable automobile is so noted. Reliability is itself being sold, in this sense, since teens are notoriously unreliable and in every way, and it is thus an adult’s responsibility to introduce them to a general responsibility, which apparently includes never even kissing one another before one marries. Being married is thus likened to driving a reliable car; the commodity fetish in this case is not about the product at all, but rather about a sensibility.

            The ambitextrous sells what is taken for common sense, all the while actually being a sensitivity over against both change and to the human imagination. It is a fear of desire, an anxiousness over personhood. It compels obedience not to the State nor even to society, both of which have their own, self-authenticating mechanisms of symbolic persuasion, as we have seen, but rather to our own worst selves; the self that masks selfishness with both a self-absorbed consumption and an aping role-play of the martinette, the one who mimics an authority he does not actually possess. That children are the chief victims of this masquerade troubles us not at all, for our own memories of childhood which have survived at all and which are not diluted by the sentimental – the major function of the ambitextrous in advertising is to present family life as the very home and hearth of human happiness, another unutterable lie given the abuse statistics, for one – remind we ourselves of being chattel. The fascism we endured was only overcome by us converting to the fascist figurehead. We now not only live the lie of ambitexterity, we are that lie.

            In this, the ambitextrous has successfully merged propaganda with socialization. In all of the efforts of the Tyro of the State, nothing political has ever come close to the rate of success to be found in contemporary advertising. And though we can find other spaces in which the ambitextrous is present – the schools are the most obvious example – in none do we find the sheer shameless showcase of purveying sentiment in the name of mere commodity. The latter is only a bauble, a representation of a hobby or the stuff of the dilettante. It is an ongoing astonishment, for the thinking person, to weekly witness the witless wonder of a way of life based upon so contented a self-delusion.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency?

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency? (The shared character of past and future)

            To be given respite in the face of a crisis is our greatest hope. Once given, once taken, how does this effect our character? Just now, and just then, I was compelled to be resolute, facing down the end and facing up to my personal challenge; the end of complacency, of whatever sort. Resolute being, one of the elemental ‘existentials’ of Dasein, places my being before itself, and thus as well wills my personhood to walk away from itself, itself as it is today. Cultures of all credo and stripe face this same task, and by it, all of them are challenged both bodily and mightily. It is perhaps not implausible to imagine that the courage which is demanded of a single human being in the face of the as yet unknown future might somehow be scaled to suit the needs of that same person’s society. The question of individual character might become a way in which to interrogate cultural merit, a kind of ‘superorganic’ structure which germinates in the basic subsistence of any social organization. The primordial society had no sense of history, and yet, painstakingly and imperceptibly, walked into a future, even though the concept of which could not itself take hold in this original imagination. Any time we today shun this movement, we are regressing into this first being; the proto-human who, in spite of himself, evolved a penetrating and visionary consciousness.

            Resoluteness is Greek, while gratitude is Hebrew. This is one mythopoetic manner of understanding the mystagogical function of the two contrasting ethical stances. That the former is superior to the latter in theory alone does not immediately help us, for it was born in the desultory of dismal dismay; the future is nothing but the end, its all downhill from here. For the Hebrews, the stance is itself weaker, but the motive superior: the future is ours to walk toward and though its all uphill from here, nevertheless, the vantage will be worth it. With the demise of Christian metaphysics in German idealism, the willing being had but resoluteness to call upon in order to become that futural figure. Can one be grateful for the loss of gratitude? As it is so often used as a mere platitude, being grateful lacks the essential kick which propels Dasein to complete the arc of its thrown project. At the same time, resoluteness alone often dismisses what has in fact already been accomplished, and to our credit. Today, we must then ask, what is resolute gratitude? What is the means by which Dasein discloses to itself not only its futurity as a being-ahead-of-itself, but as well, its own beingness-as-it-has-been, which would include its accomplishments?

            Due to a serious health condition, I lived under the impression of the loss of futural being for about 18 months. I was recently given a clean bill of health, a second chance at life, if you will, and found it just as difficult to accept the latter as I did the former. I had become resolute, and had found gratitude, but only concerning the past. I was resolute before the sense that the past was now all I had or could have had, and grateful for this past. But taken in this way, the conceptions become salves and vanish from the vocabulary of vocation, the erudition of ethics. Here lies one of the clues to resolute gratitude: that both must orient themselves toward only the future of Dasein. One may refer to what one has completed only in the sense of Schutz’s ‘I can do it again’, as a writer might say to herself, ‘I have written so many books, why should I not write another?’, and so on. In support of this self-reference which is not back-referencing, I must as well only refer to my prior experience in the manner Schutz has also detailed, when he quotes ‘I cannot swim in the same river twice’. Experience would indeed lose its value, both as the basis for human knowledge but as well, for any ethics, if it itself could only be repeated. This is why, in the primordial human trope, experience is limited to the daily round and to a small suite of crises in which all who live must be challenged by the call to that same life. Childbirth as the future, dying which is the past, hunting and gathering and storytelling and child-raising, as the present presents itself. Is it only the scale and detail of these essential rites of passage which has been altered over the eons?

            I want to suggest that for our own time, what has in fact been altered in a qualitative manner are the implications of mine ownmost death. During the interminable tenure of the social contract, there were no persons, and only parts of the mechanical whole dropped away. The ethnographic witness of mourning rituals in subsistence societies, however marked by astonishment and shot through with romance, nevertheless tells us that there is no one, only the many. One loved one’s group, unto death, and in that death the love of the group holds utter sway over the shared emotions. Here, experience of the human condition is the same thing for all. For us, so far removed from both the complete intimacy of the cohort – Freud’s ‘horde’ has been, in English, trailed away from itself with the over-emphasis on sheer size rather than cohesiveness, which is the other aspect the term suggests; his sense that it was paternalistic is almost assuredly an ironic projection, imported from his own analysis of the modern State – and the daily necessity for its nurturing and nourishment, cannot but see in experience only difference, not sameness. Just so, philosophers too have made it an ambition to convince us that experience must be ever new; Erlebnis and not mere Erfahrung. The lack of the novel in our lives is assuaged by the invention of theatrical experience, such as that to be found in sports and entertainment fiction. But there is nothing truly new in a game which has itself been played thousands of times, or in a script designed to appeal to a known market. In spite of this, we can be so captivated by the ongoing action that we forget the other chief aspect of authentic experience: its presence enacts not action but rather an act.

            In this, individuated experience, becoming an ‘in hand’ through its generalized call to conscience, reenacts the moments of ‘collective effervescence’, to use Durkheim’s phrase, to be found in contexts of crisis which the primordial human community endured or celebrated. That we cannot feel the presence of ‘others’ is precisely due to their being others to ourselves. This was not the case originally, and no ethic of the future would ever imply that it should so be again. We experience life only as our life, and this, in turn, invokes in us both resoluteness and gratitude. On the one hand, I am alienated by my solo adventures; ultimately, no one can fully share them, and this comes home to me most intensely when I am tasked with completing my own Dasein, when I am faced with finitude. But on the other hand, I am liberated by the very same sensibility; no one else has experienced life quite the same way as have I! This is a marvel, a wonder, and perhaps still for some, a miracle. Narrative thus becomes a means of communicating an unshared vision, rather than one of iterating a vision already known to all. Not only did this shift in human consciousness open up language to both religion and to science, it transformed cosmology itself, freeing it from being the vehicle only for cosmogony. Until the ethic of the individual emerges, gently beginning in the West with the Pre-Socratics and much more radically given a futural model in the life of Jesus, our story of the universe was the story of its creation alone.

            Today, origin myths are mostly of interest to folklorists and writers of fantasy quest narratives. This ‘lorecraft’ constructs in turn a ‘worldcraft’, in a manner not so different from what must have occurred during the social contract itself. Cosmogony thus remains as a part of the theater by which the lack of novelty in modern life is partly compensated, thus as well retaining an integral aspect of its cultural value; the latter day spectacle of the pulp fiction epic is our version of each evening’s fireside tale, told and retold in increments, night after starry night. But cosmology proper, liberated from the umbilical uroboros, is now able to investigate for itself the reality of the universe as it can be known without recompense and as only and ever presenting to our astonished senses the radically new. Cosmology is, in a word, the centerpiece of authentic human experience, for no other realm of our yet shared understanding is as alien and wondrous. It can be so simply due to is non-human character, and in this, it tells us its own story, bereft and unrelated to our human concerns. No cosmogony has this function, and indeed, just the opposite; origin myths relate human experience to the universe, not the other way round. This is also why almost all contemporary adventure epics chart a course backward rather than into the unknown. They are attempts to recover the recipe for respite alone, and mistake their ancient form – the extended, originally oral, narrative – for their present function – to impel the present to overcome itself.

            In this, we can be, both as a culture and as persons, too grateful for the past. The resale market for cosmogonical stories remains a leading ledger of this error. We are ourselves led away from the world-as-it-is, for that is after all the function of entertainment cast only as itself. The melodramas of fiction and sports, whether live-action or ‘virtual’, present to us a world askew, a world righted, a world askew then righted, or more disturbingly, a ‘right world’; a world which is seen as being itself in the right. Seldom are we met with the future of our own world, with all of its rightness and wrongness fully in our face. ‘Is this not after all the real world?’, we may ask ourselves. ‘If so, I cannot be entertained by it; I must be resolute only, and take my gratitude from that which allows me to dispense with my obligation to the future of that world.’ In short, the future is seen only as a task, rather than as well a gift. History is also both of these, but with the past, we overemphasize the giftedness therein and turn away from its challenge. Our stance towards the future is the very opposite; we overdo the task in front of us and forget what a great gift, indeed, the greatest of gifts, it is to have a future at all.

            And just as a person can fall ill and be forced to contemplate the lack of that future and the end of one’s life, the completion of one’s Dasein, so a culture entire can sicken itself to the point of disbelief in the future, of itself and in principle. Our half-planned technical apocalypse is a dangerous gesture to this regard. The future causes in us a basic resentment toward life if we take it only as a task. Our very will to life, so essential and indeed, seen as an essence in its supplanting of the animal’s survival instinct, is muted by this overstatement of the unknown as only a threat. Along with this, the dredging of the salvaged selvedge of historical druthers distracts us from becoming conscious that what we have been, as a species, presents just as much of a challenge to us – for it tells us who we are and why, and speaks these wisdoms to us without either rancor but also outside of all salvation – as it does a gift. The authentic disposition of Dasein’s response to the call to conscience as concernful being is that the past and future must be understood as equal parts curse and blessing. We cannot, as the cosmogonical viewpoint had it, simply choose the one and not the other, just as we cannot, as Nietzsche reminds us, choose joy without sorrow. We cannot choose the past without the future since it is we who walk forward resolutely from the one toward the other. Just so, this movement cannot be accomplished without gratitude, for futurity is something elemental to our being, and not merely an unknown factor to be discerned with time, an alien language to be deciphered with study. The future is, in its authenticity, of the same ethical presence as is the past, and thus requires of us the self-same sensibility; that of resolute gratitude and grateful resoluteness. Only by way of this will experience confer upon us its overcoming of complacency, and the universe will continue to be open to our wonder.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Reign in Spain

The Reign in Spain (falls mainly on the king)

            After having survived a quite literal mudslinging, Spain’s monarch must also have just as literally encountered the very ground of his rule. The sovereign, as a social role, is both the body politic and the territory, the land, whereupon his subjects rusticate. Bataille’s political sociology remains the best take on an anthropological history of the idea of the sovereign, but today we understand a ruler whose role is both archaic and even anachronistic to, perhaps with irony, work to get back to his earthy roots. A monarch today represents the people over against the government and other interests. They are a relatively free agent, apparently apolitical but not non-political, symbolic of a set of values of which all are supposedly supportive. Today, the list of such values which can be represented in this old-world manner is likely much shorter than it had been in the past, but we cannot be sure of this, mainly due to the fact that historic records are not only penned by the privileged, the literate, the cultured, but also preserved by them. We have an official line, prevalent in all types of history known by us, to the threshold that it would not be an exaggeration to imply that all history is, to a great extent, official history.

            The sovereign was, however, not originally an historical figure at all. The position was an Aufhebung, not only propelled to the apex of the societal pyramid, but floating above that point. Like the third eye of the Masonic lore, it was held in space by its divine assignation in feudalism, by its being perceived as the worldly source of Mana in traditional societies, or by its having secured a rather happenstance superiority in resource access and distribution, as in early irrigation civilizations. Held in space by the otherworld, and conversely, held in place by our shared world over which the sovereign presided but also must exempt himself from, the ruler’s rule is one shot through with distanciation. Today, of course, the remaining monarchs have come down to earth, with the date of 1688 being important to that regard. 1789 would not have been possible without the movement from monarch to parliament. Yet it is 1789 and not 1688 which allows us to become nostalgic for the monarchy and, in regions where such persons yet exist, such as Spain, imagine that the sovereign has a populist responsibility, an authentic obligation to ‘the people’ which, in turn, is the only thing that authenticates his existence as well as the continued existence of the role itself.

            Just as we have made God a fellow traveller, so the sovereign must also fall into that same worldly line. Lineage is now part of an antiquarian, even a dilettantish or yet Whiggish, history, and nothing more. A royal genealogy may be romantic, but it gives the current title-holder no moral purchase upon how responsible one is or what responsibilities one has. And the personalization of religion, which is easier to shoulder than that of politics due to the abstract and essential quality of the divine, is both a practice-run at making leadership itself worldly, as well as a hedge. The nautical phrase, ‘having one anchor out to windward’ applies to modern religion, especially Protestantism, in that we can still claim belief. We speak to a personalized godhead but we still have faith that someone is listening to us. Our relationship with sovereignty is muddier than this.

            Apropos, today’s monarchs are philanthropists in every sense of the term. They work for charitable organizations, they lend their status to benevolent causes, they labor on behalf of non-governmental organizations, they travel the world for the cause of surface diplomacy – nothing important actually ‘gets done’ on such junkets; monarchs do not negotiate the brass tacks of contemporary geopolitics – and they make appearances at arts and cultural events. They are taxed by their abstract origin; they must appear to be everywhere at once. To be seen but not heard in this overtaxed manner makes the sovereign into a young child. The monarch has no voice in any case, and to ‘blame’ him for his nation’s woes, natural or cultural it matters not, is to mistake both his person and his role. In the capacity of the former, he is like any of the rest of us, covered in mud by mudslides, suffocating to death if in the wrong place at the wrong time. As to the latter, the monarch has no political power, no Realpolitik, if you will. And while many of us have imagined, perhaps as children ourselves, that it would be a lark to fling mud at a king no less, the act is itself symbolic, participating in that near-primordial order of affairs where the sovereign’s very being is lived on the land through and by myself.

            This same land had betrayed its people, murdering them ruthlessly and anonymously. Ergo, the king had demonstrated that self-same betrayal. This was no mere matter of sympathetic magic; the sovereign is the land as well as is the people, and so in him, through a natural disaster, an internecine conflict occurred. The Lisbon earthquake was interpreted by some as evidence for the absence of God in the world. The world had, in that case, betrayed itself, shuddering to its foundations the culture that had grown from it, shaking in its essence with the parturition from the source of its own creation. There is no Erda in our contemporary narrative. Wisdom comes not from the earth but rather from the greater cosmos, the only remaining presence that can mimic both the distanciated being of the divine and its royal representative, as well as the abstract quality of the moral Mana necessary to keep everything in its static place. Just so, all populist politicians, none of them remotely royal or abstract, claim to be ‘the anointed’ – a recent report had one Trump follower referring to him using that exact phrase – and if one is loyal to them, they shall return the earth to its former order. The ‘again’ of these slogans is what is truly disturbing about them, not the idea of greatness.

            But Bataille reminds us that an authentic sovereign had no need to make claims of any kind. Just as the one who possesses what possesses her, the person of faith, the one who has no need to express or expound that faith to others – her acts alone speak the voice of the greater being, which is why some faiths refer to them as ‘works’; a direct nod to the sense that the divine ‘works’ through us – the sovereign acts without having to take action, utters without speaking, works without laboring. No mere politician can accomplish any of these things, but neither should they try to do so. Self-sacrifice is the lot of the modern leader, for she remains a person even when occupying her lead role. Not only was the sovereign never a self, he had no personal relationships. The people were his embodied action in the world, the land his deeper hearth. ‘The world is deep’, Nietzsche intones, the seriousness of Zarathustra’s ‘Midnight Song’ given an oddly fitting sanctity and transcendence by Mahler setting it into his Third Symphony. Yes, the world is deep. Yet we have today chosen to live only upon it, and not within its embrace. This, for the mythologist, is the truer source of the climate crisis and the overuse of our shared ecosystem.

            Divorced from the earth, our leaders no longer ‘earthly’ in that ancient sense but rather entirely worldly, we must alone confront the sheer scale of anonymous natural forces which can suddenly impinge upon our existence. The ‘natural’ disaster can sometime be avoided with planning and foresight, and this is the argument of the Spaniards who were made victims by the recently value-neutral earth. Insurance companies, ironically still comfortable with using the phrase ‘act of God’, cannot replace creation, only repair destruction, for they are not themselves Gods. Insurance can only take action, not render act. Because we are persons, our Gods personalized, our leaders elevated but not exalted, we must come to terms with both action and labor, ‘own’ our responsibilities but not author them, and leave the act to history and the work to the arts. Only a God resurrects; its representative, more akin to a mobile organ, presides over a ritual laying on of hands, acts as the vehicle for Mana, and wields it on behalf of the people at large. The sovereign sacrifices all that is merely human, and unknowingly, for from the beginning of his presence he will not be human. The Dalai Lama is perhaps the last vestige of the sovereign whom Bataille brilliantly analyses. Not a person, not quite human, he is gendered only for convenience, dressed only as a sign is dressed. His lot is no pillar of fire by night, but even so, the sovereign is expected to guide his people through his decisions. The body of the sovereign is culpable if other bodies fail; in this case, the earthly corpus lashing out, taking the people’s corpses into itself, in an excessive ritual of inhuman inhumation.

            What of our own expectations? It is commonly said that we expect ‘too much’ from our politicians, and not only given the dynamics of office and how one attains it. But this hypertrophic trophy, the leader, cannot connote a victory other than one political. It is not that we expect too much of the person but rather of the position. The reality is, is that a politician is not a sovereign, a person not a God, the office of policies not a temple of wisdoms. So, when the earth reminds us of its own current status, forever now apart from the transformational cosmology of the social contract and, more recently, divorced from its ability to at least provide recurring subsistence as a ‘land’ does for its people, we shall suffer. It is part of our drive for Babel redux that compels us to lay our too-possessive hands upon the earth, but in this we mistake the relationship a God had with earth; that we imagine the earth was enthralled to the Mana of Being, rather than it itself existing as its own form of being. Just so, since we are not Gods, our beings must remain ‘in the world’ and not within the earth. For only do the dead make the earth their home.

            The castigation of Castile is a case of mistaken identity. At once, the politics of identity is called into question: who leads? As well, the idea of identity politics emerges more fully: we shall seek to resurrect not ourselves – once again, only I as a God could do so – but instead our tribe; that which existed before there were either sovereigns or divinities. The question is itself recurring: can we manifest the community of the social contract on a global scale without descending into the mechanical solidarity which made society possible in the first place?

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.