Category: commentaries

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.

An Ethicist Looks at Youth Pornography

An Ethicist Looks at Youth Pornography (a self-inflicted study)

            “I thought I’d become entranced with myself. I got into it because I wanted to have fun and it’s my body, right? But instead of it being ‘hey, look at me’, it quickly became ‘hey, look at all the people looking at me.’ It was all about the numbers.” (19-year-old female university student).

            “My only regret is that I started too young. I was twelve. I wouldn’t recommend it before say, 16, as my body is now no different than it was at 16. But at 12 I was so taken with myself and that I was in control, you know? And all these thousands of people following me. But ten years later, I look at those people and say, ‘Uh, excuse me? You’re following a naked 12-year-old. There’s something seriously wrong here.” (22-year-old female university graduate).

            “Girls who are on the net want to be on the net. It’s that simple. Many do, most don’t. It’s like anything else you do, from vaping to playing volleyball. Most don’t, but some do, who cares? And yeah, you’re told about risks, but how many suicides have there actually been? I’ve read of three in the backstory news over the past twenty years. Three! Out of tens of thousands of girls per month, who knows, maybe way more. You’ve got a better chance of being struck by lightning, speaking of risks.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).

Introduction:

            When I consulted as an expert for the senate committee tasked with setting new government policy preventing access to violent pornography by minors, I was struck by the assumptions everyone in the conversation made about the topic itself. Eventually, Bill S-210, (age verification for online porn sites), was adopted by said body on April 18, 2023. Its coverage had, perhaps inevitably, generalized itself from restricting access to ‘violent’ pornography to all online pornographic sites. In good faith, I did not suspect the bill’s sponsors of any prior intent to widen the scope of the bill, and indeed, given that one could neither properly define ‘violence’ in sexual portrayals with any efficacy, and that even if one could, such (per)versions of intimacy would be mixed in with all other possible versions, given the scope of the sites in question themselves, any bill seeking to restrict access thereto for minors would, in the end, have to inure blanket coverage. I supported the bill as is, in practice.

            But the process left many unanswered questions. Why did minors seek out pornography, even participate directly in making it? Why did adults seek to limit such access, even ban it outright? The usual arguments hailing from developmental psychology were, to a philosopher’s mind, verging on the vacuous. Psychology itself is the source of our knowledge of children’s sexuality. Children are sexual beings. The question must rather run along the lines of the sexualization of children for adults. And this is not a question for psychology at all, but instead, one for ethics. As the American Psychiatric Association defines pedophilia using phrases such as ‘a prurient interest in children under 12’, by its own discursive and policy standards, the banning of youth access to pornography must, in turn, be argued as well along lines other than those from psychology. The argument I put forward to the committee is that, under Canadian law, persons under the age of 18 cannot have sex for money. This was the only point of consistency wherein an outright ban of access for those between ages 12 and 17 would make any ethical sense. Since pornography as an industry is not truly about sex but rather money, minors should not be able to participate in it.

            But what of pornography itself? Between parent-pandering politicians, schools concerned about lawsuits, psychologists and counselors drumming up business for themselves, and NPO’s fulminating the latest moral panics, it was clear that neither clarity nor objectivity was to be found in the public sphere regarding issues surrounding youth and shared sexuality. In order to discover the reality of such a conflicted and ideologically laden scene, it was equally clear that one had to properly study it oneself. And for better or worse, I did.

The Study:

            For the past three years I employed a battery of mixed qualitative methods, including unobtrusive, indirect participation, and interview as well as dialogue. Participants were solicited from their on-line profiles found either on porn servers or from my own academic networks, and the therapists were recruited from the Psychology Today listings. I was up-front uncomfortable about asking actual minors about their intimate doings and so I did not attempt to do so. This is a weakness in the study, as I had only past and indirect access to youth participation in pornography, through the voices of those who were youth in that past but had in the interim, before the study commenced, become legal adults. The epigraphs above are examples of hundreds of like interview out-takes. Some of the methods involved deception, including posing as a female youth online to attract groomers in hopes of disclosing the process by which illicit pornographers recruit their victims, and posing as a patient with a pornography addiction in order to access psychotherapists’ on-the-ground practices and methods of combatting this medically real health issue. As a veteran member of 4 university research ethics boards and a co-founder of two, I was well aware of both the pitfalls of engaging in deliberate deception during research as well as the ‘dangers to self’ involved in certain kinds of human subjects ethnography. Indeed, as an ethicist, it was often my role on such bodies to look for possible risks to researchers and over the years, I found many. This specific study presented a number of risks, since I was interacting virtually with both criminals and at-risk young adults. Perhaps ironically, perhaps fittingly, the vehicle of digital media lessened those risks for my vocation just as the informants claimed it did for theirs.

            Such a study would not have passed any ethics board I sat on – not on my watch, at least – but since I am long outside of the institutional circle, itself mostly concerned with litigation against it and less so about the truth of things, as an independent scholar I remained uniquely qualified to engage in this kind of research, having both twenty years of social science fieldwork behind me, much of it in arenas of social deviance and other marginal communities such as UFO cults, American Civil War reenactors, and artists. I had as well authored the first detailed scientific study of a specific genre of sexuality, the BDSM theatre, which appeared variously in peer reviewed journals as well as in my monographs of 2006 and 2011B. Even so, this recent study was different than any other I have completed in a number of important ways: 1. I no longer was capable, nor felt it necessary, to include amongst the methods those of direct participation. 2. The atmosphere surrounding the topic at hand was muddied beyond any possible clarity by moralizing, anxiety, and fashionable politics, as well as a vague fear of technology in general; and 3. Given 2, it is unlikely anyone will pay the least bit of attention to the nonetheless interesting results thereof.

A Summary of the Responses:

            All vectors requiring the suite of methods outlined above were ongoing simultaneously. It invoked, in the traditionalist view, a sense of that old-world ethnographic immersion, with the major exception that I had no novel ‘natural language’ to learn, as one would do, with pith helmet atop head and notebook in hand, ‘among the natives’. Nevertheless, I found the denizens of the pornographic scene to indeed be restless in their own, sometimes fetching, manner:

            “I was like, ‘Okay, I know I’m hot’. All my friends adored me. I wanted to pay for my own college. So, I get on there and I’ve got thousands, then tens of thousands of views and so on. I felt like I was the hottest thing out there. It was very empowering. But then I checked out the competition and it was like, ‘Okay, yeah, she’s kinda hot too’, and ‘oh, uh, okay, she’s hot’, and ‘Hmm, damn, she really is hot!’ and on and on, right? And then the whole thing became kind of a spiteful, vindictive battle of who could generate the most followers and you know these were all the same people following everyone, because young guys, and huh, I guess old guys too, can’t just look at one pretty girl.” (19-year-old female university student).

            The motivation for intimate expression and display was in some majority income related, especially for youth but also for young adults:

            “My parents couldn’t afford college. I was the first person in my family to ever go, and the only reason I went was because I did my own internet porn. It was by far the easiest way to make money. No managers bitching you out, no guys harassing you at the workplace, no minimum wage and then getting home and taking three showers and still the fast-food grease smell is on you. Its shit, utter shit, anywhere else teens work, right? So as soon as I actually was a teenager, I got on there. I’d seen my older sister work fast-food and it killed her. Not me.” (21-year-old female college graduate).

            The sense that making pornography, even illicitly, was a superior form of both self-expression and of employment, was a major theme in interview:

            “Don’t talk to me about morality. Is it a ‘good’ thing to put on a micro-skirt and sashay your way around a restaurant, smiling and flirting and flaring your skirts and bending over surreptitiously just to generate bigger tips? Is that ‘moral’ behavior? No, you wanna look, you’re gonna pay. And the only way a young person can balance those books is by doing porn. I can’t say I love it, but its way better than anything else out there. So, save me the lecture on responsibility. I fucking told my mom to shut it, I’ve paid for college through it, and what do you know? She did.” (25-year-old female graduate student).

            I was unable to access more than a handful of young males who were willing to speak of their online activities, legal or no, but those that did manifested an apparently sincere understanding for their female counterparts:

            “I don’t know if you ever worked a shit-job in your life, no offense. But people don’t know just how badly girls are treated out there. Guys like me, almost all guys, think girls are just objects for their amusement and desire. I got so turned off by that. And then one day my girlfriend told me she was doing porn, take it or leave it. Well, if her, why not me? It only seemed fair, you dig? But only when I got into it did I gain empathy for women. There was no danger for me at least. I read that the audience for young guys is either gay men or middle-aged women! Makes me laugh because I’m not gay and I was a teenager at the time. Like, hey, my mom and her friends think I’m the shit! It was a huge joke, but the money was better than anything I could have made short of becoming an actual sex worker. But then I’d have to have actual sex with my ‘mom’, so, uh, no way!” (21-year-old male university student).

            As in most professions, amateur pornography favors men, in this case mainly because the vast majority of workers are female, even though the audience for pornography of all genres is evenly split between the dominant genders. Even so, doing pornography was still found to be alienating for some in this study:

            “With all the tech toys out there, I learned quickly that I could have much more intense pleasure than any man would be capable of giving me. Overnight, it was like, ‘well, who needs men?’. And many women I know feel that way. Like, in general. Virtual solo sex for money. Sounds perfect, you know? No obligations to anyone, no health risks like STDs, no chance of rape or whatever. And cost-free admiration. Who cares what they’re doing, right? Some people I know get off on others getting off on them. I guess they could be called exhibitionists. But all these labels do is make things clinical. It’s irrelevant. The only thing that matters in the end is the money, on the one side, and the lack of real community on the other.” (27-year-old female white-collar worker).

            The anomie, or subjective alienation, expressed by some in interview was, however, not a universal sensitivity. Feelings of loneliness and usury developed only over time, and were associated strongly with older participants. Those younger adults who had been manufacturing and distributing illegal pornography for some years as youths shrugged off suggestions of any potential Weltschmerz in waiting:

            “Do you really think I’m going to be doing this at age thirty? One, no one would watch. Two, I should have two degrees by then and some normal job. I might even be married, who knows? That’s the whole thing about people who worry about teens and sex. They don’t understand that it’s just a phase of life, like anything else. Old people don’t have sex, or not much of it. Young people do. It’s that simple. Do you jack yourself off and record it? ‘Hey girls, the famous philosopher is fucking himself on-line! A can’t miss, that one.’ No offense, no really, but you get it right? I mean, I appreciate you doing a study like this because like, no one knows what this shit is really about.” (19-year-old female high school graduate).

            Very often, during any research process, participants themselves suggest promising lines of querying. So, I began to ask that seemingly simple question, and the responses were intriguingly critical:

            “What is this all about? Well, for me, it’s about control. My parents tell me what do to 24/7 and after a certain age it’s like, ‘Well, go fuck yourselves’. Hah, and then, its well, I can fuck myself but in a good way, unlike what others try and do to me. Okay, so now I’m in college but I still live at home. There’s nothing illegal like them hitting me, but there are still rules. The economy forces young people to stay young for far too long. I get that. I can’t afford anything by myself. Even if and when I get a degree, is that really going to set me free? Making porn is an insurance policy; that’s what it’s all about.” (18-year-old female university student).

            With more veteran producers, a semblance of a politics emerges:

            “Okay, good question, if vague. For me, it’s about exercising some sort of agency in a world that cares nothing for me. What are my skills? I have a great body and lots of energy. Fine, what else? Do I sell my body and my face for next to nothing waiting tables, or do I sell it on-line for decent wages? You tell me. You didn’t have to make that choice, no offense. But anyone who moralizes at me and anyone else who hates what I do needs to look in the mirror. Are they jealous of my youth? Are they the same people who leer at my peers who do wait tables? Yeah, I’ve ‘converted’ a few of my friends. They’ve seen the light, hah! No more butt-pinches and slaps at the fast-food joint, no more stares and comments at the sit-down restaurant. You get the picture. Long live the internet!” (23-year-old female sex worker).

            In spite of the consistent if not constant caveats generated by government agencies and NPOs alike regarding the risks to youth who involve themselves in pornography, whether as viewers or actual producers, when asked about such risks and their attendant campaigns, respondents were universally critical:

            “The only time I was stalked was when I worked fast food. You get all kinds in places like that, and all the wrong kinds, whether its people with disabilities, criminals, unhappy husbands, INCELs, you name it. And you know, like, right away, ‘this guy is dangerous’. On-line there’s no contact. If there is any danger to it, well, two can play that game, right? You expose me I expose you. The police can track your IP and the rest of it. Don’t insult me or play with me on-line. You have no idea where I live or even who I am. Those few girls who were threatened with exposure, maybe one or two killed themselves, well, how did that even happen, right? I have no fear of ruined reputation because there’s a million girls out there who look basically just like me. Do I live in Lithuania? No, but she might. And when I was still in high school it was like, ‘okay, make my day asshole’.” (20-year-old female university student).

            Not all research participants were as confident, nay, yet belligerent, as were some, but even the more cautious ones sneered at the nay-sayers:

            “You have to be smart with it. Of course you do. I would not tell a young girl to try this. I started when I was 15 and I learned quickly what not to do. Never invite anyone into a chat. Never focus on one consumer at the expense of others. Never say you’re single. Never offend anyone, like by saying anything about their own sexual prowess or ego. Obviously, never mention where you live or what school you go to or your real name, I mean, a ten-year-old knows that part of it, not that she should be doing what I do, but really. The biggest thing is that you’re being paid to be someone’s fantasy object, and as long as it stays at that level, there’s no risk. Like, none at all.” (19-year-old sex female sex worker).

            I asked producers what was going through their minds during actual performances, and correspondingly, reported further on, I asked therapists what transpired mentally during their respective interactions with those who did, or had, performed:

            “When you’re live it’s all about the act. You’re getting pleasure and so are they. Nothing else should intrude upon this ‘duet’, if you will. It’s a total fantasy only in the sense that I would never be together for real with anyone who views me, and they know that. But they can dream, and when they do, I’m there for them, almost equally for real. The thing that pisses me off is now the 3D AI ‘girls’ are stealing my views and you know it’s not other teenagers making those. It’s some loser who has tech gear and skill and he’s making money from some of the same people I used to make money from. Pretty soon all the moralizers can just go home, with that going on. Who knows, maybe some of those religious fanatics are actually making the AI shit, trying to put real girls out of business!” (22-year-old college graduate).

            I had not thought of that possibility, as ludicrous as it may sound on the face of it. Whoever is generating artificial sex objects however, is panning for the same guttural gold as are real persons; that much was clear. Another common response:

            “Okay, so it’s a business like any other. There’s you and there’s the competition. So, you innovate, just like any good entrepreneur. As far as the AI stuff goes, well, I have a video where I slash myself on the back of my arm and it bleeds a little, no biggie. And I say, ‘No fucking sex doll or AI mock can do that, boys.’ And some people are turned on by that, and word gets around, right? I got good responses from that one, a lot of views. People said they really appreciate me ‘being real’, and that I’m ‘not a coward’. And though I’m not quite real in one sense, I do have guts. It takes guts to make porn, which is something the haters like to forget. You try it.” (20-year-old female university student).

            The therapists and counselors involved in the study were not of one mind in their responses to being shown patterned interview out-takes with young adults. Many were shy of making any final judgment at all, which was consistent with their professional duty to act as resources rather than evaluators. The following was commonplace, whether I myself was feigning illness or no:

            “We should never moralize about sex. It doesn’t help at all. Especially for young women, I feel they are driven to place themselves at risk because they are looking for some reassurance. Not only that they are beautiful, because they know that it’s no great turn of trick to be beautiful at their age, but much more so, a kind of validation that they have some social worth, that they have a place in society more generally. What kind of place is, of course, another matter entirely.” (middle-aged female psychotherapist).

            A male professional counterpart added what turned out to be as well a well-travelled road:

            “I’ve worked as a counselor for only two decades, so while I’m still young, I have increasing difficulty identifying with youth. You told me you had the same issue as a professor, when you were still teaching. It makes me raise my eyebrows, when a teenager tells me she’s making porn, but I don’t judge. That only makes what might be a bad situation worse. Instead, I ask such a person, ‘what’s in it for you?’. I get very similar responses as you have shown me from your study. The sum of such responses is, I dare say, quite convincing.” (middle-aged male psychologist).

            Professional psychologists and counselors varied only upon their methods of guiding minors or others, and in turn, based this variance on whether or not the client in question actually wanted to get out of the business or did not. No clinician or counselor with whom I spoke, either as a health research colleague or as a ‘patient’, said that they had ever recommended to a porn producer that they stop, let alone suggesting that they were necessarily placing themselves at risk, contrasting mightily with the journalistic, political, and other grassroots voices regarding the topics at hand:

            “I don’t want to ever say to a young person involved in porn that, ‘there’s no risks’, but we have to look at the stats. We know that 95% of violence and abuse against minors happens in the home and from family members or friends thereof. 95% of the other 5% happens in the schools or in other like contexts, as in, where there may be coaches, music teachers, ballet instructors, and the like. We know this, and we have known this for some time. But it is only very recently that stories of such abuse are appearing, and some very high-profile ones, like the Olympic gymnasts and what-have-you. And yet parents blithely drop their kids off at ballet or whatever, and those same kids, when older, with their same trained and disciplined figures, may be making porn, because they know they have the right type of looks for it. And only then do parents hit the roof. So, there’s a problem with the whole discourse surrounding risk in our society, and I for one am glad you’re doing this expository study on one of the core arenas of these misconceptions.” (middle-aged female clinician).

            I have argued elsewhere that most organized activities for youth in our culture serve multiple, often conflicting purposes. Henry Giroux is the most sophisticated name in this part of critical discourse, but alas, I could not access him to comment upon this study. Yet psychologists themselves appeared aware that there was a studied hypocrisy afoot when it came to comparing activities such as sports and the arts with pornography. I then, in turn, threw that out in the direction of the pornographers themselves:

            “Hah! Well, that really makes me laugh. I was in ballet for years. That’s exactly how I got this body and the confidence to strut my butt, right? But dance is like all the rest of it for us girls. The adults bark at you, touch you when and where they should not under the guise of ‘positioning’, some parents even still spank their kids if they’re younger. The dance teachers don’t dare but they tell on you, right? I got it up until I was 12. Now I spank myself for money and I’m in complete control of it, which I never was as a little kid. So yup, hypocrisy? That’s basically any older adult’s middle name as far as I’m concerned.” (19-year-old female university student).

            There were many respondents who also did not see any serious difference between doing sports or dance and doing porn, given the apparel and physiognomic feats required for many athletic and performing arts venues:

            “Yeah, well, the thing of it is, what I wear online and what I wore in dance or when I was in track at school; not much difference. And I’m still doing crazy things with my body either way, so no real difference there either. And the people who showed up to watch me play volleyball in high school weren’t all there to watch the game, if you know what I mean. Same with track, same with dance. The bottom line, excuse the expression, is that people want to look at young girls, the less clothes the better, and so we’ve got all kinds of ways people can do just that. And my parents never batted an eye at it. So, it’s all porn, at the end of the day. All of it.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).           

            When I asked how making porn itself, illicitly or no, compared with just viewing it, after explaining that I was consulting for the Senate committee, a number of responses shared the following themes:

            “The viewers are losers, at least in one sense. But I’ve read other studies of porn usage. On the one hand, you have the stereotype, the INCEL guy who could never get a date, or that’s how those people think of themselves, anyways. I’ve always found that there’s someone for everyone out there, sad but true. But on the other, you have some married guy with a professional job and an attractive wife but they now have kids and he’s not getting enough. Women too, of course. So that audience isn’t losers at all, and so I have to perform with both in mind. But as far as the difference between making and just viewing it, producers have the bods and the guts, the consumers are just anyone, and they might be cowards too but I don’t really judge or care about that.” (23-year-old female sex worker).

            The other category of respondent were the groomers, but since they were, by their own tacit admittance, criminals, and their process of recruiting for underage sex labor was shot through with both a cloying extortion and hortatory clichés that I felt even an eight-year-old would not fall for – though apparently, I remain naïve about such entrapment – I do not consider any of it worthy of reproduction here.  Rather, I end the results section with a typical summary of responses of amateur and unaffiliated professional producers when asked to characterize the essence of the falderal surrounding their chosen workplace and their activities within:

            “It’s not for everyone. But what is? Don’t tell me I can’t do it because you don’t like it. Or you pretend you don’t. Too fucking bad. Look, I’m 18. Everywhere I go people stare at me. Do I get paid for any of that? Do I get a guy, young or old, come up to me and give me a hundred bucks and say ‘Sorry, miss, I was leering at you. I know this doesn’t make up for it, but take it anyways and just know I’d never do anything more than just look’. Never. Never in a million years would that ever happen on the street. But hey, I discovered a wondrous land where it does happen! And in that land, that’s all guys do, is ‘just look’. You hear people yelling ‘keep it real’. No, reality is what sucks. Virtual reality is a godsend. I’ll be making porn until no one is willing to pay me for it. And every critic can just suck on that. Full stop.” (18-year-old female high school graduate).

The Analytic Upshot:

            In every field study I have conducted as principal investigator, I have found that the commonplace sociological rubric regarding people defending their own values is true to life. The sentiments expressed by sex workers, of whatever age or style of performance, was no different. Even if their community is disparate, partly fictional, and connected only loosely, they still felt that they were a part of something greater than themselves as individuals. Many saw themselves as rebels with a noble cause, even as social critics. Policies which censored them or targeted them in other ways were disdained and mocked, the apparent hypocrisies of their political and parental vendors exposed. I was myself asked, on some occasions, about my role in such censorship, and I explained that, as an ethicist, I would like to see some formal accountability within the organizations benefitting from uploading their materials and profiting from them, as often as not without the original creator’s knowledge. But even this was a hedge, and I knew it. Better to state that the distinction between a shared everyday reality which is always public and must place the whole of itself before any specific part thereof, and the semi-private reality of the internet and like venues, needs to be preserved insofar as the former does not find itself too engrossed in the latter. For cultures too can become addicted.

            The most important points raised by respondents in an ethical sense were those directed against the idea that pornography was somehow qualitatively different than other activities youth partook in, and that the conception and definition of risk within its scope was severely overblown. For myself, and from an analytic standpoint alone, there may be a sense that if young people in any society become too taken with themselves in one relatively narrow way – the perfect physical and sexual specimen – then their once-respective identities would be as narrowed. As an ethicist, I think this is the greatest danger at the level of personhood. At the level of character, I feel that there is a danger of a craven cowardice in virtual sexuality, precisely due to there not being a real other with whom one must confront, conflict with, reassure and rapproche, and most of all, try to love. Given that almost all respondents themselves appeared to understand these dual dangers when questioned about them, and put their lack of interest in their ethical themes down to simply not being part of the phase of life we generally refer to as youth – thereby implying that when they were more mature, such themes would then take on more weight in their lives – I could not in turn simply dismiss such a reply. We do not yet have the longitudinal data to document either way this implied transition.

            In light and in lieu of this present absence, I will end this summary with a final quotation to these regards:

            “No one does this forever. I’m certainly not planning on it. In ten years, I’ll be married and probably have at least one kid. I’ll look like everyone else you see; that is, not great! My husband will want to fuck me at his discretion, my kids will want me to feed them, drive them somewhere, help them with their homework, all that. Right now, ‘all that’ feels like a kind of death. So, what’s so wrong with living a little before you start to die?” (19-year-old female university student).

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

On Truth and Lie in a Virtual Sense

On Truth and Lie in a Virtual Sense (it’s not 1872 anymore)

            In what is arguably the most important short essay of the 19th century, the youthful Nietzsche belatedly answers the querulous query, ‘what is truth?’ made notorious, if still resolutely apt, by Pilate. For some millennia, it was recognized that though reality could possess lies – especially the social reality constructed solely by human beings – truth, by contrast, could not. But in ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’, (1872), Nietzsche casts aside that distinction. Truth is simply its own form of lie, currency which has long lost its imprint of precise value and stands on the memory of it being metal alone. Truth is both metaphoric and metonymic, an exalted form of euphemism that covers over the reality of it itself having been constructed and imagined by that same human consciousness which, oddly, even perversely for Nietzsche, finds succor in the misplaced ‘will to truth’. This jarring statement, finding its legendary lines in “…how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life.” We can call this ‘nihilism’ if we want; nevertheless, in the cosmic order of things seen from the vantage point of Victorian period, it is more true than any human truth.

            Nietzsche, however, does not dwell for overlong in the cosmic. His question is, and ere after, not so much ‘what is truth?’, but rather, ‘what is human?’ If “…to be truthful is to employ the usual metaphors.”, then in a moral sense, truthfulness means merely “…the duty to lie according to a fixed convention.” We do hear, from time to time, the phrase ‘conventional truths’, which are taken to point to a kind of statement existing exiguously between truisms and ‘trivial truths’, the former chestnuts of uncertain origin but precise provenience, and the latter simple statements of self-definition; certain only because they can only reference themselves. But Nietzsche tells us that all truths are such only by convention, thus erasing these other, perhaps cowardly, distinctions. The most famous passage of the paper occurs just above these reminders, and after reproducing it here, I want to provide some discursive context, both before and after, in order to aid understanding of just how it was possible that Nietzsche, at age 28 – the same age at which Hume wrote his magnum opus A Treatise on Human Nature – was able to come up with such a succinctly damning statement of one of humanity’s most cherished possessions. “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force…”

            The previous year, Darwin’s The Ascent of Man appeared, making clear the evolutionary connection between the great apes and human beings, something which was only implied in his revolutionary 1859 work. We shared the primate branch with other creatures; apes and humans had a common ancestor. Recasting the ‘great chain of being’ was not what was more seriously unsettling about Darwin’s work, but rather that humans were to be included in it, as another animal, but one simply more evolved. Nietzsche himself found this fact regrettable in the extreme, but also found within it the source of the death of godhead, something some commentators imagine him celebrating. The son of a Protestant minister, Nietzsche was, instead, moved to devote much of the rest of his working life coming up with both a new ethics to replace the one sourced in the divine assignation of conscience within human consciousness, but as well, a now ‘post-metaphysical’ cosmology centered around not the will to truth, but rather the will to power, ‘and nothing besides’.

            But in fact, the seeds for the exposition of the illusory qualities of human truths were sown far before Darwin’s somewhat indirect framework had taken hold over the philosophical imagination. ‘Perspectivism’, usually attributed to Nietzsche as well as fashionably misattributed to post-colonial discourses, actually first occurs with any force in Vico’s The New Science, (1725), wherein he speaks of cultures and peoples having different truths, in which they wholeheartedly believe as if they were the sole human knowing of the things themselves. ‘New’, of course, refers to the human sciences, the Geisteswissenschaften, as a complement for, and contrast to, the sciences of nature. The German translator of J.S. Mill’s System of Logic, (1843) came up with the term as well as its contrasting one, which ever since has given students thereof problems. Naturwissenshaften is straightforward enough, but ‘Geistes’! These ‘sciences of the spirit’, were in the main, unimpressive to Nietzsche, with the exception that they exposed the relativistic quality of truth on the ground. Anyone who has travelled outside of their own locale knows that the sole remaining truth about truth is that it’s status can adhere to anything we humans need it to.

            Closer to Nietzsche’s own time, aside from Mill’s important work – it should be noted that Mill was a vigorous supporter of the nascent feminist social science, and was personal friends with a number of its progenitrixes – Marx and Engels had penned The German Ideology – 1846, but not published until 1932 – in which the phrase ‘consciousness too is a social product’ presages in a much more concise manner Nietzsche’s argument. From Vico and Hume to Mill and Marx, the sense that truth was more than merely ‘elusive’ – a sensibility hailing from the natural sciences – had been germinating in serious discourse. The irony here is, perhaps, that the entire heart of Enlightenment discourse, officially dedicated to the truth of things bereft of moral overlays, ended up losing truth itself by jettisoning its moral sources and backdrop. And it was Nietzsche who first noticed this irony.

            His essay too went unpublished for some time, but eventually this acknowledgement that evolution, on the natural science side, and cultural perspectivism, on that social, gave way to an entire discursive framework within which truth found its place beside all other human faculties; institutions, subsistence practices, cosmologies, magic, kinship, the rites of passage and so on. By 1923, W. I. Thomas’ famous ‘principle’ could be uttered almost in passing: “If people believe something to be real, it is real in its consequences.” This is the working version of Nietzsche’s essay in a single sentence. By the mid-1930s Robert Merton could sum up the source of all inquiry into truths within the reality the Geisteswissenschaften studied in a single, precise question of his own: ‘Who benefits?’. In a word, a truth, of whatever form or function, existed due to someone or other gaining something from its remaining extant. Truths which do not function in this manner are soon overtaken by others, but the character of human truth is not altered by their simple replacement, any more than it is by their reproduction, the latter of which Nietzsche himself had concentrated most of his analysis upon.

            Today, we face another challenge to the traditional model of what a truth is or can be. If we now understand truth to be extramoral, or ‘non-moral’, what then of truths which are wholly virtual? When I first placed a virtual reality helmet upon my surefire rational head, I was astonished not only at the simulacra available, but the more so, by my ‘natural’ reactions thereto. I hesitated and even leapt back from a virtual ‘cliff’; I automatically bent forward to pet a virtual dog which, just to keep things ‘real’, had the ability to pick up a bone with its rather alien snout. I knew the experience was not real in the usual sense, and yet I still had the experience. Virtual reality is thus more like a vision, but one which can be shared through technology. The visionary has now an audience greater than himself, even if the content of the visions are just as hallucinatory as those of ages antique filled with the equally aged who could at least be truthful to themselves. Virtual reality is the scion of the sciences of the ‘spirit’, and its panoramas, its melodramas, its illusions are exactly what would animate Nietzsche’s own sensibility if he would have dreamed up the idea. By contrast, the sciences of nature too have their own child, ‘augmented reality’, which is a misnomer, because what it shows to our senses through a technological prosthetic are things which are actually already there in the world. There is no ‘virtuality’ about this augmentation; yet it is not reality per se that is being augmented, but rather our sensate. We are enabled to see the guts of things, for instance, in a manner reminiscent of Husserl’s gradually building ‘glancing ray’ which, bereft of the hyletic sphere, gets at the essence of things. We can see around corners, inside compartments, splice wires and inspect semi-conductors and this is how a precise and cool empiricism would likely interpret transcendental phenomenology’s ‘noesis’. It is a literalist litany of ‘to the things themselves’.

            And when we are dealing with mere things, truth and reality coincide most closely. Things alone, however, cannot hold our human interest. We know we are the far more curious phenomenon, and perhaps the greater proportion of that more fascinating character comes from our ability to find truth in the illusory, to make beliefs real through acting upon them, and yet also to be able to analyze and critique these attempts, seeing them as well for what they are. A consciousness that understands the very truth of truth is the result, and to my mind this is laudable achievement. For Nietzsche, the tacit question which resonates from his seminal essay might run along the lines of ‘why then have truth at all?’. He answers it, in so many words: “So long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia. It is never more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. [ ] The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage from itself.” If the cosmic truth of human existence is sobering – and perhaps a new reality of a constructed intelligence will, in fact, carry humanity’s intellect ‘beyond human life’ and thus into a more ‘truthful’ future – the worldly truths we humans have taken for a wider reality have done far more than act as agents of self-deception. Our ability to conceive of something we call the ‘truth’ is far more profound than even our corresponding ability to believe in it and thenceforth act upon it. We need the concept of truth in the same way that Nietzsche much later notes that ‘we are more in love with love itself’ than we are of the beloved. We love the truth, but truths are of passing adoration. Truth then, might be one of those Durkheimian concepts which, akin to the sacred, are able to overleap discursive shifts in metaphysics and even societal shifts in modes of production. Nietzsche is correct about Truth and truths alike, and yet is it not more than true that in spite of this redolent gem of self-understanding, what more fully animates the human endeavor – patient and cumulative experiment in its natural science aspect, impassioned and visionary dream on that of ‘spirit’ – is that reality, after all, has itself always been virtual?

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

Malice and Co.

Malice and Co. (The Nobel and the Noble)

            When my wife and I were living back on the West Coast we knew a retired teacher who not only had the grace to read my first short fiction collection but also the generosity to extoll my ‘genius’ in an hours-long conversation afterward. During this too-pleasant evening he told us of an encounter with one of his youthful students. Then twelve, she had become attached to him in the classroom, and what do you know, the first day of summer had brought her newly minted teen self to his front door, unannounced but promptly revealing every intent to intimately engage with him. To his credit, he gently ran her off, never to return. But indeed, such a moment must force every man to ask of himself a challenging question, ‘what would I have done in his place?’. Writ small, this is the same question that history poses to each of us, man or woman or other, and the usual contents are ‘would I have worked in a death camp or been one of its victims or, in turn, done nothing at all?’. As an ethicist, in fact I cannot say what I would have done. Like an ominous version of the contextual jest, one would have ‘had to have been there’ to really get it.

            I doubt very much many of us could know, given the hypotheticals of alternate biographies and all that such might imply. Certainly, as a young professor, I had a conga line of young women at my door – brazenly so since all of them were of legal age or older – and while I was still single, I acted upon many such calls. But twelve or thirteen seems a different matter. So, when it was revealed that Alice Munro’s daughter had been molested by her second husband at all of nine years old, with him claiming it was merely a scene out of Lolita after all, I cringed. No, the character in Nabokov was twelve, not nine, and there is a world of difference at that age. Lolita also had already been placed in a criminal circumstance by Humbert, and the reader is left with both having to trust his account of things thenceforth as well as presume that the young woman was hoping to ease her predicament; ‘well, at least he won’t kill me if I have regular sex with him’. And while it is highly unlikely that any nine-year-old would be the initiator of such circumstance, at twelve or thirteen, it might be a different story. As indeed it should be, barring intimacy. I say this because by adolescence a child needs to have that sense that she is becoming her own person. In many families with whom I have consulted, there was an ‘Electraic’ tension between mother and daughter, beginning around that age: ‘She mocks me, hates me even, is jealous of my looks and freedom and thinks dad admires me and not her. Maybe he does. She attempts to control me, and yet she still gets to sleep with him. I know how to fuck her over big time, just watch me’, and so on. Of course, the father is still culpable if he enables such desires, but the desires themselves are perfectly understandable and, as an assertion of nascent selfhood, even laudable.

            But not at nine. This fellow, who served no jail time, was clearly a villain, but such proved as well to be the case for the Nobel novelist. It is this latter fact which is causing conniptions in so-called cultural circles, but once again, there is much evidence to vouchsafe the authenticity of Munro’s feelings. Upon divorce, the child who remains from this now moribund union is often subjected to resentment, even hatred. She is a reminder of a bond now sundered, the once gift of love become the spawn of bitterness. Munro’s daughter was abused twice over, first by her step-father and then by her mother, who wholly bought into the Lolita idea. This kind of thing is no odd slap in the face, also not to be countenanced of course, but rather constitutes an outright betrayal. But does any of this impinge upon Munro’s creative works, and if so, how so?

            Somewhat akin to the proverbial death camp question, such a relationship ambiguates established legacies. One thing I do know is that its not a problem for me. I always disdained Munro’s work; nostalgic navel-gazing from gloom and doom baby-boom. But intriguingly, and perhaps ironically, the discovery that the author herself was a villain with real feelings and conflict in her existence, which it appears she tried to suppress for decades, might well make her work the more interesting. It would have to be something big to do so, at least for myself as a fiction writer and a scholar in aesthetics. Yet culture history is replete with villains, many of such standing as to make Munro, Woody Allen and like company look themselves like nine-year-olds. The most important case must be that of Richard Wagner, whose towering genius is often seen as tainted by his vehement political anti-Semitism. It could be argued that Wagner himself had a role, however cameo, in the murder of twelve millions in the camps and sixty elsewhere around the globe. ‘Go big’ must have been his mantra, given the Ring cycle and many other grand artistic works. But even here, his personal sensibilities, presumably reflected or at least refracted in his creations, we are left with ambiguity. His call to his Jewish musicians to ‘lose their Jewishness’ since otherwise they were ‘the perfect human beings’ might be interpreted as simply a reminder that ethnicity of any sort is both window-dressing and crutch, and decoys the noble soul away from his authenticity as a superior human being. If that was the case, I would wholly agree.

            Other famous cases of the handwringing at history remain at our newly gnarled fingertips. Heidegger, also no fan of ‘The Jews’, nevertheless saved both his mentor and his lover, both Jewish, from the Nazi onslaught, suggesting that it was not ethnicity itself that he disdained but rather simple inferiority. Husserl, being one of the great modern philosophers and the founder of phenomenology as a serious discourse, as well as Hannah Arendt, who went on to become arguably the most important female thinker of the twentieth century, were certainly neither of them inferior in any way. Richard Strauss was pushed out of his job as the Reich’s Art Director because he defended working with Jewish writers and musicians. Uh, yeah, Wagner, Heidegger, Strauss. Who is Alice Munro again?

            But aside from the wider historical context and career of what has to be by now a cliché – ‘I found out my hero was a villain, woe is me!’ – we must, as with the problem of history in general, turn the critical lens upon ourselves. That there exist people who might well wish me dead simply tells me I have lived my own life, and without reserve. One owns one’s own iniquities, and I am fortunate, equally simply, that my list contains nothing overly villainous, such as molesting children or, for that matter, running a death camp. But facts and fancies are ill-matched, and just as Nietzsche slyly reminded us that pride ultimately triumphs over memory, the critic’s own desires might well be able to vanquish history itself. For instance, I have been referred to as a child pornographer, and by someone I grew up with no less. Given the commonplace and wholly fictional idea that an author must always be culling from his own personal experience, I had to blink at the implications of such an outrageous charge. Disgusted by Lolita and Romeo and Juliet alike, for my first published fictional work, I wrote something more inspiring and in fact, more real to life, if not actually my life. To my mind, this is what a good fiction author does. They don’t just look, as one of Munro’s peers has done, at Heinlein’s If this goes on…, or yet The Odyssey, and say, ‘well, how about telling the same story but from a female perspective?’. Uh, how about it? No, rather they take up a famous trope and completely redo it, from the inside out, making it once again our own, instead of the piece of comforting nostalgia it has over the centuries become. This, by the way, was the entire intent of Queen of Hearts. Both Camelot and Calvary are now once again authentically our own stories, and not those of our distant, and dreary, ancestors.

            For distant and dreary are, at last, perhaps the two things that link Munro’s personal villainy and her cultural works. In both sets of narratives there is much suppression, much decoy behavior. That she knew these very human errors personally, and not simply by way of a creative imagination, both makes her writings more real and at once less artistic. Since never the twain completely meet, each of us must then decide for herself whether we prefer art, or rather life.

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

Beothuk Dodo

Beothuk Dodo (an excursus in extermination)

                                    Too big to fly, Dodo ugly, so dodo must die

                                    Dog go, with fear on its side

                                    Can’t change, can’t change the tide

                                    Dog baiter, agitator

                                    Asking questions, says he wants to know why

                                    Ain’t no reason that money can’t buy

                                    Mink, he pretty, so mink he must die…

  • Genesis, 1981

            It is well known that the Reich made the obvious connection between exterminating vermin such as insects and rats to doing the same with those they considered to be person-pests; ‘life unworthy of life’, as was said. The penchant for eugenics was married to the desperate desire for ‘racial purity’. The Jew, in spite of his eternally wandering status and his pariah personality, had somehow maintained his own racial homogeneity, refusing to entirely assimilate wherever he next washed up. The subito siren of the death of the other, beseeching us in both ways at once – if I must die let it be quick; nay, I shall rather slay you in the heat of your own desire – is remade in the grander scale of opera or yet epic. A Wagnerian death, fit only for the antique gods, when transposed to humanity, required millions to be murdered, and systematically so, for that is the most rapid way of capturing the drama of the moment. The Holocaust was more than an anthropological machine for ‘beautifying the world through violence’, it was also an architectonic aesthetic statement; that those closer to the old Gods in form and feel would take over the once-Valkyric duty to choose the slain before these lower forms reached up from the depths of ugliness and dragged the rest of us down with them.

            How many human deaths could equal that of one God’s? That is the question the Holocaust and like events pose to us. The old god of morals, long dead, was Himself an immoralist in the sense that He aided the ancient Hebrews in their quest for a homeland. Begrudgingly, given their lack of loyalty and inconsistent worship, Yahweh must have been thinking that, ‘Well, they do suck but all these other groups wouldn’t be any better. Besides, the children of Akhenaton invented me, so I suppose I owe them one’, and so on. This ‘religion of the father’, as Freud famously put it in his final volume, Moses and Monotheism, only gives way to that of the son through patent parricide. Now, how then to keep the potency of that ultimate death alive given that history rewrites and memory forgets? The death of the father = the life of the son; Jesus was thus not forsaken on the cross but rather because of the incarnation, the one to whom He called was Himself lost. The death of the under-race = the life of the over-race, and thence toward the so-called ‘super-race’ yet to come. In the ‘Dyskabolos’ speech, Hitler cautioned his art history buff audience that ‘we can only be said to have reached our goal when we have attained the form expressed by the Greek sculptors or even have gone beyond it’.

            This ‘form’ could not have been an idealized, stylized reference simply to an Olympic athlete, though we to this day, with continued Nazi verve, celebrate the ‘festival of both youth and beauty’ – the subtitle of Riefenstahl’s documentary film of the 1936 games – but for Sontag for instance, referenced the ‘fascist aesthetic’ which was wholly esthetic in its surface appearance. Riefenstahl herself calls out this analysis in the film The Power of the Image, and somewhat amusingly to boot. But the very use of the term ‘form’ is suggestive; it in turns calls to mind the Platonic ideals, the eternal form and not its passing content. Youth, for a few years and those extended by Olympian practice and exercise, maintain something close to the ideal bodily expression of the form. So, it is not so much that a race as a whole must reproduce itself unsullied by inferior elements, but rather more specifically the youth of that race. It is not a coincidence, nor is it merely an effort in pedagogy, that the Reich spent much effort upon cultivating its youth in both culture and sport. By 1940 or so, even complete nudity was made into part of the propaganda imagery, not so much due to the sense that mores had relaxed since Orff’s highly erotic Carmina Burana was first performed in 1937, becoming a Nazi favorite soon thereafter, but rather because the first generation of racially pure youth had now come of age, ready to strut their perfect stuff in a call to more than military arms.

            At the climax to the Olympic torch relay, also a Nazi invention, one needs recall, the BBC commentator remarks on how ‘perfect’ and ‘pure’ does the physique of the German runner look, and thus extolls it to the world. Just as was the Holocaust the result of applied aesthetics, so the Olympics are the obverse side of that self-same coin. Anyone who watches them is a crypto-Nazi at best. Far better to give into the baser desire to see youthful bodies as simply objects of lust and nothing more transhistorical; that is how low we can go without imagining extermination camps. For the beauty of youth, stained by the Internet, suppressed by the neo-conservative, was actually the one truer thing exalted by the Reich. It expresses an essential will to life, just as does mass murder – we imagine that life is precious not in its quality but rather in its quantity; if you must live, then I shall surely die, there’s simply not enough of it to go around – and the killing of the other in order to preserve my own ongoing existence remains a human ultimatum to its more ‘affective unhistorical subconsciousness’, if you will. We are possessed by a feeling, not merely of superiority, but of a kind of passing grace; I am alive and at the peak of my living performance. The Olympian expresses this will to life over against the unhealthy and infirm, the injured and ill, but also, more profoundly, against all those ugly and deformed. What used to be referred to as the ‘special Olympics’ is belatedly inserted not so much out of any doubt about what is beauty and thus truth, but rather for perspective, and rather out of the sense that Nazism can after all be democratized and alles can be included in the race for the perfect race.

            But few desire to watch the ugly try to be beautiful. They exist in their own media ghetto, its walls unforgiving and stretching as far past the eye of the now as does the death of God stretch back in historical time. In His stead, we are rightly outraged in the face of the ubiquitous abuse against athletes because coaches and trainers are themselves outside their sacred circle, violating it with their perverse lust, petty authority and picayune control. The gymnast is a living sculpture, her mobile museum the stadium. It was not merely a function of lack of more qualified personnel that the Olympic stadium in Berlin was defended by two-hundred Hitler Youth led by an art history professor. The Soviets quickly dismantled this effort with few casualties on either side, sending the kids home and the professor back to his campus office, perhaps missing the whole point of it. No, these defenders were the most qualified to serve and protect this meta-sacred space. Donning the uniform of Valkyric intent, obeying the higher orders of aesthetic authority, the young men and women imagined that theirs was the transcendental task of elevating life unto death. However many barbarians died was not and never at issue. The question was not even of what constituted the ‘good death’ – that is something for the therapist to ponder in the face of a smaller life perhaps replete with some regrets and disconnects – but rather what is the highest death? What is the life that is worthy of being chosen by the sisters of Brunnhilde? That is the death worth dying, and only that. And the highest of deaths must be ledgered by the lowest, those occasioned by the camps.

            So, the function of the death camp system was at least two-fold; in its baser of operations, it was a eugenics facility, but in its noble cast, imagined by its architects and likely specifically by Haydrich himself, given his own sense of art and accomplishment, it was a bellwether for the evaluation of the meaning of the higher death. If I am the final person standing, if I have vanquished all others, pretenders and even vermin that they were, then the Valkyric youth, the ideal woman who is both a goddess and a warrior, beautiful and lithesome, whose athleticism is no longer a theatrical display as in the Olympics but is absolutely real in its ‘event’, shall surely light on I and I alone.  It is no coincidence that the Olympics were born out of the skills associated with ancient warfare, the javelin, the pole-vault, the broad jump, steeplechase, and Pankration. The Valkyrie is the one with all those skills; she is the truer heptathlete. In my desire to die by her own hand, I shall exterminate the many distractions that might yet blind her to the presence of the higher form. So much is this a vaunted goal, that in our imagined post-Nazi days we seek to buy our way into her purview, abusing our actual youth but mass-manufacturing the pretense thereof for adults; sixty is the new thirty. Yet because thirty is also the new thirteen the sixty must maintain its deeper mark, masking the stinging stingy stigmata of agedness with the wistful wiseacre of fantastic ages. But the capitalist, like the communist before him, misses the point. Extermination is about ultimate life, not death. It is the only passion by which a mortal being can distinguish himself in the eyes of the dispassionate Gods.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, religion, education, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof (The Media Minstrels)

            The fact that persons of Jewish descent dominate the culture-producing industries, both high and low, is the result of historical happenstance alone. Any other inference is not merely Anti-Semitic, it is suggestive of the very ressentiment that is once again building its political franchise. This ‘undergrowth’, as the narrator to the mostly excellent documentary The Architecture of Doom refers to it in its closing moments, is no longer simply underfoot, to the side, or creeping along unseen beneath a cultured canopy. That Jesus was himself Jewish, or at the least, was perceived as such whatever his paternal pedigree, should not have provided the Anti-Semite with an apical ancestor. But Jewish colleagues have told me that they still overhear, or are even told to their faces, that ‘The Jews killed Jesus’ and so on. Doubtless a personal retribution on the part of a few well-placed priests, the crucifixion hangs itself up on another kind of cross; one that is political through and through. The sandal has been on the other foot ever since. For ideally, being well-placed in a culture means having culture in the first place.

            Due to European property laws, as Marx and Engels pointed out in On the Jewish Question, the diaspora was funneled into service sector trades, including all those associated with accoutrement and requiring consistent and trans-national trade networks, such as jewelry, precious metals, and financing. It should be recalled that the first significant loan in history occurred when the Black Prince borrowed heavily in order to back a war, with the agreement that this debt would be repaid with interest. Needless to say, it was not. What were a group of Italian Jews with not even a militia in their employ going to do about it? By the nineteenth century, people of Jewish descent had become the leading indicators of a globalizing culture that would move from Mendelssohn to Mahler and from Marx to Freud. But at the very moment that ‘the Jews’ seemed to populate the corridors of culture, since, once again, they were barred from politics – mimicking the earlier division of labor between landed luxury and mere luxury items – there arose against this presence, both artistic and intellectual which appeared from above, a vicious counterpoint from below.

            In the Reich’s propaganda, the culture critic is singled out. This was easiest road, the lane of least resistance, for the critic produces in the criticized nothing other than a resentment. Shaw expressed it most famously, and most concisely, showing the critic to be nothing more than a eunuch beside the lovers’ bed. Akin to those who teach, those who can’t do, criticize. Indeed, I have encountered such criticism, resentful in itself, and have found myself saying, ‘write your own book, my friend,’ knowing full well that they were incapable of even that. The priests in the temple, driven from it by some neo-Hebrew and seemingly self-appointed messiah, are the truer apex of this jilted genealogy. Certainly, they got their revenge, but just as certainly, the history of Anti-Semitism, in its Euro-American context at least, begins there. And thus, and thence it is the culture critic who is the one who ‘passes his arrogant judgments’, and represents a wider ethnic group or ‘race’ who is devoid of ‘the very organ of culture’. Yet this could be said, and was said, of anyone who was a critic, Jew or non-Jew alike. The Reich focused nothing more, and nothing other, than an already present resentment, lensing it into an authentic ressentiment. Ironically, it was the artist who was first to heed this new politics, the intrusion of which into his absolutely apolitical, or even anti-political, realm, supposedly transcendent of anything petty at all, was uncommonly resented and rejected heretofore.

            The artist and the intellectual, the scientist and the lawyer, and above all others, so to speak, the physician, flocked to the NSDAP. Doctors as a profession boasted the highest party-member rates, partly due to the new regime’s promotion of eugenics, but also due to the clear-cutting of all Jewish medical professionals. The fact that many prominent members of the culture-producing sectors were of Jewish descent was simply an outcome of their heritage being prevented from pursuing other vocations was somehow lost. Of course, if any specific social group is targeted as being fit only for this or that, they will, over time, excel at it. They will, over time, develop networks internal which favor their in-group participation in a more longitudinal manner. The Nazis were adept at rewriting Germanic history into myth, but Hitler himself had more personal reasons for doing the same with his own biography. Perhaps it was so, that when he took in a performance of Rienzi in 1904, this was the ‘beginning of it all’, but surely it was three years later, with the rejection letter from the Vienna School of Art that set his resentment in motion. How many other art schools were there in Europe at the time? If one was 21st on the list of the very best, where only the top 20 are invited, one would think one would with some clearance actually get into a number of others. This fact too, was lost.

            Even so, it is not entirely fair to say that once those of Jewish descent were purged from cultural production only the mediocre remained. Otto Dix, an anti-Nazi expressionist, is a shining counter-example, one of the great artists of the interwar period and as ‘Aryan’ as they came. And even Hitler himself was a competent limner and a well-studied architect. But his real genius lay in graphic design. To this day, no symbology widens the eyes as does the suite of media bearing the half-twisted swastika; banners, flags, uniforms, standards, letterhead and many others. A whole-souled acolyte of Wagner, whose own anti-Semitism is well-known if potentially equivocal – in its singling out of Jewishness as an instance of the wider problem of ethnicity as a regression, for instance – Hitler became his own impresario. For the German of culture, it was clear that while those who were Jewish had indeed contributed mightily to European dominance, it was equally transparent that Gentiles could carry the torch without their help. Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Goethe, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger; well, yes, we’ve got some game after all.

            And thus today? The same fomenting fulminations are afoot as were present in the 1920s, this time in the United States and not so much in Germany. The same resentment building itself into a movement of political ressentiment, the same mistrust of government and its minions, the same disdain and mockery of those who create in the arts, the same ignorance of literature and of philosophy – ‘only God knows the truth of things’, that is, their God – and this reiterative refrain begins in the 1980s. Yet we must ask, and at this very moment, is not the same blithe and sometimes even blatant sense of the blasé evident in how those of Jewish descent who do dominate the modern mass media in all of its lower cultural forms, as well as the now much-less targeted high culture, as well a reprise of the same attitude and self-perception present in the bygone Berlin and Vienna sets? Seinfeld defending Israel at Duke? Convocation from an elite culture-producing space, its design and entire look mindful of nothing other than a smallish party rally, with not the king but rather the court jester presiding, cuts a rather febrile figure to my mind. A mimicry and a mockery at once, such events result in some Lovecraftian hybrid, a ‘thing that should not be’.

            Beyond the specific spaces, behind the publisher’s closed doors, within the select circles of Kultur if not the heated tin roof of society itself, the coming victims of Holocaust II await their less chosen fates. And yet this is the happenstance of history repeating itself, without grace and outside of a wider Zeitgeist. People of Jewish descent know, more than any of the rest of us, that there is no Zionist conspiracy. It would then seem prudent if they did not continue to give the impression that there were.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

This is War

This is War (The difference between forgetting and suppressing)

            At seventeen, my father left his home in Winnipeg for Halifax, lied about his age, and signed on with the Royal Canadian Navy, participating in the tail end of the Battle of the Atlantic. His act was one of both liberation and defiance, given his directly Mennonite heritage. Serving in the military was the most radical thing someone like him could have done at that time. The navy nonetheless gave him a non-combat position on the supply ship HMCS Provider. Still at mighty risk, her crew was not expected to fight per se. This satisfied the faith requirement of a background he had sought to reject, not on any theological grounds of course, but rather those filial, for youth, a much more common conscientious objection. We are fortunate today in Canada and elsewhere that our youth do not have to make those kinds of decisions in that kind of way, at least for now.

            But the filial bond-cum-bondage yet weighs heavily upon youth. The available response of the moment are the protests on university campuses scattered around much of the democratic world. To participate in them must make young people feel like they are standing up for something, as well as for themselves, which is likely the deeper import of such actions. And while it is true that war is a horrifying thing that no wholly sane person would ever wholly endorse, protesting against Israel, in this case, might be likened to someone who protested against Britain just before the time my father joined up to defend her and her allies. And to those who suggest that Israel has ‘gone too far’ in their response to being attacked, we can only remind such persons that there is in fact no such thing in warfare.

            Indeed, history tells us that the mistake is always the converse; not going far enough at the right time. The Reich made several of these errors, incomprehensibly though indeed, thankfully, when their usual tactical acumen seemed to break down. But in each case something else was at work. Their first mistake – such a phrase might have been a lesser title in a multi-volume Churchillian history epic – consisted of not annihilating the Allied Expeditionary Force hemmed in at Dunkirk, something the German forces could easily have accomplished, Their general ground command thought it unworthy to engage in such slaughter – though Göering and his air force did not – and refused to finish in this way, since the actual fight was over. The second occurred when, on the face of it, inexplicably, the Luftwaffe stopped attacking at the very point the RAF was out of resources, thereby ending the Battle of Britain. Here, Hitler had suggested moving air units to the East in preparation for Barbarossa, and also had new planes and pilots sequestered for this larger affair to come. The decision was premature, and would come back to haunt the Reich soon enough. One can say the entire campaign tactic, attacking from the air, was flawed in the first place, given that Britain would have succumbed through an all-out U-boat embargo and undersea attack on its large naval surface ships, thereby opening up the channel for an amphibious assault. The third error was directly attributed to Hitler himself, in disallowing Guderian to take Moscow before Kiev had fallen and the seasonal weather changed, abruptly and radically. The fourth and final error was also Hitler’s alone; attacking Kursk in Operation Citadel. Preserving what was then still the finest and best-equipped army in the world, even if also by then with no prospect of striking themselves a decisive blow against Russia, would likely have given the Reich enough lag time to develop their own atomic bomb.

            These are all errors of omission, if you will. To leave one member of Hamas standing is, for the Israeli Government at this juncture, both an admittance of a kind of defeat, but as well, an invitation to restore and restock that military group, patent enemies of Israel and of the Jewish people in general. And so their assault continues unabated, with the reality of both heightening suffering and misery, but also the risk of creating the image of becoming a political pariah in the eyes of the world. But the world is not at stake in Palestine, and it is perhaps too easy to stand back and direct as if it were. What is rather at stake is, aside from the existence of the Jewish state itself, is our perception of what constitutes war once it is well underway. If a young person were to ask me, does anything then go, anything at all?’ both the short answer and the long answer consist of one word. Only through either a dated sense of honor – Dunkirk – conflicting goals – Britain – or deliberate incompetence coupled with narcissism – The East in general – does warfare pause itself. Originally a local error, the expelling of payload over London because the Heinkels involved couldn’t find their assigned targets, rapidly degenerated into a town-for-town destruction, culminating in the firestorms of Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden amongst other lesser lights. Did Hamas not understand, when they struck first, that they would invite a terrible reckoning upon the people they claim to represent? And unlike a few air commanders of one specific bomber group, Hamas never supposed it made an error.

            If the human conscience tells us to stop, history tells us to finish. History is not merely written by the victor, or at least, political and military history tends to be, so it is also lived, or at least, lived better. The Reich was a few tactical moments away from world domination, their stated goal. And Israel itself has been the lucky winner in at least one other historical moment of its own short history, the moment wherein the Syrian armored columns actually broke through all Israeli lines in the 1973 war. Their commander was so astonished that he disbelieved his own sudden, and total, success, and therefore turned back instead of barreling straight into Tel Aviv. The history of warfare is filled with ‘what ifs’, hence providing endless fascination for the dilettantes who enjoy war gaming, but this is a mere aside afforded by backreading. Yet given this iterative theme, modern states have equipped themselves with foolproof, failsafe, weapons which, once launched, have both no need of, but also no recourse for, second-guessing decisions in medias res. And this condition, in which every member of the human species lies and is compelled to live, as well as all life on earth as collateral, is surely more profoundly protested by the youth of today, who have apparently bodily forgotten it.

            For nuclear weapons represent the ultimate ‘all-in’ approach. With their possession, there is no holding back, no lack of finish, no quarter given or taken. And they serve another, perhaps more symbolic purpose; to represent the essence of warfare without the need to express its reality. For this lack of care, this radical recklessness and this revolutionary ruthlessness, is war, and thus each of us might heed the always sensible option not to start one in the first place.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Friction of Faction

The Friction of Faction (and the fiction of fraction)

            It must be a burden to be the same, to bear the mark of sameness rather than that of difference. That I am as another, and thus the expectations that this other has of me are merely that which I have of her and nothing else, must appear uninteresting at the least, if not an outright waste. For who am I that I must be thou? Am I only thus, is that what I am fit for, fit to be? And who are you to make such a demand upon me? At once, who am I to declare myself as the goal of your action, or of your very being? Sameness is our human condition, but it is one which is filled with shame and resentment. And so, we seek the difference within the sameness, the diversity in the homogeneity. And we do so with a desperation which has of late become a fetish. What once was the default – this small group is ‘the people’, is what is human, and everyone else is something else – in our time becomes a contraption. If the default was a fault of misrecognition and parochialism, a severe and ultimate understatement of the species-reality, then is it surely not the error of modern global society that we tend to overstate our case?

            Or is it the same question merely scaled? For in declaring difference to be the de facto condition, over against sameness, are we not reiterating, though with by far a more cosmopolitan sensibility, the original fiction of faction? Distinguishing ourselves based on inherited traits, phenotypic and not accrued, and then even, perversely, remarking upon their degradation – this repeats, though in an obverse manner, the antique atmosphere which surrounded the stigmata, the ‘mark’ which denoted a slavish caste and thus nature; one has cancer, one is a cancer survivor and so on – appears not only shallow but as well too easy a thing. It avoids the question, as we have stated elsewhere, of the ‘who’; who am I? Such avoidance behavior seems the norm in our day, and we must then ask, why am I as a person something to so stringently avoid? Is it because I fear being reduced to sameness? And if so, what would this imply? Would I thence vanish without a trace of my being anything at all, simply because of my own humanity?

            In a society which is structurally unequal, and wherein opportunity odds are unevenly distributed, many, if not most, might appear to have small means afforded to them to distinguish themselves. We each of us might have a small circle, and are ‘known’ to be this or that within it, but are unknown beyond it. Schutz has famously outlined the topography of the social selfhood. My knowledge, of myself, of others, of society and of history etc. can be mapped, with sufficient accuracy but also intended metaphor, as with all cartographic representations. From the highest peak of intimacy – never quite closing in upon itself since there are things, perhaps unconsciously understood, once again, by way of distended and sometimes absurdly drawn-out metaphor, of which we are otherwise unaware – to what Schutz referred to as the ‘hinterland’ of awareness, and beyond which lies only the unknown for now, or, perhaps yet the absolutely unknowable, my Dasein is surrounded on all sides by relative degrees of knowledge and ignorance. The two are by no means mutually exclusive and, as people change throughout the life course, I can also say with an odd confidence that all the confidences in the world do not permit me to state with utter certainty either self-knowing or comprehension of the other, no matter how intimate. ‘I thought I knew you’ is thus a cliché plaintiff, whether appearing in a lover’s tiff or deathbed confessional, between trusted work colleagues or less trusted political bedfellows. In a word, knowledge of the other is not so different than is self-knowledge.    

            This is so because at base, we remain after all the same thing, to ourselves and to others, and it is the headlong flight from this species essence that entangles Dasein in and as a skein of social roleplays and normative presumptives. The fraction of what we do know, about ourselves, others, or again the world at large, must be ledgered against what we merely tell ourselves we know. This fraction contains its own fictions. The ‘personal fable’ is, anthropologically speaking, perhaps the most common. It can be considered a cultural item only in social organizations known to practice it in their sameness, and through some thematic variations, to indeed assert this sameness as a general intent. I am not the ‘son of eagle’ in order to make fraternal a cultural whole, but rather as a fabulous construction, though one vouchsafed by a Cree shaman, which reasserts my individuation. But if I were an indigenous person, this mark would be an effort toward the homogenous. Yet in confirming my identity in his cosmology, this shaman was not thus conferring upon me an indigenous status. For him, it merely affirmed, with some astonishment on his part, as I recall, the wider reach of forces that are generally beyond the human ken. This is a relic of the universe enchanted, and has no place in modernity. He knew this, I knew this, and yet.

            Even so, the rush to difference is itself majority fictional. The camaraderies of the faction, the dividing up of what is in camera already a clique – why would one care to ‘identify’ someone else at all; are we now all our own detectives? Is the prevalence of detective fiction in our entertainment giving us a sense that we must not only own our own actions but as well with some visage ashamed own up to them? – are artificial in the face of living and dying the both. And the conflict that seems also so desired and desirable and which can only be attained by overdoing factionalism, of making fractious the fractions of our fellow humans who would surely, in an ideal world, be more like us than anything else – the other headlong flight in evidence, that away from traditional social roles in non-Western cultures, is testament to this – is mainly a fictional conflict. In fiction, if there is no conflict there is no story. What then, we might imagine, would be the story of humankind without that same conflict? What would people truly live for? Is this why the yet-radical ethics of the Koinonium is still so rarely in evidence?

            But history is not fantasy, even if it too contains its fraction of fiction. Reality, social through and through when it comes to human perception, is also not a fiction. That it sometimes rests upon fictive kinships is no argument against its reality function. The sleight of hand of fiction is that though it is not real, it comes across as if it were. There is no real danger here as long as we keep our heads; this there is a story and this here is history, this over here is theater and this right here is dramaturgically inclined social relations, this out there is fantasy and this in here is who I am, who I really am. And even if I cannot know myself in the entirety of my being – I change over time, memory falters, pride is present, the pitch and lens of the generalized other shifts gradually across generations – nevertheless at any one time I retain the Gestaltkreis of a whole self, the personhood who I am, mine ownmost being. Is this being so paltry that I daily seek to forget it, avoid its presence, fictionalize it and divide it into fractions of itself, join it to external faction, seek the ‘friction of the day’? No, rather it is our inability to accept ourselves for who we are as human beings that promotes the fiction that we can be something else. Yet each of our replacements contains much more phantasmagoria than was originally self-present. We have in fact inverted the cartographia mundi of the self, and now dwell in the very deepest of trenches, unseen as a being, unseeing as a person. Perhaps the quite intended paradox of desiring identity difference is such that we can no longer be identified at all.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, social theory, religion, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Donate your Brain to Pseudo-Science!

Donate Your Brain to Pseudo-Science! (a tax-free way to lose your mind)

            It is always less taxing not to think. The unthinking person can still take action in the world. The mundane sphere presents few opportunities for thought in any case, so one need not generally bother with it at all. We only need learn to use our technology, in the same manner as we have already, most of us, learned to apply norms and act according to the mores of the day. We do not, in either case, need to know the ins and outs, in any great or grave detail, of either Techne or Hexis. For the one, this is the job of the natural sciences, for the other, those social. The German translator of J.S. Mill’s System of Logic bequeathed to the discourse the lasting if unquiet distinction between ‘Natur’ and ‘Geist’ in providing the prefixes for Mill’s original sense of ‘natural’ and ‘moral’. Mills used the term ‘moral’ in his ‘moral sciences’ in the same way as Durkheim would later state that there was no other ‘moral order than society’. The Naturwissenshaften are seemingly straightforward, the Geisteswissenschaften seemingly less so.The first center around objects and phenomena that can be measured, even if in high energy physics such numbers can conflict and that there is an ‘observer effect’ at work. There is no object or posited force in the cosmos that escapes its own order, and this order is non-moral as well as non-moralizing.

            It is strikingly different with the social sciences or human sciences. Not only is the object the same as the subject – we are studying ourselves, which only could not give someone like Durkheim pause because of his very French nonchalance regarding other like conditions; ‘religion is society worshipping itself’, he famously declared in 1912, and so why not have a science dedicated to studying society itself? – that object is both moral and indeed moralizing, and all the more so today it appears. Mill recognized this with a typical rationality, including understanding that because the moral sciences centered around humanity, they must not only include women by definition but also that women should be doing the research as well as men. Harriet Martineau, the first person to write a social science methods book and also the first female fieldworker, was an associate of Mill’s, amongst a number of other high profile early woman scientists. And though the inventor of positivism, Auguste Comte, coined the term sociology, Martineau was the first actual sociologist. One might suggest at this juncture that anti-moralizing is still moralizing, but there it is. For built right into the very idea of self-study is the destabilizing presence of the ‘spirit’ or Geist.

            The career of the human sciences was, over the past two centuries or so, often held up by the sense that it could not in fact be scientific at all, a view some hold even today. One could be forgiven for simply replying, ‘well if it didn’t trouble Weber, it shouldn’t trouble us’, but there is more to it than such a nod to authoritative analytics. And the critique of the human sciences was not a one-way street, with just natural scientists disdaining their ‘softer’ cousins. From within the ranks of the moral analysts a bevy of hortatory criticism emanated, with the likes of Ian Jarvie, Edmund Leach, Malinowski and Kroeber as well the founder of behaviorism, John Watson and most famously his student, B.F. Skinner, weighing in on how ‘backward’ were their respective fields, ‘mystical’, and even counting ‘magical thinking’ as a kind of object. Pitirim Sorokin, in his Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences (1956) – of which I own a signed and dedicated first edition, no less, speaking of fetishizing the object – dismantles the hocus-pocus of both the critiqued and the critics alike. Closer to our own day, the Weber scholar and philosopher of science Stanislaw Andreski, in his Social Science as Sorcery, (1972), makes no hoary bones about declaring much of the Geisteswissenschaften to be generally fit only for a museum, and some of their contents even to be non-existent.

            Even so, it can be also be said that this back and forth is part of a healthy scientific discourse, a necessary dynamic so that the wheat and chaff of investigation and interpretation can be separated and contrasted with one another. And the sciences ‘proper’ too were not without their like critics, most notably, Thomas Kuhn and later on, Bruno Latour, whose argument, if ever actually understood by the anti-science crowd, would with great irony be quite devastating. So, while there has clearly been an ever-present element of both sciences natural and social which is given to epistemological slippage, the critical discussion coming from within these discourses has generally been enough to identify the problematic feature. But not always.

            Eugenics remains the most egregious example of a study that everyone across the board for some sixty years thought was science. It was not limited regionally, like Lysenkoism, it was not practiced only by applied specialists, such as anthropometry, and it was not associated with any specific politics of the day, which ultimately was its most insidious and dangerous ruse. We have to remind ourselves that the Reich was merely an extension, in its policies and practices, of what everyone thought at the time and long leading up to that time. This aside from Anti-Semitism itself, which was ubiquitous. Eugenics was the source of this sensitivity made sensibility, bigotry turned into science and thus made ‘objective’ by it. There is a eugenics institute to this day, though privately funded only, and sociobiologists, who skirt the very boundary of a form of self-hatred as human beings, still top the best-seller lists from time to time. The idea that superiority, especially that in ‘intelligence’, can be accounted for by ethnicity, gender, or other structural variables dies hard due to the very sense that we are yet in ignorance of the ultimate workings of human consciousness.

            All of this takes us directly back to the original puzzle which confronted Mill: how does one design a logic in which subject and object are essentially the same thing? What kind of epistemology is viable for such a condition? Science is not only a demythology but also very much a deontology, which suggests that any essence of thinghood as the natural sciences explain it has nothing of Being in it at all, and thus can be ‘reduced’ to its relevant quanta. We have encountered little enough in our nascent study of the cosmos to suggest otherwise. But from the first, the social scientist comes up against nothing less than a fully-fledged ontology, living and breathing, professing its soul to itself and anyone else who might be willing to, perhaps naively, listen. How does one study something ‘like that’ at all? Attacked from all sides, with philosophers joining scientists in deriding the student of humanity – the first engaged in protecting its interpretative territory, the second its good name – it would seem that the very idea of the social sciences itself was a non-starter. But due to the exiguity of the object, as well as the simple fascination of any thinking being reflecting upon itself as well as the problem, not of ‘other minds’ or the Other per se, but rather in getting along with the other, the human sciences have, in fits and starts, nevertheless flourished. Economics, that hard-hearted ‘dismal science’ which is not about nature at all, remains high in the human saddle, and its micro counterpart, psychology, is the analytic space from which all of the ‘bleeding-heart’, if mostly equally dismal, public policies emanate. Geography reminds us that we still live in and on a world, and anthropology and sociology have gifted that same world to all of the newly fashionable ‘studies’ that, for the Thomas Huxleys of the day, strain the definitions of both science and discourse alike.

            The conflict about what is and what is not pseudo-science is thus never a town and gown affair. The physicist nods his head to the chemist but that’s all he does, the biologist shakes his head at the psychologist, the economist sniffs at the sociologist, the anthropologist wrings her hands at cultural studies and yet nursing, and the philosopher turns away from all of it in a piece. That anti-scientism targets its apparent opposite tells us of a home truth as well; that some scientists take their work for a kind of modernist and rationalist religion. And yet the political situation does not admit any easy egress, for if the scientist explicates her vocation along lines Weberian let alone from the perspective of a Latour, then all might as well be lost, for once the regressive anti-science person gets a hold of the presence of both historical and epistemological relativism within science itself, its very existence can be called into question. To be absolutely objective insofar as one can, science truly is ‘a candle in the dark’, as Sagan described it. It is only a tool, subject to human error, but it remains the best we have. The anti-scientist does not only disbelieve in this sensibility, he also feels that science is itself a fraud; that there is, in a word, no difference between science and pseudo-science.

            This fundamental opposition to all of the sciences, be they of nature or of humanity, cannot be eroded by rational argument. Even the most direct evidence to the senses is dismissed – witness the malingering doubt regarding climate change – simply because the source is itself invalidated: ‘Science says what? Well, that’s obviously wrong, immoral, ungodly, secularist, sacrilegious.’ I do not think that most scientists understand the scope and depth of the opposition ranged against their trade and its discourses. Trained to accept both authoritative argument and sensate evidence, learned in mathematics and the details of technologies, the scientist imagines that she is only an adept within a universal suffrage of thinking. But in fact, most people have no idea how science works or even why it exists. This is another reason why febrile persons from within the academic discourses have of late suggested that there can be ‘indigenous science’ or epistemology, or that different cultures have ‘different’ sciences. No and no. This is the truer pseudo-science. Science itself is a formal discourse which studies in a systematic manner the patterns and structures of nature and culture. It is neither Hexis nor Praxis. The Greeks invented it, and no one else even came close. For all other cultures, for whatever local or historical reason, remained ensconced in their tradition; their cosmogonies may be beautiful but they are nevertheless mythical. And even if our shared Jamesian consciousness is separated from the infinite ‘by only the filmiest of screens’, it will fall to science alone to discover and explain just how this is so. That is, if it still exists.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, social theory, aesthetics and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary ‘moral sciences’ for over two decades.

The Odyssey of Theodicy

The Odyssey of Theodicy (A Metacriminal Career)

            For the theist, a theodicy of some sort is generally required in order to resolve the apparent contradiction between a benevolent divinity and the existence of that which is deemed evil in His creation. Leibniz coined the term in 1710, but Levinas, amongst other contemporary writers, have stated forcefully that theodicy is, not a false problem, as the atheist would have it, but rather a kind of ‘blasphemy’; an insult to Godhead, given that one is imagining that God is Himself ultimately responsible for evil. Of course, it depends on the kind of God one invokes, for even Yahweh, the object of Job’s resistance as well as that of the post-Holocaust Jewish writers in the history and philosophy of religion, is not a God of love and grace, but rather one demonstrating some kind of vengefulness and ‘jealousy’. Certainly, the Hebrews had placed themselves in a liminal condition, by first electing a specifically ethnic mascot God but without giving Him the moral scope to ethically wax and wane along with human action in the world. Yahweh was still a God beyond history, a divinity of the Act, and not of action. It is only with what is referred to as the ‘new covenant’ that we see a God, not only on earth for the first time, but also one that declares only the good and only love and those for all, through the enlargement of grace and the mechanism of forgiveness.

            It is with this later advent that the problem of theodicy more truly arises. For the antique Gods, evil was something that humans dealt with, even if it was itself dealt by the Gods themselves on a regular basis. Good was rare, and so the bad, if not the outright evil, was something one could generally expect. The barbarian was beneath good and bad, and thus could be considered evil simply in his presence in the world. For the Greeks, this amounted to almost everyone else. They excerpted the Egyptians from this blanket indictment simply because they are aware of this civilization’s astonishing accomplishments. But for the Egyptians, the only evil which did exist was the soul’s recidivism, expressed as one not having lived up to one’s innate abilities over the life-course. For the Greeks, the greatest evil was hope, since it proffered a sense of false consciousness to anyone who maintained it overlong. It is of great interest, given the historical career of humanity’s inhumanity, that something such as hope has retained not only its significance in our collective imagination, but also its very being in a world of evils. For the theist, this is a sign that God is Himself not dead, at least not yet. For the atheist, hope is presumably a more evolutionary designed trait, though equally proprioceptive in its oft tacit presence in our lives.

            It does seem a tad irresponsible to ascribe to any sort of divinity the origin and malingering presence of what is called evil. Indeed, Ernst Becker suggests that very term is now archaic, made anonymously ‘banal’ by Weberian dynamics, including and especially  Entzauberung, of which such banality is presumably a part. It suggests that the good as well becomes, if not utterly banal, at least blithe and circumstantial, and following from this, uninteresting outside of the specific action in which it occurs. Was this then the social and historical destiny of the neighbor figure, one may ask? However this may be, the idea that it is a God’s fault that evil exists seems to me to be pathetic, a kind of avoidance behavior, so if theodicy were an ethical issue rather than simply a logical problem due to the presence of a certain kind of ontological model, I would be inclined to agree with Levinas and company. But just as we cannot murder any God based upon a Theoditical condition from which we appear unwilling to ourselves egress – such and act would be a mere rationalization set up against historical forces, as well as way in which to preserve our human ego in the face of those same large-scale and discursive dynamics – we cannot be content simply to kill ourselves either. For a human death does not meet either the design specifications, or meet up with the higher drama, of a deicide. If we ‘decide to deicide’, if you will, then it must be due rather to an acceptance of a different kind of human insight and perhaps also maturity. Somewhat ironically, the death of God has everything to do with the life of Man.

            In this, theodicy belatedly becomes a false problem, since it rests in the belief that there is not only Godhead but that this same divine presence is for the good, and is itself the good. These are two very broad assumptions, and anyone who attempts their dual leaps of faith, since they involve two quite different questions, must immediately also acknowledge that the human heart is rather the seat of evil, and thus sets itself up in opposition to that divine. More clear-headed is, I imagine, the idea of godhead but without any specific ethical rider placed upon it. Another form of being, certainly, but without an historical interest, human history being so defined by ethical action in real time. This is a more contemporary view of divinity, and it is expressed in popular culture through the science-fantasy professional ethic of the ‘prime directive’ and like policies, which specifically disallows advanced cultures to influence their more primitive cousins, though in theory it would apply to any kind of cross-cultural encounter. But more seriously, it is also expressed in psychopathology, wherein the person who imagines God is speaking to them, or equally so, extraterrestrials hounding them, is labeled as schizoaffective. In a word, we are not, in our modern scene, to think ourselves favored in any manner imaginable, for it is this idea, lending itself to the sense of both a superiority soteriological as well as material, which is the very root of all evil in the social world.

            And so we circle back, in a sense, to the Hebrew critique of those who seek to escape from the confrontation with their own character, exemplified in Babel. As Sherlock Holmes put it, ‘those who attempt to transcend their own nature tend to fall below it’, and in the context of that particular adventure, this epigram would apply equally to a Darwinian world as to one Augustinian. The Babelian aspiration, to find a way not only to be like the Gods actually are, but also, and as a necessary outcome of this false dialectic, to escape the problem of internecine theodicy – why is a being such as myself given to both good and evil, and sometimes at once? – is equally a rationalization of our finite powers as it is a hoped-for egress from our human finitude. The recognition that we are not Gods, at first a deflation and even an embarrassment or yet a shamefulness for antiquity, becomes in our own day a way in which we understand that the Gods also are not us. It is perhaps this converse statement that, more than anything else, provides the opened space wherein which deicide can eventually occur. When it does, we also gain a fuller comprehension of the Christian autohagiographic similitude; that the God of love is no longer divine but has become human, though in a way only a God could effect. It is this act-into-action, no longer metaphoric but quite real as defined by what one can know of history by definition, that should provide for us the role model given the stakes; we too must become human. Only in so doing will we gain a lasting appreciation for our finitudinal condition, one by which a fragile future for our species becomes much more plausible than it is at present.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, religion, education, aesthetics, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.