Agrarianism – GV Loewen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veni, Vidi, Vichy?

From 1940-1944 Vichy was the ignominious puppet government for the Third Reich’s occupation of France as a whole. Consisting of collaborators, it toppled during the allied liberation of that part of Europe. In one of its few acts of humanity, it allowed one specific prisoner of war camp to become the only degree granting agency within the universe of camps that erupted across the continent like a radically metastasized cancer. This camp housed many important young intellectuals of the day and well beyond, including Mikel Dufrenne and Paul Ricoeur. The latter’s late work concerning the concept of justice and problem of historical forgiveness is no doubt testament to the time he served in such a place.

But after two decades of time served in Afghanistan, what is the character of forgiveness here? No anti-Taliban Afghan would forgive us, for example. We abandoned them to a fate which was not at all preordained, though it will prove fatal to any possible vision which the vast majority of that country’s people might have begun to foster. Overnight, their culture regressed approximately 2.6 millennia. In a word, returned to the barbarism and blight of the pre-generalized ethics predating the trinity of newer Agrarian epoch religious world systems, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Yes, the Taliban claim to be Islamic, but this is a veneer, a convenient hat to wear, even a mask of gentility, perhaps. What they are is what all marginalized and neo-colonialized groups are: the mostly rural peasantry of a mode of production long surpassed in both discourse and geo-politics but stubbornly hanging about in the lands thus far forsaken by both capitalism and humanism.

For previous to the advent of Buddhism, agrarians lived in caste systems that naturalized the sense in which certain classes of persons were deemed to be at best irredeemable – at least in their present incarnations – and at worst sub-human, even non-human. Hindu-Dravidian, Egyptian-Judaic, and Greco-Roman systems were quite honest about the hierarchy of pedigrees animating human beings. Slavery was a given in the West for example, with no need to justify it until the world of ideas began to slowly alter its course from mythos to logos. Even so, within each of these earlier trinity of Agrarian epoch belief systems the seeds for a common ethics and a universal understanding of one’s fellow human as not simply akin to oneself, but as another to self, as kindred with self, were present. These would include the origins of the scientific worldview in Greece, the sense of moral weight within a life lived in Egypt, the relative equality of intimacy between the dominant sexes in India, the idea of a deity with a human, historical interest in ancient Hebrew thought, and so on. Even if the inertia of traditions dies hard, the very idea that in 2021 one could even think about a state that runs itself through such ancient and surpassed self-understanding is almost beyond the imagination.

And yet it remains as real. Today, women and children are the key chattel of yesteryear’s morals, and the reason why the abandonment of Afghanistan is so hard to bear in the West at least is that it exposes part of our own belief system for what it is. As did Death in Arcadia, the Taliban also dwell among us.

From Texan and Polish anti-abortion laws, to the absence of domestic abuse laws in Russia, to the lack of potable water for many Indigenous Peoples in Canada, to the physical coercion of children in East Asia and the United States and some few parts of Europe alike, not to mention the racial and ethnic inequalities pervading almost all large political regions, it is clear that the more ancient rubrics of what constitutes not only human life, but a moral life, resonate from far beyond their collective historical grave. Anywhere we observe ourselves disdaining the other not for what she is as a person but for what she supposedly represents as a type, we are practicing those pre-generalized moralities of the earlier agrarian trinity. The abhorrence of slavery which is itself a very recent sensibility and one not at all universally shared, should not blind us to our adherence to more informal practices of servitude, from bullying and lying to our children to the idea of private property and everything in between. It is sage to recall that nary a hierarchy is left standing with the newer ethics. Forbearance, the love of one’s enemies, the castigation of false prophets and prophecies alike, combined themselves in a trenchant and lasting historical critique of the civilizations that had rested upon the idea that there really were different types of human beings out there, to the point of those on the bottom requiring nothing and being ‘life unworthy of life’, to borrow a Nazi favorite.

In Afghanistan, young women in particular are so unworthy. But is it all that different for us? The tortured amalgam of our adoration of youth and yet our obsessive controlling of youth speaks to the same morality of ownership that was given its most grandiose forms in the culmination of the first sedentary civilizations. I worship you but you are mine nonetheless. You should be grateful to me for my affections, for an affection is all you are, in the end. An object of desire, a subject of my domain, pretty is as pretty does.

Now the explanation for our abandonment of ‘them’ comes into focus. This is not a mere convenience of politics, let alone some euphemism for ‘tough love’ – these countries need to look after their own problems, god dammit – nor is it a simple logistical failure in the face of a mere one-hundred thousand mostly pedestrian fighters who have nothing to lose in any case. All of these are symptomatic rather of a loss of determination, which is also the first sign of a yet deeper malaise: we are yet tempted by the same morality that has overtaken marginal Afghanis and created through them the Taliban and like forces. It works for us at a personal level – as small as is my life, thank god I’m not someone like him – and it works at the cultural level – for instance, youth needs to be sanctioned and molded into passive producers-consumers. In a word, it is we who are the primary source of unworthy life in this world, not a bunch of ex-peasant illiterates who have little grasp of the faith they claim membership in. For how can the West provide a role-model to the otherness of the world at large by reproducing social status and wealth hierarchies at pace, continuing to treat its children and youth as only partial humans with correspondingly partial human rights, and vehemently envisioning women as the uninscribed obelisks of phallic desire? (You are any man’s prize, you are thus every man’s prize). Our schools, the fashion system, the family, the sporting life, and even some of our legal codes continue to pay heed to the morality that states with certainty that some people are not worth as much as others, and that some fewer people, perhaps, may even be utterly worthless.

It was clearly not ‘worth’ our while to stick around protecting the youth of Afghanistan, of all places. The boys can become fodder for future conflicts, temporarily served by the girls who are to become enslaved to them in all ways. This more or less was the world before Prince Gautama had his revelation, and after over two and half millennia of conflicting values and histories, cultures and persons, we may well ask why we have ourselves become the latest Vichy government, collaborating not quite passively with the slavers, the murderers, the authoritarians, and most disturbingly, the old-world moralists of myth and inhumanity alike.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of over forty-five books in ethics, education, health, aesthetic and social theory, and more recently, epic fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.