Tag: ethics

Parental Wrongs

Parental Wrongs (statistical reality and immoral panic)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the Petty Secures the Profound

How the Petty Secures the Profound (opposites contract)

            Certainly, there are few differences more notable than that between the sublime and the ridiculous, but as we move closer together in our comparative concepts, the apparent distinctions tend to be overblown. Bliss is sublime, love merely profound, and no one would call every and all the individual ‘slings and arrows of officials’ ridiculous, though all are petty. The ends of the human emotional and experiential spectrum are also most brief. We hear and read, in song and in text, about the proverbial ‘moment of bliss’, as well as a sudden feeling that life itself may be lensed as one big joke, played upon us, of course; perhaps the outcome of a God’s ridicule. Just as, however, a routine become otiose, and in its own way extremely so with seemingly endless repetition, even the sublime may be misunderstood, misrecognized and indeed, even become unrecognizable without the ongoing background noise of the quotidian. We require a regular basis upon which to compare our experiences, shared or no, and the day-to-day quality of waking consciousness is almost overfull with the expected and the rote, much of it in itself without a lot of other merit. The petty does after all secure the profound, and in a contractuality of opposites, but in exactly what manner?

            First, through majority. The petty acts of the powerful and powerless alike contain another kind of combined force. Just as, in military matters, we understand that at a certain threshold, quantity becomes its own unique quality – both Russia and the United States have used this tactic; strength in sheer numbers metastasizes itself – so the pettiness of everyday life becomes an entire social world. Not only do we expect others to run along certain rails, narrow-gauge to be sure but also travelling more or less straight down the line, we have the same expectation of ourselves. Putting ourselves ‘out’ carries more of a meaningfulness than a meaning. This ‘outness’ is very much the stepping away from normative rules and policy regulations, and in so doing, we are required to make an unusual effort. It is not only noted by others when we do contrive to countermand the orders of the day, but also by our own sense of what should have been done. Thus the ‘must’ of any action does, in general, come against the ‘shalt’ of any act, for it is the latter that carry the weight of ongoing human life on their experiential shoulders; shoulders which only gain in strength the more often the ‘same’ experience is rendered in the world. The vast majority of time is spent engaging with and in petty acts, and these are committed as well by the vast majority of people. We may bemoan their overbearing, and indeed, sometimes as well overweening, presence, but nevertheless they contain the necessary, if not sufficient, measure for the profound to take its relatively rare place.

            Second, through ritual. The orison of the day is always directed below. My thoughts may be noble, my vision afar, but I am well aware that everything in this life is but, and thus requires of me, a single step at a time, perhaps even conjuring a cliché-ridden image if such action is paused and viewed overlong. Even in spaces labeled sacred, ritual functions in this same way: it is the bringing together of community so that it can place itself in the way of the profound, not itself create it. To judge mundane life as ritualistic is correct but unfair. It’s very mundanity takes the world into a closer proximity to my being, for through ritual I myself am also placed within the folds of an existential envelope that then becomes the vehicle for the Kerygma of both history and contemporary life to be posted to me. In this, I am adjacent to experience in the hermeneutic sense, the novel and the unexpected, just as I am alongside, tarrying perhaps, as a Dasein filled with curiosity at best, the meaning of said world in its worlding. Ritualism may be scorned as both a dimwitted excuse for meaning as well as the resonance only of a tired tradition, but in fact it serves, by its very repetition, the same deity as does bliss. Its work is by far greater and its demands upon us mighty when compared to what is sublime, blissful, or even profound. Without an endless parade of prosaic parodies and petty paradiddles the both, what with suddenness and uncanniness overfills our senses with a glimpse of the shared soul, the otherworld, or the collective consciousness, could not occur at all.

            Thirdly, through sharedness. Just as does the petty occupy the efforts of the majority of people and fill up the majority of time, so too these acts create a world which is shareable without much corresponding effort. The work has already been done, one might say, and while we tend not to enjoy any fruits of this combined labor, we also tend to define what is pleasurable far too narrowly. Is it not a pleasure, in the sense of being relieved of a task or duty, to go through one’s day without any hitches of any kind? Is it not as well pleasureful to return home to find it intact and exactly the way in which I left it, pending the scope of its untidiness or lack of staples? And surely it must also be something to be enjoyed to engage in the usual pleasantries in the shower alone or at the workplace with colleagues each day; the morning breakfasts, the scuttlebutt of work-breaks, the promise of affection without affectation but as well, without the sense that my mate and I should reconquer paradise on a nightly basis.  Speaking of the ridiculous, our mostly vain attempts to conjoin the sublime, to literally sublimate ourselves, are also pleasurable in their amusement simply because we know they are bound to fail. In failure too there is relief, for to succeed each time we set ourselves to love, to work, or to yet to play, would nullify any of the humanity held within such categories of shared experience. Their most authentic value rather lies in their being shared, as vehicles for, and expression of, Mitsein.

            Fourthly, through their self-disdain. Our very derision of the petty becomes it; the shoe fits, as it were, and it is of the utmost that the quotidian in life wear that same footwear as do we ourselves when tasked with simply walking forward, oriented to the futurity of our being’s being-aheadedness. The horizon of the future proper ever recedes from us, but this too is both necessary and a good in itself, for the new can only be new once, and we must understand that balance between the living-on of the historical horizon and the motion of that other one, existential this time, and indeed travelling in the very opposite direction as the former. Mine ownmost death, as the singular function and sole iteration of this existential horizon, already owned by me through the fact of my birth and the reality of individuated life, provides the profound ingredient by which all those petty are assembled. It is the keystone of the historical arch, steadying the gateway through which I alone must walk. It is, once again, the aloneness of existential acts which adds to their profundity, and just as dreams may not be shared, so too I must face completing only my own being, and no others. I disdain death only in youth, as a necessary aspect of being young and feeling the immortality of a life which is just now becoming mine own. In and for youth, only love is real, and this befits a specific and passing phase of human life. But in this same phase I thus learn to disdain everything else, for the time being, and it is this lesson that carries me forward into a maturity in which I know how to tell the difference between the petty and the profound, even if the adoration attached to a singular gravitas has itself left me.

            Between and among these four elemental aspects of the value of pettiness – majority, ritual sharedness, and the disdainful – we find present almost all of our unthought goings-on, our relations with others as ‘the others’, our internalization of the norms of the generalized other, and the expectations of the looking-glass self. There is a mute beauty to their amalgam, a minor alchemy in their admixture. For we are not led to rare metals let alone the philosopher’s gem, but rather gain a hearth and home, sustenance and subsistence through them. The sorcerer must have a cauldron, the priest an altar, the thinker a study, the alchemist a laboratory, just as today’s heroes have their dwellings; the athlete his training facility, the entertainer her stage, and so on. The only reason we so unreasonably judge the mundane is so we can remain open to the irruptive; the more petty shall be the routine the more gravity shall have the extramundane. We are not jealous of the petty, and seek indeed to share it as one strives to share misery. We envy not the otiose and so we are more than willing to let the majority of our time overtake it. And we scoff at the meandering mumble of ritual, knowing as we do that its only function is to merely prepare the at first grudging ground. Securing the profound in human life cannot be over-planned, nor is it the stuff of magic, and just as the petty seems to reign uncontested in the social world, just so, it can never fully rein in the worlding of the world itself. For it is within this other movement, alien and anonymous, that the profound is brought home to us.

            Yet what is momentous must too be realized historically just as it must be recognized socially. It cannot retain its uncanniness and its visionary quality overlong. On our parts, we try not to utterly absorb it into the flux of mundane time, and in this we are mostly successful. Memory does not itself baulk at the uncanny, for there is no immediate danger in mere recollection. We must react, and even act, to place ourselves within the post-traumatic reliving of a profundity, and, other things being equal, what is profound to humanity is only half-buried in shadow. What I find, in taking the lighted space of Overbeing which also occurs to me from time to time, into that twilight, is that what is momentarily hidden too comes alive with its own luminosity. The darkling angels which convene at our bedside in times of crisis are not there to offer reprimand nay yet gloat; their act is to guide us through the landscape which their colleagues, as is known, fear to tread.

            Illness and loss, the parting of lovers and the parturition of children, the shipwrecks of projects taken and the abortions of those only planned, provide profound counterbalance to all of my successes, and their graven gravity is an anchor to all the levity of my fantastic dreams. For a human life cannot be lived solely in the brightest climes; this as well is the lot of well-spent youth alone. Most of human life is petty in both its design and its outcome, and this is why the vast majority of history remains unknown to us. And yet what delight we take in the rediscovery of even the most homely vessel of the ancient imagination; the clay pot or jar, the stone tablet, the primordial obsidian tool, for their craft and their work made our species what it is today, light and shadow the both. And through their utterly mundane presence do we realize the unutterable profundity of our species-essence in and as existence itself.

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

Venus Envy

Venus Envy (esthetic and aesthetic)

            It is almost always the goddess of love, not the god. Indeed, we are told that the truer god of love is that Christian, which lends itself to the problem Plato examines in the Phaedrus, wherein love is cited as a form of madness. If this is so, if the compelling vision of the beloved is taken as herself merely a sign of the presence of love both transcendental and ‘proper’, to stay civil, then to Plato we can simply add Nietzsche’s insight about us ‘being more in love with love itself than the beloved’. Between these two takes is played out the entire problematic of what love is and how it is perceived. It is striking that love is represented by the female form in the vast majority of cultural cases, suggesting at once, and especially in the Christian era, that while the hearth of sexuality is female while the Kerygma of love is feminine, and even the ‘eternal feminine’, of Goethe, which ‘lures us to perfection’. What then is this perfect love? Is it the mimesis of Jesus as a resonant presence in the world or yet an overcoming of his absence? Or is it a sense that when in love we rather transcend ourselves?

            What I will suggest here is that love carries within it two unquiet aspects: one, the esthetic of Eros and the aesthetic of what can be called ‘autothanos’. Erotic love is possessed of a well-known power. It is the outward expression of the desire for union, on the one hand, as well as the desire to lose oneself in the other. Most of us have experienced this form of love at least once, and if fortunate, multiple times, over the life course. Yet Eros, while affirming intimacy and unification, does deny the world, which is its chief weakness. Autothanatic love occurs when the loss of self in the other is no longer the key to the relationship in question. While the erotic replays this merger, here just at this present moment but thence needing and thus heeding iteration, the autothanatic is an actual state of being. It may be cautiously compared with Stendhal’s idea of the ‘second crystallization’ in love relationships. But the loss of self which is conjured by intensely erotic stimuli and the memory of union does not affect the personhood of the partners at hand, instead augmenting it. It is this augmentation that, if relations become more holistic over time spent together, carries me across myself and back into the world. I no longer have a heightened sense-perception of worldly experience, of the ‘colors brighter tastes better’ sort, but instead a superior worldview.

            This is expressed symbolically by the superiority of the gods themselves in Classical contexts, and the superiority of one’s ethical action in the world in Buddhism and Christianity, for instance. If my mate and I have overtaken ourselves – recall Rilke’s lines about how lovers are close to the ability of being able to see beyond death if they could also see beyond the presence of the beloved – and are also no longer moved only by the presence of the beloved other, we are then on the path to superior being as a way of being in the world. As an historical presence, this sensibility is made manifest in Jesus’ efforts to love all equally. It does not matter if this love is rejected by this or that person, as it inevitably will be, only that our own sense of what love actually is, as both a singular reality and an ethical ideal, welcomes the world into its embrace rather than denying its relevance, as does erotic love.

            Hence the nature of Eros is that it in-dwells the esthetic alone. At first sight, it is envy: ‘How beautiful she is, I wish she were mine!’ This is the ‘Venus envy’ of the would-be lover. It would suffer no harm upon the newly-lighted object, but at the same time, would never sacrifice itself to obtain her. Indeed, its purpose is to prove its worth to the other, and thus acts almost against the ideal of union. It stakes a claim to be its own being and in that, throws across the ultimate compliment, hoping for the same in return: ‘I would love you; I, another being like yourself yet almost wholly different.’ In one sense, this is why what used to be referred to as courtship ritual takes on the appearance of birds parading their plumage in the hopes of catching someone’s eye. Gender is here mostly immaterial, just as it becomes in love proper and thence absent all the more so in that autothanatic. And yet we cannot entirely dismiss the cultural suasion of the esthetic, as we are socialized to prefer a ‘type’ of other as a potential beloved, whether or not the details of this ideal mate attain such perfection in her physical or mental form. Given that the vast majority of relationships and marriages occur within social class boundaries, between persons of more or less the same educational backgrounds – these variables by far outstrip those ethnic and religious based – an ample part of esthetically driven love has nothing to do with ‘looks’. The key is rather a general recognizability. Even in ‘slumming’, we zero in on someone who fits an archetype: the adventurer in the male and the nurturer in the female, for example, as expressed in human form by the rebel who is running and who harbors a secret hurt that indeed the nurturing female, of whatever class but the higher the better, can both rein in and heal. In the meanwhile, the female’s family is scandalized, bringing the adventure home to roost, and the male’s family is heart-warmed, bringing in turn the nurturing into an otherwise utterly foreign territory.

            But the numbers do not lie. Such cross-class relationships tend not to stand the test of time, and never attain an autothanatic state, for their participants’ entire reason of being with an alien beloved is based upon playing out the theater of hero and heroine; in a word, the self has been lost before love itself could absent it. And so, while it may appear ironic and even misogynistic that Venus envy should be the surer path to authenticity in love, as well as its correspondent Freudian term, this sense of covetousness we must feel in order to make what otherwise could be anyone, a random individual human in whom I have no personal interest, into the object of love is quite necessary. Perhaps even most well-aligned life-chance variable intimacies never attain the second level, but nevertheless, they serve as rehearsals which eventually allow us to take that more profound leap. In doing so, we, in a dialectical movement, exert an Aufheben upon both the thesis of myself and the antithesis of herself. This uplifted union, which has at once, through this movement, bracketed the esthetic ambit of Eros and its proper love into a specific compartment of long-term relations as well as confining its esthetics to outward expressions of sexuality or sensuality – apparel, tone of voice, sentimentality, private fable and its attendant vocabulary, cosmetics and even health and fitness, all reside on this list of esthetic items – has now risen to the occasion which autothanos provides for it.

            In so doing, I am no longer conscious of being self-consciously allured by erotic union. At first, this realization may hit me as does a resigned rationalization, just as when one ages and one is no longer capable of daily or yet hourly sexual act. I must overcome the feeling of loss this relative absence of Eros inevitably occasions, and I find that the best manner of accomplishing this ethical demand is by widening the aperture of who can be loved in the first place. The esthetic is all about the ‘whatness’ of the object of love. In erotic intimacy I seek to lose my identity, merge it with the other, even for a short time. In fact, the both of us might feel slighted and thus distanced from one another if we did not take this merger in bits and bites. But the aesthetic vision of love overtakes all of this: it is no longer envious, perceives the other as a ‘who’ and not a ‘what’ in its move from object to subject, and does not so fervently attest to the narrow ideal of simply loving the one, especially at the expense of the world. This peculiar aesthetic motivates the autothanatic; it does not seek the conjury of magic which romance alone incurs between partners, but rather the transformation of alchemy, mirroring in its novel amalgam the ethical dialectic which as well must occur in order to for two persons to reimagine themselves as those who should share a life together.

            This willing loss of being-one, which we are calling here autothanatic, is the ethical aspect of Mitsein. ‘Being-with’ is well known to have as its phenomenological property the idea that the world becomes part of Dasein’s closest-to-hand; not the world entire, but something of that world – the beloved other – who has, in an irruptive event, made my Dasein into a less self-interested being. The beloved other is the world’s expression of the call to conscience, and indeed, her fuller presence to me enjoins a demand that nothing else in that same world can equal. Even so, the acknowledgement of and adoration offered to this other as the beloved, does not by itself impel us to gain the aesthetic ground of objective love. It provides the personal template, even at base, the attraction, as in esthetic beauty, for my Dasein to be willing to see in the wider world this ‘same’ beauty. I see it at first as the same, but ideally come to understand that personal beauty is only the ‘lure to perfection’ which the eternally feminine pronounces in both male and female alike. One might venture to say that there is also a ‘love at first sight’ directed to the world, but we only know how to fall into this event through the memory of doing so for another person like myself. As with that adolescent moment, I am at first envious as well of the world. Yet the world’s beauty is so diverse and vast as to put the lie to my resentment thereof, in a movement given simple but apt imagery by Nietzsche, when he speaks of the tide’s treasures washing up on a beach afore my witness. The tide takes away these precious items but then immediately replaces them with a new set. We find, if we live long enough outside of ourselves and through the love of the world our own personal beloved has herself represented unto us, that life itself is that tidal wash, allowing us a glimpse of just as many treasures of the world.

            Autothanatic love participates in this movement, for we too can be one of those precious things to others, and not just to another. It is this wider, less self-interested level of love that proclaims that we too are kindred with the aesthetic object, a perceptual event which transcends its art history context, its art market value, and its art methods formalism. For while the beloved other provides the model for the wider love, our most authentic and objective model of loving the world rests not in the beloved, but rather in art. It is art which has no need of the personal; it has never loved the one. Its entire instanciation lies in its ability to be understood by all, in whatever depth of profundity, just as one seashell on the beach before me may appear more intricate in its beauty than another. There are as many paths to perfection as there are loves in the world, but that said, there is only one perfection itself. Art allows even the personally unloved to gain that same vantage and advantage which Eros begins. In this, the call to conscience which is the love of the world offers its truer gift.

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

Sin Agog

Sin Agog (the radical propriety of conversion)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now you say it, now you don’t

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Decoy of Self-Improvement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Token and Taboo

Token and Taboo (an unspoken snafu)

            In Bourgeois institutions, such as the Von Humboldtian university, the Jewish colleague was at once a token and a taboo. It was considered bad form to mention his ethnic background, but as well, it was in bad taste to mistreat him. He was both the ultimate outsider – insofar as ‘the Jews’ were the ‘pariah’ community; it should be noted here that Weber’s phrase does not connote any kind of stigmata but refers to the ancient Hebrews lack of a homeland – and, due to the Jewish precept of representing the Logos, and for some time even after the new covenant is proclaimed, the ultimate insider when it came to the text. ‘The people of the book’ is a stereotype, but rather more of a complimentary one than ‘the Jew’ both ‘eternal’ and ‘wandering’. This incipient tokenism in the Protestant space was, for some today, I imagine, the beginning of the end or, as Berdyaev might have it, both at once. Catholics had, of course, their own colleges, and it is important to note here that Jews were even less welcome in these institutions, modeled as they were after the original, medieval university and not that modern.

            The sense that an educational system must reflect the values of this or that subculture, whether originally ethnic-based or linguistic, religious or more recently, social class or simply of just plain material wealth, is a symptom of the absence of the concept of a wider human community. The Quakers founded their own colleges, and some few yet exist. From the late 19th century onward, schooling based upon specialized pedagogies also arose, beginning with John Dewey’s lab school in the 1890s and carrying forward with sites such as Black Mountain College, Summerhill, and the Montessori system. These alternative campuses presented themselves as attempts in creating an authentic learning community, and yet one within a wider society that hardly knew they even existed. The archetype is, of course, the ‘cult’ or sect; a small group of acolytes led by the master in the East or even a messiah figure in the West. Nietzsche’s comment about those who seek followers, ‘get noughts (zeros but also nothings) behind you’, is well taken, but at the same time, those with a vision, for better or worse, must indeed find those numbers if a solitary flash is to build into a social movement. The link between religion and education – in antiquity, much the same thing until the Eleatic and Miletian schools began to think something of worldly matters – is yet deeply held; the major competition to State education is still that parochial.

            Yet the continued existence of credo-based learning in separate sites, exclusive in terms of ideology and value-orientation, is not truly a testament to the endurance of such values, but rather a tacit admission of their failure and subsequent defeat. For, if I were confident in my Christianity, for instance, and followed the lead of Jesus in both eschewing the directly political-secular sphere – ‘render unto Caesar’ etc. – and yet working throughout the polis to model and demonstrate my ethics, why would I not desire to be within the very heart of where young people who are not converts and not believers dwell? If my values are so strong, are so noble, why would they not only withstand their foes but indeed, win them over? That parochial schools exist in modernity is a sign of self-mockery; a self-inflicted wound to be emblazoned upon the corpus of a dejected curricula laid upon the corpse now consisting of only disjecta membra. The truer Christian or Muslim does not turn away from the world; these are both Western worldviews and cosmogonies which do not seek Nirvana nor to transcend the earthly. Rather, they are soteriological through and through: the earth and its peoples must be saved, not left below in as yet an unenlightened state.

            Given this, teaching these children in spaces set apart from the world is tantamount to having given up the entire basis for the belief in the first place. It is especially concerning for the early Protestant sectarians such as the Anabaptists, for whom faith must be voluntary. The existence of such spaces, such as the child’s Sunday school, wherein very young persons are taught the basics of this or that belief, carry a patent and potent irony about them to this regard. Such presentation of the Logos is not in fact voluntary, and is practiced in almost an involuntary manner, as adults do not pause to think about what they are actually committing, and committing to. Such processes make faith the token, and taboo the anti-institutional critique in which Jesus and others engaged. Better by far to abandon these ‘Eastern’ spaces – the monasteries of Tibet and the Himalayas were also schools, and their very placement at higher altitudes was a nod to the physical sense that one was beginning to loosen one’s ties to the world and those who lived in it, far below – and fully immerse oneself in the hurly-burly of wider cultural life, as did Jesus himself. Never one to shy away from confrontation, at first appearing contrary to his uttered ethic exhorting both forgiveness and self-sacrifice – and in this did Jesus demonstrate that practicing both by definition meant placing oneself in the midst of resistance – the Christian god on earth would presumably disapprove of our attempts to shelter both ourselves, but especially our children, away from the society as a whole. It is, even in the Pauline texts, unchristian to make Christianity an exclusive space, geared to specific followers and training only those who happen to be born, very much involuntarily, into said communities.

            In our time, over most of the globe, religion is itself a token. Why then also make it a token of itself, a shadow, even a remanant? If it is taboo to discuss religions matters, matters of the heart or soul, within secular spaces, surely even the looming presence of aging churches amidst all of the glass, concrete and steel of the modern metropolis, is also an unspoken self-indictment. They are anachronistic, both architecturally and atmospherically. The history of the urban landscape is such that it was inevitable these structures gain their ‘left-over’ look, for their organizational backdrop allowed them to survive demolition, even if no parishioners remained. It is also a taboo to suggest their final removal, perhaps even to think it! Such is seen as an unhallowed hallmark of the fuller presence of the anti-Christ among us. The famed hip-hop epigram, ‘bail out the banks, loan art to the churches’ might be more radically over-written, ‘socialize the banks, demolish the churches’, but so it goes. At the same time, there must also be those entrepreneurs who bemoan the waste of valuable real estate in city core business districts which are taken up by these wastrel relics. It is of some interest to acknowledge that even cemeteries have been moved or simply built over, especially the historical or ‘pioneer’ graveyard, where only the stone monuments have been preserved. It is an odd experience to investigate their newer sites knowing that no human remains lie underneath. What then is the point of the memorials?

            The preservation of both empty churches and hollow gravestones tells us that it is neither religion nor ancestor that is directly being recalled to culture memory, but rather the problem of mortality and the only response humanity has thus far invented, that is, faith itself, that retains its perennial quality. Modernity does not free itself from finitude, and indeed exacerbates its condition by sloughing off the conceptual gravitas of both death as an abstraction and the means by which one has been called to overcome it. It is almost as if by surpassing the salvation doctrine of the new covenant we have somehow also gotten beyond the very reason for its existence! That mortality is a clinical phenomenon alone makes soteriology something only theologically interesting. The modern priesthood, the guild of psychologists, presides over an altar dedicated to the origins, not of life, but rather of the individual person. Its great achievement is its ability to separate personhood from persona, and help anyone do the same for themselves. In this, it is absolutely and directly a descendent of Christian ethics, wherein Jesus appears as the first person. Its utter reliance on the individual, however, at the same time subjects it to an unethical reduction; the ego only relates to faith as if the latter were a mere symbolic apparatus of the super-ego. God dwells in morality – this is the ‘old God’, long dead; why should psychology co-opt it and place it at the head of the institutional and ideological table? – and the devil rusticates in unbridled sexuality, or the libidinal Id. Here, classical analysis betrays its reliance on Greek-Judaic myth, in the very face of its drive to become a science.

            Is the presence of mythos in logos then also a token? Is it taboo to point out such a presence? Just as morality dumbs down ethics, in the process making the world look far simpler than it actually is, myth hijacks thought, time sabotages history, the designer trumps the artist. These are the more worrisome ‘satanic reverses’. For Freud, the ‘totemic’ represented not just the crests of clans and their specific druthers but as well a kind of hierarchy wherein the symbolic forms of cultural life competed against one another; the vulvar shapes lower down the phallic pole, the male membership higher up. Certainly, he was not speaking of actual totems, whereupon we rather see the animal spirits and archetypes in mutual support, the bear or killer whale at the bottom in part due to their sheer ability to hold the rest of their allies skyward, the creatures of the air perched atop the pole exactly as they do in reality, and those with especial duties, such as the ‘three watchmen’, as well at the very top; in all of this, function and form are one. These last figures represent both the vigilance necessary for the village to safeguard itself from both storm and enemy alike, but as well, the unuttered but not at all taboo confidence in the people’s alliance with, and even love for, the beings of the forest and mountain, for there is never a fourth watchmen figure facing rearward, away from the ocean.

            We have long lost that confidence, thinking that our superior comprehension of nature entails our complete abandonment of what that same nature has bequeathed to us via its patent evolution. Reason stands aloof to imagination, and yet both are necessary to be fully human. The rational admits nothing of the non-rational into its intensely bureaucratized corridors of borrowed power. Our success at personhood, even if we continue to deny even this to ourselves through identity politics and the adoration of celebrity persona, is at times overshadowed by the ultimate need for a shared existence which carries us beyond death whilst we are still dying. It is authentic courage to face death as mine ownmost completion of being, an overcoming of the final taboo and a dismissal of all euphemism, but it is an equally sincere cowardice to make human community, however passing, into a token of itself, in order to vault that most incomplete being into the sham of personalized myth.

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

Flatteries not Included

Flatteries not Included (The Problem of False Other-directedness)

            One aspect of David Riesman’s famous analysis of post-war society that is often overlooked is the sense that the ‘other’, in his ethical rubric, presents an inauthentic otherness. In following our literal neighbors, in ‘keeping up with the Jones’’, we are not only aping an ideal form by means of idealized formulae, we are striving to homogenize society; to make everyone into the same thing. Riesman’s other-directedness, which he rightly casts as both unethical and cowardly without quite explaining why this is more profoundly the case deontologically, is thus not about otherness at all, only ‘the others’ in the sense of a diaspora of Das Man. Insofar as one is left with making what appears only as a decision of individual character – a way in which to distinguish ourselves from a merely individuated life, another aspect of modernity of which Riesman is correctly critical – we leave in possession of an incomplete analytic, suggesting in turn that such a decision cannot itself be fully either made or kept.

            Riesman’s ‘other’ is simply another version of myself. I look at him with envy or disdain, resentment and, in a crisis, even ressentiment. Yet he is nonetheless an intimate stranger; familiar in every way that society seems to count. He has either what I have or what I would like to have. I regard him thence with covetousness, which goes beyond the antique sensibility that his trophy wife is more attractive that mine. Or, conversely, I play the other’s role for him, with similar sentiments abounding. None of this is otherness per se, only what is ‘next’ in line. And the more so, it is also not the Other, the radically irreal Otherness of the uncanny. Are there then three kinds of others with which I must live? The next person, like me in all outward respects and most inward ones as well – we often underestimate the mental sameness occurring in mass society as it is somehow disturbing to imagine myself as much less unique than I would desire – is another; a representative of the herd, to be harsh, an expression of the generalized other, to be discursive, a mimesis of class filiation and that in both senses, to be critical, or yet a ‘fellowman’, to borrow from Schutz. All of these themselves demean the humanity of this next person, and yet all of them are correct in their own way about what he is in society.

            Most mature adults will recognize the great difficulty in procuring friendship as one ages. We are wary of letting just anyone in on who we are, preferring to display only the what for public consumption. This, in spite of the corresponding fact that friends hailing from other phases of contemporary lifespan have changed beyond recognition, especially those much-vaunted childhood friends. Yet we tend not to seek replacements for friendships come adrift or gone awry, suggesting that our perspective is one that suggests ‘well, any further friendships will ultimately go the same way, and if not, we will all die out of them in any case’. Romantic relationships are subject to the same stern logic, but survive its lens more easily given the erotic desires present for some decades after youth. Either way, however, authentic otherness is the last thing persons seek when surrounding themselves with serial circles of acquaintance, very often the most any of us is willing to commit to during working adulthood. Indeed, the frisson of fascination exerted by fictional limns of the Other as an irruptive force exert more pull than does otherness as a cultural fact. Once again, the otherworld requires no real commitment from us, given its own cameo ethereality. If the potential friend might be relatively blameless in the face of our diffidence, the ghost has only itself to blame for same.

            The reliance on sameness to distinguish otherness presents, even so, a more complex problem for ethics and for sociality alike. Though it is reasonable to a point to prefer those who are deemed ‘like us’, to fall in love with ‘kindred spirits’, at least of the earthly kind, or to idolize historical figures who appear to embody our own ideals, whatever they may be, what is less reasoned is the sensibility which overdevelops out of such liaisons. We learn, from a young age, those whom to shun, and these cleavages fall mostly along class and status lines. In-marriage rates exhibit a shocking social class homogeneity, and even those ‘progressive couples’ who do not share a skin colour or even a religion, if any, find that they share almost everything else, especially when measured against the most important variables for match-making or even simply hooking up. For women, anything else is slumming, and for men, just another notch on one’s belt, so to speak. Authentic otherness is inadmissible in marriage; there is too much at stake for elemental disagreements to carry the day. But even for acquaintances who may not share anywhere near as much as do spouses, there one quickly co-constructs a list of topics that will have to remain taboo. Within families it is proverbial that one does not discuss either religion or politics, and perhaps more recently, sexuality as well. Each contemporary person travels in a set of mostly disconnected circles, a more-gentle rendering of living secret lives, if one is deemed sane, or of having multiple personalities, if one is not.

            These social circles are themselves bound by either similar tasks, viewpoints, status backgrounds, or yet beliefs, such as a church membership, and persons who appear in one circle are more likely never to frequent another. Simmel’s ‘web of group affiliations’ still provides one of the most insightful analyses of this aspect of modern society. Circles may be casual or formal, or may move from one to the other pending occasion. They may accept new members, if those more veteran tire of one another’s direct company, or they may hive off into yet smaller groups, driven by a competition for in-group status. In none of this, however, do we discover the differences associated with authentic otherness. To do so, one must be willing to essentially throw over one’s own druthers and connections, and so once cherished and newly perished. Two of my oldest friends, hailing from vastly different cultural backgrounds, nevertheless married decades ago and are yet together. The parents of the woman refused to speak to her for nine years after she had taken up with him. Only when the couple produced their own children did the newly-minted grandparents seek them out. This kind of dynamic will no doubt be familiar to many, even if very few persons take the risk of striving to know the authentic other.

            Yet one can say this and still be well within the normative definitions of otherness. The one who is truly different to me is oddly familiar in that she is eminently recognizable as a societal sore thumb. At the same time, the dominant genders and their relations present an ongoing normative context shot through with apparent conflict and difference. Men and women continue to be raised quite differently in our society and indeed, in all cultures succeeding those of the social contract. The chief reason why the total divorce rate has hovered around fifty percent for many decades is not so much economic – women appearing en masse in a non-crisis mode workforce starting in the 1970s is often cited as the most important variable here; let us suggest that this is merely a vehicle for divorce and not a motive for it –  is that men and women find one another to be stunningly unrecognizable, and this as a human being, not simply as another person. Every dominant gender marriage is thus an odd exercise in internecine yet still cross- cultural ethnography. Participant observation rules the day, and one of the major reasons why youthful intimacies are so erotically inclined, aside from the general sexual repression of our puritanical educational institutions, is that sex is by far the easiest thing for two people to share with one another. It generates both authentic and inauthentic intimacy; it tends to play us beautifully false to one another.

            When the overt passions fade, young people change up and the dance continues elsewhere. If there is also a sense that ‘the grass is always greener’ there is also a growing sense that one needs to ‘settle down’ at some point or other, and so a balance is eventually struck. Subjectively, same-sex relationships are more convenient for such persons, as they do not participate in the wider cross-cultural gender conflict. Of course, objectively they remain more difficult, since the rest of us still cast aspersion towards them, and that precisely because they are seen as avoiding a perduring conflict but one that is nevertheless necessary for the reproduction of society as a whole. It is a simple case of appearing to not be ‘doing one’s part’, ‘sharing the load’, ‘taking a hit for the team’, and so on. Any alternative gender may be hung up on such crosses, and this same diaphanous resentment is at work in other, if related, arenas having to do with the interface of sexuality and gender and the character of the polis, such as women who do not support reproductive rights and who thus vote ‘pro-life’: ‘I raised my own children, why can’t she?’. The underlying pattern to such sensitivities acts like a leitmotif; in this case, it is the perception that someone is cheating.

            It does take a tremendous effort to construct a long-term intimate companionship with an authentic other, and the dominant genders have been experimenting with this task for millennia. Those who have forsaken this norm, however jaded and jaundiced it may be as a principle and certainly not and never being something ‘natural’, are in their turn consigned to a number of margins, not least that of apparent cowardice. It may well be a wondrous thing for men and women to love one another, but how, exactly, does one go about doing such a thing? To face this question squarely is not to just be a ‘square’. There is enough queerness in heterodoxy to make most of us blink at anything yet further down that proverbial side-street. What we find in adult relationships of all kinds is a practice which both acts at a safe distance, all the while safeguarding the perimeter with which the relationship has itself surrounded. Marriage and like companionships represent the epitome of this construction, which is why, even for younger persons, it requires a fair bit of work to undo. Though statistically consistent even if in and out of pop culture fashion, ‘swinging’, mutual and consenting, provides a failsafe for formal intimacy whereby one preserves the once-again edible cake. Alternative genders may themselves be acted out in such spaces, but we lack the data to state that those who play-act the margins are more compassionate towards their reality.

            In all of this, we flatter ourselves. But the world-as-it-is does not include such pat and happy ends. Our tendency to pursue the faux otherness of distant cultural items such as cuisine and popular art forms, as well as genuflect toward political positions of ‘multi-culturalism’ and ‘inclusivity’, betray our deeper motives. We seek only the kind of difference that cements our sameness, that cannot sabotage our sense of what we are and which allows us to decoy ourselves away from the question of who we might become. That we ultimately become other to all that we have been presents Dasein with its ownmost completedness. In contemplating this, however, we are brought bodily into the question of the Other as Anxiety and as the Nothing which comes to me; that it shall come to all others itself means nothing, and this is where normative understandings of otherness let us down the most palpably. Perhaps we can rather suggest that the flight from authentic otherness in life is a proprioceptive resonance of the denial of death; it is the faux equivalent of imagining a form of consciousness immortal; it is the method by which we learn to die by ourselves. In this, we cannot entirely dismiss its patent cowardice as outside of all ethics, even if we might ideally state that resoluteness in life is the better practice of that to be tested in the face of the absence of that self-same life.

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

Does Gratitude lead to Complacency?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.