Tag: politics

Normalism: Our New Testament

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Reign in Spain

The Reign in Spain (falls mainly on the king)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authorship and Authority

Authorship and Authority (Consider the Source)

            ‘Arguments from authority are worthless’, declares Carl Sagan, as he famously defined science near the end of the epic Cosmos (1981). This is surely an element of any research field, where there is not only always the next experiment and the next, but as well, the sense that our knowledge, however cumulative, is always both partial in the sense of being incomplete, as well as in that second, deeper sense of being biased. We are not only children of our own times and no other, we are also subject, as mortal beings, to the degradation of memory and the flight of fantasy. Beyond all of this local flavor, reality is, its ‘realismus’, itself subject to change given cosmic evolution. What once were constants have been shown to be relative and discursively, we cannot be certain that it is our own history that is at least a partial source of the enduring mysteries we encounter when we do inquire into the universe at large. The most obvious such link is that diverse antique civilizations and their moralities appeared to endure, almost timelessly, and thus in their worldviews, corresponding to their perduring quality as understood from the point of view of each short generation of mortal denizens, their ideas about the cosmos were also timeless. In a word, the politics of humanity spills historically into the human understanding of nature.

            Sagan was himself an authority in both astronomy and physics, and he was a decent interpreter of history and culture as well. In spite of his credo, he too was a moralist, and in spite of the framework of his chief vocation which he correctly outlined in what remains the most watched documentary series of all time, he too mustered arguments ‘from authority’ from time to time, no less than in defining the merits of science as the ‘best tool’ humanity possessed. It is of more than passing interest that Max Weber, arguably the greatest authority  and expert on society of all time cautioned us against relying upon expertise for any serious decision in or about that same society. What are we then to make of major figures who seem to bely, or even outright deny, their authority in matters we have already ceded to them? This is more than a question of modesty in the face of the vastness of cosmos and the daunting diversity of even our own species, parochial as it must be against the wider backdrop of indefinite infinity. To my mind, it seems more about the sense that when one does in fact dig into the human conversation, things quickly become more complex then one might have bargained for.

            Which in turn begets the question of authorship as source. It is not so much that certain persons are not entitled to their opinions unbridled and unlimited, and thoughts remain yet free in at least the sense of being able to have one or the other pending one’s imagination and education. Rather, it is the recent ability for anyone to create his own venue, especially one digital, to broadcast such opinions far and wide and begin to construct his own authority out of that which is in fact mere authorship. Examples are, regrettably, far too abundant to enumerate, from misogynist bigots who happen to have Super Bowl rings, to anti-communist journalists who imagine they are experts in dialectical materialism, to Jewish comedians who are suddenly political scientists and experts in the history of the Levant. But by far the most dangerous authors who imagine they also have authority in some more profound sense are the many politicians who, because they wield power but that without non-legal authority, deliberately and diligently confuse serious discourse for mere politics. Here, names would be superfluous, because almost all politicians, whose very reason of being is to pander to any and all those who might vote for them – or, in anti-democratic conditions, support them either through their silence or their willingness to engage in precipitous conflicts upon their leader’s behalf – engage in the calculated conflation of authority and authorship. A fashionable favorite is that ‘parents know what is best for their children’, and apparently, everyone else’s as well. Teachers and mass media, the usual rivals to parental authority, have come more and more under fire, consistent with the parent-pandering craze – though with nothing else regarding the actual confluence of youth, anxiety, and hopelessness – and the ease of which targets can align against two fronts with which we are either generally suspicious – media sells things to us and little more – or have some resentment against – we all recall our poor teachers and perhaps too much so.

            But teaching is, for one, a vocation, a trade, and a profession requiring training and expertise as well as the wisdom of experience, cliché as that sounds. Stating that ‘education should be returned to parents’ is much the same as saying that ‘gas-fitting should be returned to the parents’, or that ‘hydroelectric dam-building should be returned to the parents’, and so on. So far, I have yet to hear that my own vocation, philosophy, should be ‘once again’ a parental purview, but then such parents, who would certainly be incapable of even the slightest musings in that direction, would also likely baulk at the very idea. Not quite sincerely, however, as parenting, seen as a Gestalt of mentorship, guidance, resource allocation and even love, for goodness sakes, would certainly include much moralizing if never any real thinking of any note. Yet in spite of all of this faddish and hypocritical nonsense about ‘parent’s rights’, the wider question of expertise and authority remains. And when major authorities suggest that arguments from authority are either worthless – as they are in the experimental sciences – or to be taken with a grain of salt – as those emanating from the behavioral sciences – then, with some irony, we feel we must take such statements seriously.

            I have chosen the two most important cautions that have appeared in discourse during the course of the twentieth century. Yet more well-known ones, such as Einstein’s ‘God does not play dice with the universe’ – Hawking reminded us decades later that he himself took ‘God’ to mean the same thing he understood Einstein to mean by it;  the whole of cosmic forces as known to us and not as some inveterately anti-gambling moralizer – are statements of scientific position in the wider history of ideas. For Einstein, arguing against some of the more outlandish implications of the quantum theory at the time, this was simply his non-scientific way of refuting another such position, or at least, exhorting caution about it. But Hawking himself went further than this when he warned of extraterrestrial contact and the annihilation of the human species; this was an opinion uttered by a physicist who was anthropomorphizing alien morality; and as such one with absolutely no basis nor scientific evidence behind it. Hawking had made the mistake of playing on his bona fide authority in other areas; he  was, in a word, borrowing status from himself.

            When any discursive figure does this, no matter their contributions to other fields, they immediately fall from authority into mere authorship. Unfortunately, many of the rest of us do not at once make that vital distinction, or do not care to. Perhaps one is a Hawking ‘fan’, seeing the scientist in the same way as one holds any other kind of celebrity to heart. In this, we are being as dishonest as is the figure in question being disingenuous. How then to resist both the unguarded abrogance of the expert who is too-enamored of his own authority to remember its limits, often severe, as well as our own penchant for adulation which is born of, and borne on, the sense that this or that figure really is smart and thus anything he says must have some merit to it? One can begin to reverse this troubling trend by looking at oneself and those around us.

            My father was a structural engineer and ended his career as the chief building inspector for the City of Victoria. He was a master carpenter and a decent renderer of still life and nautical scenes in oils and watercolors as well as an expert model-builder. He played golf and hockey until his mid-70s, winning his club championship at age 73 with a handicap of 10. He knew little of culture and nothing of thought, he had been propagandized during the war and as a veteran he remained so until his death. His surpassing weakness was that he rarely spoke of things he actually knew a great deal about, and yet would borrow from this tacit status – of which almost none were aware in any case – to issue declarations of the most ignorant sort upon almost any other subject. These were not stated as opinions but rather as if they had some factual basis, or, at the very least, the weight of ‘wisdom’ behind them. He was, as a parent, typically sound for the younger set, typically incompetent for those older. For his generational demographic, he was amazingly progressive and enlightened, as was my mother. As I have before japed, both my parents were philistines but they were not barbarians. My father was no discursive figure and never would be, but he nonetheless represents the commonplace error of mistaking one’s personal experience for actual knowledge. This almost-universal human error is grievous enough in itself – most of us find, as we live on, that our experience is itself often found wanting after all – but that this selfsame error is deliberately targeted by politicians as the best way to manipulate franchise is nothing less than a patent evil.

            My father’s only son is a philosopher. But he is not a cognitive philosopher, or ‘philosopher of mind’, as this once wholly archaic designation has recently made a comeback, he is not an analytic philosopher of language, an epistemologist, an ancient scholar or a medievalist, he his not a philosopher of science nor a Marxist, nor is he by any stretch a logician. And so I do not, even within the genres of my own painstakingly studied vocation, assert any serious claims adhering to any of these departments and have never done so. The stuff I do know something about – phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethics, aesthetics, critical theory, education and existentialism, religion – casts a broad enough net for any thinker to never want in topic or subject. Far beyond this, I do not spout off about gas-fitting, hydroelectricity, or even parenting for that matter – I have consulted as an ethicist for many families over the years and always explain to them that I am expert in human relations in the abstract and not a ‘parenting’ expert, whatever that last might mean – in order to maintain my serious game and nascent name within the wider conversation which is our shared species legacy. And though it may be the case that those lives deemed outside of circles meritorious are all the more likely, through ressentiment, to try to gain access to them through a combination of outright fraud and feigned ignorance as to their truer motives, it falls to the rest of us to exercise a more existential and ethical version of the caveat emptor in their face. Otherwise, we risk becoming as the politician alone, who, as a darling dapper doyenne of the system within which he must work, is compelled to become a huckster, a shyster, a conniver, a narcissist. Each of us has each of these and others within our breast, so this is not a matter of directing our disdain afar. Rather, it is more simply a matter of learning how to recognize the authorship-limitations of what we know today as who we are right now, and thence perhaps coming to a better understanding of the authority-limits of what we can know as a human being and thence as a species entire.

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

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof

Fiddler on the Hot Tin Roof (The Media Minstrels)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is War

This is War (The difference between forgetting and suppressing)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Meet the Parents’ Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not about Golf

This is not about Golf

            I played golf for thirty years. Sadly, neither my back nor my budget allows me to do so today. It’s a wonderful mind game. At once you against the course and against yourself, golf epitomizes the elemental expression of consciousness and world. Not that such philosophical musings occur inside the ropes. No, there, you’re talking to the ball, to yourself, to your club, the wind, or to the motley topography at hand; ‘give it a bounce right, hard bounce, come on!’. Golf is also engrossing to watch, with the added value of admiration for a shot well played, a miraculous save, a lucky break, mixed in with the less noble emotions of a voyeuristic Schadenfreude; ‘this guy’s one of the best players in the world and he just shanked it worse than me!’. All in all, golf is both the most outwardly genteel sport and the most inwardly intense.

            So when the abrupt news of a merger amongst the three largest professional men’s tours broke, I was momentarily stunned. Aside from all of the rhetoric, for a moment, there really did seem to be an ethical difference between the PGA and the LIV, the latter being solely funded by Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund. But the idea that this difference, actual and defensible, had suddenly collapsed with the news of the merger, is incorrect. There was never quite that difference, given that in an average fiscal year, the corporations who front the PGA events do about 4.4 billion dollars worth of business with that same nation and its affiliates. And before I borrow from Carl Sagan by calling attention to the ‘B-word’, any way you slice it, that’s a lot of money.

            Which is why, even if we will now be all the more riveted by the second season’s broadcast of ‘Full Swing’, none of this is about golf. Once back outside the ropes, in fact it is about those two very elements of our experience, as primordial as they are contemporary; consciousness and world. We are dimly aware that in wealthy quarters life proceeds quite differently than in most other places. Those of us who are in possession of such privileges consider ourselves fortunate, certainly, but as well, provide for ourselves a suite of highly rationalized validations that allow us to continue to live in such a way whilst our fellow humans suffer. It is one thing not to know, and when I was a child, I did not. But it is another to be an adult and not want to know. And this is the condition that I find myself negotiating on a daily basis, whenever I have enough presence of humane conscience for it to raise its reproachful head at all.

            And contrary to the revolutionary, this is also not about capital per se. No, Marx himself was the first to state that the bourgeois mode of production, as he called it, was by far the greatest achievement of human history. This is likely why Engels and he, hypothesizing communism as an inevitable end to capital, itself proceeded simply by a change in the relations of production and not the means, which remained industrial-technical. Thus, ‘Star Trek’ communism originates in the thought of the authentic voices of the revolution; it itself is not a rationalized version thereof, but in fact the real thing. The shame of geopolitical disparity lies not so much in wealth itself, for it is often the engine for progressive change worldwide – wealth allows its holder to ‘do what thou wilt’, in classic Crowleyan fashion, and thus to slough off mere custom and with that, often antique bigotries as well – but rather in its patently pre-capitalist distribution. Wealth has replaced God, but it still owns an equally divine hand. The elites of the world, now polyglot and cosmopolitan as never before, nonetheless share that singular assignation.

            Professional athletes and all the more so, entertainers, only appear to be wealthy simply because their holdings outstrip our neighbour’s and our own by orders of magnitude. But they themselves carry no weight. They are but the window-dressing of a decoy culture that ‘manufactures’ our consent to inequity, and speaking of the Saudis – and many others, to be fair – iniquity as well. Chomsky’s political writings, repetitive as they are, bring out the more or less subtle guises of a social system that must keep its own citizenry loyal through bread and circuses, and the less bread, the more circus at that. Golf, in its role as an entertainment device, is meant to fulfill this function alone. This is why there is no real difference amongst leagues. Complaints of any specific nation engaging in ‘sportswashing’ are naïve at best, at worst, part of the very decoy that insults both consciousness and world while denying to both their respective birthrights. It is another instance among many where the canny capitalist understands the stakes and the rationales and the canned anti-capitalist does not. The minstrel mass of entertainment, with its facts of sporting ‘drama’ and attendant OCD-oriented statistics, with its fictions of mediocre melodrama and tepid allegory, is the chief means of maintaining not an otherwise unmasked mode of production as a whole but rather its ever-masked relations.

            Inasmuch as we are self-created agents of action in the world, we must come to grips with the equal condition of being historical constructions; in many cases, built for inaction, for lack of conscience, for the absence of reflective consciousness. This is not, nor ever, solely a personal fault. It is not a weakness of character, nor is it an authentic Zeitgeist. We are the bit players, without truly gifted, if trivial, skills, or the simple but all the more gifted nerve of pretense in their absence, whose role it is to witness the decoy drama unfold itself weekly. And each week I do so, cheering on my favorite golfers and mostly silently deriding those who, for whatever intolerance of my own, are to be shunned by any rational mind, whose consciousness of the world around him begins to blur and mute in the presence of the exciting action of a contrived moment which itself, in our shared contemporary culture, has replaced both grace and love.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Lap-Dancing Drag Queen of Oz

The Lap-Dancing Drag Queen of Oz

            Reading L. Frank Baum today is like embarking on an extended acid trip. Political satire and social allegory under the guise of fantasy books for children, the Oz epic ran to 18 volumes, of which 14 were novels. Times change, so it is said, and the Wizard, however wonderful, went from being the best-selling children’s book for the years 1901 and 1902 to being universally banned by all public libraries in the United States in 1928. The chief reason for this ban, coming from the very association that is now hard pressed to keep up the fight against the hundreds of like bans being instantiated across the same nation by people who must still imagine that they themselves live a century ago, was that it was ‘ungodly’, in its portrayal of women in leadership and heroic roles.

            In hindsight, it is likely, had the Democrats run a male against Donald Trump, we would not have that specific lunacy that yet rests within popular politics at this moment. To simply say so only describes a sexism which oft verges on misogyny and is not sexist in itself. But rewind for a moment to the decade which began our social and technical modernity. The combination of women winning the national vote in 1920 and entering the workplace in droves, the new emphasis on the nuclear family and the abandonment of both that extended and the idea that young men, at least, were the de facto wage-earners in dyadic relationships must have been quite the culture shock at the time. As with today, most of the reaction against these very material shifts in society were themselves symbolic. In saying this, however, we do not say that ‘mere symbolism’ has no effect.

            If Baum’s lysergically weird trip was relatively benign – there is but one dark scene in the entire 14 volumes, and then a single dark novella in the 4 companion compendia – our current theater of identity politics seems much less so. From politicians referring to transgendered people as ‘demons’, ‘mutants’ and ‘not quite human’ to private citizens raiding, in vigilante style, drag queen shows – and, wouldn’t you know it, drag children’s story hours in public libraries – the bigotry, intolerance, and basic ignorance that could well have been widely available a century ago appears to have resurrected itself. The Scopes trial of 1925, held in Tennessee, a state which currently writhes in self-imposed political anguish – or is it neurosis? – seems as well to be a kind of resonant talisman for the neo-conservative movement. After all, creationism is taught alongside evolution in most private schools in the United States, as well as being at least present in public systems such as that of Texas, wherein over five million minors attend school. Textbook publishers kowtow to this politics simply because of market. That the pen is more powerful than the sword was never so well, if perhaps ironically, exemplified.

            Baum’s pen would no doubt have out run all available phantasmagorical ink if he were alive today. But as Al Jaffee suggested, it is more difficult to satire politics in our time simply due to the fact that politicians have outrun the satirists, ‘dreaming up things we cartoonists could never have imagined’. In America and elsewhere, politicians have become their own self-satire. The darker scene that is the outcome of what at first seemed mere theater, is that it is the lie that has been accepted as the truth of things. The Wonderful Wizard, Oscar Zoroaster Pinhead, has successfully implanted his persona as a deus ex machina into the hearts and even minds of the otherwise hard-headed citizens of the latter-day Oz. And if the ‘merely symbolic’ can take on a life of its own apart from worldly reality – one simply has to recall the woeful weight of both heaven and hell upon the faithful – all heroic deeds by men, women, or yet other genders might just be in vain.

            Baum was himself originally captivated by the theater. After an unsuccessful stab at it, he returned to it once armed with his best-selling novels. Theatrical and even film adaptations of The Wizard came early and often, culminating, long after Baum’s death, in the MGM film in 1939. But it is telling that the epic series itself has never again been so adapted after early and successful attempts in 1908 and 1910. The 1908 series has been lost though a few production stills remain. The 1910 series of three has been preserved in fragmentary form. In 1914, when Baum himself founded the Oz Film studios, the most advanced of their time, he must have had high hopes. But his offerings were box office failures, being cast as mere children’s fare and thus of no critical or dramatic value. After a scant few of the novels were scripted and shot, the studio went under the very next year.

            I am going to suggest that we too, in not taking the political theater of fantasy seriously enough, are in danger of going down with it. And though MGM itself released a number of the Oz Studio films as riders to their own famous adaptation on its 70th anniversary in 2009, it is clear that the allegorical satire of the Teddy Roosevelt empire-building era – presumably the very period that MAGA ‘if I only had a brain’ Republicans are referring to as ‘great’ – no longer has a willing audience. Or does it?

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

The Ballot and Bullet Ballet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Artless Society

An Artless Society (the neo-Christian Reich)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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