worldview – GV Loewen

The Future is Plastic

The Future is Plastic (Sculpting Fluid Change)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Between Two Worlds

Bartlett Island north of Tofino, BC. My first memories are from Wickanninnish Beach, Stubbs Island and Vargas, all to the south of this place. I miss them deeply and spiritually and return when I can.

Between Two Worlds

Travis Thomas: a case of microcosmic ‘culture flux’.

“Is it not better to use what thou hast, like a free man, than to long, like a slave, for what is not in thy power?” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. IX, 40).

“One of the great marvels of a number of human beings is their ability to shift from one form of freedom to another, when such a shift is desirable or necessary.” (Sorokin 1937 II:164).

‘Between two worlds’ is a phrase used by an Ahousaht elder to describe the condition of Travis Thomas, who was taken to Bartlett and Little Bartlett Islands in the Summer of 2018 and remains there to this day. The phrase connotes no mere material condition, though it speaks to the being who lives between nature and culture, or between the past and the present, and certainly Thomas is also living between these obverse worlds. But the deeper meaning of such a description is an existential one: it is applied to the being who finds him or herself between the realm of the physical and that of the spiritual. In cultures wherein the latter still has some suasion one can, in fact, find oneself ‘between’ in this deeper manner, as does the culture in flux more widely. But the enduring question is, does any culture today truly have access to a spiritual realm even if it believes that it does?

A system of meaning, notes Sorokin, is one in which there are logical compatibilities within the culture and that these meanings are mutually interdependent (cf. 1937 IV:21). He juxtaposes the term ‘system’ with that of ‘congery’, in which the meanings thrown together preclude logical compatibility and appear to be but an admixture, a mélange, or yet worse, a malaise. In post-contact cultures, a common response to the shock of cross-cultural meaning-conflict has been ‘syncretisms’, which refer to a dialectical process generating a novel result; a contemporary and viable system is born out of elements of both old and new, obviating the previous and necessary flux between them. At a personal level, the hope that indigenous Wellness Centers, very much material places and not at all abstractions, will result in actual people maintaining a life-balance of both traditional and Euro-American elements. This may indeed be a practical outcome of their advent, including in Ahousaht itself. But symbolically, the plot thickens and we are unsure as to what outcomes might be expected. This is so because fundamentally, advanced social contract cosmology and contemporary technical-industrial capitalism conflict in every imaginable way.

And the conflict does not begin with capital and its virtuoso of technique, its ruthless extraction of resources, its drive for profit and for the extension of markets. Long before such things were even in the imagination of Western Man the cosmology of pre-agrarian societies had vanished. It was first replaced throughout the fertile crescent and from Egypt all the way to China and beyond with systems of thought that placed the spiritual realm at a great distance from that worldly. Indeed, to mention the two of them in the same sentence might well be seen as heretical. The ‘worldly’ – a term still used by evangelicals as a negative epithet for so-called secular interests – realm was supposed to be merely a way-station or at most, a proving ground, along the soul’s journey to a higher form of being. Such ideas, much more historically recent than those that animated the traditional cultures of the BC Coast, have themselves been displaced. But it is the relatively brief length of time since they were dismantled by 17^th century science and 18^th century criticism, not to mention popular commentaries on events like the Lisbon earthquake etc., that calls into question the very anonymity of relationships in this our present day.

It is this anonymity and the alienation that follows therefrom which is the source of most mental illness cross-culturally. The older ideas of spirit possession or more recently, naturalized gender bigotries – like hysteria, levelled in 1895 by Breuer and Freud, for instance, though in fairness Charcot took pains to note that hysteria could be found equally in both men and women – have fallen into the historical dustbin. The fashionable sensibility that many diseases of the mind can be traced to genetic sources is something I as a humanist have always found unconvincing given the dangers of reductionism inherent in all such neurobiological discourses. But how to call the shot when a person hailing from a culture whose own traditions in turn hail from a cosmic order not even one, but at least two metaphysics ago presents a rather different kind of problem. Here, alienation is something forced upon communities from without. It is a kind of existential ‘Jim Crow’ that gets internalized and thence acted upon. ‘Residential Schools’ – the very term is an evil euphemism akin to Concentration Camps, spanking, discipline, and the Einsatzgruppen (literally, merely ‘single or first movement groups’ or ‘deployment groups’) – were at the very heart of this enforcement for well over a century and a half. Now, a foul potpourri of variables enfeebles once vibrant and uncannily spiritual cultures for whom the division between this world and the other world was negligible if not nil.

Indeed, the only way in which one could be ‘between two worlds’ within the tradition was to in fact be sick. It was the shaman’s job to track after the sick soul – the ‘soul-catcher’ is a wonderfully conceived (and aesthetic) object and its gloss would make a half-decent fantasy novel title to boot – and one hears of the ‘metaphor’ of a dark tunnel into which the intrepid healer would travel. On the West Coast, at the tunnel’s far and mysterious end, the puma awaited the departing soul. But she was canny to those whose time of transfiguration had not yet arrived. She might growl and send them back towards the realm of the people where the shaman could thence effect a cure. In a theatrical representation of this life and death dynamic, secret societies would initiate youth by sending them on vision quests and then work to return them from the spiritual realm into the villages of their birth. But birth and birthright are not the same thing, just as person and spirit are not. In this worldview, a personal birth is mere biography. It is one of an indefinite number of soul-cycles. It is the cycle itself that is each person’s birthright, gifted to those who have been born into late social contract cosmological systems. Today, the remnants of such systems worldwide face their imminent demise. The vast and dominant system of world-capital does not even believe that spirit exists, let alone anything more detailed ‘about’ its cosmic career.

So ‘between two worlds’ today can mean, as suggested above, many related or unrelated things. In the case of Travis Thomas and no doubt many others, it means, from the outside, a person who is suffering delusions that so happen to not affect his physical skills and his memory of experience in wilderness conditions. But what does it mean to him?

Ultimately, this is the question that is of the greatest interest for the rest of us, whatever cultural background we ourselves hail from. It is old hat that psychopathology places all those who experience the visionary into suspicion. Religious verve in general is a mark of at least a mild obsession and perhaps a projected narcissism if not worse. We can ask, forthrightly, why any God would harbor a human interest let alone an interest in a single person. A God is a God, after all. The mascot gods of the Levant, each ethnic or linguistic group possessing one of its own to the utter disregard of their neighbors’ beliefs – Yahweh was, interestingly, not unaware of His competition and made it clear not that these others were false so much as that His people shalt worship only Him; the very interdict implies that the other gods were just as real and could be believed in if one chose to break the local covenant – were as unlike to anything on the BC Coast as could be imagined. Across many languages and almost as many kinship systems, Raven was the most deeply felt Being. His wisdom was sought by all, and today we have a Canadian postage stamp bearing a work of art entitled ‘Children of Raven’, referring to these related peoples and cultures. Thus a child of Raven possesses a birthright to be a seeker of visions, if and when necessary or desirable, to use Sorokin’s terms. These visions are more than a window into another world, they are an expression of the human imagination and thus very much also one of human freedom. To simply lose them, forget them, or yet more strenuously, refuse or shun them, is to surrender not only to some more or less subtle neo-colonialism, it is to give up an integral part of human consciousness which animates to a great extent the history of the entire species.

From the inside, then, from within the tradition and from within a mind that understands that self-same tradition, Travis Thomas is no longer in this world. He has become the ‘Bukwus’ or ‘wild man’, the interlocutor with the animal spirits and the settled people of the villages, the one who travels between the worlds but never actually rests in that liminal space itself. From the inside, he is not suffering from delusions, he is not addicted, he is not missed, he is not alienated. His suffering has transcended itself, as is the precise ethical purpose of the vision quest more generally. Our outsider questions cannot even be posed until he returns to the realm of culture only, the world of humans, and even then he may not be able to answer them. This is so because it is also part of the tradition that profound visionary experiences that involve existential transfiguration and perhaps as well the transformer beings should not be shared lest one loses their power and their insight.

Wellness Centers aside, the deeper lesson of such cases for the rest of us has to do with the condition of our spirits; their merit, their strength, their wisdom and their character. Do we yet possess them or have we allowed ourselves to be dispossessed of them through the chicanery of politics, the acid fever of consumerism, the shallow shell of popular entertainment, all in an unmasked mockery of authentic religious belief? Thomas is pushing a point upon us, in a radical and even courageous manner, consciously or no: that we should reconsider our patent categories of mental and spiritual health and even what we patently pretend to know about existence proper, about life and death alike. If we wonder only at the wonderful, if we are empowered only by the powerful, if we seek beauty in the beautiful alone, then we are entirely missing that point.

Social philosopher G.V. Loewen is the author of 38 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion and social theory, and more recently, metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for two decades.