Misery Loves Company

"The Single Hound" Bruce Floyd

This morning when I checked my e-mail I found a rather weepy one from a minister who writes to me from time to time, always writing dolorous, self-indulgent, and overly dramatic words. This time, in lamenting several impediments in his life, he quoted Shakespeare, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He repined that all he endeavored seem to fail, that all his hopeful dreams were as “momentary as a sound,”

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say, “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

Well, true enough, I suppose, but the sentimental preacher is wrong to take the above words and narrowly apply them to his own life. Just about anybody who knows anything about Shakespeare knows the quoted passage above, but few know Hermia’s response to Lysander:

If, then, true lovers have been ever crost,
It stands as an edict in destiny:
Then let us teach our trial patience,
Because it is a customary cross,
As due to love as thoughts, and dreams, and sighs,
Wishes, and tears, poor fancy’s followers.

In short, what the self-centered preacher needs to comprehend is that the tragedy of “quick bright things” fading into nothingness lies in the condition of mankind, not of a particular man. The human condition in many regards is hopeless and heartbreaking. Becker calls it a tragedy, this predicament in which we find ourselves. The truth is that the “jaws of darkness” will swallow us all, in time swallow the earth itself, and, some cosmologists say, the entire universe itself. If you’re like me you can’t think much beyond this small planet whereupon we find ourselves. We have to deal with the mess of our own lives; we can’t worry about the lives of Martians, not that Martians exist. It’s probably true that we care less about stars falling into one another, about the immeasurable cataclysms tossing galaxies as if they were match sticks; yes, we care less about these conflagrations than we do our own belly aches—and for good reason too.

I can understand my tender preacher’s grief at his lost dreams, at the sorrow rolling like a river through his life, but he’s wrong to think that life demands any more of him that it demands of any of us. I could advise him that it is futile to mourn what is not only inexorable but unavoidable. But this man doesn’t want advice; he wants consolation, wants sympathy. Of course, I won’t advise him of anything. He wants me to be complicit in his descent into self-pity, to echo him, “O God, isn’t it awful!” I will say nothing about his particular complaint. It seems as foolish to state this as to say, “The wind blows” or the “rain down does fall.” Oh, how he’d bristle with outrage did I tell him that he is drifting perilously close to solipsism.

The most I could tell him, the most I understand, is that we all have to go a hard road, often on a dark night, but we have no other option but to go it. Perhaps we should go it as cheerfully and courageously as we can. I think Samuel Johnson would agree with me. In fact, I suppose I really steal the notion from the great man. I don’t think he’d object.

What do we mean by “government?”

"Normal Dan" Dan Liechty

In today’s local newspaper, there is a letter written by a fellow citizen of my town. The letter, titled “Government is nothing but a spending machine,” expressed the writer’s view that government is a farce, a flim flam. It reads, in part, “The harsh reality is that government produces neither goods nor services. How can it? Most of its members have never run a business, never met a payroll, never assumed any risk. Rather, government is an unbridled spending machine … the very antithesis of profit. Government spends, it does not produce.”

I genuinely seek to understand the view of such fellow citizens, which we are hearing with increasing frequency and volume. I attended a “listening session” (but which was highly engineered toward selling the Ryan Budget Plan) held by my elected congressman, Adam Kinzinger, and he made much the same claims about government – that government cannot by its very nature create “real jobs,” something only private sector employers can do (a strange sentiment coming from a man who had spent at least a third of his life in active pursuit of a government job.) Echoes of the same sentiment are being heard in the statements of various would-be political leaders such as Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann. I am sure that in no matter what area of the nation you live, you could easily pick up your own local newspaper, turn on your radio, or do a little eavesdropping on conversations in your local coffee shop, and quickly encounter sentiments like this.

Much as I have tried to comprehend this view, I remain totally perplexed. Have these people not benefited from a public education, either personally or for family members, or employees? Do they not drive on public streets? Do they not assume the daily public protection of police, fire and emergency services? Do they never enjoy public parks, pools or recreational facilities? Do they not benefit from the social insurance offered by the Social Security Administration? Do they not take for granted the control and protection of government regulators every time they buy medical supplies, meat or other foodstuffs? Do they not appreciate that because of government regulated licensing procedures, they do not have to personally investigate the qualifications of every physician, lawyer, dentist, CPA, psychologist and social worker they may need to employ? Do they not appreciate that because of government zoning enforcement a toxic waste dump cannot be placed right next to their property? Do they not daily enjoy the protection of the US military and defense services? The list goes on and on.

Certainly, every thinking person agrees that there is plenty of waste involved in the way government spends tax dollars, mostly because government programs must endure the cost overruns, fiscal shenanigans and outright fraud perpetrated by private contractors–government programs are easy marks for these business-suited crooks exactly because there is no funding for adequate oversight. But just as clearly, the fact remains that government sponsored programs, products and services (schools, parks, safety, roads, food, air and water regulations, to name only a few)  represent the closest measure we have in this country to “common wealth” that enhances the general quality of life and thus raises the standard of living for all citizens.

While I want to respect and understand the views of all fellow citizens, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend this current knee-jerk anti-government opinion as more than a sort of adolescent anti-authoritarian shriek. At the very least, I can only conclude that these folks use the term “government” to mean something other than the empirical designation of that term.

Fist Come, Fist Served

"k1f" Kirby Farrell

What we can’t think about:
The goal of political debates is not to test ideas but to kill the losing candidate.

“Newt Gingrich Fails To Knock Out Mitt Romney At Final Florida Debate,” headlined Amanda Terkel in Huffington Post (1.27.12). The trope of debate as boxing is of course so routine it’s transparent, like “fighting” a cold.
The New York Post punched its way to the deeper level when it summed up the “contest” with the larger idea of a fight to the death: “Romney, Gingrich Continue War” (1.26.12). The Post too saw the debate as boxing, but goosed up the fisticuffs by calling the candidates’ punches “haymakers,” meaning knockout blows and oblivion.

You get the idea.

Yes, the media are desperate to excite their audiences with punchy rhetoric. After all, these days the media outlets themselves are taking it in the chin. They’re in the ring slugging it out. Their problem is a culture addicted to shows of violent confrontation because violent conventions in movies and news and weatherforecasting have become so boringly familiar that it takes more and more extreme action to hold your attention. As the Bible puts it, If the salt or the cocaine loseth its flavor, wherewith shall it be salted?

But then, moaning about degenerate media has also become a tired convention. Let’s talk about the raw material.
If a policy debate is boxing, then by implication the force of argument determines a winner and a loser. Flattened, a loser is humiliated and helpless. Knock out the opponent and winners wipe out–annihilate–any possible opposition now or in the future. No need to negotiate or compromise or qualify your answers–everyone knows you’re right.
You can see where this is going. If the goal is a knockout, then the “argument” is not about testing ideas or solving problems. Deep down, it’s about killing resistance to your conviction of rightness. And if we agree with you–that’s what gives your words knockout force–then we too feel supremely triumphant. You’d think a system based on sublimated killing would be too disruptive to go on for long. But annihilation can be strategic. It’s a powerful solution to human ambivalence. We love and hate at the same time. And every action brings a reaction. This is why Machiavelli recommended exterminating enemies to avoid backtalk. Killing simplifies mixed feelings. The cycle of retaliation stops. In trial by combat, “Might makes right.” It may be primitive jurisprudence, but it guarantees that the winner can enforce the winning argument. When abstract law is weak, trial by combat makes a judgment irrefutable, so it can prevent schism and troublesome bad losers.

Knockout contests work best in an authoritarian society where people are used to one infallible boss replacing another. Ordinary people–in Wall Street slang, “the herd” or “sheeple”–fall in line. When life demands problem-solving and cooperation, by contrast, killing opponents has serious disadvantages. In the last congressional session, one side stonewalled the other on every initiative, producing an aptly named deadlock.

If sublimated bloodlust is dysfunctional in today’s complex societies, why don’t we break the habit? Otto Rank might say we get a special thrill out of the deaths of others. Nothing beats survival. A knockout gives a politician survival magic that we love. After all, the hero is promising to save us. As in combat, the possibility of death proves you’re alive, whereas the loser dies a little. Identify with a death-tainted loser and it might infect you too.

Conflicts over truth, said Otto Rank, are finally “just the same old struggle over . . . immortality.” As Becker elaborates in Escape from Evil, “If anyone doubts this, let him try to explain in any other way the life-and-death viciousness of all ideological disputes. . . . No wonder men go into a rage about fine points of belief: if your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible” (64).
Notice that Becker conflates immortality with infallibility. The core of personality is the conviction of what is right drummed into us from birth. It’s like the operating system in a computer. It’s the core of self-esteem. You can see how it works in debates when the loser’s reputation for rightness “dies.” And you can see it in the themes that crop up in debate. Every politician promises to rescue you from death. From employment to abortion, the themes are tacitly about making more life. Between the lines the debaters attack enemies who stand for death. Combine the themes, and you have Newt Gingrich’s fantasy of a doomsday electrical wave followed by his pipedream of a colony on the moon: a transcendent escape to another planet.

Knockout mentality assumes that the difficulties we face can only be managed by radical violence and parental rescue. It operates as a binary switch: friend or foe; on or off; alive or dead. In a sinister way the mentality is close to fantasies of The Last Judgment in which the opponent is the Evil One and the eternal survivor is the cosmic Father Who Will Take Care of You. Knockout mentality won’t help you much if you’re researching cancer cells or trying to help people find work. You have to get used to swimming in complexity.

You can see why a politician might dream about escaping to his colony on the moon like Dr Strangelove planning to survive doomsday in a bomb-proof cave with a harem of fertile followers.

At some point en route to a colony on Mars, when there’s lots of time for reflection, one of the rocket crew will start to wonder why humans turn everything into a “knockout” or a “fight.” For a moment denial will stop fogging the porthole, and looking back on the shrinking blue earth, the traveler will think, “Wait a minute. Weren’t there problems we were supposed to solve back there?”

Our Culture of Illusion

"Svaardvaard" Bill Bornschein

In my theology class we are studying the classic spiritual journey, a widespread archetypal pattern. The pattern is similar to the Hero’s Journey as described by mythologist Joseph Campbell and the spiritual journey explored by poet Robert Bly. In all three of these examples the focus is on the individual and a personal quest. With this blog post, I’d like to extend the insights to our broader society. First, here is a quick overview of the individual quest and then the application to the broader culture.

The individual journey begins with an Apollonian ascent, the first thirty years of life characterized by rising power, idealism, and egocentrism. From film, the “I’m king of the world” scene in Titanic comes to mind, as does the invincible, “it’s only a flesh wound” Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Eventually the ascent of youth is tempered by the realization of limits. At this point, the journey can go in one of three directions. The first is the attempt to maintain the ascent, reject the reality of limits, and continued reliance on heroic virtues that no longer work. This path produces the Old Fool who just doesn’t get it. The second path is the embittering journey of the individual who recognizes the existence of limits but rejects them and searches for someone to blame. This path produces the negative and cynical individual. The final option is the wisdom journey, which involves a descent, a dark night of the soul grounded in the acceptance of limits. It produces the Holy Fool. It is the Abrahamic journey into the unknown and results in what Alan Watts characterized as the wisdom of insecurity. Here we find the Socratic ideal of the person who knows he doesn’t know and can make his peace with that. This is the person who can, in the words of Becker, “fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering, so to speak, to the life force.”

Turning to our society, where do we stand?  I maintain we are very much in the crisis of limits, limits born of scarcity of resources and also a scarcity of new vision. Coming out of World War II the American Century was characterized not only by expansion, but pedal to the metal expansion. More, faster, and better became the watch words for a western culture bent on ever higher material standards. Now we are realizing the truth of Edward Abbey’s famous quote: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Our Apollonian ascent is melting our Icarian wings. Will we continue our attempt to ascend and tumble into the sea or attempt a controlled glide downward?

Surveying the political landscape does not engender much hope for the latter. Both political parties talk the talk of returning to business as usual, growing the economy and expanding infinitely. Writ large, this is the Old Fool who just doesn’t get it. The second option, the embittering journey characterized by cynicism and blaming others, is much in evidence. The polarization on almost every issue requires a demonizing of the other and, as Becker has shown, results in violence. The third option, the wisdom journey that embraces limits, is not yet part of the official discourse that you hear from public officials and their media outlets.

And yet, there are perhaps reasons for optimism and hope that we may still “get it.” There appears to be a growing movement toward localization of life processes, community gardens, and farmer’s markets for example. The general disillusionment with both political parties, all three branches of government, and Wall Street portend a potential for a new vision. New voices are emerging that give lie to the culture of illusion. Two of these voices that I’ve been following recently are journalist Chris Hedges, whose columns can be found at truthdig.com, and psychologist Brad Peters at Modern Psychologist

One final trait of the wisdom journey of the Holy Fool resonates with Ernest Becker’s analysis. For Becker, our crucial dilemma is that we are both godly and creaturely, blessed with an almost infinite spirit and intellect housed in a finite body. In the words of author Terry Pratchett, “Humans are the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.” The Holy Fool, having ridden the Apollonian rocket skyward and returned to earth safely is at home with paradox, the central human condition.

Alone

"The Single Hound" Bruce Floyd

After mentioning Robert Frost to a friend in an e-mail, I found myself reading him tonight. Frost is like Lamb and Hazlitt: he never disappoints one. I confess to liking what Lionel Trilling called the “dark” Frost (confirming that Frost was not an avuncular old man sitting around a pot-bellied stove and dishing out bromides). Frost is one of those poets who does not lie about the human condition–yet he is one, when all is over, who must be seen as somewhat of an optimist. Certainly, his poetry comes to terms with our living in a diminished world, the realization that the world will never really give us what we want: an affirmation for our existence, a supporting cry from the heavens, nature to nudge us with love.

In any case, tonight I was stuck as never before by a few lines in “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” I can’t think of a poem that better portrays the loneliness of aging. It is an unpitying look, but, more so, it is an accurate look. The old man is alone. It is cold outside and dark. The frost is on the window panes. He can hear sounds from outside: “like the roar / Of trees and cracks of branches. . . .”  The log in the stove “shifted with a jolt” and startled the old man. Here the lines that for some reason moved me tonight:

A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.

The poem is full of heartbreaking loneliness, though there is no indication that the old man is especially aware of his plight. We sense his mind is failing a little. We sense too, perhaps more than we’d like, the singular man at his end, the universe dark and cold, no help out there in the dark, no justice. And Frost, resigned to the world, does not speak of fairness. He does not pout at the hard truth.  It’s true: “One aged man–one man–can’t keep a house / . . .or if he can, / It’s thus he does it of a winter’s night.” The old man keeps the house the best he can. One knows tomorrow night will be the same. If we asked the old man about his plight, I suppose he might say what another hard-pressed character says in Frost’s “A Servant to Servants”: “I s’pose I’ve go to go the road I’m going: / Other folks have to, and why shouldn’t I?”

Donald Hall writes of how Frost hated to be alone, how he would not let a visitor leave, and if the visitor insisted on leaving, Frost would walk the visitor to his destination. We tend to forget that Frost was alone for a long time. His wife died in 1938 (he’d live until 1963). He had a son who committed suicide. One daughter died in childbirth and another was institutionalized for mental problems. Frost is not, of course, the “man” in his poems, but what man is like the man in his imagination? Like another great American poet, Wallace Stevens–though in different ways–Frost imposed an order upon the world, striving to establish the “momentary stay against confusion.”This is what Frost called a poem: “A momentary stay against confusion.”

But what I think of most when I read “An Old Man’s Winter Night” are the last days of Samuel Johnson, the sick old man, all alone, that thing he dreaded most of all finally coming to claim him. I’ve mentioned it before, but I can’t erase the image of the old man that Boswell gives us of the last time the two men met. They are in a carriage. The vehicle stops so that Johnson can exit and walk to his house. He asks Boswell to go with him. Boswell can’t. Boswell does not know it’s the last time he will see Johnson. And then Johnson, knowing he is going home to an empty and cheerless house, going to a bed in which his pain (he is very ill) and anxiety will not allow him to sleep,”steps away with a pathetic briskness.” Nonetheless it is a courageous leave taking, and though one is proud of Johnson, one winces too.

There is a lot in life to make us wince, but Johnson avers that to whine about it would be self-indulgent cant. That life is hard was to Johnson axiomatic. One didn’t complain. When times were good, one expressed gratitude. Oh, Johnson knew without peradventure that better than any king’s throne was a stool in a tavern and that no pleasure could equal a man’s being alone with a pretty woman in a post chaise. A good drink and a pretty woman: they are hard to beat.

How does a man keep a house on a winter’s night? How does a man keep a life? How does a man do anything? He does it the best he can. I think Johnson would have agreed. Johnson, as did Becker, asks the simple question: “Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, / Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?” Of course each of us must. Johnson advises us, as does Becker, not to attempt to obtain the mercies of the skies; that is, to make sense of things, to gain privileged reward from natural law. One must, instead, try to have faith in something beyond humanity, a faith that, even if one will never know what it is, each person furnishes some part of the great scheme of the universe. I am sure most of members of the Ernest Becker Foundation can remember the last sentence in Denial of Death: “The most that any one of us can do is to fashion something—an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering, so to speak, to the life force.”

I don’t know the following is relevant to what precedes it, but it might be important for us members of the EBF to remember something Becker said in his deathbed interview with Sam Keen. I don’t know, have no idea really, possess no data at all, but I’d guess that most members of the EBF are atheists. We should note, whether we agree with him or not, what Becker says to Keen a few days before Becker dies. Keen says, “Your personal philosophy of life seems to be a  Stoic kind of heroism.” Well, I suspect few of Beckerians have any problem with Keen’s summing here. You might, however, if you haven’t read Becker’s response to Keen’s comment, be surprised at what Becker says: “Yes, though I would add the qualification that I believe in God.”

Both Becker and Johnson know that when the world is shed of all illusion, when things stand revealed for what they are, the only consolation available is a faith in something higher than humankind that redeems life, though neither man’s mind, and neither can ours, can encompass this Force that they thought, regardless of the impossibility of ever understanding it, life could be said to have a purpose.

Glossing the Gilding on Guilt

"Blak Lantern" Henry Richards

A conversation on the Becker LinkedIn Discussion Group centered on guilt (thanks to Liz), and I would like to offer some observations about guilt here in The Denial File.

Right off the bat there’s the problem of definition. How does guilt differ from shame, from sadness? To what extent is guilt a derivative of anxiety?

There is recent scientific evidence on the former question.  A team of European scientists have mapped guilt-specific processing in the prefrontal cortex. (Wagner, N’Diaye, Ethofer, & Vuilleumier, in Cerebral Cortex, November 2011)  The methodology involved having subjects relive, while undergoing functional MRI scanning, recent personal experiences of guilt, shame, sadness, and emotionally neutral events. The brain regions involved in each emotion were then combined across subjects and the brain regions activated by each emotion were compared to each other and to knowledge about localization of other experiences and operations, such as–of particular importance here—the mental operation of focusing on oneself, or focusing on others. The researchers found that the brain regions that were most active for guilt experiences were different from those related to shame. The shame areas were active simultaneously with self-focus areas. In contrast, the guilt-specific areas were coactive with other-focus areas, and especially areas whose activation is triggered by the coordination of goals and interactions with another person, such as in a competitive game. All the emotions investigated (sadness, guilt, and shame) rely on brain areas that are functionally impaired in psychopaths and other antisocial disorders. The bottom line for this study is that (in terms of brain functioning) guilt subsumes shame (all areas involved in shame are active during guilt) but not vice versa, and that guilt is closer to sadness than to shame. Guilt is an other-focused experience and shame is a self-focused experience. From other contrasts, the researchers concluded that guilt is evoked when a social norm is violated, whereas shame predominates when there is a violation of personal values. This suggests that guilt has evolved to maintain one’s relationship with others, and shame has evolved to maintain the values undergirding the self.  [Unfortunately all the subjects in this study were female, leaving open the possibility (based on the widely held theory that men have no conscience) that the study might not be replicated with male subjects.]

As to my first question (Is guilt a derivative of anxiety?) my knowledge extends only to psychoanalytic theory, in which guilt is a topically defined anxiety experienced by the ego in reference to the superego. Guilt is the self feeling anxious about its relationship to the internalized parent, a relationship which has been jeopardized by some action or wish. Of course, psychoanalysis presumes that most guilt is unconscious, heavily defended against, and unfounded in reality, i.e., neurotic. In seeing guilt as related to an internalized other, psychoanalytic theory comports with the neuro-scientific findings cited above. Psychoanalysis also (like the summarized study) views shame as a self-focused emotion (with an anal and urethral in libidinal cathexis). Shame is anxiety about a shortcoming in the self. It could be said that it is anxiety about the capacity and adequacy of the self. Shame says in effect “I do not want to be seen.” The desire to hide. [As a result, it often defends against exhibitionism and unacknowledged ambition].

With that all above taken into account (which is easily said but not so easily done)  guilt and shame are used somewhat differently on the offerings [atonements, sacrifices for putting the reader through all this] that will follow in my next post.

Pop Quiz: Did Adam and Eve experience guilt or shame when they violated God’s instructions? Since Adam was in charge (in their male dominated, two-person world) did the two experience the same emotion?

Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich Are Right On!

"Normal Dan" Dan Liechty

Gary Hart is calling for a new debate about capitalism (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/capitalism-debate_b_1203153.html) and I fully agree. Think about it. One group of capitalist investors looks for undervalued companies, uses their investment and management expertise to place these companies and their workers on solid footing, leaves them strong and secure, and then shares in their increased profitability. A second group of capitalist investors looks for undervalued companies with full intention of gutting them, stripping them of all existing assets, closing them down, firing the workers, selling off the machinery overseas, and then rewarding themselves with millions in management fees for doing so. Now, we all know there is a difference in the way a trusted animal vet and a procurer for a knackering plant look at a lame horse. Likewise, even we financial know-nothings can see a moral and economic difference between these two investment groups. Group one is socially beneficial and patriotic; group two is socially parasitic and as treacherous to the commonwealth as terrorism. Look around any American city that once had a strong manufacturing segment. Where are those jobs are today? Who raked in major profits, and who got poorer, as that manufacturing segment declined? This is a crucial point on which all laboring people, Dems, Repubs and Independents, the Tea Party and OWS folks, should be able to find plenty of common ground, along with everyone else who places the good of America’s future above their own short term quick profits. Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich are right on target in pointing out the difference between entrepreneurial investment capitalism and high finance vulture capitalism.

The Psychic Bartender: Hangman’s Lunch

"k1f" Kirby Farrell

People can’t think clearly enough to justify killing.  Sooner or later, in court or out, our unseen motives will always betray us into absurdity or evil. Here’s a case in point.

Nobody likes to think that innocent people might be put to death in a nation whose leaders are getting comfortable with the legitimacy of torture and military tribunals.  Even hardcore advocates of the death penalty strongly prefer to see guilty people die.  Troubled observers rightly grumble about procedural faults in death penalty cases.  But rarely does the public think out loud about the amazing susceptibility of death-penalty jurisprudence to the irrational depths of so-called normal life.  We see pretty clearly the incongruities and lunacy in some other legal systems – Saudi religious courts, or politically warped Soviet justice, say.  But it’s not so easy to recognize the pressure of absurdity in our own “natural” rightness.

Consider this:

The execution of Troy Davis in Georgia for shooting an off-duty policeman defied international appeals for clemency.  It also discounted evidence that the original prosecution was faulty, with seven of nine witnesses to the shooting later recanting their testimony.  There are ample procedural grounds for mistrusting capital punishment.  And cognitive studies have shown that the testimony of witnesses under stress is often unreliable.  To make matters worse, the historical record shows a highly suspect disproportion of death sentences pronounced on black defendants.

But there are deeply pernicious yet unaccountable psychological distortions that bear on the process too.   The religious convictions of judges and juries are bound to color their judgment yet they’re usually unaccountable.  Religious beliefs are euphemized or ignored in public discussions, and are in any case likely to be complex, nebulous, and to some extent unconscious.

At the last minute Troy Davis appealed for a stay of execution to the Supreme Court, which declined to intervene.  The present court is well known for its political appointments and historically novel decisions.  In 2009, Supreme Court Justice Scalia declared that “this Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”  Yet beyond this peculiar, if not tortured reasoning, there are other, no less problematical forces at work.

Justice Scalia, for example, uses morally charged and unaccountable beliefs to justify capital punishment. Though ostensibly a “strict constructionist” in constitutional law, the Catholic Scalia maintains that for the believing Christian, “death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next? The Christian attitude is reflected in the words Robert Bolt’s play has Thomas More saying to the headsman: ‘Friend, be not afraid of your office. You send me to God’ . . . . For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence. What a horrible act!  Besides being less likely to regard death as an utterly cataclysmic punishment, the Christian is also more likely to regard punishment in general as deserved. The doctrine of free will–the ability of man to resist temptations to evil, which God will not permit beyond man’s capacity to resist–is central to the Christian doctrine of salvation and damnation, heaven and hell. The post–Freudian secularist, on the other hand, is more inclined to think that people are what their history and circumstances have made them, and there is little sense in assigning blame.”

“Death is no big deal” unless of course you happen to be wrongly put to death. The justice reduces the bewildering variety of religious experience to “the Christian” and attacks a straw man, the “post-Freudian secularist.”  In this rhetoric Christian theology shrinks to a historically shadowy anecdote used by a dramatist in a popular hagiography.  Murder is terrifying–“a horrible act!”–yet in theory Christian murder victims achieve bliss with God, so the rhetoric boxes in deep ambivalence.  Scalia’s Gospel sees no incoherence here and has no room for Christian mercy.

The justice is weighing the power to kill accused individuals, but his argument refuses to contemplate actual behavior. Its stereotypes foster psychic impunity by polarizing categories and ignoring the quality of evidence.  At no point does Scalia acknowledge that he is talking about faith in immortality that by definition is beyond any rational standard: and that such faith could be used to legitimize judicial murder or a genocidal crusade.  At the same time he imagines that all murders are deliberate acts, ignoring the roles of panic and accident, not to mention organic dysfunction.  Operating in an anti-psychological intellectual zone, the man never considers that the terror of annihilation might be driving his take-no-prisoners convictions about immortality, or that a judge’s magisterial courage might be at bottom tragic denial.

Rage for order is both a behavior and an idea about behavior. Justice Scalia, for instance, is attracted to the idea of punishment: “the Christian is also more likely to regard punishment in general as deserved.” He imagines a world cleanly divided between the righteous and the damned; believers and nonbelievers, Christians and “Post-Freudian secularists,” and so on.  In this mindset the deep structure is melodrama.  Differing imaginations don’t overlap, wonder at the infinite varieties of creation, agonize over how to get at the truth, or rue our tragic inadequacy (“God will not permit [temptation] beyond man’s capacity to resist”). Social life is not a matter of trade, negotiation, mutation, and adaptation, but rather an adrenalized struggle to identify and punish, empowered by a conviction of godlike invulnerability.

The issue is not whether judgment will exist, but what form will it take?  How much is enough?  Who gets to judge?  On what evidence? And who will police the system? History groans with mass movements and cults that have thrived on predatory righteousness.  The self-intoxicating effects of moral aggression stand out in Philip G. Zimbardo’s famous Stanford Prison Experiment, which had to be halted early when student volunteers in the roles of prison guards began slipping into sadism and the inmates’ depression became self-confirming.  But this was only an experiment, not the living horror of a false conviction and judicial murder–the likely fate of people such as Cameron Todd Willingham, whom Texas officials put to death in 2004 despite demonstrably faulty evidence, a feckless appeals process, and now a brazenly manipulated coverup by a governor who has become a national candidate for president..

In his retirement, with moving humility, Justice John Paul Stevens abjured his support for the death penalty decades before.  Reviewing reasons that capital punishment is “unwise and unjustified,” Stevens called attention to the creaturely motives underlying American cultural practices that make the law perverse, quoting the argument of David Garland’s Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition (2010).  Not only is the death penalty not a deterrent to crime, it actually promotes “gratifications,” of “professional and political users, of the mass media, and of its public audience.” With its demonstrable racial biases and its role in the Republican party’s “southern strategy” as well as in the post-Vietnam “culture wars,” capital punishment has served political ends.  But beyond these motives, even beyond revenge, Stevens and Garland see at work “the American fascination with death”–specifically, the “emotional power of imagining killing and death. [Garland] concludes that “the American death penalty has been transformed from a penal instrument that puts persons to death to a peculiar institution that puts death into discourse for political and cultural purposes.”

From Clarence Darrow to the Justice Project, many have challenged the death penalty, and for good reason.  But a thorough reexamination of the death penalty is long overdue.  It needs to bring into the light, for all to see, not only the difficulties that compromise capital punishment in action, but also its profoundly fallible roots in mental life.

Here in the bar, on the mirror behind the glittering bottles, you can still make out the worn gilt letters of the old advertising slogan, “Primum Non Nocere.”

Bottoms up, pal.

(This argument draws on Kirby Farrell’s Berserk Style in American Culture : <<http://people.umass.edu/kfarrell/Berserk_Style_in_American_Culture.html)

Becker and Hobbes

"The Single Hound" Bruce Floyd

This weekend I found myself reading a little about Thomas Hobbes, who, or so it seems to me, anticipates Becker somewhat in that Hobbes believed that the chief horror of a person’s living in nature is the person’s fear of death, especially sudden and violent death. Using the example of Prometheus having his liver eaten each day and repaired each night (imagine the anxiety), Hobbes says “to that man which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity, and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep.”

Hobbes had little use for clever but meaningless phrases. We should, I suppose, do our best to live in the Now, as contrasted with the past and the future, and those who keep saying this are no doubt right, but, sadly, living in just the Now is impossible for a self-conscious creature. It takes a better and wiser man than I to comprehend this living in the Now. The few withered leaves on the trees outside my study window are, surely, in the Now, but, ah, they remind me of what it to come. The resplendent beauty of autumn is fading now, the leaves bare, the brightly colored leaves sodden. Winter looms ahead. I can prate all I want about the wonder of the moment, but in my imagination I am always standing beside the newly-dug grave when the gravedigger heaves up the jawless skull of Yorick, and all I can say is, “That skull had a tongue in it once and could sing.” What “Now” can erase that tune from my memory?

Hobbes wanted to know what was the answer to this awful problem. Hobbes chose not to consider religion, since he finds is “not a safeguard against fear, but a parasite on it.” No, the answer Hobbes provides is secular. To avoid and to escape the consequences of his impotence, his mortality, his tenuous existence, his self-consciousness which fills him with anxiety, mankind must construct “an authority . . . whose opinions are truth, whose orders are justice.” Becker would say, of course, that Hobbes is talking about “cultural heroics.” The culture absorbs the anxiety, “takes over” the life of the citizen, enables him to live a truncated but comfortable life, one in which he knows his place. Men are, as Hobbes knew, eager to give up their freedom, to abdicate from responsibility for their own lives. They are sheep who want to be led, to be taken care of, to be protected.

What happens, though, when one of the sheep understands that the shepherd knows no more than the sheep?

Occupy the Toolbox

"k1f" Kirby Farrell

Yes, once again it’s time for the world to end.  Apocalyptic thinking never wholly goes away.  In good times reason sometimes reduces end-times fantasies to an entertaining diversion like the fabulous “Left Behind” fad.  But doomsday takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.  It’s partly an innocent cognitive prejudice: we frame reality all the time.  To make sense of overwhelming reality, we rely on beginnings and ends, boundaries, agreed definitions, rules.  When they don’t exist, we invent them.  The idea of death of course undermines all such frames.  It’s bigger than what we know, without measurable limits in any direction.  Its mystery is an insult the idea of a person.

Better, then, to imagine the absolute end of everything.  It’s closure.  No more stress, no more doubts.

I’ve written about apocalyptic thinking recently in Berserk Style in American Culture, but today the angels of doom are swarming and biting like midges – the aptly named no-seeums.

Sometimes doomsday is an explicit theology or fantasy of the end.  More often it’s a trope or marker for breakdown or the “I-don’t-want-to-go-there” unthinkable.  Sometimes doomsday is seductive millennialism: a projection of “fate” with hints of utopia or final perfection, as in the Nazi “Thousand Year Reich” or its Soviet counterpart.  This sort of fantasy protects infantile addiction to idealism and impossible self-aggrandizement, as Hitler obligingly demonstrated.   Christian and Islamic fundamentalists are susceptible to this sort of cosmic payoff, but they’re hardly alone. As he slipped into Alzheimer’s dementia, President Reagan poignantly brought up end-times themes in a way that showed the mind trying to cope with encroaching awareness of its own doom.

The point is, doom can be used in all sorts of ways.  It’s a Swiss army knife, an arsenal of tools that can be used in every emergency you can imagine.

And today?

Rightwing politics and media strongly favor apocalypse as a form of threat display that can compel attention and assent in anxious, frustrated audiences. Candidates such as Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman are enthusiastic about doomsday.  Newt Gingrich favors attention-getting ideas that explode “outside the box” (frame) like the atmospheric nukes he imagines causing an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would shut down civilization.

Robert Reich recognized the desperate quality of Gingrich’s budget-demolishing tax plan:  “Americans are so cynical about the major institutions of our society that someone who offers huge, outrageous plans holds a special fascination: The whole system is so awful, people tell themselves, why not just jettison everything and start from scratch? Let’s throw caution to the winds and do something really big – even if it’s colossally stupid. This is why the more outrageous Newt can be, the better his polls. The more irresponsible his bomb-throwing, the more attractive he becomes to a sizable portion of Americans so fed up they feel like throwing bombs.”

The apocalyptic feeling, Reich sees, reflects exasperation and despair of practical solutions.  Hence the urge to run amok.

The berserk behavior registers in Reich’s metaphor of “bomb-throwing.”  That trope in turn ought to remind us of suicide bombers and the thrilling, stupid pledge to succeed “or die trying.”  History’s most expensive military is always deploying doomsday threat to trigger another war.  Osama bin Laden provided the corporate military with a rich fund of threats. The nasty TV series “24″ celebrates torture as the sovereign prophylactic for unimaginable crisis.  These days a chorus is warning us that the Iranians are planning nuclear apocalypse.

The empire according to Newt has learned nothing.

This is of course one of the core motives for doomsday thinking.  If you keep repeating the same demonstrably futile behavior – Iraq was a disaster, Afghanistan is a chronic disaster: let’s invade Iran – you may begin to hear a voice in the back of the mind screaming for doomsday relief.  Vietnam marked the beginning of fifty years – half a century – of what has been “the American War.”  After all the corpses, refugees, and trashed economies are tallied, there has been no victory.  As usual, merchants of death have made a buck, but the nations involved have only enriched the undertaker.

The political-economics of the American War has a counterpart in the tormented struggle to cope with the financial debacle on Wall Street and in Europe.  The banks have created a crisis that demands the equivalent of war on the public treasury to prevent global explosion.  These days financial writers are howling about collapse, devolution in Europe (Rick Perry has advocated secession for Texas, too), and of course Nazi despotism.

On Main Street the doomsday feeling comes partly from the hoarding of money and power at the top.  It makes ordinary working people feel helpless and worthless.  At the top boundless money is boundless life and boundless freedom.  On the bottom, the empty pocket means social death.  The problem isn’t just sickening injustice.  Hoarded wealth doesn’t circulate, so the economy’s lifeblood stagnates and the heart dies.  In more senses than one.

But even at the top the fear of doomsday is at hand. After all, the higher you go, the farther you can fall and the more you have to lose.  The more you loot and hoard, the more you fear your bony, hollow-eyed, snarling neighbor.

Survival greed haunts the Midas suite as well as the gutter.  As Becker says, “Whoever gets enough life?”  No wonder the very rich live behind electric fences.  No wonder dictators murder compulsively trying to swat the swarming no-seeums of doomsday.

In this context the mild Occupy Wall Street protests are long overdue.  They dream of rolling down darkened limousine windows.  As in Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me,” they dream of looking the boss in the eye.  The act of speaking out boosts morale, but protest always struggles against disillusion and despair–doomsday.  If you rebel against denial and let yourself feel the sting of injustice and bungle, you risk feeling helpless and in danger of retaliation from on top.  The photos of cops and pepper spray that make you indignant can also make you afraid.  When media demands that the protesters say what they want, as if modern economies can be reformed by a bumper sticker, the challenge is so extreme it insinuates helplessness.

The best answer to doomsday is build something.  That means seeing problems to be solved and thinking about the toolbox rather than the cosmic grindstone.  Step by step.  Swat those no-seeums.

Roll up your sleeves.

Occupy the toolbox.