Lovers Need Lawyers

“Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains!”—Rousseau, The Social Contract 1762
In the beginning, there was the Social Contract: a freely constructed community of Individuals who willingly give up their natural Freedom and voluntarily consent to the community's Laws if—and only if—it can sufficiently protect their Life, Liberty and Property/Pursuit of Happiness.

This is the foundation of Liberalism (the type of System we currently live under), which was discovered through a hypothetical thought experiment called the State of Nature: a device used by early Enlightenment Philosophers to imagine how Man would live if stripped of all seemingly conventional attachments to Country, Religion, and Family and existed only as the isolated, separate beings that the unity of our individual Bodies suggests.

The point of this experiment was to foment a conspiracy to undermine the legitimacy of all previously existing political regimes by exposing their Rulers’ supposed claim to serve the Common Good as nothing more than a means to exploit the Ruled for their own selfish, greedy ends.

(The formula goes something like this: We are all Selves + the Self is naturally selfish = its two strongest motivating passions are Self-Preservation and Self-Interest)

The goal was to give an equal Right to selfishness to the Ruled; to allow them to be the sole judge of their own Interests; to have the Right to freely choose Rulers who would best serve those ends. And, once the old legitimacies were sufficiently disposed of (i.e. Revolution), then the Rulers and the Ruled could consciously—using their Reason—construct a new Contract that would equally protect the Interests of both parties.

But, if one constructs a Society founded on our basest, most animal instincts will it not eventually reduce us back to them; if all these Social relations are shown to be merely conventional, with no natural basis, how do you prevent that line of thought from eventually extending to every form of relationship? And now, “History” has seemingly led us full circle back to the once fabled State of Nature—not as an experimental hypothesis as those who first proposed it, but, instead, as an ever increasingly realized reality.

The Youth today are now well provided for by our Country—and continue to demand more and more social security from their government—yet there is really little to no reciprocal civic engagement required of them; they are free to choose which, if any, Religion they wish to practice; and now, even sexual involvements have been completely liberated as well—no longer necessarily leading to commitment or Family life—completing the triumvirate of conventional attachments: Country, Religion and Family. We now exist as the naked Individuals who once “inhabited” the State of Nature—but with one little difference: we still inhabit Society and like to think of our-Selves as “civilized” creatures, but, as the State of Nature originally showed, the result of disconnected Individuals all asserting equal Rights to a finite amount of Nature’s bounty is really…a War of All Against All.

Despite the radicalism of the Philosophers that first proposed this new scheme for Society, they never imagined the break down of the Family as well, and had relied on this semi-natural, or at least unavoidable, necessity to provide some sort of bridge to connect the Individual and Society. The Individual would take a material stake in his community, in order to provide the best possible atmosphere in which to raise his Family—a way to ensure the Common Good that flows naturally out of our Self-Interest. Also, the concern for the safety of one’s Family is a powerful reason for loyalty to the State that protects them.

Rousseau, however, knew better and could see where the rising tide of Egalitarianism and Individualism (which he agreed with in principle) caused by this new philosophy would eventually lead. This inspired him to devote his entire career to encouraging passionate, Romantic Love to attempt to create a bond between Men and Women that was greater than mere Bourgeois calculation of Self-Interest. But, based on this sketch by Chappelle, it would appear that his great effort has failed and our view of our-Self as simply freely contracting Individuals has now penetrated our every relation—officially destroying any semblance of a natural basis that once connected Human Beings to one another.

Rousseau tried to discover/create Molecules (Family), as opposed to simply Atoms (Individuals), as the building blocks of Society because then Society’s parts would already be moved by different motivations than mere Self-Interest—which then could hopefully be extended to Others. People in love constitute a visible proof that Man can act for other reasons besides the Economic/Utilitarian motivations that dominate Modern Theory. In contrast, each partner in the Molecule is instead motivated by forces found in true attachment and concern for Others, whereas a Society constructed out of radically separate Atoms creates no shared basis of concern—only diffidence or, even worse, war.

We have now turned the most intimate connection that can unite two Human Beings into just another contest in the War of All Against All—the final development of founding all human relations on mere contracts; simply another contest for the “Will to Power” to assert itself. The only possible peace is to be found in an artificial construct: the Business Contract—which we enter into for as long as it is convenient and serves our Interests; a union of two equally Self-ish Individuals who hopefully each have a good lawyer to settle the statistically inevitable Divorce.

And you know what the silliest part of all this is: a concurrent attempt by the same Individuals to turn the actual Social Contract—the societal one—into a more compassionate/caring relationship—i.e. some sort of Socialist type structure that could help to reduce our selfishness—while at the same time reducing real Human connection to an abstraction, with no natural basis. In the end, it appears that we all love our Rights, but hate their consequences. We want to be respected as an Individual, but also want to have real human connections.

And, what we are creating instead are a bunch of Social Solitaries and Isolated Individuals—all with their “own little separate systems”—who have no alternative to collapsing into their Self because everything else has lost its foundation. There is no longer any connection—natural or artificial—to make us care for anyone, except for number one; to draw our attention outward and give us a reason to care about a Community or Society; to not just use one another simply for bodily pleasure…

“I don’t know about you, but I’m still horny.”

Let's Go Bowling

Where does one even begin with a critique of this commercial?

—The Hollywood, stylized/hip, quick-cut interview technique; the overly Self-conscious utilization of Marketing Buzz-words; the seemingly un-Self-conscious exploitation of high philosophic concepts; or perhaps just the all around insulting, simple-mindedness to its approach to marketing its product.

Most of these are pretty much self-explanatory (and I have already covered them before: Quick-cuts, Buzz-words, Simple-mindedness) and I think I will just limit myself to exploring the existential fire this company is playing with in its pseudo-philosophic—and, not to mention, highly Ego-flattering—lexicon for this Marketing Campaign.

Let’ start with the first—and also the most egregious—instance in this commercial: “We’re not just machines that pump stuff out.” Of course our notion of the so-called “Dignity of Man” automatically makes us think of this as a no brainer—and also our commonsense, subjective experience of everyday life—but, in reality (in the work of our most highly educated Physicists and Biologists), this still remains a highly contentious scientific and philosophic conundrum. (Great article about it here) Our human bodies are made of the same substance as every other “body” in the natural world, and so much of their function is on an unconscious level that it is quite problematic to so boldly assert that “we’re not just machines.”

After Newton’s new brand of Science and Physics asserted that the world was just one big deterministic machine, all of philosophy had to follow suit. Our bodies became just another “body in motion” that wished to preserve that motion, i.e. Self-Preservation—the foundation of Modern Political Philosophy. This made the possibility of true “Freedom” quite problematic, despite Philosophy at the same time also declaring that we are all “Free and Equal.”

This lead Rousseau to assert that our Freedom can only be based on a defiance of our Nature, or a perfection of cultivated Virtue through Art and Education (or to be creative; to make something out of nothing; to be The Creator). Only when we rebel against our Animal/Deterministic Nature—Self-Interest, Self-Preservation—do we truly commit a “Free” action, which, for him, has its highest expression in a life-long, freely committed Marriage. Although Nature directs Man to Woman in the act of procreation and perpetuation of the species, there is—again, for him—no natural basis for this “Relationship.” But this initial act of Freedom sets the stage for the possibility of true Moral Choice and Human Dignity because it is an action in defiance of the Deterministic World-Machine.

These ideas were then taken up by Immanuel Kant, in his body of works known as the Three Critiques. In them, he tried to set limits to the possibility of Reason to fully penetrate the Human Condition, and created a new realm higher than Science that could account for Man’s Freedom, or Autonomy—his capacity for Free, Moral Choice, and its accompanying Dignity. But this did not truly solve the problem, as much as just place it on the shelf—it simply assumed it exists and then moved on to easier solvable dilemmas.

There is a lot more to this history that followed Kant’s “solution”—involving the Unconscious, and all kinds of other highly problematic elements—but I will just leave it there for now and move on to the next set of thorny philosophic ideas alluded to in this commercial.

At the end, the gentleman says, “It’s about a sense of community. It’s about a sense of being part of something greater than one-Self”—which is perhaps the issue for Modern Man.

If we are all Individuals, whose main motivating factors are Self-Interest and Self-Preservation, how do you make us truly care for an-Other? Now that all the old bonds—Country, Religion and Family—had been shown to be only false convention and myth by the Enlightenment, how do we now create any sort of binding, non-conditional relationship between any two separate, “free” Individuals? How can there be a Common Good if everyone is, first and fore-most, concerned with their own Private Good?

Pretty much ever since this idea was postulated, there has been a backlash against it. Our Founding Fathers weren’t nearly as doctrinaire as the European Enlightenment, and did not work nearly as hard at dispelling the “prejudices” (opinions) of the People, and left much of the old social apparatus in tact—which is what the “Real Americans” still believe in. But, for all us Fake Americans, this social network has been on a steady decline for at least the last 50 years or so and has been documented by Political Scientists like Robert Putnam in his book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Yet, we still yearn for some sort of connection—for a “Human Network” and “the power of collaboration.”

And Marketers are well aware of that. The idea that shared Consumer Tastes can be equated with “Community” is a highly pervasive one in the industry and Brands that successfully pull this off are constantly used as Case Studies to be emulated. But there is a big difference between Communities that connect us and bind us to a larger vision of society and our role as citizens in it, and ones based on the exploitation of desire in order to maximize profit.

Capitalizing on this superficial, mutual fandom may be an extremely useful technique to sell products, but there is a very deep reason that these techniques are so successful: it helps to fill a hole in our soul that has been created by a false vision of Man by Modern Philosophy. The Commercial Persuasion Industry plays a very big role in the Material success and comfort that we are able to enjoy, but, if this is to be our only metric for quality of life in America, then all we are ever going to have here is the “Pursuit of Happiness,” and never its attainment.


For more on the exploitation by Marketers of the “Tension of Modernity”—the need to feel like an Individual, but also to be part of something greater than one-Self—check out the very excellent book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, by Rob Walker.

Waking Up From the American Dream

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Anand Giridharadas
www.thedailyshow.com
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What is the “American Dream”?

It is the possibility of Social Mobility; of kids living a better (materially) life than their parents did. It is the opportunity to “pull yourself up by your boot straps;” to be a “Self-made Man” (or Woman, now). It is about entrepreneurship and taking chances and “making something of yourself.” It is about being a strong-willed Individual, who doesn’t care what the nay-sayers think; about being a “Rugged Individualist.”

In his brilliant account of our country, Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s favorite word for describing our citizens was “restive”: unable to keep still or silent and becoming increasingly difficult to control, especially because of impatience, dissatisfaction, or boredom.

Basically, we are all workaholics, obsessed with the idea and the possibilities of growth—both personal and societal. There is always something else wrong that can be improved upon; that can be done more efficiently or more intelligently. It doesn’t necessarily matter to us how our fore-fathers did things—especially if it is a material, scientific issue—which causes in us a lack of reverence for more traditional, i.e. Culturally-based, ways of living that could potentially ground our ambitions and restivity. For us, Reason is an instrument through which we can look out at the world, judge what is wrong, and use it to improve upon it.

This idea is now being exported to the rest of the world and is becoming a very destructive force in these still more traditional cultural settings. Most of the time this gets disparaged by calling it “Cultural Imperialism” because it so disrespectful to these old Cultures’ Values—and who is the West to say we’re right, right? But that is painting the situation with a very broad brush and the reality is a little more nuanced than that.

As Anand Giridharadas shows in his new book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, sometimes it can be a good thing for old Values to fall away and new ones to take their place. In India, one of the most conspicuous elements of the new economic forces that are taking shape there is the dissolution of the once determinate Caste System that formerly kept India immutably stratified in a culturally based social hierarchy. But now, a much more meritocratic system of fluid social mobility is rising to take its place: aka, The American Dream. (Sidenote: sometimes the loss of old values can be a very, very bad thing as well.)

These developments made the writer, Giridharadas, decide only one generation after his family’s emigration to America, to renounce the opportunities here and return to his homeland because India has now become the new “Land of Opportunity”. The Caste System had ordered society for thousands of years—at times more or less rigidly: more so since the imposition of British rule in the 1700’s—but is now coming to be seen as an antiquated relic of a superstitious, myth-based past.

The country is importing all sorts of jobs from factories to IT to call centers for companies from all over the world—NBC has even made a sitcom about it: Outsourced. They are becoming a major force in the world and are asserting themselves upon the world stage as a nation to be “taken seriously.” The Economy of India is now the eleventh largest in the world by GDP and the fourth largest by purchasing power parity. And Economists are predicting that by 2020 India will be among the leading economies in the world. (They also, by the way, now hold $41 billion in US debt.)

It will be interesting to see how this plays out—as the rest of the world plays catch up to America and the rest of the West, in the material realm. They are kind of experiencing our history—only in fast forward—but with one little exception, and possible advantage. This is what Giridharadas spoke of at the end: the “challenge of culture and spirit.” In America, our Culture is dissipating—the foundations are eroding and the dividedness of Western History between our Christian heritage and our “Enlightened” experiment are at war with one another and we are in the midst of a great Identity Crisis. The one side is receding further and further backward under the cover and comfort of fundamentalist Self-assurance, as the other side is trying its hardest to pull us in the opposite—just as dangerous and destructive—direction toward ungrounded, contentless “Freedom.”

We no longer know who we are, nor do we have an aim or purpose that is guiding us into the unknown future. Obama tried to inspire us with his so-called “Sputnik Moment” he spoke of in his State of the Union address, but the goals he set were low, paltry and all-around inadequate for the direness of the situation. Whether or not these rising countries are truly more united than us, or are just superficially so—united by a common “enemy” or competitor—will remain to be seen, but, if we are going to remain united, we need something much higher and loftier than high-speed rail and nationwide wireless internet access to reinvigorate our floundering and disunited nation.

Can America create a new national Culture out of the vast range of diversity and interests that are now contained within in it; is it even still possible to satisfy this diverse of a People at the Federal level, or must our government shrink to meet the needs of an increasingly balkanized Nation?

Our Time Honored Tradition of Cannibalism

For the next installment in my ongoing series in the exploration into the idea of “Culture,” I’m going to, instead, try to explore what Culture is not; or at least what inhibits Culture and its tangible manifestations: Art, Values, Traditions, etc. Sometimes a negative definition can be much more useful than a positive one because it is less definite—less constrictive and determinate; it can allow for a greater range of interpretations and positive creations to flow from it by not limiting its manifestations to a finite scale.

A good example of this would be the Bill of Rights—all of the Rights enumerated within it are defined in the negative:

-Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of Religion
-The Right of the People to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed
-The Right of the People…against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated
-Etc...

The absence of an explicitly expressed meaning of these laws allows for a great range of interpretation—which can be a good and bad thing—but, in fact, they do well to achieve exactly what they were conceived to do: provide for a broad basis for interpretation and enactment of what Freedom means to each unique Individual. They declare: You have the Right to not be forced, in this case by the Government, to do some something that is against your Conscience, but, in turn, also have the positive Right to create your world however you see fit (well as long as it doesn’t violate an-Other’s Right to do the same).

Sorry that was a bit of long tangent, but I think one that illustrates my initial point pretty well.

So, what is Culture not; or what, perhaps, inhibits the ability of Culture to flourish and to be a positive, active force in the world? Everyone today says that they respect Culture and thinks that it is an important aspect of the Human Condition; and just about everyone today also agrees that Human Values are relative to an Individual’s Culture—that they are Socially and Historically constructed—and that what is important is not so much the content of the Culture, but merely the fact that an Individual participates in one—which is what accounts for the beautiful diversity of the world.

The other day, I went to my local “Progressive/Alternative” Art museum to experience some “Culture.” They were having a presentation of an Afro-Brazilian/Samba-Reggae drumming group, called Batala Percussion Band—a 90% White, 100% Women troupe from DC. They played a very lively, all percussive style of music meant to make you move; to get up and dance; to shake off the shackles of Self-consciousness and really live!

A sizable group of about 75-100 people turned out for the event—mostly White, all Middle-Upper Middle Class, and if not White, at least fully immersed in the average American Life-style. The drumming-group came out to—what I can only generously call—a lukewarm round of applause from the gathered mass, after the group’s attractive, mid-20’s, White, female conductor’s introduction and explanation about what we were about to “experience.”

Before the group began playing we were warned by the conductor that the group’s drums could get “pretty loud,” and that we should all take our fingers and push that little flap on the outside of our ears in, so as not to damage our delicate eardrums. Maybe I just think about things too much—which, come to think of it, is undeniable—but this seemingly innocuous instruction sent my mind reeling down a path from which I could not divert throughout the rest of the performance.

What happens when one pushes the flaps into their ears? It dampens the sound; it creates a barrier between the receiver and the experience; it attenuates the sensual energy of the performance. And I realized that the “experience”—the occurrence, event or happening; the adventure, exploit or escapade—was not the point of the presentation to which I was attempting to experience. The point of the presentation was “Recognition”—in the political sense of the word: as in “Recognition of Rights.”

As I peered around the room, I noticed an evidently apparent lack of engagement from the audience. Despite the high level of energy emanating from our entertainers, there was a conspicuous absence of reciprocal transference from the audience back to the stage. Most people stood quite still, projecting an unaffected continence in both Body and Soul. After each song, there was an unenthusiastic, perfunctory round of applause, but little truly appreciative reaction.

I began wondering what accounted for this tepid participation. Why was the audience just not “feeling it”? What was the source of this evident disconnect between what this music should be invoking in the listener and what I was so apparently witnessing?

I believe the reason for this disconnect is that once you take a piece of “Culture,” remove it from its native context and so evidently present it as something that we should Self-consciously respect, the work is in turn robbed of all psychic and emotional power. Once you take it and place it in a museum it becomes dead—an interesting artifact, maybe, but it is ultimately stripped of its ability to “move” us. That is the problem with Tradition and Culture: once it becomes recognized simply as such, it no longer contains the power to inspire or create meaning for us. And even more so if the Cultural Artifact has no tangible connection to our History or Self.

This is the fundamental problem of the so-called “Culture Movement.” They are so caught up in feelings of Liberal Guilt and trying to right the wrongs of History that they have lost objectivity and cannot even see how inept their attempts to achieve this have become. The Recognition of Rights of formerly oppressed Minorities is the only goal—it doesn’t matter if they render the Cultural expressions meaningless, as long it is granted an equal presence in the public sphere; as long it makes you realize that your Culture is not special—instead just one of a plurality of Cultures all of equal worth.

And it’s not like I don’t get it, that I don’t understand the source of this Liberal Guilt or “feel bad” for what my “Culture” has done with its preeminence as a world power. Yes, White People have done some pretty awful things to People of Color for a very long time, all over the globe. I just think that Liberal Guilt is a useless, debilitating emotion: there is nothing you can do to change the Past, there is however plenty of things we can do to create a better Future—for Everyone. And as I have tried to get across in this post, the tactic that we currently employ to achieve this, I think, does just as much harm as it does good.

By forcing people to indiscriminately accept everything and “recognize” the fact that the world is made up of many, many different Cultures—all, by the way, with extremely conflicting concepts of the Good—will only result in the eventual inability to have any Cultures. What will happen when the rest of the world discovers Post-Modernity’s favorite little secret: that all basis for preference is nothing more than an accident of where you happened to be placed during the Lottery of Birth, which has no inherent value to it? That is what we—college educated Americans—now believe (unlike those backwards “Real Americans”).

Do we think that we are special—at some greater level of understanding of the Human Condition? Why is it not ok for those ignorant, prejudiced (as in based on opinion, not evidence) “Real Americans” to believe in their Culture, but it is for every other one? And, more importantly, I wonder if are we ever planning on eventually sharing that destructive little insight with all those foreign Cultures we now so valiantly try to protect?

Americans Abroad (Free-style)

“To thine own Self be true...”
—Shakespeare: Hamlet

You should make amends with you,
If only for better health.
But if you really want to live,
Why not try, and make yourself?
—Incubus: Make Yourself

What does it mean to be an “Authentic Self;” or to be Authentic or true to one-Self? Throughout all of Human History there seems to have been a moral imperative to “know thyself,” but in Modernity this need took an odd turn. And now today, a strange mixture of anti-Capitalistic ire and obsession with a Psychological need for “well-being” has seemed to confuse the issue to the point that we no longer know exactly what we mean by this, nor how to go about achieving it.

This strictly Modern problem can be traced back to Rousseau’s radical distinction between Nature and Society. For him, Man in the State of Nature couldn’t help but be him-Self and live in accord with the dictates of Nature, and his specific nature, because there was no alternative; there were no “Alienating” structures that divided his loyalty and impressed conflicting beliefs or duties upon him. He lived as a unified whole and his Amour de Soi—Love of Self—was pure and uncontaminated by the corrupting influence of Ego, Vanity, Ambition and Jealousy that are unavoidable by-products of Society and social interaction.

But today, we have two, seemingly contradictory, notions of what it means to be “Authentic.”

There is the idea of being Authentic to one’s History and Culture—such as the Peruvian family in the 30 Rock clip that has been hat-makers for the last 2,000 years. The value placed upon this brand of Authenticity is its ability to resist the corrupting influence of money and status-seeking and vulgarity: hallmarks of the well-worn critique of Capitalism. We marvel at its longevity and respect for ancient Tradition—and the attendant “care” that is put into the act of creation. The point of production is not simply maximization of profit at any cost and there is a connection to the necessity out of which it was born; therefore not simply “a groundless commitment made in the void.”

But then there is also the complete opposite sense in which we use the word “Authentic”: being Authentic to one-Self. Supposedly, we are all born as an "Authentic Self," but become “Alienated” by the demands of Society/Social Duty and the Values that we are indoctrinated with beginning at birth. To be Authentic, to be a true “Individual,” we need to stay faithful to our nature—our individual, unique, special, one of a kind nature that is all our own—even if it is completely incompatible with the Culture we happen to be “thrown” into during the lottery of birth.

So which do we mean when we say that we value “Authenticity” or “being Authentic”? The goal of both types is an escape or solution to “Alienation”: estrangement from something that is “real.” In the first type, it is an Alienation from an Individual’s Cultural History and Man’s former connection to a more Authentic form of Labor, i.e. Craftsmanship; the second, an Alienation from one’s true Self. One is external, the other internal; but the goal of the latter is, in essence, about Freedom from the former.

What Modern Man ultimately desires is Freedom—especially its most extreme form: the Freedom to do or to be whatever you want; to make yourself. But is not a 2,000 year old family of hat-makers the complete opposite of that proposition? The awe-inspired reverence Liz Lemon has for this family is completely inimical to the goal of Modern Man. I bet somewhere along the line in the last 2,000 years there was at least one son who did not want to be a hat-maker, instead was really passionate about making shoes. But he was probably forced by his father to be one—in order to keep the family Tradition alive. What do you think Ms. Lemon would have to say if she knew that?

The cause of this reverence for these uncorrupted Cultures is to protect developing countries from what are seen as the ravages of the Capitalist System—so indepthly chronicled by the writings of Marx—but is it not, in essence, denying the citizens of these countries the very goal that people like Liz Lemon also hold in such high esteem—namely, Freedom? I can completely sympathize with the impulse, but we must be clear what exactly we are talking about if we are ever going to be able to accurately and honestly talk about a concept as illusive as “Authenticity.” Maybe the real conversation we should be having is: what does “Freedom” mean?

Do What I Say, Not What I do

God may be dead for most of the so-called "enlightened" West, but He appears to still be alive and well(?) in the Middle East. The battle over the Holy Land between Israel and Palestine continues to rage on and is a very contentious issue that I think would be better for me not to weigh in on because really neither side is innocent nor more guilty than the other. I will stop with a simple recommendation of this doc, which was very well done and is getting all sorts of international recognition.

Last week I went to a screening of this movie that was attended by the director Julia Bacha, as well. After the film she did a question and answer portion about the film and about the climate of the news media and entertainment today. I have nothing but respect for people who risk their lives to help "bring the war home" in movies like this one, as well as another really good one I saw recently about Afghanistan called Restrepo. It is very easy, from our comfortable haven in America, to forget the dire struggle our service men and women are going through on a daily basis, especially as our current wars have kind of lagged on and have lost the attention of the news media.

What I really want to talk about though doesn't really have anything to do with these movies, nor the wars that are going on, but instead with this "Attention Span" problem. On the surface, it would seem to be a slightly more trivial issue, but I feel that in the long run its consequences will be felt much more acutely than any sort of blowback resulting from these latest "foreign policy adventures." It has to do with a disconnect—not just the average citizen's from the realities of war, but, even more deeply, the average Individual's disconnect from reality itself.

During the question and answer portion, the topic of Attention Span of the average American today was brought up. The typical demons were blamed: commercials, multi-tasking on the internet, text messaging, the increasingly quick cuts used in Hollywood-style films. Bacha even admitted that one of her next projects would be a series of Shorts because of this very problem. She said she had found that even Budurs' meager 70min running time seemed problematic for some people.

And then, to really drive the point home, I looked to my right at the attendee sitting next to me and, I swear to God, the jack-ass was on his Blackberry checking his Facebook! I was completely astounded that this moron, first-off, could not see the irony, but even worse was so oblivious or obstinate that he did not find something wrong with his behavior. I mean this is a no-brainer; even if he had something really, really important to check on, he couldn't at least wait another 20 minutes till the talk was over? Or if he was so uninterested in the discussion, why wouldn't he just leave? And don't even get me started about how many phones rang during the movie and the discussion, as well. How hard is it to remember to turn off the ringer?

The degeneration in Attention Span is definitely a most worrisome trend, but this lack of even the most basic level of respect is absolutely abhorrent. This problem goes all the way to the top of our social hierarchy too. Remember our esteemed members of Congress tweeting during the President's State of the Union address last year? I realize that we have a Culture War going on that disagrees on just about everything, but can we at least use a little bit of Common Sense and form some sort of consensus on this issue. Agree or disagree with the President, he is still the Commander in Chief and deserves at least some basic level of respect. These esteemed members of Congress were acting like bratty little Middle Schoolers passing the 21st Century equivalent of notes behind the teacher's back. Is it a wonder how our children act in schools these days?

When People Resort to Name Calling

Last night I went to see Charlie Gibson, the former host of ABC’s Good Morning America and World News with Charles Gibson, speak about the increasing polarization and incivility of the media and the rise of political niche-ization of cable networks. If you are not familiar with Gibson, he was the interviewer who asked the so-called “gotcha” question to Sarah Palin in her first major television appearance after her nomination for VP about how she felt about the Bush Doctrine.

It was an interesting evening with some thoughtful analysis about the current state of American politics and how the media shapes our world-views. There, of course, were the requisite attacks on Fox News’ brand of political coverage, with its self-proclaimed assertion of “Fair and Balanced” coverage contrasting with the obvious reality of its not so subtle bias; followed by the lamenting of the death of Objectivity—or at least the attempt at the suppression of the Subjective—in news coverage. He also shared a very telling anecdote—I call it anecdote, as opposed to fact, because he willfully acknowledged that he was severely approximating these statistics, despite their relative accuracy—about how our Primary System and Off-Year Elections usually workout:

The country can roughly be broken up into ⅓ Republican, ⅓ Democrat, and ⅓ Undecided or Moderate. During Primaries, the only ones allowed in many states to vote are people registered for those two parties. Also, in general, the majority of people who are active in politics are the people with the most extreme positions—whereas most people in the Center are generally satisfied by the Status Quo, or are just too busy to care, therefore do not get involved in the process. This means that the candidates who then trickle-down into the General Election or who are voted in during the Off-Year Elections—to which barely anyone pays attention—are those with the most extreme Ideologies causing the Moderates to choose between the lesser of two evils—both of whom they probably don’t generally agree with. You then get the fringes of both parties representing the country, who hold the most extreme Left/Right positions that can find no source of compromise in order to govern our nation.

This analogy seems to make a lot of sense to me and alludes to something I have mentioned before about how “the meek voice of compromise always seems to be drowned out by the angry shouts of Commitment and Moral Indignation because Passion speaks louder than Reason—and has an actual agenda and game-plan for implementing its goals.” But this “Live and Let Live” attitude of the Moderates is perfectly consonant with Americans’ basic conception of Rights: the idea that we have the Right to believe anything we want as long as we respect everyone else’s Right to do the same. I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your Right to say it. But this has no longer become acceptable for the extreme voting blocs and is the foundation of our so-called “Culture War.”

The Right is now being defined by its Christian, American Exceptionalism proponents and the Left is defined by the Cosmopolitan, Life-style Libertinism advocates and never the twain shall meet. The Middle is mostly defined by economic issues and their vote “swings” back and forth depending on the crisis our country happens to be facing at the time of a major election. It is hard to say where there could even be a source of compromise between the two extremes, at least as far as some sort of unified American Culture.

Another significant insight about current American voting patterns brought up by Gibson was the rise in homogeneity of counties, as high as almost 60% in many of them, who all vote for the same candidates. Gibson for all his probing insight into many other aspects of contemporary American trends, for some reason, could not come up with an explanation to this one. This really surprised me, especially in light of his awareness of the increasing niche-ization or balkanization of the American populace because I think these two things go hand-in-hand. As our opposition to political opponents becomes more and more uncivilized and divisive, of course we are going to cluster around those with like-minded Beliefs, Goals and Life-styles to find an anchor in a world gone mad.

This is also just an extension of our current search for Community and Culture because that is exactly what those two things mean—a shared set of assumptions which unites and binds a People. And, as the old grounding of these assumptions becomes ever more problematic, we are going to naturally gravitate towards and seek out like-minded people, who share the same Values and Goals as our-Selves. Unless we can find some new source to re-invigorate our old motto E Pluribus Unum, then this is a trend that is only going to be amplified to an even higher percentage.

It also doesn’t help that Marketers now divide us up in the same way when they talk about Target Markets and Demographics and then use Life-style Marketing that imprisons us in these constricted personalties and existences. As we increasingly learn to define our-Selves through Life-style choices, we begin to loose our sense of broader Community, Nationality and even Humanity. We become the narrowly-defined niche and our every action is expressed through this awareness.

It is hard to imagine what we will be able to use for the new foundation of Community, now that “God is Dead,” but this does not mean that it is not possible. Is Life-style really the best thing we can come up with, or can something more meaningful be found upon which to build the world of tomorrow?

It Felt Like a Kiss

Awesome new doc from provocative British film maker Adam Curtis. It is an examination of disparate forces that have arose over the last 50 years or so and their role in shaping the world the Individual now experiences on a day-to-day basis.

Or as Curtis puts it:
"I wanted to do a film about what it actually felt like to live through that time...Where you could see the roots of the uncertainties we feel today, the things they did out on the dark fringes of the world that they didn't really notice at the time, which would then come back to haunt us."

"The politics of our time are deeply embedded in this idea of Individualism, which is far wider than...consumerism or anything like that. It's how you feel. People think, 'Oh, if it's within me it must be true.' But it's not the be-all and end-all. It's not an absolute. It's a way of feeling and thinking which is a product of a particular time and power. The notion that you only achieve your true self if your desires, your dreams, are satisfied ... It's a political idea. That's the central dynamic of our life."

Word Up

This is a list of the Top 10 most looked up words on Dictionary.com right now.

1. Pretentious
2. Ubiquitous
3. Love
4. Cynical
5. Apathetic
6. Conundrum
7. Albeit
8. Ambiguous
9. Integrity
10. Affect/Effect

It appears that we are desperately searching for the words with which to describe our reality, but are not quite sure of their proper meanings. It appears to me that we are on the right track, if this list is any indication.

You Can Lead a Man to Reason, but You Can't Make Him Think

The word Kultur or “Culture” was first used in its modern sense by Immanuel Kant—who was thinking of Rousseau’s description of the Bourgeois—in an attempt to make up for the, supposed, deficiency in character of this new type of man. The Bourgeois was neither Citizen nor Individual, and his Self-Interest—even his Enlightened Self-Interest—it appeared, was simply not a sufficient basis upon which to unite a People and create a Common Good. After Rousseau’s critique, the new Liberal doctrines—based upon the early Enlightenment thought of Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu—had become insufficient, or at least too unattractive, to found truly Human societies upon. To “Enlightened” Europeans of the time, countries like America looked merely like an aggregate of Individuals, or disorderly marketplaces—dumping grounds for the refuse of real Cultures—where Individuals would simply bring their sellable commodities in the morning, and then at night return to the privacy of their own homes and enjoy, privately, the proceeds of their day.

These new Commercial Republics had as their foundations the pursuit of Material Well-Being and Self-Preservation and had stripped politics of its old imaginary goals—dedication to the preservation of throne, altar and country—leaving Man unclothed and unprotected in a new “civilized” War of All Against All. The idea of “Culture” was created as a way to somehow make up for the loss of these higher goals after the demystification of Religion by the Enlighteners—to preserve something like Religion without having to resort to superstition and myth; it was an attempt to give Morality and Art a place in the Modern World, in order to preserve the “Dignity of Man.” This new Liberal mode of Politics, with its Universalistic view of Man as Man—as opposed to the man of a particular time and place—ended up not being as attractive as was first thought, and the Culture Movement—which continues, although in a deformed manner, to persist to this very day—was created as a proposed corrective to Liberal Society or as a radical rejection of its new mercenary Morals and indifference to Art and Politics.

Plato, almost 2,500 years ago, in The Republic, gave an allegorical account of what it means to be part of a Culture—although he never actually used the word and there is no Ancient Greek word that can even be translated as “Culture.” He said, more or less, that the particular Cultures/Communities of the world are caves into which we are all born and are chained with our heads restrained forcing us to look only forward. We all stare at a wall in front of us, upon which shadows are projected that constitute the gods and heroes that are particular to our time and place that the Culture’s ideas of the good and justice are based.

There is, however, a steep incline that leads out of the cave through which the bright light of the sun shines blindingly through. “Philosophers” are people who have broken free from the chains, have exited the cave and can see the situation for what it truly is. And, for Plato, it is their responsibility to the Common Good to come back into the cave and to try and influence the politicians to rule more reasonably. But this does not mean the execution of the gods; it does not mean the empowerment of the People; it does not mean the multitudes be made capable of philosophizing. Only the Leaders—and the Philosophers who inform them—know the truth of what’s outside the cave but the masses, in the end, can at least profit from the insights of this blinding Truth. However, they are never to be told the Truth because they “can’t handle the Truth.”

Modernity changed all that. The Enlightenment philosophers didn’t necessarily think that the Masses could be made into Philosophers, but they did recognize a certain level of reasonableness of the People. If Man’s deepest motivating passion is Self-Preservation, it would be logical to conclude that Man could make rational decisions about what will help preserve himself the best—especially the type of Regime that would preserve him the best. Thus a conspiracy was born to shine the Light of Being into the caves—permanently dimming the images on the wall. The task was to rationalize all the old legitimizations of power—strength, wealth, religion, tradition, birth, age—to show that they were all simply Man-made, and hence not morally binding. Revolution became Man’s greatest and most celebrated act. The new Societies that would be created no longer would put a Socrates to death because his usefulness to Society could be made evident: Science can aide in Man’s pursuit of Self-Preservation.

But as I have said previously, at the very moment of its triumph a very large wrench was thrown into the gears of this modern machine. Rousseau’s critique of these new types of Societies was undeniable and it did not paint a very pretty picture for the future of Humanity. From this new outlook, the Culture Movement was born. For some, such as Rousseau and Kant, the goal was still the universal justice of Freedom and Equality implicit in the Enlightenment project, but the character of it was in need of some slight adjustment. The bland uniformity and universal homogenization that were to be the result of this overly rational, overly calculating mode of politics was rejected because it turned out to be only an easy fix for a very difficult problem and didn’t seem to take into account the full range of the human condition. It just wasn’t capable of accounting for the creative, artistic, or “Free” aspects of Man’s Nature and its deficiencies caused a backlash that continues to persist.

Today, in America, there are two different uses for the word Culture: 1) is as a description of a People or Nation—American Culture, Japanese Culture, Iranian Culture, Jewish Culture, etc; and 2) is everything that is created that’s opposed to Commerce—Art, Music, Literature, PBS: creations that aren’t merely dictated by the amoral demands of the Market. These two conceptions are linked in that 2 is what makes up the content of 1. The Art, Music and Literature shape the world-view of the American, Japanese, Iranian and Jew and are expressed through the customs, styles, tastes, festivals, rituals and gods that unite the separate Individuals into a community with shared roots and common goals. The Individual is sublimated into the collective, which allows a People to think and will generally for their Common Good.

“Culture” was originally conceived by Kant as the goal of our highest human aspirations—an attempt to synthesize our low brutish, animal nature with our noblest Human longings; to restore, on an even higher level, some sort of wholeness that was lost after the initial Social Contract that destroyed the perfect unity of our being that we had in the State of Nature. It was on a higher level because this new wholeness now included all of Man’s faculties and capabilities and attempted to aim them toward Man’s greatest ambitions in all the creative fields we have acquired in Civil Society.

But it soon came to simply retroactively describe the various and varied Human phenomenon that had resulted during Man’s journey from the State of Nature to Civil Society. It was transformed from Culture to Cultures, and it now has become Politically Incorrect to judge the content of the these manifestations despite these old “Cultures,” as Nietzsche put it, being nothing but “superstitious custom that originated on the basis of some misinterpreted accident.”

We are now told we must respect Others' Cultures and that we are not allowed to judge the Values of them; that we must worship and promote Diversity and Multiculturalism; that what separates us (Culture) is more important than what unites us (Nature). But there is this vast contradiction of internal logic that no one seems to recognize here. Liberal Tolerance—Classical and Modern—is completely debilitating to Culture—which was first created as a response against Liberalism. Although, we currently use it as a means of building a dam against the torrents of Capitalism and “Eurocentrism,” in the end, it will completely subsume them.

Liberalism has no respect for Cultures because it is based on Reason and Science, whereas the old Cultures are all based on the dictates of a god and the attendant superstition and myth. Liberalism is based on Individual Freedom and the Right of the Individual to decide what is right for himself; it separates us by allowing our subjectivity to take preeminence over the collective expressions of our Peoples’ particularistic historical journeys. If an old value—say, the status of Women’s Equality in a particular Culture—does not coincide with Liberalism, then the Liberal denounces it because they believe in the intrinsic Equality of all. But how do we determine which Values can and cannot be judged?

Once you take that first step and decry that even one single Value that a Culture holds is unethical, or unreasonable, or indefensible, then you open up the floodgates of the dam and eventually drown the entire village. Everything is then open for critique and nothing is safe from the cold, clear lens of rational inquiry.

We may wish all we want to protect other Peoples from the ravages of the Capitalistic machine and so-called “American Culture,” but, unless we can have an honest conversation about the history that has resulted in the present, then all we are going to have are incoherent, whitewashed, ineffectual attempts to do so—such as the new “Cult of Diversity Worship” that is the intellectual rage in all the major universities of America today.

If you open yourself up to other Cultures and look into their cultural practices, what you will find there is, in fact, closedness because Cultures are, by definition, insular. They have to be; that is how they create and sustain their distinctiveness and inner-connectedness, which is what makes the world diverse. All Cultures think that their way of doing things is the best, except currently for the West. There are a multitude of reasons for this—mainly, I would say, due to so-called "Liberal Guilt" for Imperialism, Slavery and Racism—but we must realize that our current incoherent Liberal Ideology is going to result in either a) an extreme Right-Wing Nationalistic/Race-based reactionary force, who will not stand for the destruction of their Culture, or b) in the destruction of all distinct Cultures into one Universal Homogenous Culture.

Is there a way to reconcile Tolerance and Culture, or are these mutually exclusive world-views; does Tolerance necessarily require a relativism that goes to the depths of our very souls?