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?

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."

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?

A Disruption in the Normal Swing of Things

What is “Culture;” or, to put it another way, what is “a Culture?” It is another one of those words in the modern American lexicon that everyone uses, but seems to have lost its content and has strayed very far from its source. Everything seems to be a Culture these days: Online Culture, Drug Culture, Gang Culture, Rock ‘n Roll Culture, Sports Culture, Corporate Culture. We’ve even acquired the incoherent phenomenon known as “Sub-Cultures,” as well—which still participate in the “real” Culture, just separately…I guess. But what exactly does it mean to participate in a Culture and how does the Individual fit into this picture?

According to Wikipedia—an example of an “Online Culture” or Community—there are generally three different definitions of what Culture means:

1) The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group

2) An integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning

3) Excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities, also known as high culture

As I have said earlier, Culture can generally be defined as “a shared set of assumptions that unites and binds a People.” It gives a group an inner unity of mutual ideals and a shared set of symbols through which they can outwardly express their beliefs. In the past, the foundation—the bedrock upon which it was built—of Culture was the gods that a particular People believed in and the specific “Values” that they prescribed. These beliefs, as Nietzsche puts it, were usually “superstitious custom that originated on the basis of some misinterpreted accident,” preserved by a tradition that it was considered “moral” to follow. And, if one did not strictly adhere to them, it was very dangerous for the Community because one ran the risk of angering the gods and thus calling down the vengeance of the gods upon the Community.

But the Enlightenment changed all that. It was a “conspiracy” that rejected all the Myth and Superstition that had defined all Societies and Cultures up until that point, in order to try and make a more rational and peaceful world to live in. To do this, the Enlightenment thinkers created the hypothetical State of Nature—a pre-historical time, before Man had contracted into specific groups, without any artificial cultural adornments—in order to look at Man as Man, uncolored by any human convention. Through this, they were able to show that all the loyalties that had constrained Man up till that point—strength, wealth, religion, tradition, birth, age—were all simply man-made, and hence not morally binding. They removed the veil that had legitimated the domination of one group by another and freed Man from the tyranny of dead ideas that had enslaved each generation to the “misinterpreted accidents” of their Fathers, and their Fathers’ Fathers, and so on. Or, as Jefferson said, “Every generation needs a new revolution.”

The new governments that were created using these novel ideas—such as the one in the United States—laid their foundations on the concept of Individual Rights, which sought to protect and uphold the Natural Rights that Man possessed which predate government. These Rights are the ones annunciated for us Americans in the Bill of Rights. The goal—in theory, at least—is to treat every person as an end, in and of themselves, and not a means, with a Right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. But it is their own, private Right to Happiness, not the Society’s or Culture’s overall well-being that is an Individual’s main concern—which is the general way people tend to choose to exercise this Right.

But how do you go about making a Culture and a Nation out of all these Individual Wills? Is the Social Contract still possible if there is no conception of a Common Good? Can there even be a shared set of beliefs when everyone has become a Cartesian and only trusts their own judgment?

Reason reveals that every Culture in the past was based upon the dictates of god(s). Nietzsche thus concludes that what we need to do is reject Reason on rational grounds because Reason leads to a dead-end, to an abyss. He thinks that you cannot rationally create Values and the new “civilized” War of All Against All unleashed by the Enlightenment arrangement is intolerable and its even worse, even more rational mutation of worldwide Socialistic Self-satisfaction is an even worse evil. What is needed then is a strong willed Individual who can create—a word formerly reserved only for God: The Creator—new gods, in order to create new Values that can take the place of the exhausted ones that are rapidly disintegrating because the old “God is dead.”

Today in America, we have taken the ideas of Nietzsche and his picture of the most idealized Individual, which he referred to as the Übermensch—The Superman or Overman—and now prescribe it for everyone and hold it up as the model of a healthy, well-adjusted citizen. We use these ideas to create children’s cartoons that casually preach to kids to “be themselves” and “that what makes them different can make all the difference in the world”—but that is only half of the equation. How are these radically individualized persons suppose to come together to create some sort of Community or Common Good? We don’t even think about what we are saying, nor the consequences of these ideas, because if we did we may think twice before so casually propagandizing our children.

At the end of Happy Feet, the Community completely reforms itself—in true Nietzschean fashion—around the new Values and Conventions of Mumbles, the free-spirited Creator. He is an authentic Individual, who refuses to compromise himself, who has imbued into the Culture new life and new Values. But, once the Individuals in the Culture become adapted to the new situation, everyone once again all share the same Values and beliefs and go back to living in harmony. But that is not what the true message of the movie is supposed to be. Its goal is to tell every kid that they are special and should only be them-Selves, regardless of the consequences for the Community, and magically everything will work out and there will be a nice, happy ending. Sure, you don’t have to worry about the wrath of the gods being brought down upon the Community for going against tradition—because now God is dead—but there are definitely consequences for only thinking about your own particular welfare above the Community's: that is the reality of Culture and Community. Movies like this only succeed in further complicating the problem that has been festering ever since Rousseau first articulated it 250 years ago.

If everyone is only doing what makes their Self happy, this does not lead to social harmony, it leads to chaos. It grows in the heart a selfishness that places your desires and the satisfaction of them above any concern for Others and will only exacerbate the War of All Against All that the makers of these movies wish to alleviate. This Selfism makes us slack in our duties and weak in our constitutions. It also furthers the Capitalist System, by encouraging people to indulge their Self. And what’s an easier way to do this than with all the beautiful, shiny objects that this system produces for their satisfaction? Whereas, the goal of the people who create these kids’ movies—I can only assume, and feel I am warranted to do so by the evidence—are most likely on the Left and are among Capitalism’s greatest critics, they are actually only succeeding in perpetuating and amplifying the situation.

Kids don’t need to be told to be Self-indulgent, they will naturally be so because the whole world already seems to center around them and bend to their every whim and desire. What they need are instruction and rules that can help shape them into healthy, well-adjusted adults and active members of Society. This of course, also requires that you have a Society that is worth participating in, which, with only some reservation, I would say that we no longer have (but that’s a whole other discussion altogether). This problem did not begin in the Sixties, however; it has been endemic ever since our Nation’s birth, but was below the surface, hidden, so not yet completely corrupted. It has been the object of constant philosophic study and speculation for over 200 years that so far has not produced very attractive real-world solutions that I would recommend our Society emulating. But our current arrangement is not only theoretically incoherent, it is manifestly intolerable—I could point to the high level of psychoactive prescription drug use, legally and illegally, as just one among many symptoms of its malady.

But there is no going back, nor can you just kill history and cross your fingers and hope for the best. We need some sort of creative synthesis that can balance respect for the Individual, as well as respect for the Community; that recognizes the Subjective, without discounting the Objective; that can somehow be Idealistic and Realistic at the same time. I know that this may sound ridiculous—but the extremes have been played out with some very scary results, and it appears that Liberal Democracy has emerged the victor from this battle of Wills—at least for now. What does this mean? Are we condemned to spiral aimlessly, or can we once again grab hold of the reins and steer it confidently into the future?

E Pluibus Unum: Out of Many, One

So, I’ve been thinking more and more about a comment made the other day on one of my latest posts. The comment was about the possibility of uniting the world through Metaphysical oneness as a way of over-coming our Selfish Individualized Subjectivity to bring about a more equal and just world. Everything in the world is composed of the same building blocks, therefore we are really all connected and our separate Individualities are really just an illusion, or something along those lines. I just wanted to explore this idea a little more and its recurrent manifestations throughout history and what implications it has for the present.

This is not necessarily a new idea. M-Theory may be the latest model of articulation of this concept, but it has been expressed throughout history in all parts of the known world. In Hinduism, which has been around since at least 700-800 BC, this idea is expressed by the word Brahman, in which the multiplicity of the world is really just an illusion and differs only in “name and visible appearance,” but ultimately all is united in this single unifying principle. The Chinese called it the Tao, the “Way” or “Path,” which produced harmony in the Universe. In Ancient Greece, the Pre-Socratics had as many names for it as there were philosophers who thought. Thales said it was “water;” Anaximander called it the “boundless;” and Anaximenes thought the source was “air” or “vapor.” Heraclitus called it “logos”—this “something” that was the essence of everything.

All of these things are just different names for the same thing, which of course is “God.” In the West, after the fall of Greece to Rome and the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, we were united under one of the strictest self-abnegating moral codes that had been imagined yet. We are all formed in God’s image and God is a part of all of us, i.e. we are all Brothers, thus we should “love our Neighbor [Others] as our-Selves” and “treat Others as You would like to be treated”—not that this was necessarily anything new, but the punishment that attended it was. Christ was the idealized model of love and compassion, yet, as Nietzsche put it: “There was only one true Christian, and he died on the cross.” All those that have followed him have paled in comparison and not even the threat of eternal damnation has persuaded us to act otherwise.

Then along came Machiavelli, who looked at the scene before him, saw its evident hypocrisy, and literally dared Men to forget about their Souls, forget about heaven and the afterlife and metaphysical speculation—which had resulted in naught—and to reform the here and now. He spoke admiringly about those who cared more for their Fatherland than for the salvation of their Souls. Since millennia of philosophizing about what the Soul even is had produced no results and those that pretended to know—the Priests—held power and influenced and corrupted politics, what we should therefore do is stop worrying about the things we can’t know and instead focus on those that are actually within our control. Realism over Idealism; Materialism against Idealism.

What was the cause of the Protestant Reformation, if not the corruption of the church and the debasement of the Word of Christ by those who were sworn to protect and advance it? Martin Luther was absolutely shocked by the corruption of the clergy when he visited Rome in 1510. The Pope—God’s highest representative on Earth—was selling licenses for brothels, priests who kept mistresses were simply taxed, and even Pope Alexander VI fathered seven children by at least two different women, despite priests being forbade to have sex. And, worst of all, the sale of Indulgences as a way to get absolution from sin, instead of formal penance. All these men were supposed to be Moral and Spiritual leaders and be beyond reproach, yet they were just as bad as the lowest commoner, it seemed, when it came to Self-control.

So what Machiavelli did was simply to give us—the lowly commoners—equal rights to be just as Selfish as all our supposed leaders. If Man is naturally Selfish, and apparently no amount of exhortations or threats can convince him to be otherwise, let’s re-create Society on this basis and see how that goes. Hobbes and Locke, following in his footsteps, took up this dare and recreated politics on a purely secular basis, which attempted to engage Men through their Reason, instead of through Myth—and the attendant force and fraud that goes along with it—and win Men’s consent through a new set of loyalties. Hobbes said to imagine another man holding a gun to your temple and threatening to shoot you. At that moment one is a real Self, without all the alienating opinions of State, Church, or Public Opinion and then one can really decide what counts.

So, to get back to the main point, whereas Metaphysical oneness may be true and edifying, it doesn’t seem to be effective on the human level where Man interacts on a day to day basis. Man’s mass of conflicting emotions and priorities seem to trump any sort of base interconnectedness that is so self-evidently (due to its recurrent nature throughout history, religion, and science) true and not even the threat of eternal damnation could cause us to act differently.

But where does that leave us—the children living at the End of History, forced to deal with the realization that all alternatives have failed, that there might not be such a thing as “Truth,” and what little there is does not seem very pretty?

I think, if nothing else, we can learn that the highest crime is Hypocrisy. You might be able to “fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time,” and the Truth will prevail! And when it does, the inevitable result is that which you see today: Cynicism and Apathy. You cannot found a country on the basis of Reason and then rule unreasonably—it’s gonna catch up with you eventually.

After having swept away all the other interests that could engage Men’s loyalties, the only thing left for us is to look at the world empirically—through our Senses. And right now we can see a huge disparity between the way Men talk and the way they act, and unless our leaders are willing to dabble in some of the dangerous, failed alternatives to Liberal Democracy, then they are going to have to realize this simple fact: the so-called Machiavellian method of leadership—"the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct”—can no longer work. Unless they are willing to take away our Free Press and now the Internet and, not to mention, our power of Reason—which I would hope that we as a People would never submit to—this method of rule, simply can no longer work.

I will leave you with one more quote. A bit unrelated but just some food for thought.

“General apathy [is] the fruit of [radical] Individualism…What is important to combat is therefore much less anarchy [chaos] or despotism [dictatorship] than the apathy that can create the one or the other almost indifferently.”
—Tocqueville: Democracy in America

Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes

The aspect of Rousseau’s critique of Liberalism that I want to focus on for this post is the phenomenon that is the primary result of this new system: The Bourgeois. This type of person has been the bane of every Philosopher and Artist—on the Left and the Right—since Rousseau first gave him a name in his work Émile in 1762.

Rousseau said that he is a result of a mistake made by Locke: “He who in the Civil order wants to preserve the primacy of the sentiments of Nature [Self-Preservation and Self-Interest] does not know what he wants.” To him, The Bourgeois is stuck in the middle of what he feels are two very respectable extremes: 1) the good, Natural Man, as found in the State of Nature; and 2) the Moral (de-natured) Citizen of the ancient Republics in Greece and Rome. He is constantly divided by his Natural Inclinations and the demands of Social Duty. The conflict between Self-love and love of Others, Inclination and Duty, Sincerity and Hypocrisy, being one-Self and being Alienated has pervaded all modern discussion of the Human Condition since Rousseau’s critique of Liberalism.


When a Bourgeois thinks of others, he only considers how the interaction is going to benefit himself; yet, when he tries to think about himself, his only conception is in comparison to others, with no inner metric of Self-worth.


Bourgeois and Middle Class can be used interchangeably, but, where as Bourgeois is always used with derision, Middle Class in America has always been thought to be a good, desirable thing to be. It is a status the poor strive for and a demographic Politicians always pander to because a majority of Americans fall within it (depending, of course, on your definition of Middle Class). In Marxist theory, The Bourgeois is despicable because they are the buffer that allows the Capitalist system to continue and perpetuate itself; for Artists they are contemptible because they are un-poetic, un-erotic, and un-heroic—and their religion is empty and mostly just for show. They have neither longings for greatness nor enthusiasm for life and merely accept the world the way it is, in a passionless reconciliation with “Reality.”

The Bourgeois can be directly related with, what Locke called, the “Industrious and Rational” Man that he required in order for his system to work. He was a new type of Man that made the Politics of Consent—as opposed to politics based on Myth—work. He consults his Reason and sees that, by incorporating with other men, he can get a lot more done and better protect himself (i.e. preserve him-Self), but only will consent to a Government that protects his Individual Rights (the Natural Rights he possesses, which predate Government and Society).

Throughout American history there have been people who have spoke out against this type of system—most notably Thoreau in his book Walden in 1854 and the Transcendentalists—but for the most part it has been accepted and has helped America to become the Industrial and Technological behemoth that it is today. The latest and most far-reaching of these Counter-Movements occurred in the 1960’s and has completely transformed the face of America. Although beginning with legitimate claims against American society and the Government—Civil Rights and opposition to the War in Vietnam among others—their solution and method for enacting their social change, I would say in the end, has done much more harm than good.

Their Philosophy was an incongruous mixture of Marxist collectivist communalism paired with a Nietzschean over-emphasis on a free-spirited Individualism. (And don’t forget the Freudian rejection of society as a repressive agent of neuroses and unhappiness, as if we could possibly return to the State of Nature after all of our History that has moved us so far away from it.) Although, both Marx and Nietzsche hated The Bourgeois, they approached the problem from completely different vantage points—the modern Left/Right dichotomy—and to think the two could be combined is completely foolish and is based on nothing but wishful thinking.

There are very legitimate claims that can be made against our Government and our Culture—and have been made by many Thinkers even before America was created—but the solutions of the Sixties have failed. And far from reforming or transforming Bourgeois Society, their ideas have instead led to the greatest opportunities for growth “The System” could have ever hoped for. The Counter-Culture has now become part and parcel of the Consumer-Culture. There is no differentiation between Bourgeois and Bohemian anymore other than the style of dress and the dichotomy has collapsed in upon itself. Denim may have replaced Khaki on our University Campuses, but those pants were still bought at a store that fully participates in every unsavory practice that our Capitalist system was built on: unsafe factories, low wages, child labor, natural degradation, marketing—the lists goes on and on.

The true result of the Sixties Philosophy came to a head in the Eighties and was personified by the Me! Me! Me! Generation and can be best described by the phrase, “Whoever dies with the most toys, wins!” When the contradiction of Community through Individuality became manifest, there was no longer anything left to stop the excesses of Capitalism because another part of Sixties Ideology was rejection of the past/attempt to kill History (at least Western History). This meant two things: 1) the Religion that made people at least stop and think about the state of their souls for two seconds had disappeared; and 2) all those great Thinkers that proposed alternatives or modifications/correctives to our System had been forgotten as well.

We are now Solitary Individuals, being kept afloat by life-boats in the middle of a vast, empty ocean, with no connection to History, no connection to our Community, no connection to our Country, and with only an abstract connection with the rest of Humanity.

“These are the times that try Men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
—Thomas Paine Crisis December 23, 1776

The Party's Over

Loss of Human Dignity? That is a pretty high price to pay. Why did Kant feel that this new system—which he ultimately agreed with—had such a high cost, especially when you think about all the great things that were gained from it: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, the Right to vote and have a say in the functioning of your Government, and a whole plethora of other Rights to protect the Individual.

To find the answer to that question we must look to the other half of the Modern American dichotomy: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who I indicated earlier as the basis for the current crop of Liberals today).

Rousseau wrote about 60 years after Locke’s highly influential book Two Treaties on Civil Government, and started off his thought in fundamental agreement with Locke. He agreed with him about the origins of society in the State of Nature and the principles of Freedom and Equality for all Men, but drew very, very different conclusions about how society should be set up to ensure those principles.

Locke (following in the footsteps of Machiavelli) thought—since 2000 years of philosophizing and preaching had been completely ineffectual against Man’s natural desires and the methods that had been created in order to do so led to such great torment (sin, the threat of Hell)—that we may as well act as we naturally are, instead of how we ought to be and that would lead to happiness. Man is naturally Selfish, and his two main concerns are Self-preservation and Self-Interest. But, Locke thought, if Self-Interest could be trained to be Enlightened Self-Interest—where Man has the Right to believe whatever he wants, say whatever he wants, and be whatever he wants, but must also recognize the same Right for everyone else—then Society would be much more peaceful and prosperous and the Individual much more content.

These ideas began to spread throughout Europe like wildfire by men known as the Philosophes—popularizers of Enlightenment thought—and people everywhere began to realize that all the old loyalties—God, heredity, social class, age and even gender—were simply myths used to keep the People down and resigned to be content with their miserable living conditions. Locke and the rest of the Enlighteners rationalized everything till all tradition and convention was left without a leg upon which to stand—till it seemed like anything was possible.

This is the backdrop upon which Rousseau entered on the wings of a scathing critique of Enlightenment thought, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, that completely destroyed its confidence right at its grand moment of triumph. His insights were nuanced looks at the Human Condition that peered much more deeply than Locke’s philosophy into the phenomenon known as Man to try and explore the results of this new philosophy of Individualism and what it actually meant for people’s lives: for Politics and Community, Love and Friendship, Morals and Art, and even Human Purpose.

And Kant, following in Rousseau’s footsteps, saw the degradation to human relationships that would result from this over-emphasis of the Individual and attempted to re-shape Enlightenment thought to make up for these supposed deficiencies. Kant was the last great Enlightenment Philosopher and all Movements and Political Programs—ranging from Romanticism to Communism to Fascism—that have come after him have been a result of the perceived failure of Kant, and of the initial Enlighteners, to adequately account for the Human Condition and to give a place to an exclusively Human quality that would separate us from the determinism of Natural phenomenon and the Animal Kingdom.

I will delve more deeply in posts to come into the critique made by Rousseau that has been so persuasive that it has shaped all of Western history since him…

The High Cost of Low Prices

The foundation for our current conceptions of Individualism was laid during the Age of Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th centuries by two men: 1) the Englishman, John Locke, and 2) the Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. A battle between these two men’s ideas has raged for the last 250 years, and, very broadly speaking, one could say that modern Conservatives are Lockeans, whereas modern Liberals follow Rousseau. Most people would probably say it is more Locke vs. Marx—and in a world-historical sense this may be accurate—but here in America, where Marx’s critique of Private Property has never held much sway, I would place it with Rousseau, who’s schema still allowed for Private Property (plus Rousseau is the initial source of the search for alternatives to Classical Liberalism which proceeded Marx by about 100 years).

Rousseau is an extremely interesting and complicated character, which I will very much be returning to at a later date, but for now I want to focus on Locke: the most influential thinker upon our Founding Fathers.

Locke, like many thinkers of the Enlightenment, based his ideas on what Modern Political Philosophers called: THE STATE OF NATURE. The State of Nature was a hypothetical thought-experiment first proposed by Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan, in 1651. It is a pre-social condition, in which Man lives as a solitary being, that “existed” before the incorporation of men into particular groups or cultures. It was used as a way to strip away all the human conventions and traditions that had been invented in order to discover Man as Man based on Nature—as opposed to Man of a particular time, place and culture—which has been the goal of Philosophy since Socrates. And what was found there, was that Man's two deepest motivating factors are Self-Preservation and Self-Interest, and these two natural ideas form the basis for all of Modern Philosophy.

Locke’s most influential work was his Two Treaties on Civil Government, written in 1689 during his six year exile in Holland. In the First Treaties, he lays out an argument refuting divinely-ordained, hereditary, absolute, patriarchal monarchy; in the Second Treaties, he argues that the only legitimate form of government is one derived from the Consent of the People based on Freedom and Equality. And as Thomas Jefferson appropriated for the Declaration of Independence, “that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such Principles.”

For Locke—and all the other State of Nature Philosophers—Man is by Nature an Individual, so he concluded that the only reason we need government is for the protection of our Individual Rights, which we naturally possess—namely life, liberty and property. In Locke’s view, governments were originally instituted among Men in order to have an impartial arbiter in Rights disputes, to protect the Rights that Men possess which predate government—Natural Rights, discoverable thru Reason, that we have in the State of Nature, before the creation of artificial living conditions known as "Societies." These are the Rights annunciated for us, as Americans, in the Bill of Rights.

These were very radical ideas at the time, and flew in the face of every previous civilization—all based on the dictates of a god. The veil had been lifted and no longer did Man need to rely on myths as the basis for their societies. Instead, they would be replaced with reasoned Consent that was available to all human beings regardless of their geographic location or cultural upbringing. It was Socrates—the original questioner—in action, but with one big difference: Socrates never believed it possible or desirable to create a society without binding myths or “misinterpreted accidents” which add up to a vision of the world for a specific People.

So…what the hell happened? How did we end up with this mess we see before us today?

—With a politician who tries to sell a President's former senatorial seat and another who thinks that presidents are above the law; with our system in shambles because of Wall Street derivative scams and Enron type meltdowns; with faith in the government, the schools, organized labor, the press, the justice system, big business, and God at all time lows.—

Unfortunately, the easy-going conclusions of Locke did not suffice, nor did their real-world application work out as well as it was hoped, yet somehow our system has not experienced any crisis of legitimacy for the general population. Our system has become a confused, incoherent amalgam of the last 250 years of Philosophy, yet somehow manages to function, and function very well, for enough of a majority of Individuals that there is no will, public or private, to do anything about it.

German Philosopher, Immanuel Kant, could see all the way back in the late 18th century that this new system proposed by Locke was the greatest engine of stability ever created for a society because it was the most adept at satisfying the Individual's needs, but he had just one slight qualm: the price of it was Human Dignity.

In the Beginning There Was the Word

What does it mean to be an “Individual” and where does this concept come from?

Individualism's origins begin in the late Middle Ages (The Dark Ages) in the works of early Renaissance writers, artists and scholars rebelling against the authority of the Catholic Church. A few centuries later, Individual autonomy is once again asserted by Martin Luther during the Protestant Reformation, further deteriorating the Catholic domination of the West. And the concept becomes fully developed during the Enlightenment, in the writings of Classical Liberals (not to be confused with our current crop of Liberals) such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes who helped drive the final nail into the coffin of the Church's authority over Civil Society and private life.

Being an “Individual” necessarily entails antagonism against others because of an assertion of one’s own beliefs and interests against the commonly held concerns of "The Masses.” It is the promotion of one's own goals and desires thru independence and self-reliance, while opposing most external interference upon one's interests by society (the dominant Culture/Majority) or institution (The Government/State). Individualism’s natural by-product is the concept of “Freedom,” in which one has the Right to Freedom of thought, of conscience, of speech, of the press, of religion, of assembly, etc., all secured by Private Property and promoted by a Government founded to protect these cherished ends.

Individualism also means the emphasis of Rights over Duties, of desire over responsibility, of the singular Will over the general. It is the Right to your own personal satisfactions regardless of the cost to the community—in which you are inextricably a part, despite your level of participation/non-participation in the Whole. It also attenuates the possibility of “Culture”—defined as a shared set of assumptions which unites and binds a People—because the Individualist’s goal is to transcend the commonly held beliefs and create one’s own standards upon which to live.

As the bohemian artist Oscar Wilde put it, “Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.” An important function to be sure, but where does one draw the line between the desire to be one’s self and the desire to be part of a community; to be independently minded and to participate in a Culture; to be a part of something bigger than one’s self as opposed to merely an atom in a continually changing flux?