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.

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?

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.