Purchased Experiences: Identity and Consumer Culture in Generation X

    Douglas Coupland’s 1991 novel Generation X presents a view of life in the contemporary world which can be further understood by Marxist criticism, as it aesthetically embodies the theoretical views of such criticism.[1]  The novel revolves around three characters, Andy, Dag, and Claire, all near the age of thirty.  They have left their career-oriented lifestyles, and moved to the Mojave Desert to live in Palm Springs.  Here they work “Mcjobs” and entertain each other by telling stories.  Being hyper-conscious of the world of the late twentieth century, Generation X criticizes the prevailing class structure of consumer society.  This has led to accusations of the novel being pretentious and unrealistic. Why are the members of this generation more dissatisfied with life than previous generations were?  Does the world presented by Coupland correspond to external reality, or is it one writer’s personal dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the world?

     Marxist criticism seems useful in analyzing this work, perhaps even more now than when it was published in 1991 and Marxism was still a powerful political force that overshadowed its critical effectiveness.  Marxist criticism provides insight into the world of the late twentieth century, where economic class and status have become the most important factors in social life. The Marxist idea that economic class is fundamental to everything that happens in culture reveals more about the characters in the novel than is immediately apparent  While Paul Fussell has laid out the division between classes and the similarities of the members of each class, the ideas found in the postmodern theory of Frederic Jameson are highly illuminating for understanding this novel.  In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published at roughly the same date as Generation X, Jameson details the change in culture after World War II, manifesting in the emergence of a consumer society, claiming that the postmodern split happened in the 1960’s, at roughly the point that “generation x” came into being. As the importance of participation in the consumer world has increased beyond this split, authenticity of the individual has been replaced with an artificial and superficial public stream of economic interaction - participation in the latest trends as a source of meaning. What you buy defines who you are, so the individual works just to buy stuff; work becomes the field in which to experience life while the resulting economic exchanges define the individual.

    The well developed theories of Marxist criticism suggest that the postmodern world depicted in Generation X is an accurate one, and the novel presents us with illustrations of how we should approach living in such a confusing and challenging time period.  Coupland remarks that “There is no weather in Palm Springs - just like TV.  There is also no middle class, and in that sense the place is medieval . . . Nonetheless, the three of us chose to live here, for the town is undoubtedly a quiet sanctuary from the bulk of middle-class life” (10).  Escape is an important concept in the novel as each of the main characters recalls their exit from traditional society.  Furthermore, they compare their lifestyle to other characters who have decided to stay in the mainstream society. In “An Anatomy of Classes” Paul Fussell analyzed contemporary society by dividing it into nine classes, revealing the negative aspects of each class by presenting the conformity inherent to each one. He then proposed a “Category X” of people who attempt to escape from the rigid class structure.  This category of Fussell's analysis has been mentioned by Coupland as a possible influence on his generational concept.  The idea of a “medieval” lack of the middle class can be understood as the middle-class being a very modern development, and Jameson argues that there was a pre-communist state that existed before capitalism widened the split between classes.  The novel's comparison of Palm Springs to TV shows a postmodernist awareness of real places feeling fake and fake illusions presenting themselves as real.

     While attempting to escape from the construct of the consumer society that has been created, the characters in this book find themselves in a fragmented existence, alienated from the world and each other, and internally from their own cohesive past.. They exist in isolation, trying to relate to each other.  The characters view their lives as discreet, separate experiences which seem story-like.  As they attempt to get through life and relate to each other, they tell stories, which take on a significance of their own, revealing much about the characters and the world they see themselves in.  The historical events of their lives are reduced, while the fictional stories of their imaginations are elevated, thus blurring the division between reality and non-reality.  The idea of postmodern fragmentation is readily apparent here, both the fragmentation of individuals into different groups within society, and as time fragmenting into a series of "perpetual presents,” as understood by Jameson.

    Coupland's Generation X asks "Why work? Simply to buy more stuff?  That's just not enough" (23).  This line alone communicates much of what Marxist thought would condemn about our consumer society. We go to work to make money to buy things, and then the cycle repeats itself.  The death of the subject presented by Jameson is also an important idea here.  The characters feel that if they exist in that consumer world, they lose some level of consciousness and become an automatic part of that system.  They feel restricted by their jobs, career choices and life choices. In order to become creative and have the ability to develop their own individual being, as well as experience a sense of aesthetic possibility, they must drop out of the structured world of class.  They leave behind the career track and live moment to moment.

    Andy, in one of his untold stories, imagines a future city where "its boulevards were patternless, helter skelter, and cuckoo.  Everywhere there were booby traps of moustetraps, Triffids, and black holes . . and directions were impossible" (51).  The dangers and confusions of contemporary existence found in this work correspond to the postmodern world envisioned by Jameson as “a mutation in built space itself,” a hyperspace, like the confusing maze of the Bonaventure Hotel which has become a physical manifestation of the fragmented, rhizomic structure of late capitalism. Andy warns of a future with no clear paths, exits, or methods of clear navigation.

     As Andy reflects on his home-life, he states that "I get this feeling--.  It is a feeling that our emotions, while wonderful, are transpiring in a vacuum, and I think it all boils down to the fact that we're middle class.  You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you.  You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you, It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence.  And because of this price, all happiness is sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied." (147)  Here we see the idea of the middle class forming a bland, uncreative existence, like what had been presented by Fussell.  It may be comfortable, but it is not adventurous.  While recalling his youth during the Vietnam War, Andy notes ". . . they were ugly times.  But they were also the only times I'll ever get - genuine capital H history times, before history was turned into a press release, a marketing strategy, and a cynical campaign tool.  And, hey, it's not as if I got to see much real history, either - I arrived to see a concert in history's arena just as the final set was finishing.  But I saw enough, and today, in the bizarre absence of all time cues, I need a connection to a past of some importance, however wan the connection." (151). In the post-modern world where time becomes a fleeting series of discreet points the connection to a linear progression of history and self is lost, identity becomes unanchored from events resulting in an artificial presence, an existential alienation from the larger world. After the radical break in history, Jameson argues that "there is a disappearance of the sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in  perpetual present and in perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social information have had in one way or another to preserve" (214).  This description could apply to Coupland's novels as well as the world at large.  Throughout the book Coupland's characters speak in phrases like “my hair doesn't look 1940's enough," as well as making extensive references to “dead TV shows,” Elvis, and Marilyn Monroe.  Through these references we can see Jameson's understanding of nostalgia, the idea that “we seem condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach.”  (Jameson, 208) If there is no way to map the future, no clear sense of direction, then sensible meaning can only come from the past. Furthermore, we can also see other aspects of postmodernism at work, such as the implosion between disciplines, where history becomes entangled with advertising, politics with entertainment, etc.

     Other theories, such a a psychological approach, could focus on the few disillusioned characters, and claim that this book is really just about three misfits who have a strong sense of nonconformity.  What is really important is their understanding and reaction to the world, and these understandings may not accurately represent the world at large.  In this sense the world would be a production of their attitudes, rather than the characters being the production of the social construct.  But, this interpretation becomes much too solipsistic, leaving every individual with an isolated reality.  Rather, the Marxist critique presents each individual relating to the same world, and is therefore more useful, as it deals with what is “out there,” rather than inside one’s own mind.  The base that society functions on determines the psychological consistency of its individuals.  Generation X can be seen as a story that explains the experience of existing culture, the one which has produced the characters,  as well as the readers.  This culture is indeed the one of consumerism and late capitalism described in detail by Jameson.  As it is based almost exclusively on economics, this society is therefore understood best in the terms of Marxist criticism.  It is not just a story of a few characters that have a particular psychological aversion to society.  As the novel is aware of the economic and social pressures that exist, it attempts to analyze those conditions rather than passively ignoring them, undermining the idea that modern mainstream consumerism is a natural state of existence. As Jameson notes, postmodernism explains the logic of consumer capitalism, however, "The more significant question is whether there is also a way in which it resits that logic" (214).  Coupland's work is a response to that. In the form of stories, through the aesthetic, meaning can emerge from the subjective individual experience.  Generation X is an exploration of the first generation to experience Jameson's radical break of history.

Sources:
Coupland, Douglas, Generation X. New York: St Martin’s Press. 1991

Jameson, Frederic.  “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”  Everyday Theory.  Ed. Becky McLaughlin and Bob Cole, Pearson Longman. 2005. 201 -215.

Original version written as an outline (2010)

[1] Note here that I am using the academic mode of Marxism as it was originally conceived in philosophy as a critique of capitalism, and not a particular political ideology. Remember Marx was an actual philosopher and his critique was inseparable from the actual emerging conditions of capitalism (they are intertwined views).  Non-theoretical later uses by political parties are inauthentic distortions, which may or may not represent Jameson's views.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Twenty-First Century America

With the absurdity level of the 2016 election continuing to increase, I think it is best to look back for some perspective.  Here are some of Douglas Adams' thoughts about president and ruler from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
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Only six people in the entire Galaxy understood the principle on which the Galaxy was governed, and they knew that once Zaphod Beeblebrox had announced his intention to run as President it was more or less a fait accompli: he was the ideal presidency fodder.

The President in particular is very much a figurehead { he wields no real power whatsoever.He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria. Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had {he has already spent two of his ten Presidential years in prison for fraud. Very very few people realize that the President and the Government have virtually no power at all, and of these very few people only six know whence ultimate political power is wielded. Most of the others secretly believe that the ultimate decision-making process is handled by a computer. They couldn't be more wrong.

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it. . . Zaphod Beeblebrox was amazingly good at his job. . .The fact that he had become President of the Galaxy was frankly astonishing, as was the manner of his leaving the post. Was there a reason behind it? There would be no point in asking Zaphod, he never appeared to have a reason for anything he did at all: he had turned unfathomably into an art form. He attacked everything in life with a mixture of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence and it was often difficult to tell which was which.

It is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

The Ruler of the Universe is a man living in a small shack on a world that can only be reached with a key to an unprobability field or use of an Infinite Improbability Drive. He does not want to rule the universe and tries not to whenever possible, and therefore is by far the ideal candidate for the job.
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This foresight by Adams only highlights his intelligence and awareness of devolution in the process of government. In the postmodern world of superficiality and spectacle, the real projections of power become the inverse of the apparent nodes, existing at the invisible bottom of the superstructure, not at the top.  The president here is all surface, an attraction of spectacle, while the ruler lives in hidden isolation behind the scenes.  Those who do not want power are those that are most deserving of it and can yield it most judiciously and effectively, while those that want it are the most corruptible and least likely to be "objectively" good at it.

In application, this can quite clearly be applicable to Trump and his postmodern, reality-TV spectacle approach, which overrides serious, thoughtful, calculated, and determined practice of governance. For those that think a rejection of the establishment is the crucial factor in contemporary politics, I contend that that approach is, at best, just more superficial spectacle, becoming farther removed from the real serious business of governing.  At worst (and this is becoming actualized with the elimination of Sanders), it is just a more extreme form of the Tea Party movement.  It is just an evolution of the 2010 election which sought to block President Obama at every turn.  Now it is looking to completely bypass the democratic process of compromise and agreement and replace it with the singular perspective of an extreme political movement.  Before a democrat became president, when was the establishment bad? Reagan was establishment, and the Bushes were just continuations of that line.  But, if a black liberal (through accusation anyway) becomes the leader of the free world (twice), then the establishment becomes the problem.  This election was been one continual highlighting of what a circus the anti-establishment is.  If we could throw out this distorted notion, maybe we can get back the serious issues.

For those that think government is the problem, I invite you take a time machine back to the 90s.  There were still serious issues that needed to be solved, but we were on the right road and had a good start.  American life looked ever more promising until being derailed in 2000.  Those that continue to perpetuate this myth fall into two groups - first, conservatives who have deluded themselves into forgetting the Clinton era America (by propagating a Bush-hero myth and transferring the problems of the 2000s back to an "origin" in the 90s, thereby erasing the massive failure that was the Bush administration and projecting all of his failings on to Clinton.  The second group are the millennials, many of whom were too young to understand the Clinton years, and are now being fed Fox history to rewrite and degrade that era.  Their criticisms reveal a great misunderstanding of recent history.

On a deeper level, we must separate the President from the American System.  There is a course that America sets through history, and this will not be changed by an alternate presidential choice.   Does anyone really think that drone strikes will be different depending on H Clinton, or Trump? Or that Sanders would have been any different?  Or Johnson? At this level, the precedent has been set, and will continue autonomously, or decided by people whose job it is to keep it going.  Presidents may change history on a larger level, by invading sovereign nations under false pretenses which destroy 200 years of American policy [1].  But, generally, that which they have an effect on is much smaller, and more domestic.  Tax rates for those who depend on every dollar, and the general tone of what is acceptable in society are the real things at risk.  Economic policy which favors the dominant oligarchy is self contained and will continue on.  And geopolitically, the America-as-singular-super-power will continue on unabated.  No one within the system is going to risk implementing something which might impede this course.  Who we choose for president should be based on who has the best temperament to embody what we want America to persist and present itself as. That person should be presidential as an individual.  And, they should be chosen on what tone we want to domestic policy to reflect, in ways that shape American value over time, making slight corrections to the course.  But, we should not vote thinking that the President makes decisions that decide every minute policy.  That would in actuality be bad. Very bad.  That would lead straight in totalitarianism.  But, that is the picture that Trump is presenting - that he will be able to change every little thing that makes America not great.  By immersing himself in this distortion, he is either a scam artist, or actually ignorant and incompetent.

Michael Weiss has written a very interesting analysis of Trump in  "Donald Trump’s Anti-Semitic Mob Came for Me." He also evaluates the placement of trump in the postmodern age:

"Trump is everything and anything to this camp because he is the first postmodern authoritarian in American history, a man for whom truth is a relative concept defined exclusively in relation one’s perception of the central, overriding object: the authoritarian himself . . . Trump’s positions are wildly inconsistent and galvanizing at the same time . . . He thinks America under Obama has become a weakling superpower that doesn’t stand up to its manifold adversaries, but he wants to destroy NATO."

Furthermore, he makes a enlightened connection between the relativistic nature of postmodernism and the essentialist conservative position:

"Postmodernism got its fullest articulation on the European left, but it’s always been at home on the international right: its forerunner theorist was Martin Heidegger, who infamously embraced National Socialism, which of course didn't stop him from becoming an icon to French radicals once Hitler was defeated. The internet has only given these fiefdoms of infinite “interpretation”—climate change denialists, the anti-vaxxers, chemtrails obsessives—more stridency and organization."

The postmodern rejection of Truth and its replacement with unending layers of interpretation can indeed serve the right just as well as the left.  Weiss insight-fully identifies the Trump as the first candidate to fully embrace this disconnect and use the contradictory nature of its structure as an advantage. One thing is certain, politics will not be the same as we shift toward a new epoch that overturns modern structures.  The nation state has become increasingly more irrelevant as groups like ISIL exert influence, and now the very nature of the politician and the political movement is evolving in to new types of entities.


[1] It is very conceivable that The (American) System would have found a way to create a great Middle Eastern Intervention without Bush and his personal and enthusiastic interest in Iraq, but it would have been very different under Gore, who would have been reluctant and would have appeared through his hesitation as weak and indecisive, just as Obama has been presented. However, if the US is going to make giant international moves without regard for actuality, I would prefer they are done less arrogantly and with more forethought.  A much better chess-board story could have been fabricated to prompt US action.

The Damage

So here we are again, after two days days of the same tired, old, rhetoric I have to address gun violence again.


I. Psychology & Reality
"Guns don't kill people. People kill people." Nope,  this is misunderstanding of thought and event.  An act requires intent and means.  The actual event which kills a victim is a physical chain: looking back at this chain victim>wound>bullet>gun>shooter.  The kill is done by the bullet fired from the gun (both as designed to perform this purpose). The gun is the means used by the shooter to turn intent into event. So, while the shooter originates the act, it is the gun which transforms it into a physical event with a causal result.  Furthermore, many killings are the result of loaded guns left available for children to find, which they improperly discharged.  There is no intent at all in this event.  It would be stupid to claim that in this case "children kill people." The act is reduced to an event, and it is only the means which come into play, which makes it far more relevant than intent.

Without the means, the event would not occur. Like any piece of technology, the gun transforms the individual into a cybernetic being.  That is, it enhances the capability of the human form.  The mind controls the gun, but the gun enacts the thought.  Without the presence of the weapon, the form capable of exerting this power does not obtain.  Modern NRA-style slogan thinking is contrary to historic thought such as the samurai code, which views the sword as doing the killing, not the warrior.

Those who are arguing to combat ideology rather than activity have it backwards.  Freedom must apply to thought before action.  Rather than restrict thought, which it cannot and should not do, for ethical and political reasons, the law must prevent, to the best of its ability, the realization of thought into malicious action,  There is no sense in allowing evil actions, which have real world consequences, to occur for the sake of freedom, while restricting and controlling thought, which even when it is evil or malicious cannot have a consequential effect on a victim without realization.

II. Laws
"Just because something is illegal doesn't mean someone will stop doing it."  Agreed, but this is a misunderstanding of law.  Laws are not designed to make an individual pre-examine their actions, reflect, and then decide what is in their best interest - at least in immediate situations of violence, desperate acts, or willful disregard for social good. A common psychological property of the criminally-minded is the lack of understanding between cause and effect. So, laws are in no way going to help them make immediate decisions.  But, legislation does have an effect on the physical reality which provides the conditions for the act to emerge.  In this case, the law can hinder the proliferation of guns which get into the hands of the shooter, and limit his ability to carry out the malicious act. The law deals with the physical reality, the objective, not the mental, which is an isolated subjective.

"Banning doesn't matter, people will get them anyway." Then why should we make anything illegal?  There are all kinds of laws limiting personal arms.  Fully automatic weapons, explosives, etc are strictly regulated and not easily available even in black markets.  There is clearly a divide between what we would call military grade weapons and personal arms.  Within the fuzzy middle space, the exact position of the line seems too inclusive. It is easy to put hunting rifles and many classes of handgun for personal protection on one side, and F-16s and AH-64 Apaches on the other side (even though I would like to personally own these, military grade equipment is not defensible as personal arms, existing without being subjected to a large chain of oversight).  In the middle, resides arms like the AR-15.  Historically considered personal and constitutionally legal because of its semi-automatic nature, I think this class of weapons has been inappropriately categorized on the wrong side of the line.  Classifying arms as personal or military along an automatic/semi-automatic divide is misguided.  The argument revolving around "Assault rifles" is claimed to be an aesthetic one by gun advocates.  Apparently gun enthusiasts who shoot what they consider to be basic rifles like to make their guns look like "assault weapons"  Why? To play soldier?  This isn't an innocent game, and not the world of make-believe.  But, I agree that we should not be legislating arms based on what they look like.  Why are we not discussing muzzle velocity, firing rate, magazine capacity, etc?  These are the factors that increase lethality.  And it is lethality that should determine the class of weapon.  The M-16, the standard of the US military for decades, has similar parameters and uses semi-automatic and three-round burst modes, which have been concluded to be of more accurate use.  A weapon with automatic mode does not make it an appreciably different type of weapon. With something that can fire 13 rounds per second, the technical aspects of the firing pin are irrelevant, the result of of the weapon as it is are very deadly.  I would like to hear from veterans, who used their gun as their most significant tool in doing their job, in regards to why that tool, which needs to be as lethal and effective as it can be, is something that needs to exist in civilian life? I would think that of anyone, a soldier would best understand the difference between combat and civilized life, and why such arms should only reside in the hands of highly trained professionals.

I concede that violent events can never be pre-neutralized, but the point of living within the safety of civilization is that the laws will reduce the range of possible events, and eliminate the likelihood of the most egregious ones.  Someone can always inflict harm with a screwdriver (maybe), or a knife.  But using a melee weapon limits the damage, maybe one or two kills are possible with several wounded.  Homemade explosive devices and handguns slightly more.  Comparing the Boston Bombing: two bombs only yielded three deaths.  When we get to high-lethality rifles, then we start looking at much higher death tolls, and this is the point where we must address public safety. It does not have to be an all-or-nothing result, but rather eliminate the arms which produces the most public threat but produces the least social good, without hindering the activities of hunting and reasonable self-defense engaged in by qualified citizens. [1]

III: Rights
In the conflict of rights, we must give priority to the actual before the potential found only in hypotheticals.  Why should one’s right to be safe from an actual threat be callously and negligently ignored in favor of the rights of someone else who might one day need to exercise their own rights to avoid threat?  What is immediate and active must be considered first without being subjugated to the passive world of speculation.  The toll of the lives that will be lost in events in the near future can be mitigated rather than ignored in favor of someone's future attempt at self-defense, which can be prepared through other means.  The right to life far exceeds the secondary additions to the constitution which produces a public threat, a threat to that most basic right.

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The events of Orlando have reminded me of these Marillion lyrics, which mostly pertain to the Cold War, but still have significance and resonate about the loss resulting from the conflict with those who emanate an adverse ideology filled with anger and hate, and externalize that internal lack through violence and nihilistic destructive impulses:

And we wake up without you
We wake up without you
With a hole in our hearts

You mad dog shaven head bottle-boy freaks
In Martens and khaki, drunk on sake
You stare at yourself in the cruel flush of dawn
Terrified, sunken eyed, withered and drawn
The butcher, the baker, the munitions maker
The over-achiever, the armistice breaker
The freebase instructor, the lightning conductor
The psycho, the sailor, the tanker, the tailor
The black market mailer
The quick and the dead
The spotlight dancer
The quick and the dead
We wake up without you
With a hole in our hearts

-Marillion “Berlin” 1989

[1] It's very clear that individuals can be denied constitutional rights.  Felons, drug addicts, mental disabled people are all excluded.  I don't see why stronger psychological testing of gun purchasers, and a stricter mental requirement, would be any different legally

Red Sector A

It seems significant that several of the most prominent television programs currently produced are dystopian.  Beyond the Walking Dead, now we have Colony and the Man in the High Castle.  While the first merely portrays the intrusion of the Real into the conventional construct we live in, the last latter two inject indicative political frameworks. Colony, despite its perhaps lackluster execution, diminishes that Real (an alien invasion), leaving it in the background. The resulting focus is life in an authoritarian occupation. Alarmist hyperbolism of the currently perceived dangers aside, these narratives seem particularly applicable to the zeitgeist.  The future certainly seems uncertain, with the ever present feeling that things could be much worse.  High Castle  (a historical/sci-fi/postmodern Game of Phones exploration of the nature of reality and Baudrillardian authenticity) suggests that the world we know does have to be the way it is, just as the characters in that world learn the world does not need to be the way it is.  Both of these authoritarian worlds go beyond the normalization of totalitarianism to show the alternatives tensions straining the family dynamic.  Colony's Will joins the occupation to achieve security for the family, while his wife Katie joins the resistance to secure a free future.  Similarly, High Castle's Juliana joins the resistance to find answers from the other world, while Frank just wants to escape the ongoing torment of the totalitarian regime.  What should one to in these situations? Both of these shows present the possibility that even as bad as things are, when change is injected they can get far worse.

Perhaps the most important outcome of these shows is how they draw our internal views out of reality for examination.  Man in the High Castle's ungrounded world of power, an ongoing Game of Thrones-esque Foucauldian contest of power centers, throws motivation and conventional right and wrong into the blender until the point that we can even find empathy for one (or even the one [1]) enforcing a Nazi establishment.  Even more striking is the ever present forum debates concerning the anarchic  Walking Dead between the vast majority supporting the pragmatic too-far-gone view of kill first over the moralistic attempt at non-violence.  This appears to me to echo the real life fight against ISIS.  The popular view is to strike hard with as much as possible before further analyzing alternatives.  Drone-strike them into oblivion.  But this ignores the fact that such tactics only increase the threat ultimately. Too-far-gone  tactics at Abu Ghraib only created a new threat, ISIS.  While a more nuanced, long-view strategy with a lighter touch might have given us a map to progress that didn't have  increasing blow-back.  The lesson revealed when we step outside ourselves and profess what these characters should do: there really is no longer an unbreakable moralistic code that we as a culture can fall back upon.  We all fundamentally adhere to a policy of pragmatic power exertion which will yield us the best advantage . Unchained postmodern relativism is the reality, despite those that claim different.  The standard charge of relativism may be an overstatement, but ethics certainly are fluid and up for debatable adaptation, but they are not unconnected to power. Ultimately, the Real we find projected in (dramatic) Nazis/aliens/zombies is much easier to confront then the actually Real we as humans inject into history. Despite what the outcomes are of our present predicaments, we only have ourselves to blame.




[1] Besides the standard Nazi inclusion in every hypothetical ethical discussion (possibly to be replaced with ISIS?), there is the question of killing Hitler - even Jeb had to weigh in on that with his far too utilitarian answer.  But, maybe, just maybe, killing Hitler wouldn't be the best possible alternative - if, say as in this scenario, the result will be nuclear war.

Bodycount

 The recent outbreak of violent attacks in America have generated tremendous amounts of internet discussion - most of it completely useless and irrational, appealing only to the primitive reptilian part of the human brain.  For a more rational, intelligent and civilized discusiion, here are a few points to consider:

I: The Confederate Battle Flag

First, this talk of "banning" a flag is pointless, misleading and obscures the real problems.  No such thing has happened.  What individual citizens do is very different from what the State should be doing.  No one arguing for freedom should be proposing that an individual should not own a Nazi flag.  But, if a state capital was displaying a Nazi  flag, or an ISIS one, I would hope everyone would call for its removal.  While these flags may not have a historical connection to the Southern States, that only highlights a larger problem.    Regardless of any racists connotations to the Confederate Battle Flag, which are not only recorded as a part of its inception but have certainly taken on those meanings in the Post-Civil War and Post-Civil Rights movement era, its represents a defunct government - one that lost a war against The United States of America.  For any state to fly it is a challenge to US Federal authority amounting to treason.  It's time the South got over losing the war.  For those suggesting that this move is simply a distraction from the real problem - they are absolutely right.  However, look at how this happened.  It was a Republican governor and legislature that enacted this removal.  It was not a liberal attack on the right-wing.  But it was a distraction from talking about gun violence - a preemptive move by the right to preserve their monolithic grip on the second amendment.

Second, as for any perceived continual revolt against the Confederacy, it is important to make a distinction.  There is a difference between history and ideology.  While history is locked into an objective realm, ideology continues as a subjective possibility, a "live option."  This is what separates the Battle Flag from Civil War monuments.  Memorials such as Stone Mountain  (while perhaps best not maintained by taxpayer funding)  point only to the past.  But a flag, as an ideological symbol, continues to evolve in meaning and stands for something now.  For an individual to adopt such a symbol and ideology is the price of living in a free country, but once again, it is not the place of the State to adopt, promote, and support such ideologies.  That is dangerous, unethical, and an ultimate restriction of freedom.  Groups such a the Sons of Confederate Veterans make no sense in the twenty-first century.  They may have had a place for a generation or two, but are now so far removed from history that they only perpetuate ideology.  Would we find German organizations of Sons of the Third Reich acceptable?  If not, then we should take time to reevaluate. As for symbols of ideology, flags work as symbols because their meaning is dynamic  - they represent something else and that something can develop on its own.  To suggest The Confederate Battle Flag is similar to the Egyptian pyramids is beyond stupid.  The pyramids are not symbols in themselves.  They are full objective structures with a fixed meaning.  Ignoring the fact they were built by trade laborers not slaves, they are not used by a State to symbolize slavery and further its promotion.  They couldn't be because they don't exist as something which can only represent something else - a signifier .  But flags are nothing in themselves, their meaning is only constituted by their use in context of ideology.


II. American Gun Violence

Any attempted talk to make an attempt at talk about gun violence is immediately shot down as unconstitutional.  For those that say there can be no restriction on gun ownership:  The history of American law shows that there can indeed be limits that are not unconstitutional.  Ignoring the fact (as usual) that it states a "well regulated militia", if there were no cases for limitation, then felons and mentally ill people would have to be given the freedom to purchase weapons.  Furthermore, why do we not have personally owned nuclear weapons, attack helicopters, etc ? (I'm not being flippant, there is a valid question - where does the line get drawn).  At the least we would have fully automatic weapons.  But these limitations have been continually upheld.  Just as there are constitutional limits to the first amendment, Hate speech, inciting a riot, slander, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, etc.  I don't see why a national registry, limitations on high capacity magazines and high-power assault -style weapons would be an infringement, as long as a right is retained for the fundamental ownership of firearms for hunting, self-defense, sport (whatever that is beside practicing killing), etc.  I defer to Newsweek for further discussion.

The idea that society should bear no responsibility for events such as the Charleston shooting shows a myopic view of how people and society work.  This notion, while perhaps internally correct, lacks application in an external world.  Of course, no one is arguing against the responsibility of the moral agent, as apparent from the fact that only the agent is the one prosecuted for the crime.  However:

1. People are a product of society,  increasingly in the world of the de-centered self.  One does not become a homicidal violent racist in a vacuum.  One may be mentally deranged or have sociopathic tendencies on their own, but to find a target for their violent impulses often comes from a larger social message.  It comes from a shared ideology.  One that is propagated through media (not mainstream) that promotes fear and xenophobia, and supports the means such acts to be carried out.  Certainly those that expound such ideas have some responsibility for the psychopathic environment rather than the actual crime.

2.  We live in civilized states through a social contract in order to protect each other and promote good for all individuals in the group.  Failing to do something to actively prevent harm to innocent members of society is a moral violation, just as the individual's act are.

3.  The idea that society is not to blame is not one that the right adheres to in any event other than guns.  They are quick to attack morally deficient fields of media, music, video-games, and to blame a lewd and obscene entertainment industry.  Furthermore, they attack society as "degenerate"when it supports positive and personally natural behavior that they disagree with.

4.  When such events are caused by a Muslim, the entire cultural is immediately blamed.  They are all the same and a particular actor is merely the executor of that culture.  However, when those of a White and/or Christian culture act in a terroristic manner, they are quickly blamed as individuals before any of the previous methods can be launched against that background.

So, while a restricted notion of responsibility may have some legal and ethical truths, it is morally, socially, and practically deficient.  For society to protect the rights of the individual over the rights of the many to have security,  is a morally deficiency.  The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.  While preemptively enforcing legal principles against an individual in areas such as thought crime would certainly be an overstep into liberty rights,  proactively preventing irreversible harm to another individual is far more understandable and necessary. Worst of all, following this reasoning leads to no practical solution.  If this is your response, you're part of the problem, because nothing can be done to prevent these tragedies, it only allows for a reaction.  Rather society needs to actively deal with the problems of society.  This is another example of why libertarianism is a scam.  The only conceivable response to this view of personal responsibility would be to have everyone in the church armed.  At best one person would have lost their life while the others could engage return fire.  And one innocent loss is still too many for an advanced society.  While it is impossible to prevent all such events in a free society, proactive steps in the restriction of the means for carrying out such effective attacks can be made and ultimately reduce the devastation caused.

The divide found in American opinion is interestingly analyzed in this discussion of the separate American countries which comprise the United States.  And here is another discussion on gun control, now slightly out of date, but since nothing has changed, still just as relevant.

St Augustine in Hell

From this week's stupid and annoying files:  John Piper has claimed that watching Game of Thrones is like re-crucifying Christ.  Not because it depicts the most horrific methods of violence and an incredible disregard for the integrity of human subjectivity.  No, just because it contains nudity.  After taking a lot of pain killers for my spinning head, I finally think I understand this.  Not that understanding makes the statement any less stupid.  If we take the fundamental theme of Game of Thrones to be power, in a Foucauldian sense of meta-narrative (along with Nietzsche and Adler), then it involves all of life in this world.  Piper would seem to take a Paulian and Gnostic view of Christianity which rejects everything in the material world as evil.  Only the spititaul can be good.  Anything that feels positive would be an attraction to this world, which would seem to be why we can discount violence as a bad thing.  Assuming Piper isn't a psychopath, he apparently isn't attracted to abhorrent violence.  But, he may actually have an attraction to sexuality, and any glimpse of something to which he has a natural affinity (such as the expected female nudity in Thrones) would be a quick trip into the downward spiral that is real life.  Even St Augustine dealt with the natural attractiveness of prurient interests, and took a far less extremist view.  If catching a glimpse of nudity is so severe that is an act of re-crucifying, then I think it's safe to say we shouldn't be dealing with Game of Thrones.  We should be more concerned with rejecting all of popular culture to the point of resisting going out on the street (and certainly not the beach).  If Piper wants to promote a ascetic way of life that's fine (although I would think rejecting a God-given life in God-created reality to live in a self-deluding fantasy in hopes of finally going to another world would be possibly the worst sin imaginable).  But if he is really serious about that, then he should go live in a hole in the desert, or  at least in a monastery and not participate in the cultural world at all.  Directing his remarks to cultural artifacts that are themselves created out of the real history of thousands of years of human atrocities and human desires completely misses the point.  The real problem is Piper himself, who has a motivation to live (as he rightfully should) but rejects it because of extremist ideology. This resembles the movements to outlaw everything fun -sex, alcohol, dancing, etc- because "I want to do it but I can't, so no one else should be able to do it either."  Piper and his ilk should either enter the real world and attempt to make it better - to promote the good, or he should find that hole in the desert and ignore culture altogether while wasting his time waiting to be saved from reality.  Whatever he is doing now isn't helping - either the world at large or the cause of the religion he invokes.  It's just annoying.

On Evil & The Event of Literature

Last Books Read:  

On Evil - Terry Eagleton
The Event of Literature - Terry Eagleton

I:
In On Evil Eagleton examines the nature of evil  in an attempt to give it a precise definition.  He explores the area where literature, philosophy, religion, and political history meet.  This work attempts to undo the circular reasoning that leads to the popular notion that people do evil things because they are evil.  What then does the person have to do with their own actions?  Evil is either of full description of which nothing more can be said, or it is unexplainable.  Eagleton tries to navigate between these extremes.  He attempts to define it in terms of the drive to annihilate.  The desire for pure, infinite freedom requires that nothing exists, that is the lack of anything which can get in the way of the conscious drive.  Here, in his typical fashion, Eagleton links this drive with the middle class desire for freedom and the unquenchable thirst of capitalism.  The technological progression of human history has evolved to the point where more is always desirable and attainable.  This blind drive can have negative and destructive consequences left unchecked.  In its overly ambitious process evil destroys meaning. For the nihilist, annhilation is the only way to get out of the limitations of creation - to transcend, to escape.  Following Kierkegaard, Eagleton notes the "dreadful emptiness and contentlessness of evil." It is purity, and in its totality is empty and begins to come full circle with chaos.  He presents evil as all form with no substance, although this does not apply to evil alone.  It shares these qualities with music and mathematics among other things.  It is this contentlessness that I find in my least favorite things - sports and idle chat - things which present a useless form of existence.  What differentiates formal structures from evil is indeed their usefulness, which mathematics and music possess.  They provide the foundation for content which provides meaning.  It is meaning, Eagleton argues, that solidifies into something.  In the absence of meaning, evil has "no practical purpose.  Evil is supremely pointless...[it] rejects the logic of causality" (84).  Here he compares it to a game, it is purposeful action without an ultimate purpose.  This characterization as well requires careful consideration.  Life itself for the existentialists and the extra-existential absurdists could fit into this definition.  It is absurd because of the disparity between the serious weight given to actions and the ultimate arbitrariness of those actions.  Similarly, as Eagleton argues in The Event of Literature (see below), literature contains an internal logic that makes sense within the internal structure, but is baseless in an external frame of reference.  Once again, these examples rely on the construction of meaning.  Despite the unlikely possibility of a lasting necessity, life and literature make an attempt to sustain meaning.  And meaning is something. Even in the worst case in which it is all that remains, its existence defies nihilism and evil in its project. The lack of "inner depth" is what keeps the nihilist from finding true annihilation, they must remain to counter creation, but they can find no place within it.  "Evil, like religious fundamentalism is . . . a nostalgia for an older, simpler civilization, in which there were certitudes like damnation and salvation, and you knew where you stood" (119).  It is the attempt to synthesize pure order without all the messiness of life, and the ambiguities and fuzzy logic of the world which make things complicated. Eagleton concludes by applying this to modern day ideological conflict and the disillusionment of  "[t]hose who expect too much of human nature, socialists, libertarians and the like" (148).  Conservatives by contrast have much lower expectations and prioritize the sin and not redemption, while liberals over-prioritize the redemption.  Here Eagleton has thrown the generally accepted contrast between socialists and libertarians into question.  In his view, socialism "proved least possible where it is most urgent.  And this is certainly one of the major tragedies of that epoch" (150). In the current era, where terrorism becomes the defining form of blind, mindless evil,  Eagleton points out that the recognition of evil as purposeless in opposition to the reality of "wickedness" (those harmful actions that are performed for a determined goal) is an important factor in ultimately overcoming evil.

II:
In his most recent work, The Event of Literature, Eagleton argues for a complex view of literary theory . In contrast to the emptiness of evil, literature is an immensely deep creation of meaning- of worlds in themselves. This is a dense work, of which much could be said.  However, in an effort to be brief, Eagleton defines literature as a "work" that exhibits these properties: It exists in a moral perspective, that is examines  morality,.  It is non-pragmatic - it contains features that elevate it beyond any pragmatic function it might have (such as poetic language). It is mobile and dislocated -not linked precisely to its point of origin. It invites interpretation, provides connotations, and exists with a double nature - it works on multiple levels.  It contains its own internal logic which does not necessarily correspond to external reality, but is coherent.  It is a language game, it contains only what its language allows.  It involves attempts at questions and answers.  Finally, it can be viewed as an event more than a work.  It is an attempt at "strategy," a problem-solving device,  "[t]he literary work is a a solution to to the question which is itself . . . it establishes a relation to reality by establishing a relation to itself (223). Furthermore, "[t]he literary work can be seen as objectifying unconscious fantasies, converting this shapeless, sublimely terrifying stuff into tangible images" (220). Eagleton ties together the aesthetic, political, philosophical/moral and psychological threads to sum up that "[t]he work of art is an example of human praxis, and therefore how to live well" (224).  Literature is our attempt to record the infinite amount of possible experiences and attempt to make sense of existence and its myriad of perceived meanings.

Lie (Autonomy vs Authenticity)

In the recent Supreme Court ruling on US v Xavier Alvarez  Judge Kozinski discusses the reasons for lying and makes some interesting claims relating lying to society and its freedoms:

An important aspect of personal autonomy is the right to shape one’s public and private persona by choosing when to tell the truth about oneself, when to conceal and when to deceive.

Political and self expression lie at the very heart of the First Amendment. If the First Amendment is to mean anything at all, it must mean that people are free to speak about themselves and their country as they see fit without the heavy hand of government to keep them on the straight and narrow.

The courts promotion of personal freedom and restriction of government interference is certainly to be applauded, but the ruling does raise questions regarding ethics and identity.  Moral thought throughout history would probably have disagreed with the court.  Kant would have upheld that lying was wrong even when it was for a social good or for an avoidance of evil.  In the twentieth-century, the Existentialists were concerned about lying as the basis of bad faith.  Authenticity in life was a moral requirement.  But now, through the periods of late modernism/post-modernism, personal autonomy has been elevated to a chief moral concern.  I wonder if the pantheon of Existentialists would revise there positions now, as personal autonomy was a prime concern of theirs and we now live in a world that they helped create.  It would seem that the evolution of moral thought might now regard personal autonomy as inextricably linked to authenticity.  If we must make ourselves, then an element of that creation is determining how that existence is viewed and regarded (many of the courts examples can be reduced down to an avoidance of judgement).  But, "Hell is other people" as Sartre claimed.  Perhaps he would now say that the self-created individual must be judged on a fundamental basis of who they are, not how they can be perceived.  The highest level of autonomy, he might claim, comes from the individual one becomes in its undistorted reality, not the one that is carefully advertised to affect a pre-determined response.  In the post-modern world customization and personalization have become elevated because of their availability, everything from a personal music playlist to extensive body modification.  It is also the world of the spectacle where everything resides on the surface and is therefore subjected to spin.  The court-affirmed position of deception as a valid method of self-creation becomes a another tool in self-creation.

Talk Talk

Scanning by Alistair Begg on the radio tonight I heard him discussing the "stupidity" of deconstructionism and the "idiocy" in the "ivory towers" of those in the field of postmodernism.  Now, I have to give him credit for bringing up these concepts - where else can anyone hear about them publicly? Unfortunately, I imagine his audience doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.  To reduce these movements of thought to the terms stupid and idiotic is, at best, lazy and at worst deceptive.  It shows his own lack of vocabulary.  For someone so interested in language in order to propagate his message, he should be more interested in how language works.  Does he think the word of God was handed to us in modern English in completely unambiguous terms?  The answer is, of course, yes.  And this shows his own stupidity and idiocy.  He proceeds from the premise that every word and phrase in the Bible has a singular, immutable meaning.  At which point his work diverges from any intellectual pursuit.  

First, given the unending amount of religious media, the massive amount of religious denominations (along with their internal conflicts), the history of religious wars, and the endless "talk" (babble) about this passage and that, its clear that there is no center of Biblical interpretation.  There are as many interpretations as there are readers, and it is constantly reinterpreted in new light.  Otherwise, he would be out of a job and everything would have been decided two thousand years ago.  Second, it is clear that language is a construct of humanity that continues to evolve and that we operate only with concepts found inside this construct.  So, even if the original authors intention was to relate a directly perceived truth, it had to be "encoded" into the language of the time, reduced from a pre-language meaning.  And that meaning has been re-translated though history into new languages as they come into existence.  So, what we have now is a multi-generational copy of the original thought.  Further, there is no indication that the Bible was intended to be such a precise, narrow vision.  Given the factual and logical contradictions that are constantly present, if that was the intention then it is a complete failure.  Alistair's problem is that since he operates from that illogical premise there is no way to reason with what he saying, he has closed off any possibility of negotiating a new and improved conclusion.  He condemns the intellectuals, but since he doesn't work in the rational field of the intellect, he is not proving their arguments to be invalid.  It is comparing oranges and apples, and all he can do is resort to name calling. 

Begg can denounce the deconstructionist for removing meaning, the postmodernist for rejecting the meta-narrative and the atheist for rejecting the existence of God.  But even if this group of miscreants were to proceed without any arguments, reason, or evidence (in the worst un-intellectual case), all they would be doing is coming down to his level - operating from a presumed premise based on belief.  Deconstruction and postmodern thought do not state that anything can mean anything (or nothing), they only reveal the internal contradictions, ambiguities and multiplicities that are inherent in human thought and magnified by the limitations of language.  I understand that Begg wants to believe in a transcendental signifier and must be concerned with the deconstructionists' lack of belief in one.  But, if he wants to discuss deconstruction then he needs to do it on their terms and argue convincingly why there is a transcendental signifier that gives a pre-established meaning.  Calling it stupid is not nearly enough. Perhaps he could start by reading Who's Afraid of Postmodernism and Postmodern Theology.  On second thought, maybe its best if he didn't discuss these concepts, as he only promotes misinformation that may be blindly accepted by his audience.

No, you're not entitled to your opinion

In  No, you're not entitled to your opinion, Patrick Stokes argues (quite well) that not all opinions are the same.  It is not enough to say that I have my opinion and you have yours.  There has to be some reason, and as he states: "you are only entitled to what you can argue for." Allowing every possible opinion to be right makes all views correct, and therefore nothing is more true than everything else and we end up in nihilism.  Relativism in morality is difficult enough (and presents problems even for us non-absolutists) but add extreme relativism into aesthetics and knowledge in general and the whole idea of truth is destroyed.  Opinions (at least about the external world [1])  must have some correspondence to reality and its facts.  Furthermore, views- if anywhere near complete and worth holding- must hold some level of rationality that can be argued for.  If one wants to support a right wing candidate because of belief in the super-capitalist view of trickle-down economics, then one must be able to argue why that is the correct course of action (and be able to overcome contradictory evidence found in the facts of data).  Otherwise, your "opinion" cannot be taken seriously.



[1] As Stokes notes, there are matters of taste which involve matters pourely internal to oneself.  What do I like better? - chocolate or vanilla? But this is of no consequence to anyone else. If we are to have discourse with anyone outside of ourselves - then we have to invoke criteria to evaluate competing statements in order for them to have any meaning at all.

Living in The End Times

Last book read:  Living in the End Times - Zizek


Slavoj Zizek is the new Heidegger. And not necessarily in a good way. In this work, Zizek uses Hegelian dialectical philosophy, Lacanian psychology, and Marxian economics to deconstruct late capitalism. I think? perhaps more precisely he deconstructs the underlying ideology of the global economy that has been normalized as capitalism. It would seem that analysis of Kung Fu Panda and I am Legend, along with Rammstein to present  hidden ideologies is genius. But, it soon becomes clear that this work suffers from a lack of clarity and organization. There are brilliant points, but often the discussion will shift from geopolitics to deep psychological trauma (or worse the frequent references to bodily functions [1]) without coherent transitions. This work would be much improved with divisions into many more chapters, each one explicitly providing a systematic progression to his final conclusion. Better yet, it should have been broken into several books, each dealing with a different area. Zizek wrote How To Read Lacan, now someone should write How to Read Zizek. I'm afraid that he takes Continental philosophy to such an extreme that it begins to break, and the structure of analytical philosophy becomes sorely missed. On the other hand, it may be true that Zizek is "the most dangerous philosopher in the West."  He seems ready to break down all of the current global constructs in true revolutionary fashion, although he does not offer (apart from a few specific examples) what kind of "system" should replace capitalism.  There is just so many fragmented ideas here that I wouldn't know where to begin a coherent discussion, so for now I'm going to take a break and go read some Heidegger.

[1]  Zizek criticizes modern American morality and its acceptance of vulgarity while he praises Chavez's banning of US television.  However, he is guilty of the exact same thing that he blames artists like Serrano of doing.  The book is filled with references to bodily functions, which he uses to make extreme rhetorical points in a provocative manner.  In most cases these are completely unnecessary and I can only imagine that he employs the shock value of it to fulfill the role of a  "rock star" philosopher (doing "excremental philosophy").

Jeremiah Blues (3/12)

In the latest developments in the culture wars, this is an interesting look at how the Republican party has been taken over by radicals, turning it into a party of theocracy.

On the other obvious front, here's a piece about the theist/atheist/anti-theist fight.  I think the key part here is that it should not be reduced to a science/religion battle.  Neither side may be right.  As Appleyard notes about Stephen Hawking, "he was contemptuously anti-philosophical."  This, in my opinion, is the flaw in science - it is self limiting and there may be modes of thought that, while remaining rational and logical (or not [1]), are deeper, wider, and higher than science. Another interesting aspect of this conflict is the intensification of ideology in the post-9/11 world.  In this respect both fundamental Christianity and militant neo-atheism share the same tactics and the same goal: the eradication of an impending, alien culture (Islam).


Rush v Rush

Finally, I have to give credit to Peter Gabriel and Rush for standing up against misuse of their music by vile, ignorant, disgusting loud mouths who are always more about creating the problems and less about the solutions.  From a liberal perspective, both of these artists have always promoted the importance of the integrity of the individual.  From a conservative perspective, a la Ayn Rand, comes the importance of individual autonomy - the artist should always have control over their own work and not allow it to be appropriated by other ideologies.







[1] In a Nietzschean view, rationality is only one mode of thought and irrationality may be just as valid

The Next 100 Years

Last Book Read: The Next 100 Years - George Friedman

In The Next 100 Years, Friedman attempts to map out geo-politically what may happen over the next century.  Unlike most other geo-political analyzers, Friedman thinks America is headed for a Golden Age.  He argues that nations go through three stages - barbarism, civilization and decadence.  The final stage of decadence is a period of nihilism when nothing particular is valued and society becomes complacent and self-distracted and thus unproductive. As America is still young (and undisciplined) it still has yet to evolve in Friedman's view.  Given effective decisions made during World War I and World War II which minimized American casualties and cost of war, the US quickly achieved superpower status.  Wining the Cold War allowed the US to become the first sole superpower and by having complete global dominance of the oceans, it is able to easily project its power anywhere it chooses. And this power projection is unrestrained as the US is the first nation in history to achieve this global dominance.  Future wars will only increase American determination and technological advancements and, allowing the US to further gain from every conflict it fights.

Friedman has an interesting theory about American history occurring in 50 year cycles, and what works in solving one crisis will not work in the next, rather something of its opposite is required instead, For instance Roosevelt's New Deal had to be later followed by Reagan's pro-business/ lower taxes economics in the next cycle.  What worked once won't work again.  And by that logic it would seem that it's time to move away from the sacred Reaganomics.

While discussing American technological capability, Freidman makes interesting points about pragmatism and American philosophy. American culture, he states, "is an uneasy melding of the Bible and the computer." "The significance of an idea is in its practical consequences."  An idea without practical consequences, it follows, lacks meaning.  The entire notion of contemplative reason as an end in itself is excluded, as is seen in the Anglo- American philosophy that rejects European and Continental metaphysics.  Computers reduce everything to data, they embody pragmatism.  But that data, it could be argued, is information that does not include meaning.  The computer "represents the unique manifestation of the American concept of reason and reality. . . [it] represents a powerful, reductionist force."  This is why America is so focused and effective.  It also explains the differences in American thought from Old World European ideas.

I won't go into detail about Friedman's predictions, but I certainly disagree with him on some matters of military strategy.  For instance, he ignores Russia's nuclear force - one that is maintained as a matter of utmost importance precisely to counter a foreign invasion of the kind that Freidman thinks might be conventionally possible.  Furthermore, he claims Japan already has a world class Navy and Air Force.  They don't, and I don't know why he would say this. Also, he claims that the US "Battlestars" will be vulnerable to a multiple missile attack.  But, if we look at the layers of defense systems a Carrier Battle Group has, it would seem just as unlikely that a Battlestar could be destroyed with certainty as a US carrier.  With the introduction of beam weapons, defensive systems would likely be more capable.  Finally, he thinks the US force of 2050 will be only hypersonic planes, of which only a few hundred survive.  But its already clear that we will have weapon systems such as the F-35 still in use and we will just be replacing our B-2 and B-52 forces.  I imagine we will still have a vastly numerous amount of  legacy-class systems and that it is unlikely that most of them could be destroyed in one attack.

What's important here is not the details but why Freidman makes these claims.  History repeats itself, and Friedman uses this to extrapolate future data, and given that he is an advisor to the US government, what he thinks may hold considerable weight.  Most interesting is how this study shows why the US does what it does, and how this thinking extends back centuries and every historical step we take builds upon some basic thinking.  For instance, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not important for us to win by achieving specific goals.  We are fighting them simply to disrupt the Middle East so that the Muslim world (or anyone else) cannot unite to become a dominate Asian power.

Even given Freidman's optimism, it seems that the end of the twenty-first century will bring us right back to where we are, experiencing a culture conflict with the rest of the world and struggling with issues of debt and immigration.  While he may not be accurate, his thinking does illuminate the development of America and where we are in the course of that progress.

Parallel Worlds

I. Stephen Hawking has once again claimed philosophy is dead. On the outset he is still completely wrong. No matter what final determination science can make about the nature of reality, it still can't give us a complete metaphysical picture. It is self limiting. More importantly, it can't tell us what to do. There will always be the need for philosophy as an assessment of the world we live in.

Having said that, philosophy is killing itself from the inside. After one hundred years of positivist influence, the contemporary state of philosophy as analytic is dead, in a sense of a wider historic view rather than a narrow technical method. Analytic philosophy is good at asking questions, but as it has thrown itself at the mathematical and scientific side of knowledge, it doesn't seem to do as well at answering them. In this respect, Continental philosophy fares better, as do other humanities. For instance, these days a lot of interesting works of philosophy can be found by writers like Terry Eagleton, an English professor. The other humanities, such as English, are undergoing the same difficulties, a century of "scienceitization" and intrusion by social science. Richard Rorty has written about this reorientation in both philosophy and English. In "The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature", he writes about philosophical dryness, and dissertation work being done on areas like " the proper analysis of subjunctive conditional sentences," and not in the engaging areas of philosophical wisdom.  The problem with a "little" philosophy, is that it is not enough.

II. Last Book Read - Parallel Worlds- Michio Kaku

As for science and philosophy, Michio Kaku's work Parallel Worlds does offer some insight.  This book serves as a great introduction to his work, as it summarizes much of the string theory information found in Beyond Einstein and Hyperspace as well as the future technology found in Physics of the Impossible.  He also presents interesting ideas about the transition of civilization from a Type 0 to Type I and beyond, such as the establishment of the internet as a Type I communication system and the evolution from nations to trading blocks, revealing the significance of our current time in history and the future paradigm shifts. Kaku discusses surviving the death of the solar system and, more importantly, the eventual death of the universe by using technology to escape to other locales in the multiverse. After theorizing about the "theory of everything" needed to reach this technological level, he concludes that even if we can reduce all the known physics down to a one inch equation, we still have to ask "why that equation?"  "Where did this equation come from?"  At this point, it seems that cosmology and physics can't help us.  There is still the problem of meaning.  Kaku shows that in the infinite multiverse , anything that can happen does and every choice is made both ways.  There is no uniqueness to any situation, no weight or consequence of choice, no "moral sense."  Kaku's resolution to this "quantum existential crisis" is that meaning must be created by each individual.  In this way, Kaku acknowledges that philosophy must pick up where science stops.

Martin Gardner, 1914

Martin Gardner, 1914 – 2010

It's sad when the world loses one of the good guys.  Martin Gardner exemplified rationality and the ability to explore competing alternatives to choose the best option and answer.  Unfortunately this is exactly the kind of thinking that is quickly disappearing.  Between the ridiculous amount of ghost-hunting shows, UFO watchers (You do know that there are alien fish-people living off the coast of California right?) and religious nonsense (I just learned from the radio the other night that the universe is only a few thousand years old), the world of the 21st century is quickly devolving into a state of superstitious, gullible Neanderthals.

Known for his mathematical ability, Gardner also excelled when he  pursued knowledge beyond his strict intellectual studies.  His avid interest in magic allowed him to debunk the work of many psychics and magicians.  Religiously, he transcended Christianity, and rejected (at least technically) atheism and pantheism.  His position of philosophical theism may contain the only compelling arguments for that direction of thinking.  Socially, he had a good grasp on politics and economics and defended Democratic Socialism over anything else, including Liberalism, believing this was simply the best for everyone.  I have much to say about Gardner's ideas that I just haven't had time to comment on.  I hope to in the future, and hope the world will continue to be exposed to his ideas to help them stay out of the dark world of anti-rationality.

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Being In The World

 Here's a look at a new film that I hope will be available quite soon.  The idea of being human in a technological world by attaining mastery seems quite compelling.

Being In The World

The Death of God and the Meaning of Life

Last Book Read - The Death of God & the Meaning of Life - Julian Young

In this work, Young presents an excellent history of the development of thought concerning meaning from the pre-modern age to the current postmodern era.  Central to the progression of history from one period to another is the death-of-God, a fundamental change in human understanding. He presents this transition as a stream of thought beginning with Galileo and the advent of science and ending with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.  As Nietzsche noted when he originally announced the death of God in 1882, that when Galileo unchained the Earth from the center of the universe, we were placed in a cold, dark void, moving in an uncertain direction with no up or down.  There was no longer any fixed point of reference, and no longer a fixed source of meaning.  We were left with the dangerous possibility of nihilism.  The modern age responded by providing new methods of fixed systems.  The worlds conceived by Hegel and Marx moved the true-world of religion into the future history of humanity.  This true-world was no longer an other-world in space, but existed away from us in time.  But this illusion could only be sustained for so long.  With the end of functioning Marxism in 1989, this revision of religion also became defunct, providing a final death of God.

Young suggests that Continental philosophy deals with the death of God - conservative continental philosophy being the modern-era revisioning of God.  With the end of that came radical continental philosophy, which finds any replacement for God to be impossible.  "A religion is anything that postulates or promises a true world."   Here we have worldviews such as non-theist religions and schools of thought such as Marxism, that all function as religions the same as theism does.  When Nietzsche announced the death of God, he proposed that any of these systems were no longer possible in performing the function that they had done in pre-modern world.

I think that we could view radical continental philosophy as the philosophies of existentialism.  There may be some non-existential worldviews that have subsequently developed in the branch of post-modernism, but I would hesitate to call these complete philosophies, but rather culture theories, at this point. In other words, I think that all philosophy of meaning following the death of God is existential in nature.

Young examines the philosophy of four existential philosophers: Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus, as well as the two postmodernists Foucalt and Derrida. He divides Nietzsche into three distinct periods of thought (early, late and posthumous), Heidegger into early and late and Sartre into two different early versions (ignoring the late).

He begins by tracing the lineage of thought of other-world meaning from Plato to Kant.  Schopenhauer takes Kant's notion of the hidden other-world and applies it to his pessimism, where passing from this world to the other is preferable.  Nietzsche continues this "European Buddhism" and attempts to overcome the implicit nihilism by suggesting that we can experience the other world through art.  Hegel and Marx continue a non-supernatural view of the other-world by relocating it to history.

When Nietzsche finally changes his mind about pessimism, he creates a whole new track of thought - radical continental philosophy- negating all the true-world views. Young then discusses Nietzsche's attempt at creating meaning by creating the self as a work of art, a complete narrative.  However, there is a problem of choice - the question of what life to choose.  He suggests these are the problems of authority and the immoral script.  Young then moves on to Heidegger, discussing historicity and the discovery of the authentic life.  For Heidegger your heritage, your community, are central to the meaning of life. But what if these traditions are not moral or meaningful themselves?  The problems of authority remain.

Sartre is up next. Dividing the work of Being and Nothingness, Young finds two views of  Sartre, based on slightly different interpretations of absurdity, as well as opposing views of humanity's desire to be God.  Sartre-two he dismisses as a nihilist based on this Sartre's understanding that all of life is conflict with others,  making life both meaningless and eternal conflict.  The views of Sartre-one come down to this: "(1) God is Dead. (2)Since there is no God to authorize the good, we have to do it ourselves. But (3) we have no authority over ourselves. Hence (4) we possess no authoritative account of the good, and life is meaningless (and so worthless)."

Finally we have Camus who views life as absurd - that is the disparity between how things are and how we want them to be.  But as many have argued (such as David Cooper and Camus himself ), the absurd hero of Camus' vision accepts this absurdity and happily lives in alienation, and this sets him apart from the existentialists.  Young suggest here that Camus believes life is better with no meaning. There is simply no possibility of a grand-narrative meaning.   What Camus really wants is life full of experience, "an ethics of quantity."  He looks to the "Barbarian Gods" on the beaches of Algeria, living without appeal and a lust for experience. Camus' version of the overman lives without appeal, because there is no divinity to appeal to, but rather lives with strength and majesty in this absence.  Aimlessness is preferable because a project of disciplined self development causes one to be a slave to their goals. Freedom is reduced and one always lives in the future, never in the now.  The absurd hero is indifferent to time and is only concerned with "being there."  Young ultimately rejects Camus' view and his hero as constructing static person that "will not change." Without some kind of goal, one will ultimately have a life that is simply boring.  He regards building one's life through self-defining goals as essential.

After analyzing the traps of existentialism and the unoriginality of the postmodernists, Young returns to Heidegger. He is clearly a Heidegarrian and takes the late un-existential Heidegger track as a means of escape from nihilism. Meaning is discovered rather than created, it is realizing the proper disclosure of the world and your place within it. Meaning comes from facticity - essence and existence become inseparable, according to Young.  Guardianship of the world, of Being, becomes our central task. This "Being" does not exist in a theistic sense,  but it is rather "the god of the poets," immanent in everything. 

Young does a better job at revealing underlying flaws in existential philosophy than other religious anti-existentialists that I have mentioned in the past.  He also provides an interesting and refreshing solution to the problem of meaning, by being non-theist and non-existential.  I am, at this point, however, not ready to dismiss Nietzsche, Sartre or Camus quite as easily.  I think that perhaps Young neglects some of the horrors of World War II and the Cold War, and their effects on modern philosophy, which explain some of the dark, nihilist leanings found within it.  Nevertheless, I believe existentialism is still optimistic and the right direction for finding post-death of God meaning.  As for Heidegger, his final position of Being is at least a non-true-world one.  Therefore, I can only assume that this Being, as sacred but not God, is a form of pantheism.  Of course, this leads to the question if Being is non-true-world, then does that mean pantheism is not religion?  Atheism and pantheism certainly function the same in practice, but any more on this matter will have to wait for another time.

Overall this book is highly recommended as one of the best works on philosophy in recent years.  It is an excellent work on many levels, first explaining the development of modern philosophy, as well as elucidating the existential positions and highlighting their particular details. Finally, it functions as a current state analysis of history by showing the progression from modernism to post-modernism through death-of-God realizations and the failed and desperate attempts at true-world transmutations.

Existentialism is a Humanism

Last Book Read: Existentialism and Human Emotions - J.P. Sartre

In this short work, Sartre responds to some criticism and attempts to lay out basic principles of existentialism. These principles derive from the foundation that Man is the being whose being is the lack of being. This nothingness is brought into the world through consciousness, leaving Man alone to be the creator of values, unable to escape from freedom. There are many overtones of Nietzsche throughout this work: the transvaluation of values, the spirit of seriousness, and the will to power. Here Sartre tries to make a new, solid foundation and pronounces that Existentialism is the realization that for Man, existence precedes essence.

Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of a coherent atheistic position. It isn't trying to lunge man into despair at all. But if one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, like the Christians, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing. There you've got our point of view. Not that we believe God exists, but we think the problem of His existence is not the issue.

"Man is nothing else than what he makes of himself." This is the first principle of existentialism - subjectivity. Sartre defines freedom and responsibility and explains why we can never escape these. We can always go to others for advice, but in doing so we choose who to seek out for this advice, and we choose whose responses we will consider. It ultimately always comes back to ourselves.

Sartre goes on to discuss existential psychoanalysis, by which one attempts to find their original project, their original choice. Here Sartre dismisses the notion of the unconscious mind and attempts to refute Freudian and empirical psychoanalysis. He even thinks the tastes we have for certain foods can be consciously linked to our original project. Sartre then discusses holes, and how life is an attempt to fill these holes , to "preserve the totality of the In-itself." Ultimately Man attempts to become God, by synthesizing For-itself into In-itself-for-itself, which is self defeating. This is what God would be, but because it is a logical impossibility, it can never be achieved.

After a rather incomplete discussion of this analysis Sartre move on to ethical implications. Sartre noted that in aesthetics, there are no a priori values. The same could be said for ethics. " What art and ethics have in common is that we have creation and invention in both cases. . . Man makes himself. He isn't ready made at the start. In choosing his ethics, he makes himself." "The one thing that counts is knowing whether the inventing that has been done, has been done in the name of freedom." But, in the final chapter on ethics Sartre delays discussion to a future work- one which would never come.

This work really just contains basic principles that can be found in any introduction book, and here they are somewhat obscured by technical languauge, but there are many small details which enhance Sartre's philosophy.

The Universe Next Door

Last Book Read: The Universe Next Door - James W. Sire


I came across this book in a thrift store and I can't pass up any book that discusses existentialism and postmodernism. Written as a Christian criticism of different worldviews, I figured reading this would be any interesting exercise. I will limit my comments here to the chapters on nihilism, existentialism and postmodernism.

Sire's take on nihilism is that it is logical conclusion from naturalism, that is things are as they are in an objective and contingent world. There is no inherent meaning in anything, and none can be concluded. The biggest problem with this chapter is his confusion of nihilism and absurdism. He quotes much from Camus and Douglas Adams, as well as Beckett and Kafka. All of these writers are concerned with absurdism, and I certainly wouldn't consider any of these as nihilists. None of them deny value, they only claim that it is absurd and possibly unknowable. He does cite Nietzsche, as is necessary in any discussion of nihilism, but he does not recognize Nietzsche's anticipation of escape from this "box". Nihilism is not a live option for a philosophy, and is really more of a rejection of philosophy. Sire seems to confuse two types of nihilism: epistemological, the position that there can be no truths, and existential, the position that there can be no meaning. Nihilism may be a logical paradox, as Sire claims, when it is epistemological nihilism. But that does not mean naturalism is necessarily false. Knowledge is a construct, dependant on human conciousness. Let's not confuse truths and facts, the universe doesn't care how we frame and catalog our experience of reality, it just is. It may be a fact that the universe is nothing but random atoms joined purely by chance, but nihilism is not inherently linked with this explanation. The paradox arises within the human understanding, and not in the external world. Furthermore, this epistemoligcal nihilism is not a necessary component of all nihilsm. It is in the existential sense that nihilism is most often used, and I think this is what Sire means when he claims that worldviews end in nihilism, because all values are equaled, and hence lose meaning. This is exactly what Nietzsche argued when discussing the "devaluation of values". It is also present in Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality. I think history has proven the real presence and danger of existential nihilsm, it can exist without paradox. But many people such as Pirsig and Nietzsche have shown solutions that do not reject a naturalistic framework. Finally, he claims Nietzsche "ended in an asylum" because of his links with nihilism. This is purely false, his mental disorders were a direct result of a biological infection and not a philosophical one.

Next, Sire moves on to existentialism. He correctly notes existentialism as a response and a solution to nihilism (as is much of philosophy and art). Here, we see the introduction of subject into the universe. Human consciousness changes existence, and makes meaning and value possible. This meaning is not pre-determined, however. It is created by the activity of consciousness. Sire's rejection of existentialism begins with the danger of solipsism, where the value of the "I" is the only one and no one else is recognized in the equation. But, he also recognizes that Sartre has already addressed this. The very center of existentialism is the realization that we are being-for-itself, and others are also being-for-itself. We must recognize others as subject and not as objects. Now, existentialist ethics are never a simple matter, and Sartre himself was unable to complete his works on it. But, here Sire over-simplifies the whole notion of an existentialist ethics and quickly moves past it without a detailed examination. His main argument is that in existentialism good is created by choosing, so what ever one freely chooses is the good and non-choice is evil. This, of course, ignores the major element of existentialism, responsibility. Because we have freedom we cannot pass off our choices, and any evil they create, to anyone else. We alone are responsible for the outcome. Choice itself is not the good, but we are given the opportunity to create good and make universal our choices, thereby creating the world we want to live in. Sire would do well to read de Beavoiur's Ethics of Ambiguity for an explanation of existential evil. He does admit that Camus' The Plague is a case for living the moral life in a world where values are ungrounded. But, Sire's problem still remains, they are ungrounded. Just because humans can affirm values, they do not gain any more of a base and they can be countered by opposite affirmations. Then, when these conflicts arise, how can we know which one is "right"? Here again, a more detailed analysis of freedom and responsibility would help narrow the range of possibilities and take us away from pure relativism. Sire does not touch at all on authenticity, and this, I would argue, is the centerpiece of existentialism , and without recognizing that, we cannot adequately explain or analyze it. When we recognize the freedom of others, and our responsibility to them, we go a long way forward in creating a morality that is close to "traditional", without unnecessary essences and exterior explanations. It is not that far removed from the virtue ethics of Aristotle.

Moving on to postmodernism, Sire does provide some decent background discussion, noting the historical changes from being to knowing to meaning. He does not think postmodernism will be with us "for the long haul." I think this has been quite disproven, as postmodernism continues to more accurately explain the current world. His charge that postmodernism is completely dismissed by scientists is also complete nonsense. Here some readings from Kellner and Best would illuminate that criticism. I do agree that postmodernism is inadequate when it comes to areas like ethics, leaving only a vague relativism. While I think postmodernism is an excellent descriptive philosophy, I believe it is very incomplete as a prescriptive philosophy. Finally, Sire attempts a lethal blow by claiming that the position "there are no metanarratives" is itself a metanarrative and therefore self-nullifies the whole philosophy. Once again he tries to force the position of epistemological nihilism on a worldview. I'm not convinced that the postmodern claim is that there are no truths or no knowable truths, rather that there are only experiential truths. These truths are not enough to provide a metanarrative without an external source from beyond experience, and there is no evidence of this source. We can only know what we experience, and can create stories or narratives about that. But there is no way to step outside our experience and view ourselves and the totality of existence objectively.

Sire states that this is not a work of professional philosophy and he is quite right. It is far too shallow and brief for that. Nevertheless, Sire tries to claim that he logically proved the self-inconsistencies in each of these worldviews, but that simply was not possibly in the limited manner of this work . For instance, he claims to have shown pantheism inconsistent, but nowhere in the book did he provide a full proof of that. Despite what many readers of this book have thought, it is also not a good catalog of worldviews. If it attempted to casually present a collection of worldviews it might succeed. But, Sire isn't that casual, he over-simplifies and quickly tries to dismiss everything he disagrees with and prove his own view correct. So, this book is stuck between being a serious work of critique, and a casual work of general introduction, accomplishing neither. As a final insult, after revealing the illogical form of these views, he presents his own without any logical basis. At best his theistic view, even if fully accepted, could not be defended purely on logical grounds. Sire has proven himself logically inconsistent. Since he has to accept a groundless fact for the very basis of his worldview, theism, this should not be a basis to reject other theories. The views presented here are based on facts, or at least perceptions and experience, rather than extension of belief, which leads Sire to a very unstable point for his attacks. He would be better off arguing why these philosophies could be true, were it not for an inadequacy or defect, namely the existence of his theism, and then argue why one should accept this theism as a starting point, being ungrounded, and reject plain experience for something more.