Walla Walla Bing Bang

In the 47-page essay that makes up the first third of her short book For The New Intellectual, Ayn Rand makes much use of two archetypal terms coined by Nathaniel Branden. Two kinds of human, one a figure of force and the other a figure of faith.

For a completely slanted (and often vitriolic) summary of the history of philosophy, FTNI is an interesting read. It was with good reason that a friend of mine once remarked, "Miss Rand should always be read with one eyebrow permanently raised." But even if it's not much good for anything else, the essay makes great use of the two archetypes played against each other, and against mankind. The rubric used lends a compelling perspective to certain cultural trends, both throughout history and in the present.

So, the archetypes. The first is called Atilla. This is the psychological symbol of blunt might, of violence as the solution to all problems, of destruction of one's enemies as an ideal. The second is called the Witch Doctor. This is the human who eschews reality, who retreats "into his emotions, into visions of some mystic realm where his wishes enjoy a supernatural power unlimited by the absolute of nature." They might seem like polar opposites, but Rand plays them as two sides of the same coin. Both are interested in forcing reality to conform to their desires; and while Atilla strives for physical conquest, the Witch Doctor seeks to rule the soul. The muscle of Atilla can take purpose from the values of the Witch Doctor, and in turn the Witch Doctor gains protection from and power over "any recalcitrant who may choose to challenge his authority." Rand plays both as the enemies of reason, and as proponents of the precept that wishes are superior to reality.

From page 17:

Since the clash [between reality and wishes] is constant, the Witch Doctor's solution is to believe that what he perceives is another, "higher" reality―where his wishes are omnipotent, where contradictions are possible and A is non-A, where his assertions, which are false on earth, become true and aquire the status of a "superior" truth which he perceived by means of a special faculty denied to other, "inferior," beings. The only validation of his consciousness he can obtain on earth is the belief and the obedience of others, when they accept his "truth" as superior to their own perception of reality. While Atilla extorts their obedience by means of a club, the Witch Doctor obtains it by means of a much more powerful weapon: he pre-empts the field of morality.

There is no way to turn morality into a weapon of enslavement except by divorcing it from man's reason and from the goals of his own existence. There is no way to degrade man's life on earth except by the lethal opposition of the moral and the practical. Morality is a code of values to guide man's choices and actions; when it is set to oppose his own life and mind, it makes him turn against himself and blindly act as the tool of his own destruction. There is no way to make a human being accept the role of a sacrificial animal except by destroying his self-esteem. There is no way to destroy his self-esteem except by making him reject his own consciousness. There is no way to make him reject his own consciousness except by convincing him of its impotence.

The damnation of this earth as a realm where nothing is possible to man but pain, disaster and defeat, a realm inferior to another, "higher," reality; the damnation of all values, enjoyment, achievement and success on earth as a proof of depravity; the damnation of man's mind as a source of pride, and the damnation of reason as a "limited," deceptive, unreliable, impotent faculty, incapable of perceiving the "real" reality and the "true" truth; the split of man in two, setting his consciousness (his soul) against his body, and his moral values against his own interest; the damnation of man's nature, body and self as evil; the commandment of self-sacrifice, renunciation, suffering, obedience, humility and faith, as the good; the damnation of life and the worship of death, with the promise of rewards beyond the grave―these are the necessary tenets of the Witch Doctor's view of existence, as they have been in every variant of Witch Doctor philosophy throughout the course of mankind's history.

The secret of the Witch Doctor's power lies in the fact that man needs an integrated view of life, a philosophy, whether he is aware of his need or not―and whenever, through ignorance, cowardice, or mental sloth, men choose not to be aware of it, their chronic sense of guilt, uncertainty and terror makes them feel that the Witch Doctor's philosophy is true.

In contemplating such forceful rhetoric, I think of our culture and the tag-team of the Religious Right and the Republican party over the past couple decades. It isn't a perfect match for Rand's perspective in the early 1960's, but in some ways it fits remarkably well. Perhaps where I differ from Rand's formulation is in my questioning of whether the two archetypical characters must necessarily be joined as a team. To wit: what happens if Atilla and the Witch Doctor are no longer able to get along?

My current hypothesis is that, should the tag-team continue to be stressed by Giuliani's leading in most polls, and should the stress be maximized if/when Giuliani wins the nomination, and if that were to result in the evangelical/fundamentalist "base" of the conservative party actually refusing to vote for Giuliani because of their myopic view of a few social issues, we will see two things happen. One, the Democratic candidate will win the White House; and two, the tag-team of religious conservatives and the Republican party will be (permanently?) damaged, perhaps dissolved. If our culture and our discourse and our politics can all three step together into the 21st Century to join the rest of Western civilization, the modern Republican party might only remain relevant to the extent that it marginalizes the evangelical/fundamentalist block that it has so long courted. We may very well be staring at the cusp of a political and cultural shift as it is about to happen, with the result being that we finally escape some of the ancient social taboos that we've so long been shackled to.

Insulation

Milgrim had at least one more speech in him, before the end of the novel. And this one he even managed to speak aloud...

"A nation consists of its laws. A nation does not consist of its situation at a given time. If an individual's morals are situational, that individual is without morals. If a nation's laws are situational, that nation has no laws, and soon isn't a nation.
"Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'll dismantle the structures that made America what it is?
"If you are, you let the terrorist win. Because that is exactly, specifically, his goal, his only goal: to frighten you into surrendering the rule of law. That's why they call him 'terrorist.' He uses terrifying threats to induce you to degrade your own society.
"It's based on the same glitch in human psychology that allows people to believe they can win the lottery. Statistically, almost nobody ever wins the lottery. Statistically, terrorist attacks almost never happen."

I thought of this particular exchange today during my class on education and child development, though I can't say I'm absolutely sure why. A classmate was commenting on previous courses she had taken, and a peculiar confluence she had experienced when three different classes were all covering the same certain revolutionary political philosopher. I don't know enough about what she had learned to have commented in any interesting way, so I didn't, but then she remarked that "he ignored entire aspects of humanity." Suddenly, I heard myself saying, "Well sure. Propounding your ideology is often so much easier when you flat out ignore certain parts of humanity. It's the kind of thinking that seems to get people elected to high offices of government."

Spook Country

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Thus Gibson began his first novel, twenty-three years ago. About 2,173 pages later, he gives us the following...

Milgrim had never been one for metaphysics, but. . . .this text was starting to reveal the pleasure to be had from metaphysical contemplation. Particularly if you were contemplating these Free Spirit guys, who seemed to have been a combination of Charlie Manson and Hannibal Lecter.
And insofar as everything was equally of God, they taught, those who were most in touch with the Godness in every last thing would make it a point to do anything at all, particularly anything still forbidden by those who hadn't yet gotten the Free Spirit message. To which end they went around having sex with anybody they could get to hold still for it, or not, as the case might be—rape being viewed as particularly righteous, and murder equally so. It was like a secret religion of mutually empowered sociopaths, and Milgrim thought it was probably the gnarliest single example of human behavior he'd ever heard of. Someone like Manson, for instance, simply wouldn't have been able to get any traction, had he landed among the brothers and sisters of the Free Spirit. Probably, Milgrim guessed, Manson would've hated it. What good would it be to be Charlie Manson in a whole society of serial killers and rapists, each one convinced that he or she was directly manifesting the Holy Spirit?
But the other aspect of the Free Spirit that fascinated him, and this applied to the whole text, was how these heresies would get started, often spontaneously generating around some single medieval equivalent of your more outspoken homeless mumbler. Organized religion, he saw, back in the day, had been purely a signal-to-noise proposition, at once the medium and the message, a one-channel universe. For Europe, that channel was Christian, and broadcasting from Rome, but nothing could be broadcast faster than a man could travel on horseback. There was a hierarchy in place, and a highly organized methodology of top-down signal dissemination, but the time lag enforced by tech-lack imposed a near-disastrous ratio, the noise of heresy constantly threatening to overwhelm the signal.

It surprised me, as I progressed through the novel, that Milgrim ended up being one of the main vehicles of step-by-step commentary on interesting subjects not intrinsically tied to the plot of the book. I didn't guess him for that type of character, early on in the story.

Coalesce

He sat alone in a quiet, open room. In front of him, on the far corner of the table, lay a small jumble of unsorted papers, next to which burned a small candle. The space was not bright, but not quite so dim as if the candle had been the only source of light, for a bulb or two had been left on in the next room. Behind him and against the wall were some shelves, filled mostly with books. Some were on their sides, others lined up neatly and in order, and a few were propped on the top shelf between two bookends. People always noticed the bookends. They were crafted such that one could almost believe they were not two objects with thousands of pages between them, but instead were really one wide piece, one long bridge spanning the entire distance, that removing a few books would reveal the structure joining either end... But no, they really were just two bookends, squeezing the various philosophy and science fiction books in the space between them.

He was very still. He hadn't moved, except to blink, for many minutes. However, the calm of his exterior belied the rushing activity of his mind. As was common, there was music bouncing around his temporal lobe, but this evening it was not the heavy and progressive compositions that he usually listened to. No, on this day the melody that ghosted in his mental hearing was buzzy rock, a favorite from his late teenage years. Sounds and lyrics that had once been new and exciting, burning permanent synaptic pathways in his brain as he reveled in the anxiety and frustration, had over time become familiar and comforting, like a well worn pair of sneakers (but without all the dirt). Had it really been a decade since he was that confused young man, the one he still sometimes half expected to return his gaze in the mirror?

And still he had not moved. But his thoughts continued to hurtle forwards. He often thought that the memories life was made up of, and the act of thinking back on them, made him feel as if he were stuck on a fixed point careening down the river of time, frequently straining to reach back and grab something he'd dropped in the water. But no matter how far he extended his arm, he could not fight the forward momentum of the river, and even though the dropped objects eternally bobbed up and down in the exact spot on the timeline he had dropped them, they still appeared to be just barely out of his reach. Imagination told him that if he could close that short, infinite gap and grasp one of those dropped moments, just once, that singular success would allow him to freeze time. This was how some of his thoughts felt tonight.

Abruptly his mind's eye cleared and, like a curtain had been pulled back, his eyes took in his present surroundings. He remained motionless, though his gaze wandered around the view before him, his eyes coming to rest their attention on an ordinary coffee mug perched atop a small coaster, over on the other side of the room. He tried to remember what church it was that had given it to him. It occurred to him that he had been drinking coffee out of that mug for years now, without ever thinking of where he'd gotten it from. Countless trips through the dishwasher had so worn the outside that the design and lettering once proudly declaring the cup's allegiance were now reduced to a few random flecks of color spread across the otherwise blank, smooth surface. He pondered the juxtaposition of a coffee mug obtained from a church sometime during his second decade, and the beliefs obtained from a church sometime during his first. Now in his third, he contemplated the many dissimilar coffee cups owned by innumerable people in the world. He'd never considered his particular mug to be perfect: it probably did not have the ideally shaped handle, it was not the perfect size, it was not his favorite color. He liked it and enjoyed using it, but the compulsion to convince others that his inherited coffee mug was superior to theirs―that they should discard their mug and get one just like his own―was of course unknown to him. His reasoning mind could envision a more aesthetically pleasing shape for a mug to have, a larger and more comfortable handle, a thicker material for more efficient insulation. What had happened in his brain to make him see that the beliefs he'd been given were more accordant with the mug than his younger self had thought possible?

Without stirring, he knew that the what of scrutiny and reasoned inquiry was easier to pinpoint than the when of it all. The common impulse seemed to be to assign changes to specific moments, precise instants when a choice is made and "before" and "after" are created. He felt this urge, yet knew that the truth was closer to a slow process, a gradual paradigm shift of the mind with causes stretching back into the twisting path of his life, a confluence of ideas and situations and inputs all simultaneously arriving at the present. It seemed mysterious, but it was true, and for now he'd spent enough time ruminating about it. A sudden intake of breath, an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders, then he rose from his seat and walked out the door.

The Autumn Reading Summary (part 2)

Vivekananda said: "We put our hands over our eyes and weep that it is dark."

Here are a few more snippets from what I've been reading lately. I promise that my next "Reading Summary" installment will be more focused, with longer passages of text and probably a single author. Until then, peruse the following...

First, I've been reading through the intellectual journaling of an online author named Daniel (starting with the oldest entries and working forward from there). Here's a few excerpts, each with a link to its origin, for context.

"...From there I realized that the more fundamentalist the basis for a person's stance on certain issues, the less interested he is in being objective to reality..." click

"When I was a Christian I read Christian books to find out the Christian views on all things non-Christian. How quickly my knowledge turned on me once I decided to learn of issues for what they are, as opposed to what all Christians want them to be." click

"The most serious demand for unquestioned belief is, of course, the atonement..." click

"...The more desperate one becomes for the very voice of God, the literal words from His heart and mind [that would best answer] our unique questions, the louder that silence becomes..." click

"Either God elects or he does not, but the surest way to reveal that he doesn't is for Christians to acquire their flock by indoctrination." click

Also, here's a quote that Amy and I both liked: "Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found."
–Miguel de Unamuno

She and I also just read through a novel by Hermann Hesse, called Demian. First, two quotes from the pen of the main character, and then two quotes from the mouth of his mysterious friend, whom the novel is named after.

Emil Sinclair wrote, "All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?"

And later, he wrote, "And very many are hung up for good on this reef and for the rest of their life cling painfully to the irretrievable past, to the dream of the lost paradise, which is the worst and most murderous of all dreams."

Once, Max Demian said to Emil, "They cling to ideals that no longer count, and they cast stones at everyone who proclaims a new one."

At a different time, Max also told him, "Only the thoughts that we live out have any value. You knew that your 'permissable world' was only half the world, and you tried to hide away the second half from yourself, the way clergymen and teachers do. You won't succeed! No one can do that when he has once begun to think."

If these brief glimpses (from a story about a two-world dichotomy, and a journey of individuation and finding one's self) spike your interest, Demian is a pretty short novel that can be obtained on the cheap, or for free at your local library. Or, because Project Gutenberg is so wonderful, you could read Siddhartha, which is probably Hesse's best-known work.

The Summer Reading Summary

Among the joys of married life, I've found time recently to get some reading done. Here's a glance at what I've enjoyed so far.

Scripture, Tradition, and Infallibility by Dewey M. Beegle

This was one of those accidental and exciting finds you sometimes come across while browsing through a rummage shop of old odds and ends - antiques, used furniture, miscellaneous books. After starting to read through parts of it, imagine my surprise when I realized that along with McKinsey, Beegle is the main target of all of the inerrancy reading I've done for classes at college. Of course, my schooling tells me that these two men are scoundrels - how dare they question inerrancy, let alone have the audacity to list case after case where errancy is proven. Beegle's text is lucid, and he cogently presents individual cases as well as he summarizes general problems, such as the New Testament's heavy reliance on the (often wrongly translated) Septuagint when quoting from the Old. Later, in reflecting on results, he wrote...

"From beginning to end, history warns us that theological Maginot lines or fences fail to achieve their purpose. Not only do they fail to protect, but they also restrict the outreach of the truth being guarded. This is the ultimate tragedy of all legalism."

Later, in explaining the authoritarian reasoning behind inerrancy, he quotes James Smart:

"Doctrines and practices soundly based on an infallible Scripture could not be subject to any essential change. There could be no error in them. Thus has man in different ages used Scripture to establish his own or his own human church's authority over men."

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Buddhist philosophy, hitchhiking, and living out of a rucksack as Kerouac wanders 1950's West Coast America. I laughed at his recounting of a time when he was living in a small shack with his friend, a shack that neighborhood kids thought was abandoned. The kids snuck up to the tiny house to peek inside, but just then Kerouac opened the door while holding a big black cat and said "I am the ghost." The kids were quite frightened, ran away and didn't return.

Towards the end of the book, describing time he spent as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington state, you will find one of my favorite parts of the story.

"Standing on my head before bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around upsidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remembered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence. ...But let the mind beware, that though the flesh is bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious."

Situation Ethics: The New Morality by Joseph Fletcher

The strength of this text lies in it's attempt at systematic destruction of two other kinds of ethics - legalism and antinomianism. Early in the book, he wrote:

"[Plain legalism] may reveal a punishing and sadistic use of law to hurt people instead of helping them. How else explain burning at the stake in the Middle Ages for homosexuals (death by stoning, in the Old Testament)? Even today [1966] imprisonment up to sixty years is the penalty in one state for those who were actually consenting adults, without seduction or public disorder! This is really unavoidable whenever law instead of love is put first..."

Later, two small points that Fletcher makes are of large importance in my mind. The first is the simple (and fully adequate) response to reactionary arguments such as the "slippery slope" and "abuse of freedom" tacts. Simply: Abusus non tollit usum - abuse does not bar use. Second, he questions the ubiquitous maxim "the end does not justify the means." To this oft-assumed statement he asks: then what does? What else but the end could justify the means? Certainly, he makes sure to be clear that the ends do not justify any old means we can think of, but in the final analysis his reasoning is compelling: if means are not justified by their intended end, then they are not good means.

In a shorter dose, I also recently read an excellent article (and subsequent discussion) concerning bad religion. It was written by Mark Isaak and is called "The Larger Issue of Bad Religion." You may find it interesting.

My intention now is to read yet another book. This time, a book by some silly scientist named Stephen Hawking, called "I know more than everybody."