A MEASURE OF STUCKNESS: The Forgotten Legacy of Our Ideas!

A MEASURE OF STUCKNESS: The Forgotten Legacy of Our Ideas!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2007

“Do diddle di do,
Poor Jim Jay
Got stuck fast
In Yesterday.”

Walter De La Mare (1973 – 1956), English poet and novelist

Now that we are engaged in the quadrennial madness of presidential campaigning for the presidency, which is eighteen months away, but in which only the coin counting mafia are likely to survive to convention time next year, we might reflect on the legacy of some ideas.

The hopefuls talk is of change, of a fresh view of things, and decisive answers to the most perplexing problems of the time, while stuck in empty rhetoric.

Presidential campaigners smile a lot, are well organized, and know how to get people to pledge their hard earned money for their campaigns. It is a cultural carnival atmosphere that has been going on for more than two hundred years in this country, reaching new levels of absurdity and profligacy with each passing quadrennial cycle.

Campaigners are likely to spend a combined total of $1 billion before their respective party conventions to nominate a person for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Whomever is nominated and subsequently elected, that person no longer has a free ride toward cavalier foreign engagements.

A voice out of the past once swam against the current of the sharks. A hundred years before the Iraq War this American said:

"The transformation of native friendliness to execration; the demoralization of our army, from the war office down – forgery decorated, torture whitewashed, massacre condoned; the creation of a chronic anarchy, the deliberate reinflaming on our part ancient tribal animosities. These things, I say, or things like them, were clearly foretold. "

He was speaking of the American invasion of the Philippines in 1903 and the bloody and embarrassing consequences of that action. America was in quest of being taken seriously by the world community. This found it embracing the hubris and hegemony of empire, for which the Greeks, Romans, Spanish and English had set precedence.

On another occasion, 1896, Theodore Roosevelt, then commissioner of police in New York City, questioned the patriotism of anyone who dare criticize President Grover Cleveland’s belligerent policy in Venezuela. Teddy Roosevelt's bust now graces Mount Rushmore, a man who sounded suspiciously Cheneyist more than one hundred years ago.

Again, this man who found himself in the land of stuckness had the audacity to publish a public letter stating “that in this university we shall be patriotic enough not to remain passive while the destinies of our country are being settled by surprise.”

Five years and counting after the commencement of the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, these words echo a tired and unheeded refrain.

George Orwell is famous for saying, "in the new state peace will mean war," but this man said it a half century before Orwell’s novel “1984” was published in 1948.

Then there is the trio of Sigmund Freud and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who are famous for their twentieth century “stream of consciousness” thinking and writing. This man invented the term, as well as the philosophy and psychology behind it in 1884.

Who was this man who was out ahead of so many others?

Well, for starters, he was a peculiar duck. He looked backward to see ahead, being behind or beside or above his contemporaries in thought, idea and deed.

He was the weird son of an even weirder father, a father who inherited so much wealth that he never had to work, and didn’t want his children to work either, but to explore and travel and become immersed in other cultures, languages, religions and traditions.

The father was a devotee of the esoteric and the bizarre, and so was this son, bouncing hither and yon between science and mysticism, while entertaining and even coming to believe some of the signature crackpots of his day.

How could someone with such a disorderly youth come to have such an orderly mind?

Simple. He was never stuck while remaining vulnerable to quacks all his life.

He was an enigma, an individual, and an explorer with his own moral compass without a roadmap.

His father led the way flitting from Calvinism to Transcendentalism to Fourierism to Free Love, writing unwanted and unread books about them all. This famous son was even more adventuresome and some of his madness has come to stay with us as the pathology of our current normalcy.

For instance, he ran experiments on himself from electric shock treatment, to the injection of serums from bull or goat testicles, practiced hypnotism and anesthetic trance, experimented with mind cures and consumed various mood-altering chemicals.

These drugs included mescal, chloral hydrate, amyl nitrate, veronal, and chloroform. Clearly, he had his psychedelic "Sixties" about a century earlier.

He also regularly attended séances and was a strong supporter of the Society for Psychical Research, convinced that he could communicate with his dead friend “from the other side.”

He was a great fan of the borderline kook Gustav Fechner, who thought the earth was divine and should be prayed to, as well as the outright crank Benjamin Blood, who promoted anesthetic trances and held that each letter of the alphabet has its own personality.

How did such an eccentric man become, which he did, the major American thinker of his time?

Even today, he is vastly read with many of his ideas so solid in the American consciousness that they are accepted as givens without thinking such as pragmatism – i.e., the pursuit of the possible with purpose, will and habit. For our devotion to this idea, Americans are known as “pragmatists” around the world.

He became a doctor of medicine, who never practiced medicine, a professor who influenced the thinking of other great men such as W.E.B. Dubois, George Santayana, and Bernard Berenson. For this, we acclaim him as the father of American psychology and pragmatic philosophy.

What set him apart was he wasn’t afraid to be different, wasn’t afraid to grow, change, sort out life’s ambiguities and discover his art and science in the mix, which Americans have subsequently adopted largely as their own.

He never claimed to be finished, or comfortable with where or what he was. He was constantly experimenting to experience resurrection and rebirth. He didn’t just serve up ideas; he measured them, and for it he touched truth.

I am speaking of William James, the quintessential American of more than a century ago, a man who doesn’t fit comfortably into any stereotype. Even when he believed passionately in another man, say Emerson, or an idea, say eclectic rather than systematic philosophy, he was not blind to Emerson’s shortcomings or the limits of his own radical thought.

Nor was James in any sense a perfect man. He was volatile, easily bored, and moody, subject to depression and insomnia. He was also something of a hypochondriac. In his quest for new ideas, he often neglected his wife and children. And he could be rude bordering on insulting, as in the case when he rejected an invitation to become a member of the American Philosophical Society. Not only did he reject the invitation, but he also found it necessary to be insulting to its members.

Yet, in general, because of his lack of false airs and openness, he was likable, approachable, and respected because he was real.

The darkness he saw in the motivation of the high and mighty sometimes encouraged his critics to see him as a heavy handed pessimist and cynic, which couldn’t be further from the truth. He simply carried the DNA genetic code of the America spirit in his genes. As a consequence, he has never been forgotten or his ideas ignored.

His first book, The Principles of Psychology (1890) is still in print. It established the sphere of his thought and his concrete observations on consciousness, its complexity and the fringes of subliminal or unconscious awareness around it. He was abreast of Freud’s views, but didn’t get into the messiness of therapeutic speculation that has encumbered Freud’s legacy.

Later, he subjected religion to his pragmatic test in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901 – 1902), which mounted the difficult question: does religion work? He concluded it does.

Religion, to his thinking, wasn’t the source of the world’s troubles, but quite the reverse. Religion is its antidote. The politics of religion is its curse.

We all share the legacy of his influence, a legacy founded on never being stuck, never being imprisoned by convention, never being afraid to embrace the weird or the absurd to find a kernel of meaning in what otherwise seems meaningless.

William James was authentically American, and his kind is unlikely to be found on the current campaign trail. The reason?

He culled a philosophy out of the detritus of his life, while these candidates are mouthing words, ideas and causes designed for popular acclaim without such a foundation, demonstrating a measure of stuckness that he never experienced, and would pain him now to know.

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Dr. Fisher’s latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2007). For more information: http://www.authorhouse.com/