MADNESS, SOCIETY IS CAUGHT STANDING ON ITS HEAD SPINNING LIKE A TOP!

MADNESS, SOCIETY IS CAUGHT STANDING ON ITS HEAD SPINNING LIKE A TOP!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 28, 2009

“Life in contemporary society is like an open-air lunatic asylum with people cutting and spraying their grass (to deny untidiness, hence lack of order, hence lack of control, hence their death), beating trails to the bank with little books of figures that worry them around the clock (for the same reason), ogling bulges of flesh, bent over steering wheels and screeching around corners, meticulously polishing their cars, trimming their hedges, giving out parking tickets, saluting banners of colored cloth with their hand on their heart, killing enemies, carefully counting the dead, missing, wounded, probable dead, planning production curves that will absolutely bring about the millennium in thirty-seven years (if quotas are met), filling shopping carts, nailing up vines (and spraying them), and all this dedicated activity takes place within the din of noise that tries to defy eternity: motorized lawn mowers, power saws, electric clipping shears, powered spray guns, huge industrial machines, jack hammers, automobiles, and their tires, giant jets, electric shavers, motorized toothbrushes, dishwashers, clothes washers, dryers, vacuum cleaners. This is truly obsessive-compulsive on the level of the visible and the audible, so overpowering in its total effect that it seems to make psychoanalysis a complete theory of reality.”

Ernest Becker, “The Birth and Death of Meaning” (1971), p. 149, written in 1963 during the Vietnam War.

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THE MADNESS OF NORMALCY

Carlos Ruiz Zafon in his novel “The Shadow of the Wind” has a character say, “The only opinion that holds court is prejudice. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That’s the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior. It’s pure biology.”

Novelists provoke; social anthropologists describe (see Ernest Becker quote above). .

Their incisive revelations complement each other to reconcile the fundamental contradiction to life between behavior and belief, action and rhetoric, confidence and doubt, blind obedience to social authority and personal loyalty to experience. Society, author Becker (1925 – 1974) insists, fears more the death of meaning than the death of the body itself. He sees us repressing this fear in evasive activity.

This tragic comedy gives one the impression society is stuck standing on its head spinning like a top unable to move off the dime because it keeps repeating the same errors failing to learn from experience. Philosopher Alan W. Watts describes this “forward inertia” as having our foot to the floor on the accelerator and break at once, burning up rubber and going nowhere. It was why I wrote “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007). We seem to have a tendency to stay the same, ignore the changes and to leave the future up to manipulators.

Niall Ferguson’s PBS “Ascent of Money” shows this in a financial history of the world. The housing bubble, the stock market plunge, the global economic meltdown, and shady financial dealings go back as far as John Law’s financial manipulations in France in the early 1700s to the Enron debacle to the high jinx of 2007 – 2008 with Fanny Mae and Freddie Max, Lehman Brothers, AIG going belly up, to the Ponzi schemes of Bernard Madoff to the frantically conceived and delivered stimulus package to bail out of Wall Street firms “too big to fail” to the automotive industry that never seems to get it, and so the beat goes on.

Leadership has become leaderless as style has replaced substance and correction, contribution. Those in charge are winging it but with elaborate algorithms and well-schooled staffs. This is the madness of normalcy.

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Political journalist Robert Woodward, who has written four books on George W. Bush during his presidency, was recently talking to Charlie Rose on his PBS show about the president, Barak Obama. Rose asked Woodward to assess the new president to date. After a pensive pause, the author spoke in that level staccato of his giving the president high marks for his confidence, clarity of thought and rhetoric, but failing to see this aptitude translating into practical actions. “I still have little sense of his center of gravity,” he concluded. Unfortunately, Rose didn’t explore this observation.

Under the best of circumstances, our center of gravity determines our equilibrium, our equilibrium gives order to our thoughts, and our thoughts give rise to behavior that answers the perennial question: “Who am I?” Self-knowledge is necessary to understand how self and society are woven out of the structure of meaning. It is difficult to experience equilibrium when “existential identity” gets in the way of "who we are."

The Woodward interview took place before the recent commotion at the Cambridge (Massachusetts) home of Harvard Professor Henry Louise Gates, Jr. Dr. Gates returned from China and had to break into his own home, as the front door was stuck, only to have a neighbor call “911” with the police answering the call, leading to the arrest of the jet lagged tired professor “for disturbing the peace.”

Days later President Obama was holding a news conference on his push for a new comprehensive health program, when asked about the incident. He said Skip Gates was a friend, and that the police acted stupidly. The top has been spinning out of control ever since with equilibrium but a myth.

In an obvious way, the incident revealed Woodward’s concern for the president’s center of gravity. The president’s remark captured the essence of a clash of color in a society that likes to think it has moved beyond racial subjectivity and social stigma. The tension between class and race remains with us for reason. Society has been turned upside down and inside out with some of the most powerful people now people of color. That said “existential identity” smolders under the surface of the most sophisticated for past sins of discrimination. This can break through the patina of the most controlled minds, the president’s included.

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Jewish philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel provides some perspective on this in his new book “The Other Within” (2009). It is about the Spanish Marranos, former Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal some 600 years ago. The author uses this to describe a subjectivity that emerged leading to split identity and giving birth to what we now call “modernity.”

His story begins during Holy Week in 1391 in Spain in the Jewish quarter of Seville with the “forced conversion of Jews to Christianity.” According to Yovel, these converts could not commit themselves wholeheartedly to any religion. Those who wanted to be Christian could not achieve a natural integration into Catholicism since their belief was an act of will, which is often severed from the person’s actual life. As for those who yearned for Judaism, they could not return to it openly without risking death or going into exile. This dilemma threw Jewish society in Spain on its head as it gave birth to subjectivity, “existential identity,” and “the other within.”

Dual or split identity led to secularism, and ultimately to “existential identity,” which fifteenth century Spain called “race.”

Jewish converts to Catholicism over the centuries were no longer Jews and yet not Christians other than in mock behavior. Belief was suspended in deference to ritualistic conformity. Jewish Catholics developed “split personalities” externally conforming to the demands of religious authorities but internally being incapable of submitting to the tenets of the religion, thus the split identity.

Yovel sees this self-negation and self-deception giving birth to modernity. Split identity was no longer an exclusive condition known only to Spanish Jews, but was spreading across the world as old compact identities were collapsing and being forced to assimilate new identities and cultures. From the fifteenth century on, Europe was rushing to convert and colonize continents across the globe. Discrete boundaries of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, and national orientation were in crisis. It is no less a problem at a personal level in the most advanced societies today.

Consider the bizarre and tragic life of the late pop singer Michael Jackson. He was a handsome and talented man who happened to be black, living in a dominant white culture. He spent his short life struggling with a split identity. He tried frantically to remold himself into a mirror image of whiteness, revealing in the process the conflict of “the other within,” which could never be resolved. Far from being the exception, the pressure to fit and conform is familiar to all minorities, but also to most members of the working class whatever the color or culture.

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In 1803, president Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase from France for $15 million, which was twice the Federal Budget. It doubled the size of the United States, which now stretched across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. He commissioned Lewis and Clarke to explore the North West Passage. He also forced American Indians from their eastern homes and sacred grounds to be relocated westward. Jefferson saw the United States as a country of mainly whites with European roots speaking English as the common language. This implied conformity “or else.”

Some thirty years later, the relocation of the American Indian westward would be the muscular policy of president Andrew Jackson, but Jefferson established the precedence.

American Indians and African slaves were forced to adopt, assimilate and abide by the white American culture at their peril. Small wonder that scars remain hundreds of years later in these two races. Yet, we register surprise when “the other within” shows its mind in a Freudian slip. This happened with First Lady Michele Obama when it appeared her husband would win the 2008 Democratic Party nomination. This African American lady of distinction said, “I’m finally proud to be an American.” It was no less consequential when President Obama painted the actions of the Cambridge police as “stupid” in the Professor Gates Affair.

Our subjectivity wins out when our existential identity breaks through its conscious barrier. Class and race were on display here but in a society turned upside down, that is, race was personified in an accomplished African American professor and the President of the United States, and class was displayed in the working class white Cambridge police officer, Sergeant Crowley.

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The German philosopher of modernity, Hegel, identified the subjective mind. He claimed it asserts itself against forced assimilation by finding solace in the interior self while resisting the exterior apparatus of culture, religion and behavioral constraints. Hegel saw the Lutheran Reformation as a demonstration of this placing more value on the interior and subjective mind over the external dominance of the Catholic Church.

History has proven him right about the principle of subjectivity but wrong about its character. Modernity has not reconciled the mind to itself with a higher unified identity as he envisioned, but quite the opposite. In terms of religion, Yovel shows modernity has weakened Catholicism, which early Jews were forced to adopt, but also weakened Judaism with those Jews who chose to abandon it. This hasn’t stop here.

With the world melting into a heterogeneous soup, modernity has given rise to inner life, irony, secularism, mysticism, private devotion, atheism, careerism, tolerance, curiosity, and intellectualism, as well as the notion of the self, capitalism and rationality.

Society today is standing on its head spinning like a top feigning self-confidence while affirming it no longer is prostrate before any church or any God. Modernity claims to be liberating, but is it? It would seem that integrity or uprightness is on trial and losing.

The sheer volume of books, articles, films, and the Internet traffic suggest society protests too much. The subjective or interior life has not found peace but has instead demonstrated perennial angst. Too often what appears to be generated is hatred, mistrust, xenophobia, and worse of all, patricide, suicide, homicide and genocide. Terrorism, which is the great fear of the day, is split identity on display. Modernity has become a homeless mind with no resting place in the universe.

People have increasingly retreated into the surreal world of drugs, alcohol, work, profligacy, crime, corruption, duplicity, chicanery, fantasy, and war. A life without boundaries has become like a book without a spine. We make things out to be what they are not.

The thrust to life seemingly is to fit when that is not possible; to belong when it is often at the expense of self realization; to pretend to value what is valueless; to join the herd of true believers going nowhere. In modernity’s quest for itself, it has settled on existential identity. Yovel points out Jews have been on this road of dual identity – of what they are and what they are forced to be – for centuries. This was the impetus to a secular and modern world. Confidence now is in professional powers, worldly knowledge, and careers measured by stature, wealth and influence. This has proven an empty vessel devoid of spiritual content and authentic cultural identity.

Confident man of secular society owes much to what is quintessential Jewish: positive outlook on work, personal effort, learning and money, sober logic, rough Jewish common sense, a prodigal drive for achievement and success, and an emphasis on striving to excel in everything that matters to the host society.

Jewish Diaspora is now a common experience to us all. We are all interlopers, no longer genuine insiders but only a collection of striving outsiders. Race, religion and ethnicity once gave spiritual identity and orientation. This has become seamlessly subsumed under secular “capitalism” with the ascent on money.

Yovel challenges the assumption the Protestant Work Ethic gave rise to capitalism. He sees the forced conversion of Jews to Spanish Christianity as capitalism’s driver as Jewish calculating reason and hyper rationality became common to the Christian West.

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Professor Henry Louise Gates, Jr. racial epithets when treated shabbily by police exhibited “existential identity.” The president’s remark did as well. He happens to be an African American, but with a white mother, while his friend, Dr. Gates, is African American married to a white woman with mixed race daughters, and has white blood himself. You see the conundrum. “Existential identity” is more of a puzzle today between whites and blacks than Catholics and Jews. The irony is that whites and blacks have enriched each other’s culture, but not without conflict and unease.

Yovel’s book, “The Other Within” gives pause to consider modern Western and Jewish identity. One of his philosophical conclusions is that split identity, which The Spanish Inquisition persecuted and modern nationalism considers illicit, is a genuine and the inevitable shape of human existence. Split identity is endemic to us all whatever our color, creed, character or nationality. Yovel is saying Jews are free to accept or reject other more saturated Jewish forms of religion, nationality, community, and culture, but not without a price. This holds true for us who are non-Jews as well.

No external force has its right to impose its “we” on others or to recruit them to its cause if they have a mind to do otherwise. Existential identity is no longer the discriminator it once was although subjectivity remains contentious, as the Professor Gates Affair illustrated. Will these barriers between race and religion continue? Likely. The next six hundred years look to be just as difficult for people to find their center of gravity as the top keeps spinning and people of color increasingly come to dominate the new day.

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