CONVERSATION WITH A READER ON SUBTEXT

A Conversation with a Reader Subtext!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© June 28, 2020 (March 19, 2016, originally published) 

A READER WRITES 

So...am I correct that you are saying that the subtext we all carry with us will impact how we view the content and context of our current life/affairs? 

It seems to me that the subtext, if that is correct, is the background of our lives and will be different depending on the time and place of our development. Consequently, though you and I are both from small town mid-west up-bringing, your subtext as someone whose formative years were during the late depression and WWII will be different from mine which results from growing up in the 1950s. As one psychologist put it years ago – “who we are depends on where we were when...” If that is all even close to what you mean by subtext let me know.

DR. FISHER

That is precisely what I mean by subtext.

But subtext is more than many faceted. Subtext applies equally to race, religion, nationality and culture, indeed, civilization, as they are all protean to its construction.

Subtext relates to us individually and collectively, and is marinated with our distinct histories. We bring our subtext in greetings to those with whom we interact and relate, and ultimately assimilate without conscious awareness of how aspects of that exposure finds its way into our own subtext.

In the end, we are always richer for the exposure and attention although that may not seem so at first.

Humanity is one body. Subtext may differ but it rises from that same source. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin writes that no subtext is superior to another but all can be identified through events.

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and etymologist E. O. Wilson developed the theory of "sociobiology," claiming that our subtext remains with those who follow. It surfaces quite dramatically and sometimes radically when continuity leads to discontinuity to disruption to catastrophe, or simply to mock catastrophe in comedic relief.  The point is that subtext is not usually apparent.

The stock market crash of 1929 and in 1987, and again in 2008 was evidence of the subtext surfacing and going awry in mass hysteria.  Ironically, people who had no money to lose talked as if they did.  It was an opportunity for subtext to be on display.

On the other hand, the current divisiveness in the Republican Party is playing out as dramaturgic relief as The Donald (Trump) exposes the hypocrisy in subtext. His popular bombast reveals an uptight nation comfortable and complacent in its denial.

Everything is subtext to behavior but most people do not understand that.

Occasionally, over the years, I've published "Fragments of a Philosophy." It was quoted in a missive on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) August 30, 2009, titled "The Subtext of Life and Its Meaning." It remains the most popular piece I have ever posted:

“There is general denial of the subtext of life. It is contained in a kind of culture that exists apart from the kind transmitted by schools and universities, a kind of culture that once flourished in typical neighborhoods across the country, but is gone now. It helped to stem lawlessness, greed, corruption and other social diseases. It was a kind of social resistance that is lacking today, something upheld by average citizens, but by people in authority as well. There was a subtext of restrain undefined, unwritten, unspoken, but nonetheless felt, practiced and experienced.

“Today, the gap between people’s dreams and experience is too large. People have resorted to living life on the edge, running without thinking, on automatic pilot in the rhythm of the content and context of things without a sense of restrain or penalty. We see this in general apathy as people react to the lead stories on television nightly news and in the headlines of morning newspapers regarding murder, mayhem, rape, fraud, and malfeasance with irritations but little more. It is the ghost in the room.

“The mind is homeless. It lacks roots. Most people aren’t from where they are. A kind of isolation from a sense of place and space breaks people. Easily forgotten is that shameful acts are committed by people, wounded human beings.  “Once upon a time, they were children, little ones running down the street at the start of school with their backpacks bouncing in cadence to their happy feet. They were on their way to school and on their way out into life.

“One wonders watching this parade if there goes a thief, a wife beater, an addict, a drug dealer, a murderer, a rapist, an embezzler, a gang member, a prostitute, a pimp, a drag on society, someone on the fringe that will garner those lead stories.  “Is this predetermined? Quite the opposite.

But only if people use their intelligence and good will to get beyond surface issues of class and race, status and wealth, education and profession, immigration and ethnicity, religion and ideology, language and culture to consider the subtext of life to uncover what destroys social restrain and how to prepare the damage.  The world gets better or worse one person at a time. Apathetic or psychopathologic behaviors occur because people are not acquainted with the subtext of their lives and therefore enslaved to surface issues.  It was the same a hundred years ago and is likely to be so a hundred years hence.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., “Fragments of a Philosophy” (unpublished)

* * *

THE READER

What is happening in the world is that at any given time the current content and context are what develop the subtext that will be the life background baggage for those who are at that time in their formative years.

DR. FISHER: 

The subtext can include baggage, but it is not background.  Oh, no!  It is always there working its ways to the fore but just not always apparent.  In any case, acknowledged or not, it influences events.  

The subtext is what is.  It is what drives events.  

The source of subtext is the subconscious (individual or collective) from which the content and context of behaviors are displayed and ultimately managed or mismanaged.  

You could liken subtext to values if you like or collective history but only as a gauge.  The subtext is there, fully operational, but not apparent.  By that I mean that during periods of order surface consistency give the mocking sense that all is well when it never is.

Great disruptions, personal or societal, bring the subtext to prominence and to the confusion of those in charge, who are so schooled in denial that "what is" does not get much attention.  We have seen this in love and war, politics and religion, especially in politics and religion.    

It is during these periods of disruption, such as our current "Age of Technology," that subtext is neither acknowledged nor challenged.  It is avoided by more wondrous technology.

To be fair, there has been more change in the past 30 years than the previous 300.  So, rather than acknowledge subtext, and deal with its root attributes, we call this the "Age of Anxiety" and develop drugs to treat the condition, or writes books to describe it, and on and on.  

We valiantly avoid doing anything constructive about it, which would start by addressing the nature and function of subtext relative to the current age.   

THE READER

Hitler had not attacked the US and yet we declared war on Germany and in less than 4 years the US alone killed at least 2 million Germans.  In the 1940s there was no question in our collective mind that Germans were bad and in need of killing.  Hence it was a short war.  

DR. FISHER: 

Oh, dear!  That great justification, attrition!  

Here it is an expression of content (numbers) and context (dead Nazis) as it was also used in Vietnam, but without any attention to the events (including Vietnam history), which were driving subtext.  I will have more to say about WWII shortly. 

The US military routinely published its daily successes in Vietnam in terms of "body count" (Vietnamese killed) on the television nightly news as if a war of attrition was the answer to a war without a purpose.

That attention shows a total ignorance of subtext, and yet no one in power or public life at the time seemed to see the absurdity.

The French ruled Vietnam for more than a century, the subtext of a colonial power.  When France fell to Germany in WWII in 1940, this colonial power base was disrupted.  Finally, in 1954, France lost the First French Indo-China War, and Vietnam received its independence, being divided into North and South Vietnam as if you could separate a common people without disruption. 

Not surprisingly, that solution aggravated the problem of the subtext of Vietnam as a common people wanting total independence from foreign influence.  

President Kennedy stepped into this South Vietnam quagmire in support of a corrupt South Vietnam regime with American advisers and trainers.  

From that point forward it became a descent into the subtext of hell with more than 55,000 Americans in the military losing their lives in a cause that history hasn't treated kindly.  A generation of young Americans who protested against the war and refused to join in the fight were consumed in subtext and eventually stopped its advance.  

The subtext has a very long pull from the collective or historical subconscious of a people.  The book I'm now writing, NOWHERE MAN IN NOWHERE LAND, is an attempt to give subtext to the American madness that currently dominates the content and context of our times, which is optimism in the face of reality of a pessimistic future.

To give you a closer sense of how pervasive subtext can be to history, consider WWII.  It all started long before even WWI.

Up until WWI, the aristocracy controlled every aspect of life of the European Western world.  The pull of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, alone, is impressive.  Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was a grandchild. Other grandchildren included queens of Greece, Norway, Romania, Spain and Sweden and the Tsarina Alexandra of Russia.  

WWI broke up this comfy aristocratic status but not its aristocratic subtext.  We are still feeling it to this day.

By the end of WWI, the high aristocracy collapsed.  The tsar, a relative of King George V of Great Britain, was overthrown and he and his royal family murdered by the Bolsheviks.  The great disruption didn't end there.

In the 1920s, the royal families across Europe had to find new ways to make a living as the aristocracy was in a state of collapse.  Take Germany's aristocracy as palpable evidence.  By 1938, nearly a fifth of the senior ranks of Heinrich Himmler's SS Gestapo were filled by holders of titles of nobility. The subtext goes ever deeper.  

The Third Reich of Hitler's Germany had a cozy relationship with King George and Queen Mary, current Queen Elizabeth's parents.  Her father even taught her the Nazi salute as a child.  

Many of the English aristocracy were fond of Hitler's Germany and believed he had restored political and social order.  They also saw him as a perfect foil to communism.  That was the content and context of the times with many with royal ties advocating an Anglo-German alliance.  

Great Britain's Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, gave an appeasement speech (Munich Agreement) in 1938 essentially conceding the Czech Republic to Hitler while ceremoniously declaring, "We have peace in our time."

This speech was given one year to the month before Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, launching WWII.

Appeasement was but a mask to the prevailing subtext of those in power in the British government.  Many prominent Brits were willing to make huge concessions to Hitler to avoid war.  One man understood the subtext of events and their meaning, and he saved the day for the West.  

Were it not for Winston Churchill being elected Prime Minister, it is difficult to imagine Great Britain not capitulating to the will of Adolf Hitler. Chamberlain resigned eight months after the start of WWII, the war going badly at the time, with Churchill taken office on May 10, 1940, and having to resist Nazi sympathizers in Great Britain from the first. 

THE READER: 

In the new century, based on changed subtext we have a very different context and content.  We accept Islam as the religion of peace and are careful to sort out the bad Muslims who have hi-jacked the religion, from the good ones.  The war being, for that reason, more nuanced is longer but we are killing far fewer.  That is not business as usual for us – that is progress.

DR. FISHER:

I hope what you imply is true, that our subtext reaches such maturity.  It is possible.

The People of Islam are victims of history as were the Japanese, and as are we all. Demagogues throughout history have adulterated the subtext of a people to present aspects of subtext in a twisted content and context to further their aims.  

Yet, the subtext of a people's history can be ripped from the bowels of their beliefs to present ugly aspects of that subtext.  No history is without this occasional momentum, not even ours.

The al-Qaeda terrorists present themselves as fighting a holy war, but what they want is power and the pride and identity of that power with their people. They are using religion the way Roman Catholicism justified the Inquisition, or forcing Jews to become Christians, and the list goes on.  No people or history is without the ugly side of subtext.    

Interestingly, your last word is "progress," seeing tolerance for Islam and Muslims a sign of progress.  I see it as a common sign of decency for differences. 

Everyone thinks progress is good, at least most Americans. General Electric once boasted "Progress is our most important product."  Progress is as deceptive a word as is Islam or Christianity.  African Americans understand what I mean by this.

Everyone influenced by such words thinks they understand and are simply dealing with the content and context of matters when it is subtext that is ruling the day, and not necessarily wisely.  

For example, Spain wouldn't be as Spain is today without the invasion of the Moors from North Africa in the eight century.  Nor would Europe be Europe without the Moors who would dominate well into the sixteenth century.  The Moors brought with them art, literature, architecture, mathematics, science and culture to the continent, a culture of black men who were then called "Negros" and who also taught discipline, military expertise and tolerance.   

Shakespeare would capture something of this with his "Othello" in the sixteenth century.

My views, I must confess, were influenced by a nun.  I had the good fortune of having Sister Mary Cecile as my seventh and eighth grade teacher in grammar school at St. Patrick's School, who taught me about the Moors and about their influence and culture.  It has never left me.  

No, I have no love for terrorists of any stripe, but I have no fear of a new mosque going up in my neighborhood, or of a family of Muslims moving in next door.  

Thank you for stirring up my little gray cells.  Keep thinking and reflecting.

And always be well,

Jim