Saturday, December 20, 2014

Heart Attack World - A New Theory of What Causes Heart Attacks

Alternate title:  How heart attack science is related to love. 

I was drawn to this article, "The Real Cause of Heart Attacks" (full url below in the notes*), and its accompanying video, even though it first looked to be rather scientific and technical. As I read it, I soon discovered that, at bottom, it's anything but.**

The article starts to show why and how the true human heart — understood in a way that embraces  but radically recontextualizes everything science has to offer — is best  understood, not as the biological “aorta,” the isolated organism, but instead as the larger social-relational context (community, friendships, loves) in which the heart itself, within the complex organism of the human being, is embedded and out of which it has evolved over the course of a few million years.

Our bodies of course respond to our experiences in the world. To the extent that we experience love, our paraympathetic nervous system is supported and engaged, and this produces within us chemicals that help to nourish and develop that nervous system and its associated organs, including the heart and brain and everything else, and how they are connected and communicate with each other.

But to the extent that the world we create and experience is stressful, threatening and anxiety-producing, then we primarily engage and develop our defensive, aggressive nervous system -- the sympathetic nervous system. We experience stress because our organisms evolved in adaptation to an environment that favored the development of the parasympathetic nervous system, and gave rise to human beings as loving, playful creatures. Our experience of stress suggests that the current environment -- the socio-cultural milieu of modern life and its particular underlying assumptions -- does not suit us, the creatures we had evolved to be.

One response to a stressful environment is adaptation. A stressful environment supports the increased development of the sympathetic nervous system and the suppression of the parasympathetic. We become more aggressive, and we seek to become more capable of tolerating stress. Given enough  time, biological adaptation will favor the survival and propagation of more aggressive human beings to the extent of developing a new human species, with new and distinct traits that are more suited to the environment. This eventuality can be reinforced by a reciprocity between human beings and the environment: the human being in reaction to a hostile, threatening environment develops and enthrones assumptions, beliefs and expectations of competitiveness, aggressiveness, distrust, etc., and therefore develops and conserves habits, practices, tools and institutions that promote thriving and functioning within such an environment. These activities help to establish the undesirable environment as the basis of a way of living, i.e. establish a particular world and culture, with its assumptions and activities, as normal for  human living. It's the logic of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our western medicine (and our other institutions) are now behaving precisely in this way.  The assumption of western medicine that the body is separate from and isolatable from its environment, even though the environment is obviously a kind of extension of the organism, having co-evolved with it, is itself precisely one such reactive assumption, a response to some kind of perceived threat. In the response, the image of the threat is conserved. Western medicine is generally organized on a kind of militaristic attack model: we attack viruses, bacteria, disease on an allopathic model. Alternative medicines are arising that instead seek to promote sources of health. For instance, homeopathic medicines.

At this moment, I want to say, simply, that we have the power to shape our environment. The environment is not objectively fixed. It is partly shaped by our own assumptions and choices. Our world, our environment, is largely an artifact of human choice, and we can change it. We do not have to adapt to it. We can take leadership and influence it to create the world we want to create. We carry within us a desire for love and cooperation which can become the platform for a new kind of healing medicine.

A wise medicine would seek to treat the environment as well as the organism since the two reciprocally condition each other.  Thoughts and emotions — the health of the psyche — are primarily generated through our interactions, as biologically-whole totalities (i.e., individuals) in our social context, but medicine routinely claims, for instance, that “chemical imbalances” originating in the isolated organism at the level of the brain generate disturbed moods, thoughts and behaviors. This is upside down. The institutions, being reactive and sensitive to threat, and also infused with a dim guilt, are defensive and organized in denial.  We can develop understanding and resolute cheerfullness to speak healing words to those in denial, to those who have turned against their own loving natures in reaction to threat and in adoption to the belief in hierarhical competitive culture.

I've now strayed far from the above-named article, and many of the specifics about it that interested me. Now I would like for a moment to return to the article itself and how it brought together several strands of thinking that are of interest to me – historical, dietary, economic, philosophical. The article:

1. Suggests that diets low in fats and high in grains (starchy carbohydrates) favor aggressive human behavior (medulla, reptile-brain activating behavior) - in part because they are heart unhealthy, even though the medical establishment prescribes this high-grain diet under the claim that it is the most healthy for the heart!

2. Indirectly associates aggressive behavior with the rise of agriculture and grains, which itself has been associated with the rise of patriarchy and hierarchical socio-political patterns (in brief, with the rise of farming 10,000 years ago came the rise of fenced private fields and agricultural harvests -- a premonition of of the enclosures of the early modern period and today’s private real estate system -- and the micro-beginnings of political subsidies for the products of large-scale agriculture. The products of industrial monoculture are mostly starchy grains — perhaps not coincidentally, or at least reinforcing the system in yet another way, these starchy grains happen to be the best, cheapest fuel for keeping large-scale heavy-laboring populations alive

3. Begins to suggest how the human species could morph into a new, more aggressive strain, homo aggressans, through constant, progressively self-reinforcing environmental conditioning — bolstered by  theories and approaches favoring aggressive behavior and assuming innate aggressiveness over the loving behavior that is our heritage (a theme articulated by Humberto Maturana & Pille Bunnell)

4. Suggests that current medical practices and approach, together with industrial and dietary practices, heavily favor the development of homo aggressans — Hence the establishment promotes a high-carbohydrate, low fat diet as the most heart-healthy, even though this diet is precisely the most heart unhealthy. (A classic example of why Ivan Illich called western medicine iatrogenic.) Furthermore along these same lines, the article claims that the medicine/drug/hormone that most supports the parasympathetic nervous system (the loving, resting, imagining, creative part of the nervous system) is oubain, which while present in the environment is also produced by the body itself, in the kidneys (aside: thank you, Chinese medicine), and the production of oubain is inhibited by the #1 prescribed medication for the supposed prevention of heart-disease, statin drugs, which also inhibit sexual functioning and libido (drive towards sexual loving). 

Many pieces seem to come together here, perhaps revealing the deeply interconnected and mutually self-reinforcing spokes of the larger world system -- including the spokes of agricultural and pharmacological economics, property law, medical diagnosis, diet, moral psychology, social institutions, politics ….

I’m getting this sense that industry, technology, diet, labor, socio-political patterns, science, psychology, etc. are all being shaped by and delicately influencing one another in support of this larger “world system” that seems to have been set on its trajectory by some terrible experience in human history — one that seems roughly coincident with the rise of agriculture. Perhaps it was some “wave” rather than a single experience, and perhaps it had multiple simultaneous origins -- an experience of a threat, of aggression, of competition, to which humanity responded reactively, defensively-aggressively, in a way that has been manifesting in self-propagating and self-reinforcing socio-industrial patterns for a long time, into the present.

The bad experience I'm conjecturing about may well have been very simple and gradual, rather than any sudden apocalypse. Perhaps as agricultural societies arose on the planet, and different communities each started to expand outward looking for more land to privately cultivate -- a farm being set apart and managed within the environment very much in the way that a scientific laboratory creates a controlled space for experimenation -- human beings quite naturally reacted in a push and pull way: Drawn to new possibilities of security and wealth (and patriarchal dependency) that agriculture made possible and/or supported, but also set into competition with one another because land is finite and widening agricultural empires started to encroach on each other's territories. Accustomed to living in small face-to-face village communities deeply attached to their individual cultural heritages, speaking different languages, villages may have started to come into competitive contact. These things are new and confusing and people try to adapt and invent new practices. TPerhaps this is the story we are still working out.

Democracy in the ancient and prehistoric worlds was mostly local village or tribal democracy, where people's everyday life and activity was lived with the whole community.  Perhaps we are still trying to figure out a way to preserve all that is best of local democracy as we invent larger-scale systems.  That is something like what the Romans were trying to conceive in a Republican Empire that preserved the autonomy of confederated localities. But the Republic fell and tyranny took over.  That is what the Iroquois seemed to be working out with their democratic federal constitution that unified many tribes over a great extent of territory for hundreds of years, and influenced the American colonies. That is something like what inspired the New England village democracies to join together into a larger confederated democracy that would enhance and preserve, and not tyrannize, local individual and community and state freedoms. We are still trying to figure out how to have the benefits of widening technological-economic power while fostering and not eliminating the integrity, autonomy, respect and love among all individuals in and for their local environments.

* Here is the full URL of the article,   The Real Cause of Heart Attacks:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/12/17/real-cause-heart-attacks.aspx?e_cid=20141217Z1_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20141217Z1&et_cid=DM62414&et_rid=766621351 )
Originary website for the article and video:  http://heartattacknew.com 

**A note on our aptitude to be put off by "technical" literature, be it in economics, medicine, politics, or other fields of activity. This somnorific effect of technical jargon, which takes the very energy out of our muscles and places us in a state of passivity and uninterest, is an important thing to notice. It is not trivial! Our modern-day development of so many diverse technical specialties each with their own jargons tends to disguise the underlying human, non-technical assumptions -- always very simple and open to ordinary human understanding, but obscured by technical details -- which give to each specialty its fated direction of activity and determine its meaning for humanity and the planet.  Hence our specializations themselves tend to keep us from reflecting on what is most fundamental and what ties our various special activities together, determining the course and consequences of our civilization.)







Monday, May 5, 2014

Hannah Arendt (A film directed by Margaretha von Trotta, 2013)

I saw the film Hannah Arendt last August and recently rediscoved an email I wrote to a friend about my response to the film. Here it is: 

The focus is on Arendt's analysis of the Eichmann trial, what became the book subtitled "The Banality of Evil," and the outrage her analysis triggered among those who saw her as defending Eichmann and/or blaming the victims. One source for the outrage was her criticism, in a small part of her analysis, of certain highly-placed Jews for their complicity in what happened. Beyond this, Arendt in fact extends the scope of responsibility for the holocaust to the entire technological world system. 

I was interested in the portrayal of Arendt as a chain smoker with an almost film-noir style tough exterior and comportment. I found myself wondering what it might have been like had she been able to muster something different, i.e. without losing composure, to show tenderness and vulnerability in public.

There is something about the confident, hardened, arrogant intellectual that has become an unquestioned cliche, a model to emulate even — the brilliant defender of ideas, parrying all  criticisms. For a woman intellectual in a world much more male-dominated than now, where respect must have been very hard-earned, emotional toughness and defensive alacrity were no doubt  indispensable strengths. The dismissive stereotype of the emotional woman, culturally close at hand, was no doubt important to steer clear of. These norms no doubt made it nearly unthinkable for her to show publicly any grief or sadness in response to the rejection of her ideas, to the failure of her words, at least in some prominent quarters, to create connection and spontaneous transformation.  

Yet I wanted to see her throw away her self-soothing cigarettes, drop her defenses and — while preserving all her conviction and rigor of thought — openly cry tears of sadness and speak her desire for a loving world.

Hannah Arendt (film) on Wikipedia

Review by J. Hoberman








Friday, March 14, 2014

Continuing the conversation about the shift

Hi Marc,

I'm finding much of your writing at the beginning of your letter too abstract for me to comprehend.
It seems that you're saying that our adherence to a "common" language is basically a tacit agreement, within which human beings are indirectly acknowledging their "common context" or "inherent interdependence" on each other to live.  So we "create" reality, then, when we "act together," in accordance with our common context. 

Reply: 

Maybe you’re on the right track. I can’t totally tell for sure.  

Let me try this. 

Two dogs meet at a corner. They engage in all kinds of reciprocal behaviors.  I sniff you while you sniff me.  Let’s chase each other. Etc. They can have a great time together, communicating and interacting. When this interaction falls into patterns that the dogs repeat together, when they develop “back and forth rhythms” and fall into enjoyment of those rhythms, they are finding a kind of “agreement” that I am calling consensual coordination. A lot of these rhythms, patterns of interaction with each other and the environment, are part of the evolutionary biology of the dog.

What dogs can’t do is plan to “do this again next week.”  They aren’t able to jump to the meta-level in which they start relating their ways of relating with each other.  That’s what language is: the consensual coordination of consensual coordination. 

Our interactions as human beings at the dog level, the level of reciprocal interactions that are not languaged, makes the second level, the human level of languaging, possible. If human beings had not spent many generations hanging out together and developing a deep historical experience of such interaction, they never would have been able to develop language. Language is rooted in, and is a way of learning from and organizing and structuring these behavioral dynamics.  Maturana writes that humanness has its origins in the biology of love, which is epitomized in the loving relationship between mother and child; this relationship is seen as the original matrix through which humans, and human languaging, is born -- mother and infant (non-speaking) child engage in reciprocal behaviors, creating a strong bond and shared experiences, i.e. consensual coordinations, which create a foundation for later consensual coordination of such consensual coordinations.

This is a very different view of language from the mainstream view, which says that language “represents” things: the view that the  word “tree” simply represents or signifies a “tree.”   Such representing is a very small part of language, rooted in a particular human relationship to things, but for a long time we’ve thought that it was the essence of it. This made us very good at developing a certain kind of knowledge, but it has left us with poor skills when it comes to developing healthy relationships with all peoples and our natural environment. 

When we talk with each other, our language presupposes a cultural context, which consists of all the regular patterns of behavior, consensual coordinations of behavior, that our bodies are enmeshed in. We are enmeshed in these behaviors, not conceptually, but muscularly and emotionally. You say “close the window” and I move.  You say “I love you,” and my body responds.  Language is above all about behavioral coordinations, doings, not mere “representings” that can be judged as accurate or inaccurate, correct or incorrect. Representing is only one potential function of language, and it is always embedded in a context of doing from which the action of representing draws any meaning that it has, where meaning refers to purpose and consequences for the world. Much of our knowing in the technological age has been driven by the purpose of representing -- and increasing the means of control of what is represented. Yet as is becoming increasingly evident, our technology lacks direction. We aren't sure where we are going. We don't know how to attend to the negative consequences. 

Our cultural context, all the tacit, foundational reciprocal “doings” that are going on that make up the human world that we are a part of, is historical and potentially changeable. It's malleable, because its all based on historically created behaviors.  But it’s also what we rely on for our sense of reality.  Imagine you want to throw a ball. You focus on the target and throw.  All you are aware of in your mind is the target. But in order to focus on the target, you are relying on the backs of your eyeballs — however, you don’t notice this.  What you “attend to” tacitly relies on what you “attend from” (to borrow from Michael Polanyi).  

When someone says something that seems to “threaten” what we rely on, our instinctual response is denial and defensiveness.  I.e., if someone starts to pull out from under our feet whatever we are standing on, we immediately react with fright and the attempt to shore up the platform.  For this reason, humans standing tacitly on different platforms into arguments and talk past one another; they don’t know how to construct a way of conversing where both feel secure they are working together on making a stronger happier platform. (This is what the field of understanding group dynamics is all about; how dynamics are rooted in an underlying context or level different from the presenting issues and topics of discussion or "content.")

Of course, they can’t even get into the argument unless they already share a common cultural context that allows them to converse with one another in the first place. But this common cultural context that enables them to talk with one another is tacit and in their arguing with one another they lose sight of the commonalities that they might be “working on” together. 

We construct a shared world through our interactions. Most language relies on this tacit (hidden) world without being aware of it.  Language brings forth what is visible and acknowledged on the basis of something that can’t be made visible, but is only felt in very murky ways and is hard to discover.  In most of our languaging, we never look at or question this underlying context of tacitly constructed consensual behaviors.  


The common world is constructed on two levels: tacit consensual coordination in action, and consensual coordination of these consensual coordinations through languaging.  The difficult thing to do is to change the tacit level.  Language by itself — without action that is perceived as risk because it threatens the tacit dimension we rely upon — can’t do it.  

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Local and in Person, Represented and Global - From a Conversation with my Friend Louis


The sacred is one thing that interests me increasingly. The sacred is in one sense something very ordinary--something that all indigenous peoples seem to have a direct relationship with. Yet it is something that we moderns have lost touch with. At the fork in the road between older, indigenous ways of living and modern western rationalist ones, the west left the sacred behind.  Sacredness is a key issue that comes up in the recurrent face-offs between western development and indigenous peoples attempting to preserve their lands and ancient ways of doing things. The sacred, I believe, comes into appearance when people can embrace a certain type of “human limitation” that the west believes it escaped with the invention of writing and the technologies that this invention made possible. 

The “fork” in the road, I'm theorizing, occured when we went down the path of thinking that written language could fully capture “reality,” that the real could be “represented.” This fork in the road, according to the story I am piecing together from many different authors and personal experiences, can be located with Plato and the invention of the modern alphabet (see W. Ong, E. Havelock and I. Illich). The modern alphabet, invented around the time when Plato emerged, made it possible to de-localize or detemporalize language from in-the-moment oral speech through lasting representations; and this, in turn, made it possible at a whole new level to set up agreements, laws, models and representations as "truths"guiding or shaping how people related to their actual in-the-moment experiences over wide expanses of distance. This occurred in many forms: laws and policies could be promulgated across larger expanses of terrain much more readily and with much greater "standardization" than before possible.  Thinkers and scientists, as well as engineers and artisans, could now across great expanses of distance develop and work on the same problems together, etc. 

Writing is probably what made it possible for Plato to imagine an “ideal” conceptual realm that existed outside of time.  It is what made it possible for science and technology to set up a domain for thinking that is outside of in-the-moment experience, and instead located in a lonely Cartesian three-dimensional “space,” void of everything, and where everything can be generated by mathematics — leading to computer modeling (representation) of everything. This "space" of the represented, including prominently “computer modeling,” is the space we have been increasingly living in for a very long time. Our world is becoming more “virtual" by the minute. 

The great shift that is happening with the end of Western metaphysics, as it was announced by Nietzsche, can on one level be seen as our loss of total commitment to the Platonic divide between ideal-real and temporal experience, which I am equating with the divide between what can be “represented” and shared independently of local time and place, and what cannot.  

One thing that has happened today is that this “shift,” talked about by more thinkers everywhere, has become “news” -- which means that everywhere there is talk about a shift that is really all pseudo-shift. That is an unfortunate complication. (It's also related to the very topic we are discussing. Two people who are using the same "language" -- i.e. the same words -- seem to be talking about the same "thing"; but a little direct experience can soon show that in fact they are not.) 

If the fork in the road of which I'm speaking involved both a cultural commitment to truth as certainty of representation, and if going down this path at the same time involved a leaving behind of the sacred, then how does a re-contextualization of the representational within a larger picture include a new relationship to the sacred? That’s one way of posing the question.  Heidegger’s claim that modernity was characterized by a “withdrawal of the gods” speaks to the same thing, I believe. And I think it’s in line with Heidegger’s thinking to say that, with the west's reconceptualization of truth as “certainty of representation,” the west put human beings -- as the ones who make the (artificial) representations -- in the center in a new way. We set up the human subject as the ground and arbiter of Being, Heidegger might say. We took the "path of objectivity," in Maturana's terms. 

Once consequence of taking this path is that it gave rise to a class of expert "scientifically trained" professionals in the world, the masters (or priests) of representation, who have lorded it over all the “uneducated” of the world, usually put on a pedestal by the "uneducated" themselves. (These professinals include the economists and bankers who control economics based on their expert representations; money itself is a token, although not a representation – and this is probably one of the reasons that modern economists can’t “think” what money really is — they can only describe its current functioning in highly-sophisticated ways, because they are kind of like journalists and scientists who are limited to depicting what is "objectively," and so can’t generally tap the font of creativity that requires going into the imaginal realm, or that comes only when we can think of things in terms of dynamics and consequences and goals. Anyhow, this is going off track.) 

So what happens when we go beyond truth as certainty of representation as the only or the primary way of creating human consensus? 

We start to step off the platform of the representing subject. (For Arendt, this is the platform of homo faber.) And we start to valorize the platform of the vulnerable, experiencing subject.  We start to open ourselves to the unknown and to the mysterious, instead of only validating our (aggressive) procedures for knowing. 

When we open up like this, it’s like extending our arms and letting in the sky. All experience becomes legitimated, and our capacity to relate grows hugely. (We honor even the "uneducated for the capacity that they possess, a capacity that escapes the narrow criteria of valuation that the west has held to for centuries.) All of this opening up, letting in a wider expanse of experience, can have its scary components. What I expect we may discover: What will most hold us together in the overwhelming expanse is our proximity to one another and to local place. I.e., in some sense what will come to matter to us much more once again is our local community. And we will discover that our capacity for healthy local relations -- to our neighbors, to our friends, to local flora and fauna and geography, to our local civic experience -- will be the grounding source for health across wider expanses.





Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Paradigm Shift - A Letter to My Sister - Thoughts in Progress


Western thinking has long been based on the belief that reality could be represented conceptually. Plato, an acknowledged founder of the western rational tradition, proposed that concepts (ideas) were the ultimate reality, located in the heavenly realm of Truth, in opposition to the realm of matter, error and illusion: mere earth. 

Our commitment to this paradigm is shifting. Perhaps starting with the Pragmatists in the U.S. (R.W. Emerson, C.S. Peirce and the culture that produced them) and Heidegger in Europe (who, through Nietzsche, was influenced by the Americans), a widening wave of thinkers is realizing that “reality” cannot be reduced to concepts. This is because any thing that we distinguish in words can only emerge as a thing or concept against a larger background that itself in its essence remains unwordable, a background that yet preexists as a condition for the possibility of forming any such concept or words. 

For example, if I point out a “tree,” if I distinguish the concept “tree,” I imply and presuppose the whole world  in which the tree is embedded, although all of that wider context remains in the background when I foreground the concept or object “Tree” in my languaging. We can "chase" the background by talking about it, but we can only do so through words that themselves always function only through their relation to an ever-tacit background. (This background has been called the "tacit dimension" by Polanyi, the "implicate order" by Bohm; I believe Heidegger may have called this context "world" on some occasions, although I'll have to check up on that.) 

Aside: In naming this “background” (tacit dimension, implicate order, world, context), I do not mean to refer to an external reality independent from our experience. The background refers to the wider experiential context from out of which and against which we generate words and thoughts — while the notion of experience may imply some reality “external" to our experience, we have no access to such. Instead, we as human beings are able to explain any of our experiences only through other experiences, i.e. through the coherences that we discover among our diverse experiences (as Humberto Maturana has put it). So it does not make sense to refer to an objective “external reality." 

Instead, rather than through an objective external reality, we create a common world -- i.e. a world that we can communicate in and act in together -- by coordinating our behaviors with one another in our daily living together through the coherences that we discover in our experiences with one another, which means by discovering “agreements" both through establishing habitual patterns of non-verbalized consensually-coordinated interaction, and in also developing -- on the foundation of this non-verbalized world of consensual coordinations -- express shared agreements and understandings through our conversations or languaging. This accounts for our sense that "reality" is something we rely upon, rely upon together, have a feel and sensitivity for, experience on the level of shared culture, and not as something we simply "think." 

However, under the longstanding belief that, with sufficient (scientific-technological) rigour, reality could be captured in words and representations (models and the like), the west has created a complex array of specialized disciplines, each more and more isolated from each other and removed from common sense and from ordinary understanding. 

What we are starting to realize is that what is omitted from the thinking and languaging of each of these specialized disciplines — the wider context from which they have distinguished themselves — is in fact the radically common world, the common context from which they developed and that holds them all together! And it is this common world that our specialized forms of discourse, all the professions and university departments are unable to think! As a result, common sense has been decaying precipitously in the world, and, because we are unable to think what we are doing relative to our common context, human harmony, scientific, political, economic and cultural, is threatened. 

What the world needs to do is to rediscover the portal through which we can approach the future together, which portal I sometimes refer to as the generation of the commons (where I mean "commons" in a very broad sense). This means that our expert professionals in every discipline need to rediscover their link to the commons, and through that alone, to one another. By and large, we have trained our experts and leaders to pride themselves for the very distance they have achieved from the "merely common," the ordinary, the lay mind. "Progress" has been conceived, partly, as progress away from pejoratively "common" ignorance. "Educated" people have been valued over the supposed "uneducated" commoner. "High tech" excites more peole than low or no tech. And so on. But to rediscover the commons is to rediscover and re-experience our universal commonality as ordinary human beings, and it is only in this rediscovery that we can give meaning and direction, and collectively benefit from, the insights and learnings of all our separate disciplines. 

We are starting to move out of an age that believed “truth” was the “correct or incorrect” representation  of an external reality, a notion of truth that makes us very judgmental beings, too often acting under the supposition that there are right and wrong answers to everything and often pitting us against one another and ourselves. 

A shift is happening as we begin to reconceive the purpose of “reason” and thought as that of bringing people into harmony with one another and nature (our common context), not merely through writing and other forms of representation (media, books, ideologies, sacred texts, etc.), but in actual in-person acting and living together. All thinking is doing.

As Hannah Arendt once said: There is a sense in which the brilliant expert physicists who created the nuclear bomb knew what they were doing in order to create an unimaginably destructive weapon, an extraordinary feat of engineering; but there is a deeper and wider sense in which they did not realize what they were doing.  The essence of science is not scientific. The essence of technology, as Heidegger said, is nothing technological.  Scientific-technological thinking that is committed to the notion of truth as certainty-of-representation is itself a doing, but what science and technology are really doing remains unthinkable to science and technology; this comes into appearance only when we consider science/technology within the wider context in which they are embedded, as are considering it here: One thing scientific-technological thinking is doing, as presently instituted, is fragmenting the world ever more while delegitimating what most fundamentally gives coherence to a beloved and fully human world embedded in a beloved nature. 

C. S. Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, held that the “truth” of any proposition is in its consequences (not merely in its presumed correctness or incorrectness).  Hence, for example, if the consequence of some people being republicans and some being democratics is constant fighting and failure to take shared responsibility for the world, then the “truth” of the republican and democratic propositions is not in the ideological “correctness” of either side, but in the dynamic of fighting that they are producing.  

One dream of science was to harmonize the world by establishing objective truth that would compel everyone to agree (this is arguably the underlying non-scientific rationale that provided a context for science).  To carry out this purpose, science put all its hope in truth understood as certainty of representation, and counted as “real” only what could be objectified through representation. This led not only to the fragmentation of the world into specialized professions and jargons as described above, but also to the rigorous exclusion of emotion, so-called "subjectivity," the felt experience of “the now,” etc., from the domain of scientific thinking -- except to the degree that could be objectified and captured in representations. This exclusion was concomitant to the exclusion of the wider, always inherently uncapturable context within which we live, whose relational richness and complexity will always by definition exceed the capacity of human beings to think it, rationalize it, capture it in representation, from the thoughts that we accredit.  

As humanity wakens again to its dream and opens again to this wider, uncapturable context in which we are embedded, the great mystery in which we find ourselves and which exceeds us, we will hopefully adopt anew — in new ways and old — a common quest.  

As humanity opens in this way, we open again to the incomparable gift that has been given us, wider than the sky, greater beyond all comparison to the things of our own making. 

In completely unexpected ways, we open to the quest of harmonizing with one another and with nature.
We open again to what is called the spiritual, the domain of consensual resonance from which being-together in harmony emerges. In completely unexpected ways, we open again to the sacred. 






Sunday, March 9, 2014

Antichrist (2009), a film by Lars von Trier


After my favorable experience watching Lars von Trier's Melancholia (see here), I decided to watch  another von Trier film, Antichrist (or, as represented in the title cards, Anti Chris♀). 

The film includes some very intense and disturbing sexual violence, very graphically depicted, including excrutiating genital mutilation shown up close. It's not for the faint of heart. I found myself on several occasions averting or wanting to avert my eyes. It’s unusual to see a director willing to go this far. The graphic intensity makes it hard for me to recommend the film to anyone except certain select friends. I can't imagine anything more opposite to your generic "date film." 

I’m trying to assess what the film overall means for me.

I'm intrigued on many levels, not least because of the medieval sensibility the film seems to achieve in its present-day refiguring of the Adam and Eve allegory.  

The plot is simple: A husband and wife, the unnamed characters "He" and "She," travel to a remote, isolated cabin deep in the woods -- a place they call Eden. There the husband, a trained psychotherapist, intends to heal his wife of the disabling grief and pain from which she suffers due to the death of their young child. 

Through the interactions between the couple and the mysterious surrounding natural environment, in an atmosphere evocative of horror films, the story explores and intensifies a deepening divide or conflict between He and She. The conflict variously manifests as one between intellect and emotion, control and chaos, human and nature, "normality" (to choose an intentionally ambiguous term) and incomprehensible evil. The dramatic exploration leads to ever darker places, and eventually brings the conflict to a horrific head. 

In the end, there is a kind of resolution to the threat (I'm being vague here only because, in this instance, I'm choosing not to give away the ending). More precisely, the circumstances come to an apparent end through terrible means, but the deeper conflict, I believe, remains unresolved, with no solution evident. Indeed, the film arguably figures our Judaeo-Christian civilization as trapped within a repeating cycle of sin, dramatizing western humanity's failure to escape a profround historical, and possibly ineluctable, entanglement with evil.

As I have construed it, the film and its ambiguous epilogue leave us with several daunting questions: e.g., Will this cycle continue? Is the conflict depicted absolute, rooted in nature, or of our own making? Where is the locus of the evil? of patriarchy? of misogyny?  What comes next in the human story?  Can we rewrite, not just in words but through redeeming historical transformation, the tale of what happened in the Garden of Eden?

In AntiChrist, I think, von Trier dramatizes a dark human conflict with deep roots in our culture, going back at least as far as the stories told in our most sacred western text. It finally leaves its viewers in the excruciating position either of finding a resolution, despite no apparent way forward, or of remaining in its condemning grip and conceding its unbearable irresolvability.

In Melancholia, as I see it, and as I suggested in my earlier review, von Trier explores related and analogous conflicts, albeit differently, and ultimately locates and valorizes forces of potential renewal.

The films are coherent with one another. Only, the emergence of hope and a provisional new way forward came later.



Friday, February 21, 2014

Happy-Go-Lucky (2009), a film by Mike Leigh


Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky is an unusual film that I have grown increasingly fond of in these several days after watching it. 

You might call it a character study of a woman who may appear to some a "silly airhead" (I'm quoting a family member's critical reaction 20 minutes into the film), but who proves over the course of the story, I believe, to be a portrait of psychological health: a person with strong boundaries, who is non-judgmental, non-reactive, compassionate, courageous, appropriately assertive, modest, unpretentious and just happy being herself. She keeps balanced and cheerful in the face of all the dysfunctional cultural dynamics around her. Her good cheer is not merely passive and adaptive: even if in modest ways, at critical moments, she takes a stand and proactively confronts others around her. Childlike and playful whenever she can, but a mature and forceful adult when circumstances require.

Need I say what an important achievement this is in our world today? One of the actors, giving his commentary on the film, calls the main character a living example of the laughing Buddha. I think that captures it well. 

A special something about the film quite intrigues me, and I'm not sure that I can articulate what it is. What's coming up for me is an analogy to the curious fact that our mainstream news media today is so rarely able to report "good news." If it bleeds, it leads, goes the saying about our contemporary journalism. 

This characteristic of our news media reflects, I think, something deeply characteristic about our culture's almost addicted focus on problems, on "what's wrong," on everything unhealthy and pathological. 

Why do we seem to find health so boring? 

Why does happiness in our world seem like something always out of reach -- most likely something that we haven't saved up enough money to buy yet, or something enjoyed by other people who unjustly have more wealth, privilege and power than we.  But happiness as something already present, free, available to all? Boring, or perhaps not believable. 

Are we an eternally-disgruntled, blaming, protesting people, perversely finding some self-validation, perhaps even some joy, in the calamity that happens to others?  Why do stories of murder, war and bad behavior by celebrities sell so many newspapers? 

To our negatively-oriented spirits, the central character in Happy-Go-Lucky may seem to have nothing of interest to offer. No spiky textures to chafe our excitement. 

Nothing spiky, that is, unless we find her continual laughter and good humor something quite annoying. The first thing out of many a viewer's mouth after watching this film may be something like this: "The main character laughed too much. She was really annoying. She got on my nerves. She acts like a child, not an adult." The attitude behind such a statements, I think, will bring relief to such viewers -- because they have found a way to insert the character back into the mainstream negative framework, thus making her unthreatening and easily dismissed.

Yet that annoying tapping on our nerves may represent a suppressed, inner, more happy self that's trying to emerge, if only we weren't so fearful of the consequences of letting ourselves be happy, of breaking from social norms, of being okay and compassionate with ourselves and with others -- much like the character in question. Have you considered this: Why does the word "childish" have such negative connotations in our language? Perhaps we disgruntled adults would do well to bring more of the spirit of children back into our lives.

The main character in Happy-Go-Lucky might be perceived as a sort of "nothing" from one perspective (I say, intending to invoke the ideal state of "nothingness" as preached by the Zen Buddhists). She is nothing but resilient and adaptive poise, a model of composure and unfailingly generous good humor relative to all that life brings her way.  

The world as it is currently structured and oriented, I grant, is deeply unjust. How do we respond to that? Can justice grow out of a negative and bitter reaction to injustice? (At least one character in the film models such a response.)  Yet flowers need healthy soil to grow. How can we become happy and spread health in an unjust world, among dysfunctional social relations, exploitative economics and corrupt politics, where assaults are coming at us constantly from all directions? 

For I believe that we can. All the shadows we see in our lives are only visible because of a surplus of illuminating light. The given abundance supersedes all human-generated scarcity. 

A few lines of poetry come into my mind: 

"The light for all time shall outspeed the thunder crack."   
              - William Carlos Williams

"when you consider 
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue
 bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
 guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
 way winces from its storms of generosity ... " 
             - A. A. Ammons

Perhaps the emergence of such a film indicates that our culture is finding new models of psychic and spiritual health in the face of social dysfunction, new exemplars of the kind of individual poise we must learn to join together in building a new world.  




Monday, February 10, 2014

The Celebration (1998), directed by Thomas Vinterberg

After seeing "Melancholia," the subject of my prior post, I decided to watch "The Celebration" (Festen, 1998) the first of the "Dogme 95" films.  It didn't have as strong an impact on me as Melancholia, though I thought it quite good and it gave rise in me to much reflection.

It's like Melancholia in some ways: e.g., a large extended family (about 40 people or so) gathers at a wealthy estate for a celebration, this time not for a wedding, but in honor of a father's 60th birthday. The father is a successful, wealthy businessman.
Like Melancholia, this film that is nominally about a family event, in my opinion, actually makes a challenging analysis and critique of modern civilization. 

The major event that the "The Celebration" turns on is the eldest son's shocking, open accusation of the father: When this eldest son stands in front of the entire gathering to make a toast to the patriarch, he surprisingly, yet also quite flatly and matter-of-factly, tells the story of how the father repeatedly molested him and his twin sister when the two were young children (the twin sister has recently committed suicide).

The whole family at first responds to this accusal -- or, rather, statement of fact -- with utter denial. First, the party behaves almost as if nothing had been said at all. Eventually, the son's claims are explicitly dismissed. The son is ridiculed and, finally, attacked and expelled from the house (only to return later). Even the mother, who had once witnessed the abuse with her own eyes, claims the son has mistaken imagination for reality. When a black man (the guest of another, rebellious sister) starts to defend the son, the entire party ridicules him by joining together, with a gusto quite painful to behold, in a racist song about black sambos. (With this, the film undeniably connects the family dynamic with the wider world.)

A main insight I had while watching the film was this: In the son's accusing the father of  having fucked his children, the film intends to expose the authoritarianism - patriarchal, racist, coercive -  that is at the core of our civilization and is its central sin, and to expose as well the patterns of denial by which this sin is both reenacted and kept in force. Moreover, and importantly, I think, the filmmakers intend molestation, despite its being an extreme form of abuse, to represent something that our culture typically does to its children -- that is, to virtually all of us -- ordinarily and every day, albeit in more and less subtle ways.

Molestation, I believe the film is saying, is only an extreme instance of an abusive relation between parents and children, between ruling authorities and oppressed or dependent subjects of all kinds, that epitomizes what is occurring in our families, our workplaces and in our civilization at large, and that has been at the center of our world story for a very long time. Molestation, the film says -- and as the son says at the family anniversay -- is our hidden truth.

Yet molestation seems so appalling and distant from our common experience: Why would a father molest his children? How ever could parents fuck their own sons and daughters? How can we possibly relate something so heinous to our everyday life? What is the emotional logic of molestation? As I posed these questions, I found myself at turns grasping and then losing my conceptual grasp of what I was asking. But eventually I became clearer that the answers may not be so far to seek.

The molester strangely entangles love, or a simulacrum of love, with an exertion of control. In molestation there occurs a strange and abusive mix of intimacy with an exercise of power over those who are vulnerable. Something of this strange mix is captured in the word "instruction," when we hear the sadistic parent, teacher or other authority figure speak of the "instruction" he or she "must" perform upon a child. A stereotype of the old-school Catholic nun, supposedly representing a God who loves us, strikes a ruler across the wayward pupil's knuckles.

Familiar experiences from my childhood arise: e.g. of my parents or teachers "disciplining" me, my siblings and my schoolmates -- blatantly or subtly shaming, coercing or rewarding us so that we would satisfy some perceived social or cultural imperative, achieve some perceived measure of success, and ranking us in relation to each other relative to its measure. They did these things, we were told (and we both wanted to believe them and did not believe them), "for our own good," "because they loved us," "because they cared about us," so we would "learn our lessons," "so we would be happy," so we would be "successful" and "steer the right course." "Sometimes you have to do things that you do not want to do," was a refrain often repeated to me when I was a child. I remember instances, too, of my re-performing such behavior on my younger siblings.

Molestation and its denial seem to happen at a crux of vulnerability, intimacy and power. The molester's assertion of control and intimacy are mixed up with a denial of his own vulnerability, a fantasy of certainty, a fundamental betrayal of some inner self, a wish to emulate the father. In seeking to vindicate the choices he or she has made in life, clinging to illusions of a higher authority -- the "good fathers" who say what we should and must be -- here in this most intimate and vulnerable relation to the self and to those close to him, the molester performs a victimizing ritual. A "truth," one that does not arise from nature, must be enacted, manufactured and imposed through a mix of coercive power and a claim of love (and the threat of its withdrawal). The performance, in the language of social constructivists, is how our hierarchical world and its social dynamic gets constituted in an assertion of power.

This is paradoxically a social act. For this assertion of power originates not simply with any one individual; rather, the individual participates in a socially-legitimated performance and its socially-supported denial. This shared performance creates our social artifice, sustains our culture of domination, and is at some deep level an act of belonging. It joins us as perpetrators and victims to the fathers and to the wider participant social world, all those who gather at our anniversaries to sustain this peculiar tradition of togetherness.

The film suggests that our present-day culture is molesting all of its children -- all of us are the children of our age -- just as it has molested and continues to molest, on the most visible level, people of color and other marginalized groups and nations. The educational system that drills and rams information into us as passive recipients, ranking all from top to bottom. The managers and officials who boss the ordinary laborers. The racist practices that grant some the top position and relegate others below. The financial and property systems that direct money and socially-created value to the ruling class through various means. The politicians who allow big business to have its way with us. The media and corporations who propagandize and market to us.
The film says we are getting fucked all around by those who control us and yet who need and depend upon us, who ever orient themselves toward us, and who dominate us. The molestation from the top is repeated all the way down, and passed on through the generations. And the victims repeat the cycle of perpetration.

At the bottom, there are always the suicides. How does the logic of suicide appear in this context? As a special case of self-victimization? A heroic if tragic ending to the cycle?  In "The Celebration," thanks to a suicide note that surfaces, the sister who killed herself speaks to the gathering from a strange and paradoxical place of tragic liberation.

In the current historical epoch of our dominant human culture, an epoch dating back thousands of years, we have accepted this imposed discipline over the experienced truth of our own inner, fundamentally loving, childlike, open and curious natures, and we have repeated the performance ritualistically as we have passed it on to others -- as we must once we have accepted it ourselves.

It is still rare and dangerous to publicly expose the hidden crime. Most are not ready to open themselves even to entertaining the possibility in thought. Our psychological safety, our belonging to a social world, has depended on our personal and public identification with the molesting fathers. To separate from this tradition is still to risk a terrifying isolation, expulsion and physical harm. Like the most domineering and abusive of the siblings in "The Celebration," there are many around who are poised almost desperately to defend the tradition against all imputation.

In general we hold to the tradition, I think, as we hold to our fathers and families, as we value loyalty and trust, familial and communal belonging, our cultural membership. The coercion is strangely entangled with love. We cannot easily sever ourselves from what we love and what shelters us, without risking shame over what we hold most sacred. Partly for this reason, most everyone complies with the drama, playing his or her supportive role in the birthday fĂȘte.

"The Celebration" tells the story of the favorite son who publicly reveals the truth. He does not take this risk entirely alone. Already around him the more wayward siblings in the film, including the now suicided sister, have begun tentatively and awkwardly to come together with one another, in league with the household servants, under a new set of norms and relationships, and around a new truth. To make such public risks worthwhile and meaningful, we need first to build and test a new platform of togetherness, we need to solidify new alliances, allegiances and support networks, new skills and practices, that are capable of delivering a new world into being.

Although the film puts forth a devastating analysis of our culture, such a critique is possible only from a position qualitatively different from than the one that is being exposed. Molestation and perverted love become visible as such only from a stance that knows and appreciates genuine respect and love. As the exposure of what is perverted intensifies, awareness of what is wholesome and healing also grows.

"The Celebration" is a story that means to evolve our human story, to take a step forward into a new historical epoch.

And so the "celebration" to which the title refers is finally not the father's 60th birthday celebration that brings the extended family together at the start of the film. No, the real celebration is the dancing in which the siblings spontaneously engage after the truth of the brother's accusation has finally broken through and has been heard by the gathering.

The real celebration happens with the dawning of the new era that emerges when the most racist and violent of the brothers -- the father's staunchest defender, who at first violently denies his elder brother's claim -- himself now rejects the father's story.

The real celebration begins when the father, who now admits his heinous crimes, is told to leave the breakfast table, so that the children-siblings now find themselves seated at a new table, in a new world where the central sin of the past has been brought into the light, and a new generation breathes a new atmosphere on a new morning.

The film chronicles the rite of passage that our new generations, born into a patriarchal culture,  must pass through to start the earth anew.


Thursday, January 2, 2014

Melancholia - A reflection on the film and on living today

Melancholia (2011) - A film by Lars von Trier

Somehow this film made an impact on me and is lingering in my thoughts and feelings. 

The basic scenario is this:  A large rogue planet, maybe 5 times the earth's size, enters the solar system. There are conflicting predictions whether this planet, called Melancholia, will pass close by the earth, thus providing a spectacular event in the sky, or whether it will actually hit the earth. Melancholia ultimately does impact the earth, head on, completely destroying it.

However, this story about the rogue planet does not really emerge until late in the film.

Part 1 begins with a hugely expensive wedding held at a fabulously wealthy country estate, where the bride's sister resides with her husband and child. The film starts with the bride being extremely late to her own wedding -- a wedding meticulously arranged by her sister and professional wedding planners.  We watch the bride as she goes through a kind of gradual breakdown at the event,  while  various kinds of dysfunction are revealed among the family and guests. In sum, we watch the bride go through a deeply felt disillusionment with and rejection of everything in her culture and family.

Part 2 starts with the former bride in an almost catatonic state of deep depression. The failed wedding is long over. She is now staying at her sister's estate, starting on the road to a manner of recuperation, albeit not a return to her former self but to something very different, rooted in a different awareness and values. Little by little the story of the rogue planet emerges. The different characters respond in different ways. The sister's very wealthy husband is an excited amateur astronomer, who remains in optimistic denial about where the rogue planet is actually heading; he constantly reassures the others — until he finally realizes the truth and kills himself, alone. At the very end, as the planet Melancholia looms larger and larger in the heavens, blocking out the sky, the former bride rejects her sister's proposal of how to spend the last moments (on the patio, with wine and candles). Instead, together with the child, she fields long sticks in the woods. In the simple woods, in herself and in the child, she has found the only resources she needs to live a meaningful, authentic life. With the sticks, on the grass, she builds a spare, simple tepee-like structure. She calls it the magic cave. The characters enter it together.

I think the film affected me because I saw the whole story as figuring the state we are all in now on planet earth, or at least in the western world. A hollowness in our civilization. The west in decline. The optimists, the mainstream press and people and their leaders, in denial. The coming doom.

Yet somehow I'm comforted, because in accepting my powerlessness to avert what is coming -- be it the collapse of our world, or simply death itself -- I can perhaps better enjoy the simple beauty of the moment, and a sense of modest dignity and a happiness that comes from realizing that I am doing the work that I am earnestly doing for the sake of doing it and for the sake of the ideals, the people and the vision that it keeps me in company with, even if the outcome is not what I hope for, even if the world is doomed.  I am building a magic cave, the best that I can.

UPDATE

I thought I'd add to my above review the somewhat more detailed analysis that I posted on the Film Quarterly site, and to which commenter "pekingthom" refers (thanks pekingthom!). For the Film Quarterly site, see: http://www.filmquarterly.org/2013/11/summer-2013-volume-66-number-4/
- MT


The film first represents Justine’s experience of the hollowness of western culture, the dysfunction of family and work, the hollowness of modern cultural forms.

Melancholia the planet threatens earth, in part, as an analog for the doom facing the west which today is in steep decline.

Justine’s painful loss of the shared ideals that hold our culture together, her loss of belief in mainstream western values, leads her to a deep depression, but ultimately also to a place of renewal. Stripped of her attachments to cultural norms, refusing to participate in John or Claire’s optimistic denials, Justine gradually comes into touch once again with a natural inner strength. This is like Nietzsche’s hero who sees the emptiness of the ideal realm, and revalues again the natural strength of the “beast.” Justine’s regaining of contact with her authentic, primordial self, connected to nature and authentic desire, is symbolized in one instance by her taking jam from the jar hungrily and vigorously with her fingers without concern for “propriety” of the spoon or knife, in another instance by her lying naked on the river bank.

The deconstruction of her former identity, and the nearness to doom, enable Justine to come into contact again with an underlying vigor for life, an appreciation of what really matters “on earth,” where ultimately nothing lasts, because we are all mortal.


She rejects Claire’s suggestion that their last moments be spent “on the patio” with “a glass of wine and candles” and Beethoven’s ninth, because all of these forms and “accessories,” these “ultimate commodities” of the western world, are built on a denial of, and have been interposed between, the self and the primordial authenticity of our condition. Authenticity has been replaced with commodity.

Instead, Justine opts to go into the woods with the child, in part symbolizing her own renewed inner child, to find sticks. She builds a spare kind of teepee structure, the “magic cave.” Justine chooses this “magic cave,” constructed from plain sticks drawn straight from the simple woods, over the wealthy setting of the castle, as a more true place to be. The magic cave symbolizes a more healthy, more honest dwelling place for humanity, a dwelling place for our living, which is also the place where we die.

I think it no accident that the magic cave is like a teepee. Melancholia the planet is like the juggernaut of the west that came down upon and wiped out indigenous peoples everywhere, including the Native American indians, and replaced their way of life with something else: a materialist dream, rooted in a blind industrialism that is ultimately destroying the planet and that leads to the ugly social dysfunction manifested during the wedding party.


This film is a rejection of those materialist values and an embrace of something much more basic. Let us give up all the pretense. Let us embrace the simple, the primitive. Let us face death together authentically. Let us enjoy the gift we have been given of this earth. Death is coming, and yet we sell our souls for corporate jobs so we can buy expensive real-estate, join golf clubs, drive fancy cars and follow all the dreams that advertising can paint.

- Marc Tognotti