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

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.  

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.

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. 

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.

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.  

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 fête.

"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.

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

January 4, 2014 at 10:32 pm

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

How Money Affects Morality - and How Morality Affects Money

The title of my post today reverses the title of an article in today's New York Times: "How Money Affects Morality," by Eduardo Porter.

Porter's NY Times article announces the results of a new  university study, carefully-planned and executed through experiments with hundreds of people. This study shows that even "the simple idea of money changes the way we think – weakening every other social bond," and therefore gives rise to general cultural deterioration and institutional corruption.

I'm sure the article is true. But the article is a little like talking about a rip in the upholstery when the car is headed at high speed towards a cliff. Two problems with the article's reasoning point to a much greater problem that faces us all today:

1. First, the author's unquestioned but fundamental assumption is that money "is" a given, unitary thing with a single essence. But, in the same way that fruit isn't always apples, the money we use today is not the only kind of money that has existed or could exist. So-called "money" has existed in many different forms and has many different histories, and will exist in new forms in the future. There isn't just one "money," the same everywhere and at all times, which must be the same in the future as it is today. There have been many different monetary systems, even within modern democratic and industrial civilizations, each of which has produced "money" in a different way, and in doing so has created a different relational structure between people -- that is, in each instance has had quite different "moral consequences" for individuals and for society as a whole. Different kinds of money have different moral effects. Bernard Lietaer is one among many economists who have emphasized this point.

Once we realize that money is a human artifact that can be differently constructed with different consequences, there opens up the possibility of thinking about money in a whole new way, and of entertaining different possibilities for what it might accomplish if we chose to make some changes.

Lots of people in lots of places, in fact, are carrying out such thinking and experimenting all over the world today -- it's an area of great interest and activity, beneath the radar of mainstream news and politics.

DIFFERENT MONETARY SYSTEMS HAVE DIFFERENT MORAL CONSEQUENCES

What the author of the NYT blog incorrectly assumes is that modern, privately-issued, debt-based money "is" money. He is blind to the fact that money can be and has been something quite different. He doesn't understand, for example, what makes our particular form of money "privately issued" or "debt based," because he doesn't get that other, different currency systems have existed -- so these distinguishing terms have no meaning for him.

(To give only the briefest example of some different monetary systems: First, of course, there is our present-day, debt-based monetary system, which is now used around the world and originated in monarchical Europe. But for a time America used some very different monetary systems, which  sprang up out of the much more democratic culture arising in the American colonies. These were still in operation during the time of the American Revolution (and some of the principles that led to them were revived for a time by Abraham Lincoln when he issued the Greenback to fund the American Civil War). However, over time these alternate money systems and their underlying principles were done away with and all but forgotten through a very interesting course of events and not a little manipulation by powerful interests. Because the ordinary population doesn't understand the monetary system, and because that system has been made to seem so complex that only professional economists could understand it, such powerful players have shaped our monetary system in ways that are detrimental to the population as a whole. It's this detrimental effect that the authors of the cited article and cited study are somewhat dimly bringing to awareness.  -- The story I've been tracing in this aside has most recently been told  by Stephen Zarlenga and Ellen Brown, independent of one another, in their books about money.)

2. As already implied above, a second and quite serious problem with the NYT article is that, in making the assumption that there is only one "money," the article serves to entrench our current monetary system, so in this sense the article serves the status quo and the moral decline that it complains of.  

ARCHITECTING NEW MONEY SYSTEMS: WHAT IS MONEY FOR?

A basic question the article fails to ask is, What is money "for"?  

In today's system, money has become primarily a vehicle for building the power of a small elite.  It's a vehicle for gathering up the labor energy of vast populations, and directing that energy to serve the leisure, fantasies, and egos of those privileged few who decide when to create money, whom to provide it to, and whom not to provide it to, and the terms of the deal.

Ideally and in concept, however, money is a vehicle to facilitate mutual exchange in large populations and/or across vast distances, so that large populations, collectively, can benefit from the many dimensions of "surplus value" that can be generated through mutual collaboration.

In a hypothetical world of isolated individuals, or of small isolated communities and their local resources, human effort can only achieve so much. But in modern times we have discovered that, through collaboration and specialization of work, we can produce much more, including large technologies, machineries and coordinating  institutions through which this surplus value can be invested for the purpose of achieving additional orders of surplus value.

THE MIRACLE OF COLLABORATION: PUBLIC VALUE

And this surplus value is by logic and by all rights public, belonging to the community as a whole, not to any individuals or subgroups. However, this a logic that remains little understood, and instead our civilization goes forward in allowing a very few to take what should belong to all.

To elaborate and explain a bit, let's say my private efforts and skills are worth x to me, and your private efforts are worth y to you.  However, when you and I begin to collaborate and exchange — for example, when each of us specializes, each doing one part of a "joint" work more efficiently than any one can do alone, and thereby giving rise to a new domain of "common work" — a new order of value is created (as well as a new order of shared existence, common and collective). This new value is partly reflected in time and energy saved, but also in new creative possibilities unleashed. And this new or surplus value can be called "public" because it comes out of the collaboration itself, i.e. out of the mutual coordination of multiple parties (whether by express agreement or simply going along, which is tacit agreement) and not from any of the individuals in isolation. Hence this value properly belongs to all parties in the collaboration.

It is fair that I should receive my x value — the private efforts I put in — and that you should receive your y value.  It is also fair that every I and you should receive an equal share of the public or collaboration value, which fairly belongs to all of us. And that we should reckon nature and natural resources as a common value. In today's unjust world, an individual is unlikely to receive even the "x" or "y" value of his or her efforts; the public value, and the natural resource value, is almost wholly being taken by a few. Public value today is being privatized, and largely through the vehicle of the monetary system.

(Side note: even my needs, for example the biology that demands food and shelter, are part of what gives a portion of value to your products; all human beings share certain common, fundamental needs -- hence this portion of the market value is also public, and includes this component of basic human needs, because they come from nature, and not from individual skill, learning, choice, will or effort. The need element in the market is a public value.)

INDIVIDUAL AND COMMUNITY HEALTH DEPENDS ON DISTINGUISHING THE PUBLIC FROM THE PRIVATE, SELF AND OTHER

If we were able, in our cultural understanding, accurately to distinguish between what portion value is truly assignable to private, individual effort, what portion to common nature, and what portion to collectively produced, i.e. public or collaborative "surplus," we would be in a position to reward individual merit as individual merit ought to be rewarded, and more importantly, to enable every individual to enjoy his or her "ownership share" in the (spiritual) "whole" of human collaboration.

If everyone shared only in only that portion of value whose production can in fact be assigned to no private individual(s) but comes solely out of the collaboration surplus and can only be assigned to the "community," the "system of relationships" and to nature (including earth, resources and those needs that are common to all persons), we would have a world without poverty and likely a world where love and beauty ruled the day.

Now I said "if" we were able to make these distinctions. Are we? Technically, I the answer is yes. Making a full cost accounting like this would not be all that difficult.

One of the key places that this value resides is in land. Land value isn't the entire answer, but it is probably the main answer. That's because the "public value" that I'm talking about, that portion of dollars in the economy that are attributable to no individuals, but only to the surplus value created by community and collaboration, is reflected in the market price of land. (This extends to all nature actually, including natural resources which only have "market value" to the extent that a public demand is developed for them, which demand itself grows from the engine of collaboration, and also includes things like the airwaves and internet bandwidth and public writing).

The value of land, and of access to market communications, are functions of the value of human collaboration, i.e. the public value I identified above.  The great insight was probably first made and elaborated by the great Henry George.

What makes a piece of land worth a certain price? -- by the value of land here, we mean the land itself, not any "improvements," such as buildings and infrastructure, that might be made upon it. (In standard property tax bills, this distinction is already made and accounted for between value of sheer land (nature) and "improvements" added by the efforts of individuals.) What makes the value of the sheer land worth a certain amount? Certainly not the individual, private efforts of any person. Consider a plot of land in a major urban city: the land is just there, unchanging, yet its value generally increases! As often in fact happens, an individual might buy a plot and do absolutely nothing with regard to it, yet its value still skyrockets and goes into his pockets!

As this example makes obvious, what gives value to the land is the health and collaborative/economic capacity of the community that is located near that land. As some economists say: the price of land and housing is a function of the jobs in the community.  If there is a lot of high-paying work available, the price of land goes up. Which means if the location is a hot-bed of collaboration fueled by the public infrastructures of roads, markets, common individual needs, communications and relationships, the value goes up. This is a community-produced value.

My main point with this aside into the value of land has been to suggest that, yes, the distinction between individually-created and publicly-created wealth can be measured, although we don't pay attention to it and that is part of our dysfunction and why we don't have the tools to figure out how to relate our individual selves to our communal selves (and so we have very superficial and heated arguments that pit individualistic capitalist ideology against communitarian socialist ideology).

To distinguish between what is properly individual and what is properly collective is key. Our current systems have largely been constructed on individualist logic, in part because the "scientific" turn of earlier generations towards the concrete and away from the religious and spiritual sent thinkers into refuge towards "hard individual facts" and away from seemingly "spiritual" things like community love and togetherness and relationships.  But relationships are no more or less spiritual than individuals. And if we design money only to serve individuals without remembering the collective component, we create a system that ultimately leads to disaster for individuals and the collective: morality deteriorates, corruption spreads.

The monetary system is part and parcel of the private property system and our political/governance  system -- land is a container, people are the agents, nature provides the resources, and governance provides the vehicle for coordinating and channeling all human energy towards collective benefit. Viewed in this way, the monetary system (together with taxation) is a part of governance -- this is why, in the U.S. Constitution, the power to issue money is named as a core power of government. This power was delegated to private banks with the institution of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

PERSONAL & COLLECTIVE GROWTH:  HEALTHIER, HAPPIER INDIVIDUALS AND COMMUNITIES  

The core logic I am attempting to bring forth here is something like the logic that appeared with the innovation of employee stock ownership plans -- these plans operate on the reasoning that, when everyone has a stake in the health of the whole, there is a moral and energetic benefit to all individuals and to the whole as well. (Of course, our current ESOPs of course exist only within individual firms, which themselves exist within a larger competitive context where there is no such recognition, economically speaking, of a collective ownership in the whole.)

The logic I'm trying to bring forth is also something like the logic that has emerged out of a
powerful strain of psychological thought and practive: that is, individual psychic health and the health of relationships in couples and groups of any size, is highly a function of the degree to which individuals are capable of distinguishing the difference between what they are "individually" or privately responsible for, and where relational matters depend on mutual coordination. Autonomy and intimacy, or autonomy and collective/relational strength, paradoxically grow together with one
another.

One of the key features of classical economics was the assumption that all economic logic was founded on the rational behavior of individuals and individual organizations. With the understanding that different orders of logic operate on different "higher" levels (an understanding that Keynes was one of the first to begin to bring into mainstream economics, in a partial way), our thinking about economics will change and we will begin to see more clearly the essential connection between the economic and the political, and indeed, the primacy of the political, which means not that government is more important than business, but that how we structure the human conversation, and ensure that all voices human and natural are heard and respected, is the most critical question and task facing us today: the assumption must be that the whole comes first, the collective comes first; "we" and the health of the we, ultimately decides every I.

A Workshop With Horses

(From an email to a friend, October 2011) 

One fine sunny autumn day, I attended a full-day "horse sense" workshop located at a lovely ranch in Marin. The participants, 16 women and 4 men -- executive coaches and life coaches, therapists and counselors, and some individuals just looking for healing in their lives -- had come to discover what they could learn about themselves and their behaviors through interaction with horses. Together, we went through a series of experiences, each intriguing in its own way.

For instance, the workshop leader proposed that horses are extremely sensitive to the internal dynamics of any group of people — if a group is a "unity" (so the workshop leader proposed), the horses are drawn to it. But if the horses perceive division or screwy emotional energy in the group, they are not. Horses, she explained, are naturally drawn to the energy of a confident, relaxed, flowing group because they "want to be part of the action."

We broke into a number of three-person groups and had some fun experiences testing that claim. One  group would form, and then wander, self-directed, into the large corral in which various horses were scattered. The horses responded to the different groups in different ways. As a group, we then discussed the different ways the horses responded, and each of the people in each group talked about  what had been going on in their thoughts and emotions (and thus in the group's interior dynamics). Rightly or wrongly, we assumed in every case that the behavior of the horses was a response to the group dynamics that we uncovered.

The workshop exercise that stirred the strongest reflections in me was this:

Our full workshop of about 20 people sat in a semi-circle, as a kind of audience, just outside a round horse-pen about 25-30 feet in diameter. A single horse was in the pen. Beyond the pen, beautiful rolling hillsides, a small canyon, the sky, other horses dispersed and wandering.

Volunteer workshop members were invited to enter the pen, one at a time, each taking a turn. Each volunteer was asked to bring into the pen some issue of struggle that they wanted to work on or a decision-point that they were facing in their lives. When in the pen with the horse, the volunteer was asked to speak aloud whatever his or her issue was, and to interact with the horse (or not) in any way the person chose.

The rest of the group simply watched what happened.

A pattern soon arose. Whatever the volunteer's story of struggle, in each case the horse (and sometimes other horses outside the pen) would do something that the workshop leader and participants then interpreted as clear a "sign" from nature, indicating something important to the volunteer. In unison, the group saw the horse's response as recommending a course of action or affirming an inner realization that the person in the pen had not yet owned up to.

On several occasions the leader reassured everyone -- in case there were any skeptics present -- that these moments we were witnessing together were not mere random coincidences, but that indeed the horses were communicating messages of significance, coming from the horses' almost-supernatural sensitivity to human emotion, or even from a deeper knowing. Could it be that, like dogs whose sense of smell is hundreds of times more powerful than our own, that horses have a much keener sense than we for emotional energies? The group, it seemed to me, readily accepted this proposition and, even more, seemed to assume the the horse, in its quiet knowing, could in some way understand human language.

Now a skeptical part of me rose up with some energy, and was somewhat surprised at the eagerness and willingness of the group, in full chorus, to "project" human meaning onto the horse's every quiver, snort and movement. Yet, at the same time, I was also aware that lovely things were happening that were winning my heart. So there was some way in which I was divided.

For me a special part of the experience was how I resolved this tension within me.

For instance, one of the few other men in the workshop was in the pen. He started to speak of his difficulties, in his personal life, with expressing love and gentleness, due to feelings of awkwardness and vulnerability. He spoke of a desire to express more love in his life. While he was speaking these things, a humming bird suddenly flew up, paused beside his ear, and then flitted away.

The workshop leader assured the group that this was no coincidence, that the hummingbird is a known symbol of love. "Nature," the leader affirmed, was responding to support this man and the feelings of his heart. She knew so from long experience. She had done nearly 5,000 of these horse-consultations, and it was clear to her that the things that happened were not accidents, but actual responses to the energy of the person in the pen.

I felt moved by the man in the pen; I felt skeptical of the leader's words.

Then there was another incident. While the same man stood in the pen with the horse, the workshop participants were invited to share what they had noticed, and what they had seen and felt during his time in the pen. I decided to say something.

(By the way, it's relevant to say that some people earlier in the workshop had wondered aloud if there was some competitiveness going on between the fellow in the pen and myself — this was after, early on during a different group exercise a horse had spontaneously came running up to me, and this man had later said in a debrief that he had felt jealous of me, but also that he had afterwards imitated my approach to the horses).

 In front of the group, I told the man that I had felt quite moved by his words about wanting to express love, and that what he had spoken had inspired in me feelings of support, admiration and affection. — Just at that moment, in the near distance, a beautiful snowy white egret came upon the scene and flew, slowly and majestically stroking its long wings, across our field of vision! A woman spoke up about how fitting it was that nature had given this lovely sign, just at this moment of the expression of love between two men. It certainly marked that moment as special.

I looked at this whole scene: - The lone individuals going into the pen, revealing their vulnerability, their aspirations and their yearnings in front of all. - The group of mostly women, seated as spectators, each of them striving to be caring and supportive, each of them wanting love and kindness to win the day, as intensely as fervent sports fans root for their team to win a game. - The beautiful landscape and the magnificent living creatures upon it.

I saw that I could choose skepticism, and doubt the interpretations that the group was making. Or, instead, I could decide that whether the interpretations were "true" or "not" was entirely beside the point. To doubt, to invoke the criterion of "fact or not fact," was to miss what was most important here.

Here was a community of people acting out of innate love and support for their members, and out of an innate sense of the beauty of nature. It was this loving intention that wove the whole scene together into stories of compassion, hope and care.

This little community was taking every opportunity to capture their care, for fellow people and for nature, in signs, symbols and happenings that could be shared and remembered among everyone. And because they had been made into stories, and shared, they marked the moments as special for a long time after.

I was reminded of certain ancient texts, where the poets would freely speak about gods and signs in the natural world interwoven into the human drama.

The Current Money Crisis - Taking the Conversation Deeper

Nearly all of the discussions I hear about the government's budget crisis and the country's growing wealth inequality omit what is probably the most fundamental consideration of all: What is money's ultimate origin? How does it get into the economy in the first place?

We are hard up for cash to fund critically important public needs like education, healthcare and economic infrastructure. Huge numbers of people with sharp minds, strong hands and good hearts are ready to do needful work -- but they can't get a job because cash is scarce. And yet nobody stops to consider where money actually comes from.

It's an important question, in part because core economic growth and job creation are funded with newly-created money, never with pre-existing dollars. In those strong economic periods that we've all experienced, money was being created in huge amounts to fund the growth and to keep things running at the expanded capacity. But where was all the new money coming from? The answer will surprise most people. What's more, even though the answer is in fact very simple, it goes so contrary to unquestioned assumptions that it takes most people some time to overcome the initial disbelief and to understand how it really works.

When I came to understand a few simple technical details about how money is created under today's monetary system, my entire framework for thinking about money was transformed. Slowly, the ramifications of this new understanding began to branch in many directions. Wonderful visions began to sprout in my mind -- I began to imagine new possibilities for unleashing all the good energy in this country, so much of it misdirected or underutilized, to serve the public good. I began to see the possibility of a world where there was no shortage of funding for the things that mattered most to the health of our society and environment.

HOW MONEY IS CREATED - A SIMPLE TECHNICAL FACT THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR THINKING

Here’s the technical fact about where actually money comes from, followed by a brief explanation of why it's so important to understand. What I am about to tell you is not a secret. It's publicly available knowledge, even described in some old, out-of-print pamphlets published by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the U.S. Congress (some cited in my list of references below). Yet even though this knowledge has technically speaking been available for decades, very few people have had the slightest inkling of why it had any importance. It's worth remembering that the modern banking system is something relatively new and, as with so many new technologies, it was "pushed upon us" before we understood the alternatives or the consequences, without the benefit of thorough-going public discussion, and before we had learned to use or regulate it wisely. Public thinking still hasn't caught up to the banking system yet. The "esoterics" of economic talk have obscured the simple underlying truths. But awareness and understanding is growing today, as the citations below attest.

So here comes the simple fact I've been talking about. If it doesn't make you perk up with interest, it should. Don't leave this page until the importance of what I'm saying starts to dawn on you:

Under our current “fractional reserve banking system”--created in 1913 with the establishment of the Federal Reserve system--the United States money supply today is entirely created by private banks when they make loans. (The actual printing of physically-circulated paper money on government printing presses is irrelevant; it’s entirely secondary to this process of money-creation by banks.)

That's it. All money in circulation today is created by private bank loans.

Now you are probably either curious, startled, confused, skeptical or ready to go to sleep. Assumuing you're at least still awake, you might be asking, "How can this be?" or "What difference does that make?" or "What exactly are you saying?" What I'm saying, in short, is this:

When you “borrow” money--to buy a house, for example--the bank does NOT go to some reserve stash of dollars and lend you pre-existing money they have in their vault. No. The money that is “lent” to you in truth gets created by the bank out of thin air.

Confused? If so, part of your confusion probably stems from the fact that the term “loan” is a total misnomer. Money isn't really "loaned" when you take a loan. It's created. It's created simply through an accounting mechanism: the amount “loaned” is entered into your deposit account, and an equal amount is entered into the bank’s corresponding account as a new “asset,” i.e. what you owe the bank (plus accruing interest).

That’s the technical mechanism I'm talking about. All the money in circulation, with the exception of the metal coins minted by the government, comes into existence through this mechanism of bank loans.

Of course, there is more to the story. For instance, there are restraints on just how much money the banks can create--this is where the "fractional reserve" rules come into play. But none of the pieces that I am leaving out affect this one fundamental fact: the fact that all the money that exists today is created through the loans that banks make. (Many more details, and reliable sources verifying what I have said so far, can be found in the books, pamphlets and videos I list at the end of this blog.)

Assuming you can absorb this crucial fact, which may or may not seem a little mind-bending, you are ready to understand why this money-creation mechanism is much more than a mere technical detail, and is of such enormous consequence for the public well-being.

ALTERNATIVES HAVE EXISTED IN MODERN INDUSTRIAL NATIONS

First, it’s useful to understand that it doesn’t have to be the way it is today. Although today’s “debt-based” system is the way money-creation now works all around the world, robust, alternative methods of money creation have in the past existed in the United States, Canada and elsewhere, funding energetic economies that gave people meaningful work and built schools, hospitals, roads, etc., without creating inflation or painful boom/bust cycles. Under the alternative system I am here referring to, money was created not by banks, but by the government itself, and it was created, not as loans tied to debts, but as money existing independently of debt that was spent into existence to fund public projects.

Such a system of government-issued money operated, for example, in Canada from the Great Depression until 1972, and in the United States, to take the most recent example, during the decades after Lincoln created the government-issued “Greenbacks” to fund the Civil War without going into debt to banks. Indeed, the alternative of government-issued paper currency is as American as apple pie: government-issued paper currency was an American invention. It paid for the American Revolution. Before the Revolution, the American Colonies had invented such money as a way of dealing with the extreme monetary scarcity imposed by England. It was on the basis of this American-government issued cash, the Colonies built prosperous economies and the foundation of American independence. Ironically, the current monetary system, based on private bank debt, was a later importation from England -- an importation, some argue, that made its way to our shores through rather nefarious means. The story of how the banks acquired the money power in the United States, even though the U.S. Constitution specifically reserves the nation's money-power to Congress, is a story worth reading.(For the Canadian system, see the Bill Abram's videos on You Tube; for dicussion of the Greenback currency and American monetary history generally, see Zarlenga and Brown. For the story on how bankers achieved the passing of the Federal Reserve Act that established the current system, see Rothbard.)

WHY IT MATTERS -- SOME DISASTROUS CONSEQUENCES OF THE CURRENT MONETARY SYSTEM

Why should we be interested in alternatives? Because the architecture of our monetary system has as profound consequences for the moral fabric and well-being of our society as does our culture or our politics. And because the present monetary system gives rise to many of the worst features of our current political-economic system, for example:

1) Under the current system private banks, by deciding where to make loans, decide the direction of the country’s primary energy and activity — Will they fund war industries? Housing bubbles? Environment-exploiting companies? The top 1% of earners? Or education, hospitals, roads and bridges, green technologies, and healthy democracy? To whom will the money be made available? Of course, banks choose to lend the money in whatever way will make them the highest return. Whatever the banks decide, that’s where the money will be, and the energy and action of the people will follow, because people need jobs. Will our national energy be dedicated primarily to achieving what the world most needs? Or instead to achieving the private-enrichment schemes of a very few? This decision is in the hands of those who have the money power. Today, that would be the world's private banks. Ever notice how much the financial sector has grown in comparison to all other sectors of industry over the past 100 years?

From the perspective of job-seekers, one result is that we are all generally constrained to line up for a job at the door of those whom the banks deem worthy. There are few jobs, and to take a high-paying one too often means working to achieve goals that are not necessarily in the best interest of all. A just monetary system, in contrast, would put all of the people into action in building the common well-being. Full employment should signify nothing more than mobilizing the available energy of every person in constructing the wonderful world that we all want. Our present monetary system instead funds the most powerful private interests, those who are best at exploiting others, and these folks, in the short term, benefit from high levels of unemployment that keep wages low.

2) Under the current system, if we the people (the public sector or government) need money, we must borrow it from the banks and pay the banks back with interest. This makes no sense. As Thomas A. Edison and others have realized, if the government can issue an IOU to the banks in return for money, it can just as well issue the money directly, without having to pay interest. (That's why Lincoln created the U.S. Greenback currency 150 years ago, to pay for the Civil War without having to put the government in debt to banks. It worked.) The current system presents an absurd situation where we have delegated the money-power to private interests, who then charge us a whopping price for the extraordinary privilege we (for the most part unknowingly) have granted to them. One disastrous consequence is that public projects cost us taxpayers a multiple of 3 to 5 times more than they need to, due to interest charges. Money needed for education, roads, hospitals could be many, many times more abundant, helping to secure our future prosperity for generations. Instead the money is in short supply.

3) Because under our system all money is created through "loans," more money is always owed than is actually created. Whether you look at an individual loan or the aggregate of all loans, the bank creates (i.e. "loans") x amount of dollars, and always demands back “x + interest.” In other words, as a structural necessity of the system, more money is always owed to banks than exists. This creates a situation of inherent scarcity and competition, with terrible moral and environmental effects, harming the social fabric and the ecosystem.

The only way for any person or business to pay its debts is to get money from others, which increases the general monetary scarcity and competition, and also means that some must by necessity go bankrupt. The current system places us all in competition with one another to get scarce money, supporting rapacious practices and fueling exploitation of the environment and of people.

Since the only way to expand the money supply is to borrow more money, this system locks our society onto a path of exponentially increasing growth-and-debt. It’s not an accident that people and governments have been accruing exponentially-growing debts over the past century.

This monetary system has its deep and pervasive psychological effect: at some level we are all vaguely aware, even if we don't understand the reasons why, that there is not enough money to go around. This breeds fear and cynicism in the culture generally and in our individual psyches: the fear that any one of us could fall victim and discover ourselves in abject poverty (the system as structured requires that some must go penniless), and the cynicism that the law of the world is tooth and claw, with individuals ultimately out for themselves alone. It doesn't have to be this way at all. The goodness still left in our hearts, and the hope we hold out for a different future, derives from a past when things were different.

MONETARY REFORM & INNOVATION -- FINDING SOLUTIONS TO SUPPORT HUMAN WELL-BEING GLOBALLY

Our world can’t shift its current unsustainable course without radically reforming the monetary system. It's an essential piece of the puzzle.

I am aware of one movement for radical reform at the national level, and thousands of movements at the local level. At the local level, new community currencies are helping to relieve communities from their dependency on conventional, bank-controlled money, and to provide new ways of unleashing local, self-directed energies and capabilities. There are many varieties and experiments with local currencies going on today — some are only extensions of the current system; others hold the promise of creating something truly new and exciting. There are even glimmers of possible new exchange mediums that, some think, could even eventually replace money as I have spoken of it altogether.

At the national level, the reform effort of most interest to me is the one being pushed by the American Monetary Institute and Stephen Zarlenga, in alliance with Dennis Kucinich.

REFERENCES

I hope you're interest is piqued and that you'll enjoy learning more. Here are a number of books, videos and authors who treat some or all of the things I’ve been discussing. Stop by again and tell me about what you're learning.

1. Stephen Zarlenga, The Lost Science of Money. See Zarlenga's American Monetary Institute for additional publications and links. (See: www.monetary.org)
2. Ellen Brown, The Web of Debt (See: http://www.webofdebt.com/)
3. Bill Abram on Canada’s Banking System, parts 1-4 on YouTube
- Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jghiU55O5eY
- Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyHpaHo71mQ
- Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ixeDP5LEEQ
- Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtretltL3I
4. Robert de Fremery, Rights vs. Priveleges.
5. Bernard Lietauer, The Future of Money.
6. Paul Grignon, Videos (available on YouTube):
- “Money as Debt,” parts 1 & 2;
- Website: www.moneyasdebt.net
7. Murray N. Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed.
8. Thomas Greco, The End of Money.
9. Peter North, Local Money.
10. "A Primer on Money: Subcommittee on Domestic Finance, Committee on Banking and Currency", [Wright Patman (Texas), Chair], House of Representatives, 88th Congress, 2d Session, August 5, 1964. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1964.
11. Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. (Online at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Modern_Money_Mechanics)

______________________________

Marc Tognotti, Ph.D.,
Co-Director, Institute of the Commons
http://www.iotc-hub.org
E: marc@iotc-hub.org