A Blog in Which I indulge Certain Philosophic Notions

I have been told that a blog must be interactive and visually entertaining. I really have no idea how to properly design the present blog. I am afraid it is too textual and abstract to create in mind a specific image or video clip. There is this however, which has nothing to do, (I hope), with what follows.

This blog is one wherein I become rather abstract and heavily philosophical. Please disregard the more unwelcome tones that come with such talk. Instead, dear reader, follow my words more for their content, with an open mind, and always subject to revision.

The following paragraphs or notes are experimental meditations. They are meant to be candid, honest, and forthright. I am going to state a few assertions wherein I make rather clear where I stand on some matters of great and minor consequence, the purpose of which is to open dialogue and, in the process, find out what we all truly believe, free from cant, conformity and compromise.

I do not believe the world is "one". I am not a holist. I am aware that holism is the default faith these days of most people, but that is but an inconvenience for me and is no evidence in its favor. I do not believe in a single unitary system that can be labeled and understood as such.

This puts me at odds with both the political right and left. The Right thinks there is simply a traditional body of wisdom which we ignore at our peril: to ignore the verities is to invite ruin. The Left condemns the present because it is run by some overarching oppressive system that goes by several names: patriarchy or capitalism and so on. Both Left and Right think the world is more rational (or more irrational, if one aims to condemn) than it really is.

In truth one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing.

Lest I am misunderstood: I am not saying that there aren't connections between things and there aren't meanings to be drawn from such connections as that word (meaning) is normally understood. I am merely saying there is not a single center in charge, not an apex where everything works out, whether in a literal conclusion, in the fullness of time - neither in an Utopian rebirth or renewal, nor an apocalyptic end. All previous attempts at such understanding are hampered by a kind of presumptuous holism.

Moreover, I believe individual temperament and character complicates, compromises and evades the powers of any existing system. This refusal of the prefabricated and the alternative drive to play and disrupt, is what any poet does who sets down to write, or any creative artist does who sets out to make their object. The Abstract Expressionists alone showed this when they did things with flat colored canvas. Proust did it in prose. If you are aware of Albertine and company (in Proust) as fulfilling habits and fashions of their time you are comprehending but the smallest part of that great novel. To be sure, the context and milieu is there, but Proust begins exactly after such matters end. Put another way, though The Dreyfuss Affair figures in the narrative in Proust, you would be mistaken to think that novel to be in some sense "about" that particular political controversy in France.

For any example I may be given of how a human being is made by an impersonal structure that predates their existence, whether it be familial or political, or biological, to say nothing of metaphysical, I am fully prepared to offer disproof in the form of inconvenient facts. Please give me your examples. I shall take on all comers.

If it is true that we do not live in a world that is unitary then questions of theodicy become moot. We can understand evil as so many defects within a larger whole. We can see goodness as so many bright spots that come and go but never stay around for long. We praise the heavens when brightness comes and are thankful, but we know that it can't continue indefinitely. Just as we cannot say that there is an essential goodness from which we come and to which we must return, likewise, we cannot excuse evil as a grand growing pain along the road to full maturity. We must condemn evil. It is insufficient to explain it away as a metaphor or illusion borne of our shortsighted blindness. (The mistake of certain Christian and New Age Pollyanism). We are not essentially any one thing: we are many things. These many things do not necessarily add up to a rational and logical whole.

Lest I be misunderstood: don't mistake the foregoing conclusion for "nihilism". Meaning and value does not have to add up to a whole to be meaningful and valuable. Conviction that nihilism is the logical result without a central authority or totality is a historical mistake borne of many traditions: for example, Platonism and Judeo-Christianity in the West.

We have invented things like the Internet and Facebook because we have a craving to merge, to make our belief in the"one" a physical and even spiritual reality. We believe in it so much that, if we see no evidence for it in our lives, we have a compulsion to create it, or at least a virtual form of it. We cannot bear the possibility that we are not one. We do not love our separateness enough. For it is in fact our separateness that makes our life interesting. The Internet will one day prove to make our life truly boring. The dream of essential unity is a totalitarian dream.

If we could truly love our differences without becoming at all like the other from whom we differ, without having to "learn from it", but just to love it, with the full knowledge that the difference must surely serve some need for which we are insufficiently aware - only then could we begin to live together as individuals without SYMPTOMATICALLY living as a whole. (This is what the Internet is: a symptomatic defense against the truth and beauty of our separateness.) Separation has a negative connotation because we identify it with violence and vivisection, with alienation and loneliness.

The main art we have lost, an art at which the 18th century excelled, is the art of DISINTERESTEDNESS. To be disinterested it to be someone for whom nothing human is alien.

What I am putting forth here was relatively and generally known to the American Transcendentalists. Unfortunately their wisdom was lost in the triumph of the social sciences in general and Marxism in particular. All of our current theories are system theories. Functionalism, cognitivism, Radical (as opposed to Liberal) feminism, Marxism, and the fashionable anarcho-primitivism are similar systems.

Here is (one admittedly extreme) example of how systems reason: the world was good when we hunted and gathered but, alas, then we fell and created this awful civilization of ours. That civilization inevitably created the automobile as it can only make the worst and most wasteful choices.

The same can be said for the other systems. Today psychology is such a system. Humans have these inevitable stages in which they pass through. A teenager is supposed to do such and such, likewise a mature adult. There is appropriate and inappropriate behavior for every stage. This is systematic thinking.

Lest I be misunderstood: I am not denying there is something particular and even required in being a child, a teen, and so on. It is simply that we make too much out of it, and place too much store by it. But it is to deny making a dogma out of such a commonplace fact.

At its worst, systems theory can result in conspiratorial paranoia. There is THE MAN out to get me and he and his system must be destroyed. There is our safe haven of goodness and those outsiders aren't to be trusted.

A theory that posits but one world is a world-denying theory. It denies what is most irreplaceable and mysterious in us: the existence of an unaccounted for Being and Soul. Or, if it tries to account for such mystery it reduces is to a vacuous, ever receding unity.

The major problem in culture today is what I would call cults and cultism. Cults don't have to be religious, they can be interpersonal in nature. There are thousands of cults today: political, psychological, national, familial, (think of domestic violence). The cult view of life, not conceiving of a genuine freedom from systematic thinking, wants to impose, through act of will, a better system to replace the evil one that is the status quo. But in so doing, a cult just reinforces our deep attachment to oneness and unity. Cultic thinking also attempts to dominate others in order to make them either confirm or deny, or destroy or defend a system.

Cults then may be a metaphor or an image for what happens when we deny the marvelous prickly individuality that exists at any given time. Such freedom of spirit shows that in the whole, if we must admit that there is a whole, there is at the very least, room to roam.

We humans are curious: we are local and global; we have universal desires and the most excruciatingly divergent ways of expressing those desires. VIVA LA DIFFERENCE should be our slogan again. As long as, of course, nobody is hurting others.

Finally, believing the world is one won't save us from war. We go to war when we refuse others space to find their own way. We go to war to impose a false unity. We don't go to war because we forget how much we are all truly alike. Rather, we go to war because we have not yet made peace with the manifestations of our differences. We have to BEGIN from an assumption of difference. We could discuss our differences without seeing them as so many threats. To look for an underlying or overarching sameness when difference is apparent, to view difference as but a superficial mask under which hides an ultimate unity is to only belittle and underestimate the values people hold dear. This alleged "unity" is too fragile and flimsy a basis on which to create dialogue. Let us at most admit we are all human and then get down to cases.

The kinds of things to which we cling so that we may deny difference and prevent conflict are also the most trivial things about us: our wish to avoid pain for example, or our need to survive. There is an atavistic need to hold to such things as if they were mystical touchstones.

Stephen Prothero in his new book GOD IS NOT ONE: The EIGHT RIVAL RELIGIONS THAT RUN THE WORLD - AND WHY THEIR DIFFERENCES MATTER makes essentially the same argument but in the world of religious belief. He wants us to not yield to the temptation to find underlying unity to all of the worlds' faiths. Rather, one faith's incompatibility with and exclusiveness from the others is more to the point. He rightfully reasons that we would have less conflict in the world if we did not project onto others our visions and translate others' beliefs into another version of our own.

One book recommendation is perhaps one too many in these busy days of ours, especially if you have read this far, but I do recommend this new book by religious scholar Stephen Prothero. It applies to much more than religion.

See also:

http://www.naturalism.org/OffSite_Stored_Pages/WQ-RORTY.htm

Thanks for your patience.

My Childhood in the 1970s Part Seven: Psychology

Some of my memories are quite jumbled. Indeed, some of them may not fall strictly under the province that we call the 1970s. But if we keep to historian Bruce Schulman's "long 70s", which extends until roughly 1984, we are well within appropriate boundaries. However, the concepts of both appropriateness and boundaries are thoroughly fashionable and contemporary and as such have no place in my thinking today. It is in that spirit that these blogs are written.

I went to a child psychologist for a few months. I do not remember exactly why I went, whether it was an incident on my part, a complaint from the parents of my classmates, or a note from a teacher or principal.

Reflection upon what might have motivated this rash decision makes me think of that Christian Junior High in which I did time for a year. The inciting event may very well have been my decision to beat up that boy who physically molested a girl. What disturbed people was my ruthless relish in beating the poor kid up. I really enjoyed taking out that boy: I felt as if I were stamping out evil personified. I had thought I was defending the girl's honor, (the boy, after all, had taken his hand and groped her crotch in a most untoward fashion), but in the end my "handling" of his misbehavior only made me lonely and alienated from the whole school. Other kids were sort of afraid of me, as if what I did to that boy was far worse than anything that girl might have felt in response to his predations. (It hadn't been the first time he bothered her).

The other controversy I started was when I protested the school's decision to segregate the sexes and have the boys play basketball and the girls rake leaves. Freshly inspired by my early love Carla's example, I openly proclaimed myself a "feminist" decried what I called the chauvinism of the school. Neither girls (who were just as happy to not have to play basketball) nor boys supported my "political activism".

The other memorable moment from that wretched school involved the teacher for Bible study. We had to have a whole class in which we read the entire Bible from what seemed to me to be a rather perverse perspective (talk about spoiling a good book!) The teacher in question was Mrs. Perkins and after class she requested to see me. I was at first a little nervous so you can imagine my astonishment when she revealed her real purpose in seeing me after class. It was so that she could tell me about this great television show and how important it was that I see it so that I could see "Christ at work in the most unlikely of places". Above all, she spoke to me of her "love" for southern "character" actor Joe Don Baker.

Mrs. Perkins told me in a breathless exclamation "I love that man!" "He's one of our best living actors!"

Joe Don Baker, our best living actor? Mrs. Perkins was a fan of this rather dumb and short lived cop show he was in. She could barely contain her excitement, an excitement she never seemed to bring to our study of the scriptures. Her favorite part of this series was when the Baker character, a chief of detectives in New York City (!) would say to his "boys" when they cracked the case at the end of the show: "You done good. You done REAL good boys." With her flapping jowls, her pinched mouth and this suffocating polyester "jolly green giant" plaid pantsuit, Mrs. Perkins would use this phrase in class with increasing frequency, especially when someone recited a Bible passage with a certain feeling. She certainly never told me that "I done good."

Somehow though, with all of the trouble I was immersed in, (though as you can see the adults and teachers sometimes liked me), I landed in a psychologist's office. But this wasn't just any psychologist: he was a PSYCHIATRIST, which was supposedly a more "advanced" profession, one more scientific and trustworthy. Above all, what excited me about this psychiatrist was that, according to my father, he was Burt Reynold's psychiatrist (while we are on the subject of Southern actors).

The prospect of seeing Burt Reynold's shrink excited me because, when I wasn't enjoying the French cinema of Diane Kurys ( her PEPPERMINT SODA, which was a delightful coming of age film about girls that taught me much more vividly about menstruation than even Carla's pamphlets and talks) and Francois Truffaut (The "Doinel" films with Leaud) or the Italian cinema of late Fellini (especially ROMA and THE CLOWNS), I was enjoying those commercial yet odd American "Southern" comedies with Burt Reynolds like GATOR, WHITE LIGHTNING, and HOOPER. My interest in Burt Reynolds was part of my enjoyment of such "low" cinematic fare, especially comedies, more generally.

Sometimes the theater was as much of an attraction as the movie. I saw many of the Burt Reynolds movies in a dollar movie theater, a theater whose atmosphere was as close to an adult theater as a theater could get while still showing mostly GP (as it was labelled then) fare. On one occasion I witnessed a physical riot in the theater when TIDAL WAVE was shown with Lorne Greene. The film was so ineptly made, an incoherent pastiche of Japanese monster movie stock footage, nature documentary footage of storms, with intercutting of Lorne Greene looking angry and official. Eventually the "redneck" audience began throwing beer cans at the screen and demanding their money back, and yelling at the top of their lungs "R.O. Rip Off!" Worse yet, my father had joined in with the chanting as well. However, eventually my father had the good sense to pick me up and take me out of there unscathed.

But I always did enjoy the Burt Reynolds movies even though my parents disapproved of his movies. I liked the way he handled himself in situations and his general sense of humor about life. I think they disapproved of his movies mainly because they were so macho and Southern or "unintelligent", to use my mother's word. I did not feel then and I do not feel now that there is a realm of human life unsuitable to artistic form. The only question remaining was one of interest or quality which comes down in the end to STYLE. You might say that Reynolds himself had a certain style. I was always in the unenviable position of liking movies that were either too highbrow or too lowbrow. Movies that seemed to my parents a bit too extreme for comfort in some way. I might like movies with car chases and stupid jokes and movies in which people spoke in quite intricate and subtle conversations for half an hour at a time. The question ultimately is: is there something identifiable of life in it? An even better question is: do you learn something from it. Sometimes, as in the case of Burt Reynolds, pleasure in itself can be a form of knowledge.

Thus I was hopeful I might get to see Burt Reynolds in person. Would he be in the waiting room around the time I was?

It was not to be. I never got to meet Burt Reynolds. My father gave me explicit instructions not to mention Burt Reynolds because of something called "patient confidentiality". You can imagine how hard it was not to bring up Burt's name during the few sessions we had, not to ask Dr. Anderson details of Reynold's life and loves.

There was no Burt Reynolds but there was Bob Anderson my psychiatrist. The first thing I noticed about Anderson is that, like many larger than usual men, Anderson had the unfortunate habit of wearing his trousers too tight and too low, so that his gut only appeared larger than necessary and hung above his belt like a second belt. Being perceptually driven, it was hard to ignore that for some time.

When we started our sessions I also noticed that he had a free wheeling and associative style. The subject of sex and love came up and he told me that he was sure that "Jesus had sexual fantasies and masturbated".

This statement seemed unrelated to anything in the session that had previously come up. I was quite skeptical. How did Dr. Anderson know, since he wasn't there? It just couldn't be, I reasoned, that men's desires were the same in all times and places. Surely there were men who had no sexual interest whatsoever. My own parents seemed like that: they certainly appeared to have no sexual desire at all within themselves. Maybe Jesus was like my own parents. And if Jesus did have sexual fantasies what did that mean? Would Jesus have liked Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant, Farrah Fawcett Majors, and Jacklyn Smith the way that I did? (I had not yet discovered Jackie Bissett).

This was a far cry from the asexual image of Jesus that had been painted for me at the Christian Junior High. I cringed at the thought of how serious Christians may have felt in response to such an assertion, were they unlucky enough to find themselves among Anderson's patients and on his couch. I didn't really care for the sterile debates over whether Jesus was God or man or both. But I knew millions did care and that the world was not the easygoing liberal place Anderson and I wanted it to be.

I remember asking him why he bothered to marry his wife since at that time marriage seemed such an enigma to me. His answer was as puzzling as his biographical assertions about Jesus. "Well I fell in love with a few different women and decided to pick one and marry her". Of course we never got into what motivated his choice since, of course, the sessions were all about me. How many? Did he fall in love with them all at the same time, as I seemed to do with Lydia and Sally, or one after the other? And what did this falling in love mean anyhow?

I liked Dr. Anderson. I appreciated his free unorthodoxy and frankness, but I saw him more as a friend than someone who could really help me. The main reason we ended is that he didn't feel I needed his services. He arranged a session with my parents present and told them that "there was nothing wrong with me. I was an okay and bright boy."