Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Take out the papers and the trash (in the same trash bag)
Nothing assuages the guilt of consuming mass quantities like putting a heaping bin of recyclables out by the curb for pick up, secure in the knowledge that one’s assortment of Suave family-size shampoo bottles, Diet Mountain Dew two-liters, Prego jars (It’s in there!), and all the sundry paraphernalia of comfortable modern living are not headed to the landfill, and are, as such, surgically excised from one’s conscience. And this is exactly why, if you hope to save the Earth, you must stop recycling RIGHT NOW. Step away from the government-issued blue plastic recycling bin, and put the empty can of Manwich down (sidebar to my wife: how ’bout some sloppy joes, hon?).
Because recycling ultimately has nothing to do with saving the Earth, and everything to do with guilt. Recycling is, at its core, a response to the guilt accrued by those participating in the aggressiveness of industrialized, consumerist lifestyles. A few words from Freud will help us to grasp the link between recycling, guilt, and the human aggressive drive. As to aggression, Freud stipulated in his clearest philosophical work, Civilization and Its Discontents, that aggression is the gravest challenge facing humanity: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” (p. 154) Today this aggression most prominently manifests under the cover of everyday life, in the form of a consumerism that is entrenched and pathological. Unchecked, this consumerism threatens to transform us into the Uroboros; we will literally eat ourselves until we are gone. Of course, the Uroboros traditionally symbolizes the beginning of a new cycle, or re-creation. The risk we now take is that the re-creation will be an Earth without humans, or at least, without human civilization.
Fortunately for us humans, there is a psychic mechanism, guilt, which acts as a brake on the destructive bent of the aggressive drive: “The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains a mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” (p.121) Or, perhaps, not so fortunately, as the nature of this mechanism, guilt, led Freud to remark: “What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself!” (p.151) For Freud, the price we pay for civilization, this constant torment of guilt, constant in the sense that one is punished by the superego as much for one’s thoughts as one’s actions, is criminally high. But in lieu of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max lifestyle, I’ll keep my civilization and happily pay the guilt bill.
So, how to keep the civilization? We, meaning those of us in the industrialized west, must simply consume radically less. Of course, this message is already out there, and the statistics supporting it are easy to find on a variety of websites. Just one example among many, greenlivingtips.com reports that “12 percent of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60 percent of private consumption.” Put simply, no matter what else we do about climate change, population growth and other assorted dangers, it won’t matter a bit if industrialized, consumerist peoples do not radically reduce their rates of consumption. If we don’t consume very much less, we will die, or our children or their children will.
So we should all be recycling, right? Recycling means that less stuff gets consumed, which has to be a good thing if the path to salvation is by way of consuming less stuff. The catch is that recycling impacts our pathological urge to consume in the wrong direction, by “liberating” the aggressive drive from its natural keeper, guilt. Of late recycling has been linked in a triad formula of reduce-reuse-recycle, which begins to acknowledge the limitations of recycling alone. But those limitations are not the real problem with recycling, or reducing and reusing for that matter. Our way of life, and recycling’s true relationship to that way of life, are the real problem. That way of life depends upon constantly increasing consumption, and we have stepped up to the plate like Barry Bonds on steroids. One example plucked from many: from 1973 to 1993 per capita consumption in the United States rose 45%, according to John Cunniff in the Seattle Times on 9/19/93. Continuing the engorgement could not occur without recycling.
We know that we are killing the Earth by consuming it. Al Gore is here to make sure we know this. The dykes holding back aggressiveness have burst under a tidal wave of consumption. This onslaught of aggression in the guise of shopping and eating has triggered our natural response, guilt. The burst in recycling of recent years, according to treehugger.com only 23% of Americans now don’t recycle (a number they still find appallingly high), is representative of nothing else but a seismic shockwave of guilt. We are killing the planet and we know it, but instead of changing our way of life we deal with our guilt by putting our recycling on the curb. Recycling is but a ruse to fool the superego, thereby extinguishing the psychic pain of guilt. Of course, the price of fooling the superego is preventing it from doing its job, which, sans recycling, would be to ramp up the guilt until we changed our destructive ways. But by recycling, we have pulled the wool over the eyes of the superego in order to have our cake and eat it too. But when the cake is gone there will be nothing left for anyone to eat. (In recycling, we are remarkably like the teenage female who engages in anal sex to avoid the guilt of losing her “virginity”. She, like us, is simply trying to fool her superego, yet she has engaged in a sexual act unrivaled in heat and intimacy, with all of the attendant physical and emotional consequences. In fooling her superego she has dispensed with the most effective prophylactic of all: guilt as guarantor of abstinence, or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.)
So enough with the recycling. If our way of life depends on consuming mass quantities, let’s figure out how to change our way of life. This kind of radical change won’t seem so radical in a few years when, to mix metaphors, it’s time to pay the environmental piper and the shit truly hits the fan. The sooner we start the less painful it will be, but there is going to be a great deal of pain, one way or the other. Let’s just hope that the pain is constructive, like anxiety from a guilty conscience. But I assure you I will feel no guilt tonight when I throw my can of Dr. Pepper in the regular trash bin.
Nothing assuages the guilt of consuming mass quantities like putting a heaping bin of recyclables out by the curb for pick up, secure in the knowledge that one’s assortment of Suave family-size shampoo bottles, Diet Mountain Dew two-liters, Prego jars (It’s in there!), and all the sundry paraphernalia of comfortable modern living are not headed to the landfill, and are, as such, surgically excised from one’s conscience. And this is exactly why, if you hope to save the Earth, you must stop recycling RIGHT NOW. Step away from the government-issued blue plastic recycling bin, and put the empty can of Manwich down (sidebar to my wife: how ’bout some sloppy joes, hon?).
Because recycling ultimately has nothing to do with saving the Earth, and everything to do with guilt. Recycling is, at its core, a response to the guilt accrued by those participating in the aggressiveness of industrialized, consumerist lifestyles. A few words from Freud will help us to grasp the link between recycling, guilt, and the human aggressive drive. As to aggression, Freud stipulated in his clearest philosophical work, Civilization and Its Discontents, that aggression is the gravest challenge facing humanity: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” (p. 154) Today this aggression most prominently manifests under the cover of everyday life, in the form of a consumerism that is entrenched and pathological. Unchecked, this consumerism threatens to transform us into the Uroboros; we will literally eat ourselves until we are gone. Of course, the Uroboros traditionally symbolizes the beginning of a new cycle, or re-creation. The risk we now take is that the re-creation will be an Earth without humans, or at least, without human civilization.
Fortunately for us humans, there is a psychic mechanism, guilt, which acts as a brake on the destructive bent of the aggressive drive: “The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains a mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” (p.121) Or, perhaps, not so fortunately, as the nature of this mechanism, guilt, led Freud to remark: “What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself!” (p.151) For Freud, the price we pay for civilization, this constant torment of guilt, constant in the sense that one is punished by the superego as much for one’s thoughts as one’s actions, is criminally high. But in lieu of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max lifestyle, I’ll keep my civilization and happily pay the guilt bill.
So, how to keep the civilization? We, meaning those of us in the industrialized west, must simply consume radically less. Of course, this message is already out there, and the statistics supporting it are easy to find on a variety of websites. Just one example among many, greenlivingtips.com reports that “12 percent of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60 percent of private consumption.” Put simply, no matter what else we do about climate change, population growth and other assorted dangers, it won’t matter a bit if industrialized, consumerist peoples do not radically reduce their rates of consumption. If we don’t consume very much less, we will die, or our children or their children will.
So we should all be recycling, right? Recycling means that less stuff gets consumed, which has to be a good thing if the path to salvation is by way of consuming less stuff. The catch is that recycling impacts our pathological urge to consume in the wrong direction, by “liberating” the aggressive drive from its natural keeper, guilt. Of late recycling has been linked in a triad formula of reduce-reuse-recycle, which begins to acknowledge the limitations of recycling alone. But those limitations are not the real problem with recycling, or reducing and reusing for that matter. Our way of life, and recycling’s true relationship to that way of life, are the real problem. That way of life depends upon constantly increasing consumption, and we have stepped up to the plate like Barry Bonds on steroids. One example plucked from many: from 1973 to 1993 per capita consumption in the United States rose 45%, according to John Cunniff in the Seattle Times on 9/19/93. Continuing the engorgement could not occur without recycling.
We know that we are killing the Earth by consuming it. Al Gore is here to make sure we know this. The dykes holding back aggressiveness have burst under a tidal wave of consumption. This onslaught of aggression in the guise of shopping and eating has triggered our natural response, guilt. The burst in recycling of recent years, according to treehugger.com only 23% of Americans now don’t recycle (a number they still find appallingly high), is representative of nothing else but a seismic shockwave of guilt. We are killing the planet and we know it, but instead of changing our way of life we deal with our guilt by putting our recycling on the curb. Recycling is but a ruse to fool the superego, thereby extinguishing the psychic pain of guilt. Of course, the price of fooling the superego is preventing it from doing its job, which, sans recycling, would be to ramp up the guilt until we changed our destructive ways. But by recycling, we have pulled the wool over the eyes of the superego in order to have our cake and eat it too. But when the cake is gone there will be nothing left for anyone to eat. (In recycling, we are remarkably like the teenage female who engages in anal sex to avoid the guilt of losing her “virginity”. She, like us, is simply trying to fool her superego, yet she has engaged in a sexual act unrivaled in heat and intimacy, with all of the attendant physical and emotional consequences. In fooling her superego she has dispensed with the most effective prophylactic of all: guilt as guarantor of abstinence, or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.)
So enough with the recycling. If our way of life depends on consuming mass quantities, let’s figure out how to change our way of life. This kind of radical change won’t seem so radical in a few years when, to mix metaphors, it’s time to pay the environmental piper and the shit truly hits the fan. The sooner we start the less painful it will be, but there is going to be a great deal of pain, one way or the other. Let’s just hope that the pain is constructive, like anxiety from a guilty conscience. But I assure you I will feel no guilt tonight when I throw my can of Dr. Pepper in the regular trash bin.
Dialectic of Enlightenment by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
One of the best pieces of pessimistic cultural theory you are likely to ever encounter. The entire work seethes with revulsion at the black hole of late capitalism, which the authors portray as draining meaning out of every human life sucked into its vacuum. But Adorno and Horkheimer are at the absolute peak of "it's all going to hell" brilliance with their chapter on the culture industry. Riffing primarily on the effects of film and radio, which they diagnose as instruments of mass conformity, one can only imagine their response to the all-pervasive media of our 21st Century cum electronic womb. A clear forerunner to later important works, such as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is a must read for anyone with even just a shred of doubt as to where this is all going.
One of the best pieces of pessimistic cultural theory you are likely to ever encounter. The entire work seethes with revulsion at the black hole of late capitalism, which the authors portray as draining meaning out of every human life sucked into its vacuum. But Adorno and Horkheimer are at the absolute peak of "it's all going to hell" brilliance with their chapter on the culture industry. Riffing primarily on the effects of film and radio, which they diagnose as instruments of mass conformity, one can only imagine their response to the all-pervasive media of our 21st Century cum electronic womb. A clear forerunner to later important works, such as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is a must read for anyone with even just a shred of doubt as to where this is all going.
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