Black Gold

The oil spill is the cruelest of ironies: a man-made natural disaster that is the result of our efforts to master nature.  For all of its gushing physical reality, it is even more psychically real.  The oil spill follows the first rule of psychic life, the return of the repressed.  The repressed content, what is unacceptable to modern humanity, is our helplessness in the face of nature.  Our conscious emphasis on the domination of nature is, of course, an enterprise fueled by oil.  So it comes as no surprise that the repressed content, human fragility, would gush out of the very place we go in order to master the natural world.

When a tsunami kills 100,000 we mourn our dead and move on with the project of subjugating the mass killer, perhaps even with renewed vigor and purpose.  But when the very weapon used to wage war on nature backfires in our face, the psychic fallout is devastating.  Because the oil spill doesn't just symbolize our fragile mortality with the image of slowly bleeding out from a wound that can't be staunched.  And it isn't even the fact that this wound was self-inflicted.  It's that this wound was self-inflicted by the very process intended to cure the disease. The oil spill is that quintessential late modern tragic figure, the kid who got autism from his vaccines.

By way of oil we thought we could divorce ourselves from nature.  But oil is a strict Catholic and doesn't believe in divorce.  The oil spill reminds us that we are bound to nature until death do us part.  And nature will tell us when we can part, thank you very much.  If BP doesn't stop outsourcing its efforts to Wile E. Coyote and Acme, that parting of ways might happen sooner rather than later.  When plans A,B,C,D,E and F don't work what can we expect out of Plan G?  I say it's time to bring in the psychics.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga


The theme of Adiga's The White Tiger is liberation. That Adiga's protagonist Balram achieves his liberation by way of the murder of his wealthy oppressor forces the reader to wrestle with the heaviest of ethical dilemmas. But the weight of all this is eased by Adiga's wicked black comedy. Apparently you can laugh while wondering how complicit you are in creating the conditions that force Balram to choose between murder and a life of naked servitude. I am lucky enough not to have to make Balram's choice, but does that make me one whom the Balrams of the world might need to kill?

River of Gods by Ian McDonald


Ian McDonald's River of Gods is fun because it takes us to a near-future India, but it is important because it tackles head-on one of the most important looming questions: what to do when machines become as smart, if not smarter, then us? River of Gods is an admirable addition to the canon of sci-fi projects which engage with man vs. machine, its most noteworthy predecessors being The Terminator and The Matrix films. Unlike those two, however, McDonald's tale is an optimistic one, holding out hope that the encounter between human and sentient machine may benefit both. Let's hope, then, that McDonald is as much prophet as novelist. Because if he's not, I'm betting on the machines. 

The Inevitable Disappointment of Weekends


Fridays are celebrated with unfailing consistency. Enter any workplace on a Friday and you will hear workers exuberantly voicing some version of Thank God It’s Friday. Ask a worker how she is doing on a Friday morning and she’ll say “It’s Friday,” knowing that this says it all. Most recently I’ve encountered “Happy Friday!”, as recognition of each Friday as a holiday unto itself deepens among the 9 to 5 set. Friday is the force that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together, to borrow a phrase; the love of Friday crosses all boundaries of race, class, gender, etc. Friday is universal.

But on Monday ask the co-worker who on Friday danced a jig at the water cooler how his weekend went and you will get a resigned “It was too short.” Even if you are regaled with tales of midnight love or Sunday morning spiritual breakthroughs, you will get an “it went by too fast” somewhere in the narrative flow. The would-be perfect weekend is never long enough, and is at best bittersweet. So we find ourselves in an absurdly repeating loop of always feeling unsatisfied by what we are always looking forward to. Every Friday we are Charlie Brown trusting that this time Lucy will really hold the football long enough for us to kick it, and every Monday morning we are Charlie Brown lying flat on our backs wondering how we fell for it again. Of course, by Friday we’ll be lining up for that kick again.

The unfailing beauty of Friday morning is in the way the whole weekend stretches out before us with pregnant fullness. It is this fullness that infuses us with joy throughout the Friday workday. The weekend is close enough to taste as we float through our Friday labors, and we taste it in its unadulterated fullness, for not a precious second of weekend leisure has yet been burned. Just as the 1960’s really occurred in the 70’s, the weekend really occurs after hump day on Thursday and Friday, in the sense that any joy truly contained in the weekend occurs on Thursday and Friday. The weekend’s only pleasure is that of anticipation. Fun may indeed be had on Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday, but this fun is divorced from the disappointment inherent to every weekend, the disappointment expressed by the eternal “It was too short.” The weekend’s true identity is freedom from work. This is why the weekend is celebrated on Thursday and especially Friday, when the weekend is fully intact as a 64 hour interlude between shifts. The moment the actual weekend begins on Friday evening the weekend as respite instantly begins to wane. Actual weekends are essentially an experience of loss, in that the freedom represented by the weekend shrinks palpably moment by moment; as soon it comes into our possession we begin to lose it. This sense of loss peaks on Sunday afternoons, renowned for their glaring melancholy, a sadness perhaps best captured as sung by Morrissey: “Every day is like Sunday, every day is cloudy and gray.”

The enormous and bulletproof popularity of professional football has more than a little to do with the fact that its games are largely played on Sunday afternoons in the fall and winter. Shrinking daylight matches shrinking weekends, casting a pall so grim that in comparison the escapist fantasy world of the National Football League glows with life giving warmth, each bone crushing collision reminding us that life will go on even as the weekend dies at our feet.

The only thing that goes by faster than a weekend is summer break. For students, June, July, and August last about a day and a half. For teachers it is less than an hour and a half. But that last week of school in early June, with an entire summer stretching out before her, is the happiest week in a teacher’s life. Heaven, in fact, is Friday during the last week of school. Hell gets a little closer every second thereafter.

Big Mac, Large Fries, and an Extra Large Reincarnation


In his excellent Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor notes the ironic core of the increasing belief in reincarnation among Americans (25% of Americans now believe in reincarnation, per http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,99945,00.html ). In traditional Indian culture reincarnation was viewed as a failure; each reincarnation signaled the individual’s failure to achieve the ultimate goal: liberation from the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. This traditional understanding of reincarnation regards earthly existence as, at best, a great place to visit, but by no means the final destination. More to the point, it is a place to work out one’s karma, usually with a great deal of suffering. Earth as a place of suffering is at the heart of the traditional conception of reincarnation. In contrast, as Batchelor explains, contemporary Americans’ belief in reincarnation is fueled by a desire for more, not less, of earthly existence American style (not so sure they’re interested in reincarnating in what we used to call the Third World). Americans who believe in reincarnation want to come back. We are like the two year old for whom you just cranked the jack-in-the box the umpteenth time, only for us to shout “Again!” Reincarnation is the same in name only; somehow, for Americans who believe in reincarnation, the grass is no longer greener on the other side of death.

Before considering why America has reinvented reincarnation, it is important to note that traditional Indian culture is not alone in its stance towards life in this vale of tears. Christianity, natch, wants off the island, too: “Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in heaven. (Matthew 5:12)” There are an infinite variety of takes on eternal life in the heavenly kingdom, but it is safe to say that everyday life in 2010 America is not a version. For Christians, the real world is but a prelude for what follows, which of course has implications for the reality we inhabit. Reality is never more than a first step, whether towards reward in heaven, or damnation in hell. This is a nice solution for the problems of evil and suffering, which, as in India, are the definitive aspects of this place we call home. A home from which Christians and Indians, whether by way of heaven or by exiting the cycle of rebirth stage right, just want out.

If the dominant spiritual tradition in America regards earthly incarnation in much the same fashion as the Indians traditionally have, then whence this mutant American strain of reincarnation? There is one seemingly reasonable explanation as to why Americans have transformed reincarnation from a necessary step towards departure into an infinite series of arrivals. The average American enjoys material improvements in living conditions undreamt of for nearly all of human history. The relative ease and comfort enjoyed by Americans has perhaps fundamentally altered the experience of life on Earth such that those who experience this Earth 2.0 are lining up to sign on for another tour of duty. In short, the presence of e.g. Dunkin’ Donuts in our lives empowers us all to echo Nietzsche and say “Yes to life!”

The problem with this explanation is that the joys of shopping at Walmart and/or Saks Fifth Avenue only run so deep; scratch the surface and you will find as much misery in America today as you’d likely find in any other time and place. If suicide is any indicator of net misery then the following from Wikipedia kills the joyful reincarnation theory: “According to 2005 data, suicides in the U.S. outnumber homicides by nearly 2 to 1 and ranks as the 11th leading cause of death in the country, ahead of liver disease and Parkinson's. Worldwide suicide rates have increased by 60% in the past 50 years, mainly in the developing countries.” Material wealth, if anything, seems to have made us more miserable, which makes American reincarnation even stranger. We don’t seem to be jumping for joy, in contrast to what our version of belief in reincarnation would lead one to believe. We just watch TV, surf the web, go shopping, and slurp corn syrup to get through the day (the average American spends 151 hours per month watching TV, or 5 hours per day, 68 hours per month on the internet, just over 2 hours per day, and consumes 37.8 pounds of corn syrup annually; the average American woman takes 301 shopping trips for a total of 399 hours annually). And most of us get to do this a few years longer than our ancestors suffered through e.g. life before corrective eyewear. But we’ve always had wine, women, and song, and not a one of our manufactured consolations can top that. Not to mention that our material wealth giveth and taketh away in equal portions: there is a traffic jam for every luxury car, a sexually transmitted disease for every birth control pill, to mention but two of my favorite inventions.

We are as miserable as ever; you could make a case that we have gotten better at distracting ourselves from the misery, but these distractions weave their own unique web of desolation. And still, Americans want more, as if life were like the bottomless fries at Red Robin. Our many versions of bottomless fries are a good place to start if we wish to understand what may be at the heart of American reincarnation. Americans treat the world like a bottomless basket of fries, when there are only so many spuds to go around. According to a fun game on the web at http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/, if everyone in the world consumed as much as I do, it would take 4.1 Earths to provide the necessary resources. I am an American, I am eating the world, and I too have been increasingly looking forward to some reincarnation. This is all connected.

To understand why, let’s revisit Freud’s theory of the death instinct. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud explains “that all instincts tend towards the restoration of an earlier state of things.” Following this logic, “inanimate things existed before living ones,” so “the aim of all life is death.” Ergo, the death instinct. Almost no one takes the death instinct seriously, which of course reflects the fact that almost no one takes his or her inevitable deaths seriously. But Freud’s greatest psychoanalytic successor, Jacques Lacan, did, and it is to his understanding of the death instinct and its role in human enjoyment that we must turn to fathom American reincarnation. To understand how Lacan can help us tease out the meaning of American reincarnation we must first introduce his concept of jouissance. Per Wikipedia, jouissance is a form of pleasure that is in opposition to our normal understanding of the term: “The pleasure principle, according to Lacan, functions as a limit to enjoyment: it is the law that commands the subject to 'enjoy as little as possible'. At the same time the subject constantly attempts to transgress the prohibitions imposed on his enjoyment, to go beyond the pleasure principle. Yet the result of transgressing the pleasure principle, according to Lacan, is not more pleasure but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this 'painful principle' is what Lacan calls jouissance. (Dylan Evans). Thus jouissance is suffering.” (for this quote see http://www.answers.com/topic/jouissance ) The precise connection between the death instinct and Lacan’s theory of jouissance is too abstruse for consideration here (for a concise description see http://www.answers.com/topic/death-instinct-thanatos ), but the key insight is that, due to the death instinct, we experience jouissance, that insatiable urge to overdo it. Thus, the bottomless fries.

If we take the death instinct seriously, as I believe we must, then we must be prepared, as Freud was, to follow the logic to its necessary conclusion and see if that conclusion matches the reality we see before us. So, here goes. If Freud is correct and there is “an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things,” by “becom(ing) inorganic once again”, then I see no more efficient means for the Earth as an interconnected organism to achieve this goal then by way of its human components’ consumption of mass quantities. The death instinct is driving us to literally eat the Earth back to an inorganic state. Does this seemingly bizarre formulation agree with the facts on the ground? I would suggest that the potential for an environmental apocalypse of human origins argues in its favor.

From this perspective, reincarnation American style is an expression of jouissance. Not content with doing our part to enjoy the pain of Earth’s annihilation just once, we shout “again!” Americans believe in reincarnation because of the instinctual drive for excess, and what is more excessive than using up four planets’ worth of resources not once, but until the job of killing this one planet is done? America is the ultimate “expression of the conservative nature of living substance,” (emphasis Freud’s) in the sense that we are at the vanguard of achieving the “final goal of all organic striving,” i.e. death. American reincarnation, then, is just reenlisting in the decisive march.

Perhaps the Indians and Christians are onto something when they consider the earth a place of suffering. Treating the earth as a place of excessive pleasure turns out to be in service of a death instinct that is leading us ever closer to the abyss; jouissance makes us lemmings, only we’re taking everybody and everything with us over the cliff. A return to suffering may just save us all. It may seem crazy to suggest that exercising a modicum of restraint at life’s various buffet tables would equate to suffering, but things have gotten so out of whack in late consumerist culture that for us Yanks the suggestion that we curtail our gorging is oddly anathema. But I’d like my children’s children to enjoy some French fries too, so one serving of fries will have to do. Okay, two servings.