Middle Class, We Hardly Knew Ye

I have been saving up my pennies to purchase a copy of Thomas Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. By all accounts, it is a game changing exposition of what Paul Krugman in his review of Picketty’s Capital calls “a second Gilded Age,” in which, again per Krugman, “the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/may/08/thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/)

Pope Francis essentially said “Amen!” with his recent Tweet that “Inequality is the root of social evil.”

And while Picketty and the Pope do the heavy intellectual and spiritual lifting, the New York Times runs articles titled “The Middle Class Is Steadily Eroding. Just Ask the Business World,” reporting the following:

“As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all… Investors have taken notice of the shrinking middle. Shares of Sears and J. C. Penney have fallen more than 50 percent since the end of 2009, even as upper-end stores like Nordstrom and bargain-basement chains like Dollar Tree and Family Dollar Stores have more than doubled in value over the same period.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/03/business/the-middle-class-is-steadily-eroding-just-ask-the-business-world.html?_r=0)

When French intellectuals, the Pope and corporate America are all in agreement, the game is up; politicians and pundits are, of course, mouthpieces for the burgeoning family dynasties and can, as such, be tuned out when considering whether the truth is not only out there, but, more importantly, ready at hand to, as the saying goes, set us free. So, as long as we are willing to set aside e.g. Newt Gingrich’s appearances on Crossfire on behalf of the oligarchy, in which he lambasts the idea of increasing the minimum wage, we can happily report that the scales are beginning to fall from our eyes, much as they are in regards to climate change. I am reminded of Mr. Beaver’s line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: “Aslan is on the move.” Except there is no Aslan, just us chickens. We chickens are on the move!

As we move forward, salvaging the middle class as a first step towards, dare I say it, a classless society, we will need to figure out how we allowed all of this to happen in the first place. I believe that it has a great deal to do with the interplay between thought and language. Along these lines, structuralism has elucidated the tendency in thought to mark off the world in pairs of binary opposites. In reconsidering these pairings, e.g. male and female, straight and gay, white and black, much good work has been done in demonstrating that the binary opposites are inevitably coded re: power; in each of the three examples power accrues to the former. But binary opposites do more than establish a rigid hierarchy. Notice that hewing strictly to the listed opposites leaves no intellectual space for, respectively, the transgender, bisexual, and mixed race folk among us. Binary opposites are just as much about exclusion as they are about domination.

This comes into focus when we consider the binary opposites rich and poor. Don’t forget that the emergence of the middle class is a very recent, historically contingent event, and that the American middle class proper only ever truly existed between the twin founding events of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the end of World War II and the beginning of the end with the election of Ronald Reagan. (By “middle class proper” I mean that sliver of time when any American who worked earned a genuine living wage.) The world functioned for millennia based on the binary opposites rich and poor, and without a middle class, and would happily settle right back into that homeostatic groove if left to its own devices. Recall that Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you,” not “the middle class you will always have with you.”

If we are on the move, if we are going to save the middle class as the first step towards saving the world, we’ll need to pry apart the binary opposites that prevent us from even conceiving of a world minus dominance and exclusion. Perhaps the exclusive nature of binary opposites helps explain Slavoj Zizek’s observation that “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

Movements like this need symbols. And note that binary opposites don’t just rule our minds, they also rule the marketplace. Think Crest/Colgate, Home Depot/Lowe’s, Walmart/Target, and Fed Ex/UPS, pairings which leave precious little space for Aqua Fresh, your local hardware store, Kmart and the US Postal Service, none of which will be in business in a decade. Of course, noticing that each of the listed pairings are actually much closer to clones than opposites leaves one wondering if our cherished freedom of choice is, at bottom, just another version of Jerry Seinfeld’s famous observation that rooting for one’s favorite baseball team is “actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it.” Our way of life has come to consist of preferring Crest and Colgate to Aqua Fresh, which means we’ve built an entire civilization out of a Hobson’s choice, i.e. “a free choice in which only one option is offered.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson's_choice) That said, I’ve always had a soft spot for one particular unwanted third wheel. As we choose to create a world without outcasts, let’s all raise a glass of RC Cola!

Birds and Mosquitoes

I was pushing my three year-old, Yael, in a little red plastic car the other day, the one with the blue handle for the adult to push with, doing lap after lap in her Bubbie’s back yard. Each revolution took us past Bubbie’s birdbath, your standard white pedestal-sinky set-up. Every single time we passed the hammock and came upon the birdbath I had the very same thought, which was that although it was a lovely birdbath that was sure to attract even lovelier birds, it was, with its stagnant little pool, a perfect habitat for thousands of mosquito eggs. It is said that when the English colonists first arrived in Maryland the Chesapeake Bay was so plentiful they could they dip their hands in and pull out a fish; but while the Bay is now on life support, during Baltimore summers you can stick your hand in the air and pull out a mosquito. And while Baltimore’s mosquitoes aren’t known to carry malaria, one does have to worry about the mosquito bite equivalent of death by a thousand paper cuts.

By the ninth or tenth circuit it occurred to me that the birdbath cum mosquito nursery should have its own card in the Tarot, seeing as it encapsulates the inevitability that every human effort to improve the world be fraught with unintended consequences. Look, a cardinal! Ugh, mosquitoes. Writ large, this inevitability goes as follows: Look at the standard of living in advanced industrialized nations! Ugh, climate change.

There is a small but vocal movement, some of whom call themselves future primitivists, which asserts that everything went off the rails when we abandoned hunter-gathering and took up agriculture, i.e. when we established civilization as we know it. I would note that hunter-gatherers were no less proficient at having children than their corn-fed descendants, which, as every parent knows, rendered the hunter-gatherers vulnerable to the greatest source of unintended consequences the world has known: no one ever knows what the hell their children are going to get up to.

The first law of thermodynamics holds that, in a closed system, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just changed from one form to another. The universe is an infinitely large version of just such a closed system, meaning that the total energy in the universe is constant. I’d like to suggest that the amount of good in the universe remains at a similar eternal equilibrium. The idea of such an equilibrium isn’t new, of course, and is at least as old as China’s yin and yang, the symbol for which suggests that there can only ever be as much light in the universe as there is dark. And the mechanism that keeps light and dark, good and evil in balance in our universe may very well be unintended consequences.

This balance is maintained when intentionally bad acts have unintended good consequences. To wit, Desmond Tutu’s remarkable assertion in a speech I heard him give that “Europeans brought apartheid with them to South Africa, but they also brought the Bible. We got a good deal!” But since most people, most of the time, are trying to make the world a better place, even if only for themselves or those they care about, most of the unintended consequences that keep light and dark in balance are, in fact, dark. This goes a long way towards explaining why winning the lottery is almost sure to ruin your life, and why there are so many miserable successful people, e.g. biographers for John Wooden and Bill Walsh, respectively the greatest basketball and football coaches ever, have reported that each was exceptionally insecure amidst and because of their fabulous and consistent success.

What about the unintended good consequences of good acts, when people “pay it forward,” when love spreads, not to mention the unintended bad consequences of bad acts? Perhaps unintended consequences flow out of every single act, whether malevolent or benevolent, like waves from a stone dropped in a pond. The peak of every wave is the crest of the unintended good consequences, and the trough of every wave is the nadir of the unintended bad consequences. Peak and trough mirror one another in length, and the balance between light and dark is maintained. Some quantum physicists hypothesize a universal wave function, i.e. “the wavefunction or quantum state of the totality of existence.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_wavefunction) If the universe is, in fact, an infinite ethereal wave, then maybe the idea of waves of unintended consequences keeping the universe aligned isn’t so very far fetched.

If doing the right thing leads to as much bad as good, whither social justice? I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous “We shall fight them on the beaches” speech:

“We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Like Churchill, those engaged in the fight for social justice shall never surrender. But, unlike Churchill, we shan’t go on to the end, because there is no end. Victory in one battle only assures the next. Nevertheless, we can, and must, make this better. Even if the law of unintended consequences makes the fight for social justice into a high stakes game of Whac-A-Mole.

I would close by suggesting that if you have trouble accepting the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, consider the fact that it is a world that can’t be improved upon. And if the yin-yang symbol were a glass, would it be half full or half empty?

Goodbye Selfie, Hello Thumbie!

When selfie was named Word of the Year for 2013 many folks understood it as the moment when narcissism officially became the new normal, correctly sensing that in the age of the selfie the world is diminished to background for my eternal Big Moment. Ironically, in shrinking the world down to background in order to make room for our inflated egos, the selfie diminishes the self while appearing to enlarge it. Astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson sheds light on this tragedy of egos grown too big for the worlds they find themselves in:

“I claim that if you went in there (the planetarium) with no ego at all and then you saw the grandeur of the universe, recognizing that our molecules are traceable to stars that exploded and spread these elements across the galaxy, then you would see the universe as something you participate in, as this great unfolding of a cosmic story. And that, I think, should make you feel large, not small.” (http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=283443670)
How, of course, can you see the grandeur of the universe when you are too busy looking at your phone for your close-up?

What we seem to have lost is the art of being part of a larger story, insisting instead on being the whole story. It is perhaps not entirely our fault, as we watch the grand narratives of democracy and equality fast approaching what feels dangerously like a point of no return. What larger story remains for us to inhabit? But still.

So, for now, the path forward is retreat, maneuvering ourselves out of the foreground. In Brian Browne Walker’s translation of the I Ching, the text corresponding to hexagram 33 opens thusly: “It is inherent in the design of life that forces of darkness and disruption come into prominence from time to time. This hexagram indicates that this is such a time and advises you to respond by quietly retreating.”

To retreat is not to remove one’s self from the picture altogether. Just so, to accomplish the retreat from self(ie)-absorption, I propose a transition to the thumbie. There are a number of crucial differences between the selfie and the thumbie, beginning with the fact that the gaze in the thumbie is once again focused outward, towards the world, such as it is. Looking out, we are incapable of staring at our navels. (If the selfie accomplished anything it was the reorganization of our anatomy, displacing the third eye from its accustomed spot with the navel, which migrated up from the belly to the middle of our brows so that we could stare at it on the screens of our smart phones and in the selfies we post to Facebook and Instagram.) Because the thumb in a thumbie can, of course, point up or down, the thumbie restores the ego from its current debased status as permanent carnival barker, “Look at me!”, to its sacred role as the seat of conscious awareness. A world of which I approve or disapprove will always be a world which pushes back, a world with too much backbone to ever play background. A world worth fighting for, which ever seems to be the only reason we were put here. Which reason was not, assuredly, to star in our own private cinema.

So take thumbies endorsing the fabulous view from the room in your historic Boston hotel. Take thumbies of your heaven sent children watching The Empire Strikes Back for the very first time. Consider giving Sy the Dog a big thumbs down for pooping in the house yet again, but then give Sy the Dog a big thumbs up because you love him anyway. Save those thumbs down for chance encounters with Dick Cheney. Most importantly, take a thumbie and tell its story without using any of the five following words: “Me, me, me, me, me.”

Building a Better Bonfire

It’s just over two weeks now since the conclusion of my favorite sporting event of the year, the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which has long since been branded “March Madness.” Although “March Madness” is used as a marketing gimmick, I like its echo of the connection between the calendar and behavior. The connection is not insignificant, and would perhaps be more noticeable if we followed a cyclical lunar calendar rather than a linear Gregorian one; see the rise in E.R. admissions on nights with a full moon. And even with the marking of time as we know it, don’t all of us in the northern hemisphere, at least those of us where it’s cold enough to wear hats, go a little mad by the time the tournament starts? Channeling our seasonal affective madness into the obsessive completion of tournament brackets, a therapy redoubled by the completion of equally fantastic tax documents due to Uncle Sam right as the tournament is ending, keeps many of us functioning until mid-April, when, in most years, the sun takes over for sports entertainment life support. This year, it snowed in Baltimore a week after March Madness had crowned its champion, which felt rather like finding out that one is actually a robot.

Each March, the college basketball aristocracy are paired off with their plebeian counterparts for all of the first round games via a politically charged, pseudo-objective seeding process; when CBS is paying billions in rights fees to broadcast the tournament, the “brackets” are about as objective as the Immunity Challenges on that other CBS franchise, Survivor. The seeding arrangements make the tournament the most reliable opportunity for witnessing one of the most interesting sports fan behaviors: we always root for the underdog, unless they are playing our team.

Let’s begin with the first part of the equation, the fact that we (almost) always root for the underdog. There is, admittedly, a little of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” involved in this. As a Tar Heel fan, I always cheer for whichever team in the tournament is playing Duke. I want the Tar Heels to go as far in the tournament as possible, and, just as importantly, this needs to be at least one game further than the Blue Devils. I was just talking to my (96 year-old) grandmother, Bucky, today, and chatting about the Tar Heels’ relatively disappointing 2nd round loss in the tournament. Without missing a beat, and without any prompting from me, Bucky pointed out that while the Heels hadn’t gone far, at least Duke had done even worse, losing in the first round, sparing her from having to hear any gate mouth from the Dukies in her retirement community. Which retirement community is inconveniently located in Durham, i.e. Bucky lives on their turf. Good thing Bucky is tough as nails, in the best possible way.

But, I would venture, rooting for the underdog runs deeper than the whole “enemy of my enemy” thing. With Carolina and Duke both out by the end of the second round, I was still pulling for the 11th-seeded Dayton Flyers to win their Elite Eight matchup with the #1 overall seed and two-time national champion Florida Gators, and not just because Dayton is home to rock and roll goddess Kim Deal. (Our names either make us, or we make ourselves in their images. Just so, her shit is so legit that if she were a boxer, she would definitely be Kim “The Real” Deal. Whereas, if I were a professional wrestler, I would wear a mask and my submission move would be “The Cough Drop.”) With no dogs left in the race, I was backing Dayton primarily because they were the last best underdog left standing. And because, like Darth Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi, and like everyone else in the world who roots for underdogs, there is still good in me after all.

College basketball, like the rest of America, is a landscape of haves and have-nots. The advantages held by college hoops blue bloods, the Carolinas, Dukes, and Kentuckies of the world, are legion: outsized athletic department budgets, deep pocketed boosters, constant television exposure, broad and deep fan bases, and home court cathedrals, just to name a few. In short, elite college basketball programs have a surfeit of power, and it is the responsibility of the head coach, with the full support of his athletic director and university president, to wield this power effectively enough to continually dominate the opposition. In other words, power is deployed in college basketball as it always has been in almost every chapter of human history. Cheering for the underdog, then, is an outlet for our collective instinct that this neverending story of power and its application is plain wrong. Carolina, Duke, and Kentucky aren’t evil (though we Carolina fans have fun pretending Duke is), but, in harnessing every resource to shock and awe their overwhelmed opponents, they are perfect stand-ins. (Evil = 500,000 dead in the Iraq War, all in the name of a lie. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/iraq-death-toll_n_4102855.html) Lest I be accused of “anti-Americanism,” I would ask America “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your eye?”) In always cheering for the underdog, we are constantly reimagining the world as a place where the last are, finally, first.

Except when we don’t cheer for the underdog, which is whenever they stand in the way of us finishing first. You may object that of course we root for our favorite teams against the opposition, including underdogs, because, duh, they’re our favorites. Suggesting that one refrain from cheering for one’s favorite team sounds like utter nonsense. But the fact that it sounds so nonsensical is, indeed, the crux of the problem. We so take for granted favoring our favorites (which I suppose is the very meaning of the word favorite) that we can’t even imagine doing otherwise. Which is all well and good in a basketball tournament, but which takes on new meaning when we realize that our absolute favorites, of course, are our very selves. So go ahead and cheer for whomever you please in March Madness; I would have turned on Dayton in a second if they had encountered the Tar Heels in their half of the bracket, Kim Deal notwithstanding. But understand that cheering for the underdog unless they are playing one’s favorite team is a reminder that we instinctively crave justice and equality right up to the point that it costs us something. With humans, the universal is (almost) always trumped by the particular, and “as above, so below” is replaced by “not in my back yard.” When we say “all politics is local,” we are really asking “What’s in it for me?”

We find the perfect exemplar of the tension between our intuition of the good and our instinct for self aggrandizement ready at hand in American history in the person of Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote the following in our nation’s Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And who just as famously proved unable to give up his slaves and the wealth and sexual access they provided. Self interest blinds us to the self evident truth. The very same dynamic is in play re: climate change, where the two possible responses in play for American power brokers are 1) denial or 2) hand wringing, neither of which costs anyone anything.

Organized religion has been something of a mixed bag down through the ages, though, from where I’m standing, we are, on balance, better for it. Exactly how much better is a more interesting question. The persistence of religious belief combined with the failure of the world’s great religious traditions to collectively bring about what my faith tradition would call the coming of the Kingdom (feel welcome to substitute your own tradition’s terminology for the happily-ever-after) tells us two important things. First, that our intuition of basic universal goodness is, like the State of the Union, strong. Strong enough that the world boasts 5.8 billion religious adherents, an amazing fidelity to the good given everything we know about suffering. (Though all brands of religion miss the mark, each to a varying degree in different historical moments, they also each always aim for goodness. I take this as an article of faith, which, somewhat ironically, decreases my own faith, i.e. I no longer feel about my own religion the way I feel about my children, who I know are the best. Short of feeling this way about one’s children I don’t know how it could be possible to do everything that needs to be done for them, and, just so, short of feeling just that way about one’s religion I don’t know how one is supposed to get one’s self to church, temple, mosque, meditation center, etc. Religion that loves its neighbor’s religion as devoutly as it loves itself cannot, seemingly, survive.) And second, that however strong our sense of the good may be, our sense of self, and all of the attendant self interest, is yet far stronger. We always cheer for our favorite team. Religion may be good enough and true enough, which explains why we all believe in the good, but it just isn’t strong enough. As in strong enough to make us do the right thing when it costs us something. Because if 5.8 billion people were doing the right thing, at whatever price, the Kingdom (or whatever you want to call it) would assuredly have already come. (I use the word assuredly because almost everyone almost always doing the right thing is, to my ears, the actual definition of “the Kingdom”; it is the only conceivable “best of all possible worlds.”)

The great tragedy of religion is that it has lost its great gamble that it could, indeed, prove strong enough. Religion would remake us, one by one, as individuals and communities willing to pay the price of righteousness (funny how tainted that word sounds, as if the idea of doing the right thing has gone rancid in the sun), or, as the Quakers put it on the banners above their meeting houses, willing to take the risks of peace. A significant chunk of religious life is practice for just these risks and sacrifices, e.g. fasting on Ramadan or Yom Kippur, observing Lent, or giving away one’s good fortune to others with the out breath in the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen meditation. Each of these is rehearsal for craving justice and equality deeply enough to break on through to the other side of self interest. But instead, like Jim Morrison himself overdosing on heroin, we continually hit a wall. And, we should note, we hit the very same wall, perhaps even harder, under the auspices of that religion for seculars, Marxism, the central tenet of which, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” requires at least as much selflessness as any of the aforementioned religions.

There is an old idea making the rounds again which holds that “it's institutions -- not people -- that are evil.” (http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/noam_chomsky_was_right_why_the_koch_brothers_are_obscuring_the_real_enemy/) This observation is just slightly wide of the mark. I would say instead that 1) institutions aren’t selfish, people are, but 2) institutions leverage self interest so efficiently that they perform something of an anti-miracle, the transformation of water into wine replaced by the mutation of garden variety selfishness into evil. This distinction is critical because it informs another set of solutions. Because attempting to construct or reconstruct institutions which aren’t evil is nearly as hopeless as trying to raise entire generations of selfless individuals. We must recognize the intractable difficulty of both, grounding this insight in an understanding that the inevitability of selfish humans makes the existence of institutions that feed off of that selfishness, i.e. evil institutions, incredibly likely. But note that while human selfishness is, for the foreseeable future, inevitable, we are merely at incredibly high risk of evil institutions. We are, effectively, Jim Carey being told by the girl of his dreams in Dumb & Dumber that his odds with her are “like one out of a million.” Carey sublimely responds “So you’re telling me there’s a chance…YEAH!” So must we. Even if it makes us look dumb. The only alternatives are despair or Rhett Butler’s “I’ve always had a weakness for lost causes once they’re really lost,” though it is unclear whether the lost cause is us, religion, or both.

Our last, best, slim chance is building institutions that are neither good nor evil. Because all of the good institutions, which have tried to carry us past the threshold of self interest, tend to fail, and all of the evil institutions, which simply harness that self interest, tend to succeed. It is said that Buddhism’s First Noble Truth, which holds that life is suffering, is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but realistic. We need institutions that are realistic in just this way. Realistic about both the limits of human selflessness, and the tendencies of institutions to exploit these very limits. There is at least one such human institution, namely the Potlatch:

'“In the potlatch, the host in effect challenged a guest chieftain to exceed him in his 'power' to give away or to destroy goods. If the guest did not return 100 percent on the gifts received and destroy even more wealth in a bigger and better bonfire, he and his people lost face and so his 'power' was diminished" Hierarchical relations within and between clans, villages, and nations, were observed and reinforced through the distribution or sometimes destruction of wealth, dance performances, and other ceremonies. The status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources. The hosts demonstrate their wealth and prominence through giving away goods.'(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch)

The Potlatch, of course, is no miracle cure. But in bending self interest to the good, in stark contrast to the doomed effort to transcend self interest in the name of the good, it gives us a place to start. If we can build just such realistic human institutions, I’d say our odds are at least two out of a million.

So I’m telling you there’s a chance… YEAH!!!

The Hole In Our Soul

I have just started reading Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity. It is always dangerous to draw conclusions from a 512 page book when you are just 40 pages in, but the opening chunk of Eisenstein’s Ascent is more than meaty enough to chew on, especially when amplified by some serious synchronicity (more about which in a moment). Eisenstein is right up front with his central thesis that the current global crisis, a crisis best exemplified by the existential threat of climate change yet somehow even broader and deeper, is a blending of “the story of humanity’s separation from nature with the story of our individual alienation from life, nature, spirit and self.” And, just as importantly, out of this state of alienation we have launched our twin would-be therapies, which Eisenstein describes as “the Scientific Program of complete understanding and the Technological Program of complete control.” But these therapies, far from guiding us from a state of illness back to health, are revealed as a toxic form of self-medication. Eisenstein diagnoses us, bluntly, as addicts:

“The future of the Technological Program is one where all the problems are solved once and for all. Here and now, though, we are waking up to another kind of future, and with a hangover to boot: vomit on the floor, apartment trashed, the world a mess.”

Admiring the problem, getting off on the mess, these can be just as addictive as the technology with which we’ve made the mess. It is something I guard against in writing this blog, with, I fear, mixed results. I am convinced that pessimism is addictive in large part because of how much less effort it takes. Meaningful optimism requires an increasingly steep degree of intellectual rigor, making it at the same time increasingly rare. Which makes it so thrilling that Eisenstein’s project is unreservedly optimistic, whilst, in the author’s own words, “assiduously avoiding New Age clichés.” (I have a heart full of my own favorite New Age clichés, e.g. the bumper-sticker slogan “God bless the whole world, no exceptions,” but keep them there a) because they fuel the heart-work of loving my neighbor, and b) because they are safe there from my mind, which thinks itself fully rational, making it (my mind) the ultimate emperor with no clothes. This heart-mind split sounds exactly like Eisenstein’s “individual alienation from… spirit and self.”) Eisenstein’s optimism is certified the moment he proposes an actual solution: “to abandon the program of insulation and control, and the conception of the separate self on which it rests.”

In contrasting this solution with what he terms our current “off-separation from the universe,” Eisenstein asserts that “rejuvenation and wholeness have been, and will be, the consequence of a different worldview, one that has roots in primitive culture and religion, and that is the inescapable yet heretofore generally unrealized implication of twentieth-century science.” (emphasis added) Everything Eisenstein says, or at least everything I can imagine him saying 40 pages in, hinges on that one little word: “wholeness.” Because as I read this passage the typically inaudible unfurling of my memories sounded instead like a whole tray of plates smashing to the floor in the kitchen. The noise redoubled when I got to page 19 and Eisenstein’s description of “our lost wholeness”: “It is a feeling that something is missing. Some people call it a hole in the soul.” The noise was Slovenian philosopher Slvaoj Zizek’s dramatic take on Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece.

Shel Siverstein is most famous in my household for penning The Giving Tree, a book which my wife, Jen, loathes. (Jen sees in The Giving Tree an endorsement of naked self-interest and exploitation. I must admit that I was less than impressed by the boy-who-grows-into-a-man character in The Giving Tree, especially in his bald middle age. And the tree itself seems to me sad and undignified in its giving, needy rather than gracious.) But, having never read The Missing Piece, Jen has no opinion about it, while I only became acquainted with it via Zizek’s interpretation in the introduction to his Enjoy Your Symptom! Here is the plot summary, as quoted from Wikipedia:

“The story centers on a circular animal-like creature that is missing a wedge-shaped piece of itself. It doesn’t like this, and sets out to find its missing piece, singing:

Oh, I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
I'm lookin' for my missin' piece
Hi-dee-ho, here I go
lookin' for my missin' piece

It starts out on a grand adventure searching for the perfect piece to complete itself, while singing and enjoying the scenery. But after the circle finally finds the exact-sized wedge that fits it, it begins to realize that it can no longer do the things it used to enjoy doing, like singing or rolling slowly enough to enjoy the company of a worm or butterfly. It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it. So it gently puts the piece down, and continues searching happily.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Piece_(book))

The key moment comes when “It decides that it was happier when searching for the missing piece than actually having it.” For Zizek, this is precisely when “the it… constitutes itself as desiring subject through a lack.” If you have been reading this blog you know I have a penchant for reformulating Descartes’ cogito. So, at the risk of going to the well once too often, here goes. Zizek is essentially saying “I desire, therefore I am.” Or, since we only desire because of our constitutive lack, “I lack, therefore I am.” Eisenstein’s “feeling that something is missing,” his “hole in the soul,” is, then, simply the emotional tone and spiritual condition peculiar to a human consciousness.

Seen from this angle, The Missing Piece is the tale of Eisenstein’s longed for “wholeness” found and rejected; it is a reversal of Amazing Grace into “I once was found, but now am lost” that is, shockingly, as overflowing with gratitude as the original. Eisenstein’s pursuit of wholeness suddenly seems reminiscent of the scene in The Matrix: Reloaded when Neo learns from The Architect that the original Matrix was both a) a virtual utopia free of all suffering, and b) rejected by its human inhabitants for that very reason. The history of The Architect’s first Matrix is, at bottom, a retelling of The Missing Piece.

But if, per The Missing Piece and The Matrix: Reloaded, we homo sapiens have rejected wholeness, our preferred modus operandi is leading to another rejection, only this time it is Mother Earth herself rejecting the artificial heart transplanted smack in Her chest in the form of us “desiring subjects.” The choice between Eisenstein’s wholeness and Zizek’s lack begins to feel like choosing your last meal before execution.

It was with just such pleasant thoughts that I went to bed after reading the first bit of The Ascent of Humanity. The very next morning my work took me to a meeting held in an elementary school library, during which meeting I glanced at the bookshelf abutting our little round table. There, at eye level directly in front of me, were three copies of Silverstein’s The Missing Piece. “Aha,” I thought, “the universe is clearly endorsing Zizek, we aren’t meant for wholeness, and if we’re going to save ourselves and our planet we had better rescue desire from capitalism, perhaps beginning by collectively desiring a twenty-hour work week.” (I didn’t actually think all of this on the spot given that I was attending to the specifics of the meeting, but I could feel the thought’s “bow wave,” one of my new favorite terms and one which describes the experience of knowing what’s coming before it happens, i.e. like the wave pushed out in front of the bow of a boat. I played baseball for years and came up to bat hundreds of times, but only once did I ever have precognition of getting hit by the pitcher. Standing in the on-deck circle, I felt the wild pitch’s bow wave. Neither before nor since have I ever been struck with such vivid foreknowledge. We all know what we’re going to think next, e.g. I know that I will never vote Republican, so maybe my use of “bow wave” in reference to my thoughts is a bit of a misnomer. In any case, my wife, who knows me better than I do since her view of me isn’t clouded by my garden variety projections and denial, i.e. she sees through my bullshit, can also tell you what I’m going to think next. And she still loves me! “A man’s greatest treasure is his wife,” indeed.)

But there, just a few books down on the very same shelf, was P.D. Eastman’s Are You My Mother?, which was something of a miracle given that a book by Eastman has no business on the same shelf as one by Silverstein. Unless the books were shelved by genre instead of by alphabet, which changes the particulars but not the fact of the miracle; either way I was staring at two famous illustrated children's books that essentially tell the same story, but with much different endings. Here is the plot summary of Are You My Mother?, again quoted from Wikipedia:

“Are You My Mother? is the story about a hatchling bird. His mother, thinking her egg will stay in her nest where she left it, leaves her egg alone and flies off to find food. The baby bird hatches. He does not understand where his mother is so he goes to look for her. In his search, he asks a kitten, a hen, a dog, and a cow if they are his mother. They each say, ‘No.’

Then he sees an old car, which cannot be his mother for sure. In desperation, the hatchling calls out to a boat and a plane, and at last, convinced he has found his mother, he climbs onto the teeth of an enormous earth mover. A loud ‘SNORT’ belches from its exhaust stack, prompting the bird to utter the immortal line, ‘You are not my mother! You are a SNORT!’ But as it shudders and grinds into motion he cannot escape. ‘I want my mother!’ he shouts.

But at this climactic moment, his fate is suddenly reversed. The earth mover drops him back in his nest just as his mother is returning home. The two are united, much to their delight, and the baby bird tells his mother about the adventure he had looking for her.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Are_You_My_Mother%3F)

The search for a missing piece is mirrored by a search for a missing mother, and both searches endure several false starts. But where Silverstein’s “It” finds the missing piece, only to throw it back and continue looking for satisfaction it doesn’t really want (thereby achieving satisfaction by never finding it, making life either a mystical paradox or absurd, which seem to be the only available choices for us desiring subjects), Eastman’s baby bird is delivered to its missing mother by its last, seemingly terrifying mistaken maternal object. As Snort, the embodiment of the industrial revolution, unexpectedly delivers the baby bird to its lost mother, one can hear Eisenstein in the background, riffing on the possibility that it is technology itself that will bring about the end of “The Age of Separation,” and deliver us unto “The Age of Reunion,” a “potential reunion that lies in the fulfillment, and not the abandonment, of the gifts that make us human.” The particular tale of separation and reunion told in Are You My Mother? is the children’s illustrated version of The Ascent of Humanity every bit as much as The Missing Piece is the children’s illustrated version of Zizek’s Enjoy Your Symptom! I would note that in both cases the children’s illustrated version came first.

So what was the universe telling me by putting both of these books on the same shelf right in front of my nose? Presumably, if the universe endorsed either wholeness or lack I would have encountered the corresponding children’s book, but not both. And it doesn’t seem possible that the universe was endorsing wholeness and lack; we don’t live in a universe of squared circles, after all. I am, it seems, left with the work of interpretation. So… if wholeness and lack are mutually exclusive, then perhaps a semantic shift is required. A shift from wholeness contra lack to a desire born from wholeness. The latter may be just as illogical as the former, if we grant that desire is just a byproduct of lack. But perhaps it isn’t always. And what would a desiring subject constituted from wholeness even want? She would want to give and, quite possibly, create.

Some would say that God, who by Her very definition is whole, constituted us with a lack, gave us our hole in the soul, so that there would be someone to receive Her gift. For us, achieving wholeness, then, would be to join in the Divine game of creation in order that we might give. (Our giving will be nothing like the Giving Tree's; if nothing else, we won't end up a stump.) What might we make, and to whom might we give? I seem to recall something about a “five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

Here’s hoping we find wholeness before we take to the stars.

Seven of Ten

In a recent Washington Post article about the most expensive colleges in the country, Catherine Rampell reports that “after subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid at each institution… seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are arts schools or conservatories of some kind.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2014/03/28/the-most-expensive-colleges-in-the-country-are-art-schools-not-ivies/)

It would be easy enough to note the obvious irony in the fact that the profession which pays the least (see “starving artists”) costs the most to pursue, and stop at that. But I am going to propose that everything you need to know about art schools and, by extension, art in America, can be gleaned from that one fact. Before doing so I should note that I know as much about the ins and outs of the art world as I do about the inner workings of the Internal Revenue Service; my art diet consists of books and rock and roll (the beans and rice of the arts). This means that I am either a) free to interpret the cost of art school without the filters and biases of someone submerged in the arts, and, as such, able to see the truth hidden right in plain sight, or b) completely out of my element, and about as likely to succeed as if attempting to design and construct my own rooftop deck. I will, for the purposes of writing, presume the former; the reader is, of course, free to decide for him or herself.

Prohibitively high art school tuition operates on two primary levels, one impacting those who somehow matriculate, and the other affecting those who are essentially excluded. I will begin with the former. Setting aside the narrow sliver of the population whose parents can actually afford to pay full art school tuition, the dream of making art involves the reality of massive student loans. If your retort is “So what, I had to take out student loans, too,” recall that the art student’s loans will necessarily be the highest, and their post-graduate earning power the lowest. If you took out student loans you took out less, and you came away with the power to earn more. This is true for even the financially humble professions of teaching, social work, and nursing, and even more so for law, business, and medicine. Art school students fall prey to a quintessential double bind, their cash flow bringing to mind the old Black Flag Roach Motel tag line, “Roaches check in, but they don’t check out.”

This analysis is just a longer version of the obvious irony initially noted above. We don’t really get anywhere unless and until we are willing to stipulate that the price tag on art school is no accident, nor is it because it is just plain more expensive to teach art. Last I checked, pastels and clay don’t cost anymore than books or beakers, art history profs no more than their counterparts in engineering, and the computers used to make graphic designs would seem to carry roughly the same price tag as those used for typing senior theses about Proust. The price of art school doesn’t come into focus without the recognition that art school graduates, saddled with enormous debt, become the vanguard of paying the bills. Seen in this light, art school costs the most precisely because theirs is the most dangerous profession. Dangerous because the bulk of an artist’s raison d’etre is the imagining of other possible worlds, except in those cases when the artist instead exists in order to pay back six figures of debt (plus interest!). Art isn’t inherently revolutionary, just potentially so. Really existing art school exists to quell that potential.

Art school’s suppression of that revolutionary potential is reinforced by its clientele. If you are fortunate enough to attend art school, college loan debt notwithstanding, can you reasonably be expected to turn your art against the very system that upholds your privileges, since these very privileges enable your emergence as an (official) artist? Could you turn your back on the only form of externally granted status that could ever align with your deepest sense of who you are at your core, the only institution that has ever said “Yes, art is important, and yes so are you,”? (All of these things, by the bye, apply in varying degrees to liberal arts higher education, which doesn’t cost quite as much, and which allows you to make a little more, but which doesn’t change the fact that folk like yours truly are implicated by pretty much all of this. It takes one to know one.) Which makes the second level on which art school tuition operates, the exclusion of entire swaths of society from art school, equally as important as the first in the neutering of art. Because those who have the most to gain from social change, from making art that opens up new possible worlds, are those effectively excluded from making professional art. In a society where credentials are everything, art school is the keeper of cred. Street cred may help with sales of your first rap album, but it won’t help you open a gallery in SoHo. For that you need a blurb in the Times, i.e. you need to go to art school.

Many of the teachers and students in art schools would likely describe their work as exactly that imagining of new worlds which I am, a priori, denying them. I would respond that by describing their work as such they are making a sales pitch, that they actually believe it to be the truth and not a sales pitch, and that this in turn makes it a more effective sales pitch. I am, of course, accusing them of inhabiting a false consciousness, which is not in any way a new critique, but is, I would argue, no worse for the wear. Again, the reader is welcome to disagree. But if one disagrees one takes on the burden of explaining how one can make art that is both a commodity and transformational. It says here that the two are mutually exclusive.

I don’t know about your burg, but everyone I’ve ever met in Baltimore who went to MICA (the local art school), now works at MICA. And I would hazard a guess that all the rest of MICA’s alumni work at other art schools. There is an old word for toiling away one’s years in debt bondage: indentured servitude. Art school grads have simply updated it for modern times, making it permanent instead of temporary. (To get a sense of MICA qua institution, consider the following report from the current edition of Baltimore’s weekly City Paper: “In response to efforts of the art school’s adjunct faculty to form a union, outgoing MICA president Fred Lazarus and other administration officials have sent out letters urging adjuncts to vote ‘no’ and consider ‘whether you want to turn over important rights to a union.’” (http://citypaper.com/news/baltimore-city-power-rankings-1.1661057) That these “important rights” are left unspecified is no surprise, given that the only rights the adjuncts could possibly lose in forming a union are the rights to continue giving away all of their power; the aforementioned indentured servitude clearly ain’t just a rhetorical device. But the cover-up is always worse than the crime, and in covering their tracks with a bald faced lie, “The union will hurt you as much if not more than us,” MICA is no longer merely exploiting its workers, it is operating in bad faith. This is an exponentially graver sin.)

My solution: Everyone makes (free) art and no one goes to art school. It’s often said that after the revolution comes, the first thing to do is to empty the prisons. But to start the revolution, let’s try emptying the art schools. And, crucially, filling the streets with art.

Discuss Amongst Yourselves

I was struck by the following passage in Will Oremus’ recent Slate article about coffee’s “third wave”:

“Their search for a better cup has given rise to a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious. Stumptown of Portland, Ore.; Intelligentsia of Chicago; and Counter Culture of Durham, N.C., don’t just sell ‘dark roast’ and ‘light roast.’ They sell coffees like Stumptown’s Indonesia Sulawesi Toarco Toraja, which is grown by smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website. The beans come with descriptors like ‘fair-trade,’ ‘single-origin,’ and ‘shade-grown,’ and sport ‘flavor profiles’ that would make Robert Parker blush. They’re roasted and brewed with obsessive attention to details like the extraction rate and brewing ratio, which are separately optimized to bring out the best in each bean.” (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/crosspollination/2014/03/blue_bottle_coffee_vcs_search_for_the_new_starbucks_starts_in_san_francisco.html)

In reading this, I was overcome by two primary emotions, the first of which feelings was surprising in the way that discovering you are bleeding when you aren’t aware of a wound is. I have only recently discovered the pleasures of coffee, having for years believed that “I can’t handle coffee,” which belief ran so deep that I listed it on the “25 Facts About Me” that everyone was filling out on Facebook a few years ago. (In retrospect, the “25 facts” fad was likely a narrative ur-form of the selfie, like novels presaging movies. The book, of course, is always better than the movie, and “25 Facts” trumps the selfie. Making it doubly depressing that if I posted 25 new facts about myself every week on Facebook it would come off as raging narcissism, whereas the posting of selfies as new profile pictures is an easy ticket to 25 “likes” or more. Fortunately, I can embed all the new facts about myself I like in this blog, which is symptomatic of merely mild to moderate narcissism, and therefore well within cultural norms.) But after several slow and steady years of building up caffeine tolerance via Irish and English breakfast teas and cultivating a willingness to endure an afternoon of mild shakes and low grade anxiety (given that I felt that way all the time before giving up gluten, crashing off of coffee is sort of nostalgic), I am a newly minted member of coffee nation. (Note: If you can meaningfully apply the suffix “nation” to a term, as you can with coffee or e.g. the Red Sox, then the group in question has already lost its soul.) But I had no idea I had fallen “truly, madly, deeply” for coffee until I read the quoted passage and felt a wave of sadness as I realized it will never again be possible to simply enjoy a good, or even a very good, cup of coffee.

The Slate article focuses on Blue Bottle, a San Francisco-based purveyor of coffee that has attracted some serious venture capitalist investment. Oremus’s slant is that Blue Bottle might turn out to be Apple to Starbucks’ Microsoft. Massive and rapid growth seems a bit unlikely for a business that handcrafts each cup of coffee, a practice which, if nothing else, puts a natural cap on prospective sales, but growth, of course, is the name of the venture capital game. When pressed for an explanation of how Blue Bottle will survive the natural pitfalls of corporate expansion, Blue Bottle founder James Freeman explains to Oremus “his goal is not to keep quality constant—it’s to keep improving it, even if that means growing more slowly than he could otherwise.” (ibid) The growing slow part of the equation is all well and good, but it is the first part, the part about constantly improving the coffee, which is so sad. Because what Freeman and the entire third wave of coffee have forgotten is that a cup of coffee can only be so good. And, even more importantly, this is good enough.

If there is one cliché at the heart of late capitalism, “When good enough isn’t good enough” may very well be it. Originally intended as an ode to the pursuit of excellence, it has become a diagnosis. The original meaning, the understanding that excellence is always within reach, has been twisted into a forgetting that perfection is always beyond our grasp. “Constantly improving the coffee” is also an echo of constantly growing the economy, the failure to recognize the limits of flavor reminiscent of the failure to recognize the limits of growth. If our great wisdom traditions tell us anything, it is that this very moment, the eternal here and now, is “When good enough is good enough”; see both Tibetan Buddhism’s “Basic Goodness” and the Book of Genesis: “Then God looked over all he had made, and He saw that it was very good.” In reading about third wave coffee, one gets the feeling that on the seventh day, the barista worked straight through the night.

But, as noted, sadness wasn’t the only emotion in play as I read the quoted passage. It also felt awkward, like accidentally walking in on your roommate having kinky sex with his or her partner. In describing “a new crop of roasters whose reverence for coffee borders on religious,” Oremus has missed the mark; third wave coffee makers and consumers haven’t found religion so much as they are indulging a fetish. To be clear, this isn’t equivalent to a straightforwardly sexual fetish as exhibited by e.g. New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, whose foot fetish videos, endearingly produced with the full cooperation of his wife cum foot model, found their way onto the internet. Instead, third wave coffee is entangled in the process of sexualized commodity fetishism, a Marxist concept that sounds dense and complex, but is actually rather simple. It is, in a nutshell, an explanation of how we end up desiring consumer goods. And third wave coffee is fraught through and through with this misplaced desire.

Commodity fetishism can sound rather bland, and hardly worthy of the term fetish, until we acknowledge its sexual underpinnings. Note the difference between the two following definitions of the term:

1) “The psychological phenomenon of commodity fetishism, which ascribes an independent, objective value and reality to a thing that has no inherent value- other than the value given to it by the producers, the seller, and the buyer of the commodity.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism)

Yawn.

And 2) “Marx said that fetishism is ‘the religion of sensuous appetites,’ and that the fantasy of the appetite tricks the fetish worshipper into believing that an inanimate object will yield its natural character to gratify the desires of the worshipper.” (ibid)

Now we’re getting somewhere! And perhaps, seen in this light, Oremus is correct, and third wave coffee does indeed involve religious reverence. But in aiming for (sexual) self gratification, it is a debased form of religious worship. (This is not to suggest that there is anything debased about Rex Ryan’s conjugal relations with Mrs. Ryan; sexual fetishes are apples to sexualized commodity fetishism’s oranges. And if an apple a day keeps divorce away, bon appétit.) In worshipping commodities like third wave coffee, we have made a graven image out of our own desire. (Full disclosure- I have my own commodity fetishes: automobiles and, of all things, tennis racquets, which I like to justify to myself by imagining them as substitutes for lightsabers. But really.)

The old saying goes that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Just so, Eros is as bound up with its opposite, aggression, as yin is with yang. Thus it comes as no surprise that third wave coffee, the new sexualized commodity fetish par excellence, is rife with aggression as much as it is with sex. The clue here is the “smallholder farmers whose faces you can see on the Stumptown website.” To interpret the clue, we turn to Robert Cluley and Stephen Dunne’s explanation of the turn from commodity fetishism to commodity narcissism:

“Consumers who claim to be ethically concerned about the manufacturing origins of commodities, nonetheless behaved as if ignorant of the exploitative labour conditions under which the workers produced the goods and services, bought by the ‘concerned consumer’; that, within the culture of consumerism, narcissistic men and women have established shopping (economic consumption) as a socially acceptable way to express aggression.” (ibid)

What is most important about both Cluley and Dunne’s description, as well as its glaring example in the form of Stumptown’s smallholder farmers’ faces, is that this is a veiled aggression. Veiled, most of all, to the aggressors themselves, who, in consuming “fair-trade” coffee not only deny their inescapable culpability in the (literal) sins of globalization, but imagine themselves as rebels against the very system that has no better symbol than a $4 cup of coffee. All of which brings to mind the conundrum facing African Americans: would you rather live where the racism is overt (i.e. the American south) or covert (e.g. Boston)? In this case, would you rather live amongst the wolves of Wall Street, or amongst the wolves in sheep’s clothing inhabiting San Francisco cafés (or your local third wave coffee shop)?

Time for decaf, indeed.

The Plane

As I write, it has just been reported that the debris spotted in the south Indian Ocean, debris which was the best lead thus far in the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, may well have already sunk to the bottom of the ocean. And so we are left with the mystery that has captivated the world since the plane’s disappearance on March 8th. Captivated, of course, is just a polite way of saying obsessed, if I may use myself as a test case (and Courtney Love, who, via Twitter, offered her own possible lead in the search and declared herself “a little obsessive.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2583143/Courtney-Love-claims-located-missing-MH370.html). I know that my captivation by the missing plane reaches the level of obsession because I have been Googling for updates on the search as frequently as I have been checking Foot’s Forecast for news of the next snowfall. (Another snowstorm is coming on Tuesday, on the heels of this past Monday’s Mid-March six-incher, which featured the eerie combination of snow and daylight savings time and felt like getting a sneak preview of climate change’s Earth 2.0.)

So, then, why are we so obsessed? Russia has invaded Ukraine, an event with far greater potential to upset the geopolitical applecart than a missing plane, and I haven’t heard one single mention of it in my daily rounds. In stark contrast, everywhere I go it’s as if we’re all suddenly Tattoo announcing “The Plane! The Plane!”, except that this time there is no plane.

I happened across the beginnings of an explanation of our obsession during one of my countless Google searches. The article, which, unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark and is now, like the plane, lost, explained that the missing plane was so particularly jarring to our collective consciousness because we live in the age of surveillance, be it in the illicit-external form, i.e. the NSA reading our boring emails, or of the self-imposed variety, e.g. 236 Facebook friends (my current tally) keeping tabs on us.

I think this is the start of an answer, but getting further traction requires that we expand the analysis in a few crucial directions. First, we must define the conditions on the ground in the surveillance state, where Descartes’ famous cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” has been displaced by “I am seen, therefore I am.” In fact, as a good Episcopalian, I would argue that “I am seen, therefore I am,” was our default setting long before Descartes was even a gleam in his mother’s eye, except that up until the well noted “Death of God” and the attendant rise of secularism circa sometime between the Civil War and the War to End All Wars (which, tragically, had to be renamed with a Roman Numeral) the seer guaranteeing existence was God Himself. This isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of folks who still believe in God, but to note that once belief in God became optional (which is likely the best possible definition of secularism), belief in God, while still capable of grounding an individual life in sufficient meaning, could no longer provide a corporate proof of existence; for God to prove our existence, everyone has to believe in Him (in the same way that juries can only prove a defendant’s guilt if everyone on the jury agrees). And because it turned out that the cogito was as ill suited for the role of “ground of all being” as I was for manning the drive thru at McDonald’s (where I had the same effect on traffic, if unintentionally, as Chris Christie did in Fort Lee, New Jersey), we are left looking for a substitute seer in our modified cogito. All of which made the rise of the surveillance state and the explosion of social media perhaps inevitable, and which also helps to explain why no one cares that Big Brother is reading all our email; illicit-external surveillance doesn’t bother us, and, in fact, we secretly embrace it, because it means that at least someone is watching.

The vanishing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370, then, is to be understood as an eruption of nothingness. In a world where to exist is to be seen, the plane’s disappearance is a resounding answer of “Yes, definitely!” to the terrifying question always lurking in the tenets of materialism, a question precisely formulated by Charles Tart:

“Am I just a meaningless accident in a meaningless cosmos? The result of zillions of meaningless molecular collisions that just happened to turn this way?” (http://www.academia.edu/2560387/Is_transpersonal_psychology_consistent_with_a_materialist_account_of_consciousness)

Because if the plane can go missing, despite the concentrated efforts of a surveillance state that is, like the Death Star, fully armed and operational, so can the rest of us. In other words, rephrasing the answer to “Am I just a meaningless accident in a meaningless cosmos?”, we can say, re: human beings and self-aware consciousness, “Easy come, easy go.”

Rather than face our terror at the seeming brute contingency of existence, we bury it beneath our fears, wishes and/or fearful wishes: “The plane was hijacked by terrorists who will use it to deliver a nuclear weapon in a major western city,” or “The plane is having an extended, peaceful encounter with extraterrestrials who guided it to a safe destination in their UFOs in order to launch a shift in global consciousness.” (The latter was/is exactly my fantasy.) Every version, there are literally thousands to be found on the internet, is an escape from encroaching nothingness.

Barring the unlikely Re-Birth of God, i.e. the reestablishment of unanimous monotheistic belief as it once existed (in western civilization), the only viable approach to collective therapy for the terrible specter of nothingness personified by Flight MH370 can be found, of all places, in a Grateful Dead tune. The pertinent lyrics, “Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world,” dissolve the materialist nightmare that we are temporarily (until our pending doom) marooned in the universe. Our mutant cogito is reformulated one last, decisive time: “The Divine in me sees, therefore I am.” What joy, as seers, to witness the end of Descartes’ cancerous dualism along with its foremost symptom, modernity’s fear of annihilation.

Would that we all might see, and that, in seeing, we might cease our obsession with Flight MH370, and begin its mourning.

"Happiness is the Truth"

My new favorite song is Pharrell Williams’ “Happy,” an ode to happiness, especially happiness in the face of “bad news,” which makes it a song about the only kind of happiness currently available. And I was listening to the last ten minutes of Fresh Air the other day, which has become my favorite part given that it features reviews of all the books, movies, TV shows, and musicians I have no time for amidst working full time, raising up three girls, staying happily married, and penning this blog. (Going Freud one better I have not just love and work, but love, work, and art, which to this sometimes-Freudian feels a little heretical, like adding a third item, let’s call it yong- Chinese for permanence, to yin and yang.) Fresh Air rock critic Ken Tucker came on and, miracle of miracles, he was reviewing Pharrell Williams’ new album GIRL, a review which opened with a sampling of “Happy.”

At the end of his review, Tucker mentioned that “Pharrell has come in for some criticism recently as being merely a glossy pop hit maker, for lacking edge.” (http://nprfreshair.tumblr.com/post/78770019820/ken-tucker-reviews-pharrells-new-album) Immediately I was flashing back to 1988, when Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” climbed all the way to #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100, and 1989, when Public Enemy dropped “Fight the Power” for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a searing anthem of Black liberation that included the following lyrics:

“Don’t Worry, Be Happy
Was a number one jam
Damn if I say it you can slap me right here”

To borrow a phrase from Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Pharrell’s joyful smash hit and the sullen, shaming backlash, the contretemps between Bobby McFerrin and Public Enemy, all of it has me questioning the relationship and tension between happiness and injustice. And it is a questioning on unsteady ground; who am I to interject myself into a discourse between Black artists on the subject of, of all things, happiness? Of all White privileges, is any more galling than the act of gerrymandering the Other’s cultural narratives, erecting boundaries around what can and cannot be spoken? E.g. everyone knows that Rosa Parks refused to get up out of her seat on that bus, but almost no one knows that this was a planned, coordinated act of nonviolent resistance. Just so, if I were to opine on the if, when, where, and how of Black happiness, would it be substantively any different than repeating the official (White-washed) version of Rosa Parks, the story of the perhaps brave, but nevertheless isolated, impulsive act of a lone, tired woman? Wouldn’t the appropriate Black response be Ice Cube’s “Keep my name out your mouth”? And if I champion Pharrell and McFerrin, am I any different than George H. W. Bush, who co-opted McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” as his 1988 presidential campaign’s official song (at least until McFerrin issued his own “Keep my name out your mouth” and flat out refused to perform the song for as long as Bush kept playing it).

But to avoid the question raised by, on one side, Pharrell and McFerrin, and, on the other, P.E. and the current arbiters of appropriate artistic expression, seems in the end little more than a copout. Because, reversing The Merchant of Venice, if you prick me do I not bleed? In other words, White privilege, while it may have its (unjust) perks, ultimately fails in its efforts to offload pain, suffering, and evil onto the Other. In a tragic yet just irony, the surfeit of pain, suffering, and evil dumped on the Other does nothing to spare White folk from the Buddha’s first noble truth that life is suffering. Making the question of the tension between happiness and suffering perhaps even more urgent for White people than anyone else, given our historical delusion that, much like the old bumper stickers announcing that “Virginia is for lovers”, suffering is for Others. (Re: “Virginia is for lovers,” I would be willing to bet that the Commonwealth of Virginia gave its advertising account to the same people who came up with Virginia Slims’ “You’ve come a long way, baby,” both slogans somehow evoking active lifestyles, sex, and retrograde patriarchy.) It’s time for White folks to take the red pill and get real about our suffering, own it, and, in the process, considerably lighten everybody else’s load.

Once we do so, we begin to realize that the pertinent questions here are even older than that abomination known as the Atlantic slave trade. They are at least as old as Job, whose third act opens the gap in which Pharrell, McFerrin, Public Enemy, you and me now find ourselves in freefall. Job, of course, lost everything via an act of God that we wouldn’t even hesitate to describe as evil if it were committed by anyone other than God (not, mind you, an isolated incident- see God asking Abraham to murder his son Isaac; the staying of Abraham’s hand at the last minute may have spared Isaac’s life, but still feels very much a day late and a dollar short given that Abraham had already emotionally committed to the unthinkable act). Job, courtesy God, is later rewarded with a second family for the loyalty he showed throughout all of his many trials. The question, which is the very question I believe Pharrell and McFerrin are answering differently than Public Enemy, is whether or not Job should be happy with his second family. Is it okay that the Lord taketh away, just because He also giveth? Stretching the question even further to wrap all the way around the issue of justice, is it okay that the Lord sends his rain on both the just and the unjust? Is it okay for Job, African American males, privileged White folks, any and all of us including even God Himself, to be happy?

As for Job and the African American males, I would suggest that the answer to the latter question is an unequivocal yes. Not, I should hasten to point out, to encourage victimization, at least of the passive variety. If Job and America’s twenty million Black men are to be victims, let them also be vindictive, and let them remember that happiness is the best revenge. So conceived, Job’s happiness is not out of fidelity to God, a fidelity which would, in its obscenity, strip Job of all remaining dignity, but an act of rebellion. And, understood as revenge, Pharrell and McFerrin’s happiness isn’t the obsequious shuffle Public Enemy paints it as, but a form of intentional, nonviolent resistance that would make Rosa Parks proud. (We should note, if only in passing, that Public Enemy’s confrontational approach to race relations, an approach from the “By any means necessary” side of the resistance continuum, also has much to recommend it, including the possibility of bringing things to a crisis point; as Chairman Mao liked to say, “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”)

Happiness sans reconciliation between Job and God, and between Black and White Americans, is, however, fraught with danger. Which is why the very first thing Nelson Mandela did when taking the reins of power in South Africa was to establish a truth and reconciliation process. Mandela re-taught us that true happiness is never vindictive, always inclusive, and therefore radically revolutionary.

Inspired by Nassim Nicholas Talib’s brilliant The Bed of Procrustes, a collection of well over one hundred of Talib’s often provocative philosophical aphorisms (e.g. “In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.”), I have begun composing my own. So far I have seven, including the following: If the revolution is to succeed, it must be funny.

Humor, of course, is concentrated happiness; even the darkest humor is but the stitching of happiness into pain. Following William James’ “We do not sing because we are happy, we are happy because we sing,” I would argue that Pharrell, McFerrin, you, me, Job, God, even Public Enemy, shouldn’t be happy because things have changed, (they haven’t much,) but in order that they might.

We may never be able to change the fact that the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. But in unflagging, tender happiness we may finally learn to love Him anyway, just as He has always loved us, even given our considerable baggage, making our relationship with the Divine into that of a happy old married couple who not only recognize one another’s flaws, but love each other for them. Let’s sing the Song of Songs, and cast off the exhausted Father-Child symbology. It’s time we all grow up.

But even if we do, it is likely that God, suffering, and death will continue to confound. Job is constantly speaking to us. Nevertheless- Don’t worry, be happy. Love.

All Shall Be Well

My lovely wife, Jen, turns 40 this month, which means I turn 40 in November, which further means Generation X is in the process of collectively hitting this milestone throughout the decade. If we stipulate that modern medicine (or its holistic alternatives) will see most of us an extra ten years past our allotted three score and ten, then we are about half-way home. In addition to being a great time to run to the bathroom and then score some nachos, halftime also affords a brief respite to pause and take stock of things, to graph our current data, as it were. I would like to suggest that the trajectory of our generational line graph, our trendline, depends in many ways on what, in retrospect, we make of the signature Generation X death, the suicide of our rock and roll antihero, Kurt Cobain. Cobain is inarguably the most important (white male) Gen X figure because the art he made out of his angst was universally accessible; it spoke to people with real problems like abusive parents, depression and/or serious drug habits, and to people like me, who blared songs from In Utero on our college dorm stereos after getting unexpected C’s on sociology midterms. If reading Gen X’s David Foster Wallace was, per David Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody you knew,” then listening to Cobain was to hear their heart voice.

Google “Kurt Cobain on mainstream music” and you will quickly come across this:

“Kurt Cobain was an outspoken critic of the mainstream music industry, both prior to and after his success with Nirvana. He believed that major record labels promoted anything they believed would sell, and gave little regard to the quality of the music. This belief, combined with immense mainstream success of Nirvana, is believed by many to be the primary factor in Cobain’s suicide. In his suicide letter, Cobain stated that he no longer enjoyed writing or performing music, and hadn’t for a long time.” (emphasis added) (http://www.wisegeek.com/who-is-kurt-cobain.htm)

The perspective referenced here, that Cobain killed himself because he couldn’t reconcile his mainstream success with his religious belief that all things mainstream sucked, was pretty much what I was suspecting when I started my Google search. But if you read the full text of the suicide letter referenced at the end of the quote, you find the following: “Since the age of seven I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general.” (http://kurtcobainssuicidenote.com/kurt_cobains_suicide_note.html) What happened at age seven is a matter of public record; his parents divorced and “his mother noted that his personality changed dramatically; Cobain became defiant and withdrawn.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Cobain) In trying to grasp Cobain’s suicide, then, this leaves us with two seemingly competing narratives: 1) He never got over his parents’ divorce, or 2) He never got over his own fame. But if we dig a little deeper we find that 1 and 2 are simply the staging of the same basic tragedy, like West Side Story following on the heels of Romeo and Juliet. Because 1 and 2 are not only both striking cases of the collapse of meaning, they were both experienced by Cobain as self-inflicted wounds, making them sad augurs of his suicide.

Understanding divorce as the collapse in meaning of a child’s world should meet the criteria for commonsense. But to connect the dots, here is UVa sociology professor Brad Wilcox:

“Marriage conveys a sense of meaning, purpose, direction, and stability that tends to benefit adults and especially children. People who get married have an expectation of sexual fidelity, and that fidelity tends to engender a sense of trust and security.” (emphasis added) (http://uvamagazine.org/articles/the_marriage_crisis)

Wallerstein et. al. give an even better sense of just what this collapse in meaning feels like in lived experience:

“The children are badly frightened and apprehensive about what lies ahead. It’s as if the entire family at its weakest point is expected to deal with an earthquake and its aftershocks.” (http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/w/wallerstein-unexpected.html)

Even more importantly:

“There is now way for a sensitive child to see her mother cry or her father fall into depression without worrying she’s the cause of it- and so she takes full responsibility for her mother’s tears and her father’s moods.” (ibid)

It is almost certain that Cobain the artist was exactly that sensitive child. So not only was his world torn asunder at age seven, he was left to believe, consciously or not, that he had done the tearing. “I’ve become hateful towards all humans in general,” indeed; who wouldn’t hate the progenitors of a civilization that (from the perspective of a sensitive child) enables its seven-year olds to essentially hit the family’s self destruct button. Parental neglect is suddenly writ large, becoming, via the developing child psyche, universal human neglect.

As we know, Cobain sought, and ultimately found, refuge in Seattle’s underground music scene. (After, we should note, turning to his temporary non-parental caregivers’ brand of evangelical Christianity and then rejecting it; one can only wonder how history might have changed had Cobain stayed the course and formed a Christian rock band instead of Nirvana. If nothing else, I might be able to name two Christian rock bands as opposed to the current list that begins and ends with Jars of Clay, whose “Lift Me Up” is as good as anything ever released by e.g. Live.) Like all undergrounds, Seattle’s punk rock scene defined itself in contrast with the mainstream; undergrounds are forever playing antithesis to the mainstream’s thesis. To find belonging in his second, punk rock family, Cobain would necessarily have exhibited the fervor of the religious convert in expressing the family creed, especially since that creed, “everything mainstream sucks,” aligned with his personal encounter with that foundational mainstream institution, marriage.

Had Cobain been gifted with anything less than artistic genius, he likely would have lived out his days as a contented punk, i.e. as someone content with his discontent. Given that every action results in and equal and opposite reaction, the reactive antithesis has exactly the same quantity of available meaning as the thesis it rejects and mirrors; no is as deep as yes. But Cobain’s talent proved too large for the space afforded by “no.” Cobain’s band, Nirvana, was the first glimpse of synthesis, the transcendence of the mainstream’s thesis and punk’s antithesis into something entirely new. That something new is the way we are all going to be living on the planet by the end of this 21st century, which, in early 2014, is just beginning to come into focus. If, as Colin Andrews describes in On the Edge of Reality, “society’s conflict is between secularism and religion, capitalism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism,” then it is also between mainstream and punk. Andrews goes on to say that “The reconciling of these forces will require dropping long held ideologies that are blocking our ability to move forward. The tensions demand a shift in paradigms.” The tragedy of Kurt Cobain, then, lies in his inability to understand himself as a prophet rather than a punk. Nirvana jumpstarted the initiation of new meaning, and all Cobain could see was the collapse of the old.

Cobain’s blindness to his own prophesy is illuminated by a particular reading of the title of a documentary film about Nirvana and Sonic Youth’s 1991 European tour: 1991: The Year Punk Broke. When, in the early 1990’s, Nirvana, like The Beatles before them, became “more popular than Jesus,” all Cobain could see was that his band had broken punk, just as he (believed he) had once broken his parents’ marriage. In achieving mainstream success, Nirvana dragged punk with them into the spotlight, singlehandedly creating the “Alternative” music genre that would dominate the music industry for the next decade. By making punk mainstream, Cobain had unmade punk. He had silenced the antithetical “no,” and all he could hear emanating from his own music was a “yes” to everything he had ever rejected. Amidst all of this he had dissolved his second family in his short life, making his suicide the ultimate “Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” moment.

In her brilliant memoir, In Spite of Everything, Susan Gregory Thomas finds new meaning in Cobain’s death by providing an antithesis to the dark thesis Cobain settled on in place of the synthesis his music truly hinted at:

“All alone is all we are, whimpered our sweet, lost, sad, fallen hero. Our fear is that ‘alone’ is the central truth that lies at the heart of the universe, and that if we cannot provide them with an unimpeachably happy childhood, our children will be forced to stare into that void by themselves, too. But what if that isn’t true? What if there is more than this? What if the only truly perfect gem that we can really keep and share with our children is that none of us is alone- that they can remain loved and secure, in spite of everything?”

The alternate reading of 1991: The Year Punk Broke has nothing to do with broken homes and broken movements. 1991 was the year punk, via Nirvana, broke a hole through all the tired conflicts (“secularism and religion, capitalism and socialism, conservatism and progressivism,” mainstream and punk) that would keep us spinning our wheels in perpetuity. Like Obi-Wan dissolving around Darth Vader’s light saber, Punk’s disappearance into the mainstream was pure illusion; by delivering us the seeds of synthesis, punk became more powerful than we can possibly imagine.

“None of us is alone.” Cobain sang the opposite even as his music made way for this new meaning to break through, making Cobain more of a John the Baptist figure than the messiah figure he is frequently touted to be. It is up to the rest of us, collectively, to save things this time around. We can, and we will, if we heed Susan Gregory Thomas: “None of us is alone…in spite of everything”. This is the impossible, necessary truth on which everything depends. If we listen, then “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” This may strip Julian of Norwich’s prayer of the comfort of certainty, but these are uncertain times. Thanks to our modern-day punk prophets, our Cobains and Thomases, at least we know the path forward, a path defined by the fact that it is wide enough for all of us.