One of my favorites among the many unforgettable scenes in Star Wars comes when Obi-Wan Kenobi is trying to slip through the Empire’s tentacles in the Mos Eisley spaceport with Luke, R2D2 and C3PO in tow. The latter two, of course, were wanted by the Empire for stealing away with the plans to the Death Star when jettisoned from Princess Leia’s consular ship, the Tantive IV, and landing on Tatooine. With Mos Eisley crawling with Storm Troopers, Kenobi’s party eventually comes to an Imperial checkpoint. With the two droids in plain sight, the gig appears to be up. But, with a wave of his hand, Obi-Wan simply says “These are not the droids you’re looking for.” Like a perfectly compliant husband, the Storm Trooper immediately repeats back the required thought: “These are not the droids we’re looking for.” Moments later, Kenobi, Luke and the wanted droids breeze through the checkpoint, scot-free.
One of the interesting things about the Jedi Mind Trick, the Force power utilized by Obi-Wan at the Mos Eisley checkpoint, is that you’ll actually hear people here on earth talking about using it themselves. This, in my own experience, is unique to the Jedi Mind Trick among all of the Force powers; people generally don’t go around, e.g., talking about how they levitate their car keys to themselves from across the room. But they do go around talking about how they used the Jedi Mind Trick to, e.g., get out of a speeding ticket. Until recently, whenever I heard a claim like this I took it as a cute way of saying you had talked your way out of said speeding ticket. But a new understanding of how the mind works suggests that the two methods of getting out of the ticket are distinct, a distinction which (accurately) presumes the reality of the Jedi Mind trick.
The really existing Jedi Mind Trick is made possible by mirror neurons: “A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron ‘mirrors’ the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron) In other words, if I’m sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner and you’re standing in front of me doing jumping jacks, the same neurons that are firing in your brain as you jump are firing in my brain as I laze. This has all kinds of implications, and potential implications:
“mirror neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people, and for learning new skills by imitation. Some researchers also speculate that mirror systems may simulate observed actions, and thus contribute to theory of mind skills, while others relate mirror neurons to language abilities… In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy. It has also been proposed that problems with the mirror neuron system may underlie cognitive disorders, particularly autism.” (ibid)
A close reading of this laundry list of potential implications reveals that research on mirror neurons to date (they were only discovered by researchers in the 1990’s) has focused on the impact of mirror neurons on the receiving end; mirror neurons have been conceptualized in what I would call a passive voice. Because of my mirror neurons I empathize, I imitate, I relate, even and especially verbally. But a far more interesting (to me) way of understanding the possible implications of mirror neurons comes when we think of them in the active voice. Because what does it mean that I can fire whichever neurons in your brain I wish to simply by firing them in my brain in your sight? It means, of course, that the Jedi Mind Trick is real, and that instead of spinning a convincing tale of exactly why I should not be held accountable for doing 55 in a 35, e.g., I am hurrying home in order to get dressed to go to church (a real excuse shared with me by an old friend when we were teenagers- and one that worked), one simply needs to exhibit the mannerisms and tone of voice of someone who should, at worst, be let off with a warning. Of course, the genius is in knowing exactly what those mannerisms and tones consist of, which is why it is the Jedi Mind Trick, i.e. this is advanced stuff. But I would hazard a guess that more than practicing 7 particular habits, the world’s highly effective people, those who get things done, are all people who have mastered the Jedi Mind Trick.
As everyone knows, the Force can be used for good or evil, and the Jedi Mind Trick is no exception. “Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few find it.” Among the many potential abuses one thinks of seduction, and the adoption of the mannerisms and tone of someone who truly, deeply cares when nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth. Caveat emptor, indeed. But, if we are going to get on with saving the planet, mirror neurons and the Jedi Mind Trick just may supply the means to do so. Because the radical truth found in mirror neurons is that the social world is essentially a mirror. The most powerful act in the world is simply to quite literally gaze peacefully into that mirror. And never blink. Or, more realistically, try again tomorrow when you inevitably blink. Here on earth, Yoda’s “Do or do not. There is no try.” must always be translated into Beckett’s “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Look longer.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Sunday, November 09, 2014
Get Thee to a Primary School
Every now and again House of Pain’s bombastic 1992 single, “Jump Around,” still gets played on the radio. Naturally, I turn it up full blast and wait for the opening of verse two, at which point I rap along with Everlast to my favorite single line of lyrics in record industry history: “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe”
Unpacking the lyrics’ impact first requires tearing off the sport of tennis’ country club veneer to reveal the truth at its core, captured precisely by David Foster Wallace when he described tennis as a hybrid of chess and boxing. In other words, tennis is the ultimate combination of physical and mental combat. And yet the force of the lyrics is almost entirely embodied by McEnroe, if not the sport’s greatest player, certainly its singular genius, as perhaps best described by Dick Enberg’s remarks that “everyone else plays tennis, McEnroe plays music.” So, McEnroe was artist and, per D.F. Wallace’s definition of tennis, warrior. But, just as importantly, he was also quite infamously the anti-hero. And because we all tacitly acknowledge that almost every hero is on some important level a fraud, leaving anti-heros as, to borrow a phrase from Princess Leia, “our only hope,” we loved McEnroe not in spite of, but precisely because of all the Sturm und Drang. Artist, warrior, anti-hero. In evoking John McEnroe, Everlast has captured the three primary elements of contemporary masculinity. “Jump Around,” then, becomes the response, twenty years later, to Helen Reddy’s 1972 smash hit and the unforgettable lyrics, “I am woman, hear me roar.”
Would that we could stop there, declare “Jump Around” the yang to “I am Woman’s” yin, and celebrate our enlightened post-feminism. But the potpourri of art, war, and anti-heroism that makes up contemporary masculinity has a certain stench to it. And the odor wafts right out of “Jump Around,” in particular those opening lines of the second verse; “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe” is but the first half of a couplet. Completing the rhyme is this: “If your girl steps up, I’m smacking the ho”
That “Jump Around” pairs the definitive image of really existing masculinity with violence against women is, I would suggest, no coincidence; there are any number of words that end with a long-o sound. The couplet could just as easily have been, e.g., “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe, and my girl drops elbows like as if she fights for G.L.O.W.,” (G.L.O.W., of course, standing for the quite real Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), or “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe, if you step to me in battle you’ll get doused by my flow.” That’s battle as in freestyle rap battle folks, which, based on the quality of my imaginary substitute “Jump Around” lyrics, is a battle I am clearly not yet ready to wage. But you get my drift, which is that when Everlast penned the lyrics that would come to define modern man, he had no choice but to complete the definition with the second half of the couplet. I.e., language was speaking through Everlast, as it so often does with all of us, when the picture of today’s man was paired with the image of male violence against women. Language knows what so many of us pretend ignorance to. Language, the Symbolic Order that Jacques Lacan (rightly) suggests is the cost of doing any human business, knows that “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe” is the dictionary definition of the word man, and “if your girl steps up I’m smacking the ho” is the picture in the dictionary next to that definition.
How exactly have we arrived here, here being the time and place where manhood is not just inextricably linked to violence against women, but in fact emerges out of violence against women? Because if art, war, and anti-heroism dominate the foreground of masculinity, that foreground is thrown into sharp relief by the backdrop to it all, a background scene of symbolic and actual violence against women perfectly captured by Everlast’s “smacking the ho.” (See “smacking” for the actual physical violence, and see “ho” for the perhaps more dangerous and inevitably more potent symbolic violence.) Author Judy Y. Chen’s new book, When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity, offers some new insight into just how we’ve taken this extraordinarily wrong turn. (Full disclosure: when I went to pick up When Boys Become Boys from the local bibliotheque, it was already checked out. So we are relying here on the informative review posted at http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=7231. ) Chen’s research-based thesis is that boys become boys “in opposition to femininity,” i.e. a boy is that which is not a girl, but, more specifically, not a girl by virtue of aggression, and, ultimately, aggression towards the feminine.
Just so, Chen (as quoted in the mentalhelp.net review) writes that "…boys' socialization towards cultural constructions of masculinity that are defined in opposition to femininity seems mainly to force a split between what boys know (e.g., about themselves, their relationships, and their world) and what boys show. In the process of becoming ‘boys,’ these boys essentially were learning to disassociate their outward behavior from their innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.” Moreover, Chen’s research supports the disturbing reality that the split between what boys (and men) show and what they know plays out as violence against girls (and women), as per the mentalhelp.net review:
“Another significant find in her study was the fact that one of the high status boys in the class came up with an all boy group named ‘The Mean Team.’ The Mean Team targeted girls in the sense that they teased them or were mean to them. Being a successful Mean Team participant ensured a higher status and participation in a group and became another way for the boys to establish hierarchy and segregate themselves based on gender.”
Being one of the boys, which is precisely how one becomes a man in this culture that has no truck with rites of passage, requires joining The Mean Team. That is to say that the harsh reality is that men are The Mean Team. And the even harsher reality is that this includes just about every last one of us, which sounds confusing given the relative abundance of nice guys, until one realizes that nice guys are the good cops to the overtly mean guys’ bad cops. While bad cops busy themselves “smacking the ho,” and while good cops go about the business of making nice to only those women the world deems “good girls,” rest assured that they are both policing female bodies and the symbols that represent those bodies. (As an example of this policing, see every 13 year-old good girl who wears skirts and shorts that would make even Daisy Duke blush in the desperate hopes of earning the attention of the nice guys in 7th grade.) If the only way forward is to first admit that you have a problem, then the unvarnished problem is this: like the doctrine of the privation of good, which holds that evil is the absence or lack of good, masculinity as we know it, and as understood in the work of Chen, is the absence of femininity. To connect the dots, masculinity as we know it, is, to the degree that it is constituted in the absence of the feminine and then organized in aggression towards that very constitutional lack, evil.
The monumental task before us is to reinvent masculinity so that, returning to an image from the third paragraph of this essay, masculinity at long last takes its rightful place as the yang to the feminine’s yin. Building on Chen’s work, masculinity must be reinvented such that it is no longer born out of opposition to the feminine, but instead, building on the concepts inherent to the yin and the yang, blooms in complement to the feminine (with, to be clear, both masculine and feminine paths open wide to people with either sets of genitalia, although I would maintain that it is certainly reasonable to expect certain sets of genitalia to generally gravitate towards one pole of the masculine/feminine continuum- at least for now). Borrowing from the idea that real human history will only begin once a genuine socialism has taken root, I would argue that authentic masculinity will only begin once genuine nonviolence has won the day. But in a time when “world peace” has been reduced to clichéd punch line, global nonviolence isn’t even a glimmer in our collective third eye. So, we need to take the very first baby steps towards reinventing the masculine and undoing the current chokehold of evil. In planning these very first steps we would be wise to note that 98% of pre-school and kindergarten teachers are women, as are 81% of elementary and middle school teachers. Is it any wonder that boys are defining themselves in opposition to women, when there are quite literally little to no men around to model themselves after? If you are a man with even the vaguest sense of commitment to nonviolence, and if you want to (again quite literally) save the world, you should take a job in any primary school that will have you. It is a place to begin now, in a hurry, before we find that the show is abruptly over.
Unpacking the lyrics’ impact first requires tearing off the sport of tennis’ country club veneer to reveal the truth at its core, captured precisely by David Foster Wallace when he described tennis as a hybrid of chess and boxing. In other words, tennis is the ultimate combination of physical and mental combat. And yet the force of the lyrics is almost entirely embodied by McEnroe, if not the sport’s greatest player, certainly its singular genius, as perhaps best described by Dick Enberg’s remarks that “everyone else plays tennis, McEnroe plays music.” So, McEnroe was artist and, per D.F. Wallace’s definition of tennis, warrior. But, just as importantly, he was also quite infamously the anti-hero. And because we all tacitly acknowledge that almost every hero is on some important level a fraud, leaving anti-heros as, to borrow a phrase from Princess Leia, “our only hope,” we loved McEnroe not in spite of, but precisely because of all the Sturm und Drang. Artist, warrior, anti-hero. In evoking John McEnroe, Everlast has captured the three primary elements of contemporary masculinity. “Jump Around,” then, becomes the response, twenty years later, to Helen Reddy’s 1972 smash hit and the unforgettable lyrics, “I am woman, hear me roar.”
Would that we could stop there, declare “Jump Around” the yang to “I am Woman’s” yin, and celebrate our enlightened post-feminism. But the potpourri of art, war, and anti-heroism that makes up contemporary masculinity has a certain stench to it. And the odor wafts right out of “Jump Around,” in particular those opening lines of the second verse; “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe” is but the first half of a couplet. Completing the rhyme is this: “If your girl steps up, I’m smacking the ho”
That “Jump Around” pairs the definitive image of really existing masculinity with violence against women is, I would suggest, no coincidence; there are any number of words that end with a long-o sound. The couplet could just as easily have been, e.g., “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe, and my girl drops elbows like as if she fights for G.L.O.W.,” (G.L.O.W., of course, standing for the quite real Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling), or “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe, if you step to me in battle you’ll get doused by my flow.” That’s battle as in freestyle rap battle folks, which, based on the quality of my imaginary substitute “Jump Around” lyrics, is a battle I am clearly not yet ready to wage. But you get my drift, which is that when Everlast penned the lyrics that would come to define modern man, he had no choice but to complete the definition with the second half of the couplet. I.e., language was speaking through Everlast, as it so often does with all of us, when the picture of today’s man was paired with the image of male violence against women. Language knows what so many of us pretend ignorance to. Language, the Symbolic Order that Jacques Lacan (rightly) suggests is the cost of doing any human business, knows that “I’ll serve your ass like John McEnroe” is the dictionary definition of the word man, and “if your girl steps up I’m smacking the ho” is the picture in the dictionary next to that definition.
How exactly have we arrived here, here being the time and place where manhood is not just inextricably linked to violence against women, but in fact emerges out of violence against women? Because if art, war, and anti-heroism dominate the foreground of masculinity, that foreground is thrown into sharp relief by the backdrop to it all, a background scene of symbolic and actual violence against women perfectly captured by Everlast’s “smacking the ho.” (See “smacking” for the actual physical violence, and see “ho” for the perhaps more dangerous and inevitably more potent symbolic violence.) Author Judy Y. Chen’s new book, When Boys Become Boys: Development, Relationships, and Masculinity, offers some new insight into just how we’ve taken this extraordinarily wrong turn. (Full disclosure: when I went to pick up When Boys Become Boys from the local bibliotheque, it was already checked out. So we are relying here on the informative review posted at http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=7231. ) Chen’s research-based thesis is that boys become boys “in opposition to femininity,” i.e. a boy is that which is not a girl, but, more specifically, not a girl by virtue of aggression, and, ultimately, aggression towards the feminine.
Just so, Chen (as quoted in the mentalhelp.net review) writes that "…boys' socialization towards cultural constructions of masculinity that are defined in opposition to femininity seems mainly to force a split between what boys know (e.g., about themselves, their relationships, and their world) and what boys show. In the process of becoming ‘boys,’ these boys essentially were learning to disassociate their outward behavior from their innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.” Moreover, Chen’s research supports the disturbing reality that the split between what boys (and men) show and what they know plays out as violence against girls (and women), as per the mentalhelp.net review:
“Another significant find in her study was the fact that one of the high status boys in the class came up with an all boy group named ‘The Mean Team.’ The Mean Team targeted girls in the sense that they teased them or were mean to them. Being a successful Mean Team participant ensured a higher status and participation in a group and became another way for the boys to establish hierarchy and segregate themselves based on gender.”
Being one of the boys, which is precisely how one becomes a man in this culture that has no truck with rites of passage, requires joining The Mean Team. That is to say that the harsh reality is that men are The Mean Team. And the even harsher reality is that this includes just about every last one of us, which sounds confusing given the relative abundance of nice guys, until one realizes that nice guys are the good cops to the overtly mean guys’ bad cops. While bad cops busy themselves “smacking the ho,” and while good cops go about the business of making nice to only those women the world deems “good girls,” rest assured that they are both policing female bodies and the symbols that represent those bodies. (As an example of this policing, see every 13 year-old good girl who wears skirts and shorts that would make even Daisy Duke blush in the desperate hopes of earning the attention of the nice guys in 7th grade.) If the only way forward is to first admit that you have a problem, then the unvarnished problem is this: like the doctrine of the privation of good, which holds that evil is the absence or lack of good, masculinity as we know it, and as understood in the work of Chen, is the absence of femininity. To connect the dots, masculinity as we know it, is, to the degree that it is constituted in the absence of the feminine and then organized in aggression towards that very constitutional lack, evil.
The monumental task before us is to reinvent masculinity so that, returning to an image from the third paragraph of this essay, masculinity at long last takes its rightful place as the yang to the feminine’s yin. Building on Chen’s work, masculinity must be reinvented such that it is no longer born out of opposition to the feminine, but instead, building on the concepts inherent to the yin and the yang, blooms in complement to the feminine (with, to be clear, both masculine and feminine paths open wide to people with either sets of genitalia, although I would maintain that it is certainly reasonable to expect certain sets of genitalia to generally gravitate towards one pole of the masculine/feminine continuum- at least for now). Borrowing from the idea that real human history will only begin once a genuine socialism has taken root, I would argue that authentic masculinity will only begin once genuine nonviolence has won the day. But in a time when “world peace” has been reduced to clichéd punch line, global nonviolence isn’t even a glimmer in our collective third eye. So, we need to take the very first baby steps towards reinventing the masculine and undoing the current chokehold of evil. In planning these very first steps we would be wise to note that 98% of pre-school and kindergarten teachers are women, as are 81% of elementary and middle school teachers. Is it any wonder that boys are defining themselves in opposition to women, when there are quite literally little to no men around to model themselves after? If you are a man with even the vaguest sense of commitment to nonviolence, and if you want to (again quite literally) save the world, you should take a job in any primary school that will have you. It is a place to begin now, in a hurry, before we find that the show is abruptly over.
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