I’ve been wearing the same buzzed haircut now for about eight years, largely for the same reason that Jim Harbaugh wears the exact same pair of khakis every day. Harbaugh explains “It’s gotten to the point where I have so much time in the day knowing that I don’t have to stand in front of the closet, trying to decide what outfit to pick out.” (http://blogs.mercurynews.com/49ers/2015/01/06/jim-harbaugh-weighs-in-on-his-49ers-exit-kaepernick-khakis-twitter-and-michigan/) Exactly. I never, ever have to think about my hair. Or at least I don’t have to think about my hair anymore than I do my toenails.
Like Harbaugh, I would happily wear the same clothes each day, at least to work, like my seventh grade Industrial Arts teacher Mr. Wilken, who had a grand total of three outfits that he rotated on a weekly basis, e.g. week 1- navy slacks, light blue short-sleeve button down, navy necktie; week 2- dark green pants, light green short-sleeve button down, dark green necktie; etc., and who was so humorless that he demanded absolute silence from us, his pupils, as we used t-squares to fill our papers with the desired combination of geometrical shapes. Humorless, that is, but for his one joke: “Why do they call it a Sears & Rowback motorboat engine? Because it always breaks down and you have to row back.” If anyone ever made a sound in Mr. Wilken’s classroom he would promptly exclaim “I’m getting static!” Nothing further was ever required.
I was well prepared for the rigors of Mr. Wilken’s shop class by Ms. Travers, a 4th grade teacher at my elementary school to whose classroom I was not assigned, but who did take her regular turn monitoring the cafeteria for all of 4th grade. Ms. Travers had but one rule for the lunchroom: no talking. On days when absolute silence was kept, she was sure to pop onto the loud speaker during the end-of -day announcements, genuinely thanking us for our beautiful behavior. Not once, ever, did one of us give Ms. Travers any static.
The great thing about silence is that, like buzz cuts and uniforms, you never have to think about it. It’s always the same, always beautiful. Many Buddhists love the movie Groundhog Day, finding in it the paradox that it is only in the repetition of the very same day over and over again that we find the opportunity for change by way of slowly, haltingly, but assuredly increasing our compassion. But I am left with the distinct impression that Ms. Travers’ and Mr. Wilken’s insistence on the repetition of silence had nothing to do with a paradoxical opportunity for growth and change. And I am only left wondering which is the more emphatic “yes!” to life: the Buddhists’ “Once more, from the top,” or Travers’ and Wilken’s “Let’s check the instant replay.”
Even more to the point, do I always wear the same haircut in order to free up time to improve on the past or in order to assure more of the same? Jim Harbaugh is lucky in that he can definitively answer that question based on the outcome of his last football game. Without wins and losses balancing the ledger, the question basically boils down to whether you would prefer to live forever or never die. Strangely, you can’t have both. I owe my own recognition of this distinction to the author of the Gospel according to Matthew and David Shields.
Perhaps wanting to live forever is the surest sign that you are making a mess of the effort to never die, a twist hinted at in Matthew 16:25’s “For those who want to save their life will lose it.” For a more contemporary take, Shields, in How Literature Saved my Life, writes the following about Raymond Kurzweil, the futurist who expects that nanobots will, in the next twenty years or so, cure all disease and reverse aging, an eventuality the 62 year-old is preparing for with a regimen that involves, per Shields, 150 daily supplements, weekend intravenous transfusions, and, for a worst case scenario, plans to cryogenically freeze his body:
“He wants not so much to live as never to die. He seems to me the saddest person on the planet. I empathize with him completely.”
Kurzweil and, it seems, Shields both take their Woody Allen much more literally than their Matthew 16:25. I am, of course, referencing Allen’s famous “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
Things will get very interesting if Kurzweil is right about the nanobots. I have a feeling I’ll be sitting in my apartment, with the exact same haircut, wondering if I am still alive.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Sunday, February 15, 2015
The Trap You Set for Yourself
Raymond Chandler ‘s masterpiece, The Long Goodbye, reminds us that fiction is the best, perhaps only, place to find truth. And if we grant that truth is stranger than fiction, then we should go one step further and stipulate that fiction feels less strange than real life to us because it has the ring of truth to it. On page four Phillip Marlowe, Chandler’s protagonist and literature’s most sublime first person voice, having just happened upon a drunk named Terry Lennox, delivers the truth: “I guess it’s always a mistake to interfere with a drunk. Even if he knows and likes you he is always liable to haul off and poke you in the teeth.” Marlowe being Marlowe, he proceeds to interfere with the drunk, befriending Lennox and, on page six, he gives us the whole truth: “Terry Lennox made me plenty of trouble. But after all that’s my line of work.” Then, on page eighty-six, having just received a letter from Lennox explaining how he (Lennox) is about to kill himself to avoid being murdered in a mountain town in Mexico, Marlowe tells us nothing but the truth: “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
Chandler’s equation:
Truth=Truth
The Whole Truth= Ignoring the Truth
Nothing but the Truth= Ignoring a problem, i.e. the truth, doesn’t make it go away.
Reading Marlowe, it is impossible not to think about the many traps we’ve set for ourselves, the truths ignored. And, rather ironically, we’ve set our biggest traps by pretending to the throne of true knowledge. In other words, the pithy diagnosis is that we are “often wrong, but never uncertain.” Speaking specifically about climate change while at the same time generalizing his observation, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert restates the diagnosis when he says “In the United States, can we actually have a reality-based, serious deliberative process about anything anymore?” (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/02/nrc_geoengineering_report_climate_hacking_is_dangerous_and_barking_mad.2.html)
One of the things that has often worried me about the idea of an omniscient God is that if God knows everything why would God need to listen to me? This worry might be indigenous to the United States, where everyone knows everything and no one is listening. Or, as Marlowe puts it:
“It was the same old cocktail party, everybody talking too loud, nobody listening, everybody hanging on for dear life…”
What, exactly, are we hanging on to? At the same old cocktail party in 1953 it’s “a mug of the juice.” Today we’re hanging on to something equally intoxicating, and you can still call it juice if you are willing to dig back into pop culture circa 1992, when the movie Juice, starring the late Tupak Shakur, told the story of “4 inner-city teens who get caught up in the pursuit of power and happiness, which they refer to as ‘the juice.’” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104573/mediaindex) So, to mash up Raymond Chandler with Juice auteur Ernest R. Dickerson, Everybody is hanging on for dear life to power and happiness, to a mug of the juice.
It is this desperate clinging to power and happiness that makes a collective “reality-based, serious deliberative process,” a process you might simply call being adults, well nigh impossible. To understand exactly how this all happens we could do much worse than to turn to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the subject supposed to know. According to Lacan, transference, that fundamental exchange between analysand and analyst, has nothing at all to do with the analyst’s actual fund of knowledge. Instead:
“It is the analysand's supposition of a subject who knows that initiates the analytic process rather than the knowledge actually possessed by the analyst… the analyst is often thought to know the secret meaning of the analysand's words, the significations of speech of which even the speaker is unaware.” (http://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Subject_supposed_to_know)
All of which leads to the analyst being “credited at some point with a certain infallibility.” (ibid) Infallibility. What could possibly lead to more power and happiness than that? But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Because, to do justice to psychoanalysis, we must note that “the analyst is aware” (at least in theory) “that there is a split between him and the knowledge attributed to him…. The analyst must realise that, of the knowledge attributed to him by the analysand, he knows nothing.” (ibid)
My gambit is that we walk around supposing that there are subjects who know all the time in everyday interpersonal relations, but without ever acknowledging the split between the subjects and the knowledge attributed to them. We know well and truly that we know nothing, but we keep that dirty little secret locked up tight because no one else seems to be owning up to this, which further leads us to suppose that quite possibly we are the only ones who know nothing. Everyone else, then, is supposed to know everything that I manifestly don’t. Making it all too easy to fall under the subject supposed to know’s spell, e.g. at Jiffy Lube when they inevitably tell me I need a new air filter yet again.
But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and we’ve locked our dirty little secret up so tightly that we too can be supposed to know that, e.g., Philip Marlowe is “literature’s most sublime first person voice.” (Full disclosure: I was inspired to read Raymond Chandler by the praise heaped upon him by one of my own personal subjects supposed to know, Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is, famously, a Lacanian, so I guess I obviously haven’t yet achieved the end of my “analysis” with Zizek by recognizing that he, too, knows nothing, i.e. “The end of analysis comes when the analysand de-supposes the analyst of knowledge.” (ibid))
To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with the pursuit of knowledge, in and of itself. When I take my car in to Jiffy Lube it is important that they do know how to change my car’s oil, just as it is important that I know that air filters do not actually need to be changed every 3,000 miles. Our civilization’s pathology is not to be found in the pursuit of knowledge, but in the trumping up of provisional knowledge as absolute certainty in the service of power and happiness. We are all like bad Lacanian analysts, who occupy the position of the subject supposed to know without ever acknowledging that, in fact, we know nothing. And when I say that we know nothing, I am interpreting Socrates’ famous “I know that I know nothing” to mean I know that I know nothing for certain. If there’s one thing that we human beings aren’t allowed it’s certainty. The second we had certainty all science and prayer would end. (The fact that science and prayer are both linked to uncertainty perhaps provides at least a glimmer of hope that the war between science and religion is, at bottom, unnecessary.)
More equations:
Knowledge= I know nothing
Knowledge= power
I know nothing= power
Edward Brown, in Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, quotes his teacher Suzuki Roshi explaining that “Zen is to feel your way along in the dark, not knowing what you will meet, not already knowing what to do.” Strangest thing in the world: we are at our most powerful when we are feeling our way along in the dark, together.
Chandler’s equation:
Truth=Truth
The Whole Truth= Ignoring the Truth
Nothing but the Truth= Ignoring a problem, i.e. the truth, doesn’t make it go away.
Reading Marlowe, it is impossible not to think about the many traps we’ve set for ourselves, the truths ignored. And, rather ironically, we’ve set our biggest traps by pretending to the throne of true knowledge. In other words, the pithy diagnosis is that we are “often wrong, but never uncertain.” Speaking specifically about climate change while at the same time generalizing his observation, Raymond T. Pierrehumbert restates the diagnosis when he says “In the United States, can we actually have a reality-based, serious deliberative process about anything anymore?” (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/02/nrc_geoengineering_report_climate_hacking_is_dangerous_and_barking_mad.2.html)
One of the things that has often worried me about the idea of an omniscient God is that if God knows everything why would God need to listen to me? This worry might be indigenous to the United States, where everyone knows everything and no one is listening. Or, as Marlowe puts it:
“It was the same old cocktail party, everybody talking too loud, nobody listening, everybody hanging on for dear life…”
What, exactly, are we hanging on to? At the same old cocktail party in 1953 it’s “a mug of the juice.” Today we’re hanging on to something equally intoxicating, and you can still call it juice if you are willing to dig back into pop culture circa 1992, when the movie Juice, starring the late Tupak Shakur, told the story of “4 inner-city teens who get caught up in the pursuit of power and happiness, which they refer to as ‘the juice.’” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104573/mediaindex) So, to mash up Raymond Chandler with Juice auteur Ernest R. Dickerson, Everybody is hanging on for dear life to power and happiness, to a mug of the juice.
It is this desperate clinging to power and happiness that makes a collective “reality-based, serious deliberative process,” a process you might simply call being adults, well nigh impossible. To understand exactly how this all happens we could do much worse than to turn to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of the subject supposed to know. According to Lacan, transference, that fundamental exchange between analysand and analyst, has nothing at all to do with the analyst’s actual fund of knowledge. Instead:
“It is the analysand's supposition of a subject who knows that initiates the analytic process rather than the knowledge actually possessed by the analyst… the analyst is often thought to know the secret meaning of the analysand's words, the significations of speech of which even the speaker is unaware.” (http://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Subject_supposed_to_know)
All of which leads to the analyst being “credited at some point with a certain infallibility.” (ibid) Infallibility. What could possibly lead to more power and happiness than that? But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Because, to do justice to psychoanalysis, we must note that “the analyst is aware” (at least in theory) “that there is a split between him and the knowledge attributed to him…. The analyst must realise that, of the knowledge attributed to him by the analysand, he knows nothing.” (ibid)
My gambit is that we walk around supposing that there are subjects who know all the time in everyday interpersonal relations, but without ever acknowledging the split between the subjects and the knowledge attributed to them. We know well and truly that we know nothing, but we keep that dirty little secret locked up tight because no one else seems to be owning up to this, which further leads us to suppose that quite possibly we are the only ones who know nothing. Everyone else, then, is supposed to know everything that I manifestly don’t. Making it all too easy to fall under the subject supposed to know’s spell, e.g. at Jiffy Lube when they inevitably tell me I need a new air filter yet again.
But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and we’ve locked our dirty little secret up so tightly that we too can be supposed to know that, e.g., Philip Marlowe is “literature’s most sublime first person voice.” (Full disclosure: I was inspired to read Raymond Chandler by the praise heaped upon him by one of my own personal subjects supposed to know, Slavoj Zizek. Zizek is, famously, a Lacanian, so I guess I obviously haven’t yet achieved the end of my “analysis” with Zizek by recognizing that he, too, knows nothing, i.e. “The end of analysis comes when the analysand de-supposes the analyst of knowledge.” (ibid))
To be clear, I am not suggesting that there is anything wrong with the pursuit of knowledge, in and of itself. When I take my car in to Jiffy Lube it is important that they do know how to change my car’s oil, just as it is important that I know that air filters do not actually need to be changed every 3,000 miles. Our civilization’s pathology is not to be found in the pursuit of knowledge, but in the trumping up of provisional knowledge as absolute certainty in the service of power and happiness. We are all like bad Lacanian analysts, who occupy the position of the subject supposed to know without ever acknowledging that, in fact, we know nothing. And when I say that we know nothing, I am interpreting Socrates’ famous “I know that I know nothing” to mean I know that I know nothing for certain. If there’s one thing that we human beings aren’t allowed it’s certainty. The second we had certainty all science and prayer would end. (The fact that science and prayer are both linked to uncertainty perhaps provides at least a glimmer of hope that the war between science and religion is, at bottom, unnecessary.)
More equations:
Knowledge= I know nothing
Knowledge= power
I know nothing= power
Edward Brown, in Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings, quotes his teacher Suzuki Roshi explaining that “Zen is to feel your way along in the dark, not knowing what you will meet, not already knowing what to do.” Strangest thing in the world: we are at our most powerful when we are feeling our way along in the dark, together.
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