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[Dear LiveJournal Friends: Remember, YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THIS. Just scroll down to the next item on your Friends Page.
The impatient can also settle for the summary, “Those who say ‘There are two sides to every question’ are lost already. For there are always more than two sides.”]
There is a saying about some ancient group or another that “when they said things that could be understood, what they said was of no use to anyone, and when they said things that were of use, no one could understand what they were saying.”
Given the off-kilter nature of my intellectual frameworks, I am constantly falling prey to this occupational dis-ease.
I keep recommending really badly written novels that were written for some other purpose than producing good literature, for example, forgetting that most of my readership, in spite of my continuing efforts at outreach, is composed of the original LJ Friends—all of whom are rightly (by virtue of profession and/or preference) but also inordinately concerned with how to produce a good piece of prose, whether fiction or what we believe to be non-fiction.
Whereas the psychologically inflected traditions I prefer, far from pursuing elegance and clarity, are devoted to finding ways to unsettle expectations and to make sure that no one figures things out too quickly, chasing off the uninterested while planting suggestions and mental models that are meant to operate years later, under completely different circumstances. This kind of technique has been put to alarming uses in recent years, but the original uses were more beneficent, and as I am fond of quoting from Kenneth Rexroth who may have quoted it from Herbert Read or somebody else, the basic strategies probably date back to the Paleolithic caves.
The evidence for this glibly confident saying was assembled more systematically by Richard Rudgley in his 1999 The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, which lately I have been reading again. In spite of the similarity of the title to a good many very silly speculations, Rudgley assembles the then most recent research to put the case for the development as early as the Upper Paleolithic of the roots of mathematics, surgery as well as medicine, writing, art, music, and the symbol-using capacities that lie behind them.*
[Why I think the evidence he summarizes makes sense takes us too far afield, but I have summarized it in a footnote. Otherwise we’ll never get to my point, a point for which it is important to show the very early emergence of the roots of sophisticated human endeavors, but less important to show that the Neolithic explosion of culture was prepared for by prior developments, in much the same way that the Italian Renaissance was the coalescence of a good many prior developments that were combined and reinterpreted. So instead, we move on:]
At the same time that I have been reading Rudgley, I have been working up a possible lecture on global art for a conference in Brazil, and have been brought up short by the observation in Frank J. Lechner and John Boli’s book on globalization (World Culture: Origins and Consequences) that there are four main competing theories of globalization, but that since the four theories are not as mutually exclusive as their proponents think they are, Lechner and Boli intend to use a method of approach that borrows elements in different quantities from each of them.
(All theories are partly right and partly wrong, but some are more wrong than others, and yes, some are so incorrectly constructed as to be not even wrong, since they fail to address the problem at all. This should be obvious, but of course it isn’t. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the silly academic arguments that are the stuff of intellectual life.)
And that leads me to my next point, which I can only make by telling you another story about my recent reading, because I am stupid like that:
I have written before about how a well-edited magazine can be a corrective to the tendency to worship one’s own chosen methodology. If you read enough reviews in sequence—let us say in the April 7, 2011 NYRB (don’t ask why I was just now reading the New York Review of Books of April 7, 2011; I just was)—reviews that all take issue with the books under review in different fields of study, and you notice that the reasons for taking issue appear to be the same reasons, why, you might begin to suspect that many different fields of endeavor suffer from the same tendency, to seek a single cause or a single evolution of events when there are always many interacting causes and many channels through which the same goal is accomplished.
This again is perfectly obvious except when it isn’t, which is most of the time.**
So starting, say, with Julian Bell’s critique of the empty or overly broad categories of the classical inheritance into which the curators at the Louvre attempted to force eighteenth-century art in the L’Antiquité révée exhibition, and then encountering Bill McKibben’s critique of the faulty logic and research methods of the climate skeptics anthologized by Bjørn Lomborg—whose economic cost-benefit analyses, for example, neglect such variables as national borders and the uneasy relationships between individual populations—and then reading Pico Iyer on Colin Thubron’s To a Mountain in Tibet and Peter Brown on Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome forms a veritable mini-education in the problematics of constructing academic models. (As a professor wrote on one of my papers in college, "This sentence, while grammatically correct, is awfully complicated.")
Actually, Brown’s essay fits with McKibben’s in that Cameron’s book demolishes the post-WWII model in which the last pagans were wonderfully tolerant types undone by intolerant Christians, whereas it is closer to the truth to say that while paganism per se was undone by the simple economic decision to stop funding it, the intellectual edifice of what we call the classical inheritance of literature and art (and back we go to the Louvre and its categories, if we have been reading straight through the magazine!) was preserved by the meeting ground of centrist pagans and centrist Christians, the latter greatly relieved by the disappearance of paganism as a competing religion. The displacement of classical art and literature into the category of “worldly temptation” allowed for the survival of humane literacy, since “worldliness” such as reading Vergil was so much less monumental a sin than murder or adultery.
If the person who has been reading these essays is myself, which to my surprise I find that it is, then he or she (he or I, in this case) may find the general premises derived from them are not only applicable to the essays in the magazine, but to other issues of immediate interest in the aforementioned reader’s world.
In this case, it would be Thubron’s bemused approach to the Tibetan Buddhism practiced on Mount Kailas—which is of immediate interest to me because of the three mandala exhibitions currently on display in Atlanta, plus Glenn Mullin’s discussion of that mountain in a lecture on “Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas” the evening after my methodologically reflective reading of Iyer’s review. (One more meaningless coincidence, enacted in a gallery full of the mandalas painted in the 1920s and 1930s by Jung's patients.)
Thubron "rightly points out," says Iyer, that Tibetans “can be seen as a people ‘in love with war’ and some pilgrims have been known to finance their trips to Kailas with banditry (suffering public mutilation if caught). There are always as many devils as deities in the wildly esoteric paintings that fill Tibetan Buddhist prayer halls, and when he encounters a painting of the Celestial Angel of one valley, Thubron discovers ‘a demon goddess with a pig’s face and lewd fangs.’”
By coincidence, another book on twentieth-century Tibetan history that I am currently reading points out that the original legends surrounding the so-called Wrathful Deities are literal-minded examples of bloodthirstiness, and not the tales of symbolic deities devoted to stamping out devotees’ negative qualities that we find in today’s accounts of Tibetan practice.
My response to this—and this is what makes relevant the prospect with which I began, that human beings have been pretty much governed by the same psychological and social variables since the Paleolithic, even if the distributions of psychological proclivities shift from culture to culture—was “For heaven’s sakes, why shouldn’t Tibetan Buddhism have incorporated literal-minded bloodthirstiness into psychological practices designed to neutralize the human tendency towards violence? The savants who turned the Wrathful Deities into visualizations of fictional manifestations of real human possibilities—into psychological tools for transformation, not literary or artistic allegories—knew very well that they had to deal with a quarrelsome people given to fussin’ and fightin’. That is why they developed the methods that they did, knowing that not everyone would be inclined to practice them and would need the literal threats to keep them in line. Just as in Jungian or Freudian analysis, the outcome of initiatory practice would be partial failure at best and total failure at worst, and some members of the society would have no interest whatsoever in the possibility.
Of course, human beings being what they are (or “as is the way of men” in the older sexist language...perhaps “as is the way of folks”?), the places where the encoded practices were taught could all too quickly be incorporated into feudalist economies in which the voluntary contribution of resources to your local professionals for services rendered (the monks being the equivalents of psychiatrists and dispute resolution counselors in so many cultures from one end of the Silk Road to the other, kind of the successors to the shamans in smaller forms of social organization) became an obligatory payment to folks who might not be providing much counseling at all, and frequently not exercising much in the way of personal transformation within their communities, either. The smooth operators can always be counted on to make the most of an opportunity, whether in Tibetan monasteries, university departments, or political revolutions.
For some reason theorists are unable to imagine a culture in which smooth operators and proto-psychoanalysts and all the other familiar types of literature actually function as they would in a different culture, only they function in slightly different formats and with substantially different distributions of prestige and power. To say so is usually sneered at as simple projection of our categories onto cultures that need to be approached in their own terms, but this ignores the fact that all cultures are subject to self-deception. Even if our own categories are misleading when overlaid as an interpretive grid, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t comparable categories in the other cultures, just arranged very differently, and that the cultures may be as incapable of interpreting themselves correctly as we are of interpreting our own culture accurately.
Illustrating this ongoing failure of imagination in the name of maintaining a rigorous theory, Rudgley cites a discussion of early hunting cultures as being more empathetic towards the animals they hunt (which they are, in documented cases) in which the counter-evidence includes sadistic behavior towards animals observed in present-day hunting cultures that inculcate respect for the creatures being hunted. Again, for heavens’ sakes, why shouldn’t every culture on earth have deviants from the cultural norms of the culture? They obviously do have such deviants, only the definition of deviancy differs depending on the conceptual weight given to different aspects of behavior and their relative suitability in public or private contexts.
That brings me full circle to some things that Lechner and Boli have to say about how today’s global institutions define one-size-fits-all approaches to acceptable global behavior, and the confusion of universally desirable outcomes with universally applied methods for reaching those outcomes—a debate that is rendered more difficult by the fact that an emphasis on the dubious functionality of universally applied methods (No Child Left Behind being a current American example) is usually an excuse for not attaining the universally desirable outcomes or even trying to attain them. And as we know, in other contexts “local control” is often a synonym for “local oppression.”
But we are not going to go there right now. I imagine that no one has actually gotten to the bottom of this two-thousand-word essay, which I am not going to LJ-cut because I suspect that my non-LiveJournal readership doesn’t always comprehend the rationale for not weighing down LiveJournal Friends’ pages with huge blocks of text. And I do have some people other than LJ Friends who read these things.
Now for that asterisk’d footnote from above, about there being no need to explain the sudden evolutionary leaps of the Upper Paleolithic and the subsequent ones of the Neolithic, because there were transitional precursors of which we have only the sketchiest knowledge:
*There are rarely evidences of such capacities in the Lower Paleolithic, when, as an archaeologist speaking in more recent years put it, “it’s a hundred thousand years later and they’re still chipping the same spear point,” and Rudgley’s unfortunate effort to trace the origins of language and the creation of proto-writing in systems of keeping track of quantities leads off into summaries of what may be assorted dead ends. What counts is the discovery of a sufficient number of objects suggesting the evolution of abstract intelligence to contest the notion that we have a sudden leap in mental capacity 40,000 years ago that led to the abrupt appearance of all these wonderful human abilities in art and reasoning, followed by the abrupt emergence in the Neolithic of all these other wonderful human abilities.
And that other, double-asterisk’d footnote:
**We always want to turn implication into strict implication, adding that fatal extra “f” to “if.” The “iff” that signifies “if and only if’ in symbolic logic is, much of the time, exactly the misspelling that a legendary proofreader once thought it was. Very few sequences of causality and events in the real world are “if this, then only this”; they are “if this, then this, but also this, and this, and every once in a while, this, and possibly even this, though this last ‘this’ is subject to endless argument.”
The impatient can also settle for the summary, “Those who say ‘There are two sides to every question’ are lost already. For there are always more than two sides.”]
There is a saying about some ancient group or another that “when they said things that could be understood, what they said was of no use to anyone, and when they said things that were of use, no one could understand what they were saying.”
Given the off-kilter nature of my intellectual frameworks, I am constantly falling prey to this occupational dis-ease.
I keep recommending really badly written novels that were written for some other purpose than producing good literature, for example, forgetting that most of my readership, in spite of my continuing efforts at outreach, is composed of the original LJ Friends—all of whom are rightly (by virtue of profession and/or preference) but also inordinately concerned with how to produce a good piece of prose, whether fiction or what we believe to be non-fiction.
Whereas the psychologically inflected traditions I prefer, far from pursuing elegance and clarity, are devoted to finding ways to unsettle expectations and to make sure that no one figures things out too quickly, chasing off the uninterested while planting suggestions and mental models that are meant to operate years later, under completely different circumstances. This kind of technique has been put to alarming uses in recent years, but the original uses were more beneficent, and as I am fond of quoting from Kenneth Rexroth who may have quoted it from Herbert Read or somebody else, the basic strategies probably date back to the Paleolithic caves.
The evidence for this glibly confident saying was assembled more systematically by Richard Rudgley in his 1999 The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age, which lately I have been reading again. In spite of the similarity of the title to a good many very silly speculations, Rudgley assembles the then most recent research to put the case for the development as early as the Upper Paleolithic of the roots of mathematics, surgery as well as medicine, writing, art, music, and the symbol-using capacities that lie behind them.*
[Why I think the evidence he summarizes makes sense takes us too far afield, but I have summarized it in a footnote. Otherwise we’ll never get to my point, a point for which it is important to show the very early emergence of the roots of sophisticated human endeavors, but less important to show that the Neolithic explosion of culture was prepared for by prior developments, in much the same way that the Italian Renaissance was the coalescence of a good many prior developments that were combined and reinterpreted. So instead, we move on:]
At the same time that I have been reading Rudgley, I have been working up a possible lecture on global art for a conference in Brazil, and have been brought up short by the observation in Frank J. Lechner and John Boli’s book on globalization (World Culture: Origins and Consequences) that there are four main competing theories of globalization, but that since the four theories are not as mutually exclusive as their proponents think they are, Lechner and Boli intend to use a method of approach that borrows elements in different quantities from each of them.
(All theories are partly right and partly wrong, but some are more wrong than others, and yes, some are so incorrectly constructed as to be not even wrong, since they fail to address the problem at all. This should be obvious, but of course it isn’t. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the silly academic arguments that are the stuff of intellectual life.)
And that leads me to my next point, which I can only make by telling you another story about my recent reading, because I am stupid like that:
I have written before about how a well-edited magazine can be a corrective to the tendency to worship one’s own chosen methodology. If you read enough reviews in sequence—let us say in the April 7, 2011 NYRB (don’t ask why I was just now reading the New York Review of Books of April 7, 2011; I just was)—reviews that all take issue with the books under review in different fields of study, and you notice that the reasons for taking issue appear to be the same reasons, why, you might begin to suspect that many different fields of endeavor suffer from the same tendency, to seek a single cause or a single evolution of events when there are always many interacting causes and many channels through which the same goal is accomplished.
This again is perfectly obvious except when it isn’t, which is most of the time.**
So starting, say, with Julian Bell’s critique of the empty or overly broad categories of the classical inheritance into which the curators at the Louvre attempted to force eighteenth-century art in the L’Antiquité révée exhibition, and then encountering Bill McKibben’s critique of the faulty logic and research methods of the climate skeptics anthologized by Bjørn Lomborg—whose economic cost-benefit analyses, for example, neglect such variables as national borders and the uneasy relationships between individual populations—and then reading Pico Iyer on Colin Thubron’s To a Mountain in Tibet and Peter Brown on Alan Cameron’s The Last Pagans of Rome forms a veritable mini-education in the problematics of constructing academic models. (As a professor wrote on one of my papers in college, "This sentence, while grammatically correct, is awfully complicated.")
Actually, Brown’s essay fits with McKibben’s in that Cameron’s book demolishes the post-WWII model in which the last pagans were wonderfully tolerant types undone by intolerant Christians, whereas it is closer to the truth to say that while paganism per se was undone by the simple economic decision to stop funding it, the intellectual edifice of what we call the classical inheritance of literature and art (and back we go to the Louvre and its categories, if we have been reading straight through the magazine!) was preserved by the meeting ground of centrist pagans and centrist Christians, the latter greatly relieved by the disappearance of paganism as a competing religion. The displacement of classical art and literature into the category of “worldly temptation” allowed for the survival of humane literacy, since “worldliness” such as reading Vergil was so much less monumental a sin than murder or adultery.
If the person who has been reading these essays is myself, which to my surprise I find that it is, then he or she (he or I, in this case) may find the general premises derived from them are not only applicable to the essays in the magazine, but to other issues of immediate interest in the aforementioned reader’s world.
In this case, it would be Thubron’s bemused approach to the Tibetan Buddhism practiced on Mount Kailas—which is of immediate interest to me because of the three mandala exhibitions currently on display in Atlanta, plus Glenn Mullin’s discussion of that mountain in a lecture on “Sacred Sites of the Dalai Lamas” the evening after my methodologically reflective reading of Iyer’s review. (One more meaningless coincidence, enacted in a gallery full of the mandalas painted in the 1920s and 1930s by Jung's patients.)
Thubron "rightly points out," says Iyer, that Tibetans “can be seen as a people ‘in love with war’ and some pilgrims have been known to finance their trips to Kailas with banditry (suffering public mutilation if caught). There are always as many devils as deities in the wildly esoteric paintings that fill Tibetan Buddhist prayer halls, and when he encounters a painting of the Celestial Angel of one valley, Thubron discovers ‘a demon goddess with a pig’s face and lewd fangs.’”
By coincidence, another book on twentieth-century Tibetan history that I am currently reading points out that the original legends surrounding the so-called Wrathful Deities are literal-minded examples of bloodthirstiness, and not the tales of symbolic deities devoted to stamping out devotees’ negative qualities that we find in today’s accounts of Tibetan practice.
My response to this—and this is what makes relevant the prospect with which I began, that human beings have been pretty much governed by the same psychological and social variables since the Paleolithic, even if the distributions of psychological proclivities shift from culture to culture—was “For heaven’s sakes, why shouldn’t Tibetan Buddhism have incorporated literal-minded bloodthirstiness into psychological practices designed to neutralize the human tendency towards violence? The savants who turned the Wrathful Deities into visualizations of fictional manifestations of real human possibilities—into psychological tools for transformation, not literary or artistic allegories—knew very well that they had to deal with a quarrelsome people given to fussin’ and fightin’. That is why they developed the methods that they did, knowing that not everyone would be inclined to practice them and would need the literal threats to keep them in line. Just as in Jungian or Freudian analysis, the outcome of initiatory practice would be partial failure at best and total failure at worst, and some members of the society would have no interest whatsoever in the possibility.
Of course, human beings being what they are (or “as is the way of men” in the older sexist language...perhaps “as is the way of folks”?), the places where the encoded practices were taught could all too quickly be incorporated into feudalist economies in which the voluntary contribution of resources to your local professionals for services rendered (the monks being the equivalents of psychiatrists and dispute resolution counselors in so many cultures from one end of the Silk Road to the other, kind of the successors to the shamans in smaller forms of social organization) became an obligatory payment to folks who might not be providing much counseling at all, and frequently not exercising much in the way of personal transformation within their communities, either. The smooth operators can always be counted on to make the most of an opportunity, whether in Tibetan monasteries, university departments, or political revolutions.
For some reason theorists are unable to imagine a culture in which smooth operators and proto-psychoanalysts and all the other familiar types of literature actually function as they would in a different culture, only they function in slightly different formats and with substantially different distributions of prestige and power. To say so is usually sneered at as simple projection of our categories onto cultures that need to be approached in their own terms, but this ignores the fact that all cultures are subject to self-deception. Even if our own categories are misleading when overlaid as an interpretive grid, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t comparable categories in the other cultures, just arranged very differently, and that the cultures may be as incapable of interpreting themselves correctly as we are of interpreting our own culture accurately.
Illustrating this ongoing failure of imagination in the name of maintaining a rigorous theory, Rudgley cites a discussion of early hunting cultures as being more empathetic towards the animals they hunt (which they are, in documented cases) in which the counter-evidence includes sadistic behavior towards animals observed in present-day hunting cultures that inculcate respect for the creatures being hunted. Again, for heavens’ sakes, why shouldn’t every culture on earth have deviants from the cultural norms of the culture? They obviously do have such deviants, only the definition of deviancy differs depending on the conceptual weight given to different aspects of behavior and their relative suitability in public or private contexts.
That brings me full circle to some things that Lechner and Boli have to say about how today’s global institutions define one-size-fits-all approaches to acceptable global behavior, and the confusion of universally desirable outcomes with universally applied methods for reaching those outcomes—a debate that is rendered more difficult by the fact that an emphasis on the dubious functionality of universally applied methods (No Child Left Behind being a current American example) is usually an excuse for not attaining the universally desirable outcomes or even trying to attain them. And as we know, in other contexts “local control” is often a synonym for “local oppression.”
But we are not going to go there right now. I imagine that no one has actually gotten to the bottom of this two-thousand-word essay, which I am not going to LJ-cut because I suspect that my non-LiveJournal readership doesn’t always comprehend the rationale for not weighing down LiveJournal Friends’ pages with huge blocks of text. And I do have some people other than LJ Friends who read these things.
Now for that asterisk’d footnote from above, about there being no need to explain the sudden evolutionary leaps of the Upper Paleolithic and the subsequent ones of the Neolithic, because there were transitional precursors of which we have only the sketchiest knowledge:
*There are rarely evidences of such capacities in the Lower Paleolithic, when, as an archaeologist speaking in more recent years put it, “it’s a hundred thousand years later and they’re still chipping the same spear point,” and Rudgley’s unfortunate effort to trace the origins of language and the creation of proto-writing in systems of keeping track of quantities leads off into summaries of what may be assorted dead ends. What counts is the discovery of a sufficient number of objects suggesting the evolution of abstract intelligence to contest the notion that we have a sudden leap in mental capacity 40,000 years ago that led to the abrupt appearance of all these wonderful human abilities in art and reasoning, followed by the abrupt emergence in the Neolithic of all these other wonderful human abilities.
And that other, double-asterisk’d footnote:
**We always want to turn implication into strict implication, adding that fatal extra “f” to “if.” The “iff” that signifies “if and only if’ in symbolic logic is, much of the time, exactly the misspelling that a legendary proofreader once thought it was. Very few sequences of causality and events in the real world are “if this, then only this”; they are “if this, then this, but also this, and this, and every once in a while, this, and possibly even this, though this last ‘this’ is subject to endless argument.”
