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joculumI Know Why I Haven’t Seen This Before: Sorry, Folks, It’s a Whole New Theory of Everything
Jerry Cullum
Any theory of human society and psychology that is sparked by an almost certainly wrong anthropological theory about tribal cultures in upland South Asia is almost certainly insane. But the theory doesn’t involve space aliens, ineffable revelations, or thoughts that I and only I have had, so maybe it’s worth going past the LJ-cut when you feel sufficiently rested and misguidedly curious.
The anthropological theory is James C. Scott’s hypothesis that tribal cultures on the margins of the great South Asian civilizations are anarchistically inclined peasant collectives that renounced literacy as tools of power and otherwise organized themselves to produce a largely egalitarian community in which Big Men couldn’t arise beyond a certain level—all these things having happened because these separate tribal units had had more than enough run-ins with the incipient authoritarianism of the imperial states that dominated the various lowland cultures of China, India, Burma, Cambodia, et cetera.
Scott’s hypothesis is too simple by half, but he’s on to something. And the semi-ignorant garble of the Boston Globe reporter writing about him in his article of December 6, 2009 led me to hypothesize further (from what is probably invincible ignorance on my part).
The aforementioned reporter ended his article by extrapolating to the notion that the high cultures of the Asian empires defined themselves in contrast to the “barbarians” on their frontiers, which the reporter took to be equivalent to the anarchist collectives of Scott’s model of the mountain regions of South and West Asia. He cited the restive Tibetans as an example.
But Tibet on the fringes of China is more like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth squeezed in between the Germans and the Russians: it was an empire of its own, dominating some varieties of cantankerous peasants who might very well have withdrawn into the mountain fastnesses to get away from the rule of Lhasa.
And this smaller Tibetan empire, unlike the smaller states of Southeast Asia that were resisting one great empire at a time, was pinned in between a variety of contending empires, even as it sought to dominate the tribal units of its own that had no wish to be dominated.
Bingo. Ideal turf (because of all the political and social tensions) for the development of Tibetan Buddhism, just as Afghanistan and the outer fringes of Persia (not identical with the borders of today’s Iran) and the mountain territory in between the warring empires constituted ideal territory for the development of the various mystico-psychological religions about which I have written previously. Whether Orthodox hesychasm (which reached its apogee in the outer fringes of czarist Russia, i.e. Finland) and the various Jewish mysticisms of the Pale and beyond fit my hypothesis about the sociology of knowledge avant le lettre, I’ll leave for others to debate.
Now we come to my forty-year quarrel with the utopians of the 1960s and after. Herbert Marcuse began his English-language career with Eros and Civilization, an attempted synthesis of Freud and Marx that was followed by Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, Brown and Marcuse went off in their separate directions and occasionally got together long enough to quarrel with each other’s emphases, Brown being more Freudian, Marcuse more Marxist (and both probably demonstrably wrong).
Then in the fullness of time came Fredric Jameson’s re-reading of Jacques Lacan’s structuralist Freudianism and Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism in The Political Unconscious. I cannot claim to have read that notoriously difficult book, but the companion commentary Jameson, Althusser, Marx provided more than enough food for thought.
Jameson, at that stage of his career, shared the view that we cannot possibly know what a post-revolutionary society will want or require. It may be that the paintings of Breugel (or Breughel, or whoever) that we value so highly today must be destroyed and forgotten in order for the post-revoutionary society to flourish, and that there will be no regret for this fact in that unimaginable condition-to-come.
Bad choice of examples. At least as far as I was concerned. For it calls up my quarrel with the anti-aesthetic theoreticians of all stripes, whom I believe to be one type of personality, engaged in universalizing about something that is only their own inner condition. (Which is what all of us do, frankly.)
Now I am left with the feeling that Ernst Bloch might have had something to say about this in The Principle of Hope, because that vast book is devoted to the many different visions of utopia. But since Bloch at one point ended up as an apologist for Stalinist repression at its worst, and since Comm-u-nism in general is a topic best left to one side in American discussions, I would prefer to work from other examples.
But I do have to go back to the very simple example of the Bread and Roses Theatre’s insight that the people do like flowers and pretty pictures, and it won’t do for the party bosses and the highfalutin’ theorists to insist that this is because they have been led to accept false substitutes for material satisfactions like real pie instead of paintings of pies. (Some of the theorists would add that the people like roses because they aren’t getting enough sex, but those theorists are frowned on by the commodity-satisfactions theorists.)
Now, I have written before that the ultimate problem of the moment is not how to reconcile Freud and Marx (actually, the problem would be how to reconcile either one with today’s research in their respective disciplines), but how to reconcile both with Darwin. For Darwin has usually been the great excuse used by conservatives of all stripes, which is paradoxical when you consider the extent to which the folks in America who call themselves social conservatives are anti-evolutionist. But the free-market nihilists who make common cause with the so-called religious right are Darwinians all the way, right down to the primacy of biological imperatives over social ones.
(The interesting thing about reductionism is that the Marxist reductionists and Darwinian reductionists are mirror images of each other, disagreeing only on whether social relations are illusory reflections of biological ones or biological relations are fictions created to mask the reality of social relations. The psychological reductionists insist that both are fictions created by the mind to mask the psychological needs that underlie both the uses of society and the uses of the individual body. I insist that all of them have their heads inserted into bodily cavities better used for other functions.)
So, back to Tibet, or medieval Europe, or wherever. The tribal cultures of Scott’s mountain margins all have art, and song, and they have story even when they do not have writing; this suggests that roses remain a concern even when bread has become secure. (Of course, there are societies in which aesthetic needs are distributed differently from the ways they are in others…less interest in making a really good painting or piece of lace or beadwork, and more in making a really good stew or rocking chair or alcoholic beverage. But the issue of whether the various arts and crafts can be prioritized is a separate one…if we stop to think about “high” and “low” and their political and gender implications, we’ll never get to where I am going.)
Empires tend to go in for excess social repression, as a way of wringing maximum surplus value out of their labor forces. They don’t just require contributions of food and hours of time spent in warfare or construction, they make it impossible for flower gardens to be cultivated, and otherwise excessively humiliate and degrade their human resources.
So the response of certain social revolutionaries has been to get their own back by burning down the castles and demolishing the public sculptures, when the response the people really wanted was to be able to plant their own flowers around the sculptures and have a nice picnic with the food that the revolution kept them from having to donate to the landowner, and maybe visit the castle on weekends and take in the sights. (I have written before about how Ronald Hutton’s research indicates that most of the “pagan survivals” in British festivals were Reformation inventions by the folk, trying to sneak a bit of beauty past Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers and the later enforcers of Low Church piety.)
And whatever else religion has done in these latitudes, it has provided a space for the creation of art that is available to the people. The assumption that cathedrals are merely props for power is shortsighted; people like cathedrals, the way that today they also like movies and video games. Whether the cathedrals also support a repressive social order, or provide spaces in which to conduct psychological education and consciousness-raising, is separate from the question of whether they provide a space for the creation of a complex aesthetic object that couldn’t be gotten by leaving artmaking in the hands of the villages or hiding the stuff away in the treasuries of the socially powerful.
Substitute “monasteries” or “pilgrimage sites” for “cathedrals” or other terminology appropriate to the specific social and historical contexts around the world, as you will. The centers of religion have been centers for the transmission of psychological and social insight, filtered through the usual human propensity for getting it all wrong whenever possible.
And because we are a swamp of primal urges and a mountaintop of possible capacities surrounding the little island of the force that calls itself “I,” there is a lot of room for land reform in the internal regions. We are just beginning to get accurate maps of the territory.
Freud did get it right, that the swamps can never be drained, only landscaped. Jung got it right, that the mountains are really there to be climbed. Marx got it right, that all this muck and higher territory creates an illusory self that collides or colludes with other self-aggrandizing selves, and the social results create impacts on those selves, results of which the selves are not at all aware. In fact, the collective force of the collisions and collusions results in independent impacts that operate whether anyone is running the machine or not. (Tip of the hat here to Benjamin and Gramsci.)
And Darwin got it right, that all of this is underpinned by material mechanisms that arise out of blind biological forces that themselves arise out of the limitations of physical reality as it arose from the explosion of some centrally condensed Urstoff,a primal stuff that we can describe rather than leave to the realm of mystery.
And the mystics got it right that…well, I think I’ve written enough for one morning, don’t you?
Except maybe to suggest that they were closer to the “give us bread + Breugel” interpretation, or to the partly right and partly wrong visions of Brown and early Marcuse, than to the mechanistic models of structuralist Marxists and Freudians of any persuasion.
We’ll let the anarchists duke it out as to the degree to which the self-organizing collective of mutual aid can be derived from the doings of a bunch of Baptist tribesmen engaged in a longstanding rebellion against a repressive central government somewhere in upland Southeast Asia (and Ernst Bloch would doubtless understand the uses of the Baptist religion as an oppositional force that the missionaries never expected it would be, and how it might comport with economic activities that would horrify their straitlaced Baptist brethren in the American South…though the underlying moral codes for personal conduct might be amazingly similar).
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. (As a social entity in one of the neighboring burgs sang once upon a time.)
Jerry Cullum
Any theory of human society and psychology that is sparked by an almost certainly wrong anthropological theory about tribal cultures in upland South Asia is almost certainly insane. But the theory doesn’t involve space aliens, ineffable revelations, or thoughts that I and only I have had, so maybe it’s worth going past the LJ-cut when you feel sufficiently rested and misguidedly curious.
The anthropological theory is James C. Scott’s hypothesis that tribal cultures on the margins of the great South Asian civilizations are anarchistically inclined peasant collectives that renounced literacy as tools of power and otherwise organized themselves to produce a largely egalitarian community in which Big Men couldn’t arise beyond a certain level—all these things having happened because these separate tribal units had had more than enough run-ins with the incipient authoritarianism of the imperial states that dominated the various lowland cultures of China, India, Burma, Cambodia, et cetera.
Scott’s hypothesis is too simple by half, but he’s on to something. And the semi-ignorant garble of the Boston Globe reporter writing about him in his article of December 6, 2009 led me to hypothesize further (from what is probably invincible ignorance on my part).
The aforementioned reporter ended his article by extrapolating to the notion that the high cultures of the Asian empires defined themselves in contrast to the “barbarians” on their frontiers, which the reporter took to be equivalent to the anarchist collectives of Scott’s model of the mountain regions of South and West Asia. He cited the restive Tibetans as an example.
But Tibet on the fringes of China is more like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth squeezed in between the Germans and the Russians: it was an empire of its own, dominating some varieties of cantankerous peasants who might very well have withdrawn into the mountain fastnesses to get away from the rule of Lhasa.
And this smaller Tibetan empire, unlike the smaller states of Southeast Asia that were resisting one great empire at a time, was pinned in between a variety of contending empires, even as it sought to dominate the tribal units of its own that had no wish to be dominated.
Bingo. Ideal turf (because of all the political and social tensions) for the development of Tibetan Buddhism, just as Afghanistan and the outer fringes of Persia (not identical with the borders of today’s Iran) and the mountain territory in between the warring empires constituted ideal territory for the development of the various mystico-psychological religions about which I have written previously. Whether Orthodox hesychasm (which reached its apogee in the outer fringes of czarist Russia, i.e. Finland) and the various Jewish mysticisms of the Pale and beyond fit my hypothesis about the sociology of knowledge avant le lettre, I’ll leave for others to debate.
Now we come to my forty-year quarrel with the utopians of the 1960s and after. Herbert Marcuse began his English-language career with Eros and Civilization, an attempted synthesis of Freud and Marx that was followed by Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, Brown and Marcuse went off in their separate directions and occasionally got together long enough to quarrel with each other’s emphases, Brown being more Freudian, Marcuse more Marxist (and both probably demonstrably wrong).
Then in the fullness of time came Fredric Jameson’s re-reading of Jacques Lacan’s structuralist Freudianism and Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism in The Political Unconscious. I cannot claim to have read that notoriously difficult book, but the companion commentary Jameson, Althusser, Marx provided more than enough food for thought.
Jameson, at that stage of his career, shared the view that we cannot possibly know what a post-revolutionary society will want or require. It may be that the paintings of Breugel (or Breughel, or whoever) that we value so highly today must be destroyed and forgotten in order for the post-revoutionary society to flourish, and that there will be no regret for this fact in that unimaginable condition-to-come.
Bad choice of examples. At least as far as I was concerned. For it calls up my quarrel with the anti-aesthetic theoreticians of all stripes, whom I believe to be one type of personality, engaged in universalizing about something that is only their own inner condition. (Which is what all of us do, frankly.)
Now I am left with the feeling that Ernst Bloch might have had something to say about this in The Principle of Hope, because that vast book is devoted to the many different visions of utopia. But since Bloch at one point ended up as an apologist for Stalinist repression at its worst, and since Comm-u-nism in general is a topic best left to one side in American discussions, I would prefer to work from other examples.
But I do have to go back to the very simple example of the Bread and Roses Theatre’s insight that the people do like flowers and pretty pictures, and it won’t do for the party bosses and the highfalutin’ theorists to insist that this is because they have been led to accept false substitutes for material satisfactions like real pie instead of paintings of pies. (Some of the theorists would add that the people like roses because they aren’t getting enough sex, but those theorists are frowned on by the commodity-satisfactions theorists.)
Now, I have written before that the ultimate problem of the moment is not how to reconcile Freud and Marx (actually, the problem would be how to reconcile either one with today’s research in their respective disciplines), but how to reconcile both with Darwin. For Darwin has usually been the great excuse used by conservatives of all stripes, which is paradoxical when you consider the extent to which the folks in America who call themselves social conservatives are anti-evolutionist. But the free-market nihilists who make common cause with the so-called religious right are Darwinians all the way, right down to the primacy of biological imperatives over social ones.
(The interesting thing about reductionism is that the Marxist reductionists and Darwinian reductionists are mirror images of each other, disagreeing only on whether social relations are illusory reflections of biological ones or biological relations are fictions created to mask the reality of social relations. The psychological reductionists insist that both are fictions created by the mind to mask the psychological needs that underlie both the uses of society and the uses of the individual body. I insist that all of them have their heads inserted into bodily cavities better used for other functions.)
So, back to Tibet, or medieval Europe, or wherever. The tribal cultures of Scott’s mountain margins all have art, and song, and they have story even when they do not have writing; this suggests that roses remain a concern even when bread has become secure. (Of course, there are societies in which aesthetic needs are distributed differently from the ways they are in others…less interest in making a really good painting or piece of lace or beadwork, and more in making a really good stew or rocking chair or alcoholic beverage. But the issue of whether the various arts and crafts can be prioritized is a separate one…if we stop to think about “high” and “low” and their political and gender implications, we’ll never get to where I am going.)
Empires tend to go in for excess social repression, as a way of wringing maximum surplus value out of their labor forces. They don’t just require contributions of food and hours of time spent in warfare or construction, they make it impossible for flower gardens to be cultivated, and otherwise excessively humiliate and degrade their human resources.
So the response of certain social revolutionaries has been to get their own back by burning down the castles and demolishing the public sculptures, when the response the people really wanted was to be able to plant their own flowers around the sculptures and have a nice picnic with the food that the revolution kept them from having to donate to the landowner, and maybe visit the castle on weekends and take in the sights. (I have written before about how Ronald Hutton’s research indicates that most of the “pagan survivals” in British festivals were Reformation inventions by the folk, trying to sneak a bit of beauty past Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers and the later enforcers of Low Church piety.)
And whatever else religion has done in these latitudes, it has provided a space for the creation of art that is available to the people. The assumption that cathedrals are merely props for power is shortsighted; people like cathedrals, the way that today they also like movies and video games. Whether the cathedrals also support a repressive social order, or provide spaces in which to conduct psychological education and consciousness-raising, is separate from the question of whether they provide a space for the creation of a complex aesthetic object that couldn’t be gotten by leaving artmaking in the hands of the villages or hiding the stuff away in the treasuries of the socially powerful.
Substitute “monasteries” or “pilgrimage sites” for “cathedrals” or other terminology appropriate to the specific social and historical contexts around the world, as you will. The centers of religion have been centers for the transmission of psychological and social insight, filtered through the usual human propensity for getting it all wrong whenever possible.
And because we are a swamp of primal urges and a mountaintop of possible capacities surrounding the little island of the force that calls itself “I,” there is a lot of room for land reform in the internal regions. We are just beginning to get accurate maps of the territory.
Freud did get it right, that the swamps can never be drained, only landscaped. Jung got it right, that the mountains are really there to be climbed. Marx got it right, that all this muck and higher territory creates an illusory self that collides or colludes with other self-aggrandizing selves, and the social results create impacts on those selves, results of which the selves are not at all aware. In fact, the collective force of the collisions and collusions results in independent impacts that operate whether anyone is running the machine or not. (Tip of the hat here to Benjamin and Gramsci.)
And Darwin got it right, that all of this is underpinned by material mechanisms that arise out of blind biological forces that themselves arise out of the limitations of physical reality as it arose from the explosion of some centrally condensed Urstoff,a primal stuff that we can describe rather than leave to the realm of mystery.
And the mystics got it right that…well, I think I’ve written enough for one morning, don’t you?
Except maybe to suggest that they were closer to the “give us bread + Breugel” interpretation, or to the partly right and partly wrong visions of Brown and early Marcuse, than to the mechanistic models of structuralist Marxists and Freudians of any persuasion.
We’ll let the anarchists duke it out as to the degree to which the self-organizing collective of mutual aid can be derived from the doings of a bunch of Baptist tribesmen engaged in a longstanding rebellion against a repressive central government somewhere in upland Southeast Asia (and Ernst Bloch would doubtless understand the uses of the Baptist religion as an oppositional force that the missionaries never expected it would be, and how it might comport with economic activities that would horrify their straitlaced Baptist brethren in the American South…though the underlying moral codes for personal conduct might be amazingly similar).
It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. (As a social entity in one of the neighboring burgs sang once upon a time.)
