joculum

I am not completely satisfied with my first-draft versions of these and am keeping them, for the moment, on joculum.livejournal.com until I am satisfied with the flow of the argument. I may have posted part one to dreamwidth prematurely, for that matter.

The goal is to have the logical connections between these posts a bit more self-evident than has been the case on the LiveJournal postings, in hopes that a more fruitful dialogue will eventually emerge. This may be an impossible undertaking, given the number of topics that should properly by discussed en route.

We need more comprehensive and better-structured cross-disciplinary models of the imagination, and as far as I can tell we don’t have them. Kripal has to waste a huge amount of time just arguing that there is a dialectic between marginal or “paranormal” experiences (let’s bracket for now, as an unproductive argument, just what is para- about the paranormal) and socially constructed interpretations of experience. This particular brand of social constructionism doesn’t debunk the marginal forms of experience, it simply ignores them and generally proceeds as though human beings never do anything more than respond to social cues or environmental pressures.

But anyone who browses the internet can affirm that even though millions if not billions of people spend their free time rehashing the details of the final episode of Breaking Bad, or the fourth season of Downton Abbey, or what Kim Kardashian did last week or last year, in much the way that their ancestors rehearsed the verses of the latest murder ballad or adapted anew the stanzas of the epic the griot recited, and even though more billions never get beyond arguing about the local sports statistics, those same billions put more emotional weight on certain aspects of those things than on other aspects of them, without ever thinking about it. Symbols emerge even from the stupidest situations.

And many, many other people spend their time remixing and mashing up the elements of popularly given imagery and narratives—some of them engage in cross-disciplinary discourse without realizing it, because they aren’t academicians. Others create spontaneous fictions that form striking parallels to books they have never read, because the great strategies of literature and art are transmitted in their structural essences. They are transmitted in their structural essences, via the forms generated in society, because they resonate with inbuilt (I don’t mean “built” literally) psychological proclivities that are not the same in each individual, but that repeat often enough in a variety of combinations.

Many, probably most, of the personality types represented on the internet obsess disproportionately over one or another of these structural essences, because their personal circumstances have made those particular essences particularly attractive. They also often don’t do a very good job articulating their obsessions, because they aren’t all that creative—“creative,” like “imagination,” is a cuss word or a god term for contemporary academicians that can be analyzed much more accurately than it usually is.

Some “creative” folks recombine the elements of the word and the world much more unexpectedly and unusually than others do—whereas some “uncreative” folks replicate the expectations of the society almost perfectly, although some of those still produce better replications than others; and many of the more imaginative others, far from being creative geniuses, do a modestly competent or an embarrassingly flawed job of expressing their own idiosyncratic reinterpretations or subversions of socially given expectations as to how things are supposed to be put together. We don’t have to put an absolute value on degrees of complexity to assert that some creative outcomes are more complex and unexpected than others; whether we find that unexpected complexity “intriguing” and/or “pleasing” depends on our own internalized criteria for interest or pleasure.

And somehow many, many people—no, actually, all people—are in some measure incapable of distinguishing between the structure of physical reality and the imaginative forms they themselves have generated. The most rationally inclined are capable of distinguishing and deploying the forms that are the most descriptive and emotionally filtered (not emotionally neutral), and we call these forms the sciences and the other academic disciplines.

We all live, to some degree, in a shared hallucination, because we never see reality unfiltered by social forces and by our own psychological/neurological factors. We advance in rationality by recognizing and analyzing the hallucinatory elements and realizing that there are other hallucinatory elements we haven’t yet brought to conscious awareness.

We need, and are getting, better analyses of hallucination in its more ordinary meaning of immediately perceived sounds and sights that are generated completely from within the brain, rather than from the interplay between the brain and the body’s sensory evidence of the physical world, which is always misinterpreted to some degree or other. But we also need better analyses of how interpretations can shift abruptly according to circumstances—all of us see what we think is “the real meaning of events” when viewed in retrospect. Most of us reinvent the past to improve our self-image.

But not all of us (or am I wrong in this?) undergo reinterpretations of the magnitude of the ones recounted by the flood of letter writers who told one visionary (the incident is described in Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics) that they themselves remembered having been imprisoned in subterranean chambers after they read about the visionary’s traumatic experience of same. The fiction writer who discovered and championed this particular visionary pointed out that during the time the man claimed to have been imprisoned beneath the ground by aliens, he was in fact detained in a mental institution. (This is one of those real-life parallels to a mytheme that leads, in one direction, to novels like Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell.)

The aforementioned visionary fits into a commonplace model, but we know less about the apparently just as commonplace model of the letter writers. Would they, granted more complex faculties of imagination and personal circumstances, have turned out like Howard Finster or Sun Ra, creating art out of a mixture of marginal experience and total fantasy? What do we know about the shared structures of such reinterpretations?

Whitley Strieber brought forth a similar flood of letter writers’ recollections of alien encounters that were, if not just like the ones he described, then close enough. None of Strieber’s correspondents, as far as I know, spontaneously recounted suddenly recalled experiences that were parallel to Finster’s or Sun Ra’s—neither of whom, as far as I know, ever reported sightings of gray-colored insectoids. The well-known power of suggestion is even more powerful than most of us think, apparently; but what is equally interesting is the range of creative experiences in which the memories are structured in individual directions based on no more than a few vague cultural hints. In their more pathological forms, the remarkable delusions that stem from such combinations of complex experience and inherited cultural information go off in all sorts of directions, but the directions are not infinite.

We have clinical descriptions of these delusional states in terms of their specific mental miswiring; but of course the miswirings are only extreme versions of the wirings (and I don’t mean “wirings” any more literally than I meant “built,” above) that we already have as a species. We have symbol-using and storytelling capacities that go astray because they are errant and erring to begin with. This is a boringly familiar commonplace, but one that ought to stir more conversations across academic disciplines than actually take place.

Too many of the attempts at such conversations do no more than correlate mutual misinformation, and other attempts simply confirm mutual incomprehension. There need to be more situations in which one specialist paraphrases what another specialist is assumed to be talking about, and then presents an alternative view; on occasions when this has actually happened, the specialists being paraphrased have protested that that isn’t what their work is about at all, then proceeded to provide a cartoonish summary of their opponents’ views that itself reflected a hitherto unsuspected mistake. After that, productive discussion sometimes followed.

Problems for Posting on Saint John’s Day (just because that is what today is in the liturgical calendar): When Is Myth Actually Analogy Right from the Start?


I actually have a couple of notes on topics relating to myth, one of them written two or three days ago, but since I have learned that stringing together such topics in what I consider sequential order only confuses everyone, I am striving, for once, to keep it all apart. Here is number one. Number two may continue to be delayed.

David Brooks’ annual Sidney Awards for remarkable essays of 2013 (published in his column in the December 27, 2013 New York Times) includes a summary of opposing essays in The New Republic by Stephen Pinker and Leon Wieseltier regarding what Brooks describes as “the proper role of science in modern thought.” [Brooks seems to be rehabilitating “modern” as a synonym for “contemporary,” incidentally.]

Brooks summarizes Pinker as saying that science “has demonstrated that ‘the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans and societies—are factually mistaken.’” He quotes Pinker directly about science’s alternative view of things: “’The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for ourselves, our species and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces.’”

Wieseltier retorts that (I continue to quote Brooks’ summation) “few believers take Scripture literally. They interpret. Meanwhile, science simply can’t explain many of the most important things. Imagine a scientific explanation of a beautiful painting, based, say, on a chemical analysis of the paint. ‘Such an analysis will explain everything except what most needs explaining: the quality of beauty that is the reason for our contemplation of the painting.’ The scientists deny the differences between the realms of human existence and simplify reality by imposing their methods even where they can’t apply.”

Reading this, I recalled my late mentor Thomas O’Dea’s description of a debate between Wilfrid Cantwell Smith and Morton Smith in which W.C. Smith asserted that the scholar of religion had to be a believer because only a believer can know what the interior condition of belief is, while M. Smith asserted that on the contrary, the scholar had to be an atheist because otherwise he (this was a long time ago; he meant “he”) would believe that angels really appeared to the British doughboys in World War I. [This was a slightly distorted shorthand allusion to the incident in which a piece of fiction by Arthur Machen became the basis for the popular legend of the Angels of Mons.] O’Dea said that if the two had been his students, he would have interrupted and explained some basic things to them; but since they were two of the most respected men in their academic discipline, he couldn’t.

Likewise with Pinker and Wieseltier. Part of the problem is that the English language doesn’t do a good job of using the word “science”; French and German have no such difficulty when it comes to asserting the continuity between the physical sciences and the human sciences...even though it is now necessary to assert more decisively than ever before that there is a continuity, and not some kind of fundamental break where the qualities of the human species are under discussion.

That beautiful painting of which Wieseltier makes so much? Well, my growing pile of important, but not yet read, books now includes some newly published volumes in which the biological and mathematical foundations of beauty are discussed alongside the physical conditions necessary for such activities as painting to arise in the first place. Let there be no pigments, however, and human beings will scratch their pictures into sand or rock. And although chimpanzees have been known to develop passionate attachments to non-functional objects for reasons that resemble aesthetic pleasure, we can’t really reduce the problem of “beauty” to the pre-linguistic emotional responses for which we can pretend to map the neural circuitry. (Many neuroscientists other than Pinker are careful to discuss the problem of deciding what those neural maps are really showing us about the mental territory.)

Wieseltier is right to imply that Pinker’s map of the neural circuitry is more akin to the chemical analysis of the paint on the canvas than of the conditions under which the artist painted the picture and the conditions under which the audience for the painting responds to it now, or has responded to it in the past. But audience response, and the origins of particular moments of creativity, and the particular weighting of historical forces versus psychological peculiarities and inbuilt biological limits and possibilities, are all topics that remain under vigorous debate in the “human sciences.”

The inability to prove which factor ought to be considered dominant is increasingly thought to be evidence that none of them are dominant except in the most transient fashion. There are, to take the most trivial approach to the problem, cases in which a literally starving painter makes a huge body of work without concern for whether anyone else will ever see it, and cases in which the primary motivation of the painter is to make as much money as possible, or to be regarded with the highest possible esteem by society; but given the right circumstances, the resulting paintings by the two artists might look very similar to one another. Why that might be so would involve a discussion of many historical variables regarding, among other things, the implicit or explicit rules for making “art.” And that would lead us down several other increasingly tortuous trails of inquiry and vehement debate among investigators of the human condition.

So it is silly to say that “science imposes its methods where they don’t belong.” The problem is that most English-speaking “scientists” don’t understand what science is, and why the so-called hard and soft sciences can’t be separated from one another or ranked by degree to which they offer provisional explanations of the world.

And those “provisional explanations of the world” are surely what religious believers ought to assert that the forces of transcendence were offering to those to whom they originally spoke. This might be considered “interpreting” rather than “taking literally,” but this is only because well-informed believers know we can’t take anything literally. Everything is a relative statement based on historical forces and psychological and linguistic limits, whether the statement is made by a literal-minded believer in absolutized notion of “science” or by a priest, a prophet, or a poet.

Everything has to be explained in terms that fit the prior assumptions of an audience, and that means working by means of analogy most of the time, or by “approaching the unknown in terms of what is called ‘known’ by the audience.” So much of what we call myth might, for believers, be considered shaping the information into forms the audience of the time would consider meaningful.

Edward Frenkel’s hybrid book Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality begins with a biographical description of how his life as a Jew excluded from certain career paths in the Soviet Union led him to become a major explorer of the farther reaches of contemporary mathematical theory, then embarks on a chapter by chapter attempt to make intelligible for the ordinary reader “a grand unified theory of mathematics,” the Langlands program that the New York Times reviewer of Frenkel’s book [I apologize for not citing more profound sources; the NYT is the easiest resource for quick reference] describes as proposing that “the hard questions in number theory can be answered by employing the methods of a seemingly unconnected field called harmonic analysis.”

Let’s imagine Frenkel suddenly becomes a time traveler intent on explaining his knowledge not to English-speaking readers with a little bit of recollection of elementary mathematics, but to various communities in the ancient world. He could probably get a long, long way with Archimedes or Pythagoras; even if they began to dispute some of his more arcane premises in terms of their own worldview, they might well understand what he was talking about and even debate the adequacy of the logical analysis underlying his higher mathematical constructions.

If Frenkel were plopped down in the middle of one of those imagined ancient communities in which there were no names for numbers higher than, say, seven, he would have to start at a rather more elementary level, and even the group’s best intellectuals might have trouble learning how the abstract concept of number might relate to descriptions of shape, and so on. There would be many stories to tell and analogies to make that would gradually lead this fictional group’s thinkers past the point at which discrete objects turn into a blurry pile, and on to notions that would allow them to connect realms of their world they had never previously conceptualized as in any way related to one another.

Any number of believers I have encountered, though usually ones not shaped by university educations about the nature of myth, have suggested to me that the inbreaking reality known as God would not get very far trying to make a bunch of nomadic herders understand the nature of quantum reality. When you know the whole story and they don’t, no surprise that all that gets transmitted is, “I am the LORD. My ways are not your ways, neither are my thoughts your thoughts.”

This implies a belief in ongoing revelation that is not accepted by any of the orthodox religions assaulted by Pinker, but it suggests that an ongoing current of heresy has long addressed the problem of supplanted cosmologies and found no difficulty in supposing that transcendent forces have been trying to have a conversation with humanity ever since the species acquired the capacity for language, and that the conversation is evolving along with the species.

It’s an interesting subtopic in the history of religions, and as such is as open to scientific inquiry (in the sense of the “soft” sciences of psychology, history, anthropology of all societies, et cetera) as any other, without accepting or denying the premises from which such believers start. It presents a view of religion less as merely symbolic representations of an unknowable dimension of reality, and more as a combination of simplified explanations and outright failures of hearing as in the “blessed are the cheesemakers” burlesque of the Sermon on the Mount in Monty Python’s legendary Life of Brian.

We can track such hybrid hypotheses and explore their past sociological consequences without offering an opinion as to their ultimate truth value beyond their observable effects, or we can construct our own provisional hypotheses as to what might have been “really” going on, but regardless of how we approach the problem, it’s further empirical evidence that when it comes to the human condition, Pinker and Wieseltier don’t understand the half of it, any more than the one Smith and the other Smith did. (Huston Smith would have been an interesting third interlocutor in the discussion that O’Dea described nearly half a century ago, but he presumably wasn’t there.)

Bringing together the various strands of the task I set myself forty-four years ago is probably more than I can accomplish, but at least the reasons why the strands can and should be tied together has become clearer, for myself if not for anyone else.

I currently find myself facing the task of plowing through large parts of the early nineteenth century that are singularly revelatory in terms of being bridge passages between one characteristic mind set and another—historical territory I’ve traversed before, but only in terms of what this or that thinker believed.

I’m trying to clarify for myself what little I’ve learned about the complex nature of human self-awareness, and about how difficult it is to achieve self-awareness, and how it relates to various conditions of consciousness that are almost never understood by mainstream thinkers—because, whether the conditions in question are mental illness, mathematical insight, or mystical rapture, so few of them ever experience anything remotely similar. They dismiss all of them except when the practical results are so spectacularly successful that they have to mention them in a footnote.

The problem is that everybody is a combination of quirks imposed by early childhood experience occurring in a specific society, within neurological and biochemical limits; education by the prevailing social order, parents, and peer groups; the usual challenges common to all human beings, as modified by the previous two limiting factors; and individual responses to the larger accidents of history that frequently are more fundamental in shaping the human being than any of the deliberate impositions of ideology. (Hurricanes, the Holocaust, what have you...including the dramatic ups and downs of national economies, the ups as well as the downs.)

All this stuff typically doesn’t add up to a completely stable set of components, which is why therapists or spiritual advisors have been around since the Paleolithic, under one name or another, and why human societies exemplify all the weirdnesses that they do.

I happen, for reasons of my own, to be drawn to the test cases of potentially insightful individuals caught between incompatible cultural choices, or ones who find ways to bridge seeming incompatibilities or operate between the options.

I hadn’t realized until revisiting Terragni’s Danteum in the previous post that his geometric Casa del Fascio followed the plan of a particular Renaissance palace exactly, except for all the frills, frou-frous, and cultural accidents. I suspect that the dialectic of Terragni’s encounters with historical forces might be as intriguing as Oscar Niemeyer’s, whose sensuously involving but not always human-scale buildings in Brazil might or might not be profitably discussed in terms of the socialism and atheism that led him to design the headquarters of the French Communist Party while he was in exile during the rule of the generals. One can’t reduce either architect to his politics or his religious beliefs or lack of same, and in general neither can be “reduced” to anything. So it is no wonder we just look at the Casa del Fascio and the Danteum or Niemeyer’s Brasilia and Ibirapuera Park and don’t try to make our way through the tangles of personality and history behind them.

There are so many cases where we can’t begin to guess, in fact, that it does little good to speculate.

But it induces vertigo to realize, for example, that at the moment when the European and American Romantics and their opponents were being enthralled or appalled afresh by the eternal silence of the infinite spaces that had horrified Blaise Pascal, some of their contemporaries further east were blithely explicating the nature of multiple universes and how they might interact, but were not doing so in a way that today’s theorists of the multiverse would find even remotely intelligible. There is neither intellectual profit in trying to explore, nor even the possibility of getting at, the nature of the personalities involved, but it is intriguing that in the early nineteenth century A.D./C.E. this type of complex imaginative cosmology was being spun out near one end of what had been the Silk Road while the Tibetans were working out a similarly involved cosmology of conscious illusion near the other end of it; and Europeans, confronting a less complex traditional worldview, were doggedly plowing ahead with a “Just the facts, if you please” investigation of what could and could not be known about the physical universe. (Whether there was anything that could be known besides the physical universe was one of the dividing lines, of course—but that, too, was a more complex question in those regions than the traditional European duality of “matter and spirit” that the Romantics were resolving in their own fashion.)

Divided in a different way, the “history of the human community” looks considerably different—but of course every part of the human community always also had to figure out who was going to bake the bread and harvest the vegetables and which persons were entitled to have a little more garlic tossed in their soup. “Some of them got it, some of them didn’t,” as Kenneth Rexroth’s poem has it, and some of them were artisans who produced the most exquisite objects the world has ever known, and others were...the list of possibilities goes on and on, obviously, through all the positions of any human society.

And if the original point of this meditation was to figure out why the prescriptions of fairly unimaginative experimenters so seldom succeed in shaping human destinies, maybe we should pick and choose which of these cases to investigate, in which of their dimensions.

We can appreciate, for example, a Yuan Dynasty bowl in and for itself without caring the least bit about the psychology or social circumstances of its maker, although the broad historical outlines of the Yuan Dynasty might give us further grounds for reflection. But first we have to learn to care about Yuan Dynasty bowls, and there are many people who wouldn’t notice they were any different from the ones from the big-box store down the road.

Even investigating the reasons for that lack of understanding is dispiriting; the point would be to get from cluelessness to comprehension in as short a time as possible, and this is something that the world’s traditional psychologies have excelled in doing. Sometimes.

And as the world’s traditional psychologies have taught us (or contemporary interpreters of them pretend they have taught us, anyway), most people will approach the problem from the particular points of view that seem most interesting to them. Other people will find those points of view boring, unintelligible, or both. As you doubtless may find this preliminary note.

Re-Mapping the Human Condition, Historical Division: Further Considerations


One of the so-called mystical traditions that interested me in past decades (and whether it simply imported its insights from contemporary sociological and psychological journals remains to be investigated) dealt extensively with the barriers to understanding: why we are so persistently unable to understand what it is we don’t understand.

There is now a growing literature about this topic, but much of it is specious, based on inadequately conceived research and insufficiently concerned with the contributions of history to our persistent failure to comprehend what is before our faces. (Apologies for the allusion to Logion 5 from the Gospel of Thomas, one of the earliest corrections to the Greek supposition that knowing oneself was sufficient for transformation, rather than also knowing the actual condition of something apparently external.)

Given the extent to which contemporary research corrects old errors by replicating previous generations of errors that no one remembers ever having been made, it would be salutary to look at where it all went wrong in various fields of endeavor, and trying to glean at least a few lessons from the experience.

Suzanne L. Marchand’s remarkable historical survey German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship leads me to think that her earlier Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1730-1970 would be its perfect complement in terms of interpreting how the scholarly fictions we create about the world’s cultures (no matter who the “we” in question might be, or the particular fictions) mask immediate historically given concerns. Those concerns are not necessarily economic or political; they can be bound up with anxiety over the status of personal religious belief, the identification of one’s own place in the universe, what have you, and the answers being sought may not always have been to the financial or social benefit of the seeker. Obsessive and consequential mistakes are made almost as often in the name of abstract truth as in the name of concealed motives of conscious exploitation; all that matters is that the mistaken researcher be unaware of the implications of his or her framing of the research. Marchand’s focus on German orientalists are parallel to recent re-readings of British and French orientalists, and all of the scholarship is implicitly revising postcolonial studies; footnotes to Edward Said, without negating the notion that in some if not all fields of human endeavor, disinterested scholarship is impossible. The problem facing the researcher is to identify as many of the hidden or unconscious interests as possible, rather than having someone else do the debunking for them.

The unconscious influences of previous decades of scholarship continue to have consequences as new circumstances cause their evolution into unexpected popular forms, which in turn have consequences for the decades after that. I suspect, though I haven’t confirmed this, that Marchand’s essay in the newly published anthology of essays Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy would lead in some very interesting directions, just based on its title and what I know of the time period in question: “Eastern Wisdom in a Time of Western Despair: Orientalism in 1920s Central Europe.” Reviewers have suggested that this volume incorporates enough recent scholarship and corrects enough previous factual errors as to make it an indispensable contribution to the history of Weimar thought, and since it covers an unprecedentedly wide variety of topics it may well supplant a good many previous efforts, which is good news for those of us whose shelves are groaning with earlier volumes (future scholars who restrict themselves to e-books will not have this problem, though they will have many others).

The legacy of Weimar is or was well known; a whole generation of American thinkers grew up under the direct or indirect tutelage of German refugee intellectuals, and the generations since then who learned from those Americans may not always realize the extent to which their present-day ideas germinated in the 1920s.

This is only one reason why I am fascinated by the proto-debunking of Georges Bataille’s short-lived magazine DOCUMENTS, which suffered from the necessary limitations of its historical horizon ca. 1929 while reframing or rendering unexpectedly alien most of the received scholarly and popular ideas of its epoch. Undercover Surrealism: George Bataille and DOCUMENTS provides an excellent anthology of excerpts from the magazine (including its provocative juxtaposition of ethnographic and popular-culture images, often presented without further comment), a good starting point for tracing the intellectual legacy of a magazine that probably influenced hundreds of thinkers and artists who never knew it had existed—though I can’t prove this, and don’t feel much like perusing the individual biographies to figure out the lines of generational influence.

All of this intellectual ferment ca. 1930 was about to be spread worldwide by the rise of the dictators and the subsequent Second World War (the unintended intellectual consequences of global conflict ought to be looked at from a fresh perspective; cf. Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire and Marchand’s chapter on “Orientalists and ‘Others’”). Stalin and Mussolini did their part in disseminating dissident thought by sending its thinkers fleeing for their lives to the far parts of the earth.

This is also a reason why I keep wishing I could find time to analyze the eleven issues of Civiltà: Rivista della Espozitione Universale di Roma. I suspect (from extremely partial evidence) that proportionately fewer cross-culturally-minded scholars emigrated from Italy before the outbreak of war rendered that option impossible; yet their perspective was clearly excluded from the official magazine of the planned 1942 “Olympics of Civilizations,” which was intended to demonstrate the superiority of the Roman-Classical and Renaissance inheritance—including, however delicately the topic might be raised, the superiority of the Italian Renaissance over the inferior German cultural product. The magazine’s very title contains a longstanding cultural coding that predates Italian Fascism: medals commending the “defenders of civilization” were cast for Italy’s military efforts in World War I and in the earlier, but not that much earlier, wresting of Libya from Ottoman Empire control.

The Wolfsonian in Miami is devoting autumn 2013 to a series of exhibitions exploring the curious dialectic between Italian Modernism and the “Rebirth of Rome,” a governmentally sponsored effort that was explicitly intended to demonstrate how the totalitarian state was the perfect rebirth of the ideals of Roman civilization, embracing both the spirit of modernity and historic Romanitas.

Since there will be a catalogue documenting the interwar Italian portion of the Wolfsonian’s collection of decorative and propaganda arts (originally assembled by Mitchell Wolfson Jr.), it would be interesting to use the occasion to revisit the monumental catalogue of the Guggenheim exhibition of fifteen or so years ago that presented Italy’s unparalleled upsurge of trend-setting creativity in cinema, design, and art that began in Allied-occupied cities almost before the end of hostilities. Governmental encouragement of modernist design and architecture had gone into eclipse almost a decade earlier, and what happened in the 1936-1946 time frame is a topic that must have been explored extensively by now, but I don’t know by whom. As with the potential multiculturalists who did not or could not emerge under those historical conditions, there seems to have been a great deal going on of which we know almost nothing.

An interesting bridge between the two eras might be Giuseppe Terragni’s unbuilt Danteum, an allegorical structure meant to transport the visitor from the entangled hell of earthbound error to the heaven of an architecture that was literally openly transparent. As proposed in 1938 as a structure to be in place in time for the Universal Exposition of 1942, it contained heavy-handed thematic references to the glories of Roman civilization (much as Dante’s Divine Comedy does) on the ground level before moving to ever-higher levels of numerologically defined geometric abstraction.

Thomas Schumacher’s book of some decades ago remains the definitive study, as far as I know; it is amusing that the Wikipedia entry for “Danteum” indicates that while the project was never completed, the maquette for it was exhibited at the Universal Exposition of 1942—which in reality was itself a project that was never completed.

Friend and Facebook friend Faith McClure has just now posted Cassini's photograph of the pale blue dot of Earth barely visible beneath the rings of Saturn.

It has been used as a symbol of the insignificance of our speck in the cosmos, but it is all a matter of perspective.

Here we are, seen with greater magnification:



Now don't you feel happier about living here? Unless of course you dislike abstract art.

Preliminary Notes on Re-Mapping the Human Condition: a review essay, of sorts


Andy Letcher’s Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom, a far more scholarly book than its title would imply, dispenses with most of the myths surrounding psychotropic mushrooms: the fly agaric was never widely used by Siberian shamans (who in turn were and are a far more diverse lot than the word “shamanism” would imply), and in fact fly agaric mushrooms did not play nearly the role in world religions that enthusiasts believed they did (nor did the far more effective psilocybin mushrooms). However, contemporary practitioners find that their mushroom trips leave them with the sense that “the world is not as sterile as science maintains, meaning resides within all things, and the essential quality of the universe, its quiddity, is one of enchantment.”

Following this thread of perception or shared delusion would lead us into the territory mapped by a new, dense MIT Press anthology of scholarly papers by psychiatrists and neuroscientists and philosophers on the topic of hallucinations (Hallucination: Philosophy and Psychology, an introduction to the philosophy of “disjunctivism,” q.v. in Wikipedia). It has the distinction of being almost unreadable, unlike Oliver Sacks’ popular compendium, Hallucinations, full of mysterious anecdotes of monitory appearances by figures who couldn’t have been there, until the doors of perception end up seeming as dubiously permeable as Aldous Huxley claimed they were, but without benefit of psychedelic substances. (Huxley’s The Doors of Perception was an early book on the topic, taking its title from William Blake’s maxim “If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear... as it is, infinite.”)

All perception is physically and socially constructed perception, grounded in neural networks, modified by individual psychology, shaped by social surroundings.

That implies a will-to-meaning that inevitably distorts our perception of the world at large, and of ourselves (assuming “ourselves” is a meaningful term, which ordinary language and our own dubitable perception would lead us to think). Not only do we never see truth whole, we are never sure what the word “truth” actually means even in ordinary usage, as a memorably cynical wisecrack by a Roman governor reminded us almost two thousand years ago. (See: John 18:38.)

We seem to be evolving a twenty-first-century style of meaning that is a willful combination of having and not-having, of believing without belief, beyond belief. (I quote these phrases from William Hamilton’s death-of-God theology of the 1960s and from Wallace Stevens via Robert Bellah’s sociological study of that era, Beyond Belief.) Bruno Latour is the French history-of-science hero of the currently fashionable philosophy of object-oriented ontology (a.k.a. OOO, not to be confused with object-oriented programming, or OOP). Latour, unexpectedly enough, has written a book on the functions of religious language without religion (Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech), which oddly parallels German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s book on the function of religion as practice rather than belief (You Must Change Your Life, a book which takes its title from Rilke’s poem “Torso of an Archaic Apollo”); the American philosophical theologian Adam Miller has written a book on a/theology, transcendence, and immanence that even more strangely parallels the arguments fifty years ago over the meaning of the death of God (Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology).

Just pursuing the Wikipedia entries (some of which are stubs) for the aforementioned philosophers leads to more potential dead ends than I wish to consider here or hereinafter, because I considered some of them heretofore and discovered that they were, indeed, dead ends, ones that required backing up and beginning the task of rethinking. The topics with which these men deal (and they are all men, though there are certainly women dealing with their topics) are the central issues of our time: globalization; the nature of consciousness; the relationship of human beings to the environment in which they exist physically and mentally and economically and conceptually; the unwieldy immensity of the multidisciplinary pursuits necessary to understand the foregoing problems; and so many other topics with which I have dealt previously in my joculum LiveJournal that I shall not bother to list them further here.

I have, I hope, learned not to try to discuss all the aforementioned subjects at the same time—although they do need to be remembered all at the same time, for otherwise we shall have an even more distorted picture of the world than the one we might achieve if we “widen the area of consciousness,” to quote another of my persistent topics.

My present essay is concerned only with belief and its contents and discontents, or the second of Immanuel Kant’s three questions: “What can I know? What may I believe? What should I hope?” (This is how I recall the late Walter Capps paraphrasing them in his seminars and his subsequent book on Ernst Bloch and Jürgen Moltmann, though I seem to be the only online source to have put them that way.)

Concurrent to the previously mentioned developments in intellectual history, Victoria Nelson has written a book titled Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural that provides a flabbergasting survey not just of the most recently popular versions of fantasy characters in movies and fiction, but of the fiction-based religions that have evolved from such portrayals. These religions are serio-comic affairs, only one step away from the open satire of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, yet incredibly elaborated in their quality of wresting and wrestling dogma and ritual out of writers from H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Machen all the way up to...well, let’s not go there, although Nelson does.

Like the Church of the SubGenius of a generation ago, these groups are dealing with real epistemological issues, in a way that incorporates mockery but also transcends it, in much the way that Hegel’s slippery concept of Aufhebung meant simultaneously “raising” and “cancelling” or “transcending” and “abolishing.” (And we are back to Bruno Latour and company again...strange fantasy-fanfic company for them to keep, indeed.)

Historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal’s 2011 book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal has generated blog reviews that range from expressions of bafflement to outbursts that are genuinely baffling in their own right: see Kripal’s response to a few early reviewers at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/takeandread/2011/11/yep-were-all-superman-mutants-mystics-jeff-kripal-responds/ and a more recent whacked-out reaction to Kripal’s book at...no, actually I would prefer that the sufficiently curious reader locate that one via a Google search, because even to mention it takes us off into new territory that I would prefer not to explore, given the option.

Kripal’s book offers a meandering history of the American pop-cultural imagination over the course of two hundred years or so (territory explored in a different key and to different purposes by Harold Bloom in The American Religion and Omens of Millennium, and assorted other volumes) but his ultimate point is that it is the genuine margins of human experience that has generated genres of fiction relegated to their own kind of marginality. Mainstream experience is the stuff from which respectable mainstream fiction is crafted; the otherworldly is restricted to the disreputable realm of fantasy, even if some writers would hold to Paul Éluard’s dictum, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” (This was attributed to Éluard half a century ago, in, I think, Elizabeth Sewell’s The Orphic Voice, but it now seems to have drifted onto the Internet misattributed to W. B. Yeats, and nobody seems to be able to find it in Éluard.)

Kripal would insist that there is indeed another world in this one, a world that we make up as much as we perceive it—and he would insist that that world contains precognition, synchronicity or at least improbably repetitive coincidence, and all the other paranormal phenomena that we almost certainly misinterpret every bit as much as we misinterpret the doings of the world economy or the world ocean currents.

This particular set of interests and speculations dates back at least as far as the Romantics, with whom Harold Bloom began his career in his book The Ringers in the Tower, and whose belief-without-belief M. H. Abrams characterized more systematically in Natural Supernaturalism. Lately there has been renewed interest in the Romantics’ perspective on psychology and epistemology, an interest which ought to overlap, but does not, with the current fascination with the relationship between the physical substrate of perception and the environing world that is perceived.

An art exhibition incorporating this last-named revisionary point of view has recently been staged at the Menil Collection in Houston: “Byzantine Things in the World,” with the thematic emphasis placed equally on “things” and “world.” Byzantium has not been subjected to a more thorough re-viewing since W. B. Yeats made it his paragon of the “unity of being”—although in this case the unity is between object and perceiver and environing world, a single relational entity that might as well be called “being” were it not that the relationship in question has more in common with what ancient philosophy would have called “becoming.” The eponymous catalogue for the exhibition, distributed for the Menil by Yale University Press, is as elusively mindbending in its own way as anything ever written by Jeffrey Kripal.

All of this has been demanding my attention lately, but so (unfortunately) have a host of other mundane issues, so at this point I can do no more than cite the previously mentioned subjects as worthy of further study and elucidation. The several books and topics I have named in this survey all serve to reinforce my hypothesis that we are living in the age of the rise of a variety of (w)hol(l)y agnostic perspectives—beliefs without belief, beyond belief.

And that topic interests me in my various roles as historian and critic of art, religion, and culture, incorporating the current fascination with neuroscience into the foregoing topics both as a source of information and a new cultural perspective that deserves analysis as such.

This point has been met with incomprehension so many times on LiveJournal that I think I won't copy this one to Dreamwidth, where the groundwork of prior bewilderment hasn't been laid:

Maybe if I explain a bit more concisely what a non-reductionist remapping of the human condition would look like, using some of the metaphors that have puzzled my readers for the past seven or eight years:

A fast-food hamburger, canned beef stew and freshly made boeuf bourguignon are different ways of combining some of the same basic ingredients, with a few more items added or omitted. We do not ordinarily argue that a can of beef stew (I hated the stuff as a child) is either a degraded or a more fundamental version of boeuf bourguignon. It is perfectly possible to make a completely inedible boeuf bourguignon if you have no aptitude at all for cooking and you combine your ineptitude with a bad recipe and bad ingredients. I believe I recall that some European purveyors forty years ago actually managed to make an edible canned beef stew. But in either case, it is just plain bizarre to argue that a fast-food hamburger is just a differently cooked boeuf bourguignon, much less over which of the two is a more “authentic” reflection of the human capacity to cook the material that we describe as beef...you can argue over which one embodies greater complexity or even quality of flavor, if you wish, but then you are getting off into territory that is different from unambiguous analytical judgment.

And yet other aspects of human culture are constantly being broken down into constituent parts and judged according to the value assigned by the particular reductionist to those constituent parts. The reading of complex human behaviors as completely a reflection of cultural conditioning, economic motives, early-childhood traumas, or the firing of neurons combined with signals from the nervous system is equivalent to reducing the three dishes listed above to aspects of the main chief ingredient, a thing that a Hindu or a vegan would describe as a fragment of a murdered cow.

We need to analyze the components and combinations of human behaviors and beliefs and institutions with the same alternation of relatively dispassionate distance vs. committed but analytical passion that a food scientist and a recipe writer would bring to the three types of food categorized above. The fact also comes into play that we also have our own particular tastes in this comparison of flavors and textures, including the taste in which we don’t like, or we like but refuse to eat, any of ’em. But our ineradicable personal preferences shouldn’t be disguised as objectively analytical rules of procedure.

I have posted a differently detailed version of this for friends on my joculum LiveJournal, but in spite of starting in medias res, this version probably explains more clearly than do previous posts why I follow such disparate concerns even in this journal's fresh attempt at a more coherent approach to my overall arguments. We begin with a reprise of why rehashing the old arguments about the legacy of the Enlightenment only gets us so far, and we begin with a re-reading of the eighteenth century based on a summary by Christopher McIntosh but going off in quite different directions from his:

The Enlightenment adopted egalitarian views about human nature only slowly, after beginning with a sense of hierarchical privilege for the rational elite over the irrational masses. The Counter-Enlightenment stuck with hierarchy and distrusted abstract rationality, being suspicious of the capacity of human reason to comprehend and change the world quite as fully and quickly as the philosophes supposed it could. But even among Enlightenment thinkers, the correlation between the belief in ages of “reason, science, and freedom” versus ages of “credulity, myth, and superstition” does not lead to identical conclusions from country to country—ironically confirming the Counter-Enlightenment’s argument that there is nothing universal about the socially given qualities of human nature. The difference is that the Enlightenment thinkers thought they were fighting over which brand of universal principle was preferable, not noticing the social conditions within which they were devising their arguments, and the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers were absolutizing local preferences, when their logic should have been leading them to relativize those preferences instead. (But then, the Counter-Enlightenment's argument always was that following logic too far just gets you into trouble—and I should emphasize that McIntosh is not putting things quite this bluntly.)

McIntosh’s point, which I have already shamelessly taken off in another direction, is that there is no automatic correlation between epistemological and political views in the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, or even of overall epistemological views. The Counter-Enlightenment’s rejection of the notion of a “universal human nature” led more often than not to “a distrust of reform, a respect for tradition and a deference to authority, even when it was given to cruelty and abuses”—on the grounds that the blind worship of universal principles was even more likely to give rise to even worse cruelties and abuses.

But this is already an odd form of the hermeneutics of suspicion—we hang on to the old, not because it is right, but because it is less destructively wrong than the other incorrect ways of looking at the world. And in this slippery environment, such a figure as Giambattista Vico appears to be an Enlightenment thinker from one perspective and a Counter-Enlightenment one from another. Isaac Newton applies the methods of “rational science” to the search for “a prisca sapientia in which biblical studies and alchemy occupied more of his attention than astronomy and optics.”

What this really means is that the meaning of meaning, or indeed the very means of knowing what was right and wrong, was deeply in contention. Positions that seem to us to lead to one logical conclusion often led to the opposite, and for equally good reason. (There were also many exquisitely erroneous syllogisms, of course...the Counter-Enlightenment didn’t merely defend the divine right of kings and the supremacy of the Pope as convenient fictions to ward off catastrophe, it defended absolutist views absolutely.)

I bring all of this up because we have gone through so many ultimately pointless debates about the legacy of the Enlightenment in recent decades. Of course the belief in universal human nature served as a rationale for colonialists using cannons to bring enlightenment to “lesser breeds without the Law.” Of course both optimism regarding human nature and pessimism regarding it were, and are, used by exploiters to manipulate other human beings for their own selfish purposes. Of course we are able to change the human condition less than the Enlightenment hoped, and more than the Counter-Enlightenment believed.

—But of course there is no “of course” about that last statement. That is what we are fighting over today, and we are fighting over it, too often, with intellectual weapons forged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that are ill-fitted to twenty-first century realities. North Atlantic philosophy (James Elkins’ latest attempt to get around that problematic term “Western”) may be a series of footnotes to Plato, but North Atlantic (and global) science is not, and therein lies the intellectual conflicts and muddles we have repeated, like the return of the repressed, ever since the Renaissance. Adding global philosophy to the debate has often only deepened the muddles, although deep muddles may well be better than shallow ones.

We do not need to keep repeating the muddles, even if we are only going to develop new muddles. At least let us confront the evidence, and the question of whether it really is evidence. “Say of what you see in the dark / That it is this, or it is that, but do not use the rotted names,” as Wallace Stevens put it.

What we see in the dark is that as we know well, the human genetic inheritance is not distributed according to “racial” lines since races do not exist, but as we are learning more and more, it is unevenly distributed nonetheless. Some personality quirks do show up more dominantly in some populations than in others, some diseases are more chronic in some populations than in others...and yet the existence of neuroplasticity and the amazing adaptability of human social institutions means that a good many of the variables can be eliminated with the right tinkering.

But what is “the right tinkering”? And what is the right way to redefine what is universal about human nature? We have learned there are pitfalls in the very nature of our language, and most of all in how we frame our arguments. Ideas have consequences, although the consequences are not always what we expect and far too frequently not what we intend, even when we try to correct for probable distortions.

I think it’s worth looking at the various ways that world cultures have solved that problem, even when they didn’t always know how to define the problem and certainly didn’t know the biology behind it.

And to some degree, just mapping the terrain accurately is useful for seeing why we keep hitting the same dead ends, century after century. So I feel impelled to look at whatever segments of it I can endure to study, and see where they fit into this misassembled jigsaw puzzle of human history.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote that the most difficult thing to do was to diverge from common opinions just a little. My various efforts in that direction have been so fundamentally misread as to make this 750-word summary almost doomed to incomprehension, but when I explicate the same topics at great length, citing historical and methodological precedents, they seem equally doomed to be reshaped to fit readers' expectations of what I surely must be saying. I am not saying that, most of the time. That is why I engage in the deliberate hyperbole of something like the following absurd title: Of course it is not true that "everything we know is wrong," or there would be no technical or social progress. We simply tend to absolutize whatever level of understanding we have reached, to the point of deifying our own opinions, even our opinions that we are not deifying our own opinions but rather are subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny. So I tend to imitate Flannery O'Connor's dictum that it is necessary to wake people up with grotesquerie before you can expect them to pay attention. Even then they will get it wrong, but so will I, the author; we never know our own motives, not fully anyway, and all we can hope to do is reduce our level of error to tolerable proportions. Some assertions are more deeply and indisputably wrong than others.



Everything You Know Is Wrong, But Then Everyone Has Always Been Wrong About Everything Anyway


Knowing that we view everything through cultural filters—mathematics being as cultural as anything else that is human—leads at least some of us to the strangely vertiginous feeling that all of human history (our own included, of course) is largely a matter of seeing differently sized pictures considerably out of focus. We think we have a clear vision of things at last until something forces us to realize that we don’t. We think we have the big picture at last until some event forces us to realize that there is either a bigger one or a potentially valid different one. This is not exactly a new insight, but it seems to surprise people every time it heaves into view.

Reductionist neuroscience is coming to resemble the reductionist biologies of a century and more ago, and is creating a structurally similar backlash that is even more wrong in its anti-reductionist assumptions, except when it isn’t even wrong. The genuine advance in knowledge allows for a synthesis of social, psychological, and physiological approaches that could go far beyond the insupportable, largely emotional responses to reductionism that have given “holistic” such a bad name, but scarcely anyone has mastered the relevant disciplines sufficiently.

At the same time, as I have noted much too repeatedly, the ability to perceive the need for a working synthesis of nature and nurture isn’t rocket science (i.e., it doesn’t require knowledge of an immense percentage of the general principles, just a perception of the main effects that stem from the underlying causes); some kind of behavioral modification rooted in physiological substrates probably dates back to the Paleolithic, and has advanced or regressed according to the historical circumstances in which such knowledge found itself embedded. Every so often some horrific upheaval of history wipes out all the advanced practitioners, and few enough of the advanced practitioners ever acquire enough distance on their practice to contemplate the possibility that theirs is only a specific instance of a larger theoretical body of knowledge. The whole thing slides back to grade school levels with monotonous regularity, and in many if not most cases never gets out of nursery school. It is not necessarily—actually, it probably isn’t—a single body of knowledge, just the same practices and principles being rediscovered independently again and again in different parts of the world, and sometimes being expressed in the same fairly obvious analogies and symbols. Sometimes it works, more often it doesn’t, and always it gets things at least slightly wrong, pretty much like the practice of medicine and psychology and such in our own century.

Now that practitioners of the traditional techniques are showing up in Europe and the Americas and getting doctoral degrees in psychology and anthropology and physiology, we are bemusedly coming to realize that some of the stupid assertions of the occultists a century and a half ago really were based not on their own delusional inventions but on their misunderstanding of some now-forgotten Victorian explorer’s badly summarized but accurate version of some other traveler’s tale based on some rural farmer’s explanation of what he remembered having heard from the traveling merchant who came through the village—recollections that were true, as far as they went and as far as the farmer was capable of making sense of the original beliefs and events in his own terminology, which the intervening narrators then understood in terms of their own presuppositions.

Some of the more preposterous theses really did reflect actual belief structures that persist to this day—the actuality of which does not automatically mean that the belief structures themselves were or are valid. That’s a separate question, being investigated for the most part in such muddled conditions that nobody is likely to learn very much of any use—not until everyone involved buckles down to contemplating how to create multidisciplinary parameters within which empirically valid methods might be devised that would fit the problem at hand, rather than denying that the problem at hand even exists. We are always blind to our own shortcomings, even when we take them into account and try to correct for them.

I write this because I have just encountered another case in which ideas that were general cultural currency a century ago have so metastasized into infantile nonsense in the intervening decades that they have rendered us insensible to the possibility that there ever were grown-up versions of the ideas—grown-up versions that are probably as wrong as everything else that human beings assert, but that at least are not childish nonsense. Like our own best beliefs, they are grown-up nonsense.