The Opposite Of Despair

I’ve been haunted by feelings of maladjustment my entire life. For starters, I’ve never embraced the core values of United States culture: the idiotic obsession with money and its confusion with real wealth; the love of guns and violence; the virulent anti-intellectualism and exaltation of team sports; the hyper-militaristic supremacy and supposed right to dominate and exploit other people and resources; the blithe disregard for harming or inconveniencing another person or group of people; the infantile belief in the power of positive thinking and its consequent egotistical, willfully ignorant and mean-spirited assumptions about poverty, particularly the cruel policies criminalizing destitution and ascribing its causes to the personal failure of its victims. The United States is now essentially a dystopic, barbaric oligarchy with a powerful extortion ring called healthcare, a rapacious appetite for oil and a foreign policy based on bombs, hellfire missiles and warrior drones.

Strangest of all, is the cultural obsession with Christianity. If it were the real deal, if Christian fundamentalists espoused the teachings of Christ and lived accordingly the United States would be the polar opposite of what it has become. But it behaves in just the opposite way; it has far more in common with the Roman empire and its disciplined legions than the man who stood on the mount in Galilee and espoused beatitudes of mercy and forgiveness.

I find all this deeply confusing, mystifying, and contradictory since I grew up in the United States. I’ve never lived abroad. My early childhood was spent in Minnesota and my path from adolescence to adulthood occurred in Seattle, Washington. I absorbed the values of the United States. My parents were 2nd generation Americans, the schools I attended were all in the United States, and all the movies and TV shows I watched dramatized the mythologies of American life. Yet, at about age 15, I began to reject these values. I’m not sure how that came about, but books like Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Kerouac’s On the Road and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had a lot to do with it. As did magazine articles in the late 50s and early 60s about the revelations ascribed to hallucinogenic drugs like peyote and psilocybin.

And then the Beatles: I can’t emphasize that enough. The Beatles were more than a rock group, more than a sound. They challenged the prevailing paradigms, both in England and the United States. And they did so almost by accident. They didn’t set out to subvert values and revolutionize anyone’s outlook. It was the music itself that did that. Suddenly, it was ok to be odd, to be silly, to be eccentric. You could be effeminate. You could dress weird. You could spurn the American dream and its toxic materialism. You were at liberty to evolve however you wanted. And this was accompanied by a spirit of fellowship and benevolence.

Not so much the Beatle’s immediate counterpart, The Rolling Stones. Their sound derived from the blues, from black culture, which arose out of hundreds of years of enslavement and institutional violence. There were definite subversive elements in their music, but its energy was decidedly more hedonistic and centered around the pleasure principle. It was openly sexual. It was unembarrassed by its inherent contradictions. It was Dionysian. It was defiant and urgent and brilliantly sassy.

And then there was Bob Dylan. Dylan drew on elements of Dada and Surrealism and gave the cultural momentum of the riotous 60s its poetry and drive.

I was lucky to make the transition from adolescence to adulthood during this time. I had a subculture. I had support. Friends. Lovers. Generosity and goodwill. What happened to that subculture is another mystery. It didn’t take long for it to be co-opted and commercialized and trivialized into inanition. I strongly suspect that much of that had to do with the fact that many of the principle players in that movement came from families of affluence.

Today there is very little subversion in evidence. In the music industry (which is most certainly an industry with all the pathology that the word ‘industry’ implies) you’ve got Rap, which I don’t much care for, but glad it exists. It’s full of anger and defiance. It’s aware. It’s engaged. It’s motivating. It’s abrasive. It’s a far cry from the poetry of Chuck Berry and Smokey Robinson but it’s something. It’s a manifestation of hostility to the status quo, even when it celebrates gangsterism, or exalts the power of wealth. I can hear the language of maladjustment in it: a rise in temperature for a culture turned abysmally cold.

None of this, however, answers the ongoing riddle: how is it possible to absorb the values of a culture and then find oneself embattled and burdened by them?

I look for some clues in Morris Berman’s book A Question of Values. Berman is an historian and social critic who moved to Mexico in 2006. He describes how pervasive a culture’s values are, how virtually inescapable. He refers to this phenomenon as tribal consciousness, and refers (as a partial explanation) to the theories of Richard Dawkins about the nature and the power of the meme: “an idea, behavior, style or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” It’s a virus that colonizes the brain. “Memes are essentially replicators, and their mode of transmission can be likened to a contagion.” He is also quick to point out that the meme theory itself is a meme and “can be seen as a meme, moving through society like a virus.” “But this,” he elaborates, “takes us into a classic situation known as ‘Mannheim’s paradox,’ because the scientific status of the theory is called into question (it too is a fad, in other words).”

If the values of a culture are transmitted by this quasi-genetic unit called a meme, is there a way that once can be vaccinated or develop an immunity against it? Were the Beatles, in the days of my youth, a form of counter-virus? Sure, but within the narrow framework of meme theory, the counter-virus becomes the new virus and there is no such thing as a non-meme world. There is only the Beatles, no Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa or Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Morris doesn’t discount the meme theory so much as emphasize its pervasiveness and offers – as a form of antidote – another sociological theory called “nonparticipating consciousness.” “It all comes down to reflexivity,” he declares.

Can we break the hold of the meme-trance, and look at things from the “outside”? After all, intuitively speaking, heavy bodies should hit the earth faster than light ones when dropped from the same height, and we can plainly see the sun “rise” in the East and “set” in the West. Getting outside of the (medieval) meme here means that we look at evidence that is counter-intuitive; that we recognize that there is an objective truth to the situation that doesn’t give a damn about our personal or tribal belief system; that one can stand outside a situation and evaluate it, and extend this analytical mode to our own beliefs, and to who we are.

I am not, I should add, claiming that nonparticipating consciousness is without its problems; indeed, that was the entire point of my book The Reenchantment of the World. But it is also the case that there is too much that simply cannot be solved from within a strictly mimetic framework, and this is why we need to ask if the Enlightenment tradition can ever be made to “stick.” Reading its late twentieth-century representatives – I am thinking of philosophers such as Peter Singer and John Rawls – I am often frustrated at how naïve they are, because they are clearly taking about how people “ought” to behave (i.e., rationally) and not how they actually behave (i.e., tribally). What planet are you guys on?

Singer and Rawls don’t have any clear ideas on how to get to such a place, and frankly, neither do I. My guess is that force, not reason, will be the deciding factor in a whole host of areas as the twenty-first century wears on. But it’s challenging to think about what a non-mimetic path might consist of.

We’re all stars in our own personal movies. We write our own scripts. We do our own directing. There’s a lot of creativity involved. What gets in the way of that creative impulse is much the same as what gets in the way of original film makers: finance. You need to please your investors. This leads, inevitably, to a diluted project, an endeavor so compromised by vested interests that it’s no longer recognizable, much less original or authentic.

Psychotherapist Donald Winnicott offered a theory of the authentic self – an instinctual, spontaneous being expressing itself freely and autonomously – as opposed to a false self that is sensitive to the signals of other people and is always eager to please and be rewarded with approval. Erich Fromm gave this theory a spin by claiming that the inauthenticity of the pseudo self is a way to escape the loneliness of freedom. This is similar to the earlier claim of philosopher Sorën Kierkegaard that “to will to be that self which one truly is, is indeed the opposite of despair.” The despair, that is, of choosing “to be another than himself.” The one thing all these theories of the self have in common is narcissism. Narcissism doesn’t have to be a bad thing, there are such things as a malignant versus a healthy narcissism, but it continues to mire the self and the values that go along with that self in the larger dynamic of culture and its norms. It does suggest that if one manages to unchain the authentic self from the dictates of the norm one might be able to live more fully, more intensely. But a lot of that élan might well be spent in constant conflict with the society in which one lives. The trick is in learning how to be authentic without always being at loggerheads with people, without disrupting the social fabric to such an extent one is forever unemployable or quite possibly in jail.

There are a surprising number of words to describe people who have a tough time adjusting to the rigors of conventional society – in particular, capitalist society with all of its stupid, soul-killing jobs – few of which are without a pejorative resonance: kook, weirdo, oddball, screwball, wacko, nutjob, eccentric, freak, beatnik, hippie, bohemian, outsider and misfit. I was delighted to find that there is a blog devoted to “Outsiders and Misfits” by Wesley Stuer (https://www.outsidersandmisfits.com/blog). His book recommendations include – quite robustly – books by Charles Bukowski. Excellent choice.

I have a special place in my heart for Charles Bukowski. I enjoy his poetry, I like the baldness of its confessions and affirmations and the unaffected transparency of their situations and the easy spread of the words across the page. I don’t give them quite the respect they deserve because they don’t appear crafted in a way that calls out for anyone’s respect. They’re not fussed over and self-consciously assembled to please the academicians in the postmodern poetry world and now that the beat era is all but forgotten and poetry has been helped back into the universities again like a drunk put to bed in a hotel room, Bukowski’s poetry would be facing extinction were it not that it continues to find an audience among other disaffected misfits. Like Kerouac, they’re especially popular among the young.

Bukowski’s prose is where his real flair for clarity, audacity, and observation occur. Few writers capture the shabbiness of the world but also its terrible beauty as lucidly and openly as he does. And he lived it. There’s little that has been made up. I know Bukowski’s world. He spent 15 years as a mail clerk. I spent 19. He continued to drink. I quit. I admire Bukowski’s determination to continue drinking, however horrific the hangovers. Here is one of my favorite Bukowski quotes about drinking: "Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now."