seekersandsought.com

By Vwadek P. Marciniak

The following is drawn from Sean Healy’s Boredom, Self, and Culture (1984) using quotes from him while concepts analysis and interpretations are this writer’s responsibility.

“The center will not hold,” as William B. Yeats stated, while vidiots sit in front of the tube stunned by the department of redundancy department enveloping us in order to leave one so redundant as to look to redundancy for answers.

Is there a more boring topic to analyze than boredom? As J. Heller put it, a world empty of “meaning seeks to escape from the infinite boredom of its meaninglessness by the magic of words without flesh, and forms without content.”

If you feel jaded or are sitting with cabin fever are you bored? An article in Reader’s Digest a few years back on “How to Cope with Boredom” read in part: “Despite its extraordinary variety of diversions and resources, its frenzy for spectacles and it feverish pursuit of entertainment, AMERICA IS BORED.” Continuing, it stated that “The abundance of efforts made in the United States to counter boredom have defeated themselves, and boredom has become the disease of our time.”[89]

Are there paradigms for such grit? We throw “boredom” around as though it was a child’s toy without concern for meaning or appropriate application. Words too often can create more problems than resolutions and boredom can fit that niche. Placing it in historic context, therefore, is one issue here confronted. What follows may be aggravating and pointless but words need space to face meaning for our times.

Early hermits in Lower Egypt used a term like “noonday devil” while fourth century Greeks referred to the “tedium or perturbation of heart”.[16] During the Middle Ages sloth as well spiritual laziness came close to our understanding. Around the thirteenth century the root for the French ennui appeared while Petrarch suggested “melancholy” for what he perceived as “hatred and contempt” being part of the “human condition.” This was a pre-cursor of the English “bored” when Robert Burton wrote in 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy.(18-19) Shakespeare used “weary” some twenty times.

The French jumped on this issue earliest with ennui which in a seventeenth century French/English dictionary was listed as synonyms with “annoy; vexation; trouble; disquiet; molestation; sorrow; grief; anguish; wearisomeness; tediousness, irksomeness; importunity; a loathing, …; discontentment, or offence, at.”[19] Where is there clarity for understanding?

In France the “inner, deep-seated changes in the psyche during the early seventeenth century, occurred.”[20-1] Pascal wrote of “the state that defines man’s structure” in noting “ennui had become no longer a problem of existence, it had become man’s problem.” His contemporary, la Rochefoucauld, observed that hanging at court was an endurance of boredom. Voltaire found ennui the most horrid of conditions, and spoke of it as being “the abyss of eternal nothingness.”(23) France being at the beginnings of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment, was on the cutting edge that some might wish never occurred. A comforting faith driven religion was being replaced with a faith in divisive and confusing reasoning where each would create their own path to understanding.

Blaise Pascal, one of the first modern writers to expatiate on boredom, suggested that “justice does not lie in these customs but resides in natural laws common to every country” where the joke “is that man’s whims have shown such great variety that there is not one.”(77) The more exciting aspect of Pascal’s position was that he was not speaking of the “actual condition of his fellow men of the seventeenth century, but as a prophet (an early-warning system to put it in modern terms), acutely sensitive to changes still so subtle and undeveloped as to be quite invisible to be undetectable by the vast majority of those around him at the time.”(54-5)

It was at the University of Paris where late Medieval intellectual advances challenged tradition notwithstanding objections from the Church. There was an explosion of population, growth of cities, revival of trade, and the circulation of new ideas (a smaller version of what we now see), both exciting and profoundly disturbing. Intellectual growth can create contempt, especially for a declining church where this new faith in reason was finding fruitful soil.

Later we have Flaubert offering not only suggestions for this anxiety but who also was one of the first to draw a distinction “between occasional boredom and more chronically fixed boredom which he referred to as ‘modern boredom’ or what might be labeled as ‘hyper-boredom’ a ‘deep-seated agony recognized only by its effects.’” The idea of some form of painful circumstance, something of an existential experience, began making an early appearance.(28)

It was “Baudelaire who most acutely captured the morbid richness of l’ennui moderne. He too points to the blankness of the state and to its sweeping extent …. he is in himself one the great prophets of the malady” since raising this above all other vices or painful conditions.(29)

We arrive at the English word bored around 1766(24) when an English philologist noted that what we have is “the curious class of verbs and adjectives which describe not so much the objective qualities and activities of things as the effects they produce on us.”(24) While accurate it also demonstrates a fundamental problem when discussing bored, a subjective experience looking for an objective definition. As for leisure as a cause, it suggested “For the vast majority, the tediousness of life is experienced as boredom (or boredom 2), the common or garden variety that tends to afflict any leisure class.” Since contrived busyness is tied to leisure it lies at the heart of this manifestation.(66) And for the “British Isles we discover those who tended to be morose, sullen, phlegmatic, and generally private, in contrast with the forms it assumed on the Continent, where it had fast become fulminating, virulent and destructive”(27)although this delineation between cultures is more apparent than real.

Entering our own era, Kierkegaard offered that “Boredom depends on the nothingness which pervades reality.”(15) He further suggested that boredom is the root of all evil,(26) demonstrating how lost one can get in trying to pin down this all too common condition. On more solid ground he noted “that everyone who feels bored cries out for change…. One tires of living in the country and moves to the city; one tires of one’s native land, and travels abroad;…”(26) This is a classic example of not only seeking busyness but equally avoiding productive work because we’ve arrived where nihilism, nothingness, is a void today’s mind all too willingly grasps.

For Emile Durkeim, suicide reveals this deep crisis in modern society. This sense of something not holding together was also recognized by Flaubert who recollected “how he and his friends had ‘lived in a strange world … we swung between madness and suicide.’”(33) As the song states: “Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes.”

Some could suggest that a person bored by work is too busy most of the time to realize it and therefore it is not leisure but its recognition that creates boredom. But we could echo Baudelaire in saying that “one must work, if not for taste then at least from despair, or, to reduce everything to a single truth: work is less boring than pleasure.”(86) Work unlike leisure or busyness offers creative opportunities for expansion of the self beyond the world of the bored.

Lewis Mumford suggested that “those who have great wealth, that minority with privilege, commanding all that the heart desires, could be classic examples of those who suffer from chronic disaffection, malaise, anxiety and psychotic self-destructiveness.”(96) While this may appear rather cavalier, when things do become too easy there is more room for boredom thanks to technology.

This raises an interesting issue of how much and of what importance the development of the modern self has or has not contributed to this pervasive sense of boredom now running rampant. The answer is no more clear than defining what it is to be an individualized self. The appearance of the modern individual has contributed to the birthing of the contemporary self where increasingly the center of the universe has found its discoverer. It is not the ego which asks “look at me” but rather one’s inner becoming where there are beginnings of opportunities that only end when the curtain is drawn.

The individual is now where today’s boredom can find comfort, blossoming unless the self creates an openness, that place where freedom finds fertility. The difficulty for most is that this is a huge personal burden that one would just as soon ignore. To look in the mirror and see the beginning and end of all of the best and worst looking back at you is not a popular sport. Yet this authentic privacy stands against that which is more than an escape from a public commune that we all belong to. Beginning alone is an early positive step—when properly embraced—towards the eventual communion with fellow travelers. Thus the self-conscious being is freed (not politically liberated)to enter the next expansive opening.

To note: “… there was one characteristic common to all instances of boredom, present and past, namely the loss of personal meaning, whether in relation to a particular experience or encounter.” This loss could be occasioned by the absence of something comforting like religion, for where doubt and hypocrisy find a berth so might boredom. And today’s idea of human nature does not offer supportive roots for a place in a community beyond doubt. Where was “some objective reality corresponding to the term ‘human nature’” when the line between objective and subjective is blurred. Having “inauthentic selves, to be untrue to their perception of their own nature as human beings”(101)is deception and boredom awaiting us. This is just one more reason for suggesting that individuality is where a self finds authentic expression which is far more complicated and difficult than one may wonder. Today we find an increasing collapse in modernity and its blind optimism in the rational and progressive nature of humankind. Since this pattern of a breakdown of the older order has taken hold, the counter- culture developed a youth driven revolution for those unwilling to be bored or conform, often two sides of the same coin.

Many drop-outs, literally and figuratively, do so because of a boredom with our systems - schools, industry or corporations. The certitude inherent in religious faith is now replaced by a faith in a collective reasonableness that has lead to a post-boredom where space and time is now torn apart beyond our traditional expectations. Two phenomena confront us as we transmigrate through and beyond the modern world. We have the evolving modern and high-tech maturation based upon the developmental roots of the late enlightenment. Now comes the surreal and fresh arts referred to as “absurd,” new physics beyond order and unheard of destructive planetary wars as well as the view of a rationally ordered world now seen as challenging. Consciousness within a growing self should now begin to find some central birthing.

We note that “The difficulty of finding an answer is only compounded when, on closer inspection, it becomes evident that it is actually not rationality as such that lies at its root but the immense and it would seem irreversible growth in consciousness and self-consciousness (reflexivity) which is dialectically related to that rationalism.”(166) Also it is that “greater consciousness and deliberation had ‘completely upset the balance between conscious and unconscious forces operating in our society,’”(108) The more actively we apply conscious states to given circumstances the more one exercises a self outside the mainstream of traditional assumptions.

Sometimes we must reach beyond the familiar in risking our understanding in order to embrace a new road. While no certain definition fits terms like boredom and consciousness, the more forceful element, the voice of post-modernity further adds to this confusion. Elements of post-modernity include that no inherently rationally organized universe exists, that art defies simple definitions given our inherent uncertainty; we now have extreme meta-fiction, fragmentary, full of a discordant genre mixture, lacking any hierarchy of discourse, and we now possess self-contradictory and unresolved uncertainty as a basis for living. There is a beginning and end but what is between is the existential burden of what is partly an absurd existence. It has even been suggested for boredom that “the world is eaten up by boredom … you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice.” This same commentator also noted that boredom “is like a fermentation of a decomposing Christianity”, what could be called a legacy of a materialistic and mechanistic world.

When signs of post-modernity appeared we hear Kafka’s voice offering feelings of “absolute indifference and apathy.” It was as if “A well gone dry, water at an unattainable depth and no certainty it is there.” Here we find something more than boredom as “Nothing, nothing…. The present is a phantom state form…a Nothing, nothing. Emptiness, boredom, no, not boredom just emptiness, meaninglessness, weakness.”(35) And Beckett’s Waiting for Godot offered boredom as a central point of interest.(35)

The population today is more than 300 million versus some 92 million a century ago; average age now in the 70s versus the 30s, while relationships to speed dramatically altered our sense of time and space. Our agrarian rural society is now urban where living, sleeping and eating is performed by the power of mechanical time which is fixed outside London by an atomic clock. While divorce is common and wars are as insane as one can make them, the planet is smaller, polluted and dependent on electronics, our new deity. Dissonance applies in music, painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and even in some ways politics. This is not the time to be looking for order or a sense of harmony but one for hiding. Erich Fromm, in Sane Society stated: “one of the worst forms of mental suffering is boredom, not knowing what to do with one’s self and one’s life.”(55) What then is the choice?

The following by Rollo May adds that “while one might laugh at the meaningless boredom of people a decade or two ago, the emptiness has for many now moved from the emptiness of boredom to a state of futility and despair” which is followed by a sense of “nausea, disintegration, and to the terrifying situation in which even ‘evil itself bores.’”[86] When Mersault in The Stranger was asked if he regretted committing murder he responded that “what I felt was less regret than a vague boredom” (”un certain ennui“). Today we embrace phrases like “bored to death”, “crushingly bored” or “out of one’s mind with boredom.”

This was expressed in part by Alan Watts’ “divided mind,” suggesting that as “long as the mind is split, life is perpetual conflict, tension, frustration, and disillusion. Suffering is piled on suffering, fear on fear, and boredom on boredom.”(63-4) Mersault noted that they are “not having any feelings, of being blocked emotionally, being frozen, of feeling the self to be unreal, in a word, apathy.” All these are “affective states and states of mental inhibition.”(49) Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur has a salesman leaving a ship again and again and again. As Susan Sontag explained it, the brutal nominalism of the artists as minimal has replaced the place for detailed and lengthy visual explanations of what is perceived. The world like art is reduced to the point of lacking definable clarity.(71)

Only when man is seen as Dasein, as a being whose essence is a function of Being-in-a-world, is there found a resolution of the riddle as to what is the crises for a generalized ennui.(64) The German term Dasein implies man in context.(64) William Barrett’s Irrational Man stated that “words like dread, fear, guilt and boredom are not merely mental figments, but… modes of man’s Being-in-the-world”[72], a none enviable position. Heidegger offered that this mood that assails us “comes neither from ‘inside’ nor from ‘outside,’ but arises out of the Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being.” As with anxiety, boredom has no special object.(65)

If a prime function of culture is to provide meaning, and if the incidence of boredom (the result of an unaware realization of the collapse of meaning) greatly increases, then it follows that there is something gravely amiss within such a culture, something seriously disordered at its deepest and least accessible level. We may wonder about the act of living while not understanding it with no heaven or hell, or reason or progress. Thinkers like Rilke and Nietzsche were early in pointing to our being worn-out of things and of the words attached to them, a process that has accelerated enormously since.(68) “As has been made clear, the sheer number of things has depreciated any particular one of them” while “our reckless destruction of things has sundered us from them in spirit.”(68) The irony of all this is that things are no longer precious (however expensive they may be). For Rilke, the sharing of lives, the preciousness of our lives and of others has been diminished.(68)

We have gained much outside around us and lost much inside us. We run away from ourselves with useless busyness. So much of our social activities are nothing more than an avoidance of our threatening boredom and the fear of it. And one may add that “as the meaning continues to be eliminated from the world and from man (meaning in the sense of an answer to Heidegger’s question, … `why is there anything at all, rather than nothing?’)” what is called hyper-boredom, “will become increasingly powerful forces in Western culture.”(69) The “Great Chain of Being” has been reduced to a heap of links unattached to one another or anything other than redundancies. (70) Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse stated that “there are times when a whole generation is caught between two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand itself, and has no standard, no security, so simple acquiescence.”[60] Only with individual and personal work do we find dignity.

We live in two worlds beyond a faith in religion, one a belief in the tradition of utilitarian modernity and the other an unknown post-modernity appearing on the horizon. This idea of transition between these two epochs can be found as early as in Hegel: “The spirit of the time growing slowly and quietly ripe for the new form it is to assume, disintegrates one fragment after another of the structure of its previous world.” He died in 1831 while the Great War did not begin until 1914 when technology became the dog and human reason the tail—simple rationalizations. Little wonder that the idea that “frivolity and again ennui, which are spreading in the established order of things, the undefined foreboding of something unknown,” has “betoken that there is something else approaching.”[61] For those of the world of hyper-boredom, “they have merely let the sense of vacuity ensuing from the collapse of the ‘traditional paradigm’ break through.”(88) An early poet of our era, T. S. Eliot, suggested that “We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/ Leaning together/ Head pieces filled with straw. Alas!”(90)

As our sources have noted: “boredom is the inevitable accompaniment of the absence, or even serious uncertainty about the stability and reliability, of values, purposes, meanings and commitment.”(91) What is there when there is nothing but the “nihilism of the masses; the largely unconscious, unacknowledged sense that the bottom has fallen out of the world.”(91) Boredom exists because “our present temporarily schizoid existence” is centered “in the two cultures—vacillating between dead purposes and deadly devices to escape boredom,”[77] one leading to the other!

We’ve arrived full circle where modernity bumps against the wall of this strange and ill-defined post-modernity that demands more of the individual, that inner self trying to create focus where once it was a given. There are forces to face and keep in mind that delineate these two eras as Alvin Toffler in Future Shock (p284) suggested that we now need a “new theory of personality” to take account of the novel type of man already coming into existence. He further admits that “the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together.”[43] Distractions are comfort blankets to hide beneath when boredom knocks at your door.

Self is what has let go of the familiar collective that hides the pain that rains when the ego is the star attraction. The self is the existential becoming rather than traditional religion or some rational ego dominating force, a recognition that only between birth and death is where one’s own loving works. The self cannot be discovered, it can only be created by effort.

This changing horizon also offers freedom from the burden of uncertainty and its fear in a world no longer providing meaning with its response of boredom. This is not just a subjective reaction since the world of mechanics and consumption is boring (except for workers).(93) Selves live by judgements of correct and incorrect rather than ancient metaphors of right and wrong secured in righteousness that can transcend fearful moments and leave boredom for the boring.

But then this is only a beginning.

PAX/LOVE

 by Vwadek P. Marciniak

 Arriving late at the conference and finding it crowded with a group of illustrious scholars and writers on stage addressing the topic of consciousness, I was able to garner a seat and hear the opening remarks of the moderator. After each guest gave their opening comments, I began reviewing my notes during the question-answer period and realized I was more confused than when I entered. The attempts offered to define the consciousness left me uninformed since what was offered was an undifferentiated explanation, so general or obtuse as to leave one empty without satisfactory clarification. The well known names, from Searle to Churchland and Koch, ‘Dennett to Baars, Chalmers and Burrows, offered their thoughtful insights but there still remained little light as to agreed meaning. It was clear that simply equating consciousness with awareness would not do, even if it would follow a Cartesian base.

While this conference is fictional, the named thinkers are not, for consciousness remains one of the most discussed and confusing terms to attract intellectual interest this past half century. Further compounding these difficulties there has been an increasing if meaningless applications as in “absolute” consciousness, “wake” consciousness, “alternate”, “collective” or “class” consciousness among too many others that further expand a descriptive but confusing collage of this subjective, amorphous but significant idea. What is the meaning in speaking of black or national consciousness? Do we have a better understanding when we have an offering of feminist or gay consciousness? Does one wake up one morning and suddenly discover that they are female or black? It is never helpful when the answers are more confusing than the question. This should not be an Hegelian intellectual homecoming. Even John Locke expanded Descartes’ definition to include memory and thinking which at least is a step in the correct direction. This introduces how all three offer a time frame with aware as the present, memory for past and thinking the future.

The concept of consciousness deserves more consideration than these examples of an over-worked and over-distorted term now run amok in a mental mind-field. Part of the problem may be that those most concerned are too unwilling to take an historic approach, locking themselves into a fixed psychological exercise with philosophical definitions for a mental activity that is pure subjectivity and more dynamic complex which is still evolving than too often is not granted.

Given this situation, it would not be inappropriate to question from where consciousness arrived, how it may have evolved and what could be some of its roots? What in our historical mental transformation made it possible, at least for those who have experienced what may be called conscious states of mind, i.e. achieving a fully conscious experience? This last statement further implies that we have not always been conscious, that it may possible that it has not been necessary to be conscious. And finally, it may not be an absolute but rather occasional activity. It’s presence as a mental activity is only one of degrees, appearing rather recently and with relatively modern and postmodern beginnings, at least if we are cautious in our historical analysis.

The central tendency in defining consciousness as awareness poses, as noted, more problems than solutions. Animals and plants are capable of a certain type of awareness. One could call it an instinct but it still is a capacity to “know” that the animal should not jump from cliffs that most plants should not open their buds in the winter months. Even our genes have some type of awareness as to what is appropriate or not for both health and growth. Being aware may possibly be a component of consciousness, but it is not to be equated with consciousness. Awareness is too general and amorphous to offer meaningful clarification. Defining a confusing concept with another adds to the blind spots. For those who experienced this unique phenomena, especially to a high degree, equating it with awareness is more confusing than enlightening.

The concept consciousness has a history and since history and language are companions in their respective altering of our own understanding, a review of the history could offer some potentials for clarification. That the conceptual root of the historic term consciousness can be traced as far back as the Roman Empire further expands the potential for confusion. Those oriented toward the power of the word, the literary character of language, are more concerned with the relation of each of those words to each other as was originally used in documents and for creative purposes. Historians, on the other hand, are attracted more to the cultural relationship of a word to its own era as well as to the future usage as both a potential cause and effect for later adaption. Since “conscious” is itself the third incarnation from its original roots, its historical transition can reveal some basic fundamentals towards attempting clarification. A source for a clearer historical understanding can be found in the writings of C. S. Lewis who discovered its roots through scholarly analysis. The earliest documental appearance arrived around the first or second century A.D. with the marriage of two Latin terms, con and scire together giving us conscire and from which we acquire the noun conscientia. Allowing for difficulties that exist in all translations and therefore interpretations, especially when the term is so ancient, it is suggested that in the tying of the `with’ or con to that of scire or `know’, implies meaning knowledge between two parties, specifically, some form of secret knowledge. The idea of hidden information, that which is possessed exclusively by two parties, may well have been appropriate during the Roman Empire as it moved towards instability where increasing numbers of important and powerful citizens worked in secret with others to create family and clan stability. What is significant is that this is a knowledge that is anything but public which was an original and fundamental frame for all human references in the ancient world. Roman society, like the earlier Greeks, were dedicated to public life where citizens possessed duties rather than rights; this was a world without individuality as we now understand the concept. In Rome, a citizen was defined as being a member of a clan, a family and a community. The very modern concept of an individual self will take centuries before developing and will mature along side any modern concept of consciousness.

This is an appropriate and mandatory mental backdrop, especially when considering a world so distant and unlike our own. When discussing the vast difference between our world and where we have come from, it is necessary to comprehend how this distant world may have existed as a contribution to defining our present psychological pattern of existence. This understanding can be offered in contrast to the growing individuation and decline of the collective that now inheres in our modern lives since clans, tribes and family dominated our traditional frame of reference. There was no inner alienation or estrangement in a world without any inner self burdened by daily living. The mind of antiquity demanded nothing resembling any of the extreme complexities or abstractions of our world. The earlier the languages we examine and study, the more this is clearly expressed in its comparative simplicity. The organic and collective world of antiquity is now replaced by one of complex machines, singularity, estrangement and even isolation.

The change from its original meaning while retaining the rather unique sense of a secret but shared knowledge soon began to enter a theological metamorphosis into even more remarkable secret knowledge now tied to the Christian acquisition of an inner immortal soul that was indispensable for the Medieval Christian sense of salvation. This was a creative weaving of a new cloth to cover the old meaning which now became a unique and applicable activity in the form of “conscience”. What had been secret knowledge hidden from others and primarily passive was now radically transferred into an active transcending communion of secret knowledge between the Christian soul and an active God. This was more than secret knowledge, for now there was a reflection tied to the inner soul, hidden from all others since the issue was one of sin, a reflectively soiled soul only known to God. While the appearance of conscience in the Christian world was slow in developing, it found full birthing and given a central role in the new canonical rules of the early Fourth Latern Council of the Thirteenth Century when the confessional was made a mandatory annual sacrament.

Priests now found they needed training as to how to aid a penitent to review their secret knowledge (con\scire) of sin (conscience) and reflect upon a knowledge exclusively known by God which now would be revealed to the His intermediator, one’s confessor. Without reflection it would be impossible for the penitent to make a complete and satisfactory confession of their sins. This was so new that many generations will pass for the confessors (priests) to begin understanding this original and very strange phenomena of inner reflection. An inner examination, a turning into oneself as a primitive form of introspection began slowly, while it increasingly impacted on the late medieval psyche. The sinner and God (with the priest-church acting as intermediary) now have a shared secret knowledge that are confessed in order to return to the good grace of the Savior. In addition, this was clearly less a typically passive situation since these secrets must be activated and accepted first through the inner reflection followed by an open and voluntary expression of that newly acquaired knowledge. Both a more active and more inner state of thought was becoming a fundamental part of a changing western mentality.

This was not the only beginning steps of the idea of an inner and hidden existence since the very idea of a Christian inner being, a soul, already implied the creation of such a phenomenal condition. This soul retained a passive existence, however, since all moral acts, according to Augustine, the official theologian of the medieval church, were only attributable to the infinite grace of the Lord. Still, the interior soul and personal conscience would now run parallel to the revolutionary new mentality of a Christian communicant, creating an inner identity, one where consciousness will eventually find a home.

What was more striking was this movement towards an inner existence now manifested and supported by changes in the art of writing and reading, especially the newly discovered art of silent reading, followed by the creation of the printing press, making religious script even more personal and increasingly an inherently private activity.

Language originally being an oral experience from its earliest roots had naturally always been intended to be heard. The ears, not the eyes, were the natural organ for experiencing language. Early copy rooms in monasteries were known as mumbling rooms since monks read out loud whatever they were copying. But several medieval changes did begin to impact. First came our present written script, the Carolingian, which originated in the court of Charlegmane somewhere around the beginnings of the ninth century. This was followed by the monks in Ireland expanding the accessibility of writing by separating words into sentences, eventually creating punctuation marks; both of these additions contributed to the general comprehension for those other than professional scribes and making possible the delineation of sounds in order to facilitate one’s ability to join the world of the literate. This last component, the birth of silent reading which evolved throughout the High Middle Ages with its impact on enlarging our inner voice, cannot be overestimated, along with the earlier contributions of the concept of a soul or inner conscience.

When we can establish the existence of an intimate relationship with “The Word”, an individualized one in the interior of the mind, we have an arrow pointing to what will eventually be known as a “private” act as we take our first steps into the earliest hints of modernity. It was the Catholic confessional combined with the birth of a conscience and the skills of silent reading that made possible an early and enlarged reflectivity, our inner introspective mentality, one of the first contributions in creating the modern distinction between objective and subjective experiences.

The creation and acceptance of a nonmaterial but uniquely personal immortal soul with the development of one’s own hidden conscience, an inner place where the voice of a righteous god could reside privately along with the ability to read silently, removed western humanity from an exclusive dependence upon audio experiences. These are three early meaningful steps driving our mental capacities into breaking from ancient and early medieval frames of thought and a traditional understanding of our sense of reality. While there were earlier but more shallow roots, these three created a road map marking the unique historic events from the Renaissance and Reformation to the Scientific Revolution which for consciousness would find a powerful impetus in the writings of René Descartes.

Three early events, important pieces of this puzzle, occurred during the Renaissance: first the printing press with the other arriving from the hands of the artists who entertained the idea of foreshortening or depth of field, a radical new realism being expressed by the artist’s control of a visual and a human sense of place and time. Add to this the artists new practice of signing their art works in this revolutionary age of fine art and you have the beginnings of artists expressing their personal tie to their work and commiting the number one of the seven deadly sins - pride. While many have suggested that the printing press was the most important of invention for the topic of consciousness, it is suggested here that rather than the printing press, it was silent reading that may have played a far greater role since it was this process that offered a new parameter for understanding time and space, an inner and revolutionary new subjective ontology.

The leaders of the Reformation also added to this expanding horizon of self discovery in their demand that followers of the Protestant communion with Christ first develop this personal relation with His Word by their private reading of the newly accessible Bible. This was Protestants replacing the Roman Church with a new intermediary between the faithful and their Lord - God’s holy word. To bring conscience into an active state would require not the church but rather the interiorization of the Holy Word read in the silence of one’s growing personal space where the mind could embrace and absorb the message of salvation. The guide for moral conduct was becoming both more personal and private. This was the early foundations upon which the individual (public) and the self (private) could be framed to hold one’s personal consciousness.

The concept and creation of realistic rendering in the plastic arts meant among other things that one could now perceive an image with depth, that is, a rationally controlled sense of space and time, a spacious entity set in a specific time where we, the audience, are uniquely separated and yet in a certain sense a singular part of that very space. We look at a painting and see “it” standing with us “here” and this increasingly became the accepted view of an expanding Renaissance realism: The space in the painting is placed for us here in our eyes with the space we are residing in at a particular moment. This was not yet the modern notion of a clear distinction of subjective and objective but it was an important contribution to that soon to be an articulated discovery during the Scientific Revolution.

With the combination of the inner word with our new sense of space, a radical changing or our undestanding of our humanity, a new meaning could be found in the significant and brilliant genius of historic and humorous settings created by William Shakespeare. Such theatrical poetry is traditionally to be heard, to be approached with the ears, rather than simply read. It is common for students to be told that if they are to read an assigned poem they should do it orally, to hear its lyricism. Audiences in Elizabethan England enjoyed an audiovisual experience. Recent scholarship supports the concept that today one can acquire a great deal of pleasure and knowledge by simply reading Shakespeare quietly, visualizing and hearing inside one’s own mental home this profound theatrical and rhetorical experience, assuming we have such a capacity. If this were not the case one would be hard pressed to explain why it would be difficult if not nearly impossible to enter a book store and not find works of the Bard on the so many shelves.

Clearly, there has been an expansion in our ability to absorb and internalize aesthetic as well as practical experiences. The subjective inner life, the early stages of a developing self, our own subjective “here” versus the objective that is observed “there” did become a central contribution from and for the creation of modern science most clearly in the writings of Francis Bacon. His idea of “disengagement”, the separation of the observer from the observed, is a touchstone for the birth of the modern notion of objectivity without which science could not exist. If we can better know something by standing back from what it is we study, we can make ourselves an observer and by implication, someone unique as a thinker to match our unique soul or conscience. It was in this context that Descartes - defeating his doubts - made his contributions. His work as well as that of contemporaries, John Locke and Isaac Newton, created a radical new vision of space, time and motion which completely undermined traditional assumptions.

Offering more confusion than clarity, Descartes equates consciousness with the Germanic term of awareness. This had been an extremely important concept for Descartes since he made consciousness in our thinking a central component of his cogito. In other words, for cogito ergo sum to work, our being aware of our particular active cogito is required. The act of thinking is made part of our awareness in order to make those thoughts operational and useful. To have a thought is only the first part of the process of thinking for it is also necessary to make conscious that thought. A baby may have a thought but simply cannot bring it to a conscious state and thus for all practical purposes is without that very thought except perhaps for a non-reflective moment. What is all too often overlooked regarding Cartesian philosophy is that this idea of being conscious means an awareness of thinking what it is that we are actually thinking. This was the path which Descartes took to arrive at a new form of certainty that he hungered for. If I think and can be conscious of that thought I must be alive and so must exist. This was the key to his secular dualism that began to replace religious dualism. It is his “conscious” embracing of the implications of his cogito that gave him some comfort in a world that appeared to be increasingly flowndering in uncertainty. Which was the true religion? What to think of nascent new national governments. How to deal with religious wars? The times were changing and his thinking proved significant in the secularizing of the western mind, especially in turning away from an exclusive dualism of God and Satan or Heaven and Hell, those long held assumptions that had so underlined if not dominated our pre-modern psyche.

This newly evolved mental construct, methods for discovering our ability to think, reflectively aiding in createing something that we label with the term consciousness now made its appearance in England. John Locke expanded this new topical term by exploring many similar ideas from a more empirical rather than metaphysical assumption, creating a radical change in the understanding of how we know what it is that we know, and what knowing and knowing we know is all about. He also raised the bar for our understanding of consciousness by adding to Cartesian awareness our personal memory and the very act of thinking. Locke agreed in principle, therefore, with the earlier writings of Descartes that there was a consciousness, now a term established in English lexicography, and that what we mean by aware was in part a necessary component for any definition of consciousness.

The expansion of our vocabulary, writings, historical knowledge and printed works created a frame whereby remembering along with the act of thinking naturally added to awareness. This Lockean contribution created, therefore, more than a singular term offered in defining consciousness. That memory, thinking and awareness would dovetail into consciousness, created a serious expansion of meanings, since the activation of awareness implies that memory and thinking inhere at the moment of that activation. Memory implies a frame of reference drawn from our past and added to our present observations just as our aware state of mind must imply something that is equally believed to be presently activated. Here, memory is awareness of our experiences driven from a more passive to more cognitized state.

If Cartesian awareness is to be applied to our act of thinking, thinking in part inheres in the act of memory. It now becomes very difficult to separate awareness, memory and thinking, just as it becomes clear that there is something integrative here, something we could generally label as the act of being conscious as distinct from being cognitive.

A very odd and significant occurrence followed when Locke’s consciousness was translated into French early in the Enlightenment. Whether because Descartes used the medieval Latin term along with his French for consciousness, or if for some other reason, the French translator decided Locke’s English consciousness should appear as sentiment in French. Western mentality had long been very concerned with how to appropriately restrain people’s more anti-social or sinful behavior. From the role of the Church to the use of the Bible, restrictions applied; but now, in the growing secular world, how to pressure people to behave in an appropriate manner became an important issue. The traditional dualism of good vs. evil, God vs. Satan and life vs. death, had remained a central issue for western values. While deism and theism grew in popularity, however, the issue of a working guide for proper conduct remained an issue. Sentiment could play such a role to some extent since it implied for Eighteenth Century philosophes that human beings had an inherent capacity to sympathize and even empathize with others and thus would offer a secular but ethical frame for behavior. Could not this new rational approach replace the religious theology as social guidance?

As failures within the paradigm of rationality began to appear at the end of the Enlightenment, and serious reservations of Cartesian metaphysics and Lockean empiricism made their presence felt, what loosely was labeled the Romantic century began. Now the more contemporary meaning of sentiment began to apply to correct human behavior. Along with these caveats regarding human rational capacity, radically new scientific, political and economic ideas began pushing our thinking into a genuine break from Medieval residuals along with questioning simple blind trust in reason. This was a modern (post-modern?) world that would give us another problematic term - i.e. existential.

Whether it was reservations regarding the use or meaning of consciousness by Frederick Nietzsche or the question of its existence as once was suggested by William James, consciousness was now becoming an intellectual issue. With the mental creation of logical positivism and the later writings on behavioralism by thinkers like John B. Watson, consciousness fell out of favor since subjectivity was not a measurable phenomena. With the arrival and dominance of the social sciences and its child, behaviorism, there was little room for such an abstract and subjective idea as consciousness, making it relatively irrelevant for the first half of the twentieth century. Only after the experiences of massive world conflicts did the concept return and come to dominate so much of our psychological, neurophysiological and philosophical studies.

What began in antiquity as little more than a secret shared knowledge finally became an intellectual issue of great import for understanding the inner and subjective state of our mental activities. This now proved to be truly shared secret knowledge, so secret in fact that there have been and still remain some serious thinkers who raise the interesting question as to how can something even exist that is so non-observable.[1] Others raise questions as to this being a state of mind existing only occasionally or only present in various degrees depending upon the person and/or circumstance.[2] And finally, it has also been suggested that machines will some day be conscious while others suggest this is a term we will never be able to definitively explain.[3] This brief historical journey does disservice to this confusing concept but necessary in order to support a more historical approach to something so complex and evolving.

If we are capable to some degree to make conscious choices, and only at certain times and only historically more recently, the question also needs to be asked as to whether there is any point for such a capacity.[4] Professional athletes, musicians and actors would find being conscious an interference to their performance. Those making very quick and difficult decisions under pressure would also find reflective conscious choices irrelevant if not a potential hindrance. It is easier to argue against rather than in favor of its existence, at least from a practical point of view. From the pragmatists to the utilitarians, one can only wonder as to what the point of consciousness could be. We can reflect and introspect within our inner selves, taking an existential position at the moment, but is it necessary to also be conscious in doing so? Jean Paul Sartre appears to have thought so and there are others who would agree. Nietzsche also had earlier raised serious questions in this regard, and we now find ourselves with more wonder than answers.

Perhaps one of the results of this transformation of such a fundamental concept has been the challenge it offers to traditional conflicting dualistic assumptions that has so powerfully driven much of western thought. We may have entered an age so complex in its technical changes including a life potentially lived in outer-space that the very idea of simple good versus evil and right versus wrong has become rather antique absolutes if not potentially quaint.

For the average citizen, this may not be applicable. But what of those more rare individuals; the artists and intellectuals who push the envelope of understanding and creativity beyond the horizon of everyday functional existence? Are the great geniuses by nature closer to the edge of conscious and subjective reality, somehow transcending the mendacity of daily living? Is creativity the space that appears between those times of deep conscious reflective existence? And, finally, are some people capable of being more than singularly conscious, moving into a new realm of multi-consciousness, as perhaps in poly-consciousness?

Beating old dead horses of equating consciousness with awareness will not enlighten. The roots and complexities are necessary components in any eventual clarification if it is to come.

Individuation, the singularity of the self and the isolation of the individual is a burden that the lone voice expresses within the mind, that interior conversation we alone have remaining private and hidden; this is our own phenomenal mental reality that no one else can ever come to know.

I would suggest that the concept of consciousness is so large and dynamic as both a topic for consideration and an activity exercised, that for it to be left only to the most narrow scholarly fields of study notwithstanding whatever contributions their’s have been or might be is inadequate.

FOOTNOTES

1. This idea of consciousness being unmeasurable being totally subjective is a position for those dusk

behind behavioralism

Maximilian de Gaynesford, “Worn Out” review of Between Saying and Doing: Towards an analytic pragmatism,  by Robert B. Brandom (Oxford U Press), Times Literary Supplement, 29 May 2009, 29.

 ”Between Saying and Doing has two central topics.  The first is the relation between the meaning of expressions and their use, which Brandom sometimes articulates as the relation between what is said and the activity of saying it.  The second is the relation between the classical project of philosophical analysis and pragmatism, which he portrays as a confromtation between a project primarily concerned with logically elaborating the meanings of expressions and an approach which focuses more on the use of expressions, the primacy of their practical significance, what they are for.  These topics are related in their turn: the first is the battleground for the second.

“Not all are prepared to recognize pragmatism as a challenge to analytic philosophy, but those who do tend to assume that the outco me must be disastrous to the latter.  They thing what pragmatic cnsiderations show is that one ought to stop theorizing in terms of the meaning of expression altogether, and concentrate instead on their use.  Whether this pragmatist turn could lead to more than piecemeal idagnosis of philosophical confusion is something Brandom appears dubious about.  He is more scathing about the common alternative strategy: to ignore pragmatism altogether, refusing to recognize a challenge to analytic philosophy from considerations which imply the primacy of practical signficance.  His option is to chart a course between these extremes, retaining due appreciation of pragmatism’s power to discomfort without seeking the destruction desired by some who wield it.  His core proposal is that we reconceive the pragmatist challenge so that it becomes the long-sought instrument that renews and regenerates analytic philosophy. 

“But it is a description of the promised land…. “Between saying and doing, many pair of shoes is worn out” (Italian proverb). …  Amid the heavily technical discussion of automaton theory, computational inguistics, modal semantics and consequence-intrinsic logic, it is possible to discern something like the following picture.  Pragmatism ought to be able to see its way through to a milder form, one that retains its insistence on the primacy of use, but is prepared to accept the possiblity that this might be consistent with the systematic analysis of meaning.  conversely, analytic philosophy ought to be able to see its way through to a broader base, on that retains its focus on semantic theorizing, but accepts that an appeal to the meaning of expressions gets its point and purpose from attempts to codify and explain their use, and that only their use explains the expression on meanings.”

The first rule of thumb is understanding the historic appearance and cultural dynamics of both the terms ego and self in there developmental and comparative implications. As an attempt to explicate terms that represent inner psycho-centering drives that have experienced metamorphic changes, we begin with the ego and finally meet the more recent self.

The earlier ego appeared in ancient Rome where loosely it translated with the later English “I” which Romans could not prefer. Romans did not accept the modern concept of individuality that would inhibit one being identified as Roman. One did not say “I am going to the baths” but rather “Going to the baths.”

The idea of not expressing the subject “I” continued throughout the Medieval Christen world since ego dominating as an “I” could not replace the dominance of God, the creator and center of everything and everyone. The favorite term for an interior drive was soul, the place where the divine gifts and dynamics of how one should live by good or evil shaped the finality for those gates opening up or down. This inner force, our soul, could be cleansed after the thirteenth century with a confessional demonstrating the power the church placed on this interior force for one’s identity. This term would continue to be used in the early modern world when the beginning idea of an individual made an appearance with the arrival of the Renaissance. The word ego would continue along with soul until finally the developing term of self began in early modernity with postmodernity embracing its implications.

Egoist, egotistical, egoism, egoistic and six more are examples in the New World dictionary demonstrating both breath and depth of meanings. The reason for this may be that the ego is what we are born with and is transferred into fully developed humans. A new born baby has an ego ready to fly while the un-recognized “I” is applicable for simple health reasons - the baby cries for food and for the cleaning of waste - an instinctual drive. This key element for the operation of the fundamental ego demonstrates how basic it is. There is inherently nothing cognitive when a child’s ego is operational. The pain of one sort or other exists and the baby seeks relief until a response is offered. The ego is simply inherent and bio-chemical.

This changes somewhat and somewhere around the age of approximately eight months depending on each babies chronological development. About now the baby notes a distinction between their own hand from others and the ego begin its own psycho-dynamics in public exposure. This continues as the child now discovers crying and making a scene calling for attention the ego seeks. By approximately six or seven the child has a primitive understanding of an abstraction such as love followed by about age eleven or twelve when the ability to join two abstractions arrives, as with love and death. Most of the cognitive potential appears by the age of pubescence with the final maturation of the brain occurring around twenty-five. The form is finished and the ego finds a place in matured young adults which inherently looks for re-assurance and gratification from the outside world with no two people having the same quantity of an ego drive.

Sports and theater are gratifying for some, playing the game, cheer leader or stage hand, the closer to the applause the better. The conflict, competition for friends and being liked by fellow students cam border on a pathology for a few, perhaps as much a conceit, unless one finds a means to short-circuit the ego. How pathological depends upon one’s egocentric nature, especially where poverty dominates and where there are few outlets for either males or females except as groupies, thugs or in gangs. A sense of power is one means of compensation for a sense of emptiness that may result from feelings that one”s ego has not received the kind of attention it craves.

Vanity may be an example of the ego in action - “look at me” which can mean that no one else matters. Vanity has long been condemned even by those who practice it. This blends in with those who are sinfully vain in offering something for those who feel no inner value - the extreme egoist. Moreover, during the time of the church, God was the only number one and no one could get near him except saints.

An early ego was expressed in the Renaissance when various artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo were expected to place their names on their art. This was only enhanced by the arrival of the printing press at the end of the fifteenth century. When turning to the written word we find Montaigne who created the art form of the Essay and was considered by his peers to be driven by his ego. Here the problem of these two terms becomes interesting because artistic personas generally have both a strong ego and strong sense of self.

This apples to an ego vs. self in Montaigne ( Donals Frame, “The Complete Essays of Montaigne” 1943) as witnessed from the following passage : “And if no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts? In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted inward self with colors clearer then my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me - a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self , as integral part of my life, not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.”(p. 504) While at best confusing in the us of the term “self” that the translator applied to this sixteenth century essay, it may apply because this genius possessed both. His use of “I” is appropriate as it now came into play. His reference to “painting myself” also applies in the revolutionary visual arts. In both cases the temptation is to wonder whether this is not the ego and not singularly some pure expression of the self speaking. One page earlier he said: “Others have taken courage to speak of themselves because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, because I have found mine so barren and so meager that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon my plan.” As the brilliant inventor of the modern Essay his ostentatiousness has an odor of ego - “I found mine so barren and so meager…” Yet there is the inner potential of the self in the artist.

It is little wonder that in the later Romantic era, Flaubert, who loved Montaigne’s Essays, once noted “his own flintiness in the Essays …, and the reading notes record careful scrutiny of the `egoiste’ Montaigne.” After all, Flaubert was detailed in his notes as he embraced the Essays. As one romantic noted, Montaigne had “been led astray in his youth by`that false philosophy, that finds happiness in selfishness [”I’egoisme”] and wisdom in insensibility.” It is not surprising “for the Romantics…, Montaigne had for some years provided an antitype of generous emotion - the classic` egoiste.” [p.26T.L.S. 10/2/09] Yet how to judge a giant who would offer this title for one of his chapters: “That to Philosophize is to learn to die” (1572-74)? Here one must offer again a voice of caution if not a caveat: Great artistic and brilliant minds who have left us so much to contemplate and share are not easily categorized as either ego or self driven - genius as they are.

It may be easier to look at a fictional but reliable example of an active ego for guidance in making judgements as can be seen from the informative, interesting and remarkable master of great theater, William Shakespear and his infamous egotist Iago, Hamlet’s ultimate manipulator. This is a convenience from which we see if clues can offer distinctions between where the ego and then the self dominate. We all have egos including great artists as well any genius; that is not the issue, the issue is which is dominant at any one time. Iago wins but Hamlet has character. The more inside one’s inner being the more likely the self , the more the outside, the ego. Again we have both potentially: did Iago have both?

The ego survival is revealed by the many in the public eye who cannot live without accolades for their significance. This should not seem strange to anyone since we all have this inherited characteristic, although some with a great deal more, others with only a small amount and many in between. Those of little or less egos could become saintly, dedicated givers to the poor and disadvantaged. The issue is not in having an ego but rather is there more. The more competitive the more one panders to the ego, not a bad thing in itself - competition does have its place, but only in a limited and channeled expression of that potential. . Even here it should be noted that the self can come into play, even in a small way as one listens to successful actors or actresses when you sometimes hear the self behind the ego. It was for the first time in 1828 the term ego in England began not being equated with the term of self, both becoming separate but confusing at best and at worst distracting .

While the ego is given dominance the self is too weak or undeveloped. The first is a life of social images whereas the self is more interested in an inner becoming and imagination, a process rather than a static state. While the ego is something that is a given, the self is earned through effort, time and introspection. There is no free lunch when it comes to the self just as there is no way one can avoid the inherent ego each has. As the ego suffers from a sense of vulnerability the self has the ability to transform the fearful into an opportunity for discovery and growth - a moment for inner reflection. With imagination the image regarding others’ judgements means little or nothing. The self is what can short circuit the burden that inheres in the ego if one should decide that this should be viewed as a distraction. Many if not most, especially those of great ambition, want this ego as a motivator and touch stone in expanding control and measuring success in their own and other’s eyes. There are too many social activities that could not function without powerful egos from sports and entertainment to politics and being a C.E.O. Basically there is nothing here in itself that needs condemnation. What we should recognize is that our language has greatly been damaged with sloppy and careless usage. The self is the light to glow beyond the ego, to expand one’s inner identity without an audience applauding you. All great artists and thinkers, notwithstanding the size of their particular ego, are driven by something from the inside, by something other than audience approval. Picasso created for himself as did Miles Davis, even with the dynamics of an audience. The singular act of creation is personal and private, satisfying in and of itself. There are many as these although only a few become noticed historically. It is true that most can live without any strong sense of self but none can live without an ego so this is not to say that even famous artists are not in some ways and in various degrees partially driven by their ego. The painter S. Dali was well known for his ego games as were many others - but there is that other side, the creative self, that is of interest. It is suggested here that while we cannot live without an ego, we cannot grow without a self. May the two find a joy together with the self in charge and where the ego does not interfere.

What is it then when speaking of the self? We have self-destructive, self-indulgent, self-negating, self-aware and, of course, self-consciousness. If not enough, there is self-fulfilment, self-expansive, self-reflective and self-introspective as well many more. While the term ego has one expression for expansion, the self expands by adding many other addenda. Ego and self are confused so regularly that it can make anyone constipated pleased. What are some marks for clarity, some space or juxtaposition for these?

Ego is more a public frame whereas self is more the hidden individual. This is why the self is more recent since the idea of individuality with its earliest hints in the Renaissance did not blossom until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the self being more modern while the ego has remained classic. The ego inherently seeks out others to bounce off and is also more appropriate for a sense of the collective or community which has been disappearing this past century. Since the self is more independent, given more to individualized demands and not dependent on the judgements of others, it is not only very modern but equally postmodern. For this reason the ego is of a traditional public state of being while the self is a more private process that inheres in the existential.

So where does the self arrive from, where is it’s root and what offers the opportunity for those so drawn to explore it as an inner potential? The title of this essay suggests an answer. A crack can occur for some in their ego, that reflective moment when you open yourself to new questions; when that happens there is a sense of a phenomena deeper, wider and more curious calling for discovery and exploration. This could be called the beginning of the self, although only a beginning. Reflection and introspection can then arrive requiring serious activation of inner expressions and expansion of whatever is behind that curious door. Note the word curious must be an handmaiden of that inner becoming arriving out of the crack of discovery that challenges areas exposed. Born with the ego, we are only offered the potential for becoming self directing. Also note the active verbs used since we speak of an ongoing process and not blind stops on the highway of life.

The inner discovery can occur a variety of ways, one of which is inner conversations where the thinker is talking to themselves about something personal, taking positions as say the pro - say me - then the con - say myself - and then the observer - I - experiencing thoughts of three beings: I was listening to me talk to myself . This break from simplistic dualism offers entry into a more complex triad that potentially exists in someone becoming - past, present and future at once. When this triad is realized the potential for a human triune is made accessible, a human coin where the three sides makes a whole but ever changing value. This is but a beginning, for wherever one is as a self it is always a beginning towards one’s last breath, and even at that very last moment it is still only a beginning.

Is there a tool in all this that can aid this crack to grow into this powerful sense of an individualized self? Perhaps. Along with the coming of a self out of the crack there is the mental state of unbelievable proportion arriving in wait to be used by this new becoming. Consciousness, not just awareness, or having a memory or thought, but something larger than the collective of these ideas, becomes so introspective that the center of the universe is inside a transcendence that has gone beyond the everyday. In every way it enters new realms of becoming, an existential freedom so pure that nothing can touch that moment so personal and yet so powerful that anyone and anything outside are just that, outside, only relevant by choice. This has been called a form of madness for some people who use the term “self-conscious” when really meaning “ego-awareness” unless they were to have an understanding of both these terms with deep introspection.

The New World Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, lists ego and another nine various expressions of it, four versions noted. For self, there were 144 citations of various forms some mentioned including three additional not mentioned in the dictionary, i.e. self-engaged, self-expansion and self-developed, all evident in meaning. These three reflect an inner becoming that can be processed. Self-conscious is also self-evident as are all the rest. Self-fulfilled, self-expressed , self-explanatory, and self-devotion require something other than an ego as does self-determination , self-definition , self-esteem , self-expression and self-contained. To have an inner self with consciousness means self-control without any self-deception which could end in self-defeating which is only avoided by working on one’s inner self-definitions with self-defense. One could go on but this picture has enough paint to fill the canvas with clarification and confusion as well self-presentation. The self is a big word because it is the center of the modern and postmodern psyche along with consciousness.

To finish with an example we have a contemporary of note who may demonstrate the power and danger of the ego, the discovery of the self and the usefulness of consciousness. Because his “Red Book” is being made available there is an introduction to it (N.Y.T. Mag. 9/20/09) by Sara Corbetto titled “The Holy Grail of the Unconscious. What the Unearthing of Carl Jung’s Red Book is Doing to the Jungs and the Jungians (and maybe YOUR DREAMS)”. Our interest is in the insights regarding his transformation from having major mental problems to coming into the open with a stronger interior and relative balance.

What first must be understood are elements of the language in this piece regarding Jung and his own proclivities which the author offered: “Man skids mid life and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure - taking place in his head.”(p.36) While the use of the term “soul” was favored by Jung it should be understood to mean his inner being since his idea of soul was not Christian. Perhaps this curious use of soul was a precursor for the creation of self. This raises an interesting thesis as to whether the ancient soul that dominated western religious thought regarding the change and value of behavior, good and bad, was the early beginnings of a contemporary self. Did each historic change move metaphorically first from ego followed by memory or past history with inner moral discoveries - the soul, eventually offering a basis for a mature identity following and flowing through the self? Is this but another door to the postmodern world? It could be that most thought in terms of a soul throughout history until the idea and word self began to offer a relevant and dynamic alternative. How interesting if not enlightening it would be if someone wrote a scholarly study analyzing the evolution of this transformation from historic literature to our own era. Would the dynamics of the soul tied to a deity when released from that deity be seen as a change in living behavior, more earthly than otherworldly, and thus a self in the making, an inner being becoming? Perhaps instead of going to church to pray at the cross and later the confessional to talk to our lord in order to confront and understand our soul, we today could look in the mirror to contemplate that inner dynamic that seeks understanding and expansion. As the postmodern world evolves we use the term soul in many new ways including “soul brothers”, “soul mate”, “soul music” and “soul food”. What was a Christian icon now becomes a hip term not unlike “cool”.

When Jung went through his mental crises which he records in his “Red Book”, he looked primarily to his dreams, a form of a mirror for him, to see moments of his anxious state as well any clues beyond. The language used here from the essay offers an opportunity to review the confused state and language of a genius who wandered from a dominance of his ego to the creation, expansion and intellectual exploitation of his self and his growing health supporter - self-consciousness.

The term consciousness like that of self are huge in being misused terms carelessly applied and thus more confusing then enlightening. Most people using conscious states mean aware or cognitive states. Jung seems to have crossed over although he still subscribed to “sub-conscious” for habitual but non-cognizable thoughts, memories or impressions.

It is remarkable that we grew from the ego in antiquity even before the term appeared. Egyptian kings being too important were immortalized with life after death followed by the Roman ego then soul. From here is the long story of the growth of individuality to self. Jung appears to have noted some part of this when it was mentioned according to the Times essay that followers of Jung had “goals of self-discovery and wholeness - a maturation process Jung himself referred to as `individuation.’ Perhaps as a result, Jungian analysis has a distinct appeal to people in mid-life.” The points to draw here are profound in that Jung recognized at least two components having to do with developing one’s own sense of inner self : “individuation” or full blown individuality, plus breaking from the traps of ego which are more likely in middle age (”mid-life”), a change in life’s stage where we discover the shortness of the future and arrival of that final curtain for one’s termination. An important caveat: today’s youth, with a history of a growing self- awareness, impacts upon an educational system that operates on the assumption we are all behavioral, thus leaving behind those students who are genetically thoughtful with potentially richer authenticity in that crowded classroom. Each student becomes increasingly more an individual needing special encouragement in the development of their unique self..

There is in Jung’s thinking a break from the modern and an opening to a more postmodern perception of entering our potential realities. His “Red Book” has as its’ “central premise,… that Jung had become disillusioned with the scientific rationalism - what he called `the spirit of the times’ - … he comes to know and appreciate `the spirt of the depths,’ a field that makes room for magic, coincidence and the mythological metaphors delivered by dreams.” The enlightenment glorification of reason has been collapsing and he appears to have found this from his own inner struggling turmoil. The idea that all answers do not come from some form of unified reasoning is a postmodern liberation he began to uncover as he turned to his dreams for answers to dilemmas discovered.

Ego though more applicable for the younger, weakens as we age, facing as adults our shortening development with an expanding history. The self offers a new life no matter what the age.

The crack can come at any time and is an opportunity to discover the basis for a self with the tool of consciousness; the question is when and for whom this may apply.

PAX \ LOVE

“The only Thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  — President F.D. Roosevelt

by Vwadek Marciniak

The new millennium sits uncomfortably on our doorstep while offering expanded insights from complex philosophical perspectives to diverse cultural analysis. This a glorious beginning for students of history, philosophy, literature, art and our social condition. Welcome to the funny farm of the bizarre.

If we go back to the road that brought us here we could find many elements we might not want to own up to and yet find trapping us. Without dragging us too far back we could trace the madness that took hold with Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and now continues in various degrees in places like Serbia, Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan. Welcome to the mad century even in the new millennium.

The issue of intelligence versus stupidity or sanity versus insanity appears to dominate the global picture. Polarization has become the norm. We could discus Korea or Vietnam to no avail as we could discuss the number of countries that have recently appeared and are now members of the U.N. And there is urban decay with collapsing school systems while universities become trade schools for training rather than institutions for higher learning.

Where is the mental and emotional stability out there? Our economic system has been consumed by greed. Michael Moore’s latest movie makes this point clearly. In this and the past millennium we have had wars upon wars we do not pay for because the rich, especially since their Reagan’s tax cuts with the abbreviation of tax rates, have no intention of paying for wars they make a profit from. For the rest, they earn less to take home - if they still have a home. What has become all too normal is the use of lies to expand people’s anxiety and thus gain further power and control.

A little background might offer context, especially when considering how often it has been in the West that political and economic bitterness has led to major disasters and transformations of historic significance based on irrational fear, noting that today as many as forty million may be born anxious, ready to be pushed over the edge. (R.M.Henig, N.Y.T Mag.10/4/09)

In the Seventeenth Century the English were the first Western civilized country to behead their legitimate king only to allow the monarchy to re-appear a decade later. The French followed at the end of the Eighteenth century only to re-establish the crown early the following century. Anxiety followed by popular bitterness often leads to a level of fear and anger that can point to disastrous results. Fear on top of anxiety is the operational psychological tool for those wheeling and dealing power. Without this sense of latent and activated feeling of fearfulness much of the worst of our historic past could not have occurred. Turn to the Boston Tea Party where colonists’ fears about taxes paid to England helped begin a revolution that contributed to the eventual demise of the British empire. Our own civil war was predicated on a fearful assumption that President Lincoln would be a disaster for the slave owners in the south.

More recently we discover the beginnings of the Second Chapter of the Great War with Germany’s attack on Poland on the pretense that Poland attacked Germany first, causing fear among Germans which was created by this successful lie that ended in an unsuccessful war. In this century we had a our own cause celebre of fear, 9/11, which was expanded to include a theory that there were threats from Iraq which supposedly had weapons of mass destruction and left us with a need for a destructive and pointless war. After Berlin we have Washington D.C. as another peace maker.

At times it would appear that instead of operational political voices being concerned with the three principles of governance - Policy, Politics and Power - those voice are slipping into a crippling two - Politics and Power. I am sure that if we could find a better way to waste money and power we could invent it by using the basic rhetoric for creating anxiety, fear and mass hysteria.

The issues of fear and the root of anxiety can appear relatively minor although still of little value especially when tied to lies. We should question what was gained by Father Caughlin’s irrational attacks on F.D. Roosevelt’s presidency, or McCarthy’s attacks on Eisenhower with the aid of the extreme right led by the John Birch Society accusing him of being a communist sympathizer? Attacks on President Clinton and Bush served no purpose other than to keep a small group excessively wired with increasing deception, anxiety, fear and even hatred for some.

Today’s economic conditions have deteriorated given the polices begun by president Reagan and carried on by those who followed, Democrats and Republicans. Incomes are now driven for and by the wealthy while credit rather than manufacturing dominate, waiting a short time to explode as a bubble. But this is not the real issue which is pointing deceptive fingers of fear at whomever one can blame and then letting it get so out of hand we begin to wonder how much we wish to follow the earlier English and French models of frustration, hatred, madness and sometimes destruction. History has much to teach: one reason this topic is so unpopular in this country is because looking at lessons learned from the past is not always pleasant.

A key component for deceptively driven fear are serious changes, especially those directed at some massive unknown, even when there is a desperation out there for a need to improve our economic and cultural circumstances. Entering the unknown breaks down a sense of control and thus a sense of secured freedom. Something unknown, other than our positively colored memory (or history), is followed by that overwhelming and comforting power of an optimistic present, one offering the promise of a predictable tomorrow and anticipation for a better future. The real problem with this abstract explanation is that it doesn’t factually fit the basic psycho drama of most people’s everyday lives given their tendencies to hold optimistic perceptions as a source for tomorrow’s certainty. Look at the number of people who still cannot accept that they might or even have lost their job!

We already have a future to fear in the form of technical changes from electronic computers, the internet, handheld devices and a plethora of explosive information, so much of it wrong for this confused society lacking critical skills to edit through this maze. Anxiety inheres both in people biologically and culturally. A recent article in USA TODAY by Theresa Howard(10/1/09)noted that “The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate speech on the Web, says complaints are up this year more than 200% through July, to 1,152 complaints. `This whole era of cyber-hate is one of the biggest challenges we face,’ says Deborah Lauter, civil rights director of the league. `We’ve gotten to a place where we made it unacceptable for haters to hate in the public space.’” Little wonder “they turn to the Web, where they can be anonymous.” New technological is always unfamiliar and potentially dangerous.

The philosopher Hegel once suggested that it is the image of our future that dictates our perceived past in the present we now live in. We see this application in how people assume a future predicated on their understanding of past memories. But here is the problem: memories we now know are very unreliable in that they offer us wishful thinking. We often think of our past in ways that conform to what we anticipate it might bring - “I’ve been lucky, I may win the lottery”; or “people always said I had a nice smile so I know I could make it in sales”; and again, “I have always been flexible, even adaptable, and therefore should get that promotion upstairs.” We create myths by those images that we have lived by and in so doing ignore not only the variables of future possibilities but the here and now for all that it might offer. Our memory is a convenient tool of escape: “A man’s memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interests in the present” as George Santayana so clearly expressed. We do not want to threaten images of the future with any alteration of our inventive and comfortable memory of days long gone. As Caesar stated it: “Men quite gladly believe what they want to believe.” And as the philosopher Francis Bacon added: “Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true”.

We construct an assumptive past, a certain history, in order to offer a convenience of assumptions for some mythical future to alter the coloration of our present. Little wonder that Americans hate to study the past; it would undermine the lies now lived. Fear drawn from apprehension and bitterness is always potentially dangerous if not a basis for disaster. There is no room with the economic, political and military crises we now are exploring for anything but the coolest heads combined with reflective thinking. Convinced that abortion is evil a man chooses to go to a church to shoot and kill a physician who performs abortions.

Little wonder that this era demands humor on a large scale. It was George Carlin that suggested that American’s favorite passtime was bending over and grabbing their ankles, to wit, I would add that it should read grab their ankles and then say thank you. From Carlin to the “Cuckoo’s Nest” we witness the recognition of a breakdown of anything we could call an order of sanity on a massive although entertaining scale. We see a man shoot a black guard at the Holocaust museum in Washington to make some point…?

Perhaps we should look into the poor mental habits of those problematic areas of economics, drugs and political policies, not neglecting issues of education and the environment, especially the latter with forest fires and melting ice caps that expand the evidence on how we are incapable of honoring our insights or sanity. The nut house is for those in lock-ups and not for those with radio and televison shows - except in the U.S.A. Did hate, in general, and on the radio or T.V. have anything to do with Timothy McVeigh destroying lives at the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma? It is too easy to move from being stupid to mentally unbalanced, even crazy at various times given the circumstance of some irrational fear pushing one to anger then hate that can open the door to an unbalanced paradigm.

When the English were beginning to face their monarchial crisis the brilliant physician, William Harvey, a contributor to the scientific revolution, noted “he had met with more disease generated from the mind than from any other cause.” Not surprising a “similar observation was to be made about the French Revolution.”[p.9H.IO] How many have crossed the line today and where are we going? Is this what is wanted for this country with wars, economic collapses and shortness of civility? Changes, past and present, requires dreamers and leaders not negativity.

Perhaps a more revealing expose of this nightmare would be to look first at the role of fear, its potential to lead to anger, then hatred and often some degree of mental instability.

Fear is the most powerful emotion according to University of California professor of Psychology, Michael Fanselow (Las Cruces Sun-News of Oct. 31 09). “When it comes to ruling the brain, fear often is king, scientists say.” From the same paper(Sept. 7 2009), in a column by Claudette Oritz, it was suggested “we do have a lot more fear. Fear is capitalized on in our country, It sells. We pay.”[p.120] How bad can it get? This same writer noted that when attending a gun show in Denver she found two books for sale entitled “Basement Nukes” and “Life After Doomsday.” To her credit she also noted that “…laughter helps chase fear back into its natural boundaries.”[p.120]

So what would an analysis of fear offer us? Of the types, two stand out. First we have the occasional and brief where a gun may be drawn or a car slides off the highway. These are usually short and to the point - sometimes only seconds long. The other is more complicated since it is an accumulated fear often based on anxiety accumulating to higher and higher states of anguish and terror driving the mind off the road into a mountain of panic. This was the kind of fear that many Europeans for good reason experienced during the Second Chapter of the Great War. These kinds of crises can push those more susceptible beyond simple fear. The Great Depression pushed some in that direction as has the Great Recession. There are no easy fears to deal with because they can lead to even deeper and more problematic emotions. For many, 9/11 still marks such a demarcation as well as an expansion of this fear’s hand maiden, ideology.

Where there is this fear and ideology there also can follow serious anger where hate sits in the back room waiting to open the door. This anger is equally a relative term and, again, in one sense can be but a brief moment, not of great concern except where accumulative. Like fear, anger held onto too long, in distorting attachments, can lead to more serious and even criminal activity. The prisons are full of those who moved beyond a small momentary feeling of anger. When hatred enters the picture any sense of rational thinking is out the window even when there are no windows.

It is short trip, hardly a sneeze, to go to war and eventual annihilation. Look at the beginning of the Thirty Years War or more recently consider some U.S. soldiers who fought natives in our western lands.

What happens if we travel from fear to anger to hatred? Mental instability is not far from a simple case of some petit negativity driven to fear and all that might follow. Being nuts comes to dominate, whether for a moment or longer, with roots often in the lands of economic and political crisis where the most unstable can become potentially dangerous, no longer part of a civil dialogue but rather a bitterly driven disagreement.

One can march on Washington, New York or even Athens as some of us did for peace and an end to atomic threats. The difference between the past and contemporary marches is that these are filled with a diet of hatred for the president expressed on a level of anger that is only heightened and vented. We should be glad we see no guns emptied at Town Hall meetings.

We are walking a line where the unknown has never been a greater mystery, especially when it comes to domestic economics in a global economic world. Stresses are huge for many if not overwhelming for some, and with good reason since this economy we inherited in the late 1940s with roots in the Nineteenth Century is now disappearing. This is especially difficult for those who have no other living models other than increasing consumption to the point of addiction and for the younger who cannot imagine another life style; this is a major cultural crisis introduced yet unexplored.

Mental instability whether calling it nuts, crazy or insanity could well be the roadway we are laying for tomorrow. We have witnessed since the Bush/Cheney bankruptcy through war on top of Reagan’s reforms for the rich and his credit dreams, a collapse of a manufacturing order that once seemed comforting. Get a job, get married, buy a house, have children, get promoted then retire on easy street - a dream expressed in movies and TV for many years now disappearing. There is no blame since this dream could never have lasted in any case. These historic changes and challenges with little imaginative leadership give no cause for optimism. The unknown may be great for a hip counterculture and a curious postmodern mind but what about the average Jane and Joe?

Looking at other causes for fears with at least theoretical responses we discover billions of dollars wasted based on a fear our society is addicted to, that of illegal drugs and its users. Not tobacco, no, not booze, caffeine or sweets, no, only those illegal today. This ironically may prove to be the easiest problem to deal with while at the same time offering a blessing for the strained economy. In the Guardian (9/3/09 p.1) the author Simon Jenkins stated that “The greatest social menace of the new century is not terrorism but drugs,… It fills jails, corrupts politicians and plagues nations. … It is utterly mad” Did he find an answer, yes, but in another land where “Last week the Argentine supreme court declared in a landmark ruling that it was ‘unconstitutional’ to prosecute citizens for having drugs for their personal use.” The court further asserted that “`adults should be free to make life style decisions without the intervention of the state.’” If we look at the logic behind this failed if not peculiar war we discover that “The underlying concept of the war on drugs, initiated by Richard Nixon in the 1970s, is that demand can be curbed by eliminating supply. … This concept marries intellectual idiocy… with practical impossibility.”[p.2] We did this in outlawing booze and now find that “Making supply illegal is worse than pointless. It oils a black market, drives trade underground, cross-subsidizes other crimes and leaves consumers at the mercy of poisons. It is the politics of stupid.” This is as generous as there is in stating the case.

But the deeper, more lengthy and challenging problem is the ending of and transferring from the old economic order to something yet unknown while allowing for a promise of economic survival. The fear implodes upon all, even the rich and powerful who normally pedal such fears. How the tables are turning. An introduction go the issues is found at what Paul Krugman noted in his NYT piece (9/6/09) in explaining “How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?” His comments are simple and direct: “…they turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts.” To clarify, “…, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior,…” The point drawn is that people do not live by the assumptions of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment which had it all wrong - people are not inherently rational as fear only makes too clear. Most newspaper and magazine articles along with cable and radio network news are not necessarily here to support this revelation but rather have a tendency to cover up the grasping wealthy in this outdated system.

Looking for exceptions we find the following: “The incomes of the young and middle-aged especially men - have fallen off a cliff since 2000, leaving many age groups poorer than they were even in the 1970s,” as a USA TODAY analysis of new census data found.[9/18-9/09] We also have “People 54 or younger losing ground financially at an unprecedented rate in this recession, widening a gap between young and old that had been expanding for years.” Older workers are not retiring which is not promising for the young. Then there is the story in USA TODAY (9/21/09) telling us that “More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields.” Now “`what was a trickle has become a flood,’ says Duke University’s Vivek Wadhawa,…” One can add as the article states that “the U.S. economy will suffer without there skilled workers.” - Anyone for watching Catch 22?

Add to this the housing crisis, increasing unemployment, much of it permanent and a health care disaster where we see the slaughter of so many at a cost that continually expands while we do nothing and end with this picture, this horror movie we would just as soon miss.

What is needed, it has been suggested, is a more earth driven economy. As Berry Wendell suggested in his September(09) “Progressive” article(p.18): “I would put nature first, the economics of land use second, the manufacturing economy third, and the consumer economy fourth.” The world driven by materialistic and pointless consumption is coming to an end. As one other commentator put it, the “…last thing we need is to re-employ the flawed economic thinking that brought us to this point.”

While the data is huge on this last subject we should also note one last comment on fear and hatred which has been directed and well covered by the media where it was announced that “On Saturday the 12 of Sept. 2009″ a crowd of Tea Party followers marched on Washington to complain about Obama on a variety of items from Birthers to health care to communist. One sign read:

O pressive

B loodsucking
A rrogant

M uslim

A lien

We are still engaged in a shrinking-stinking ideological race war with hatred to match. The same can be said of the anger at Town Hall meetings - expanding divisions galore. Still if you are going to have anything resembling a democratic society you need people and groups of people in the streets marching and at meetings asking difficult questions of those in power, even if one does not always agree with their varied points of view.

We have a long way to go but first we must define the problems and let powerful negative emotional responses abate regarding these misunderstood and confusing issues now coming into the open. Coming together may be too late - but we still could explore new approaches to political and social order, and expand our collective political, economic and cultural horizons.

PAX/LOVE

by Vwadek P Marciniak

The western world has been blessed by the rise of creative new civilizations only to find that there are other developments that in time will replace the latest dominance.

If not enough to impress us with the dynamics of cultural evolution than we only need look at the birth of the Early Modern Western world with the creative impulses of the Renaissance followed by the Reformation, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment adding to the wonder of modernism that created the confused nineteenth century thinkers that eventually led to our own evolving postmodern world .An important note: the end of great historic civilizations like that of the Romans does not mean that its influence ended. Rather than completely disappearing when the Empire no longer dominated the headlines, it’s influence can continue. We still have Roman law as well Roman classics from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius let alone their brilliant architecture that we still study, are influenced by and find pleasure in. Try to image the University of Michigan football stadium without the Roman Colosseum as a model. The same can be said of other eras such as the Renaissance birthing of individualized artworks and the brilliant political philosopher Machiavelli who still is relevant today. The Enlightenment offered us a belief in progress and a capacity for human reasoning to understand as demonstrated by their creation of the Encyclopedia, both of which are fundamental for the functioning assumptions of modernity. We now have a growing “…agreement among most postmodernists that the Enlightenment must be seen perhaps not as a beginning point but as an ultimate defining moment of modernity and modernism.” It is this “…progress, depicted as the Enlightenment’s quintessential view of history, [that] dominated postmodernist discussions of history.”[fn.1.11B.FH]The examples are manifold but what follows should be seen as an introduction that endings of a great age does not mean an end of it’s influence on the future, but rather an introduction of elements that will follow. This can and should be said about the slow decline of the dominance of modernity. Here the end is not terminal but transforming. A brief review of some of the changes that have been and are now taking place this past century may prove helpful.

At the beginning of the last century we were a rural country with dirt roads, horses and buggies with waterways for greater distances. Thanks to the coming of railroads we were finally able to travel at a speed of the ancient Roman chariots, 25 miles per hour. About the same time (1863) London England finally matched the size of Rome’s ancient population with a million inhabitants, indications of what would follow on a planetary scale. Highways , telegraphs, telephones and finally radio would break our inherently isolated existence while movies, television and computers would completely alter perceptions that the modern mind hast yet to adjusted to. The historic dramatic differences between the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries deserves serious attention.

Our Monstrous Modern Western Wold has offered developing technical, expanding and intrusive engineering with weapons of increasing destruction starting in 1914 with the First Chapter of the Great War and it’s annihilating toys; bigger and more powerful tanks, submarines, airplanes, cannons, machine guns and poison gases. Between 1914 and 1918 the world had completely changed with a new order where the term modernity quickly lost the efficacy of sensible reason. As we entered Chapter Two of the Great War with the Third Reich, Hitler and Japan’s desire for expansion, we ended in 45 with the atomic bomb and the developing of hydrogen bombs and the beginning of the Third Chapter of the Great War, which we still are engaged in with terrorists demonstrating how blind we’ve been these dozen decades thinking in terms of wars of nationalism. Beginning with twenty eight countries in the First Chapter it has only expanded into continued madness. This occurred with the modern assumption of the reasonableness of humans and belief in progress of the Enlightenment ended in the holocaust. Lest we forget, Einstein said: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift to unparalleled catastrophe.”

We now live in ” the huge secret empire built by the National Security State” as Garry Wills succinctly put it (”Entangled Giant” N.Y.T. Review 10/8/08). He stated further that “the whole history of America since World War II caused an inertial transfer of power toward the executive branch.” This power has not been limited to a particular party for as he noted we now “see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the powers, the secrecy, the un-accountability that had led Bush into such opprobrium.” We now have “The monopoly on use of nuclear weaponry, the cult of the commander in chief, the worldwide network of military bases to maintain nuclear alert and supremacy, the secret intelligence agencies, the entire national security state, the classification and clearance systems, the expansion of state secrets, the withholding of evidence and information, the permanent emergency that has melded World War II with the cold war and the cold war with the `war on terror’” - Power corrupts, absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. This is not to say that the modern world was rosy before the First of the Chapters since a British psychiatrist had noted that “Daily we see neurotics, neurasthenics. hysterics and the like,’”(Phillip Blum, The Vertigo Years, 1900-1914) We have been on a mad road for some time.

Little wonder that increasing numbers have begun leaving the modern set of assumptions as they look to the idea that we live in a global world with global governments from the United Nations and I.M.F. as well global economies where nationalism is increasingly antiquarian and where too big to fail contributes to the nut-house of the powerful. As one thoughtful commentator put it: “During the twentieth century Europe’s hegemony disintegrated and gave way to a new global pluralism.” As we witnessed, “European, or Western civilization no longer is the sole model. Several alternatives are now available - the modified capitalism of the United States, the mixed capitalist-socialist societies of Western Europe, the varieties of socialism in Eastern Europe and East Asia, and the still undifferentiated embryos of the emerging societies of the Third World. This pluralism is a healthy development, making possible world-wide interaction and mutual stimulation.”[fn.2p.viiiS.PC] Diversity is the essence of postmodern thinking.

We live with accelerating motion on highways and in air flights; enclosing space beyond our planet while separating people into economic and racial groupings; electrifying both our homes and hands as we destroy our environment, create bubbles and collapses, offer crazy economic credit as we operate antiquated financial systems where too big is a norm followed by the cult of personality. Our housing bubble and credit addiction has been driven by raw greed and deceptively cheap credit. Little wonder this past century has witnessed the rise of alienation and estrangement This has been a Manipulative Modernity growing out of control. Ad hoc politics with economic and population explosions and a life in outer-space have slowly become new frames of reality with antiquarian political, social and economic games holding onto whatever can still be grasped. The literature of science fiction was created at the end of the nineteenth century when modernity was finding itself challenged and revolutionary views of time and space were often being encouraged and explored. Will we wake up?

The Vietnam war was a fine example of the divergence between the modern and the postmodern world view. Robert S McNamara, the Pentagon chief director, supervised the escalation of this disastrous War. Trapped in a modern view of power with a war directed from this nineteenth century point of view, he had thought that extreme bombing would solve the crises, a mind set perhaps appropriate for 1814 or 1915 but not today. He finally noted he was wrong and placed a toe into a postmodern world when he became the head of the World Bank where he felt improving global lives was a more promising path to peace than building more arms and armies. This was the same man involved in the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 and the Cuban missile episodes eighteen months later which was the closest we came to a nuclear confrontation. He learned that the modern warfare of the late nineteenth century as expressed in the First Chapter of the Great War no longer applied, notwith- standing all the wars that have followed. This is an interpretation of the madness that has occurred since the end of the Second Chapter of the Great War and beginning with the Third Chapter of the same - i.e. 1945/46: the story of a society that refuses to see the historic transformation that has occurred since the beginnings of the last century and exploded since the mid-forties. Today we live with a chief executive in charge of the secret empire built by the National Security state. Thank you for an atomic driven cold war.

Americans in general are not fond of history since they think that anything over six months old is ancient. Even antiques should be 100 years old to technically be such while history is older than antiques. It is from here, however, that we will first review a short political and social-scientific frame for this analyses.

First we have two terms that have no meaning in our daily debates regarding politics in the twentieth-first century. One is conservative which has its basses in the writings of Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century followed by that of Edmund Burke at the time of the American Revolution. Not only are these ides out of date so is the term liberal which was a child of the thinking of John Stewart Mill who in the nineteenth century argued for small government and individual rights. We will not even deal with the irrelevance of Marx and Engels. Today the use of left and right of center would be considerably more accurate. The theory of individuality, on the other hand, is applicable in it has become a large part of a postmodern mind where social controls are not necessarily applicable. Earlier in this past millennium we discover “a September 1973 Harris Poll found that 61 percent of Americans cited `the inability of government to solve problems’ as a high-priority complaint, and 71 percent faulted the federal government for failing to improve conditions or for making them worse.”[p. 86S.PC] Ironically, the implications have not and may not be recognized for some time.

It is not only political labels like conservative and liberal freely thrown around that are meaningless if not confusing, it is also the assumptions people apply to dated attitudes regarding the universe we live in. We inherited our modern view from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century where Galileo, Descartes and especially Sir Isaac Newton who offered an organized unity for a universe consistent with the much older religious one, a universe that was orderly whether by divine grace or new deity of reason. A little earlier in the seventeenth century Francis Bacon “… boasted that we have`the power to conquer and subdue nature and to shake her to her foundations.’ The goal of the new science said Bacon, was to `establish and extend the power of dominion of the human race itself over the universe.’”[fn.3p.99R.ED] This powerful force of optimism would come to dominate the modern mind of motion. It was “…Newton, who provided the mathematical formula for reorganizing the natural world.”[p.101R.ED] Additionally “Newton discovered the mathematical method for describing mechanical motion.”[ibid] As every school kid learns, Newton offered us his “three laws: a body at rest remains at rest, and a body in motion remains in uniform motion in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force; the acceleration of a body is directly proportional to the applied force and in the direction of the straight line in which the force acts; and for every force, there is an equal and opposite force in reaction.”[p.102R.Ed] Movement became a fundamental concept as we entered the world of modernity and even more in the postmodern world.

This introduces us to one of the great revolutions that transformed thought and understanding. This was brought about by postmodern physics and astronomy directed by thinkers like Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Niels Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity . The universe like life is uncertain as with the new idea of the existential where the random nature of events inhere even if not being welcomed in our daily confused lives. Hurricanes, tornadoes, earth quakes as with birth and the actual moment of death cannot be absolutely predicted although we do have that one certainty - death. It has been noted correctly that we now have “the `sequestration of the life of the body into dead things’ in the name of technological and material progress [which] only draws humanity further into the realm of the death instinct.”[p.371R.ED] The reason in part for this is because “it is the gnawing of death, which the baby first experiences upon the initial separation from his mother, that has, up to now, driven so much of human progress. The history of civilization for Freud, Brown, and other psychologists is little more than the projection of the death instinct out onto the external world.”[pp.371-2R.ED] As we look around at our world we see that “We are no longer surrounded by living nature, but, rather, by dead artefacts.”[p.372R.ED] The postmodern mind accepts this confused state of being while most modernists might call it insanity. Living is an open door and not a closed box with comforting walls which in itself is a new challenge to knock down. We are always at the beginning even as we draw our last breath. Heisenberg suggested we begin living when we accept death as the neighbor hanging onto our shoulders. It was the counter- culture after the Second Chapter of the Great War that noted the operative word for living was “a happening” since no one sees around the next corner.

The visual arts from the Theater of the Absurd, (e.g. Waiting for Godot) to Surrealism offers perceptions that make little sense to the modernist while normal for the postmodernist. We except a little madness as part of a sane life. Again the individual must make existential choices as to substance and relevance since no system exists to save us in this unfolding world that puts the burden of freedom in the middle of one’s back. How many ways can this new condition be expressed or hidden?

This found a relevancy in a view expressed by the Chronicle of Higher Education, (Feb. 27, 2007) which was partially summarized in stating that “today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study of five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.” The article continued that ” We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special and having children repeat that back,’ said the studies lead author … ‘Kids are self-centered enough already.’” Finally it stated that “the study asserts that narcissists ‘are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors.’”[fn.4C.EL] Life may be short and death long for those seeking a self-centering in their becoming.

How to explain this requires a component that takes account of this new postmodern view. A key element is that such behavior is driven by the ego rather than the postmodern sense of a self, keeping in mind that the ego is what we are born with while the self is something that develops by the labor of the person acquiring a more mature psychological, emotional and intellectual becoming. The ego for those maturing could be considered a bee in a bonnet debilitating the potential for human development. The self is hard work for the growing individual as it is given birth by experience, expanding horizons and the challenge of living as many full lives as one can between birth and death, all too rare in this complex universe and materialistic society. It is not surprising that there are “… modernists, … who sometimes called themselves `post-modernists,’… and find that “… modernism of pure form and the modernism of pure revolt were both too narrow, too self-righteousness, too constricting to the [post-] modern spirit. Their ideal was to open oneself to the immense variety and richness of things, materials and ideas that the [post-]modern world inexhaustibly brought forth.” They further “… breathed fresh air and playfulness into a cultural ambience which in the 1950s had become unbearably solemn, rigid and closed.”[fn.5.32B.SM] These are activities of those postmodern selves in becoming rather than the more traditional modern ego-driven fixed being. It is no accident that during the post-war years of the fifties the counterculture was rightly the appropriate label for these changes and may be one of the reasons for their revolt.

The self must have an open playing field that calls on the creative energy of the inner transformation to draw out the potential we each have and in doing so welcomes the challenges of the unknown. The musical “Hair” was not a modern event, and Woodstock was a well-disorganized happening. The self is always an becoming and opening.

Again we should beware of more traditional labels when facing this new world being born around and in us. As one commentator put it: “Like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, then, liberalism, communism , and fascism are singular, `totaliz ing,’ and `hegemonic’ - as the postmodernists rightly point out. Plurality and diversity are anathema to all grand narratives. … It is a recipe for perpetual war, violence, and conflict.” The theme is clear: “We must beware of he dangers of faith in an inevitable destiny - … . it allows human beings to absolve themselves of responsibility for action by imagining that they are pawns in the grand scheme of God, history, or nature. In this way, conscience is silenced in the face of imperialism, indiscriminate slaughter, and genocide.” As the writer makes explicit: “…civilizations will always rise and fall. It is time to embrace a genuine plurality and stop insisting on our own global dominance.” [fn.5] People who have answers will always need to find more questions if they are thoughtful.

The question therefore must be asked: when can we attempt to date a transformation into a more postmodern perception for this growing new world? One suggestion by the famous historian Arnold Toynbee stated his answer In 1939 and later in 1954 when he offered that it was the “term to designate a historical period as postmodern - first referring to the time after 1914 and then for the age since 1875.”[p15B.FH] It is important to recall names like Baudelaire, Rambaue, Kafka and others arriving out of the late nineteenth century seeing inherent problems with the unfolding of modernity.

There have been others noting this growing change in attitude, all of which should be considered since this is such a contemporary and therefor difficult event to date. One who has seen it suggested that “the postmodern age was Western culture’s stage of the decadence that recurred in every high culture, once total relativism prevailed and ushered in anarchy in thought (excessive relativism) and life (social turmoil, revolutions, wars).”[p.15B.FH] It should be safely added that eventually, “In the 1950s, the term postmodern found more frequent use.”[p.16B.FH] But if we are looking further back we can find an important mind for the creation of that existential approach, “Nietzsche [who] once remarked that since Copernicus Western culture had been on a slide downward toward nihilism. He referred to the vanishing certainty that had been offered by the essences, and ideas of the ancients, God and divine providence of Christians, and, he might have added, the Reason of the Enlightenment thinkers.” This was one of the earliest thinkers to see that the belief in nothing and its growing love affaire with materialism was expanding as he equally interpreted it correctly. What followed only confirmed his insights since when we turn to the years after “… 1945, the progressive view’s persuasive power showed a serious erosion as the impression of an inescapable impasse in truth-finding had reached critical levels.”[p.16B.FH] The technical and dehumanizing “progressive” changes created for those war years that civilians were increasingly dependent upon offered an odor that more thoughtful observers began questioning. One need not travel far to pursue what the electronic and military hardware were doing to the young minds of this past century, at least for those who survived a slaughter with indifference that too many embraced.

It was, after all, right after the First Chapter of the Great War that “the disenchantment, particularly in Europe, began … and increased steadily as the twentieth century kept on producing a long series of events that supplied testimonies against the progressive hopes once vested in human control:…” The list which is much too long can be best summarized as “…the inability of modern knowledge to stop the deprivations of the Great Depression, the shocking role of science and technology in increasing the horrors of war, the horrendous price exacted by tyrannical ideologies in their attempts to create the envisioned `new human being,’ and…” lest we forget, also “the so-far unimaginable Holocaust and other genocides.”[ibid] Brutalities offered in the mid-century remains a problem for digestion, even for those more enlightened and possessing the strongest of stomachs.

Little wonder that the brilliant thinker Max Weber offered an “assessment [that] was less than sanguine when he described the late modern human beings as `specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines it has attained a level of civilization never before attained.”[fn.6B.FH] The word hypocrisy appears too often regarding the contemporary picture of the west.

While a passing reference has been made regarding the arts and the transformation of this new term seeking meaning, a closer examination may could prove to be helpful for the reader trying to find their footing. One name that comes to mind intertwined in the arts of our unique age is that of Eugene Ionesco who once examined some of the earliest experimenters entering the realm beyond modernity: “Indeed Buadelaire, Kafka, Pirandello … and Dostoevsky were regarded with good reason as writer-prophets.”[fn7p.40I.NC] These as well as others would be later referred to as the avant-garde who “… would seem to be an artistic and cultural phenomenon of a precursory nature…” since “avant-garde cannot generally be recognized until after the event: … a cultural style which is recognized and will conquer an age.”[p.40I.NC] An issue for all dramatic historic changes is that retrospective is necessary to create meaningful definitions, understanding and clarity. The reason in this instance is made clear by Ionescoe: “`Symbolism and later surrealism [dadaism] were further attempts to reveal and express hidden realities.’” [ibid] In this is the “hidden” where the great historic changes are taking place and making them so impossible to understand as they occur - from Medieval to Renaissance to the Enlightenment; it matters not, for each period cannot be truly understood in its own era since only history can catch up with reflective justice. As the historian Jackob Burckhardt once noted, in order to have an understanding of a new era one must first study the period that preceded it. This applies equally to retrospectives. It would be grand to be around to give witness to the discovery of the historic transformation of the counterculture, from music, literature, arts and new social attitudes.

The reason for this difficulty is that all great historic changes are great works of art and Ionesco makes it clear that “… a creative work of art is, by its very novelty, aggressive, spontaneously aggressive; it strikes out the public, against the vast majority; it rouses indignation by its nonconformity which is, in itself, a form of indignation. … the sense in which a work of art is unpopular, … it is unpopular only because of its unfamiliarity.”[fn.8p.45I.NC] So much more yet for this curious, wonderful and confusing world we are now entering.

Pirandello was brilliant with his own understanding of the art of humor, and, to be honest, as Ionesco noted, most people “… are afraid of too much humor, (and humor is freedom). We are afraid of freedom of thought,…”[8p.46I.NC] One of the characteristics of the postmodern mind is its welcoming not only freedom but a freedom that walks on the edge of chaos. A happening, good or bad, can never be anticipated as Kafka’s Mr. K. discovers, and even with sick humor there is a place, although not readily so in the modern world. Ionesco said it best: “The imagination is not arbitrary, it is revealing. … since the imagination has laws this is a further proof that finally it is not arbitrary.” [ibid] Never try to live trapped by images when you can live by way of imagination.

As for that more comfortable term, avant garde, Ionesco noted that in “the beginning of this century and in the 1920’s, in particular, a vast universal avant-garde movement was felt in all domains of the mind and human activity.” The reason for this is not hard to understand if one considers that we are now dealing with the “…overthrowing of our mental habits. Modern painting from Klee to Picasso, from Matisse to Mondrian, from cubism to abstractionism expresses this overthrow, this revolution.” Not only here but we also see it emerging in “music and films” while it also “affected architecture.” From A-tonal music (Schoenberg) to counter-cultural blues and progressive jazz where the artists did not always know what they would blow next, and for many films like the “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, the mind moved out of the most conventional modes and for all time were dawn out of their everyday slumber of complacency, out of their lack of imagination as they walked away saying “Yes, yes, yes, that’s it!” If one were to ask as to what a film like Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” is about, the answer would have to be that it is about 111 minutes long - you personally experience it and create your own world. Looking for answers is not wrong but finding them can be disappointing since new questions immediately arise from any valuable answer.

Several examples may make this clearer. The film “2001 A Space Odyssey” ends with the confusing picture of birth and rebirth. Even televison has not been immune from the postmodern view as Patrick McGoohan’s “Prisoner” series does not have a denoument at the end since we still do not know who No. I. is. For rock listen to the “Goodby Hello” album by Tim Buckley where the last song ends on an unresolved chord while for jazz there is Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” where there is no final “doh” or eighth sound leaving you in a state of incompleteness, much like living in the postmodern realm. Knowing your resolved chord or point for your flick occurs best when dead, not before.

These new insights of the sixties generation of protests and experimentation aimed at knocking down old boundaries that constrained the human spirit worked as well in testing new realities that came with an intellectual companion in the form of postmodern creative thinking.[p.4R.ED] Thus a substantive ending might be reached here by applying some thoughts that have more relevant ingredients for this transformation, some defining clarification without reaching a resolve or entrapment.

First note that “the post-modernist asked how the world came to be locked into a death change. What were the reasons that led to the dropping of the atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the establishment of Nazi death camps in Europe, detention camps in the Gulag and Maoist re-education camps in the Chinese country side?”[ibid] This could be considered too important and complex for our age to completely understand.

One answer in part could be simple since postmodernists consider “modernity itself as the culprit. They placed the blame for much of the world’s ills on what they regarded as the rigid assumptions underlying modern thought. The European Enlightenment, with its vision of unlimited material progress, came in for particular rebuke,…” along side “market capitalism, state socialism, and nation-state ideology.” Little wonder then, that “Modernity, argued the post-modernist thinkers, was at its core deeply flawed. The very idea of a knowable objective reality, irreversible linear progress, and human perfectability were too rigidly conceived and historically biased, …”[ibid]

One can smell the stench of conformity on a grand scale when “by locking humanity into the ‘one right way’ of thinking about the world, post-modernists contend, modern thought became dismissive of any other points of view and ultimately intolerant of opposing ideas of any kind.” This has not been the view of an open society full of ideas that many would want to embrace. Too much of modern thinking like the old religious narrow paradigms were limiting original and creative thinking. “Those in power - be they capitalists or socialists, conservatives or liberals - continue to use these meta-narratives to keep people contained and controlled, argue the post-modernists.”[pp.4-5R.ED] As an alternative: “The post-modernists provided the rationalization for the revolt, arguing that there is not one single perspective but, rather, as many perspectives of the world as there are individual stories to tell.” In other words: “For the post-modernists, there is no one ideal regime to which to aspire but, rather, a potpourri of cultural experiments, each of value.”[p.5R.ED] Each of us has a history to live and a story to experience and express, for the triumph of individuality is a characteristic defined by the creative imagination in this postmodern world.

What we find with the runners of the counterculture are new paths where “we became existential nomads, wandering through a boundary less world full of inchoate longings in a desperate search for something to be attached to and believe in.” While it is true that the “human spirit was freed up from old categories of thought, we are each forced to find our own paths in a chaotic and fragmented world that is even more dangerous than the all-encompassing one we left behind.” [ibid] The word “left” is appropriate here since other labels are too restrictive. The author’s point is clear; the closer we have come to this awareness the more we are to be associated with the expansive term of the counterculture still so alive and active.

As noted, the scientific insights of the past century have contributed greatly to a change of thinking since “The Great Turning Points in human history are often triggered by changing conceptions of space and time.”[p.89R.ED] It is because of this context that being “autonomous is to be independent,” which guarantees “endless new opportunities.”[p.90R.ED]

While our sense of time and space has found new roots in the thinking of postmodern physics, old Newtonian laws of motion and ideas of nature in the hands of philosophers of the Enlightenment, those of “abstract, rational, mathematical construction, seem better suited for a world of machines than of human beings.”[p.102R.ED] Where can humans find a place in such a new paradigm? We now have the “detached, impartial, automatic, and autonomous, the new god governing the marketplace”; no longer the traditional deity, today’s “understands only the language of numbers,. … all phenomena are reduced to commodity values costs per unit, price per pound, dollar per hour, wages per work, rents per month, profits per quarter, and interest compounded semiannually.”[p.103R.ED] Is it surprising that humans in the modern world are themselves considered nothing more than a number. We acquired a “…modern and scientific tableau, based on objectivity, mathematical calculation, detachment, and appropriation. Time was denatured and scientized.”[p.103R.ED] Ah, human control is now reduced to rationality and progress while in “The Prisoner” No 2 said that “I am not a number, I am a freeman”, or, we could add, a postmodern man.

If time is mathematical then profit plays in the hands of time and we finally can discover a key invention of that era - the clock. “Lewis Mumford once remarked that `the clock, not the steam engine, is the key machine of the Modern Age.’” Could there have been either the first or second industrial revolution without the clock? “The first automated machine in history ran by a device called an escapement, a mechanism that `regularly interrupted the force of a falling weight,’ controlling the release of energy and the movement of the gears.”[p.108R.ED] Time, energy and a mechanical rather than a natural life began taking shape. “By its essential nature,’ observes Lewis Mumsford, the clock `dissociated time from human events.’ …” Now ” time, which had always been measured in relation to biotic and physical phenomena, to the rising and setting sun and the changing seasons, was henceforth a function of pure mechanism.” [p.109R.ED] The “escapement” should not be lost as a metaphor for those stepping outside this modern world as it has been forming. After all, “highly centralized energy-consuming production technology made it necessary to establish and maintain fixed hours for the beginning and end of the workday.”[p.110R.ED] If you were to add television to this scene you would have that early hippie, Charlie Chaplin, and his “Modern Times” to which he rebelled against, or should we say he escapes from. The frightening line of being regular as clockwork began taking hold on one and all. This was the winding-up of the industrial age in the heart and mind of citizens, rich and poor.

One of the more curious, paradoxical and promising historical concepts began when “the radical new idea of the rational `individual’ took shape slowly over a period of several hundred years and paralleled the deep changes in the worlds of philosophy, science, commerce, and politics.” [p.120 R.ED] What irony that “the strange idea of the self was so revolutionary that, for a long time, there were insufficient metaphors to even explain its meaning. In previous times, … lives had been lived, for the most part, publicly and communally.”[ibid] Even in the medieval world university students would never be seen walking alone. “No one would run such a risk who was not deviant or mad.”[ibid] Welcome to the “Cuckoo’s Nest”.

It is within this transformation that the “spiritual values had been largely replaced by material values. Theology gave way to ideology, and faith was dethroned and replaced by reason. Salvation became less important than progress.”[ibid] As we moved to the modern world “Nature, in the Enlightenment scheme, was wild and dangerous, a primal and often evil force that needed to be tamed, demonstrated, made productive, and put to the service of man.” When Louis XIV plane his Versailles gardens he made sure that the grounds were drawn with detailed mathematical balance and order. There is an interesting irony where “people, too, had to be made over to make them more rational, calculating, and detached. Creating the self-aware autonomous individual proved to be a challenging task [as it still is today].”[p.121R.ED] When noting how many today are dominated more by their ego than any growing sense of a self it now can be seen how challenging this task is; there is a big difference in moving from individuality to self-controlled individuality. For most, one’s identity is their position in society from whence the satisfaction of the ego is acquired - “see my new suit?” “my new car?” “my new mate”. These become an extension of your job and ego in offering up a public persona.

Enlightenment thinkers sought that “the civilizing process separated man not only from his own animal nature but also from his fellow beings. He became an autonomous island, a detached free agent, in control of his own body and private space in the world. He became `an individual.’”[p.122R.ED] Yet he became alienated and estranged, those modern conditions that continue to grow as a burden for too many. Even privacy grew with the sense of individualism making it possible “to exclude others …” therefore offering “a mark of the new priority given to the individual life as opposed to extended-family relations,…”[p.125R.ED] Here we find interesting writings on the collective wall of “individuality”. 

This pattern went so far that “the word ‘I’ began to show up more frequently in literature by the early eighteenth century,” and as well, the “prefix ’self-,’ ‘Self-love,’ ’self-pity,’ and ’self-knowledge’ found their way into the popular lexicon.” Thus we find that “The autobiography became a new popular literary mode. Self-portraits … small personal mirrors, … being mass-produced by the mid-sixteenth century.” This culminated with “the increasing sense of self [that] brought with it greater self-reflection …”, or at least its eventual potential.[p.126R.ED] This further developed in our own era with increasing introspection which became indispensable for the growth of one’s own inner consciousness.Even what might appear to be small inventions could make a great deal of a difference in moving away from the collective. While this may appear strange, “the idea of the chair was truly revolutionary. It represented an emerging feeling among an incipient bourgeois class that each person was an autonomous and self-contained being, an island unto him-or herself.” It could be suggested as one writer did “that with the widespread introduction of the chair in Europe, the autonomous individual of the modern era had indeed arrived.”[p.127R.ED] All roads were appearing to lead to our increased individualized isolation, unless your’s was a love chair. The irony was that this growing middle class living style “were, at once and the same time, both more individualized and autonomous and yet more tightly integrated into a conformist-oriented culture than any other people in history.” [p.129R.ED] It was in the “modern era that the individual claim to independence became so totalized”[ibid] - but only within the paradigm of Enlightenment reasoning. Here is a paradox where the modern world introduces the postmodern idea of a land of individuality with implications of an inde- pendent self that follows when those implications are explored beyond immediate effects. It is time to leave the collective box of attempting individual thinking and settle into one’s own inventive chair.

In the world of economics the same confusing pattern was developing since we now have “… Adam Smith’s glib suggestion that in a market economy, each individual pursues his or her own self-interest and that even though such behavior might appear selfish, it’s only by the maximizing of each self-interest that the general welfare is advanced. A dubious proposition.”[p.130R.ED] One might add to this position that it became less and less appealing for any of the new youth who returned to nature and wonder: “how many roads must a man walk down” as we face histories paradox if not contradictions.

While this new economic class “… learned to be self-controlled, self-sacrificing, and self-possessed, to be diligent and industrious. … never before in history had people willingly imposed on themselves such utter restraints. …” With the “autonomous individual, each person now became his or her own ruler, governing his or her own behavior…”[ibid] Such individualized collective restraints inherent in the modern mind was not appropriate for a new and fresh way to view history and the world since for the middle class “everyone learned to balance his or her newly won autonomy and independence with self-imposed responsibilities to society.”[p.131R.ED] Now, one way or the other, it was time to explore in this confusing state “…the premium each placed on the autonomy of the individual.”[ibid] This was what the “drop-outs and tune-ins” did.

What began with the Protestant Reformation when it “sought to dethrone the Church hierarchy and elevate each believer, making every human being equal in the eyes of the Lord. …”[ibid] and which eventually lead to the Enlightenment’s commitment to each equally independent in their reasoning as they pointed to a future, offered a two edge sword of conformity verses rebellion.

This only furthers the expansion of a global direction for our immediate history where pressure is moving in two opposing directions, one a western heritage while the other an expanding of force moving towards a global economy: “… in an era where space and time are quickly being annihilated and identities are becoming multilayered and global in scale, no nation will be able to go it alone twenty-five years from now. European states are the first to understand and act upon the emerging realities of a globally interdependent world.”[p.358R.ED] As a clear example of that other world, we can turn to the orient long known as different from the west. For the “East Asian economic community would be a formidable economic and political force on the world stage. The combined land area of East Asia (including China, Korea, and Japan) is 50 percent larger than the United States.” [p.361R.ED]

But this is more than just economics since the “… Eastern mind is also conditioned to appreciate a world full of contradictions.” This at least is more than we of the west would traditionally accept. The nature of opposites are not as much an issue there as here. As an example: “The idea that every event is related to every other event makes the Asian mind more interested in the relationships between phenomena rather than the phenomena in isolation.” This is a radical perception only to those in the west who only dip their toes in the east. “It’s not surprising, given their more holistic orientation, that Asians emphasize harmony of humans and nature.”[p.363R.ED] The western alienation from nature puts us at a disadvantage. The Chinese don’t even have a word for individualism.[p.364R.ED] The coming together is less discomforting for those who think more in line beyond modernity since “post-modernism, after all, is a reaction to the Enlightenment idea that `one container fits all,…’”[p.366R.ED]

Our moral frame has now come under attack where we now have “violent weather changes induced by global warming, the spread of deadly new bacteria and viruses resulting from inhumane animal-husbandry practices and factory farming,… .” If that is not enough, we now have “terrorist attacks using chemical and even biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction, more prolonged power blackouts around the world brought on by global energy shortages, massive starvation, and a global depression…” all of which “could hasten a new systems approach to morality and ethics.” [p.369R.ED] A global bases for morals changes the assumptions and framework for how we should function as decent humans. It also raises the issues of “…whether the increasingly harmful systematic effects of the activity created a sense of shared vulnerability and responsibly for one another and the Earth or whether the fear generated by catastrophic activity creates a siege mentality and a feeling that everyone better fend for him- or herself in a war for survival.”[p.369R.ED] Fear is an end while challenges are a beginning.

If not problematic enough then answer “how do we create a new moral bridge between `the self’ and `the other’ that is expansive enough and encompassing enough to be global in scale and universal in outlook? Can we establish a systematic approach to ethics that allows us to identify cold evil in all of its various guises?”[ibid] Modernity has been raised on its own pre-supposed purity offering a conundrum of conflicting values while the counterculture embraces all peoples of all cultures and values.

There still may be one creative method for reaching towards agreed upon means, assuming we can engage ourselves around that massive term consciousness. The argument has already been made that there has been a growing sense that this is an interior mental phenomena slowly developing within people.[p.370R.ED and V.P.M.] “The emergence of the totally detached, autonomous self brought with it an increasing self-awareness on the part of human beings. With self-awareness came the sense of personal volition, …” This “gain in self-awareness and personal sense of identity has come at a very high price, however - the loss of intimate participation and communion with the natural world.” [p.373 R.ED] Yet we find we can fall back on mental states of our becoming and on occasion our consciousness of these events. Those with “…self-awareness and individuality have only made us all the more aware, and thus anxious, about our own finite existence and morality.”[p.374R.ED]

Death is only a step for conscious beings and it is a challenge to accept a universe in flux where all societies should be capable to find in this finite world of existence a means of functioning together in an expansive manner. “The early-twentieth-century poet Rilke provides us with a clue. He wrote, `… whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life.’ In other words, we can’t really begin to live until we first accept the fact that one day we will die.”[pp.374-5R.ED] The more we control our own mind set, our ability to become conscious of alternatives and their burdens, the more complete our life is before the finale curtain is lowered.

In a post-modern world which is marked by “increasing individuation, where personal identity is fractured into a myriad of sub-identities and meta-identities, reintegration with the whole of the biosphere may be the only antidote encompassing enough to ensure that the individual does not lose all of his or her moorings and disintegrate into a nonbeing.”[p.375R.ED] Those of the postmodern mentalities like many of the counterculture note that the self development grows into multiple selves where the complexity of individualities become activated. One psychologist has argued “that multiple personas are a coping mechanism that allows the psyche to adjust to the growing density in an increasingly globalized society.” It therefore has been suggested that “multiple personas represent a more mature state of consciousness - one that allows individuals to live with the complexities and ambiguities around them as they try to make their way in a more interconnected global environment.” [p.376R.ED] No one knows yet how far this most recent development of consciousness can lead but that is the challenge for and the promise of tomorrow. As has been noted: “Overcoming the sense of personal isolation and alienation that can accompany an electronically mediated environment requires a new integrative mission powerful enough to be transformative in nature.”[pp.376-7R.ED]

There are writers who have suggested “that human beings are maturing in their self-development to the point where they can make a personal choice to re-participate with the myriad relationships that make up the biosphere.” It is in “our growing involvement in networks, our new founded ability to multitask and operate simultaneously on parallel tracks, our increasing awareness of economic, social, and environmental interdependencies, our search for relatedness and embeddedness, our willingness to accept contradictory realities and multi-cultural perspectives, and our process-oriented behavior…” that can for some aid in breaking through those characteristics that “predisposed us” to chose “systems thinking.” [pp.377-8R.ED] If there is to be a re-participation, a true reaching out to the other for “actually being there” is required [p.378R.ED] However, “if that awareness is not balanced with intimate, face-to-face re-participation with the body of nature, our journey into a new stage of consciousness will be stillborn.”[ibid] One way to put it is to note that “the life instinct can be rekindled only by really living life, and living life means deep participation in the life of the other that surrounds us.”[ibid] It is in asserting life that we defeat death and in this, “by choosing deep-re-participation with nature, by stewarding the many relationships that nurture life, we surround ourselves with a life-affirming environment.”[pp.378-9R.ED]

The real tragedy of modernity has been that “the American Dream is largely caught up in the death instinct. We seek autonomy at all costs. We over consume, indulge our every appetite, and waste the Earth’s largesse.” If this is not enough, “we put a premium on unrestrained economic growth, reward the powerful and marginalize the vulnerable.” Now that we have come to consider ourselves a chosen people, we are “therefore, entitled” and “sadly, our self-interest is slowly metamorphosing into pure selfishness. We have become a death culture.”[p.379R.ED] Our greed has become a form of greed-itus for which there is no known cure. After all, “consumption and death are deeply intertwined. The term ‘consumption’” itself “dates back to early fourteenth century and has both English and French roots. Originally, to ‘consume’ meant to destroy, to pillage, to subdue, to exhaust. It is a word steeped in violence and until the twentieth century had only negative connotations.” Lest we forget, in the early 1900s within the walls of medical societies we “referred to tuberculosis as ‘consumption.’ Consumption only metamorphized into a positive term at the hands of twentieth century advertisers [people like Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud] who began to equate consumption with choice.” The consumer’s choices soon replaced “representative democracy as the ultimate expression of human freedom, reflecting its new hallowed status.”[ibid] It is no accident that “on the domestic scene, these critics on the Left warn that modern technology, with its un-precedented productivity, `sells’ itself to the people so pervasively that, in the words of Herbert Marcuse, they `recognize themselves in their commodities,’ thereby accepting `a comfortable, smooth,, reasonable, democratic unfreedom.’”[pp.12-13S.PC] After all, “a consumer-oriented society is self-destructive psychologically as well as ecologically.”[p.138S.PC] And if one needed a more deeply understood knowledge of the dangers offered by continually consuming one need only look at psychology where ” it results in the transformation of man into an insatiable consumption machine, and, as Maslow had noted, man by his very nature cannot remain forever content with this role.”[p.182S.PC] Suicide may be painless but the real change is the end of life for zombies in the mall.

Note that we in the modern world is where “today, Americans consume upwards of a third of the world’s energy and vast amounts of the Earth’s other resources, despite the fact that we make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population.”[pp.379-380R.ED] As the “cultural historian Elias Canetti once observed, `each of us is a King in a field of corpses.’”[p.380R.ED]

For modernists, reasonable and massive wars with slaughtering of civilians by newly developed destructive weapons as well raping of the restoring plant’s natural gifts, have come to enjoy the sick humor of this past century of annihilation and the insanity that seems to prevail while embracing diseases we call unlimited growth. Ah, how we have come to worship at the alter of death in our over-priced and over-dressed clothing of tanks we call cars. We should all join consumer’s anonymous since “a consumer-oriented society is self-destructive psychologically as well as ecologically.”[p.138S.PC]

We grow our own terrorist in Washington and the hinder-lands while seeking to attack the more abstract versions abroad. We have replaced a meaningful life of free choices with what we call the good life where we need garage sales to make room for what postmodern poets like Ferlinghetti called a “Junkman’s Obbligato” which is tied to “One the Road” by Kerouac and “Howl” by Ginsberg. As one thinker stated - “That our age and culture are apocalyptic is a truism.”[p.37 B.BC]

Sure, the universe is not as orderly as we would like even with our mathematical tricks, nor is living with a relative degree of wonderful absurdity easy, but that is the price of living with discovery where death is reduced to a later conclusion. Maybe one thinker has a partial solution in offering that “considering first the restructuring of the Third World, we will see a political decentralization reminiscent of the disintegration of the Roman Empire. In the Third World today as in the Roman Empire … there will be an assertion of local autonomy and traditions against the increasingly restrictive and exploitative domination by metropolitan centers.”[p.168S.PC]

NACHWORD

There have been others who contributed to the new thinking and demands noted in the beginning of this essay.

We were given insights with the words from songs by Pete Seeger and spread by Peter, Paul and Mary, who like others stated it so clearly:

“If I had my way, if I had my way, in this wicked world I would tear this building down …”: Goodby modernity. And as in another of their well sung offerings:

“Where have all the flowers gone, long time passingWhere have all the flowers gone, long time agoWhere have all the flowers gone, young girls have picked them every one

Oh when will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn.”

“Where have all the soldiers gone, long time passing

Where have all the soldiers gone, long time ago.

Where have all the soldiers gone, Gone to graveyards everywhere

Oh when will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn”

As an addenda: Transitions may be difficult but they are inevitable -

So dig it, as the old song says: “Which side are you on …”

After all: “The answer is blowing in the wind.”

FOOTNOTES: Because so much of my thoughts were match by these writers it only seemed reasonable to us their notes where possible to make the points for this essay. When the citation has been made, the code for the study is used in the text where applicable. The length of this work was not intended but the breath and depth of the subject from an historian’s point of view made for this demanded for which this author apologizes.

F.N.1 Breisch, Ernst. “On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath.” U. Of Chicago Press, 2004 p.11B.FH

Stevrianos, F.N.2 L. S. “The Promise of the Coming of the Dark Age” W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1976S.PC

F.N.3 Rifkin, Jeremy. “The European Dream. How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream” . Penquin Books, London. 2004/05R.EDF.N.4 Berman, Marshall. “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity.” Simone and Schuster NY 1982B.SM

F.N.5 Crary, David. “El Paso Times Feb. 27 2007 and the Chronicle of Higher Education” 28 Feb. 2007C.EP

F.N.6 Drury, Shadia. “Free Inquiry” Aug/Sep.. 2009 pp. 22-3D.FI

F.N.7. See in Breisach, Ernst “On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath” see the reference to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” trans. By Tacott Parson, NY Scrimbers 1958,[p.182] p.36B.FHF.N.8. See Ioneso, Eugene. “Notes and Counter notes: Writings on the Theater.” Trans. by Donald Watson, NY Grove Press, Inc. 1964 orig. fr. 1962I.NC

For Luigi Pirandello on humor see his “On Humor” Trans. By Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1974. To see his theory applied see Vwadek P. Marciniak, “Politics, Humor and the Counterculture: Laughter in the Age of Decay.” Lang, NY 2008

F.N.9. Brantlinger, Patrick. “Bread @ Circuses. Theories of Mass Culture as Social Decay.”Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1983 p.37B.BCThat the war of 1914 is still with us see Hew, Strachan, “The First World War” Simon & Schuster, 2006.

PAX/LOVE

Neither!

“A great part of the mischiefs in this world arises from words.”[1] People who need absolute certainty turn to ideology. Those who don’t, turn to philosophy.

The fundamental difference between holding a philosophical position versus an ideological one is that the former always remains to some extent open-ended while the latter is inherently closed. While traditional liberals and conservatives can and do debate issues, neo-cons, fascists, communists et al. can only relate potentially to others who possess the same prejudices. This is where important political issues are framed by simplistic conclusions that are beyond debate—the ideologue is not only preoccupied in being right but also in being self-righteous. I am right, you are wrong; I am good, you are evil; I speak the truth while you are a liar! And so it goes. These extremists with their closed dogmas can tell you if a particular news medium is liberal simply by noting their disagreement with it—call it the Jesse Helms school of political theory.

The idea of a struggle between powerful absolutes—either right or wrong (or good vs. evil) has proven too appealing, foolish and very destructive for those who hide behind these historic ideological walls. All we need is to look at is those (righteous) terrorists who are so absolute in their perceptions that the many who commit suicide are convinced that they have the one and only right answer. They and they alone have intimate ties to Truth.

For students of political philosophy, the immediate beginnings of conservative philosophy began with Thomas Hobbes who, in the early seventeenth-century, having had witnessed the hints of early individuality, argued for a strong central government. It was his perceptions of the individualized brute (first drawn out of the Renaissance) that frightened him because it implied social chaos. A century later, Edmund Burke, developing this conservative viewpoint, added a defense of the power of religious prejudices. His theory was that human nature—being brutish—cannot be trusted because it can be corrupted by sin. Thus, the argument was for a powerful central government encouraging religious bias in order to keep us on an even keel. For Burke, this was the counterweight to the French with their “destructive” Revolution which he abhorred.

In the nineteenth-century the father of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, offered the argument for smaller government where the people should be given necessary information to make intelligent choices. Here the brutish nature of mankind was overcome with the potential of expanding literacy and the exercise of reason in guiding people and government in a positive direction. It should not be surprising that William F. Buckley, the founder of the “conservative” journal, The National Review, suggested that his mentor was Mill and not Hobbes or Burke.

While the dualism of birth and death is a basic human condition—our singular certainty—its validity applies only to our birth and our demise; only the very first and last breaths are absolutes. There is no question that this discovery of our terminal condition is the foundation for our concept of “certainty.” This fundamental characteristic of our existence not only marks us as uniquely distinct creatures but also grants us the burden of our responsibilities: We know our terminal situation. However, it is this certainty that leads to dualism. Philosophical differences add to our thinking, whereas ideological responses only lock us into that narrow paradigm that I am right. The fact is that philosophy and language change over time, but not those inherent absolute dualistic struggles that mark the thinking of ideologues.

It is worth noting that we believe that persons with bi-polar disorder should be medically treated while those who take their dualistic pre-disposition into an ideological camp have unfortunately, proven to be acceptable. Perhaps comments regarding some psychological sources for driving one’s mentality into a dualistic or ideological pattern may offer some enlightenment.

Fear is known to be one of the most fundamental emotions for all animals, especially those who are aware that they are terminal, as, for example, those growing old and sickly. Fear does not stand alone, however. Disregarding mental disorders, fear is a given. A frightened mind is juxtaposed to whatever or whomever one most fears and it will seek to hide or find some form of comfort. This juxtaposition of fear and righteousness can often lead to expansion of that frightened state so powerful that one will build an ideological wall to hide behind. There is comfort in a group-think that demands that we must reduce our thinking into a dualistic modality. This is a step that inherently and quickly transforms into an ideology where you either belong to the group or else you are ignorant, if not, a dangerous enemy. Acquiring this mind set of a central concept of certainty has proven to be an insurmountable conundrum, even for those making possible this discussion. Unfortunately, from this discovery of our terminal condition, we have constructed and colored so many of our social and cultural ideas of what is perceived as being significant for our security and/or welfare.

This mental and emotional trap can take government control with religious dominance and even flirt with theocracy. Giving into fears can do that, as it did in ancient Rome as it fell. These utterly baseless beliefs can be a cause-célèbre for public policy decisions as expressed in dumbed-down science, education by testing, restrictive health-care options for women and the terminally ill, dividing nations into those who are “good” and and those who are “evil”; war mongering, economic abuse and the denial of basic civil protections.

This trap often manifests itself most clearly with those labels of liberal and conservative. While it is possible to reach a correct decision, choice or conclusion, it is only correct and nothing more. A correct position does not allow, in retrospect, for it to be a right choice since right implies an absolute that correct does not and which, incidently, can only exist in the past.

The Republican Party is dominated by the righteous, those calling themselves religious; according to one poll 82% of the party claims this self-righteous position of absolute faith which should always give pause to any reflective citizen. But the problem goes much further. Perhaps it would help if we explore the roots of these terms.

Correct, an ancient Latin term, is drawn as so many Latin words by the combination of two other words: the first com- meaning together, while the second, regere, meaning to lead straight or direct. While this dictionary definition is only an indication, it is important to consider that this ancient Roman word grew from the most sophisticated ancient civilization, classic Greece; for antiquity this was about as open and flexible language as could be found in any ancient society. Their linguistic adaptability can be seen in the adoption of such diverse cultures as Hebraic, Macedonian, Egyptian, as well their various religious beliefs.

Right is quite different in its origin as well as our understanding. Right is not the ancient multi-syllabic Latin but the single syllabic Germanic (recht) which was, for these later peoples, not uncommon. This was a direct and simple word that belonged in a direct and simple lexography for a primitive warrior people. Not surprisingly, therefore, it had something of a different interpretation than simply straight or direct since it fully implied direction, most notably as associated with travel; it also applied later to the law as well as other fixed functional patterns. The Romans created the earliest Western concept of law but it did so with a sense of flexibility and diversity while the more tribal Germanic peoples (a basis for common law) needed a more absolute reality, being more nomadic.

The problem with the word “right” is how easily it can lead us to become righteous which often ends with self-righteous and arrogant. An example of self-righteousness leading to arrogance would be when Mr. DeLay of Texas (et. al.), attempted to keep a mentally dead woman artificially breathing. A preponderance of evidence that she was brain dead had no bearing on DeLay’s actions which reflected the party’s righteousness and desire for some form of absolute purity.

This is not to say that the use of the word right may not occasionally be appropriate in a limited manner, but when politics is the issue, the danger can be very serious. Imagine two powers facing off on the battlefield, weapons drawn, millions of lives and fortunes on the line when leaders sit down to discuss how to avoid massive destruction. As the saying goes: “When words fail, wars begin. When wars finally end, we settle our disputes with words.”[2]

Now imagine they predicate their discussion as follows: “We are correct in our positions.” It is not necessarily a problem if the other responds with the same: “No, we are correct.” Without question there is room to negotiate. But now the same scenario but this time the line reads: “We are right in our conclusion.” All it takes is for the other side to respond with: “No, we are right!” And if one is arrogant enough they can proceed unilaterally to enter into the land of slaughter (as the White House has done in Iraq) predicated entirely upon deceptions and opportunism. Combine greed with self-righteousness and you have the making of a huge disaster—i.e., our present economic crisis.

It is common knowledge that G.W. Bush did not speak to an audience unless that group has been properly filtered so that only those who already agreed with him were allowed to attend. This raises another possibility: those who see themselves as most right cannot tolerate any diversion from the party line. The results at home and abroad are often nothing less than a disaster! War and peace should not be the result of one or the other of the parties being right but rather the result of either the presence or absence of a middle position that is derived from negotiations. The two parties can claim the purity of their respective positions and rattle sabers but in the real world they must establish an acceptable comprise that saves face for both and avoids disaster. If this principle had been followed in 1914 the 20^th century might not have become the Century of Annihilation with two chapters of the Great War followed by a great deal of nonsensical foolish and brutal excesses offered as an afterthought in the form of a Third Chapter (Wold War III as Nixon referred to it). Bismarck understood the potential for this type of disaster when he was fired by Kaiser Wilhelm: he knew his old boss was a simple-minded fool.

Von Clausewitz once observed that war results from a failure of diplomacy, “War is not merely a political act, but also a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means,” appealing enough to attract those who are absolutely right enough to charge into this tragic trap.

At issue is the contrast between a philosophic position and an ideological position, the former working for an accurate if not always correct analysis while ideology possesses absolute righteousness on its side. Perhaps the best means of delineating between the two is noting that ideology, unlike philosophy, is a closed system of assumptions where those inside are always right while those outside are perceived as categorically wrong. In contrast, philosophies, such as conservative and liberal, are open-ended and can change with the times or circumstances and be freely discussed and debated.

What else besides fear could be the attraction for such an ideological approach? For one thing, the appeal could be that it is simplistic, or a less complicated path, and avoids those mental difficulties in facing complex issues needing serious consideration. No one has ever said that thinking is a task for the lazy or frightened. For many, using a multi-syllable word like correct is less appealing than using a single-syllable word like right with all its implied power. Who has not fallen into that trap? Anyone who has taught can attest to this kind of rhetorical and grammatical laziness and fear.

Machiavelli a half millennium ago established the fundamentals for modern political philosophy and later political science. In doing so he noted the importance for political leaders to appear righteous. What is central, however, is that they act in a practical if not sensible manner. Appearance is fine but destroying the state is not the goal of a political leader.

Being right could be considered a one-way trip, a trap where ideology rather than philosophical positions that are dominated by correctness. The latter at least implies multiple options. This is often called pragmatism with lip service to principles. However, when you have an American president who suggests that the word entrepreneur is not a French word (read foreign and unpatriotic) you cannot expect an understanding of pragmatism beyond opportunism. Laws are changed when judged to be incorrect. But what happens when you introduce the Law as an absolute? Capital punishment reveals a great deal more than most would want regarding the kind of society in which we live. We should never give in to simple answers or even falter, for the risks are far too great, personally and collectively, to play such righteous games.

Right does have an historic cultural positive connotation; for one can sit at the right hand of the King or the Law but someone else can come along doing the same in replacing you. Flexibility is a key component when confronting reality.

Unfortunately, there is a deep appeal to abdicating the personal responsibility for carrying one’s own living on one’s own back: Let someone else do it, someone else has the answers, someone who is right and thus a savior from the certainty of our terminal condition. But there is “the truth” of un-lived lives since questioning and wondering, the key components of a lived life, are absent. While this might occur on occasion in the Medieval or Christian era, in the end such worlds have proven to be too stagnant and too untenable an approach for any expansion of living, governing or growth where daily changes inhere in an increasingly dynamic world. Fortunately, the western world has never been truly “right” though often correct. The danger today is self-righteousness and delusional neo-cons who took over the running of this country into the ground using fear and hate for supposed righteous ends.

The biggest danger lurks in becoming righteous, for this is the camel’s nose entering into dangerous and unknown territories. The righteous becoming self-righteous is followed by an arrogant stance where the righteous can become part of a fanatical purity of beliefs. It is a simple step from this to a 9/11 or the tradition of the Crusades re-born in our era. Those of the Nazi era knew they were absolutely right, but this never solved a problem, it only exacerbated it. This is little more than childishness since as a member of the righteous elect you are above human law and reasoning; to reason always implies the give and take of discovery - philosophical positions rather than ideological death traps.

Consider: it is suggested that there are not two sides to a coin, a common mistake of simple logic, itself a mental game about which one always should be cautious. For a coin to have two sides it actually must have a third where heads and tails exist only because of the metal in between making possible that dual distinction. There is always a third position no matter our trying to avoid it. The dualism of birth and death only can make sense when living exists between birth and burial. To be right or wrong implies a choice which in itself is a third position. Even physical problems such as mental illness are normally matters of degree from minor to extreme. After all, even those who give into greed can become ideological in turning it into greeditis which we have recently witnessed.

We have seen those painting themselves into a corner with impossibly slow drying paint—perhaps centuries of drying out.

The real tragedy in this approach is that where ideology reigns with its extreme mind set, there is a fundamental human characteristic conspicuous in its absence: our curiosity, the basis for imagination.

If one aspires to live a unique life they must find their own way through a could’ve into an unrealized should’ve finding a base for a would’ve in a world where the dollar too often determines the quality of life.

As for the question in the title the more appropriate answer should be “correct or incorrect.”

1. Edmund Burke Quoted p. 212 of Richard Lederer The Miracle of Language

2. Wilfred Funk p. 220 ibid Lederer

3. Johann von Goethe p. 221 ibid Lederer

Shadia B. Drury. “Fascism American Style.” Free Inquiry, vol. 29, no.3.

“I argue that unless we understand fascism as a radical form of nationalism that springs from the human love for the true, the good, and the beautiful, we will fail to recognize it as the perennial danger of political life in democratic societies….  This radical nationalism valorizes militancy, struggle, and death for the nation.  Fascism is not for sissies.  it is not soft or comfortable; it is not free or easy, It demands hardship, toil, death , and self sacrifice.”

Also includes a differentiation between nationalism and patriotism by Irving Kristol.  (!!)

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=drury_29_3

Interesting article about Frederick Soddy’s (1877–1956) early 20^th Century theories combining economics and thermodynamics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/opinion/12zencey.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Obit of Robert Delford Brown, the originator of the “happening.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/arts/design/05brown.html?scp=1&sq=happenings&st=cse