In 1932, a peculiar and extraordinary piece of scholarship appeared, the work of a very unusual author. In English translated from the original German it is entitled Art and Artist, and for many years it was published only in English but not in German. The author, Otto Rank, long of Vienna but recently of Paris, pursued his formal higher education only in adulthood and had become a close associate of Freud during the heroic period of the psychoanalytic movement, in which capacity he remained until the mid-1920s when he and Freud could no longer reconcile their views.
Art and Artist appears, then, in the wake of Rank's defection. If it is clearly more than just emblematic, it also does not quite "smell" like the visionary work that it is. Rank is eclectic, verbose, uneven, and often inscrutable, deadly sins all of them in the rare academic air which has blown ever harder through the windows of the intervening century. It is a long way for the reader to travel from, say, the "building sacrifice," the immuring of live children in the cornerstones of ancient buildings, only to arrive, a long while later, at those modern artists who wear a "uniform" even though they are proudly self-employed. It is a long way indeed, because Rank begins at the beginning, such as it was understood in the 1920s at least, and he travels all the way to the bleeding edge of his own time, and by the time he has finished he has indeed had visions, so to speak; and visions they have not yet ceased to be.
Rank had doggedly pursued the "problem" of art and artist for many years, but his observations strictly about art, though they are important in their own right, are ultimately means to a far broader end. What he concluded, ultimately, is that "all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul," a conclusion which, already, evinces both the superficial banality and general unclarity which has turned away most of the readers and writers who would best thrive in the space that Rank opened up. Like most geniuses, Rank struggled terribly to verbalize his insights fully and comprehensibly, and for English-language readers there are the obvious added difficulties. But here he means exactly what he says: when some "human" has a serious enough "problem," either the cause of the problem or its solution (or both) have been or will soon be sacralized; and this latter not in some knowing postmodern sense wherein all bets are hedged, but rather in the full terror of absolute belief and "soulish" gait. And that is why, among other things, artists still wear their "uniforms" as if some other soul had gained absolute powers of coercion over them; it is why some of them still wear exactly what artists wore in Vienna in 1884 or Paris in 1932; whereas for those who work just to pay the bills, marking time in a world which has lost its purpose right along with its soul, uniforms have been on the way out for a long time already.
Rank has never entirely lacked for disciples, but he has had no more worthy or more sheerly brilliant disciple than Ernest Becker. Becker was born in Massachussets in 1924, served as an infantryman in World War II, and went on to pursue an academic career as a cultural anthropologist, a career that was cut short by his unfathomably young death in 1974 but which nonetheless packed in several lifetimes worth of achievement. According to Becker himself, he was only ever on the cusp of something significant until he "belatedly" discovered Rank and was finally able to make his synthesis. Rank became Becker's scholarly muse, the detonator on myriad explosive insights into human existence; and the relationship now extends in the other direction too, since Becker understands Rank's more inscrutable passages as well as they can be understood and is able to make everything out of them that must be made.
There is much to be unpacked and repacked here, but it is necessary, already, to state clearly from the outset one use that this study does not aim to make of this work, and one use that it does aim for.
This body of knowledge has its very origins in the problem of art, but it does not map onto mere anecdotal observation quite as directly as the problem of the uniforms suggests. It is not sufficient merely to conclude, as a third and fourth and fifth person enter a theater all wearing sportcoats with sneakers, that one has had some kind of penetrating insight into the people, or into the artwork being produced and presented to them. The larger point about uniforms may eventually stand, of course, but not on such a flimsy basis as this.
The reason Rank's work is so powerful is that it originates in precisely this kind of parochial question, it seeks the answers, and it ends with those answers, once they are found, demanding to be seen as universal rather than parochial. Hence, before attempting the long passage back from life to art, it is important to proceed here by way of a very specific route: it is necessary, namely, to first get a handle on the universal claims that these two authors make and to situate these claims in the wider world of which contemporary art is just one small facet. It is necessary to understand, as Rank did, that a priest, a politician and a painter may have much (indeed, almost everything) in common psychologically, and they may appear on the stage of culture as very nearly the same character, and yet they may have entirely incommensurable biographies; or, obversely, three people may come from the same town, schools, faith, and even family and yet diverge into three lifeways which are absolutely incommensurable.
On the latter point Jung became such an authority that Rank was put in the shade; but as Becker, the encyclopedic anthropologist and no small authority himself, says bluntly, "although Rank's thought is difficult, it is always right on the central problems, Jung's is not." Further, though "biographies" and "lifeways" per se are in some sense two sides of the same coin, they are observed from incommensurable standpoints, no matter if the observer is a learned scholar, a platitudinous newspaper critic, or a bourgeois parent who wishes their child would become a doctor instead of an artist. Almost anyone who tries to write anything at all about the life of an artist therein evinces some residual ignorance of this problem, or perhaps evinces total ignorance of it, or perhaps just slips up when their guard is down. Most anytime artists "write" about their own lives for publicity purposes, distortions of one or both sides of the problem will be in evidence. At times this collective dissociation rises to the level of temporary insanity, and a writer can suffer from it all the same if they have in fact read all of the authors named here as if they have never heard any of their names.
So, Rank could thus dispense with very nearly the entire institution of criticism as it existed in his time, in its mania for "mechanistic" biography, and yet he could be rather unconcerned, seemingly, about all of the merely parochial implications. He would remain a hero to artists (though still not to critics) if he had made this single searing insight and explained just a little bit about how he arrived there; but this is merely what he does in the introduction to his great work, and then he really gets on with it. And so there is a whole sidebar to this central Rankian insight which is of great concern to almost any upstanding citizen of the artworld, a tremendously important sidebar for them and for their world to come to terms with, and yet it is not the fifth most important thing that art people, and any other people, really ought to understand about the "existentialism" of Rank and Becker. Instead, it is necessary, here and anywhere else, to follow these two men all the way to the full consummation of their learning, in all its breadth and depth; it is necessary to do this first, no matter what one's own life project is; and only then to ask: "What can I, the artist, the audience, the critic, learn about my entire social world, which I view from the standpoint of an artist, audience, critic?" And only then, thusly situated, will it be profitable to ask: "What can I learn that can be applied, in one sense or another, to my art, my connoisseurship, my criticism?" Only by that time has one made a full circle from the origins of Rank's work in the art problem, through the synthesis by Becker with existentialism and with the contemporary social sciences, and finally back to one's own "soulish" concerns. It is not easy to know those concerns, but they ought to be known somewhat better by the end of this journey than they previously were.
For contemporary workers who have no work clothes, who wear whatever is clean while they are working and save their uniforms for the various rituals of the common life, this full circle sounds more like a death spiral. Technically they are correct to think so, since everybody dies eventually and in the end there is nothing. But traversing this expanse really is not half as difficult as the above might imply, because past generations have already done all of the hard work. It is merely up to later generations to put this work to the uses for which it is intended. If this is done then things will be alright, even if things are not good.
So, self-knowledge is a profitable byproduct, perhaps, of taking this journey with Rank and Becker, but even this is not the point of the present study. The first point to be elaborated here, rather, is more of the airless academic variety: Rank and Becker are not populists and do not even use the word, but there is much populism implicit in their broader conclusions. This is populism, of course, in a distinctly contemporary sense which may not apply to 1970 or to 1932, but if these are truly visionary thinkers then this contextual dissonance is not too hard to understand.
That is one sort of claim. The second major claim of this study is yet more dissonant: it is possible even for high modernist and for uncompromising experimentalist art also to be "populist" art in at least one important and thoroughgoing sense; this all the same if there are no people in the audience as if there are hundreds in the room or billions online.
Full-circle Rankianism is made necessary by circumstance, namely by the circumstance that art people have worse critical habits (and more of them) than mere "mechanstic" biography. A great many people are so very concerned to show that art itself "matters." They are concerned to show this, of course, because art matters to them and they too must matter, somehow, to someone or something bigger than them, just as Becker says is true of all human beings; and so they are concerned to show this (all of it at once) by way of beginning with the art and then asking: "What are the ways that art matters?" . . . "To what and to whom does it matter, and how?" . . . "Can art change the world?" As has already been suggested, this is just one of two sides, and when there are only two of them then one is closer to none.
Finally, it will be seen straightaway that the above preliminaries do not "smell" much at all like a polemic in defense of "pure" art, of modernism, and of the smallest possible role (ideally none whatsoever) for criticism and critics as intermediary priests between the believers in an art form and various art-gods. The concern so far seems to be, instead, with precisely everything that makes art first and foremost a social phenomenon and only incidentally (or not at all) an aesthetic, psychological or recreational one. Things have started out this way, it is true, but they will not end this way.
It is indeed the entire "social" world which is, paradoxically, both the absolute essence and the absolute negation of art itself. Any so-called "social theory of art," then, is nothing but an absolutely one-sided thesis. But then there must be an entire antithesis, complete in itself, lurking unstated on the flipside; and so it is the ultimate task here to elaborate as much as possible everything lying on the antithetical side of the social theories, and then to stare down those theories, to look them straight in the eyes with the glare of a worthy adversary, and to then see if those theories do not actually begin to flinch back ever so slightly from the ground they have so long occupied and from the cocksure pose they have struck and held there.
Incidentally and ultimately, it is to be argued here that this antithesis can quite reasonably and literally be called a
populist
antithesis, no matter how many tickets are sold (or unsold). And then, finally, it is necessary to notice merely in passing what this says, by unstated implication, about the social theses and theories themselves. It is best that this implication remain largely unstated, and it is best that it be implied as much and as often as possible.
It will be noticed in the hypothetical of "biographies" and "lifeways" that things are done by the painters and politicians: these people have appeared on the stage of culture and indeed have made culture; or perhaps what is noticed is that something has been done to them: they have started out each in their own places, but circumstances intervened and caused them to converge upon some common patch of ground. The estranged siblings also can be rendered either way; or, ideally, both ways, or neither. That is the point. There is always a bit of both things in any human matter, and so this points again to the readymade opportunities enjoyed by critics and other literary folks who wish to deploy only one side or the other, depending on whatever point they already want to make; or, if they are hard up against a deadline, to pick a side and reach a conclusion only about that side, thereby neglecting half (really all) of their critical duties.
Faced with art criticism which makes such a hash of causality, as most all of it does, a philosopher of science might say that the "degrees of freedom" are very large here, almost certainly too large to lead to any valid and definite conclusions. As they get to know the art people, the philosophy people brush off more and more of their old Latin phrases, and eventually they grow fatigued of issuing the same ones over and over. Art is not science, certainly, nor is criticism, nor historiography; but if not then it is quite unclear just what the historians and the critics of the world think they are achieving with such "mechanistic" methods as they so often deploy. This sentiment often is implicit or even explicit when philosophers write about art. Here it is again, coming from an artist, just for good measure.
Typically it is the first kind of doing, doing by, which is the domain of criticism per se. It is likely that a work which delves more than superficially into everything that has been done to an artist is something more than mere criticism; perhaps Art History or Musicology or any of the various art-ologies and -ographies; perhaps it is baldly polemical or speculative and just barely critical; or perhaps the writer is essentially an artist at heart and none of this really applies, and so nor does the faintest conceit to have achieved "criticism" or "art history" in the resulting piece of work. Critics themselves would be the first ones to point that out and to congratulate themselves for keeping their side of the street clean.
In any event, while criticism of the done by variety is usually harmless and diverting enough, there is grave hazard in saying that someone has done something if they have not certainly done it. It is true that there is always both some doing by and some doing to whenever art is made, but false ascriptions to either effect are not commensurate. False ascriptions of done by and done to are absolutely equivalent only abstractly or rhetorically. Pragmatically they are not commensurate. This is not obvious, though, least of all pragmatically, most of the time, because it is also true that saddling someone with mere stigma of the act-of-another that is done to them can and often is pragmatically equivalent to a "false accusation" of something done by them. "Pragmatically" means that the full gamut of causal variables is in play, including human vicissitudes, and so no human being can observe the full gamut for themselves. They are lucky to snatch any suprainfinitesimal glance at it at all. This can be very bad indeed for the victim; indeed, it can be the worst. That is all true, and unfortunately it happens all the time.
In spite of all the chaos of pragmatic variables, or perhaps because of it, no causal variable really can modulate the semantics of "victim" and "perpetrator." Once the distinction between done by and done to has so much as flickered in the dim recesses of the human mind, the problem has been manifested in absolute "semantics," and it will be seen straightaway that the two sides of the duality are semantically irreconcilable, period. Why? Because human beings generally prefer being in control to being controlled. And why is that? Selection pressures? Toxic ideologies? Social media? But then, why . . . ? And then, why . . . ? At that point it is enough to grant the skeptic their skepticism, wish them the best, and advise them to quit while they are ahead.
It is necessary to lay all of this out in the very heaviest language, comprehensively, because it is a subtle point which grates so hard against everyday human experience that it is very difficult to grasp it entirely through observation, and even then it remains very difficult to articulate it. It will be noticed, certainly, but it takes hard thinking just to notice that it has been noticed. Once it is so much as noticed this leads much more easily to the realization that thinking is inferior to doing; on which more in due time.
From here, however, if the finest points are grasped, then all of this can very safely be reduced. Hence: to saddle people with things they have not done puts them on the defensive; whereas to saddle people with the stigma of having had something done to them that has not actually been done at all, this can go wrong in a thousand and one different ways, certainly, but it also represents the plaintiff position, perhaps not pragmatically, or not always, but semantically, at the very least; and semantic qualities alone are more than enough to make the two sides of this contradiction incommensurable, and to make the contradiction itself, therefore, pragmatically underdetermined.
In this respect, then, the question of free will and determinism is
not
dialectical; or at least it is not dialectical when it is viewed pragmatically as against abstractly. That is why so many enlightened Westerners maintain that a person can invite a playful barb or a stubbed toe into their life but cannot invite an assault. And
that
is why thinking is absolutely inferior to doing.
Rank's central insight is that
all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.
Becker's work is essentially a fleshing-out of the above capsule statement and an effort to account for all of its many implications.
For Becker, first and foremost,
what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignifcance.
This thesis is reiterated many times, in mildly varied form, throughout Becker's mature work. It is the thesis for which he is most remembered.
Societies, therefore, must allay this endemic human fear by affording subjects some opportunity for achieving "significance." In other words, every society is
a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism.
Becker's last book, published only after his untimely death and against his wishes, is his fullest account of social life per se. In this formulation,
social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others,
which reflects
a "social contract" forged in desire and fear.
Hence the second of Becker's great existential theses, that
man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are
not merely form-giving to societies, but in fact are
the root causes of human evil.
Becker's untimely death unfortunately precluded him from any further elaboration of this latter thesis. As viscerally unsettling as certain passages in The Denial of Death may be, this account of the roots of human "evil" is yet more difficult to reconcile. It would seem to preclude concerted social progressivism tout court and to reveal even mundane social life to be a zero-sum struggle for existence.
The conceit of a mere theory of art to intervene in questions of such breadth and severity can only come down to a ham-handed breach of disciplinary consilience. The consilient direction of application is the other way: there are myriad granular details of Becker's account which any contemporary theory of art would do well to account for, if only for its own good.
Foremost: as Becker develops the notion of "working out of one's problems and ambitions on others," he lands not merely on mundane or altruistic gestures (e.g. Goffman's "facework") but also on such malign social epiphenomena as "priestcraft," "scapegoating," and "transference." He uncovers "cosmic heroism" in the common life, and he uncovers nothing less than "the origins of inequality" in the very fabric of human association. For Becker it is all in the mix, as it must be for someone who mined the anthropological record so thoroughly. Becker attacked his questions from all angles and so his work is well-suited to confront one-sided social theorists of art and stare them straight in the eyes.
To use a contemporary term, priestcraft is "transactional," but with a twist. The currency in which priestcraft transacts is what Becker calls "sacred power." It is at root an existential rather than straightforwardly economic transaction.
All power is, as [Norman O.] Brown says, sacred power, because it begins in the hunger for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power.
And again,
men are always dissatisfied and guilty in small and large ways, and this is what drives them to a search for purity where all dissatisfaction can come to a head and be wiped away.
But this sacralizing of mere human objects is bound to miscarry.
No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll in some way on both parties. The reasons are not far to seek. The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract—as Hegel saw. He is not a concrete individuality, and so He does not limit our development by His own personal will and needs. When we look for the "perfect" human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this...
Of course art also is typically thought unable to "bear the burden of godhood," the occasional bohemian ruse notwithstanding. Art is not thought able to support this kind of weight precisely because it seems to consist, largely if not entirely, of mere "human relationships" and man-made object-idols; that is, it seems to consist of "concrete individualities" rather than "abstract spiritual objects." To sum things up this way is more or less to recapitulate the one-sided "social theory of art" in esoteric terms.
However, there is an art practice, which, though it may incidentally produce social relationships and material artefacts, does locate "sacred power" in the "invisible" rather than the "visible" realm. This practice is known, variously, as Art for Art's Sake or Pure Art. It has been rejected on just about every imaginable pragmatic and consequentialist basis. It pines to be (re-)considered on a soulish basis.
To start, it is necessary to distinguish two sorts of arguments against Art for Art's Sake: those which hold that it is a bad idea, and those which hold that it is impossible.
As for whether it is a bad idea, this short preliminary aims only at one narrow aspect, i.e. at the question of "sacred power" as a vehicle of "heroic death denial." Per Becker, all societies (religious and secular alike) must afford their subjects something of this kind; generally art comes off as among the least bad ways of doing so. Art that is more or less "pure" may, for all anyone knows, prove better or worse as a means for people subsumed in a given culture to "earn a feeling of primary value." Making art is a good enough way for a person to feel, at once, that they have done something and also had something done to them. Things will probably be okay for them if they can pull off this simple trick; or maybe things will not be okay for them if they are too absolute about it, or not absolute enough.
This is one way (at most) to approach the question: to enter Becker's existential riddle through the back door thinking that one will soon come out the front. This may work out, but it often does not; more importantly, there is no way to anticipate if or how it will work out without simply making the declaration and taking things from there, and this is, at minimum, rather obnoxious "social" comportment, the same on the macro as on the micro level. This line of approach starts with the art and only then tries to confer sacred power upon it prospectively. This is not really coherent with the larger thrust of Becker's (and certainly not Rank's) arguments. This line may in fact be, literally, the root of all evil. Enough has been said about that already.
Anyway, in the collective discourse on pure art there are nearly as many of these consequentialist arguments waiting in line to be serviced as there are theorists writing on the subject, and so it is beyond the scope of any single study to meet each of them where they live.
The thesis of impossibility, on the other hand, is a "conventionalist sulk." It holds the entire argument to be moot because there simply is no Pure Art: even if that is what an artist thinks they are doing, they are simply mistaken. The reasoning here also varies, but not as widely as the consequentialist arguments, and it can be met not just abstractly but also empirically. If it can be met successfully, the mere possibility of Pure Art would at least be established.
Most likely this negotiation begins with both sides proposing to abandon the hideous term "pure art." Absolute purity regresses to absolute nothingness. There is no "pure purity," so to speak. If there is any purity at all it is found only at some pragmatic node or waystation (or several of them) located on a scale from contaminated to pure; it must be granted that a waystation is all that is being sought, or unsought, and that the regression to absolute nothingness which is the basis of the conventionalist's sulking fit is certainly not what the aspiring pure artist is seeking, either.
This is how the coinage "pure art" might be abandoned by the side of the road. It cannot be abandoned, however, for reasons presently to be explained, and for additional reasons to emerge later on, piecemeal. The word "pure" itself and all of its derivatives have something in common with words like "plaintiff" and "defendant" or with whatever equivalents those words might have in any other language practice: once the corresponding synapse fires, once the Jungian gods of absolute semantics hear the alarm and start tossing their lightning bolts, then lightning will strike and there is no going back from there. The conventionalist holds that the purist has got their semantics all mixed up. There is no rejoinder to that argument. But just try to think of all the ways human beings have invoked purity throughout the millennia. Think about just how semantically pervasive this idea really is. Then, think about everything that is said above about the dual nature of causality as it is seen from the human standpoint. It does not need to be argued or accepted than anything here is "essential." The whole point, in fact, is that nothing really is. To say something is pervasive is plenty good enough, perhaps actually better, than to say that it is essential. Of course mere pervasiveness could be a towering coincidence, but this is very unlikely. The really serious objection is that being pervasive does not make something good, or bad for that matter. That point is happily conceded here. But if something is pervasive then it must be accounted for, one way or another, and sulking is not the way.
So, the phrase "pure art" is not abandoned by the side of the road after all. It has to ride in the back seat, or maybe in the trunk, but it rides on. It is hideous and misleading, but this does not mean that all who have ever spoken this way have spoken in error about every aspect of the problem, and it does not mean that whatever it was they were trying to speak of actually is "impossible." To hold either of these latter positions is not even conventionalist. It is simply and obviously wrong.
If there is a scale or continuum of purity, then, with the waystations distributed along its breadth, then life itself runs concurrently along infinite continua, all at once, parallel about the depths, each representing a different aspect of human life. A single analog knob is thus dimensionalized into an analog mixing board with infinite channels and infinite sliders, the sliders sliding along the breadth and also running infinitely from nothingness to saturation.
The assignment of channels is arbitrary, because assignments must first be imaginable to the human being who makes them. That is a very real limitation of the metaphor. Channels cannot be assigned in any absolutely "correct" or hedonically optimized way, but assignments and reassignments are made as needed, and channels can be muted or unmuted; all of this depending specifically on what sort of human matter one is trying to understand. The way of purity, then, in art as in life, is familiar to all viewers of "The Price Is Right": the goal is to name life's prices as closely as possible without going over.
This is what is meant by pure art anywhere that term appears below. It is not quite the right term, but nothing is. "Absolute art" or "artistic absolutism" would be only slightly better, and they are confounded by the lexicon. "Art for art's sake" is the right term, but it is unwieldy. L'art pour l'art would, for various reasons, communicate the utter contrary intention as is actually the intention of this study. Peter Kivy proposes that absolute music might be referred to as a "decorative" art, which is a very promising insight but also is badly confounded by the lexicon. By this time options are running low. Also, there are good as well as bad reasons to reach for purity and this is a useful frame for the broader discussion.
It must also be said, in passing, that the advent of the Rankian mixing board well and truly walks off Mencken's infamous epithet on Puritanism, walks it off the collective property and escorts it to the office to fill and file the papers on its mandatory retirement. It is far better to say that Puritanism is nothing but the effort to name life's prices without going over, and it is truly beside the point whether the historical Puritans have figured out how to play the game, or if they have ever actually come on down to play it in the first place. As David Funder puts it, "process" must be distinguished from "content" in all such matters.
if you want to understand completely how a chess player thinks, and in particular if you want to be able to predict his or her next move, it will not suffice to garner knowledge, no matter how extensive, about the chess player's cognitive processes... You will also have to acquire an understanding of chess.
The most ardent reiterators of Mencken's dictum thereby reveal that they have not thought much about this.
Be it granted straightaway, also, that there is constant danger here of merely reducing the search for waystations back into consequentialism or even tautology: now that there are many continua with many waystations located somewhere along them, the waystations have become targets at which consequentialism sprays its buckshot, hoping to hit something. Straining the analogy to the point of farce, it might be said that children, e.g., will not know quite what a mixing board is for, though they can amuse themselves beautifully in between takes by silently sliding the sliders; or they can nip a burgeoning masterpiece in the bud this way, cause it to rot on the vine, or simply blow out everyone's ears and speakers. All of which to say: Rankian existentialism cannot come down to the mere spraying of buckshot at invisible targets or the naive sliding of sliders while Papa has the monitors muted; and so when it comes time to try to say more precisely where the waystations are and what sorts of art parties are being thrown at each one, things must proceed methodically, and methods must proceed comprehensively and rigorously. There is only one way to proceed here without blowing anyone's ears out, and that is scientifically. And because art is not science, is anathema to it in one meaningful way, it is unusual for art people to feel this way.
The present task is not to make "art" but to make (some) sense.
Becker, above, refers to the purity problem as a social and existential problem: it is precisely the "search for purity" which drives people into the waiting arms of malign social actors, be they therapists, bureaucrats, or demagogues. Other people, meanwhile, may mix life's many channels like a playful child rather than a worldly-wise studio engineer. In other words, "evil is a robust child." Children are
"blustering organisms who must take some toll of their environment, who seek activity and self-expansion in an innocent way," who do not realize the destruction they do in this way.
Similarly,
all through history it is the "normal, average men" who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves.
These are significant challenges, indeed ultimate challenges, for any human being to confront, no matter how mature, and no matter how skilled in life's strictly hedonic matters; but at the very least it ought to be possible to say something robust about just what is required of artist, audiences, and yes, of critics too, in order to transcend Becker's "social" and "secular" levels of power, to reach for "cosmic heroism" on the "sacred" level, and to do less evil if they cannot actually do more good. That is the ultimate goal of this study.
There is a simple procedural explanation for why Becker's account particularly supports such an arrogation on behalf of such a hideous term as "pure art." The explanation is not that either he or Rank before him are particularly apt to exalt art's "sacred" aspects above those of anything else human beings might do just to pass the time. Rank, very explicitly, bootstaps himself out of this sort of evangelism for art; and Becker develops aspects of this problem which Rank could not, develops them brilliantly, but he ends up back at something of an impasse when it comes time to ground any of it in decisive judgments (on which a bit more below). Anyway, none of this is to be taken as ammunition for aspiring pure artists to spray in the general direction of the conventionalists, hoping to hit something without even knowing what is out there to be hit. Rather, the simple fact is that Becker has attacked the topic of religion with detachment, irreverence and rare erudition. That is all. He treats religion in the manner of a disinterested social scientist rather than a believer. Any particular religion is thus reduced, in one sense, to a mere artifact of cultural relativity, whereas the human needs driving the religious impulse are revealed to be nothing less than universal. If the present arrogation seems unthinkably vulgar, then, perhaps that is because these peculiar human needs have not been construed with the rigor and disinterestedness with which Rank and Becker construe them.
Recently it is particularly in vogue among conservatives to understand progressivist activism as a "secular religion," with an occasional explicit nod to Becker alongside myriad other social scientists. The upshot is of course to call out bad behavior, but more in the manner of an art critic than a social critic: to observe post hoc that whatever malign "gods" certain people do worship must be leading them astray; or, more severely, that the human being
is not just a naturally and lustily destructive animal who lays waste around him because he feels omnipotent and impregnable. Rather, he is a trembling animal who pulls the world down around his shoulders as he clutches for protection and support and tries to affirm in a cowardly way his feeble powers.
Becker's ultimate question is,
How empirically true is the cultural hero system that sustains and drives men?
But he is aware that his project stumbles somewhat on this question. Namely, it seems possible to answer it only consequentialistically, or, worse yet, prejudicially, and not "empirically," for the fact is: not all priests were raised in devout households, and not all progressives riot in the streets. These simplest of "empirical" facts elude most writers on art as well as they elude political combatants, but they are facts nonetheless, facts so simple as to be useless most but not all of the time. A seemingly useless fact is the answer to some question, but probably not to whatever question happens to be asked today or next week. If something really is a fact then it withstands all prejudices equally well, and if it crumbles in the face of mere prejudice then it was never really a fact. What this suggests, unfortunately for Becker and his ecstatic digressive passagework, is that a bird's-eye-view "science of man" was not as close by as he thought. But there is far too much of value in Becker to allow this problem, though it is severe, to capsize the entire vessel. The boat is well afloat.
Even under the sway of prejudice, then, it is not so easy for the apostle of pure art to point "empirically" to artists in their midst who are of truly devout bearing and constitution, who are devout vis-a-vis their art practice itself ("for its own sake") and not towards some other master practice which their art serves. Rather, just as adherents of great religions-of-peace often go to war with each other, most contemporary artists reject the "invisible god" of pure art in favor of the social conception, the one which better permits them the working out of their problems and ambitions on others. Like the religionists and their demagogues, social artists have lacked neither for social theories nor for social theorists of art to assist them in rationalizing one particular variety of "transactional" behavior while other varieties are condemned in the same breath.
The analogy between art and religion is a vulgar analogy, certainly, such as tends to attach to
differences of degree and not of kind.
It is vulgar aesthetically and semantically both, and it cannot be a so-called "perfect analogy." Still, the time has come, finally, to broach it sincerely, because it suggests just which contaminants pure art must be purified of in order to be a plausible aspiration; and
that
may well be, to be even bolder on behalf the ideal, finally something that the social practice of art
can
help to clarify for all the rest of the world.
. . . "building sacrifice" . . .
Otto Rank, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson, Art and Artist (p. 199).
This age-old custom, still practised...consisted in immuring living human beings—new-born children for choice—under the foundation-walls of new buildings. No clue is found to the origin of this custom... Rudolf Kleinpaul refuses to regard these built-in persons as "sacrifices" in the true sense, on the ground that there would not at that stage be any protecting demons and gods in the new building who would require victims; the intention, he holds, was to create spirits, to make a beginning. In the deeper sense of creative force these "house-spirits" may resonably be called victims, however, as they embody the idea that every created thing, if it is to be capable of life, owes its existence to some life destroyed. Whichever way one looks at it, the building-sacrifice affirms once more the dualistic nature of the problem of architecture, and, in principle, of all other art-creation. ...the custom further reveals the fact that the building is not intended as a mere copy (imitation) of natural processes, but represents a spiritual re-creation, and this is made possible by the death of the walled-in person, which sets free his spirit to animate the building.
. . . "uniform" . . .
ibid (pp. 30-31).
Among the American Indians as well as the Australians and other peoples, a typical form of painting is, in fact, the sign of the tribe, which indicates membership of a particular totem, and is therefore in a sense a collective badge of the individual which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community, and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others. ... On the other hand, the belief held by the Fijians and the Eskimos alike that to remain untatooed is to hazard one's future happiness in the world beyond throws a light on the religious significance of tatooing, a significance that inheres also in membership of a particular totem-society. We have thus along with the enhancement of (and even emphasis on) the self its levelling-down by means of the collective symbol; so that in fact we should find the fundamental dualism of art even at the primary stage of human creative instinct. ...
From this point of view, of course, we cannot admit it to be mere chance that the "Bohemian" artist of modern times, even as late as the close of last century, had a definite costume, even a conventional mode of doing the hair and the beard, which were to mark him out as a "genius." The proper artist, who had chosen art as his profession, had a special manner, almost a special life, laid down for him; and in actual fact he had to play a definite part determined by an ideology; so also, according to Dessoir, the actor nowadays represents this pristine type of artist, where object and subject coincide, and the body forms the material in which and through which the artist creates.
. . . "all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul" . . .
ibid (p. xv).
even though the various human civilizations may each arise from the combination of a certain environment and a certain type of humanity, all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul. By this we mean, not to say that the soul can be wholly explained in terms of modern psychology, as our mechanistic science would claim, but, on the contrary, to stress the autonomy of the spiritual, which not only works creatively in the religious, artistic, and social realms, but also determines the ideology which colours the psychology of the time.
. . . "belatedly" . . .
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man (p. ix).
There are two thinkers above all to whom I personally feel specially indebted for this mature psychology and whose vital work I had previously slighted to the real detriment of my own. One of them, Erich Fromm, is well known... The other thinker—Otto Rank—is today almost wholly neglected, and this new edition represents only a first reflection of my ridiculously belated "discovery" of his breathtakingly brilliant work. Rank truly is the brooding genius in the wings of Psychoanalysis, and we have only just begun to hear from him—... I am not trying to absolve myself of brash ignorance, but there is something perverse about our university education when it fails to show us the authentically cumulative tradition of thought. We have to discover the vital thinkers on our own and accidentally; our teachers, if anything, pooh-pooh the very people we should be studying, and we spend needless years just randomly and with luck coming into our own heritage.
. . . "although Rank's thought is difficult, it is always right on the central problems, Jung's is not" . . .
Becker, The Denial of Death (p. xxii).
Even a book of broad scope has to be very selective of the truths it picks out of the mountain of truth that is stifling us. ...the reader may wonder, for example, why I lean so much on Rank and hardly mention Jung in a book that has as a major aim the closure of psychoanalysis on religion. One reason is that Jung is so prominent and has so many effective interpreters, while Rank is hardly known and has had hardly anyone to speak for him. Another reason is that although Rank's thought is difficult, it is always right on the central problems, Jung's is not, and a good part of it wanders into needless esotericism; the result is that he often obscures on the one hand what he reveals on the other.
. . . "The Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard" . . .
Becker, Denial (p. 159).
Chapter Eight of Becker's pulitzer-winner is entitled, in full, "Otto Rank and the Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard."
. . . "what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignifcance" . . .
Becker, Escape from Evil (pp. 3-4).
man transcends death via culture not only in simple (or simple-minded) visions like gorging himself with lamb in a perfumed heaven full of dancing girls, but in much more complex and symbolic ways. Man transcends death not only by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for his life, some kind of larger scheme into which he fits: ...the "immortal self" can take very spiritual forms, and spirituality is not a simple reflex of hunger and fear. It is an expression of the will to live, the burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because he has lived, has emerged on it, and has worked suffered, and died.
When Tolstoy came to face death, what he really experienced was anxiety about the meaning of his life. As he lamented in his Confession:
What will come of my whole life. . . . Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?This is mankind's age-old dilemma in the face of death: it is the meaning of the thing that is of paramount importance; what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignifcance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning. And in order for anything once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity in some way. Or, if there is to be a "final" tally of the scurrying of man on earth—a "judgment day"—then this trace of one's life must enter that tally and put on record who one was and that what one did was significant.
. . . "a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism" . . .
Becker, Denial (pp. 4-5).
this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call "cultural relativity" is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the "high" heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the "low" heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.
It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. ... The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.
. . . "social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others ... a "social contract" forged in desire and fear" . . .
Becker, Escape (pp. 48-50).
I linger on [Paul] Radin's views for a good reason. They put closure on the very beginnings of the modern debate on the origins of inequality. Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive world had to break up because of man's burning ambition to improve himself to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection. Ferguson's was a very straightforward and unburdened view of man. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change his position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one of central importance; from one of inability to cope with the overwhelming world to one of absolute control and mastery of nature. Each organism is in a struggle for more life and tries to expand and aggrandize itself as much as possible. And the most immediate way to do this is in one's immediate social situation—vis-à-vis others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on inequality, and his whole intent was to show that this isn't true, that the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and unintentional ways. But this is just what Hobbes was driving at, that the organism expands itself in the ways open to it and that this has destructive consequences for the world around it. Rousseau and Hobbes were right, evil is "neutral" in origin, it derives from organismic robustness—but its consequences are real and painful.
What Radin did was to bring all this up to date with an acute understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and a frankly materialistic perspective on society. This is already the makings of a union of Marx and Freud. Seen in this way, social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others. What else could it be, what else are human objects for? I think it is along lines such as these that we would find the psychological dynamics for a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history; it would be based on power, but it would include individual deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect a "social contract" forged in desire and fear. The central question of such a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history would be, Who has the power to mystify, how did he get it, and how does he keep it? We can see how naive the traditional Marxist view of simple coercion is: it doesn't begin to take into account what we must now call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate way to speak. What began in religion remains religious. All power is, as Brown says, sacred power, because it begins in the hunger for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power.
And so Brown could offer his own biting criticism of Rousseau:
If the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall took place not in the transition from "primitive communism" to "private property" but in the transition from ape to man .That is, from a type of animal that had no notion of the sacred to one that did. And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they dominate by a psychological spell, not by physical coercion. As Brown puts it, "Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment." Thus Brown could conclude—in the epigraph we have borrowed for this chapter—that the chains that bind men are self-imposed.
. . . "man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil" . . .
Becker, Escape (p. xxvi).
In The Denial of Death I argued that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
. . . "men are always dissatisfied and guilty in small and large ways, and this is what drives them to a search for purity where all dissatisfaction can come to a head and be wiped away" . . .
Becker, Escape (pp. 114-116).
[Kenneth] Burke recognized that guilt and expiation were fundamental categories of sociological explanation, and he proposed a simple formula: guilt must be canceled in society, and it is absolved by "victimage." So universal and regular is the dynamic that Burke wondered "whether human society could possibly cohere without symbolic victims which the individual members of the group share in common." He saw "the civic enactment of redemption through the sacrificial victim" as the center of man's social motivation.
Burke was led to the central idea of victimage and redemption through Greek tragedy and Christianity; he saw that this fundamentally religious notion is a basic characteristic of any social order. Again we are brought back to our initial point that all culture is in essence sacred—supernatural, as Rank put it. The miraculousness of creation is after all magnified in social life; it is contained in persons and given color, form, drama. The natural mystery of birth, growth, consciousness, and death is taken over by society; and as [Hugh Dalziel] Duncan so well says, this interweaving of social form and natural terror becomes an inextricable mystification; the individual can only gape in awe and guilt. This religious guilt, then, is also a characteristic of so-called secular societies; and anyone who would lead a society must provide for some form of sacred absolution, regardless of the particular historical disguise that this absolution may wear. Otherwise society is not possible. In Burke's generation it was above all Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini who understood this and acted on it.
If there is one thing that the tragic wars of our time have taught us, it is that the enemy has a ritual role to play, by means of which evil is redeemed. All "wars are conducted as 'holy' wars" in a double sense then—as a revelation of fate, a testing of divine favor, and as a means of purging evil from the world at the same time. This explains why we are dedicated to war precisely in its most horrifying aspects: it is a passion of human purgation. Nietzsche observed that "whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefore; we others will be his victims. . . . [sic; missing unquote in orig.] But the irony is that men are always dissatisfied and guilty in small and large ways, and this is what drives them to a search for purity where all dissatisfaction can come to a head and be wiped away. Men try to qualify for eternalization by being clean and by cleansing the world around them of the evil, the dirty; in this way they show that they are on the side of purity, even if they themselves are impure. The striving for perfection reflects man's effort to get some human grip on his eligibility for immortality. And he can only know if he is good if the authorities tell him so; this is why it is so vital for him emotionally to know whether he is liked or disliked, why he will do anything the group wants in order to meet its standards of "good": his eternal life depends on it. Good and bad relate to strength and weakness, to self-perpetuatíon, to indefinite duration. And so we can understand that all ideology, as Rank said, is about one's qualification for eternity; and so are all disputes about who really is dirty. The target of one's righteous hatred is always called "dirt"; in our day the short-hairs call the long-hairs "filthy" and are called in turn "pigs." Since everyone feels dissatisfied with himself (dirty), victimage is a universal human need. And the highest heroism is the stamping out of those who are tainted. The logic is terrifying. The psychoanalytic grouping of guilt, anality, and sadism is translatable in this way to the highest levels of human striving and to the age-old problem of good and evil.
. . . "No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood" . . .
Becker, Denial (p. 166).
. . . "conventionalist sulk" . . .
Peter Kivy, Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music (pp. 146-147).
it should be perfectly obvious that although the "meaning," as construed above, of King Lear is certainly there for the culturally prepared and attentive viewer, that is by no means the case for the "meaning" of the Mahler movement. For whom—for how many—of culturally prepared and attentive listeners is [Anthony] Newcomb's agency, and the rest of the story, there? The first person I have run across for whom it is there is Newcomb himself. And it is no good to say that after Newcomb points it out, lots of people will hear it and it will be there for them. For one thing, lots of people who read Newcomb's message will continue, like me and other formalists, not to hear agents or agencies in the music. For another, if "meaning," as construed above, were really in the Mahler, we wouldn't need assistance in hearing it. It would be as apparent to us as the plot of King Lear. What are there for all culturally prepared and attentive listeners are the expressive and other phenomenological properties that the music possesses, the clumsiness among them, as the enhanced formalist admits. But to go from there to "meaning," as construed above, is an unjustified step. And if it be claimed that not hearing what Newcomb hears simply eo ipso disqualifies one as a culturally prepared and attentive listener, then the claim simply becomes true by fiat—what is sometimes called the "conventionalist sulk."
. . . ""decorative" art" . . .
ibid (p. 248).
I have been arguing in this section, that if one chooses the right comparison class of decorative art, namely that art in its highest manifestations, there is no reason to believe that it does not have the same ability to produce the kind of mind-uplifting ecstasy in the susceptible viewer that absolute music, in its highest manifestations, does in its appreciative audiences. Of course it does not follow from this that absolute music is a decorative art—merely that the experience of it is, in the way described, consistent with the hypothesis.
. . ."if you want to understand completely how a chess player thinks". . .
David C. Funder, "Process and Content in the Study of Judgmental Accuracy" (p. 207).
. . . "Evil is a robust child" . . .
Becker, Escape (pp. 132-134).
The Nature of Man
The question of the origins of inequality is only half of the problem of a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history. The other half is that Rousseau's argument with Hobbes has never been satisfactorily settled. The Marxists have said, with Rousseau, that human nature is a blank slate, neutral, even good; evil exists because of social institutions that encourage it, because of social classes and the hate, envy, competition, degradation, and scapegoating that stem from them; change society and man's natural goodness will flower. Not so, say the conservatives, and they point for proof at those revolutionary societies which have abolished social class but which continue to express personal and social evil; evil, then, must be in the heart of the creature; the best that social institutions can do is to keep it blunted;...This question has been the central one of the science of man, and as such the knottiest in its whole career; thus it is logical that it is the last problem to be solved. I myself have been coming back to it again and again for a dozen years now, and each time I thought there was a clear solution I later discovered that vital things had been left unsaid. At first it seemed to me that Rousseau had already won the argument with Hobbes: had he said that evil is a robust child? Then, as Rousseau argued, children are clumsy, blustering organisms who must take some toll of their environment, who seek activity and self-expansion in an innocent way, but who cannot yet control themselves. Their intentions are not evil, even if their acts cause damage. In this view, man is an energy-converting organism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature as an active being. He seeks self-expansion from a very uncertain power base. Even if man hurts others, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one.
Later I agreed too with the Marxists, that hate and violent aggression could be developed in man as a special kind of cultural orientation, something people learned to do in order to be big and important—as some primitive tribes learned warfare and won social esteem because of their cruelty to enemies, etc. It was not, as Freud had imagined, that man had instincts of hate and aggression, but rather that he could easily be molded in that way by the society which rewarded them. The thing that characterized man was his need for self-esteem, and he would do anything his society wanted in order to earn it.
From this point of view, even scapegoating and the terrible toll it has taken historically seemed to be explainable in Rousseau's terms: the thing that man wanted most was to be part of a close and loving ingroup, to feel at peace and harmony with others of his kind. And to achieve this intimate identification it was necessary to strike at strangers, pull the group together by focusing it on an outside target. So even Hugh Duncan's analysis of the sacrificial ravages of the Nazis could be approached in terms of neutral motives or even altruistic ones: love, harmony, unity. And Hannah Arendt's famous analysis of Eichmann would also fit in with this:... We could even, as we have seen, subsume this under the Agape motive: man wants to merge with a larger whole, have something to dedicate his existence to in trustfulness and in humility; he wants to serve the cosmic powers. The most noble human motive, then, would cause the greatest damage because it would lead men to find their highest use as part of an obedient mass, to give their complete devotion and their lives to their leaders.
. . . "all through history it is the "normal, average men" who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves" . . .
Becker, Denial (p. 187).
Rank makes a special type out of the hypersensitive, open neurotic; and if we put him on the schizoid continuum this is probably true. But it is very risky to try to be hard and fast about types of personality; there are all kinds of blends and combinations that defy precise compartmentalization. ...if we say that the average man narrows down "just about right," we have to ask who this average man is. He may avoid the psychiatric clinic, but somebody around has to pay for it. ... Even if the average man lives in a kind of obliviousness of anxiety, it is because he has erected a massive wall of repressions to hide the problem of life and death. His anality may protect him, but all through history it is the "normal, average men" who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves.
. . . "social ... secular ... sacred" . . .
Becker, Birth (p. 185-187).
Levels of Power and Meaning
...we have...evolutionarily and historically, a common problem for men of good will in all fields to work on: in their own lives if they so choose, and in the social and political sphere. Basically,... it is a problem of the identification of idols. To what powers has a man given himself in order to solve the paradoxes of his life? On what kind of objective structure has he strung out his meanings and fenced off his own free energies? ...he lives his version of the real without knowing it, by giving his whole uncritical allegiance to some kind of model of power. So long as he does this he is truly a slave, and Scheler's point is that not only is he unconsciously living a slavish life but he is deluding himself too: he thinks he is living on a model of the true absolute, the really real, when actually he is living a second-rate real, a fetish of truth, an idol of power.
We might say that there were roughly four levels of power and meaning that an individual could "choose" to live by:
1. The first, most intimate, basic level, is what we could call the Personal one. It is the level of what one is oneself, his "true" self, his special gift or talent, what he feels himself to be deep down inside, the person he talks to when he is alone, the secret hero of his inner scenario.
2. The second or next highest level we could call the Social. It represents the most immediate extension of oneself to a select few intimate others: one's spouse, his friends, his relatives, perhaps even his pets.
3. The third and next higher level we could call the Secular. It consists of symbols of allegiance at a greater personal distance and often higher in power and compellingness: the corporation, the party, the nation, science, history, humanity.
4. The fourth and highest level of power and meaning we would call the Sacred: it is the invisible and unknown level of power, the insides of nature, the source of creation, God.
These levels, of course, are not discrete for most people: most of us live in several of them,... I said that the individual could "choose" the levels he would live by, and it is obvious why I put the word in quotation marks: usually the person doesn't ask himself this basic question: this is decided for him by the accidents of his birth and training and by the energies of his heredity, his constitution. ... The great tragedy of our lives is that the major question of our existence is never put by us—it is put by personal and social impulsions for us. ... Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for. The way things are set up we are rewarded, so to speak, for not finding our authentic talent. The result is that most of our life is in large part a rationalization of our failure to find out who we really are, ... The question of what one's talent is must always be related to how he works it on the world: "Into what hero-system do I fit the expression of my talent?" It is worked on some combination of the four levels of power and meaning.
. . . "he is a trembling animal who pulls the world down around his shoulders" . . .
Becker, Denial (p. 139).
. . . "How empirically true is the cultural hero system that sustains and drives men?" . . .
ibid (p. 6).
. . . "prejudice" . . .
Stephen Alexander, "When Even the Flies Leave You Alone: Ernest Becker's 'The Denial of Death' as Interpreted by Sebastian Horsley"
https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2022/07/when-even-flies-leave-you-alone-ernest.html
All forms of human culture and civilisation, argues Becker, constitute an elaborate defence mechanism against biological reality. That's what we, as symbolic animals, are extremely good at; defiantly creating a world of meaning which allows us to transcend the fact that we end up as worm food or a few pounds of ash.
Becker seems to find this ability heroic, but that's not the term I'd use. For a fantasy of immortality remains just that and, ultimately, no life matters and no great work will be remembered.
In other words, in the grand scheme of things, there is no grand scheme and Becker's privileging of religious illusion in which our animal and mortal nature is given spiritual significance - over what he dismisses as hedonistic pursuits and petty concerns - is just conventional moral prejudice.
Becker "dismisses" very little, actually; the flipside of "conventional moral prejudice" is conventional moral relativism. But the larger point is what matters and it is unusually well articulated here.
Becker also, to reiterate, is himself aware of the problem. He does not articulate it as ruthlessly as the above, and it is easy to imagine why; but even so, all three books do land here, and the occasion is never entirely missed, although certainly more could be made of it.
e.g. Towards the end of The Denial of Death,
As [Suzanne] Langer explained, some myths are vegetative, they generate real conceptual power, real apprehension of a dim truth, some kind of global adumbration of what we miss by sharp, analytic reason. Most of all, as William James and Tillich have argued, beliefs about reality affect people's real actions: they help introduce the new into the world. Especially is this true for beliefs about man, about human nature, and about what man may yet become. If something influences our efforts to change the world, then to some extent it must change that world. This helps explain one of the things that perplex us about psychoanalytic prophets like Erich Fromm; we wonder how they can so easily forget about the dilemmas of the human condition that tragically limit man's efforts. The answer is, on one level, that they have to leave tragedy behind as part of a program to awaken some kind of hopeful creative effort by men. Fromm has nicely argued the Deweyan thesis that, as reality is partly the result of human effort, the person who prides himself on being a "hard-headed realist" and refrains from hopeful action is really abdicating the human task. This accent on human effort, vision, and hope in order to help shape reality seems to me largely to exonerate Fromm from the charges that he really is a "rabbi at heart" who is impelled to redeem man and cannot let the world be. If the alternative is fatalistic acceptance of the present human con-dition, then each of us is a rabbi—or had better be.
But once we say this, once we make a pragmatic argument for creative myth, it does not let us off the hook so easily about the nature of the real world. It only makes us more uncomfortable with the therapeutic religionists. If you are going to have a myth of New Being, then, like Tillich, you have to use this myth as a call to the highest and most difficult effort—and not to simple joy. A creative myth is not simply a relapse into comfortable illusion; it has to be as bold as possible in order to be truly generative.
(pp. 278-279)
And again, in the Conclusion to Escape From Evil:
If I wanted to give in weakly to the most utopian fantasy I know, it would be one that pictures a world-scientific body composed of leading minds in all fields, working under an agreed general theory of human unhappiness. They would reveal to mankind the reasons for its self-created unhappiness and self-induced defeat; they would explain how each society is a hero system which embodies in itself a dramatization of power and expiation; how this is at once its peculiar beauty and its destructive demonism; how men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world. ...
Yet I know that this is a fantasy; I can imagine how popular and influential such a body would be on the planet; it would be the perfect scapegoat for all nations. And so, like a true Enlightenment dreamer, now supposedly sobered by experience, I turn my gaze to the stars and imagine how wiser visitors from some other planet would admire such a world-scientific body. But nothing, then, changes: must we scientists still despair of the masses of men and forever turn our yearnings to the Fredericks and the Catherines—but now in outer-space garb? ...
Fortunately, no one mind can pose as an authority on the future; the manifold of events is so complex that it is fraud for the intellectual to want to be taken seriously as prophet, either in his fantasies or in his realities. One of the last thoughts of the great William James was that when all is said and done there is no advice to be given. And if a man of Freud's stature shrank back before prophecy, I surely am not going to peep any note of it at all.
(pp. 168-169)
It can only be speculated that, had Becker lived a few more good years, he may well have found his way back around to nihilism proper, as Stephen Alexander clearly has. But by then Becker would have passed through all of the searing insights contained in his last three books, including all of the references to Nietzsche, and through who knows what else subsequently. Becker made the insights rather than just reading about them, and he must have made myriad unknown-and-unknowable others that came and went without finding their way into print.
A person who has read the books may easily remain unchanged, and there is indeed nothing wrong (or right) with that; but no person could
write
what Becker wrote without being changed by the experience. This is itself a serviceable one-sentence summation of Rank's entire argument. True enough, the "change" could be an unfashionable prejudice as easily as a spiritual awakening or a spiritual narcosis. Who knows what the change will be, or
if
it will be, until after it has happened? Nobody can know this, just as a music critic cannot know
post hoc
that a turn toward atonality was precipitated by some grave misfortune of the composer. Becker himself was perfectly able to see this Rankian side of things, because he had read Rank and had thought deeply through it all. He wrote the books anyway, knowing full well that somebody, somewhere, would find "prejudice" in them.
That
is the most that any human being can do after running up against the impasse. That is transcending one's prejudices, not consolodating them.
The most curious aspect of Becker's books is that he writes of "dualism" matter-of-factly. This little term detains him not in the least even as it derails some otherwise sympathetic readers.
Really it is possible to sum up Becker's dualism of the "bodily" and the "symbolic" very concisely: he is saying of human beings that their eyes are bigger than their stomachs.
Presumably even card-carrying materialists have observed this phenomenon (or evinced it themselves) at some time or other; but if they would
deny even the "idealism" of going back for a second piece of cake after one's stomach is already full, then materialism indeed cannot explain much at all.
If proof that all cognition is "embodied" leads not merely to the dethroning of classical Mind-Body dualism but also to the repression of everything that is even vaguely contradictory about human behavior, then cognitivism also cannot explain anything of any importance.
Really Becker's "dualism" is nothing controversial, and it is both more parsimonious and more incisive than any laboratory psychology. Its only fault is that it arrives stamped with a contested label, a label which it can quite well do without. Simply put,
The theory of desire starts here. Because human beings are social creatures, however, it cannot end here.
Suppose that a guest at a dinner party must explain to the host that a spouse or a child suddenly is not feeling well after going back for a second and third dessert. The guest's rhetorical options are constrained by whatever norms prevail among those present. Only in the paradisiacal and mindfully rationalistic milieu of professors, scientists, and public intellectuals could the existentialist version perhaps, maybe, find practical outlet on such genteel occasions.
"Rank and Becker show that after a full evening of recreation, entertainment, libations, and nutriment, a human being has already
eaten
too much and yet still has not
lived
nearly enough. And indeed, dear Carruthers The Younger evidently has lived a bit too much in too short a time frame. Therefore he must retire, along with those members of his kinship group who are presently charged with his custody."
Meanwhile, in most every other milieu, it is unthinkably rude to meet generosity with ingratitude, or even to risk misconstrual to this effect; and so a genteel metaphor serves the occasion more gracefully. Hence:
"I'm so sorry, but we must leave. The kid's eyes were bigger than his stomach."
This ensures that fault is laid on the guest rather than the host, which is what is most important. The quality of the explanation is much less important. And indeed, this formulaic utterance, even if it were somehow literal rather than metaphorical, merely suggests a
proximate
cause. Rank and Becker propose an
ultimate
cause: a living thing can (quite easily) have not enough life, but it cannot have too much life. It does not take a laboratory scientist to see that, but it does take a certain tolerance of wounded vanity for a human being to accept, as they utter this truism, that it applies not just to others but also to themselves. And so it is that from this inability to tolerate unhappy realities, from the various efforts to escape or deny them, from seeing faults only in others and not in oneself, the entire absurdity of the human condition follows. That is most of what Becker is trying to say. Whether human existence is essentially "monistic" or "dualistic" is much less important.
Contemporary cognitive science, for all its explanatory and predictive power, cannot penetrate very deeply into existential matters, not even when they are amenable (as the Eye-Stomach problem is) to a cognitivist account. This impasse traces back to an "existential" conflict which is cognitivism's own:
Stated bluntly: cognitivism plus progressivism equals a reversion to behaviorism. Merely explaining to people how to think-about-thinking guarantees nothing and can even be tautological. Coercion is effective only temporarily and hence must ramify into full-blown repression if it is to be sustained. Appealing rhetorically or moralistically to
the better angels of our nature
fails at scale even if it succeeds in awakening those angels in an elite psycho-minority. And so on down the long list of interventions available to progressivism, from the gentle to the severe, until finally it is tacitly admitted that better floor plans and organizational hierarchies can be created but better people cannot be.
The broad social intervention on behalf of cognitivism, if there is to be one, and if it is to be received as noncoercive (though in the end it is inheretly coercive, of course, and there is no way around that), any such intervention must be an intervention in environment and conditioning. It cannot be merely an intervention in knowledge, in morals, or in public opinion. Like dessert and recreation, knowledge and morals are too existentially bound up with
life itself
to be subject to mere rhetorical persuasion and transactional bargaining. Scholars such as Stephenson and Lakoff, e.g., show that even "public opinion"
per se
also is bound up with nothing less than existence itself. Rank and Becker explain precisely why this is, on which point it is best, by now, to refer the still-skeptical reader to the original texts. So it is also that Rank and Becker have unwittingly explained precisely why progressive psycho-interventions must be behaviorist in application even after they have become cognitivist in principle and in research methodology.
Yet another way to put this is that every christening of a new "cognitive bias" is a tacet confession by cognitivists that a certain antisocial behavior is amenable only to behaviorist remedies.
[FN??]
Thaler and Sunstein's Nudge is emblematic of this. They are smart enough not to propose that people should try to think differently than people have always thought. They are not the kind of progressives who propose that better people can be created. Rather, they make the humble recommendation that "choice architecture" be expertly designed to favor certain high-level outcomes over others. This is Skinner's brand of progressivism after it has lowered its ambitions and skimmed some cognitivist abstracts.
It may be objected that this is a jaundiced view of things. Perhaps so, but there is a purpose to taking such a view in this instance: it is most important that laypeople direct their skepticism toward everything that happens when
any
science is
politically
operationalized; and it is useless, on the other hand, merely to bluster against the research findings themselves. It is better that cognitivist findings be accepted rather uncritically than that laypeople should arrogate to counterpose such anecdotes as are available to them, or to join in disputes over methodology which are well beyond lay comprehension. Privately one can make what one wishes of the cognitivist account, even where the conclusions appear to be very severe. But for communities the trick
is to make the
right
thing of it. To learn to do this (or, channeling Feynman, to learn what one must learn in order to do this), it is simplest to start with data that is not a moving target. Presumably the target
will
move, later, but the methods and habits of mind developed may still be useful.
Much as a piece of music is not complete until it is performed, scientific data is not complete until it is operationalized. Science always requires some further elaboration in order to be reconciled with the truly unscientific world of social norms and competing value systems, all the more so for a globalized population of
Billions-with-a-B
whose specialists even cannot hope to keep up with the advance of specialist knowledge. This task of reconciling the scientific and the social is something that philosophy can assist with.
Asked in an interview towards the end of his life if "aesthetics might eventually become just a branch of cognitive science," the philosopher Arthur Danto answered:
"
I don't believe that. Works of art need to be interpreted. There's something to what Derrida would say, that there is an infinite number of interpretations. It may be very difficult for anybody to think out more than one or two. But if somebody is intelligent and motivated enough, they probably could do it.
"
And later on:
"
When Marat was assassinated..., they said, 'Take up thy brush, David, take up thy brush!' They would never have said, 'Pick up your Bunsen burner,' or 'Pick up a test tube,'... They said, 'Take up thy brush,' because they felt that David would say something of very deep meaning. You wouldn't get that out of science at that time. Meaning in terms of human life: that comes from art, I think. So, I don't find the idea of aesthetics as a branch of cognitive science compelling at all. Why should it be?
"
(Danto, interviewed by Hans Maes in August, 2011
http://aesthetics-conversations.com/arthur-danto/)
Indeed "the idea of aesthetics as a branch of cognitive science" is not compelling or even sane. Neither aesthetics nor any other branch of philosophy
per se
can simply be collapsed into any other discipline.
And yet, with all due respect to the venerable
Nation
critic, the rest of Danto's answer (and there is plenty that has been omitted above) is very troublesome when it is considered in relation to the specific question that was asked, and when it is considered in the light of Danto's considerable intellect and learnedness and his own background in the philosophy of science. It is so troublesome, actually, that it reeks of wounded vanity. [FN]
[[
The possibility that this remark was made casually and towards the end of a long life could just as easily amplify that conjecture as moderate it.
]]
What the remark suggests, namely, is that there is something about the social practice of art which must remain a Black Box not merely to formal "science" but to collective rationality writ large.
The guiding purpose of this study is to elaborate a contrary, dialectical view: it is certain
individual
cognitions which must be allowed to remain, properly speaking,
irrational,
in order for art to be practiced
socially
in a just and meliorative manner; and it is precisely the social practice of art which must be hardened in the crucible of rationality in order for any just individualism to be possible. Art should be made and experienced irrationally but transacted rationally.
Hence works of art do not need to be interpreted; in fact they
need not to be
interpreted but rather
experienced,
as Susan Sontag says in her first famous essay. "Interpretation" of artworks is precisely the
wrong
answer to the existential problems posed to artists and audiences by ever-advancing knowledge and global interconnectedness. Interpretation is precisely the wrong answer to those human problems which are progressive humanity's legacy to itself. And yet interpretation
is
one of the ever-recurring answers offered up by progressives when challenged to rationally assess the social practice of art. This curious phenomenon, among innumerable others, calls for reconsideration.
"Interpretation," says Sontag in 1964, "is the revenge of the intellect upon art." In 2024, ever-advancing specialist knowledge and global interconnectedness make for a gathering storm of revenging intellect. But the seeking of revenge on this scale is precisely what must
not
happen if there is to be any art (or justice) at all. And so it is necessary to leverage both philosophy
and
cognitive science, and much else besides, in order to show just what interpretation and criticism really come down to.
Danto's comments here in defense of interpretation actually bring into higher relief a fundamental problem of transactional criticism. To agree that "there is an infinite number of interpretations" is to more or less to grant that even "very deep meaning in terms of human life" is ultimately ephemeral.
Danto speaks of an intepretation "fall[ing] into place." He speaks of an art historian wrestling with the meaning of "a series of enigmatic frescoes in Ferrara." "He really cracked it! But it wasn't cognitive psychology that did it, it was the zodiac, finally, that gave him the clue."
According to Maes' introduction,
"
Given [Danto's] conception of art it seems obvious what the task of the art critic should be, namely, to find out what a work is about and then explain how the stylistic choices of the artist embody the meaning of that work.
"
The first problem, then, with any effort to explain how "meaning" is embodied in an artwork is that this meaning must first be nailed down; but if there are infinite interpretations limited only by the "intelligence" and "motivation" of the interpreter, this suggests either that meaning too can be infinitely elaborated or that something inscrutable happens as the critic completes the first part of her "task" and turns to the second part. If ultimate "explanations" of how meaning is "embodied" by "the stylistic choices of the artist" are literally "infinite," then what can be the use of any one of these explanations, or even a few dozen very "intelligent" ones? To say that there are infinite interpretations is not to say that
anything and everything
can qualify as an interpretation. Only certain statements qualify. This at least draws
some
boundaries around the enterprise. But these boundaries remain far broader than the conceit to "crack" the code of an artwork based on the available "clues" would suggest.
Danto speaks also of seeing and interpreting the Sistine ceiling: "The
first
thing that hit me was that the birth of Eve is in the middle." He notes that his eventual interpretation would never have been possible to arrive at "if you [that is: he] didn't live in a culture saturated by feminism. ... So you never know where a new interpretation is likely to come from." All the same, "I don't think there was any whiff of feminism when Michelangelo was doing that."
This suggests that the "meaning" on which interpretation bases itself not only can change but that it
will
change. But if this change is macrohistorical, then the audience for criticism will be waiting a long time between installments.
What Danto does
not
offer, the cryptic remark about Derrida notwithstanding, is a straightforward example of two people approaching an artwork in the same time-and-place and ascertaining wildly different meanings. It falls to the present disproportionately careful parsing of casual remarks, then, to suggest that this
does
happen, not just occasionally but
frequently,
and thereby also to suggest that metacriticism's habitual elision of the fact becomes comprehensible once it is seen just what havoc this ephemerality of meaning wreaks upon the doctrine that "artworks need to be interpreted" as that doctrine is rendered here by Danto and Maes.
Finally, it is also widely observable (and significant) that when someone ascertains "meaning" in an artwork, they can and often do
transact
in this meaning rather than merely keeping it to themselves. Professional criticism is an extreme version of this, but the behavior is not limited to critics. Actually there is hardly anything people would rather do with a meaningful art-experience than to talk to (or at) other people about it. The reason is that art-experience
is
laden with meaning. To call meaning "ephemeral" is not to say that it is absent or unimportant; rather, it is to say that transacting in meanings is risky business, more so for the mark than for the transactor.
Becker is again useful here. For one thing, the reason is straightforward why people talk mostly about other people:
[[Becker quote]]. And it is clear enough also where this goes wrong: some ascribed meaning amounts to "sacred power" which can be transacted as such.
Becker does not address globalism per se, but reading Becker after the sun has finished setting on "the twilight of sovereignty," the takeaway is clear enough. It has little to do with cultural relativity and everything to do with eye-stomach dualism.
The ultimate hazard of globalism, as a correspondent of N.N. Taleb's poses it, is connectivity without responsiveness.
If we take a step back and more generally consider the issue of partitioned systems versus connected systems, partitioned systems are more stable, and connected systems are both more vulnerable and have more opportunities for collective action. Vulnerability (fragility) is connectivity without responsiveness. Responsiveness enables connectvity to lead to opportunity. If collective action can be employed to address threats, or to take advantage of opportunities, then the vulnerability can be mitigated and outweighed by the benefits. This is the basic relationship between the idea of sensitivity as we described it and your concept of antifragility.
(YBY, 458)
Axiomatically, contemporary art is an artifact of "connected systems." But then, human beings' eyes are bigger than their stomachs.
AnA = Rank, translated by C.F. Atkinson, Art and Artist (1932)
Birth = Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning (1970)
DoD = Becker, The Denial of Death (1973)
EE = Becker, Escape From Evil (1975)
[published posthumously]
YBY = Yaneer Bar-Yam, quoted in N.N. Taleb, Antifragile (2012)
First and foremost in elaboration of the above: The social priestcraft of art lives not only in the "artworld" but also in the purported content of artworks themselves; and to be sure, "purported" is the crucial term here.
Retrospectively, the philosophical discourses on "expression" and "intention" in art bear heavily on contemporary "social" theories. The phenomenon of social messaging, e.g., can be seen to be (probably unwittingly) a refinement of technique in the face of the realization that the "expression" of anything in particular is actually very elusive in most "artistic" media.
Gil-White writes:
Constructivist studies in recent anthropology have made an intellectual and moral contribution by repeatedly demonstrating that neither supposed “races” nor ethnic groups—or “ethnies”—are natural kinds in any biological sense. Biologists have reached the same conclusion. However, establishing the ontological fact may have clouded our understanding of local epistemologies. ... Even though ethnies and races do not have essences, we still need to investigate why ordinary people often believe that they do and how this affects their behavior. ...
These days “good” anthropologists do not essentialize groups, and therefore no self-proclaimed essentialists are found in anthropology journals. But ordinary folk are not good anthropologists or sophisticated constructivist scholars. Quite to the contrary, they are naive essentialists, and I will try to explain why.
(515-516)
In other words, as human knowledge marches forward, human beings stay pretty much the same.
As the knowledge-cognition gap widens, "sophisticated constructivist scholars" find the ground shifting beneath their feet: they are on the right side of truth but on the wrong side of justice. Justice, after all, is "constructed" but not in a "constructivist" fashion. Justice too is a "local epistemology" which turns toxic at global scale. Justice itself is the ultimate "essentialism." If justice is the end, relativism cannot be the means. Thus every relativist conclusion reached by contemporary scholarship is a problem created rather than a problem solved.
If it requires thirty-some additional pages for an eminent scholar to "try to explain why" essentialism persists among the folk, it is much simpler to explain why they do not become constructivists. The reason that "no self-proclaimed essentialists are found in anthropology journals," e.g., is that a dozen generations of professionals have painstakingly litigated their own protocols of observation and argumentation down to the smallest detail. That is what is required to establish a minimum of empirical truth.
On this point Feynman's address on "Cargo Cult Science" is worth excepting at length:
there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know,...? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and, still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A‑Number‑1 experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat‑running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using—not what you think it’s using. ...
I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The subsequent experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats.
The anecdote is enlightening and inspiring, certainly. But "ordinary" human existence cannot proceed this way. Whether it should is moot. It has not and cannot.
What possibilities exist for progress, then, can only entail working around human frailties, not in trying to change them. Most basically, the literal "construction" of the environment and of institutions is at least potentially responsive to advances in human knowledge in a way that human beings themselves cannot be. Human beings do have some ability to crystallize their knowledge as built environment and institutions. In this way knowledge can be "applied" and passed on without needing to be accounted for in its intractable granular detail.
Knowledge can be transfigured into
practice
and thus survive the journey across time-and-place with greater fidelity than if it is merely fixed in language and left to enjoy the short journey into incomprehensibility as the language changes.
-----
"
you need a name for the color blue when you build a narrative, but not in action—the thinker lacking a word for "blue" is handicapped; not the doer. (I've had a hard time conveying to intellectuals the
intellectual
superiority of practice.)
"
(Taleb, Antifragile, 108-109)
[some Engels quote somewhere: ~it is better to have waged a revolution than to have merely thought about it~
The "superiority of practice" makes strange bedfellows
Yet later Marxists (unless this merely indicates that they are not genuine Marxists) have not been able abide the notion that this translation into practice could not possibly preserve ethnic and class metadata. They treat all culture like it's comprised of heavily DRMed MP3 files. But this anonymizing process is certainly a meaningful pragmatic aspect of the "superiority of practice.")
BEHAVIORISM AND BEHAVIORISTS! Expand+amplify this part!
i.e. Unless it somehow becomes possible to pre-install "sophisticated constructivist" firmware on the neural hardware of each newly conceived human social agent, SHORT OF ALL OF THAT type of thing, the entire cognitive turn in research is unactionable unless it is applied in good ol' "behaviorist" fashion. If it something cannot be learned in a few hours, then it has to be "crystallized" into built environment and institutions.
And by the way, this DOES apply in a small but non-negligible way to The Arts. Here is
one isolated area where consilience permits certain narrow aspects of The Arts to rise a bit further up the consilient hierarchy. The Arts too are crystallizations of knowledge and human needs; in fact they are more objectively crystallizations of these things than of mere ideologies or identities; the contagion theory of art-ideology-ontology is actually pretty hard to prove in most cases, whereas merely to observe that people "create what they need," though admittedly facile and perhaps not delivering too much real enlightenment, is by the same token not making such an extravagant claim. And that is all the claim that the thesis of "crystallization of knowledge" or "cultural niche construction" is making.
But guess what kills the "superiority of practice" most thoroughly of all? It is when the concrete artifacts of time-and-place-and race manage to reattach themselves to the pratice in question. It is when the practice is not "pure," not done "for its own sake" but now for some other sake. This practice is now once again alienated and gainful. It is no longer superior because the knowledge crystallized in it has been reconcretized back into the old "inferior" stuff of time-and-place-and-race.
As Becker shows, it is precisely the Eye-Stomach dilemma which drives human beings to construct soulish remedies: asceticism, potlatch, authoritarian moralism, and hoarding of surplus are some common examples which Becker sought to understand through his novel synthesis of cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, and existentialism. Asceticism and gluttony, moralism and hedonism, exchange and pillage: these name timeless human pretensions. They are timeless because the Eye-Stomach problem is timeless; also because all of these remedies fail, more or less quickly depending on the context, though this does not prevent their independent discovery elsewhere in time-and-space.
Moralism especially has failed because it requires a diversionary cover story that becomes evermore difficult to sustain as knowledge advances. This is another way of saying that eating beyond satiety is likely to be rational and stopping short of satiety is likely to be irrational, all else being equal. If a human being has ever starved; if they have ever had an abundance of cake during an earlier phase of life and been involuntarily deprived of cake later on; if they have ever happened to observe closely how other people behave around cake; then they will want (rationally and correctly) to make hay while the sun shines.
In order for asceticism to qualify as rational behavior, then, human beings cannot merely try to "discover something" about nutrition and metabolism. For one thing, someone must play the part of the forgotten Mr. Young: someone must first have "discovered all the things you have to do to discover something." Otherwise, besides merely landing on bad science, human beings neglect to answer life's most important question, as Becker formulates it: they remain ignorant of their own solution to the problem of earning primary value in a society; hence they can only sink deeper into the "vital lie" of character. Without self-knowledge they can only sink deeper into their existential dilemmas.
What all of this suggests, specifically, is that cognitive science may be fertile ground for research but it must nonetheless revert to behaviorist methods in the formulation of remedies. In other words, in order to crystallize cognitive findings in built environment and institutions, cognitivists must again become behaviorists; and both idealists and materialists must become practitioners.
Moralism: cake is shameful. Asceticism: hide the cake. Gift-giving: coaxes the recipient into exemplifying the Eye-Stomach problem; the giver plays the stoic and hence appears superior. Hoarding: acquire so much cake that it can never run out or be taken away.
Skinner of course formulated the question differently: what must happen to a human being for them to desire exactly one piece of cake in a sitting? Which experiences must a human being have had in order to "behave" this way without feeling that they are being coerced? In which environment(s) and under which conditions would a person behave this way?
Becker's existentialism suggests an additional condition: what is necessary for a human being to eat only one piece of a large cake and feel that they are thriving to the tune of endless cake?
None of this is to claim that
individuals
cannot make use of cognitive science to "intervene" in their own problems. They can make great use of it. So-called "individual initiative" is a
post hoc
tautology rather than an explanation, but it is informative to examine those instances where it suggests itself as an explanation (and where nothing much else in the way of explanation seems plausible). It is informative, particularly, as a thought experiment to try to locate instances of "individual initiative" of thinking-about-thinking on the cognitivist-behaviorist spectrum. It would go something like this: first, a person becomes aware of the existence of a given "cognitive bias;" next, they realize that they themselves have instantiated the bias in the past; they realize that in instantiating the bias they have harmed the wellbeing of themselves and/or of others; finally, they resolve, in contemporary therapeutic parlance, to "work on themselves" to the effect of remedying the bias. In a classic example, this could be as simple a matter as realizing that they themselves have haggled over three dollars when buying a lamp but didn't bother haggling over thirty dollars when buying a mattress. This is a simple problem because it can reduced to taking the newfound awareness of the problem which the person already has, given that they have stopped to think about it, and simply remembering in the decisive moment that they thought about it once, and that the solution, then, is to take ten seconds to think through some very simple math. And if the result is the realization that even thirty dollars is not worth the trouble to them, then this is either a product of their circumstances or it is another personal fault which requires a new project of thinking-about-thinking.
In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution in psychology, this is the zero-degree of "working on yourself." The "individual initiative" required to conduct it is very minimal. Additionally, there are plenty of those "mediating institutions" identified by Stephenson as decisive in helping a piece of knowledge or persuasion to be widely disseminated and to actually stick in the minds of a population.
PTMC:
"
Advertising has been blamed for social effects that belong, instead, to the contrary principles of social control.
(p. 203)
...why television can sell soap but not, it seems, citizenship. The reason lies in the part played by mediating mechanisms in advertising; in between the advertisement on the one hand and the consumer who reads it there are the facilitating factors of supermarkets, shopping habits, and the ready availability of spending money which make it relatively easy for a consumer to be "sold" a new brand of soap. It is the absence of such mediating institutions that makes it very difficult for a society to "sell" citizenship.
(p. 204)
But the problem of the lamp and the mattress is a simple problem. It is literally
simple
in terms of information theory and requires only a minimum of intellect and self-regard in order to be solved. Mere word of mouth is sufficient to spread this gospel. Even a sclerotic and corrupt education system cannot botch the spreading of this message too badly. But the consequentialism of myriad other "cognitive biases" is much more complex, indeed intractable. Some of these lessons are not easily communicated, and some of their solutions require a degree of intellectual and material wherewithal that a majority of people do not possess. To think oneself out of the myriad problems of implicit bias, to invoke another classic example, is daunting enough for those with ample leisure time, high intellectual ability, and a stinging gadfly of "individual initiative" stalking their every waking thought. And so it is informative (highly) to observe, on one hand, just how impressively a problem such as Implicit Bias has been grasped by cognitive scientists, and on the other hand, just what the fate of this "sophisticated constructivism" has been in the public consciousness and in the hands of public officials: namely, its fate has been a motley of equal parts idealist moralism and essentially behaviorist interventions in the built environment and in institutions. No "cognitive" remedy can be scaled up because thinking-about-thinking is something that only individuals can do, and because individual human brains have around 100 billion neurons, thereby ensuring just enough variability to combine with the essentiality of the bias
du jour
to create what cognitivists call a "wicked problem."
In this repsect, cognitivism arrives on societys's doorstep with
some assembly required. It falls to individuals to launch their own behaviorist interventions on the individual level; but most people cannot or will not do this. Or, it falls to governments and other powerful instutitions to launch larger-scale behaviorist interventions with or without the explicit consent of their subjects. Or, it falls to persuaders to try to shift the moral ground beneath the feet of all of the above social agents, such that certain problems cease to be problems and certain behaviorist interventions appear more or less rational. And so one and so forth.
At this point in the argument, while certainly seeing the need to better characterize this vague distinction between individuals, governments, and persuaders, the present work of "aesthetics" has, finally, run up against the limits of its purview. The point is: no matter who arrogates to make an intervention, no matter the scale of the intervention, and no matter the moral framework guiding the construction of right and wrong terms of intervention, there are
only
behaviorist interventions in the sense that a cognitive bias cannot be countervailed merely by admonishing people to think about thinking. To the contrary, their circumstances and conditioning must be changed, whether it is they themselves or some unseen outside force which does the changing; and that is behaviorism, not cognitivism.
[footnote 2]
[[p. 207??? double check...]]
"
One of the errors most commonly demonstrated in these experiments is the "fundamental attribution error," the putative tendency to overestimate the importance of persons relative to situations in the determination of behavior. Ironically, it could be argued that by attributing errors to shortcomings of subjects...instead of to the deliberate rigging of experimental situations, researchers are themselves committing a particularly grievous instance of the fundamental attribution error.
"
David C. Funder "Process Versus Content in the Study of Judgmental Accuracy" (1990)
[[also RANK on the limitations of psychology as a discipline, already in 1930!! the discourse is thus thrown back upon "epistemology and ethics"!!!]]
[122] Psychoanalysis must be understood as therapy in the widest, illusion-promoting sense. The psychology is based on the relation of "I" to "thou," whether we interpret this relation religiously (as does Jung), or socially (as does Adler), or as infantile (as does Freud). This psychology neither knows nor acknowledges the individual as such, whose will is explained "causally" as sexual libido and whose consciousnss is ultimately determined by the "unconscious." With his theory, Freud tried to explain the whole person in causal terms, and individuality per se; but individual means meta-causal, transcending causality .
...
[123] analogous to Nietzsche's dictum concerning the inexactness of natural law as a condition of existence or being. ...it is the false false, "noncausal" connections in our soul that make it possible to adapt and function in the real world; we make reality bearable through denial, displacement, and rationalization, not by recognizing psychological truth, which is destructive. Paradoxical as it may sound, the false connections in our soul are the truly causal ones , for they are the "cause" of all the human reactions we observe and study in psychology. This dethrones psychology as self-knowledge and reestablishes ethics and epistemology in its place .
Psychology can no more replace knowledge gained through thought than it can replace religion and morality. Yet psychoanalysis seemed to make such a claim; at least, people wanted to believe that it could. Freudian doctrine could not have been extolled as a new religion and moral system without an inherent tendency to become that. In fact, religion, morality, and psychol-
[124]
ogy all represent repeated attempts to solve the problem of will interpretatively by different means: religion, by means of projection; morality, by means of introspection; philosophy, by means of rationalization; and psychology, by means of intepretation. Religion and morality motivate causally—that is, fatalistically and morally, respectively; philosophy and psychology motivate in terms of the final state—rationalistically and interpretively, respectively. But the causal principle as such conforms to a moralistic formulation of the will-principle, so it cannot be applied in the pure psychology of the individual personality. Though not clearly expressed, this insight underlies two recent trends in psychology, structural theory and gestalt theory, in which neither object nor subject is measurable or subject to strict causality. There are wholes instead of parts, understanding instead of explanation, description in place of generalization. This "moderate" orientation resembles that of recent physics, but both are too negative, timid, even intimidated. Here I see a trend toward self-diminution among psychologists as among physicists, expressing the temper of the times, of course, but showing the psychology of the scientist more than that of people in general.
...
The free action of positive will in the primal era seems here, in the psychological era, to be reaction—not only to external stimuli, which it always was, but to internal, self-constructed inhibitions and resistances, which function as "causes" just as mch as do external stim-
[125]
uli. Freedom of will now appears only as denial of compulsion; the vestige of free, positive willing is morally rationalized as causal compulsion or inevitable fate, or is otherwise justified. So it is that psychic phenomena, psychology's concern, constitute the absolute negative of the soul, where projection of positive, free will reigned autocratically, aware of no guilt.
Otto Rank,
Psychology and the Soul
Orig. 1930
trans. Richter and Lieberman (1998)
Perhaps Becker indeed drunk deeply of this specific passage, because the insight that "the false connections in our soul are the truly causal ones" explains precisely why the facile equation food = life is not only not absurd but in fact explains almost everything about human behavior. It is not false materially of course, but it
is
false
symbolically.
It is materially true that organisms must eat to live, but it is not materially true (or even rational) that the sheer amount of food stuffed down one's gullet equates to a better life. This latter is true only symbolically, and then only some of the time. It is a "vital lie." But it is not possible for human beings to escape this lie merely by thinking-about-thinking. The conceit to the contrary is the biggest lie of all.
It is striking, actually, that several of Becker's central insights suggest a behaviorist rather than a cognitivist approach. e.g.
"
the humanization process is one in which we exchange a natural, animal sense of our basic worth, for a contrived, symbolic one. ... Our character has become social. ... Some people work out their urge to superiority by plying their physical and sexual attractiveness—... Others work it out by the superiority of their minds;... ; some work it out by being devoted slaves: "I am a locus of real value because I serve the great man." ... The great variation in character is one of the fascinations and plagues of life:...
"
(Birth, p. 71)
As Becker well understands, all of the above assessments are made of the "exterior" or surface of social agents, not of their interior; and these assessments are made by other social agents, who have their own myriad foibles to contend with. This bespeaks total relativization of social space, but still it does not preclude certain observations and interventions; namely, it permits of a behavioral orientation even if it does not permit (and to be sure, nothing really does permit) a real and true view of the "interior" of human beings. The above are surface observations. The very real possibility (perhaps the likelihood) that they are wrong assessments of the interior really doesn't matter at all. On the social level, observable behavior is the baseline, proximal. Inferences as to ultimate interior causes certainly are made, but if they are too out of line with observable behavior then they must be discarded.
Unfortunately, for lack of such foresight at the crucial time-and-place, human beings have momentarily lost control of this existential lever too. As Harari puts it,
When people realise how fast we are rushing towards the great unknown, and that they cannot count even on death to shield them from it, their reaction is to hope that somebody will hit the brakes and slow us down. But we cannot hit the brakes,...
...nobody knows where the brakes are. ... Nobody can absorb all the latest scientific discoveries, nobody can predict how the global economy will look in ten years, and nobody has a clue where we are heading in such a rush. Since no one understands the system any more, no one can stop it.
(Homo Deus, Ch. 1)
The bottom line, then, of ever-advancing knowledge, exploding population, and global interconnectedness is that even residents of representative democracies actually are no more self-governing than rats in a maze. They may reflexively slam the footwell with their braking foot, but they will not run into any brake pedals. They may dutifully masquerade as self-governing Greeks, but in actuality they lead a merely solipsistic, Roman existence. They may know that not just culture but time-and-space too have been relativized, but this does not solve their problem; rather, it is their problem.
Once again, a theory of art can contribute only meagerly to the biggest questions. More to the point, the biggest questions devolve upon art theorists the responsibility to keep their side of the street clean.
Along with race and innumerable other vexed social questions, cognitive scientists have also turned their attention to the irreducible "naive essentialism" underlying aesthetics. Whereas artistic intention, for example, has been pored over philosophically and idealistically for a century, Jucker and Barrett put forward an intentionalist theory that is cognitive, empirical, and pragmatic. The finding that, e.g.,
intention plays an important role in artefact categorization and appreciation
(117)
is offered as a blunt empirical finding, no matter if the "artefact" is a stone tool or a contemporary artwork. The only question left is what to do with this finding.
Similarly,
From infancy babies automatically represent artefacts partly in relation to how they might be manipulated...
(115)
Works of art, most typically,
cannot be readily manipulated, and are neither created nor used to achieve purely practical goals,... ...although perceived as intentionally created by human agents, the purpose of works of art is not clear, and cries out for an explanation.
(116)
This non-utilitarian nature of artworks notwithstanding,
most of the time, form and function actually constitute good indicators of what the intention of the artefact’s maker was... More simply, it means that taking into account the intention of the artefact’s maker allows one to avoid some problems with classic approaches to artefact categorization. ...similarity of form and function are not sufficient for artefact categorization, because two objects may be dissimilar in form, but belong to the same kind, and two objects may be similar in potential function, but belong to different kinds. If one considers the intention of the artefact’s maker, categorization appears to be less problematic:...
(117)
Curiously enough, the authors also find that,
Human products that appear to have required a lot of effort and skill to produce seem to be naturally admired by people.
Or, in other words,
effort is used as a heuristic for quality.
(120)
"Heuristics," of course, in the context of cognitive science often amount to little more than "cognitive biases." The authors do not say this explicitly, but they do note that
A few pilot raters reported “embarrassment” with assessing the effort and skill that went into a work of art, and during the actual survey this was a general trend among visual arts specialists.
(124)
Indeed, and one can imagine even "ordinary folk" similarly effacing their "naive essentialist" view of ethnicity if presented with an ethnically diverse lineup and asked to "rate" each specimen as an exemplification of its type. Even if privately unapologetic, they may realize that some other people find this unsightly.
Meanwhile, a "visual arts specialist" presumably is also a "sophisticated constructivist." Presumably such a person knows that effort is not a fail-safe indicator of quality, just as "good anthropologists do not essentialize groups." And this of course bears not in the least upon the revealed preferences of "ordinary folk."
For a long time Western art theory has self-curated its own eclectic apocrypha of cultural relativity, as in McLuhan's anecdote of the African chief with an alarm clock strapped to his back. For better or worse it is no longer necessary to rely on apocrypha in such matters, not when there exists, purportedly, an entire "ecosemiotic" science of "artefact categorization" proceeding from first principles. If such work is taken seriously, what it suggests, again, is that short of everyone becoming a "specialist" in everything, better people will not be produced. And it is very imaginable but unfortunately, for the time being, equally dubious as a practical matter that behaviorist remedies of improved environment and institutions could be hammered out via community self-government. No brakes, no community self-government.
All merely to say what both radicals and reactionaries have been saying for a long time: a populism of Revealed Preference is no populism at all.
Richard Feynman, "Cargo Cult Science" (Caltech’s 1974 commencement address)
Francisco Gil-White, "Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” to the Human Brain?"
Current Anthropology 42(4) (2001)
Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus (2015)
Jean-Luc Jucker and Justin L. Barrett, "Cognitive Constraints on the Visual Arts: An Empirical Study of the Role of Perceived Intentions in Appreciation Judgements"
Journal of Cognition and Culture 11(1) (2011)
According to the European Center for Populism Studies, "the ideational approach" defines populism as
an ideology which presents “the people” as a morally good force and contrasts them against “the elite”, who are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving. Populists differ in how “the people” are defined, but it can be based along class, ethnic, or national lines. . . . the populist decides who the real people are; and whoever does not want to be unified on the populist’s terms is completely and utterly excluded . . . [02-C1]
To this it can only be said: corruption and self-dealing exist. Be it denied that they (or any other human construct) exist as ultimate realities or essences, a Real Populism nonetheless rises to meet them on the pragmatic and phenomenal levels. Individuals, groups, institutions: all may be or become corrupt.
Drawing "lines" of the "class, ethnic, or national" variety certainly is highly suspect here. The class, the ethnic group, and the nation are themselves the most prolific breeding grounds for "corrupt and self-serving" behavior; this precisely to the extent that groups qua groups find themselves conscious of their difference. The phenomenon of tolerating profoundly "corrupt" dealings with out-groups while a strict moral code prevails among the in-group is too widespread to require elaboration here. "Elite" corruption is merely one instance of this, the instance which the most people are most comfortable talking about: after all, most people are not "elites" and hence do not implicate themselves with such talk.
A Real Populism refuses this moral double-standard, on which no class, race, nation, or gender has had a monopoly. It seeks a basis for association in traits that are more than skin-deep.
When suggested by an interviewer that he had "become a man of the right," historian Christopher Lasch replied, "if I have to be labelled I would prefer to be called a populist." Acknowledging that "populism can be reactionary," Lasch enumerates its "values":
a sense of limits, a respect for the accomplishments and aspirations of ordinary people, a realistic appraisal of life's possibilities, genuine hope without utopianism which trusts life without denying its tragic character.
"Above all," he concludes,
it is connected to a moral tradition. For this reason alone we cannot let it go out of fashion. [02-E2]
In contrast to this insistence on maintaining connection to a moral tradition, the ECPS article does not seem too concerned with the question of what, exactly, is "morally good" and what is "corrupt and self-serving." In fact, anyone who is too sure of the answer is a threat to democracy. The problem with "unifi[cation] on the populist’s terms" seems not to be the nature of the terms but the mere fact that there are terms.
Certainly "not everyone who criticizes elites is automatically a populist," and "keeping a close eye on elites can in fact plausibly be seen as a sign of good democratic engagement." It is even "completely normal" to hold certain "values" which don't align with one's community; yet to "personalize and moralize political conflict" is to exit "productive democracy" and descend into "anti-pluralism."
Between this kind of "elite" equivocation and the close-at-hand caricature of "populist" vulgarity with which it comforts itself, it is hard to say which is the greater threat to peace and stability.
It is hardly novel that a loaded term such as "populism" could be thought of differently by observers separated in time and space. In this case, however, the juxtaposition of disparate standpoints poses a crucial and substantive question.
As Lasch insists on staying "connected to a moral tradition," so for the ECPS "populism inevitably involves a claim to a moral monopoly," leaving all others "completely and utterly excluded." This is a question, then, not merely of multiculturalism but in fact, if such a term may be permitted, of multimoralism.
Lasch's later work fills out his position. [02-C3] "The impending crisis of competence and civic trust . . . casts a heavy pall of doubt over" the notion that "it is liberal institutions, not the character of citizens, that make democracy work." (85-6) "Formally democratic institutions do not guarantee a workable social order." (85) Further, if fellow citizens "are never held up to any kind of judgment," then "the question that really matters—How should I live?" becomes a mere "matter of taste." (87)
Indeed,
this deeper and more difficult question, rightly understood, requires us to speak of impersonal virtues... If we believe in these things, moreover, we must be prepared to recommend them to everyone, as the moral preconditions of a good life. To refer everything to a "plurality of ethical commitments" means that we make no demands on anyone and acknowledge no one's right to make any demands on ourselves. (87-8)
Hence, "it is our reluctance to make demands on each other, much more than our reluctance to help those in need, that is sapping the strength of democracy today." (107) "We can enjoy only the most rudimentary kind of common life," for "we have no basis on which either to demand respect or to grant it." (88)
For Lasch, "liberal democracy has lived off the borrowed capital of moral and religious traditions antedating the rise of liberalism," (86) hence confounding the historical data. Only now that this "capital" has dried up is democratic formalism fending for itself; the result has been the recapitulation of social ills rather than their remedy.
Whatever objections this line may be open to, it plainly enough isolates the crucial hidden premise of the ECPS article, which is precisely this "liberal" faith in institutions and their attendant formalism to deliver not merely a "workable public order" but much else besides. For the varying breadths of moral "pluralism" entailed by several hundred, hundred thousand, or hundred million citizens there is prescribed, ostensibly, the same set of procedures.
Lasch's point bears repeating:
If we believe in these things, ...we must be prepared to recommend them to everyone.
This is morality. It entails the very real possibility of exclusion, including self-exclusion. It matters not whether morality is relative in an abstract or philosophical sense. It matters not what roles "nature" and "nurture" have played in retrospect. Morality can be severely strained by circumstance, it can be explained or explained away, it can ossify or evolve; but if it is amenable to the quotidian bargaining or suggestion of practical politics, it is not morality anymore.
Noam Chomsky [02-C4] is onto this question, if somewhat obliquely, when he observes that "American politics is a politics of accommodation that successfully excludes moral considerations." Rather, "only pragmatic considerations of cost and utility guide our actions."
It is deplorable, but nonetheless true, that what has changed American public opinion and the domestic political picture is not the efforts of the "peace movement"—still less the declarations of any political spokesmen—but rather the Vietnamese resistance, which simply will not yield to American force. What is more, the "responsible" attitude is that opposition to the war on grounds of cost is not, as I have said, deplorable, but rather admirable... (10)
Faced with atrocity,
By entering into the arena of argument and counterargument, of technical feasibility and tactics, of footnotes and citations, by accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one's humanity. (9)
In these respects, Vietnam certainly stands as a lurid historical monument to a democratic formalism that has lost its moral compass. But even Chomsky here seems to take it for granted that most people's morals would align on such a grave matter were they simply deemed admissable, a questionable assumption and one which itself evinces a vulgar rather than a Real populism.
Another unlikely angle on moral pluralism comes from William Stephenson [ 02-C5 ] , who concludes that
almost all that we are in selfhood respects is given to us in relation to social controls. [Yet] the self so put upon us is to a degree false—a façade only. The person has to be what custom or status demands of him. (pp. 192-195)
Without having to deny that inner-direction has its roots in history the facts for other-direction suggest more immediate causal agencies. ... New Yorkers moving to California or Texas want to behave like everyone around them; they do so in terms of the trivia of modern consumer goods—cars, homes, dress, barbecue pits, swimming pools, and the rest—not out of any sense of shame but out of dissonance, followed by self-expansion, self-respect, and self-expression. They change their ways, and their social character follows suit. Whether their deeper value-systems fall in line as well is another matter; our own view is that it would be well to recognize that early internalizations remain untouched. (83)
Writing at the twilight of American consensus politics and without recourse to the sophisticated laboratory psychology which emerged later, Stephenson the opinion researcher and methodologist has already glimpsed the social psychology of total polarization that by the 2010s had acquired unqualified scientific endorsement and entered the popular discourse: Senator McCarthy's approval rating was virtually unaffected by his censure; there are two completely contradictory definitions of "democracy" in the U.S., each of which perseveres in rather total ignorance of the other. This is also, a populist would argue, a glimpse of the demarcation line beyond which people cease to be amenable to democratic compromise. A Populist Aesthetics takes note as well that there is a boundary (but also a nexus) here between the aesthetic and the moral.
people invoke an expression, "Balkanization," about the mess created by fragmented states, as if fragmentation was a bad thing,...but nobody uses "Helvetization" to describe its successes. [ 02-C6 ]
Whether moral pluralism is truly untenable or merely fragile, it is hardly surprising that so much vulgar populism of the 2010s and 2020s has been an anti-globalist populism. Yet the pop-psychology that is deployed to account for the evident racism of these movements can seemingly produce solutions only in negative, so harshly do these solutions grate against the creed of democratic formalism.
There is of course much boilerplate talk of scapegoating, much talk of people under threat (often it is even granted to be a real threat, such as economic strife) reacting the way people under threat always do, whether in a psychology lab, a work performance review, or a school playground. But pluralism is a threat to the personal moral absolutism which is the bedrock of the self-concept. "Almost all that we are in selfhood respects is given to us in relation to social controls." People for the evident racism of these movements can seemingly produce solutions only in negative, so harshly do these solutions grate against the creed of democratic formalism.
There is of course much boilerplate talk of scapegoating, much talk of people under threat (often it is even granted to be a real threat, such as economic strife) reacting the way people under threat always do, whether in a psychology lab, a work performance review, or a school playground. But pluralism is a threat to the personal moral absolutism which is the bedrock of the self-concept. "Almost all that we are in selfhood respects is given to us in relation to social controls." People adapt easily "in terms of the trivia of modern consumer goods." But destabilizing the edifice of "social control" strikes at our very "selfhood." When that happens, as Ernest Becker sums it up, we are "as good as dead." [02-E7]
Exasperated globalists throw their hands up at the historical moving targets of race and nationality; it seems to matter not at all who the immigrants actually are or where they come from, they will be opposed regardless. It seems it hardly matters if they really are morally compatible or incompatible with their hosts, though anti-globalist commentators fixate endlessly on this as the decisive question and are well-prepared to explain away the fact that the same line was taken against their own immigrant ancestors. It seems America has learned nothing from its own history and Europe learned its own too well. The exasperated are onto something here that the sanguine overlook. They should take their own exasperated observations more seriously. They apply tortuous depth psychology to observed behavior while taking words at face value. They have got it backwards.
What is at issue here, namely, is the right to form and maintain communities of moral consensus. Alongside whatever shortcomings they also have, populists refuse to abdicate responsibility for the reconciliation of disparate moralities to the formal vicissitudes of a neo-liberal "politics of accommodation" ill-equipped to handle such a task.
This is a question of "sovereignty," certainly, but not just any sovereignty. Populists (and some others) are notably unmoved by the line that globalism has "lifted millions out of poverty." Globalists ask rhetorically, What on earth could take precedence over that? They should ask their own exasperated question more sincerely. It would elicit the sincere answers which they had already decided don't exist.
Prejudiced or not in whatever direction, vulgar populists may in fact prove above all to be poor judges of their own line of exclusion. They hurt themselves, too, by refusing community with foreigners who may ultimately prove like-minded and up to the enormous task facing them. This is not an easy problem to solve, but at least it is theoretically amenable to some technical refinement in a way that moral bedrock cannot be. There is every reason to think that eventual assimilation and acceptance (in some order) are just as inevitable as initial opposition. But responsibility for this cannot simply be imposed upon the rooted any more at least it is theoretically amenable to some technical refinement in a way that moral bedrock cannot be. There is every reason to think that eventual assimilation and acceptance (in some order) are just as inevitable as initial opposition. But responsibility for this cannot simply be imposed upon the rooted any more than assimilation itself can be imposed upon the uprooted.
This is the pragmatic view. A blind faith in institutions is not.