Reason #7--It Takes the Objective AND the Subjective
As I mentioned before, I began writing my personal take on Marx when I was spending most of my time lying flat on my back. I was still functioning; I could take a couple of Vicodin and go teach class, grade papers and spend time with my daughter, but the evenings and the nights, as anyone with back pain can testify, were the worst. During one of the first weeks of my pain, before I had a regular prescription for codeine, I grew more depressed with each passing day. I did not care too much about anything anymore. Thank God for the narcotics that were able to at least get me off the floor and engaging in life on some level after that.
But the doctors didn’t have many answers. My physician referred me to a back surgeon, who said that I could probably go on like this indefinitely, but my condition would only worsen. He gave me back exercises to do, and he said that I may be able to lessen the pain with this therapy, but, longterm, the only thing he really had to offer me was surgery.
I wasn’t ready for that, but I was close. I did the exercises religiously. I talked to everyone I knew about alternative therapies, including massage, yoga and acupuncture, and I took their advice. In fact, I visited an acupuncturist a few times, but I couldn’t afford the $60 a session for long, and I wasn’t experiencing any tangible results, so I quit.
One friend of mine told me about a book called Healing Back Pain by a doctor named John Sarno. She said her husband had also been flat on his back, and this book got him up off the floor without drugs. Sarno had found that most people by their mid-20s had herniated and desiccated discs, but they had no pain. He acknowledged that the pain many of us experience was physically real, but questioned whether it was being caused by something other than the apparent injury. After years of treating these patients, he developed a theory that the pain was a genuine physical effect of an emotional cause, generally anger.
My friend explained this theory carefully, but I wasn’t ready to hear it. All I heard was that the pain was psychological, and I knew my pain was real. I’d insisted for three years that my neurological symptoms (skin crawling essentially) had been real, and the outbreak of severe pain as well as the CatScan of my discs was my vindication. As suspicious as I was of Western medicine’s shortcomings, my experiences with asthma had made me very resistant to psychological explanations, and I’d also learned that nothing but a doctor’s shot or prescription was a guaranteed fix. The same could be said for my pain pills.
I accepted her advice graciously, but I didn’t act on it. Instead, I stuck with my neck exercises, and by spring, when I was to be re-evaluated for surgery, my pain had diminished considerably, so I was able to put that off.
But, the neck pain came back for the holidays the following year, and I started going through several pills a day. That's when I finally read Healing Back Pain. I couldn’t put it down because it met me right where I was living. It carefully began by describing the horror of backpain in such a way that I knew Sarno knew what he was talking about, and he was clearly granting that it was real. He made a point of giving a physical explanation of the pain’s causes before daring to speculate about any emotional issues at its root.
Using his own story as a doctor treating back pain for several decades, Sarno eased into how he began to question the relationship between the back injuries and the pain. He noticed contradictions between what should be the effects of the injuries and their place of origin in the nerves. He argued that the pain was caused not by pressure from the disc but by a tension in that area of the back. He called that condition Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS), and it was in his effort to explain this syndrome that he began to tackle an emotional root.
He talked about anger and how we are socialized not to express it and, worse, not even to acknowledge it. He personalized his theory by explaining how he had put an end to his own migraines by listing what was making him angry whenever he had the first visual symptoms of an oncoming attack. His theory of treatment echoed this approach. When pain was coming on, he told patients to think about it psychologically and emotionally. What was going on that might be making them angry?
What he found was that this approach seemed to alert the brain that the cause of this tension was being acknowledged. Very often, the perverse rewiring of the emotional response would cease. He said that many people became better the minute they began thinking of their condition in these terms.
I sat and read his book for about 3 hours straight realizing he had me. I had always been a “nice guy,” an empathizer, who rarely felt I had the right to my anger. According to Sarno, rationalizing away anger didn’t work. If I was angry, right or wrong, the emotion would find expression, and if I did not feel good about my anger (which I rarely did), it made an odd sort of sense that it would turn against me.
In the second hour of reading that book, my pain began to diminish. Sarno said it would grow smaller and begin moving around once I found it out. It did. Though I renewed and sometimes took my pain medication after that day, I knew in my heart I really didn’t need it the same way I did before. When I got the symptoms, I went through a process of listing just as Sarno did for his migraines, and the pain always diminished. I get some restless leg type symptoms still today, and my lower back pains (which predate the neck pains) still flare up at times, but even these can be greatly eased when I think of them as stemming from a tension disorder and an emotional root.
This has even got me pretty convinced of an emotional root to that asthma (which I denied throughout my childhood), and I do know that I can associate various aspects of it with my emotional state at the time. I also know that a strong asthma attack is potentially deadly, so I still treat the disorder with respect, but I no longer see the psychological root and physical reality as contradictory explanations.
I tell this story to complicate things a little in, hopefully, a constructive way. After all, though I associate Marxism with pretty straightforward scientific method, this example shows my personal experience with the shortcomings of conventional science. The important thing to note is that Sarno drew his conclusions based on scientific reasoning. He simply factored in that emotional element of what it is to be human in his exploration of the physical, something Western medicine still has a hard time doing.
In some ways, I think some rejection of Marxist ideas has a similar root cause. The Western mind is not comfortable drawing connections between objective conditions and their social expression. Instead, we tend to relegate science to things scientific (the physical world), and we treat psychological and social illnesses as subjective conditions, as moral weakness. There are exceptions, of course, but the treatment of anxiety and depression as simply physical problems to be medicated also leads down a dead end path.
This division between the rational and the spiritual no doubt accounts for our society’s extreme disconnect between science and spirituality. These ways to view the world co-exist in many unexamined ways, and that's one reason I've wanted to tackle monsters, Marx and music together.
But as my back story testifies, and as most of us quietly know somewhere deep in our hearts, the truth lies in some connection between the outer and the inner world, the objective and the subjective. We cannot solve our objective problems without the will and the vision to do so, but we can also not solve our moral and spiritual problems without an understanding of our objective conditions.
Marxism asks us to identify the contradictions between what we believe and what we collectively perceive to be true. In many ways, our daily lives are simply reactions to forces that bat us back and forth without any apparent rhyme or reason. Because of its focus on the relationship between the subjective and objective dimensions of what it means to be human (that's actually "dialectical materialism" in a nutshell), Marxism hands us tools for rising above the fray. Not grappling with Marx’s theory at all, as Americans in general have not, means attempting to navigate a sea of subjective squalls and objective currents blindfolded....
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Reason #6--Words Matter
We are taught Marxists not capitalists spread “propaganda." They “infiltrate” and they “recruit.” They talk about the “working class” or “the proletariat” revolution against a “bourgeois system.” They talk about the “abolition of private property” and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
In these words, we hear the things Americans hate most. In a country founded on “free speech,” “propaganda” suggests lies dictated from above. To “infiltrate” is to undermine the will of the group. To “recruit” is to brainwash. We hear “working class” as blue collar. And “bourgeois” is a stuffy, European word in which many hear a put down to their way of life.
We work hard our whole lives for a few nice things--a house, a car and a little plot of land--and this is what we see as the “private property” the communist wants to steal. “Dictatorship,” too, is an anti-American concept, the antithesis of our democracy.
But what we hear and what is being said are often two different things. In this case, Marx’s use of "dictatorship" (a century before the 20th century fascism we associate with the word) means a stage of authentic political control by the will of the people--the character of that control is up to us. Right now, many would say we live in something close to a global dictatorship run by corporations.
In fact, Marx’s vocabulary sounds so alien because it talks about those things Americans simply learn not to talk about. Our fears of Marxist concepts reveal who we are.
Anyone reading this probably knows we are thoroughly propagandized already.We are propagandized, first and foremost, by family ideas that spring from relationships in the system. Our churches reconcile social divisions and war-making with the often compassionate and peace-loving messages of the prophets. We are propagandized in the classroom by textbooks (generally censored from the right and left). Our politicians propagandize us; this is how they run for office and maintain public support once in office. We are also propagandized by large corporations, which own all of our major media and control its content through the economic vote of corporate advertisers. Wherever we work, the interests of that organization propagandize us.
This is not all bad of course. Propaganda is a neutral thing, neither true nor untrue. Originating with the early Roman Catholic Church in its efforts to spread Christianity, propaganda is simply a term for any mechanism used to intentionally spread ideas. What we believe is generally based on a long history of propaganda that favors the current system, even as we see all the tell-tale signs that it is breaking down.
Narrow systems of propaganda, like gossip, keep us from questioning the system in fundamental ways. It is not the system that is making our life miserable; it’s the damn traditionalists, or the administrators, or the students. It’s not the system; it’s the night crew or the customer or the patient who makes me not want to get out of bed in the morning. Capitalism’s most insidious propaganda is that which operates at the level of tribalism, dividing full-timers from part-timers as slickly as Crips get divided from Bloods.
As Americans, we have been heavily propagandized down to the level of our language while, at the same time, being taught that propaganda is evil. That’s a neat trick. Think about that. If there is a single, clear symptom of just how diseased our system is it is that we have multifold, multilayered systems of propaganda that insist they are not propaganda.
We just choose what propaganda to believe based on that which is embraced by our families, our churches, our schools, our news media and our social cliques. Interestingly enough, the negative connotations for the word “propaganda” started with Protestant propaganda against Catholicism. But propaganda is not denominational--Jesus and the Apostle Paul did the same thing. They were two of history’s greatest propagandists, and that doesn’t mean they were liars; that means they spread new ideas deliberately and effectively.
Christians must recognize the Creator of the universe as a propagandist who used the ingenious tool of an illegitimate child born in a manger as his or her chief propagandist. Judaism has Abraham and Moses and all of the other Old Testament prophets: Islam, Mohammed; Buddhism, Siddhartha or the Dalai Lama; Hinduism, Lord Krishna. Each religion has its priests, ministers, rabbis, monks, shaman, gurus and yogis. Each one a crucial piece in a mechanism for intentionally spreading ideas.
And I am a propagandist as both a writer and a teacher, though both professions deny it. Both professions like to pretend to be objective, but data comes with theory. Information without ideas is meaningless by definition. What most writers and teachers do is propagandize as safely as possible, teaching those ideas generally already accepted by most of society. It's called keeping your job....
....And, of course, that is why one aspect of the relationship between students and teachers is based upon suspicion. The trick is to BS the teacher, writing opaque nonsense or regurgitating what’s been said. Though I'd guess most teachers believe in what they do, students have good reason for the doubt. It goes back to the roots of American education, for instance. In the mid-1800s, the economic incentive behind the spread of public education was to develop an industrial workforce. Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States, describes the cause and its predictable effect:
“ . . . the spread of public school education enabled the learning of writing, reading, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers, skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority. A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote: ‘The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent: the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly.’”
Our approach to education has evolved a great deal over the past century, but most of us know that chill. Teaching what I know about writing is a daily battle for sincere communication in an atmosphere hostile to such communication on many levels. This atmosphere stems in part from the assumption of the teacher as authority and student as empty vessel. Fighting that subjective game, I try to be honest about my own ignorance. When I don’t have an answer to a question, whether it is a stylistic dilemma or a simple comma rule, I try to admit it. This is a little like throwing blood to an audience trained as sharks, but I know of no better way to get at reality.
My students are just as fearful about expressing their own ignorance, to each other and to me. Both teachers and students are trained to project an idealized image of themselves, which means denying much of what we really know. Since we don't learn unless we make use of what we do know and recognize our limits, breaking down false fronts is essential to real learning....
We are taught Marxists not capitalists spread “propaganda." They “infiltrate” and they “recruit.” They talk about the “working class” or “the proletariat” revolution against a “bourgeois system.” They talk about the “abolition of private property” and a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
In these words, we hear the things Americans hate most. In a country founded on “free speech,” “propaganda” suggests lies dictated from above. To “infiltrate” is to undermine the will of the group. To “recruit” is to brainwash. We hear “working class” as blue collar. And “bourgeois” is a stuffy, European word in which many hear a put down to their way of life.
We work hard our whole lives for a few nice things--a house, a car and a little plot of land--and this is what we see as the “private property” the communist wants to steal. “Dictatorship,” too, is an anti-American concept, the antithesis of our democracy.
But what we hear and what is being said are often two different things. In this case, Marx’s use of "dictatorship" (a century before the 20th century fascism we associate with the word) means a stage of authentic political control by the will of the people--the character of that control is up to us. Right now, many would say we live in something close to a global dictatorship run by corporations.
In fact, Marx’s vocabulary sounds so alien because it talks about those things Americans simply learn not to talk about. Our fears of Marxist concepts reveal who we are.
Anyone reading this probably knows we are thoroughly propagandized already.We are propagandized, first and foremost, by family ideas that spring from relationships in the system. Our churches reconcile social divisions and war-making with the often compassionate and peace-loving messages of the prophets. We are propagandized in the classroom by textbooks (generally censored from the right and left). Our politicians propagandize us; this is how they run for office and maintain public support once in office. We are also propagandized by large corporations, which own all of our major media and control its content through the economic vote of corporate advertisers. Wherever we work, the interests of that organization propagandize us.
This is not all bad of course. Propaganda is a neutral thing, neither true nor untrue. Originating with the early Roman Catholic Church in its efforts to spread Christianity, propaganda is simply a term for any mechanism used to intentionally spread ideas. What we believe is generally based on a long history of propaganda that favors the current system, even as we see all the tell-tale signs that it is breaking down.
Narrow systems of propaganda, like gossip, keep us from questioning the system in fundamental ways. It is not the system that is making our life miserable; it’s the damn traditionalists, or the administrators, or the students. It’s not the system; it’s the night crew or the customer or the patient who makes me not want to get out of bed in the morning. Capitalism’s most insidious propaganda is that which operates at the level of tribalism, dividing full-timers from part-timers as slickly as Crips get divided from Bloods.
As Americans, we have been heavily propagandized down to the level of our language while, at the same time, being taught that propaganda is evil. That’s a neat trick. Think about that. If there is a single, clear symptom of just how diseased our system is it is that we have multifold, multilayered systems of propaganda that insist they are not propaganda.
We just choose what propaganda to believe based on that which is embraced by our families, our churches, our schools, our news media and our social cliques. Interestingly enough, the negative connotations for the word “propaganda” started with Protestant propaganda against Catholicism. But propaganda is not denominational--Jesus and the Apostle Paul did the same thing. They were two of history’s greatest propagandists, and that doesn’t mean they were liars; that means they spread new ideas deliberately and effectively.
Christians must recognize the Creator of the universe as a propagandist who used the ingenious tool of an illegitimate child born in a manger as his or her chief propagandist. Judaism has Abraham and Moses and all of the other Old Testament prophets: Islam, Mohammed; Buddhism, Siddhartha or the Dalai Lama; Hinduism, Lord Krishna. Each religion has its priests, ministers, rabbis, monks, shaman, gurus and yogis. Each one a crucial piece in a mechanism for intentionally spreading ideas.
And I am a propagandist as both a writer and a teacher, though both professions deny it. Both professions like to pretend to be objective, but data comes with theory. Information without ideas is meaningless by definition. What most writers and teachers do is propagandize as safely as possible, teaching those ideas generally already accepted by most of society. It's called keeping your job....
....And, of course, that is why one aspect of the relationship between students and teachers is based upon suspicion. The trick is to BS the teacher, writing opaque nonsense or regurgitating what’s been said. Though I'd guess most teachers believe in what they do, students have good reason for the doubt. It goes back to the roots of American education, for instance. In the mid-1800s, the economic incentive behind the spread of public education was to develop an industrial workforce. Howard Zinn, in A People’s History of the United States, describes the cause and its predictable effect:
“ . . . the spread of public school education enabled the learning of writing, reading, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers, skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority. A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote: ‘The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent: the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly.’”
Our approach to education has evolved a great deal over the past century, but most of us know that chill. Teaching what I know about writing is a daily battle for sincere communication in an atmosphere hostile to such communication on many levels. This atmosphere stems in part from the assumption of the teacher as authority and student as empty vessel. Fighting that subjective game, I try to be honest about my own ignorance. When I don’t have an answer to a question, whether it is a stylistic dilemma or a simple comma rule, I try to admit it. This is a little like throwing blood to an audience trained as sharks, but I know of no better way to get at reality.
My students are just as fearful about expressing their own ignorance, to each other and to me. Both teachers and students are trained to project an idealized image of themselves, which means denying much of what we really know. Since we don't learn unless we make use of what we do know and recognize our limits, breaking down false fronts is essential to real learning....
Friday, December 15, 2006
Reason #5--Reality Matters
“If Herr Bukunin knew even one thing about the situation of a manager of a
workers’ cooperative factory, all his hallucinations about domination would go to
the devil.”
--Karl Marx, review of Bukunin’s “Statehood and Anarchy,” 1875
In the early 80s, my gruff, gray-headed semantics professor passionately railed against the insanity of the world around him. Thumping his critical thinker’s bible--Wendell Johnson’s 1946 book, People in Quandaries--he raged over the blind machinations of the university, condemning the institution for firing two award-winning teachers in a row because they were short on publishing. One period, his lecture sang hallelujah to a Vietnam era speech by Dick Gregory, skewering the insanity that prioritized a piece of cloth, the American flag, over the right of free speech.
All of this passion erupted from a fairly quiet little book. Johnson’s People in Quandaries argued that most of society’s irrational and unhealthy behavior stemmed from what he called “verbal cocoons”—our subjective worldview that sifts through learned abstractions to interpret events in a way that reinforces our preconceptions. Johnson writes:
“Quandaries, then, are rather like verbal cocoons in which individuals elaborately encase themselves, and from which, under circumstances common in our time, they do not tend to hatch. The peculiar structure of these cocoons appears to be determined in large measure by the structure of the society in which they are formed--and the structure of this society has been and continues to be determined significantly by the structure of the language which we so unconsciously acquire and so unreflectively employ.”
If he did nothing more, my semantics teacher dramatically challenged us to take a close look at the abstractions that made up our view of reality, question them and allow ourselves to see new possibilities.
In his struggle for a similar sanity, Karl Marx often reminds me of that Semantics professor. Early in his career, he argues against “setting up any dogmatic flag” and dismisses “sentimental, utopian, mutton-headed socialism.” He’s most impatient with his fellow revolutionaries who want to achieve romantic goals while ignoring realistic conditions. In his final years, his critique of the anarchist Mikhail Bukunin reveals his ongoing exasperation with those who won’t grapple with the messiness of reality. Responding directly to Bakunin’s criticism of his theory, Marx writes, “Schoolboy drivel! . . . He understands absolutely nothing about social revolution; all he knows are its political phrases. For him its economic requisites do not exist . . . . Will power and not economic conditions is the basis of his social revolution.”
Marx insisted the path to realizing our dreams must be traveled with good maps and eyes wide open. Consistent with anyone who believes in scientific method, Marx saw goals for what they were, ideas (subjective concepts) that may only be achieved by a thorough understanding of the workings of the material world (objective conditions). This is the essential difference in Marx’s philosophy and Hegel’s dialectics that influenced him. Hegel believed the history of human ideas evolved through a series of arguments and counterarguments, purely products of the mind. Marx believed this series of arguments and counterarguments emerged and challenged one another based on changing realities. With the industrial revolution, Marx saw the potential for a society run for the benefit of all, but he believed that resolution would only be possible when the impoverished majority took power from the elite minority.
This balancing of the ideological and the material runs throughout his most concise summation of his theory, his famous preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” Roughly, this is what it says:
*In their workplace, people must assume certain relationships to one another whether they like it or not. These relationships correspond to the development of our technology. As a whole, these relationships make up the basic framework of society, and on top of that we build legal and political systems consistent with our ideas. But our ideas come from our experiences in this structure. At various points, developing technologies make the old relationships obsolete—our outdated social framework becomes an obstacle for the entire system. This is the beginning of revolution. Everything begins to change rapidly. Our ideas change in an unpredictable variety of legal, political, religious, artistic and philosophical ways. The important goal during such upheaval is to understand what’s really going on by asking tough questions and seeking contradictory answers—plain old scientific method. The struggle for revolution shows us just what’s possible, and when people finally run the world in the best interests of all, true civilization will begin.*
For over 150 years, Marx’s analysis of the arch of capitalism has generally been proven accurate. Marx theorized the globalization of capital and the falling value of labor. His forecast saw smaller and smaller numbers of the very rich forced into increasingly barbaric competition while the middle classes began to disappear. The rich divided further and further from the poor, the movement of capital would become more speculative, the pace of financial transactions would accelerate faster and faster to keep the system afloat. This whirlwind of money would not serve the needs of the growing numbers of poor, and it would erode our quality of life, destroy our environment, deplete our resources and rob us of a salvageable future. Marx’s vision of communism was not a vision of a system that could compete against a market economy; it would have to overcome it. We manage civilization cooperatively, or we lose it altogether.
“If Herr Bukunin knew even one thing about the situation of a manager of a
workers’ cooperative factory, all his hallucinations about domination would go to
the devil.”
--Karl Marx, review of Bukunin’s “Statehood and Anarchy,” 1875
In the early 80s, my gruff, gray-headed semantics professor passionately railed against the insanity of the world around him. Thumping his critical thinker’s bible--Wendell Johnson’s 1946 book, People in Quandaries--he raged over the blind machinations of the university, condemning the institution for firing two award-winning teachers in a row because they were short on publishing. One period, his lecture sang hallelujah to a Vietnam era speech by Dick Gregory, skewering the insanity that prioritized a piece of cloth, the American flag, over the right of free speech.
All of this passion erupted from a fairly quiet little book. Johnson’s People in Quandaries argued that most of society’s irrational and unhealthy behavior stemmed from what he called “verbal cocoons”—our subjective worldview that sifts through learned abstractions to interpret events in a way that reinforces our preconceptions. Johnson writes:
“Quandaries, then, are rather like verbal cocoons in which individuals elaborately encase themselves, and from which, under circumstances common in our time, they do not tend to hatch. The peculiar structure of these cocoons appears to be determined in large measure by the structure of the society in which they are formed--and the structure of this society has been and continues to be determined significantly by the structure of the language which we so unconsciously acquire and so unreflectively employ.”
If he did nothing more, my semantics teacher dramatically challenged us to take a close look at the abstractions that made up our view of reality, question them and allow ourselves to see new possibilities.
In his struggle for a similar sanity, Karl Marx often reminds me of that Semantics professor. Early in his career, he argues against “setting up any dogmatic flag” and dismisses “sentimental, utopian, mutton-headed socialism.” He’s most impatient with his fellow revolutionaries who want to achieve romantic goals while ignoring realistic conditions. In his final years, his critique of the anarchist Mikhail Bukunin reveals his ongoing exasperation with those who won’t grapple with the messiness of reality. Responding directly to Bakunin’s criticism of his theory, Marx writes, “Schoolboy drivel! . . . He understands absolutely nothing about social revolution; all he knows are its political phrases. For him its economic requisites do not exist . . . . Will power and not economic conditions is the basis of his social revolution.”
Marx insisted the path to realizing our dreams must be traveled with good maps and eyes wide open. Consistent with anyone who believes in scientific method, Marx saw goals for what they were, ideas (subjective concepts) that may only be achieved by a thorough understanding of the workings of the material world (objective conditions). This is the essential difference in Marx’s philosophy and Hegel’s dialectics that influenced him. Hegel believed the history of human ideas evolved through a series of arguments and counterarguments, purely products of the mind. Marx believed this series of arguments and counterarguments emerged and challenged one another based on changing realities. With the industrial revolution, Marx saw the potential for a society run for the benefit of all, but he believed that resolution would only be possible when the impoverished majority took power from the elite minority.
This balancing of the ideological and the material runs throughout his most concise summation of his theory, his famous preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” Roughly, this is what it says:
*In their workplace, people must assume certain relationships to one another whether they like it or not. These relationships correspond to the development of our technology. As a whole, these relationships make up the basic framework of society, and on top of that we build legal and political systems consistent with our ideas. But our ideas come from our experiences in this structure. At various points, developing technologies make the old relationships obsolete—our outdated social framework becomes an obstacle for the entire system. This is the beginning of revolution. Everything begins to change rapidly. Our ideas change in an unpredictable variety of legal, political, religious, artistic and philosophical ways. The important goal during such upheaval is to understand what’s really going on by asking tough questions and seeking contradictory answers—plain old scientific method. The struggle for revolution shows us just what’s possible, and when people finally run the world in the best interests of all, true civilization will begin.*
For over 150 years, Marx’s analysis of the arch of capitalism has generally been proven accurate. Marx theorized the globalization of capital and the falling value of labor. His forecast saw smaller and smaller numbers of the very rich forced into increasingly barbaric competition while the middle classes began to disappear. The rich divided further and further from the poor, the movement of capital would become more speculative, the pace of financial transactions would accelerate faster and faster to keep the system afloat. This whirlwind of money would not serve the needs of the growing numbers of poor, and it would erode our quality of life, destroy our environment, deplete our resources and rob us of a salvageable future. Marx’s vision of communism was not a vision of a system that could compete against a market economy; it would have to overcome it. We manage civilization cooperatively, or we lose it altogether.
Reason #4—We Need Each Other to Be Ourselves
I started writing directly about Marx at a point when I was literally hurting about as bad as I’ve ever hurt. Heartbroken, financially broken and physically broken, I was pitifully spending many of my days flat on my back on codeine, nursing herniated discs and wondering just how much writing I still had in me.
One day in particular, I remember I’d put off making some doctor’s appointment because I couldn’t drive, and I happened to have a phone conversation that gave me the kick in the ass that I needed. I was talking to a friend who lived about 500 miles away, and she was alarmed by my situation. She asked me if I had called on my friends for help, and I admitted not really. I don’t remember the details that well, but the gist of it was, “You have got to give other people the opportunity to help you.”
At that moment, I realized I was a creature crippled by my self reliance. To hear people talk, especially those the most obnoxiously vocal and lacking in self awareness, you would think everyone in our society was just looking for a handout, or those who ask for a hand are just too busy enjoying their laziness to do for themselves. But I’ve found almost the opposite to be true. Most people I know would (almost literally) rather die than ask for help.
Ironically, and this is one of those perspectives that comes from being a teacher, it’s the ones who argue otherwise who you’ve really got to watch out for. The students who complains about others taking advantage of a class are the ones who time and time again ask me to bend over backwards for them. And don’t get me started about those who like to tell me about their Christianity while showing no respect or compassion for those sitting right next to them.
But I digress (never said that before, kind of fun), the point is right there at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—self actualization is almost always linked to self transcendence. When we are fully ourselves, we turn outwards. Aside from the obvious significance of this in terms of Marx’s vision of a cooperative society, I think it’s also right there in the concept of that old Aristotelian dialectic to get at the truth. We find ourselves through contradiction. We need others to grasp our reality and the reality of the world around us, and we need others to keep us from dying of pride on our living room floor.
Not long after that rear-kicking phone call, I wrote the following, also for Monsters, Marx & Music:
“Our need ties us to all humanity.”
--Headline, The People’s Tribune
Americans have a knee jerk resistance to the idea of working in groups. We joke, “If you really want to kill an idea, just put it in a committee!” We don’t like to think of ourselves as “joiners.” Other people are “joiners”; other societies are filled with “joiners.” But not us, not Americans.
[12/15/06 interruption--As I reread this, all I have to do is look out my window at the workers putting up the building next door to think how silly our myths of individualism really are. We do amazing things in groups, precious little as individuals acting alone. But still we have these myths, for better and worse, and that’s why they’re worth considering as part of reality themselves.]
A great American icon like John Wayne doesn’t “join.” He rides into town alone. He sees a problem, fixes it and then rides out again. The American lone ranger mentality is not only familiar; it’s pervasive. It is the ideal President, the action hero, the singer-songwriter-virtuoso performer. Though it may be particularly associated with masculinity, it is a more generalized notion of success that is part of the appeal of feminine icons from Madonna to Ani DiFranco to J-Lo.
And of course, this concept of individualism is deeply tied to the American resistance to communism. In American Cold War propaganda, the Russian is a person who lives a dull, colorless existence with his individual freedom sacrificed to an inhuman state. It is this sort of prejudice that General William Westmoreland is banking on when he puffs out his chest in Peter Davis’s Academy Award winning documentary Hearts and Minds and explains, “Well, the Oriental does not put the same high price on life as the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” (Davis cuts this interview with footage of a Vietnamese mother sick with grief, throwing herself atop her dead son’s coffin in his grave.)
Though Westmoreland’s racism is about as disgusting as this mindset can get, the fact that Americans pay great lip service to individual freedom is not a bad thing. We have good reason to be suspicious of groups. As any Psych 101 student learns, numerous psychological studies in the wake of World War II, particularly concerned with explaining the Holocaust, have shown that most people betray their own judgment in groups. People disbelieve their own perception about things as objective as shapes and sizes when a group disagrees with them.
I recently had an experience that brilliantly illustrated not only the reality of groupthink, but also how susceptible I am to its pressures even as I was perfectly aware of what was happening. I was on jury duty, in jury selection, for a man up on marijuana charges.
Screening the jury, the prosecutor asked how many in the potential jury thought that marijuana should be legal. There were at least 50 of us in the room, and not one hand went up. Now, I have no firm opinion on this (and if I were to get into why, it would be nothing more than a distraction), so it was fairly easy for me to wrestle down the bad taste in my mouth as I kept my hand down. But I was surprised because, from my experience teaching English and hearing semester after semester what people have to say about these issues, I would assume a sizeable number, privately, would say that the drug should be legal but regulated.
Then the prosecutor asked how many in the room felt that too many people were in prison on marijuana charges. Now, I do have strong opinions about this. It is injustice, plain and simple, that half the people in our prisons are there on marijuana offenses when well-heeled professional people (perhaps this prosecutor himself) get away with a toke before bedtime on a regular basis. But I noticed no hands going up, and I hesitated, and then I began to rationalize. Should everyone with half a brain that believes these laws are unfairly enforced risk being thrown off of this jury? Sure, we were sworn in, but is this really the elimination of bias or an attempt to guarantee a bias against the defendant? I didn’t raise my hand, but now I knew I was lying.
Then the prosecutor asked how many in the jury pool felt that marijuana should be legalized for medical purposes. 6 hands out of 50, mine included, shot up. What I think is most remarkable about this is not that several hands shot up when one, whoever the leader was, shot his or her up, but that it was only 6. Again, in talking over this experience with my students (and I’ve told it to every one of my classes since it happened), I have not yet heard one person make an argument against the use of medical marijuana, yet only 6 in the jury pool raised their hands. We were all thrown out of the jury within an hour, and my mind reeled over the implications regarding the court system.
Despite the occasional 12 Angry Men scenario, in which a brave individual (again an American hero) challenges the tyranny of the group, this experience drives home the greatest irony of American individualism: the very myth of individualism is groupthink itself. While individuals make very important contributions in this world, a pure individualist is about as desired by the system as the Unabomber. The myth of individualism is little more than a useful form of divide-and-conquer social control.
That’s why our political censors, the politicians--from Joe Lieberman to Jesse Helms, who repeatedly argue that movies, TV, popular music and video games are bombarding our children with too much sex and violence--never speak out against the most insidious, dominant theme in our media, the idea that the path to happiness is individualism. All of these varied means of artistic expression come wrapped in advertising, and that advertising--just like the advertising for everything else we own--almost always has the same message. Buy this SUV, wear this kind of running shoe, visit this website, and you will be happy and free like the actors and models on TV.
Many have attacked various advertising icons, the Marlboro man and the Virginia Slims woman, as examples of the immorality of the tobacco industry--selling mythic American individualism as the outcome of smoking. But the underlying message is not so readily questioned--individual fulfillment as an individual goal to be purchased. Our entire advertising industry sells one message--the American dream is to buy your own happiness. Tough luck if you can’t manage it. Buck up, and remember that philosophy filed under “Plan B”—success is only a state of mind.
To understand our trap, we have to take a close look at our ideal of individualism. Webster’s defines individualism, first and foremost, as “the leading of one’s life in one’s own way without regard for others.” Without getting into the specific doctrines this logic suggests, let’s contemplate that essential philosophy for a moment.
Who really lives his or her life without regard for others? It is a dead end, and it is not even heroic in terms of our culture. This is Ebenezer Scrooge, who lived an isolated life without caring for anyone or anyone else caring for him. Even the mythic John Wayne (or even more pointedly, Clint Eastwood) cowboy took risks to protect a vulnerable township from the malevolence of a band of black hats. Of course, they can and do ride away….but is that their greatness or their tragic flaw?
Among humanity’s most basic impulses (beyond our animalistic instincts) are to love and be loved. In fact, most of us would give up eating a meal or two or sleeping a night or two (or any of our basic drives, including self preservation) for the sake of those we love. We have confused the need to be our own uniquely fulfilled persons with the need to divorce our concerns from the concerns of others. The popular saying that “to love another one must first love one’s self” is no doubt true, but to love one’s self only, to the exclusion of others is a miserable existence. Virtually all of our religions and philosophies counter this idea vigorously with martyrs and teachers who give their lives for the sake of others. In the end, what things heroic or noble come from our individuality unless there is some benefit to others….
I started writing directly about Marx at a point when I was literally hurting about as bad as I’ve ever hurt. Heartbroken, financially broken and physically broken, I was pitifully spending many of my days flat on my back on codeine, nursing herniated discs and wondering just how much writing I still had in me.
One day in particular, I remember I’d put off making some doctor’s appointment because I couldn’t drive, and I happened to have a phone conversation that gave me the kick in the ass that I needed. I was talking to a friend who lived about 500 miles away, and she was alarmed by my situation. She asked me if I had called on my friends for help, and I admitted not really. I don’t remember the details that well, but the gist of it was, “You have got to give other people the opportunity to help you.”
At that moment, I realized I was a creature crippled by my self reliance. To hear people talk, especially those the most obnoxiously vocal and lacking in self awareness, you would think everyone in our society was just looking for a handout, or those who ask for a hand are just too busy enjoying their laziness to do for themselves. But I’ve found almost the opposite to be true. Most people I know would (almost literally) rather die than ask for help.
Ironically, and this is one of those perspectives that comes from being a teacher, it’s the ones who argue otherwise who you’ve really got to watch out for. The students who complains about others taking advantage of a class are the ones who time and time again ask me to bend over backwards for them. And don’t get me started about those who like to tell me about their Christianity while showing no respect or compassion for those sitting right next to them.
But I digress (never said that before, kind of fun), the point is right there at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—self actualization is almost always linked to self transcendence. When we are fully ourselves, we turn outwards. Aside from the obvious significance of this in terms of Marx’s vision of a cooperative society, I think it’s also right there in the concept of that old Aristotelian dialectic to get at the truth. We find ourselves through contradiction. We need others to grasp our reality and the reality of the world around us, and we need others to keep us from dying of pride on our living room floor.
Not long after that rear-kicking phone call, I wrote the following, also for Monsters, Marx & Music:
“Our need ties us to all humanity.”
--Headline, The People’s Tribune
Americans have a knee jerk resistance to the idea of working in groups. We joke, “If you really want to kill an idea, just put it in a committee!” We don’t like to think of ourselves as “joiners.” Other people are “joiners”; other societies are filled with “joiners.” But not us, not Americans.
[12/15/06 interruption--As I reread this, all I have to do is look out my window at the workers putting up the building next door to think how silly our myths of individualism really are. We do amazing things in groups, precious little as individuals acting alone. But still we have these myths, for better and worse, and that’s why they’re worth considering as part of reality themselves.]
A great American icon like John Wayne doesn’t “join.” He rides into town alone. He sees a problem, fixes it and then rides out again. The American lone ranger mentality is not only familiar; it’s pervasive. It is the ideal President, the action hero, the singer-songwriter-virtuoso performer. Though it may be particularly associated with masculinity, it is a more generalized notion of success that is part of the appeal of feminine icons from Madonna to Ani DiFranco to J-Lo.
And of course, this concept of individualism is deeply tied to the American resistance to communism. In American Cold War propaganda, the Russian is a person who lives a dull, colorless existence with his individual freedom sacrificed to an inhuman state. It is this sort of prejudice that General William Westmoreland is banking on when he puffs out his chest in Peter Davis’s Academy Award winning documentary Hearts and Minds and explains, “Well, the Oriental does not put the same high price on life as the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient. And as the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not important.” (Davis cuts this interview with footage of a Vietnamese mother sick with grief, throwing herself atop her dead son’s coffin in his grave.)
Though Westmoreland’s racism is about as disgusting as this mindset can get, the fact that Americans pay great lip service to individual freedom is not a bad thing. We have good reason to be suspicious of groups. As any Psych 101 student learns, numerous psychological studies in the wake of World War II, particularly concerned with explaining the Holocaust, have shown that most people betray their own judgment in groups. People disbelieve their own perception about things as objective as shapes and sizes when a group disagrees with them.
I recently had an experience that brilliantly illustrated not only the reality of groupthink, but also how susceptible I am to its pressures even as I was perfectly aware of what was happening. I was on jury duty, in jury selection, for a man up on marijuana charges.
Screening the jury, the prosecutor asked how many in the potential jury thought that marijuana should be legal. There were at least 50 of us in the room, and not one hand went up. Now, I have no firm opinion on this (and if I were to get into why, it would be nothing more than a distraction), so it was fairly easy for me to wrestle down the bad taste in my mouth as I kept my hand down. But I was surprised because, from my experience teaching English and hearing semester after semester what people have to say about these issues, I would assume a sizeable number, privately, would say that the drug should be legal but regulated.
Then the prosecutor asked how many in the room felt that too many people were in prison on marijuana charges. Now, I do have strong opinions about this. It is injustice, plain and simple, that half the people in our prisons are there on marijuana offenses when well-heeled professional people (perhaps this prosecutor himself) get away with a toke before bedtime on a regular basis. But I noticed no hands going up, and I hesitated, and then I began to rationalize. Should everyone with half a brain that believes these laws are unfairly enforced risk being thrown off of this jury? Sure, we were sworn in, but is this really the elimination of bias or an attempt to guarantee a bias against the defendant? I didn’t raise my hand, but now I knew I was lying.
Then the prosecutor asked how many in the jury pool felt that marijuana should be legalized for medical purposes. 6 hands out of 50, mine included, shot up. What I think is most remarkable about this is not that several hands shot up when one, whoever the leader was, shot his or her up, but that it was only 6. Again, in talking over this experience with my students (and I’ve told it to every one of my classes since it happened), I have not yet heard one person make an argument against the use of medical marijuana, yet only 6 in the jury pool raised their hands. We were all thrown out of the jury within an hour, and my mind reeled over the implications regarding the court system.
Despite the occasional 12 Angry Men scenario, in which a brave individual (again an American hero) challenges the tyranny of the group, this experience drives home the greatest irony of American individualism: the very myth of individualism is groupthink itself. While individuals make very important contributions in this world, a pure individualist is about as desired by the system as the Unabomber. The myth of individualism is little more than a useful form of divide-and-conquer social control.
That’s why our political censors, the politicians--from Joe Lieberman to Jesse Helms, who repeatedly argue that movies, TV, popular music and video games are bombarding our children with too much sex and violence--never speak out against the most insidious, dominant theme in our media, the idea that the path to happiness is individualism. All of these varied means of artistic expression come wrapped in advertising, and that advertising--just like the advertising for everything else we own--almost always has the same message. Buy this SUV, wear this kind of running shoe, visit this website, and you will be happy and free like the actors and models on TV.
Many have attacked various advertising icons, the Marlboro man and the Virginia Slims woman, as examples of the immorality of the tobacco industry--selling mythic American individualism as the outcome of smoking. But the underlying message is not so readily questioned--individual fulfillment as an individual goal to be purchased. Our entire advertising industry sells one message--the American dream is to buy your own happiness. Tough luck if you can’t manage it. Buck up, and remember that philosophy filed under “Plan B”—success is only a state of mind.
To understand our trap, we have to take a close look at our ideal of individualism. Webster’s defines individualism, first and foremost, as “the leading of one’s life in one’s own way without regard for others.” Without getting into the specific doctrines this logic suggests, let’s contemplate that essential philosophy for a moment.
Who really lives his or her life without regard for others? It is a dead end, and it is not even heroic in terms of our culture. This is Ebenezer Scrooge, who lived an isolated life without caring for anyone or anyone else caring for him. Even the mythic John Wayne (or even more pointedly, Clint Eastwood) cowboy took risks to protect a vulnerable township from the malevolence of a band of black hats. Of course, they can and do ride away….but is that their greatness or their tragic flaw?
Among humanity’s most basic impulses (beyond our animalistic instincts) are to love and be loved. In fact, most of us would give up eating a meal or two or sleeping a night or two (or any of our basic drives, including self preservation) for the sake of those we love. We have confused the need to be our own uniquely fulfilled persons with the need to divorce our concerns from the concerns of others. The popular saying that “to love another one must first love one’s self” is no doubt true, but to love one’s self only, to the exclusion of others is a miserable existence. Virtually all of our religions and philosophies counter this idea vigorously with martyrs and teachers who give their lives for the sake of others. In the end, what things heroic or noble come from our individuality unless there is some benefit to others….
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