Always Look on the Bright Side of Life . . . do-do . . . do-do-do-do-do-do . . .

A few mailings ago I cited some passages from a psychoanalytical profile of modern liberalism. The fact that I did so does not necessarily mean that I am a believer in psychoanalysis—it is just that in making an argument one tends to pick up the evidence wherever one can; and in this case it more or less coincided with my own observations down the years.

But then this—this suggested lack of belief in psychoanalysis—should surprise nobody who read my posting of the twentieth of November—the one to do with the Eiger. The underlying substance of that posting was that I am a convinced Doubting Thomas insofar as any possibility of a complete human knowledge of existence or any facet of existence is concerned. Whether it be Freud or Einstein or Pavlov or whoever—and no matter how they may view it themselves—there is no complete and unchallengeable theory of anything existing in the world. And even if there was, we have no way of knowing it.

Now, in terms of what I spoke of in my original mailing as the possibility of lesser ‘local’ or ‘contingent’ truths, the question is to what extent does Freudian psychoanalysis fit even this particular bill?

The first thing that needs to be said is that the overall Freudian structure is one of the great intellectual achievements of mankind—but then so also is Don Quixote. A great intellectual achievement need not encompass truth (with a small t) in any literal sense of the term. With such in mind—to what extent is Freud’s theory to be regarded as true?

Any exhaustive answer on this would require almost a lifetime’s study. The collected works of Freud run to some twenty-four volumes, not including the thousands of subsequent articles and books written by supporters, critics and rivals. A lifetime would be too long to devote to the study of something that in the end can come down only to a choice between three possible single-word conclusions: yes (it is true); no (it’s not true); and maybe (it is true; and, again, maybe it’s not).

Now it is undeniable that Freud here and there seems to touch on things that resound in us with a sense of deeper meaning. But the question is to what extent these insights arise from his theory—or to what extent they are more representative of the phenomenon of the village clock that although stopped still manages to be right twice in the day. In line with the suggestion that if you give sufficient monkeys sufficient typewriters for a sufficient length of time, then inevitably one of them will produce the works of Shakespeare, it follows that anybody of ability who dedicates his or her life to investigating a certain field of knowledge—in Freud’s case the underlying structure and operation of the human mind and its expression in bodily actions—must, even if only at random, hit upon ideas that are true in their own right.

On a more practical level, there has been over the years increasing debate over the efficacy of psychoanalysis, even as practiced directly by Freud, in the treatment of neurosis. The fundamental idea would seem to be that psychoanalysis, for all the brilliance of Freud as a theorist and writer, is really a delusionary system, a self-delusionary system, that has more to do with the deeper needs of Freud’s ego than with scientific fact.

Idries Shah, a well-known writer on Sufism, speaking on the hunger for attention that can exist in some (indeed, many; if not most) individuals:

‘. . . [they] might even turn up at the house and ask for attention. It’s very easy to illustrate this attention desire if one does not feel flattered by the attentions of the other person. I’ve very often spoken to people who’ve come to the house, for half an hour or forty-five minutes, absolute nonsense, just to make them happy, just to show them (although they don’t always see it) that what they wanted was attention; they did not really want metaphysical truths or interpretations or advice. And, as a matter of fact, there are so many jokes about that in the Middle East that one is almost surprised that it is so unknown here, relatively unknown’ (The Diffusion of Sufi Ideas in the West: Idries Shah, Keystone Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1972).

The relevance of this to psychoanalytical practice is too obvious to need underlining.

Simone Weil, writing from a diametrically different direction, yet about the same phenomenon of attention, says:

‘The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection,or a specimen from the social category labeled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
‘This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.
‘Only he who is capable of attention can do this’ (Waiting on God: Simone Weil, Fontana, 1959).

As I say, the two approaches are diametrically opposed. Shah’s might be described as the more cynical, Weil’s, perhaps, as the more naïve (although this is a characterization demanding of a much closer discussion).

But the fact is that although both identify in their different ways the importance of attention, it seems to me, nonetheless, that they both miss the point—Weil somewhat more so than Shah.

There is a widespread hunger abroad for attention in these modern times. Some of the people who came to Shah might have gone away momentarily satisfied with the attention they received—but it was liable to be a very short-lived satisfaction. For the fact is that in many, if not in most cases, it is a hunger that is unassuageable.

The fact is that so many people are black holes for attention—they can never get enough. The roots of this deficiency, I think, lie in childhood and some deprivation of necessary attention or love or whatever. It is a deficit that, not being satisfied at the appropriate time, can never be satisfied, no matter how strenuously the victim may in later years try to compensate for it. One can shovel attention and consideration on such a person all the waking day long, only for them to rise next morning, and every subsequent morning—like some brain-damaged patient, the blackboard of whose short-term memory has overnight been erased—just as hungrily empty and imploring as the day before.

And there is no direct cure for it. No way of restoring what has been lost or never found. At best, one may come to a realization of the futility of one’s actions, and an acceptance of the long-term and irremediable nature of the loss which underlay them. It amounts to the establishment of a sort of laid-waste ground zero, the destruction of all you believed in and clung to up until now, with no promise of anything beyond it other than a blank a hospital corridor leading straight to death.

The difference for the secularist, Freud, was that the establishment of self-knowledge didn’t just threaten with the possibility of the bleakness of existence, it guaranteed it. At most, Freud promised to ‘change [unconscious] neurotic suffering into everyday misery’; the root of neurosis being something he [Freud] could not cure, it was up to the patient to consciously endure it.

Freud’s statement is both a chilling and a magnificent statement of the existential secularist position—especially when counterposed to the laughable naivety of the recent spate of slogans financed by atheists on London buses: ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy life.’

Strip off the slab, sharpen up the obsidian knife . . .

A passage from J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough:

‘It was the belief of the ancient Irish that when their kings observed the customs of their ancestors, the seasons were mild, the crops plentiful, the cattle fruitful, the waters abounded with fish, and the fruit trees had to be propped up on account of the weight of their produce. A canon attributed to St. Patrick enumerates among the blessings that attend the reign of a just king “fine weather, calm seas, crops abundant, and trees laden with fruit.” On the other hand, dearth, dryness of cows, blight on fruit, and scarcity of corn were regarded as infallible proofs that the reigning king was bad.’

Not to mention economic collapse, swine flu, floods, and being turfed out of the World Cup. Indeed, all this nonsense about securing a replay is just that, nonsense. The mojo is simply not with us: we could have ten replays and the result would still be the same.

In ancient times, in situations like this, an unlucky king might well be running a nervous finger around the inside of his collar . . .

[For those of a literalist disposition, I'm being ironic . . .]

I'm still here . . .

When I began this process of blogging, I indicated that if I found that it was ego that was at the root of it, then I would abort the whole thing. But even in writing that I was being dishonest, and knew I was being dishonest—because the very fact of writing at all (or of doing anything) is ultimately informed by ego.

Blogging consists in giving one’s opinion on things. An opinion is at best a partial truth—when it is a truth at all. And a partial truth bears the same relationship to ultimate truth as a photograph of the north face of the Eiger does to the reality of the mountain it claims to portray.

And this is unavoidable. Ultimate truth is forever beyond us. We have no capacity for apprehending it. At best we can now and again take hold of the shreds of its coat-tails and then only for the briefest of seconds. It is possible to sometimes catch and relay a fragment of truth or reality—in this posting, I am using ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ as synonyms of each other—as reflected momentarily in some limited situation. But it is not Truth—it is only a local truth, a contingent truth, as short-lived in its beauty and duration as the rise and fall of a starburst rocket at Halloween.

The relatively few people who foresaw and warned against the economic disaster now swamping us comprehended, in their various ways, just such a corner of truth. But the world moves on—and the fact that they were right last time does not mean that they will be right next time or, for that matter, ever again . . . notwithstanding the strange human tendency of slavishly latching on to so-called ‘winners’ as though there was no possibility of their ever again being wrong.

Now if people who were right last time have no guarantee of being right next time, then the argument is logically capable of being turned on its head in favour of people who were previously wrong. Next time, who knows, they might be right. But in saying this we can see the native sense that underlies the popular faith in ‘winners’. It is a matter of pragmatism: the fact that someone has been successful in calling the toss in the past, while not guaranteeing that he will be equally successful in the future, at least proves that he is capable of being successful. Whereas with failure, no such signpost to success exists . . .

But this is all by way of digression . . .

But to get back to where I was originally heading . . . If we take the example of the Eiger, it is possible to postulate a process by which the ultimate truth about the mountain might be achieved. One could set up an archive involving all the scientific knowledge available about the mountain—its geographic details, mineral composition, dimensions etc.—together with an exhaustive set of photographs taken of it from every possible direction and in every possible weather condition. Add to this everything that has been written about it—together with a comprehensive hands-on experience of the mountain on the part of the student—and arguably you have the possibility of approaching the Eiger in its overall truth, its overall reality.

Except, of course, that you don’t . . . have such a possibility, that is.

Immersion in such a process of learning—a lifetime’s immersion—would no doubt produce an almost exhaustive knowledge of the Eiger. But it would still not represent, or even begin to represent, the ultimate reality of it. The sense of it gained would be akin to one of those old slot-machines that were still around when I was young—you can find the same mechanism, too, sometimes built into books—where a moving image was broken down into a sequence of still photographs and a mock animation produced by flicking through them at speed.

The thing is that the ultimate truth, the ultimate reality of anything, is not a cumulative or sequential or composite process. It is awareness—in a single intuition—of everything to do with the matter or thing in hand; everything known and ‘unknown’, lost or found, that has happened or has yet to happen. It is the phenomenon viewed within the setting of eternity . . .

And as such it is forever beyond us as human beings.

[For anyone that may be interested—that is, if there is anyone interested—the hiatus of almost a fortnight since my previous posting has been due to my being busy with other things. A situation likely to continue at least until Christmas—so that for the time being postings are likely to remain somewhat more sporadic than heretofore.]

Kidding Oneself (2) . . .

The question might be asked of me, arising from my most recent posting: Do I think that it is possible to engage in social and political activism without it in some way being ultimately a vehicle for the fulfillment of some unconscious emotional need?

And the answer I would have to give is no—I don’t think it is possible.

In relation to anything we do, the roots of our actions plunge much deeper than we can ever consciously know. It is open perhaps only to saints, or people analogous to saints, to approach any closer to an absolute knowledge of themselves and a rational control of their thoughts and actions—and then only to the extent that they have, as they say, already died to themselves. For the rest of us, no such disengagement from the influence of the emotions is possible.

When we speak of this or that individual as being more or less rational, it would be more accurate, I think, to talk in terms of he or she being more or less irrational. As a species, I believe, we are less rational than potentially rational—and I am using the term rational, not just in the conventional sense of the processes of abstract reasoning, but as a synonym for something more along the lines of, perhaps, say, enlightenment.

In such a circumstance, the systems of mechanical reasoning would continue to operate as before, but in the context of individuals of a deeper self-knowledge, compassion and unselfishness—and a deeper awareness, too, of the myriad of ways in which it is possible to deceive oneself—than the rest of us in general possess.

Is such a development possible on any sort of wide scale? Certainly not on the basis of the human species as it exists. Any such general change would involve at least several evolutionary shifts—and the nature of evolutionary shifts is that they involve minorities. The bulk of populations get left behind.

What is possible is for individuals to make the journey within the context of human existence as we know it . . . And it must be such a lonely journey—one that involves turning one’s back on the things that give human life its—ultimately delusionary—glamour and savour and sense of warmth. People who successfully take that path become, arguably, the leaven and justification for the rest of us—the true meaning of the ten just men of Sodom may lie somewhere along these lines.

Such people are not heroes likely to gain popular acclaim; instead they make the secret sacrifices by means of which the rest of us may live.

[I would hasten to point out, in case anyone should think so, that I am certainly making no personal claims in this regard. To quote Bertrand Russell (again!): ‘I made up my mind when I was young that I would not be restrained from preaching a doctrine merely because I have not practised it’—or, as I might add, am congenitally incapable of practising it.]

Kidding Oneself . . .

I touched in passing in my last posting on what is nowadays the cliché of the middle-class revolutionary—though of course it wasn’t always a cliché. For example, of the twelve members of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, as listed by E. H. Carr (The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. 1, Pelican 1966), the majority were from a middle-class or prosperous farming (or, in one case, even, an aristocratic) background. A somewhat greater majority might be categorized as intellectuals, in that at some stage or other they had attended university.

Nor were the Bolsheviks the sole organisation that might be categorized in this way. Nineteenth-century Russia was possessed of any number of middle-class individuals and movements with an interest in reforming or revolutionising society. The Bolsheviks just happened to be the ones who reached up from the scrum to grab the brass ring.

The most interesting of such movements was the Narodniks, who saw the peasantry as potentially the main progressive force in Russian society, and who instituted a movement back to the land on the part of thousands of idealists, all with the ostensible aim of radicalizing the peasantry.

I say ostensible aim, for beneath it there seems to have lurked an almost mystical fascination with the peasantry and with peasant life. Disguised as a revolutionary movement, what often seems to have been afoot was a middle-class search for authenticity—for the holy grail of something uncontaminated, organic and true surviving from an earlier and holier age.

Now in the Himalayas, where there is no naturally occurring salt, it is said that cattle will follow people in order to lick their sweat. Now, being cattle, there is obviously no great logical process going on here—beyond some instinctive recognition of the need for salt and some sensed recognition that salt can be got from sweat.

I would suggest something of the same scenario in relation to the Narodniks . . . there was of course a process of reasoning involved in their situation; but a process of reasoning that was, in fact, and often unknownt to itself, knitting, at least partially, a rational garment to disguise an unconscious yearning of the human soul—or at least the spiritually disenfranchised soul of the middle-class intellectual.

James Burnham, in his book, Suicide of the West (John Day, 1964), gives a more conventional argument for the liberal social and political engagement of our time:

“The guilt of the liberal [over being indulged and pampered as children] causes him to feel obligated to try and do something about any and every social problem, to cure every social evil . . . even if he has no knowledge of the suitable medicine, or for that matter, of the nature of the disease; he must do something about the social problems even when there is no objective reason to believe that what he does can solve the problem – when, in fact, it may well aggravate the problem instead of solving it.”

As far as it goes, I think that Burnham’s analysis is correct enough. The problem is that it does not go far enough. I suspect that underlying many of the orientations of the modern middle-class liberal—indeed, underlying many of the orientations of modern life in general—there is hidden the same search for personal authenticity as lay at the root of narodism.

How to explain what it means to suffer from a lack of authenticity? . . .

Firstly, it is a lack, every bit as much a lack as that which drives the cattle of the Himalayas to harass travellers. And just as unconscious in its operation, too—or, in human terms, perhaps semi-conscious.

In a way, it is the opposite of experiencing a phantom limb—that sense or pattern of wholeness that persists despite the fact of an amputation. In the case of the lack of authenticity, it is the nagging sense of something missing that one cannot quite put one’s finger on. It might be described as the psychic equivalent of body dysphoria (a relation of body dysmorphia).

It is a fretful sense of incompleteness, of in some way your life falling short of the hidden pattern of what it is to be human or happy or fulfilled, or even real—and all despite the fact that, as in some obsessive dream, you can count over and over through the elements that go to make up your ordinary human existence and seem to find nothing missing.

As I say, this lack of authenticity, this search for authenticity, seems an almost generalized condition of the modern developed world. But it is in terms of what we might call the disaffected middle-class—or the disaffected children of the middle class—that it is most clearly to be seen, and in a way that is most subversive of the theories of secular liberalism. Here we have people who are unhappy, yet on the secularist agenda have no right to be unhappy, enjoying as they do, and as they have done for most of the past fifty years, prosperity and stability and opportunity and the freedom to pursue pleasure.

In a paradoxical way, it might seem that, like the proverbial Chinese meal, the greater one’s access to material goods the greater the underlying emptiness that is ultimately revealed. Betrayed by their faith, or the faith of their parents, in material prosperity, disaffected youth turn instead to political and social activism, or the quietism of a drug-fuelled hedonism. And contrary to what it might seem, the one is not necessarily superior to the other. Both are ways of achieving roughly the same end.

The turn to political and social activism by the disaffected young over the past fifty or so years, is, I would suggest, in general less a matter of altruism or social guilt than a more roundabout way of seeking self-validation. What the druggie seeks to achieve through the pipe or the needle, the activist seeks to achieve through social and political engagement—a sense of oneness with the universe, an end to the dissonance he or she feels in relation to life as it is currently lived.

The politically and socially active (in the liberal and left-wing sense of the terms) deceive themselves when they think that they are doing things for the poor or the oppressed or the working class. Rather their activism is often a device for coming into contact with the poor etc., in their search, like the narodniks with the peasantry, for some bedrock of authenticity, some point of balance, some place of absolute truth, where they can firmly place their feet amid the crazy and undependable relativism of the rest of the world.

As I say, the whole process is analogous to that of cattle in the Himalayas—except with the cattle there is no mistake: they sense what they need and sense how to get it. It is with people that the process becomes complicated and the possibility—the guarantee—of self-deception comes into play.

Stealth Bombers . . .

I append an extract from a draft of an unfinished document begun in January of this year. Even in its uncompleted state, it still has, I think, something of relevance to say:

‘From the London Times of 22/1/2009: "The LSE economist Robert Wade addressed about 1,000 Icelanders recently at a protest meeting in a Reykjavik cinema, warning that large-scale civil unrest was on the way. The tipping point, he said, would be this spring."

Nothing very surprising in that, given the likely nature of the audience and implicitly the speaker. But it is significant. It strikes me almost as wishful thinking – the article that the quote is taken from comments, rather wistfully it seems, that ‘some say it could become another 1968 – a new age of rebellion.’

There are factors sufficient in the current economic situation to produce chaos and social breakdown of their own accord should they be allowed continue unabated. But to this must be added the fact that there are people who are hellbent on creating just such a social breakdown. Konrad Heiden, who was a German opponent of Hitler’s and who knew Hitler personally, described a certain déclassé element that supported Hitler as the ‘armed bohemians’. And indeed this term could almost be used to describe the element that is currently trying to foment trouble and collapse on all fronts. Except that technically they belong to the Left – to the extent that the terms Right and Left longer have any relevance. Best perhaps they could be described as nihilists or anarchists.

There is a certain type of international agitator that currently fits the bill – middle class, generally swanning around the world on an allowance from daddy, without job or career, except perhaps a few diplomas or an unfinished degree from the LSE or some other such fashionable institute. Really, they are not political at all – more what Lenin used describe as ‘useful idiots’. It seems to me that what they really are into is street theatre, posturing with petrol bombs and slings and ball-bearings, intent on creating an image for themselves that seems ‘cool’. Certainly one imagines there is very little intellect behind it. As well, one imagines that it is a phenomenon in the process of creation – rather in the way that stars and planets are said to condense out of globules of gaseous matter; certainly there is no finished aspect to it, and I would not be surprised if it, at the moment of self-consciousness, finds itself on the radical right rather than the left – or at least predominantly so.

For the fact is that the mainstream Left works much closer to the coal face, engaged in the ‘rights’ and ‘equality’ industry. This is one of the staples of Marxist agitation: to take the proclaimed tenets of capitalist society – say, liberty, fraternity, equality – and push them out to the point that they become weapons for the undermining of that society. Of course there can be no argument in the normal course of events against seeking to extend rights or gain greater equality. But the point is that the success or otherwise of such campaigns is of secondary importance to, certainly, revolutionary Marxists and anarchists: the primary value of such things lies in the extent to which they inch society closer to the edge of the abyss.

Take the ‘equality’ industry . . . One philosopher has written quite well on it – Mary Midgeley – without at the same time necessarily following the argument to its logical conclusion. The fact is that there can be no intermediate halt to demands for equality short of reducing society to a flat level desert of undifferentiated rubble. Whenever an ‘equality’ is argued for and gained in one field, another deserving cause immediately presents itself, and so on and on – all the time boring like woodworm, until at last society is undermined and collapses in on itself. It is a variant on the statement by Lenin – and a way of achieving the same end by different means – that equated revolution to a bomb in the basement of an apartment building, reducing it all to rubble, out of which the revolutionary party could then begin to build the mythical classless society.

The architect, by way of digression, of this new Marxist approach was primarily Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Communist who died in prison (of natural causes) in 1937 under Mussolini. Realizing before most that the revolution was not going to be achieved on the barricades, he sought instead a way of achieving it by stealth. From now on Marxists “must join in whatever liberating causes might come to the fore in different countries and cultures as popular movements, however dissimilar those movements might initially be from Marxism and from one another. Marxists must join with women, with the poor, with those who find certain civil laws oppressive. They must adopt different tactics for different cultures and subcultures. They must never show an inappropriate face. And, in this manner, they must enter into every civil, cultural and political activity in every nation, patiently leavening them all as thoroughly as yeast leavens bread . . . a quiet and anonymous revolution. No armed and bloody uprisings would do it. No bellicose confrontations would win the day. Rather, everything must be done in the name of man’s dignity and rights, and in the name of his autonomy and freedom from outside constraint. From the claims and constraints of Christianity, above all.”

The above quote is from Malachi Martin, a controversial priest and writer, and an opponent of Vatican II. But it does cover the main points. I saw the idea being advanced in the sixties . . .’