Nature and City

The poet’s natural place is in a landscape, not a city. He who pictures nature red in tooth and claw is moved by an emotion inspired by human behavior rather than what we observe in nature. An interesting documentary on Civil War battle sites reminded me of this the other day. The site was Antietam. The show was a succession of images, of peaceful landscapes, but the producer alternated current day shots of hills and fences with photographs taken after the battle of the same scenes. The pictures taken long ago, however, also featured piles of bodies in uniform, the corpses grotesquely swollen by decay. Nature red in tooth and claw?

The mind wants to grasp reality and therefore simplifies and says: the poet’s place is in the landscape because Spirit permeates nature albeit in a muted, understated way. Predation is part, but a very small part, of nature—and has a utility function, like sewers have in urban settings. The city, by contrast, concentrates the peculiarly human spirit; hence it is a vastly more stimulating environment. But that which develops the human spirit is much more perceivable in unspoiled nature. What remains tangible of it in our vast conurbations is drowned out by noise and business, positively by excitement and distraction, negatively by conflict, anxiety, and, for many, misery.

Romanticism? Yes, of course. Big, sloppy symbols like Nature and City are easily debunked. Nature can be merciless and harsh; we could go to Pakistan to see that face of it; cities have charm, elegance, and symphonic orchestras. But if we contrast romanticism and modernism, for example, and ask ourselves which one describes reality more comprehensively, I’d vote for romanticism. It captures more aspects of reality.
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Added Later: Only after this post was up did I look at other blogs and noted, with a chuckle, that Laudator Temporis Acti commented today on the same theme in its usual way, by quotes, here.

Let Me Show You A Picture

…they showed people from various social strata some images of menacing faces. People whose parents had low social status exhibited more activation in the amygdala (the busy little part of the brain involved in fear and emotion) than people from high-status families. [David Brooks in a column on neuroscience in the New York Times October 13, 2009]

I find this sort of report delicious, especially when I discover exactly the conclusion I anticipate even as the factual build-up is still under way. Here are two conclusions that Brooks draws from several studies very much like the one outlined above:

• Eventually their work [the neuroscientists’] could give us a clearer picture of what we mean by fuzzy words like ‘culture.’ It could also fill a hole in our understanding of ourselves.
• The work demonstrates that we are awash in social signals, and any social science that treats individuals as discrete decision-making creatures is nonsense. But it also suggests that even though most of our reactions are fast and automatic, we still have free will and control.

I love it. The last citation is particular crisp and crunchy. The pressure of producing two weekly columns for the New York Times must be enormous and leave no time for rereading the text for logical consistency. Does the last quote mean that people are in fact not decision-making creatures or merely that they appear to be automata for the neuroscientist? If we are automata, how can be “still” have free will and control? Does the activation of the amygdala control what we do? Are we absolutely prostrate before the phenomena of fear and emotion? Are fear and emotion two discrete entities? Or is fear one of the emotions?

But let me now show you a picture. It is a motion picture of a man taking a dog on a walk through a wooded suburban neighborhood. It’s late fall, a gorgeous day. Suddenly the dog dashes forward, yipping like mad, going straight for a wooden fence you can’t see through, jerking the leash, almost choking herself, and acting as if she would chew her way right through those dense pine planks. It is Katie, the clan’s beagle. [Yes, Katie. I’m trying my best to promote you in these blogs. The other day I elevated you to the status of the Muse, today to the even higher status of a neuroscientist.] Katie had smelled a rabbit.

Now, of course, Katie could not chew through the fence because the man restrained her, made soothing, if totally ineffective calming sounds, and pulled the dog gradually away from the all-consuming object of passion that had gripped the animal.

Man and dog, in this picture, as seen from the Olympian distance of the neuroscientists—let’s say a woman three houses away looking out of a three-storey mansion’s highest window—are one system, to use an appropriately sophisticated modern word: let us call it a man-dog-system, or (all-right, all-right, already) a dog-man-system. Until that leash breaks, they’re certainly connected. Really deep analysis might actually detect that the system consists of two entities, not one, and that in this particular case one of the entities is on a higher level than the other and quite capable, with some effort, to be sure, in restraining the other.

If neuroscientists were required to study men taking beagles on a walk in a neighborhood thick with rabbits (my maximum sighting on a walk one fall was 19 rabbits in an hour)—and if they had undergraduate degrees in the classics, including the old staples of Plato, Aristotle, etc., etc., they could get on with their work on a higher level perhaps. But it might be that picking out pictures of menacing faces is as irresistible for them as rabbits are for Katie—as is wondering how the proles will react when they flash these on a screen.

Mirrors of Projection

It was in C.G. Jung’s writings that I first encountered the rather useful concept of projection. Jung held that the collective unconscious holds permanent energetic structures he labeled archetypes (“primal patterns”)—an old, old concept with a hoary history… Plato’s ideal, eternal forms were of this category existing somewhere in a transcendental space, the very model and source of all things visible; in scholastic times they were transferred to the mind of God; during the Enlightenment Locke, for instance, brought them back to earth and suggested that archetypes were simply things out in the world that our minds turn into patterns. What goes around, comes around. In the transitional twentieth century, the archetypes go back into our chests, and if we seek to trace them further, we find them in that quasi-divine collective unconscious which was Jung’s reinvention of divinity. They reside there in Platonic silence, energize us, and we project them out into the world. There you have the root of this conception. The archetype of “father” is projected onto leaders, of “mother” on the nanny state, of “evil” onto capitalism, socialism, the red menace, or Muslim terrorism. Jung wisely suggested that people should withdraw their projections in order to mature.

Let’s walk hand-in-hand for a moment with this archetype of the Wise Old Man. Jung thought that the mirrors of our projection take on the energy of the archetype itself, and that, by projection, we thus form god-like entities that rule us in our turn. Not bad when you think about it. The rational way, Locke’s way, is much less exiting. Without the psychic energies that reflect malignly from so many structures of reality, CNN’s coverage of news would become—as it already is for the aware—a crashing bore. If we genuinely saw the reality behind today’s bogey-man, Al Qaida, we wouldn’t get very exited—much as in McCarthy’s day careers and reputations would not have been destroyed had we really looked at communism as it really was. When we don’t see reality, it turns into a mirror. It reflects back what we are.

Okay. But what is your solution, Mr. Darnay? And what does science say about this subject? A solution? I don’t have one. One of our more interesting projections is that the world arrays itself in a series of problem-solution sets, and if we can just get enough people behind us, we can get the problem solved. If this state of affairs troubles you, look for a solution within. Turn off CNN, for instance, or decline to participate in polls. Now as for science… Or should I have capitalized that word?

One Hand Clapping

Some time after I became a civil servant, I had to testify before a Congressional subcommittee—a first for me. My chiefs made laudable efforts to brief and to train me. We had a dry run with an audience drawn from senior staff. We had people impersonating congressmen asking me what were supposed to be embarrassing questions. By then, of course, I’d already written my six pages of double-spaced testimony—surprised that these words had to be approved by what is today called the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The text passed muster; not one word had been changed. Knowledgeable staff people also prepared a thick binder filled with Qs and As. The first time I heard those words, I’d no idea what Qs and As were. Such was my innocence. I was also surprised that the notebook would be shared with the committee, further that some committee members would actually ask the questions in the notebook; some, I was told, did not prepare but wished to sound good in questioning us. Well…

The hue and cry, the dry run, the Qs and As turned out to be ridiculously excessive preparation in light of what transpired. As I read my testimony, the chairman was reading a newspaper, holding the pages wide apart, a pair of glasses on his nose. Really; insultingly. His body was half turned away from mine. I was less than a cockroach, sitting way below him, sweating to get the words right, reading to the empty air. Only one other congressman attended this hearing; a dozen chairs stood empty; this second elected representative of the people spent the time of my testimony talking with his head bent down listening to the earnest but whispered briefing of a staff member squatting next to his chair. Welcome to democracy in action.

Leave the village and you’ll get an education. I gave testimony many times in the years that followed. Those were the days before C-Span. Congress treated those of us in the bureaucracy with barely-disguised contempt; and nothing since has changed my own echoing feeling for that body. Yes. I do remember one or two congressmen and senators who actually treated me with courtesy. Indeed, those were notable events, occasions you actually remembered. But the experience that formed my attitudes was what went down on nearly every other such occasion. Why should I believe the braying of these people before the cameras about the American people this, the American people that—when, with no cameras watching, they couldn’t even give the time of day to those who, supposedly just like them, were doing the work of government.

Why do I tell this story? Well, I had in mind addressing today the problem of policy, of group thought, of message, of staying on the message, riding it, as it were, as witches ride a broom. I was going to address the supposed truth that perception is reality, the current great illusion that shaping a message on the television screen actually moves the people to act in concert and in lockstep with those who manage the message. Instead of that, thinking back to my first ever step out into the light of public life, what I remember of it is the irrationality, the destructive force of it, the shape that it gave to my perceptions. Had that been an isolated case, Okay. I’d have gotten over it. But, since that time, I’ve seen nothing but more, more, and much more of the same, expanding outward from that powerful institution to the media, then to industry. I saw the same contempt in the hidden spaces and the pious posturing in the televised. Thus do people, raised by earnest mothers like mine had been, disaffiliate from a civilization once they discover that it is shot through, every fiber, with the same spirit of emptiness. Hear my applause of it....

The New Saints

O Lord, I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in.

Our age is fond of demystifying our traditions. It’s a movement, in part conscious, in part collectively unconscious, ultimately culture-driven. The leaders of this movement, seconded by a cynical press, view this activity as progress. But, alas, it is just part of a cycle of change. In wave after wave of revelations we’ve been told that we are first cousins to the apes. Later our prophets have issued a correction: No, we are mere carriers of selfish genes. Our heroes were cruel and greedy exploiters, our old saints certifiably schizophrenic.

Amidst this rising chorus of progress, it’s easy to overlook that another process has been taking place alongside the debunking. It is the glorification of science and the exaltation of its leading figures. Some have been elevated straight to Olympus (Einstein, Darwin) while others have only been sainted. Among these are the Big Bang’s father, Hubble, and the holy pair of DNA, Watson and Crick. Heisenberg (Uncertainty), Schrödinger (his cat), and Freud (his Id) are other saints of note.

I’m putting this vividly to make a point. The past is by no means innocent, and science is full of merit. But what interests me in the current context is the way in which powerful cultural contents have come to use the substrate of mundane science as a carrier of values.
The process of mystification is neatly on display in a series of popular books on physics that appeared during my years of maturity. I read them all with a great deal of attention. Some reveal their interesting take in their titles, like The Dance of the Wu Li Masters, The Tao of Physics, The Looking Glass Universe. Others are simply intriguing or praise our happy times: In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, The Symbiotic Universe, Coming of Age in the Milky Way. These samples are largely concerned with Quantum Mechanics, but there is a similar literature centered on our Holy Father Einstein and his twin theories of relativity, General and Special. The pop literature on string theory is thinner—perhaps because the theory is rather obscure and thus far lacks achievements. To this literature we must add the Augustinian “confessions” of actual practitioners, of whom Stephen Haw­king (A Brief History of Time) has been spectacularly successful, perhaps because, severely handicapped and wheel-chair bound, he touches our neo-medi­aeval intuitions of what it takes to be a saint.

In addition to the two halves of physics (classical and quantum), biology (as evolutionary theory) and cosmology (as the theology of the Big Bang) have developed similar haloes of tendentious literature. This would not be a counter-movement to the debunking of tradition if we left it at that. There are endless variants and combinations. We have new popular theories of consciousness based on quantum uncertainty. We have adherents of the Anthropic Principle who see the laws of nature designed to produce humans. We have the Many Worlds interpretation according to which every choice made spawns another full-fledged cosmos with copies of ourselves. We have vast clouds of complexity rising out of Chaos in some mysterious way that only expert manipulators of quadratic equations and fractal graphics can hope to understand—and much more along these lines. Thus far I have stuck to subjects considered to be genuine science and have left such words as “synchronicity” and “paranormal” out of this paragraph. Words like that, to be sure, are wormholes by means of which we can escape from the new faith of scientific righteousness, tunnels back out to the old time religion.

Truly, we live in a religious age.