Adulthood (8)

Plainly, what I have written so far on this topic is grounded in the idea that the notion of adulthood that seems to press upon us from the world at large is a confused one, and the wise thing to do with it is to take it apart. But it is necessary to take it apart precisely because it is impossible to abandon it altogether—because, contingent and historical as it is, it has at its core something deep and abiding. This is why it is a problem and not merely a nuisance. I wish to grow up, and, if I am unwilling or unable to do so in the terms that my culture asks of me, I must seek out other terms.

We may say, in some sense, that this is what went wrong in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was in this era, of course, that the rejection of bourgeois adulthood first took on a national visibility, first became a trend whose attraction was therefore necessarily in part its very trendiness. (It was also in this era, that adolescent rebellion became intermingled with a program of political resistance (the anti-war movement), and thus the two forms of rebellion became confused.)

There must have been, in 1967 and ’68, a wild sense of possibility, a feeling that everything was changing. Indeed, a number of things did change: sexual mores, clothing styles, the acceptability of drug use. But, by the 1980s, all of these changes were smoothly reincorporated, not only into the same stable class structure that had been there before, but into the whole consumerist-conformist construction of identity that lay at the heart of the sudden revulsion that had precipitated the rebellion in the first place. If anything, the liberalization of sexuality, clothing, etc. seemed to lead in the end to an even more firmly consumerist culture. Without the old taboos, identity was all the more free flowing, all the less grounded in anything but success, acquisition, choice. I am hardly the first to make this observation.

One way to explain this reincorporation—this failure of the rebellion, this victory of the existing system of class and identity—is to say that the hippies rejected the existing forms of adulthood but failed to discover any new notion of adulthood to put in its place. The standard line on the hippies is that their rebellion was essentially adolescent and when the party wound down, they grew up, got jobs, and settled down. This is not the point I’m making. If the rebellion was adolescent, this was perhaps necessary: to alter one’s life, one must begin with a movement of rejection—not a wholesale rejection but still a revulsion, a turning away, yes, in disgust, for it requires energy to dislodge things. But there is a second movement, much harder than the first, and this movement was never made. The second movement consists in going back and understanding and salvaging from the wreck those elements necessary to human life. An inevitable effect of this second movement is that one discovers how much more value there was in the things one rejected than one had realized, how cleverly that old hideous system had met the demands of human dignity and human frailty and human desire.

Pasolini wrote in 1973:

…[T]he radical and indiscriminate condemnation that they [the hippies] have pronounced against their fathers… rearing up against them an insurmountable barrier, has in the end isolated young people, blocking them from engaging in a dialectical relationship with their fathers.  Now only through this dialectical relationship—even if dramatic and extremist in character—could youths have obtained a true historical conscience of themselves and moved forward, “passing beyond” their fathers.  Instead, the isolation in which they have enclosed themselves – like a world apart, in a ghetto reserved for youth – keeps them stuck in their unbudgeable historical reality; and that inevitably implies a regression.  They have actually ended up in a position behind that of their fathers, resurrecting inside of their own souls terrors and conformisms, and in their physical appearance, conventionalities and wretchedness that seemed to have been permanently overcome.
(Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Contra I Capelli Lughi,” Corriere della Sera, January 7, 1973)

Having written all this, I see that it is, really, only a parenthesis. It was my intention to write about something else entirely. But I got carried away. Perhaps I have only written things that were already obvious.

The Age of Bread (Adulthood 7)

Apropos of the previous crumb, I present the following excerpts from an open letter to Italo Calvino, written by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1974 (the translation is not mine but also not published; the translator chooses not to identify themselves):

Maurizio Ferrara [communist intellectual] says I am nostalgic for a “golden age,” you say I am nostalgic for the “little Italy of once upon a time” [l’Italietta]: everyone says I am nostalgic for something, and they speak of this nostalgia in negative tones, so as to make it an easy target.

What I am nostalgic for (if we are going to use that word) [...] is [the] unlimited pre-State and preindustrial rural world, which survived up to just a few years ago – there is a reason why I spend as much time as possible in Third World countries [...]

The people in that universe did not live in a “golden age” [...] They lived in what Chilanti has called the “age of bread” – i.e. they were consumers of extremely necessary goods. It was this, perhaps, that rendered extremely necessary their poor and precarious lives. Whereas it is clear that superfluous goods make life superfluous [...]

Whether I am or am not nostalgic for this rural universe is in any case my business. It doesn’t prevent me from formulating a critique of the current world as it is – if anything, this critique is only more lucid the more I am estranged from the current world, the more I accept only stoically to live within it.

Is the adult the one who has achieved middle class comfort, or the one who has never known it? Is it the one who has made choices or the one who never had them in the first place? Is it the one who knows the pain and anxiety of deciding his own fate or the sorrow and light-heartedness of submitting to a fate that was given and unchangeable? And, most importantly, is it possible to discover, by relinquishing certain types of ambition and holding fast to others, that one never really did have any choices?

Choices (Adulthood 6)

Two hundred years ago, hardly anyone had any choice of profession. They did what their parents did, which, for most people, meant farming. The opportunity to “find one’s calling” is one of the great luxuries of the modern age, or so it appears. Thus, when people like me complain about the lack of satisfying job opportunities, it seems very reasonable to see a kind of spoiled pickiness in these complaints: “Oh, so you’ve looked around and every industry seems vapid? Well, imagine if you had no choice but subsistence farming!”

This sounds very reasonable, but in fact it is mean-spirited, and the way you can tell is that it’s always said with a certain glee. (Why are we so eager to dismiss the very grounds of other peoples’ unhappiness, to deny that they have a right to be unhappy? It is a strange world where this is a common habit. Perhaps it is a world in which everyone feels that their grip on their own personal experience is terribly tenuous and goes about looking for reasons to dismiss other people’s, under the confused notion that only one experience can be valid. I think that’s just the sort of world it is.)

Shall we not say, rather, that one of the most striking characteristics of modern life in so-called “developed nations” is that one is surrounded by choices and all these choices seem rotten. If you are not inclined to dismiss the observation and the observer in one fell swoop, there are two conclusions you might draw from this: (1) that choosing something is irreducibly different from being bound to it, and one who has many choices can never know the ancient light-heartedness and sorrow that come of simply doing what one must, but is always glancing back and sideways and second guessing and thinking after all that he might try something else, and this state, once one has entered into it, is escapable only through some unforeseeable disaster; (2) that all the choices really are rotten. I say unto you, we should draw both of these conclusions.

A great deal is made the limited options available to those in poverty, the lack of access to resources and opportunities. Accordingly, new initiatives are proposed: job-training programs, free preschool programs, college-readiness programs, free universal internet access, etc. These proposals all refuse to notice what ought by now to be obvious: that more choices generally make people more unhappy; and that what we are trying (and mostly failing) to offer poor people access to is the same dystopic menu of meaningless white-color jobs that we ourselves gaze upon with bleak and bleary eyes.

This is all very gloomy and no doubt I am an incurable preacher of gloom and nostalgia, but let me end by returning to something which I mentioned parenthetically: the precarious hold that people have upon their own personal experience, as if, at any moment, this experience might be blown away by some more valid one, might be shown to be only a delusion they are suffering from. As if there were some mystical higher ground from which one could look down on the subjective world and see it for only a little world within some vast… vast… vast void, I think. It could only be a void.

More on this theme >>

The Supernatural (2)

When we speak of the supernatural, we are speaking quite simply of all that which refuses to be known in the scientific sense—all that which refuses to come out of hiding and become a fact.

The category of factual knowledge, is not ahistorical. It was brought into being in significant part by a methodology which, during the 17th and 18th centuries, began to generate and consolidate this type of knowledge, to give it the definite cumulative systematic character that it now has. That methodology, which we now call science of course, was originally called natural philosophy, because it was the philosophical study of the nature. The supernatural, then, is that which will not submit to this methodology, and therefore cannot be known on its terms.

The supernatural differs from the unknown and the unexplained, in that the latter categories contain things which may someday be known or explained, swept up in the continual progressive accumulation of knowledge, but the supernatural contains that which can never be known or explained, because it will not allow itself to be subjected to that methodology. Many people no longer believe this category exists. Or, rather, they believe this category contains nothing, that it is an empty set. They are free to believe this, but we should remember that the reasons for this belief cannot be scientific ones, because, by definition, science cannot bear on the existence or non-existence of things in this category.

We are so used to thinking that science has debunked the supernatural that the point I am making will not go down easily. But it is an analytic point, it is true by definition.

The issue has gotten somewhat confused by the fact that, between the late 19th and mid 20th century, efforts were made to apply scientific methods to the study of ghosts and other “supernatural” phenomena. But had such efforts proved successful, this would not in fact have provided evidence for the supernatural; rather, it would have proved that the objects of these studies (ghosts, or whatever they were) were not in fact supernatural. If you can detect and measure a ghost—by its electromagnetic disturbance or what have you—then your ghost is part of the larger system of physical phenomena (a.k.a. “nature”). In that case your ghost is not supernatural, it’s natural.

It may appear that I am switching between two uses of the term supernatural: one, a strictly etymological one, referring to systems of knowledge and so forth; the other a folk term, referring to ghosts, demons, elves, and so forth. I am myself (as always) only feeling my way confusedly through these ideas, but my instinct is that these two definitions cannot be separated—that should ghosts (or elves, or etc.) ever become subject to scientific knowing, they would immediately cease to feel supernatural; they would lose all the qualities (charm, spookiness, etc.) that that category is meant to embody.

At this juncture several thoughts press themselves upon me, further confusing and entangling the subject:

1. The charm and spookiness that I am imputing to the category of the supernatural were clearly properties of science itself up until about half a century ago. Who could doubt, looking at the representations of science in mid- and early-20th century popular culture, that science at that time appeared mysterious, spooky, exciting? The darkness of night, daughter of chaos, with her panoply of stars in a vast untamed void—was this not the very realm of science, the mystery it set out to explore? Apparently, then, in the past fifty years, our feelings about science have undergone a radical change. I am not saying that science itself has changed—though perhaps it has—but the meaning of science in the popular imagination, the force that it exerts on our understanding of ourselves and our position in the world, has changed completely. Presumably, this change cannot be understood without reference to marketing and commercialization, but it is still a change that attaches itself to, that accumulates around, that makes use of science.
2. This category of the supernatural that I keep invoking is difficult to separate from that of the fantastical, the unreal. If the supernatural is that which refuses to be known, to be caught and trapped and domesticated by our systems of knowledge, it also seems to be that which refuses to conform to our sense of reality, which refuses to agree to the terms on which we distinguish the literal from the figurative, the actual from the imaginary. But by saying this I do not mean to “return” the supernatural to the realm of the imaginary where we are used to and comfortable finding it. What I wish to do is point out the degree to which our imagination has been annexed from reality. It seems to me very clear, from the science fiction of fifty and a hundred years ago, that people were perviously very ready to imagine that the literal world held mystery and wonder wholly commensurate with the capacity of their imaginations. One of the defining characteristics of the contemporary world, then, is the degree to which almost any act of wild imagination appears puerile and escapist.
3. I do not think it is an accident that the category of the supernatural, as we imagine it, consists almost wholly of beings with at least some degree of sentience and volition. They are all beings that act like they are alive, though in many cases, we are told, they are precisely dead. This life-like quality is essential, because anything which is passive, which stays put, which behaves according to general principles, must eventually be caught in the net of factual knowledge. Only that which generates within its own being an impulse, a cause, whose prior causes are not discernible, has any hope of escape. That which follows a pattern can be studied; so only that which has volition, which can choose forever to break its pattern can escape.
4. But the deadness of these beings is perhaps equally significant. By placing them beyond death, we place them within a realm in which, in a much more radical sense, nothing can be known. For death is the moment at which the knowable and the unknowable diverge. And death is also the event that forces us back into our individuality and back through the other end of that individuality into, well, whatever lies back there. That is, death is the fact that renders all schemes of accumulative knowledge finally irrelevant.

The Supernatural (1)

As we all know, people who live in cities tend to get more formal education than people who live in the countryside. And people who live in the countryside tend to believe in the supernatural more than people who live in cities. The usual assumption is that the causality goes like this: live in city => get education => abandon superstition. Implicit in this causal ordering is the idea that city dwellers are right in their unbelief, which is born of rationality, whereas rural people are wrong in their belief, which is born of irrationality.

But when I look at myself, I find everything backwards. I live in a city, and cannot, for the most part, bring myself to believe in the supernatural—and yet, rationally I affirm it. With my intellect, I am convinced that the supernatural is as real as the natural, but in my heart I cannot accept it. I long for it, but this longing seems fantastical, nostalgic, wishful. But it seems so not for rational reasons. As far as I can see, science has rendered no evidence against the supernatural: science is the study of the material world, so it simply cannot speak of the immaterial world, any more than the eye can smell or the ear see. And yet, when the rubber hits the road, when someone tells me they have seen a ghost, I think they're making it up. My mind wishes to believe but my gut cannot.

But when I go to visit the country, the deeper into the country I go, the farther from cities and lights and traffic and the sounds of machinery, the more plausible the supernatural seems, the more my gut begins to accept it. And then it is that my reason, frightened at the sudden possibility of what it had affirmed so abstractly and longed for so ardently, begins to assure me that there are no grounds for belief. But its assurances are quite useless, for my soul now fears and believes and watches the shadows for sudden apparitions.

The city is an environment wholly subjugated to human technology and human control. Except for vermin, no living thing persists there unless it is sanctioned by human agencies. The ground is concrete, the landscape composed of artificial structures, the air filled with mechanical sounds. Day in the city is like day anywhere, but night is not herself here. She is not night, daughter of chaos, primordial darkness, hour of witches and spirits. She is not even dark. The sky is yellow brown. The stars, which always remind us of the vastness and mystery of the world, hardly ever appear—and when they do, there are only three or four of them, looking lost and forlorn up there in the domesticated vault, criss-crossed by airplanes, outshone by helicopters. How could one believe in spirits here? How could one believe in wild things and fugitive truths?

To put the same point slightly differently: the past 200 years has seen a massive decline in belief in the supernatural. This period has also seen the rise of scientific rationalism. The standard causal inference has been that reason did away with those beliefs. This inference demands and has fostered a general view that reason is opposed to such beliefs, that they are irrational. But the opposition between these beliefs and sound reason is at best wildly overstated, so the sudden vanishing of belief demands another explanation. The past 200 years has also seen massive urbanization and domestication of the world, a phenomenon that extends well beyond cities: suburbs, small towns, even farms and forests, have become vastly less wild, vastly more controlled by human schemes. Perhaps, then, the loss of belief has been driven not by reason but by an irresistible analogy between the subjugation of nature (in the sense of plants, animals, land, water, weather) to human schemes and the subjugation of nature (in the sense of the system of the world) to human categories of knowledge.

Let me just add one other minor but I think rather telling observation in this vein: I am told that, in places like Iceland and norther Scandinavia, where cities are rare and countryside wild, but formal education levels relatively high, belief in fairies and other spirits is still fairly common.

Acknowledgements (7 of 7)

The most recent series (beginning with the crumb on St. Paul) is heavily indebted to Gabriel Josopovici’s book on the bible, The Book of God. I mentioned this at the beginning of the series, and I quoted him in the middle, but I want to go back here at (what I think is) the end and highlight some ideas that Josipovici explores that I’ve used in the past several posts:

• the emphasis on action and speech and the shortage of subjectivity in the Old Testament;
• the introduction of a more modern type of subjectivity in Paul’s epistles;
• the tendency of the OT not to tell us how we are to interpret its events;
• the variation in the Gospels with regard to how much power and vulnerability Jesus seems to have.

In addition to these specific points, my general style of reading and thinking about the bible comes from Josipovici. I think, by and large, I've found my own valences and configurations of his ideas, but if, in some places, I have done nothing more than summarize his position, that would not have been a bad use of anyone's time.