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Saint Augustine and the Parrot

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The conscious mind allows itself to be trained like a parrot, but the unconscious does not—which is why St. Augustine thanked God for not making him responsible for his dreams. -Carl Jung

A hashtag tells me that today is the International Day of Happiness. It doesn't really seem like it would be worth anybody's time to dive around and find out what kind of nonprofit or transnational organisation decided this was the best way to showcase their latest evo-psych flim flam. (Getting funding to tell me that going for a walk each day and eating vegetables will make me happier than not doing either. Thanks. I'll be sure to bookmark your brilliant insights and refer to them often.)

But happiness -joy is probably closer to what I mean- is useful to think with at the moment. Joy is both a more acute and more fleeting experience. You can certainly 'set the table' for it but in almost all cases it arrives when it arrives -a semi-bidden upwelling. The title image is from the front porch of the farm, last weekend, probably our last genuinely hot day for the season. I was already having a good day but when we sat down in the late afternoon and just listened to the river my head spun with joy like my first ever teenage cigarette.

So ask yourself the following few questions:

  1. How do you reconcile feeling joy when the world is the way it is right now?
  2. How do you feel when you hear about other people's joy? Divide them into those you don't like and those you do. Is it the same feeling?
  3. Has your relationship to joy changed over the last couple of years? Can you experience it without subsequent guilt if it accompanies some signifier of financial good fortune? (Some people got laid off but I got a payrise so I'm going on a cruise because I haven't taken my family on a holiday in two years, etc.)
  4. Has joy moved up or down in your personal priorities over the last couple of years?

Now ask yourself if you think of joy as an 'external' concept like love or kindness or compassion. Does it have an independent ontology the way we think love or compassion does? We treat love and compassion almost like critically endangered species: they should be cultivated and encouraged at all places among all people at all times even if you are not in any way involved with where said cultivation is attempted. The world has too little of it, the world cannot ever have enough of it and its continual growth is a universal good. (I believe this to be true, by the way. I just want you to observe it.)

Is it the same with joy? Or do you need joy to satisfy certain moral conditions before you will allow it to manifest -in yourself or others- without reacting negatively? Leave aside the ludicrous examples of Pol Pot 'enjoying' genocide or child molesters 'enjoying' their assaults and so on, because you can similarly twist kindness/compassion/love to fit that scheme. I mean it more the way Frankie Boyle meant it in this tweet:

 

 

There'll be more about the distinction in this week's podcast but typically when centrists -centre right or centre left- talk about 'The Left' they're talking about themselves. They're talking about the neoliberal consensus. Jordan Peterson isn't battling 'The Left', he's yelling into a liberal centrist mirror that is only slightly askew. He's certainly correct that these campus teenagers are radical but he's wrong that they are radical left -they are the accompanying chorus to a demoniacal, interventionist, full-surveillance, global war plan implemented at the behest of mega-corporations that seeks to accrue the last few shreds of domination to itself. (Žižek makes this point in a recent piece about Peterson.) The Far Right and the Far Left are certainly 'radical', but the centre is anything but moderate. How else would you describe a project that requires full-spectrum monitoring of every human on earth so they can watch them all vaporise in real time from the comfort of a New Zealand bunker? Yes, let's all give those guys more power. Let's take to twitter and get them to intervene in our lives even further.

I'm reading Nassim Taleb's latest, Skin in the Game. You're probably already familiar with his notion of the 'Intellectual Yet Idiot' (IYI). It's his bombastic term for what we would call the (neo)liberal intelligentsia:

Typically, the IYI get first-order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects, making him totally incompetent in complex domains. The IYI has been wrong, historically, about Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, trans-fats, Freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, HFCS (High-Fructose Corn Syrup), Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, marathon running, selfish genes, election-forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup), and p-values. But he is still convinced that his current position is right.

Probably Taleb's prime example of an IYI is Steven Pinker -who's latest book is somehow even stupider than his one about how war is getting less and less likely. (I'll bet king's money we'll find out in a couple of decades that Pinker was CIA. All his stuff reads exactly like the CIA-funded pap that academics shat all over the world during the Cold War about how amazing the American system is. He's a paid apologist for military expansionism and anglo-supremacy. Taleb misses the conspiracy angle.)

Thinking the status quo is moderate or preferable is first order logic. It's thinking that the presidential candidate that single-handedly brought slave markets back to Libya after a multi-century absence isn't racist because she (eventually) said less appalling words than the other racist candidate.

But there is good news. Firstly, probably a majority of you didn't even know that Steven Pinker had a new book out so that gives me a little comfort. Secondly, some people did and are systemically pulling out and unpicking his troubling racial claims:

With all of this... The Pinker stuff and the seeding of identitarian conflict, I just can't shake the suspicion that it's a PR campaign to rehabilitate the neoliberal project in the face of its abject domestic failure for the majority of its victims. I think we are seeing neoliberalism's New Coke. (Actually a perfect metaphor, when you think about it. You're welcome.)

Neoliberalism's New Coke now comes with extra spy flavour. Mark Blyth makes the point that, prior to Alan Greenspan, no one new the name of the Chairperson of the Federal Reserve. At this stage of neoliberalism's unfolding, everyone knows their name because they are one of the top three most powerful people in the world. Consider that, today, we seem to not only know the name of the assistant undersecretary to the third floor doorman of the Indianapolis bureau of the FBI... but that Woke Twitter will gladly give him the 'Oh Captain, My Captain' treatment every time he tweets. This is your official proof that you live in the Age of Espionage. Spies should not be your heroes, you idiots.

But even the spy worship is (albeit only just) starting to fade. And so I think the good news is we're witnessing the diminishing efficacy of these tactics -which many of us have observed over the last six months- and that a growing number of minds are thinking with better alternatives. I think IYIs are mostly just talking to themselves at this point. It's just a parade of flapping heads on news programmes and newspaper websites with cratered audiences. We don't know what these better alternatives are yet -they aren't fully fleshed out and I frankly hope they never will be. I've always had much more sympathy for Left thinking but it has always had that Demiurgic sin where it thinks it has the complete solution of what we all should do at all times into the future: The universe as a solved math problem which is just childish, nineteenth century idiocy. So I know it's a bold claim but I can smell sanity on the changing winds. I suspect -well, not that sanity will return to public discourse- but that sane discourse will have a slightly larger public space. Optimistic, yet realistic. That's the forecast.

Let's return to the hypothetical guy taking his family on a cruise vacation. How does he frame his windfall so that he can better experience joy? Does he just compartmentalise and say "fuck it, I worked hard for my promotion". That may well be true. (Not always. I've been living proof of that at least once.) But is it true enough? What are his alternatives? Put on a hairshirt and hand out alms to his former colleagues? What about his kids? Does his moral responsibility to maximise their chances in life trump any feelings he may have about the conditions surrounding his windfall?

On the Right, you will hear that no luck was involved, and vacation guy earned his money with skill and diligence. On the Left, you are more likely to hear that it is all luck. Luck in being born into our oppressive matrix a male, a heterosexual, and white. (My hypothetical guy is white, obviously. He's going on a cruise. That means he's either white or possibly Japanese.) Luck in being born middle class and thus getting access to tertiary education that oppressed groups are 'systemically' marginalised from. Luck in being on the right side of apparently racial and sexist hiring practices.

Across the spectrum, these contentions are completely idiotic, and not because they aren't all partially correct. Their universal inaccuracy does not come down to economic analysis, but a failure to define, understand -even jailbreak- 'luck'. You are more likely to find such failure localised on the Left, where our messy, organic, meaning-filled lifeways are reduced to a mechanism -a literal artifice of automatic oppression that drains all the blood from a wider appreciation of what life even am. Although, on the Right you'll find a superstitious solipsism that -taken to its 'logical' conclusions- suggests that vacation guy is the only thing that exists or moves in the entire universe and may well have godlike superpowers. So it's glass houses.

We commonly think of luck as an error in cognition when assessing probabilistic outcomes. There is no longer any 'life' there, any 'caprice'. It is an unthinking mathematical function, poorly described. Our ancestors were not so stupid. 'Fortune', not just as a deity but as a concept, is far more nuanced. Today, 'fortune' typically means 'good' things. It is analogous to 'wealth'. We say 'fortunate' when good things happen and 'unfortunate' when bad ones do.

There is a slight, fragrant horror to the Classical conception of Fortune -and it lasted until well past Shakespeare. She is Europe's longest reigning goddess in many respects. Fortune could be bargained with a little bit but that's it. She would heap her favours upon you at random (luck) but she may equally randomly take them back and more. It is a more animate, more directed, conception of luck and one that -to my eyes- leads to greater appreciation and humility. The pseudo-Left conception of luck -you are lucky to be a white, hetero, middle class male- carries an accusatory air for circumstances that are largely out of vacation guy's control. If he were an Ancient Roman, it may sound more like this: "the gods (in general) birthed you into a favoured family. Fortune brought you a lovely wife, has not yet taken any of your children, and then she cleared a path for your ascent at work. She has plainly noticed you."

You see how that's creepier and somehow more... real? It inspires a potentially healthier combination of gratitude and fear. So instead of vacation guy getting justifiably defensive at the accusation of 'luck', if somebody says 'Fortune' then there's not only some agreement... but also a slight gulp, like he's just realised he's wandered away from his friends in a haunted mansion and probably something bad is about to happen. We don't consider the fact that our children are still alive to be of a kind with getting a promotion but we probably should, especially when we are talking about or thinking with joy. ("Be joyful and do the little things.")

And really that's my whole point. In my books I go to pains to describe how we've reached the edges of last century's prevailing epistemologies: in physics, in biology, in psychology, in ecology. This Fourth Turning or whatever it is other than a point in the timeline means that same process is now happening to politics and economics. The models have failed. Stop looking backwards.

How do we experience and think with joy in a world that is often cruel and uneven with its favours? By sliding some better -or at least currently unfalsified- foundational premises underneath and have reality unfold differently. Note that this still allows you to keep all the injustices and iniquities you are so insistent on pointing out on social media as if no one else had ever heard of them. But they must occur in a universe of deeper meaning. (Secondary Note: this also implies a greater urgency in addressing said injustices, as they now have cosmic implications, not merely mechano-economic ones.)

We don't get garbage pick up on the farm so I was listening to an old episode of Speaking of Jung on the drive back from the local tip on Saturday. The guest, Barbara Davies -who in lineage parlance is only one removed from Jung himself- gave her definition of 'the good life'. Because it's a troubling term, yes? Is it a yacht? Is it vacation guy's life? 'Good' is insufficiently universal but we all also know what our good life would be. Paraphrasing, Davies defined it as allowing the unconscious to become conscious in the clearest way possible in your life.

This is classic Jung, of course. The purpose of life is to make the unconscious conscious. Where else would our impulses and compulsions toward our own 'good' life be coming from? Who else but our dreams would show us these things and seek to live them through us? Here you see some of the profound impact the gnostics had on him. Consider the Gospel of Thomas:

If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.

What is important to realise is you are only partially in control of this process. Worse still: you are almost entirely in control of preventing it from happening. What he is talking about -what gnostic Jesus may well have been talking about- is exploring and also getting out of the way of the unconscious experiencing itself/you/the universe. And it may well destroy you if you do not.

You are free to gloss 'the unconscious' with whatever term you like: the spirit world, the gods, God, whatever. But I like the (jailbroken Jungian) use of 'the unconscious' here because it carries very little predestination. It is not 'destiny' as a fiat declaration of some god prior to your birth, but a plant growing: toward light, around obstacles, deeper into the soil, up balustrades. The outcome is not certain and may well be an emergent goal along the course of your lifetime. You may not 'fulfil your fate'. I like it even more because it requires engagement. It requires exploring one's dreams. It requires observing and participating in the patently exogenous meaning in the world. You don't just get whisked along to your fate by some god or another.

The road from the tip to the farm is narrow and winding, hugging the side of the valley, opening up vistas over forest and farmland to the north with each bend. It's an astonishingly incongruent spectacle for so quotidian a chore. The rhythm of the road, combined with my origin point and destination seemed -if not synchronicitous- then at least pregnant with Barbara Davies' meaning. The metaphor felt alive at that moment and I felt joy.

It's a long-running topic of examination among the premium members: what analogical methods are available to bring western lifeways into a-line-ment with non-western ones -operating on the reasonable assumption that it is we who are in error rather than all other people everywhere for all time since the beginning of human history. See some of Eriol's uncharacteristically brief thoughts here. One of our current operating assumptions is -now that The Red Book is out in the world- a sufficiently haunted Jungianism is a big part of it. If you've read your Red Book, and you've read your Eduardo Kohn, you'll see -when it comes to dreams, spirits, and how both they and we are embodied and made physical- the differences are invisible to the naked eye. And that's not a statement I make lightly. I am all too aware and loudly critical of the breezy universalism left over from last century that still afflicts magic (and especially paganism).

Bring to mind some of the pseudo-left-liberal buzzwords that set the twitter trolls running like flies to shit: toxic masculinity, intersectionality, nonbinary, privilege. Perhaps few people articulate it this way, but why they have such a 'nails on chalkboard' effect so often may be because they emerge from a failed cosmology but describe real things. Another key reason to think with 'the unconscious' rather than 'the spirit world' in this context is that it provides far richer and far more effective methods of healing trauma -certainly a very real thing- and fully actualising sexual/gender/bodily personhood (in a specifically western context). For instance, off the top of my head right now I can't think of a single animist culture that would raise an eyebrow over trans ontologies. Physical things -especially humans- have infinite interiority. But it also allows for fuller expressions of macro goals like sex positivity and better relationships with the more-than-human world because we have re-acknowledged the meaning inherent in the physical. This is a far more defensible hill than some sort of intersectional-materialist pseudoscience.

Speaking of defences, the genesis for this post arose from the drive back from the tip and also Becca Tarnas -former podcast guest and all around smarty pants- uploading her PhD thesis defence which is about the temporal and synchronistic parallels between Tolkien and Jung, which you can see here:

 

Have a bit more Jung so we can lean into the implications of joy in a wider model.

Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.[..]

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being. Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart ... Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

Your interiority is pure nature (leaving aside how that term has dated, for now) that is outside the control of your will but available for interrogation/interaction/dancing by/with it. Almost by definition, joy emerges from here, underneath your parrot, to trouble it. The fact that joy appears almost unbidden is a sure sign it both is and comes from the unconscious. It does not even really belong to you. And what is down there -however you describe it- is really real. It is The Real. Its arrival may trigger some squawking -either from your own mind or the minds of your chattering detractors. But it is a sacred signal. We need more of it, not less. This is my solve for joy in an uneven and cruel world.

Let us end with vacation guy, now walking up the gangway to board the cruise ship. He is anxious about enjoying the experience, given everything that is going on. And he should be anxious. He should be anxious about not experiencing joy. He should be concerned about his capacity to bring forth joy.

Because if he doesn't, it might destroy him.


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