Freud -- with Marx, Darwin and Einstein -- ranks among the intellectual fathers of the 20th Century. The core concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis still pervade Western society. We talk about the meaning of dreams, make "Freudian" slips, appreciate the power of unconscious desires and accept the influence of childhood experiences on the adult. However, Freud’s relevance for the 21st Century lies more in his call for a renovation of human consciousness. Freud's concern with the health of the soul and the support he sought to give to reason and intellect places him in a dialogue with Plato and gives psychoanalysis roots deep in Western culture. Both Freud and Plato practiced statecraft of the soul, reforming the “inner city” that determines individual and collective character. Both attempted to help the individual gain control over desire through establishing proper order among the parts of the soul.
As we move through these first years of the new millennium, it sometimes appears that the world has become too large, too complex and more dangerous and inhospitable every day. We seem beset by nightmares: terrorism, fanaticism, fascism, communism, tribalism, nationalism, racism and the other -isms that have prevented us, as individuals and as societies, from thinking clearly and acting with humanity. We paid dearly for these nightmares in the 20th century and the end is nowhere in sight. We feel increasingly challenged to preserve a minimum sense of security and well being in the midst of the planet-wide struggle of billions of others to do the same. In this struggle, our political systems -- the governments that oversee our domestic and foreign affairs and the organizations that connect us internationally -- often seem overwhelmed by the effort to stave off ever-threatening crises and disasters of one kind or the other. No place, no one, no system appears immune to difficulty. At a time when the major ideological and systemic competitors to Western liberal-democracy and free-market capitalism have collapsed, neither democracy nor the market appear to offer, by themselves, the answers we need to our many problems.
We in the West have been especially blessed by history. But with an abundance of natural and human resources, a long and secure tradition of democracy and individual rights, and the strongest and richest mass economies the world has ever seen, we nevertheless remain afflicted by poverty, prejudice, racial injustice, declining living standards and political system mired in parochialism and shortsighted partisanship. We have proved incapable of preventing the death of innocent men, women and children from terror, war, famine and disease -- which are, after all, largely the result of human action or inaction. And although the world has providentially taken a step back from nuclear Armageddon, we are still poisoning our environment and degrading its capability to feed, care and comfort us. To be fair, it is not that we are at a loss for ways to resolve many of these problems. One can imagine solutions to most of them that could succeed if we were determined enough, worked hard enough and sacrificed enough. Yet, when we are not dreaming, it seems naive to believe that we could ever achieve such outcomes in the "real" world. So, our feet firmly planted on the ground, we hope for the best while fearing, more and more, the worst.
In all, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that we have reached a point in global history that demands finding new ways to live, individually and collectively. We have lost our faith in ourselves and in our ability to reason our way forward. After the terrors of the 20th Century, the Enlightenment and its faith in the ability of human intellect to help us perfect our world have come to seem like a bad joke. The nightmares have entered our very souls and made us doubt our ability to think, reason, discuss and decide with our fellow human beings the many problems that we face. Some believe that the only response is to trust instinct, listen to our blood, and fight to protect what we have while seizing the high ground before others do so. Reason must be rescued if we are to find a better way.
Freud can yet help us begin. His conception of the human soul and the conflict within us reconnects our problems with the similar concerns of Plato and Aristotle. Freud's work recalls Socrates' invitation, in the Republic, to establish within ourselves the rule of reason without which we cannot have just and well-ordered societies. 2300 years later, this solution remains difficult to achieve. But after all this time, we have even more cause to believe that "knowing thyself" may be the only way to leave the nightmares behind.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Lost
I followed Lost since the beginning, on TV while home and however I could abroad. It was good TV and in the end, as profound as TV ever gets. The ending tied things up well and was quite satisfying. We can discuss the details maybe forever, but these are the basic insights I take away from Lost:
o The struggle between good and evil is real on the Island and in the world.
o This struggle never ends, some fall, others take our place.
o We are at our best when we are part of that struggle.
o The people we are closest to are the people we share the struggle with.
o Our guide in the struggle is -- as it was for Plato -- the light of the good. We can never grab that light but we can go where it shines brightest.
o We should do all we can to preserve the light, to do the good. That is the struggle.
o Life is a mystery and there are things that we will never be able to explain.
o Love is all that really counts.
The meeting in the Church at the end of Lost is just a bit of hopeful wishing. But who knows what comes after this life? Maybe there is a Valhalla.
o The struggle between good and evil is real on the Island and in the world.
o This struggle never ends, some fall, others take our place.
o We are at our best when we are part of that struggle.
o The people we are closest to are the people we share the struggle with.
o Our guide in the struggle is -- as it was for Plato -- the light of the good. We can never grab that light but we can go where it shines brightest.
o We should do all we can to preserve the light, to do the good. That is the struggle.
o Life is a mystery and there are things that we will never be able to explain.
o Love is all that really counts.
The meeting in the Church at the end of Lost is just a bit of hopeful wishing. But who knows what comes after this life? Maybe there is a Valhalla.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
A New Patriotism
The weather has been glorious these past two days. Went biking in Virgina this morning on the W&OD. On the way back, came to a stop sign on the trail where it crosses a road. A guy in a pickup, wearing a cowboy hat and playing country music on his radio, stopped, when he didn't have to, to let me go by without stopping on my bike. It was an act of kindness. Made me feel good and to realize how much we are missing when we don't try to treat each other with kindness and tolerance. What I think we have been missing for a long time now is the sense of being citizens, fellow citizens, comrades in a great adventure to see if government by the people, for the people and of the people can rise to the challenges that face us. We need a new form of patriotism in which we all recognize that whatever our different views, we are all trying together to get it right. This new patriotism - maybe just good, old fashioned civility - should start with recognizing each other as fellow citizens of this great country founded on the notion that freedom and democracy works better. Friendly kindness and mutual tolerance and understanding is patriotic and good for us.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Some Conclusions about Brain, Mind and Consciousness
The brain’s many organic processes most likely utilize quantum effects as well as classical ones. The classical elements include the physiology, chemistry and electro-dynamics of the brain. The quantum elements may include synaptic connections and large-scale, non-local coherence of brain functioning. The organization and dynamical functioning of these processes in networks and “mappings” – in the context of the shear complexity characteristic of the human brain – produces a tangled hierarchy that emerges as mind. Mind is non-conscious. Much mental processing goes on of which we are unaware. (We can be mindful about things that we remain unaware of at any particular moment.) Some of what mind contains may be/can be offered up to consciousness. The intersection of mind and consciousness produces self.
Socrates said: know thyself. Freud said: where It is, I shall be.
Consciousness itself is primary.
Socrates said: know thyself. Freud said: where It is, I shall be.
Consciousness itself is primary.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
The Role of Chaos in Human Evolution
Two terms need immediate clarification. The chaos I am referring to is the deterministic yet unpredictable kind. And I take human evolution to include that change accruing from cultural, social, political and technological processes as well at the slower progression through genetic natural selection.
The conception of natural selection as a form of progression flies in the face of the current politically correct tendency to question the notion that life is evolving toward anything. But the constantly increasing complexity resulting from chaotic processes applied to existing complexity has clearly driven an ever increasing individuation of life since its start a few billion years ago. Natural selection feeds on the random and unpredictable variation characteristic of all life - indeed of all material existence - and results in this progression from lessor to greater complexity.
Down to quantum level, all material processes occur according to deterministic laws even when the outcomes so generated are statistical probabilities. And as interactions between matter and energy become more complex according to these laws of nature – we live in the kind of universe that they do – the processes also become more chaotic. The result is that as complexity increases, it begets greater complexity. And whereas one stone is pretty much like any other stone, every single live organism is a unique individual. And the process of each individual organism interacting with its environment – also always changing – results in achieving various degrees of fitness. The important points here seem to me to be two: that it is individual differences that determine fitness and fuel evolution and that the more individualized the organism, the greater the possible points for chaos to operate.
A human being is a marvelously unique and individualized organism. We vary at almost every interesting point from all other humans. Our cultural and social variability adds extra dimensions to our individuation. Our accelerating technology allows ways of interacting beyond calculation and is a true chaos multiplier. The human race is by this point of time a realm of complexity that the earth has never seen before. Evolution from this basis promises to take us places that we cannot now imagine, if we survive at all.
Thus, everything that we do – to test our boundaries, to right the world’s wrongs, to struggle for our daily bread – and the way that we do it provides the raw material for evolution, for greater complexity. We drive change when we seek to effect our environment in our own way, even though we do not always succeed. In the chaotic processes of life, some win and more lose. (As Crash Davis put it: some days you win, some days you lose and some days it rains.) And in the end, it is not about us but about the fact that our species will survive only if there are enough folks pressing forward even when most of our individual efforts seem to fall short.
The conception of natural selection as a form of progression flies in the face of the current politically correct tendency to question the notion that life is evolving toward anything. But the constantly increasing complexity resulting from chaotic processes applied to existing complexity has clearly driven an ever increasing individuation of life since its start a few billion years ago. Natural selection feeds on the random and unpredictable variation characteristic of all life - indeed of all material existence - and results in this progression from lessor to greater complexity.
Down to quantum level, all material processes occur according to deterministic laws even when the outcomes so generated are statistical probabilities. And as interactions between matter and energy become more complex according to these laws of nature – we live in the kind of universe that they do – the processes also become more chaotic. The result is that as complexity increases, it begets greater complexity. And whereas one stone is pretty much like any other stone, every single live organism is a unique individual. And the process of each individual organism interacting with its environment – also always changing – results in achieving various degrees of fitness. The important points here seem to me to be two: that it is individual differences that determine fitness and fuel evolution and that the more individualized the organism, the greater the possible points for chaos to operate.
A human being is a marvelously unique and individualized organism. We vary at almost every interesting point from all other humans. Our cultural and social variability adds extra dimensions to our individuation. Our accelerating technology allows ways of interacting beyond calculation and is a true chaos multiplier. The human race is by this point of time a realm of complexity that the earth has never seen before. Evolution from this basis promises to take us places that we cannot now imagine, if we survive at all.
Thus, everything that we do – to test our boundaries, to right the world’s wrongs, to struggle for our daily bread – and the way that we do it provides the raw material for evolution, for greater complexity. We drive change when we seek to effect our environment in our own way, even though we do not always succeed. In the chaotic processes of life, some win and more lose. (As Crash Davis put it: some days you win, some days you lose and some days it rains.) And in the end, it is not about us but about the fact that our species will survive only if there are enough folks pressing forward even when most of our individual efforts seem to fall short.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Gods, Monsters and Americans
Was reading a book putting forward the theory of monistic idealism. The author notes an observation attributed to Mother Theresa that Americans are the most materialistically blessed but impoverished in spirit people on earth. This could actually be said about most of the people in the Western world but maybe of Americans the most.
The author (Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe) attributes this to America’s unquestioned materialism. We have lost connection with the world of enchantment in which we felt connected to something greater and more mysterious. I won’t gainsay this. But it may not be the whole picture. To judge from American popular culture – especially in the movies and TV that we export to the whole world – we seem to yearn for what we are missing. Living far from the US for the past few years, I see the reflections of this American preoccupation with particular clarity. We flood the ether with vampires, superheroes, ghosts, wizards and witches, psychics, aliens, magic, lost dimensions, time travelers, alternate realities, undead, formerly dead, demons, angels, devils, gods, mythical beasts and monsters. And I have no doubt left some out. We seem to have an utter fascination with things and beings which we in our day-today life know do not – cannot – really exist. What are these if not expressions of something deep inside of us that we feel the loss of, something beyond what science and modernity have left us? (There are other manifestations of this as well that lay at the root of the various forms of fundamentalism, including the political ones.) Some seek this missing dimension in religion, many look for it on the Sci-Fi network and Beyond.
Freud called this sort of thing the return of the repressed. For Nietzsche, it was the eternal return. It almost certainly is a return, a deep echo, of the pagan gods buried in our walls so long ago. And those gods themselves a kind of short-hand for that sense of horror and magic human beings first experienced when, a few hundred thousand years ago, we woke into conscious awareness of who and where we were. Americans are not materialistic as much as just a long way from home and very unsure of how to get back. And from the appeal of what we broadcast to the rest of the world, we are not the only ones.
The author (Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe) attributes this to America’s unquestioned materialism. We have lost connection with the world of enchantment in which we felt connected to something greater and more mysterious. I won’t gainsay this. But it may not be the whole picture. To judge from American popular culture – especially in the movies and TV that we export to the whole world – we seem to yearn for what we are missing. Living far from the US for the past few years, I see the reflections of this American preoccupation with particular clarity. We flood the ether with vampires, superheroes, ghosts, wizards and witches, psychics, aliens, magic, lost dimensions, time travelers, alternate realities, undead, formerly dead, demons, angels, devils, gods, mythical beasts and monsters. And I have no doubt left some out. We seem to have an utter fascination with things and beings which we in our day-today life know do not – cannot – really exist. What are these if not expressions of something deep inside of us that we feel the loss of, something beyond what science and modernity have left us? (There are other manifestations of this as well that lay at the root of the various forms of fundamentalism, including the political ones.) Some seek this missing dimension in religion, many look for it on the Sci-Fi network and Beyond.
Freud called this sort of thing the return of the repressed. For Nietzsche, it was the eternal return. It almost certainly is a return, a deep echo, of the pagan gods buried in our walls so long ago. And those gods themselves a kind of short-hand for that sense of horror and magic human beings first experienced when, a few hundred thousand years ago, we woke into conscious awareness of who and where we were. Americans are not materialistic as much as just a long way from home and very unsure of how to get back. And from the appeal of what we broadcast to the rest of the world, we are not the only ones.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Tolling Bells
Siddhartha is said to have discovered in his youth four basic truths: that life contains suffering, that we grow old, that we die and that suffering originates in desire. The fourth is certainly an existential dilemma. But it is realization of the other three that brings home the existential truth of life. We of course know intellectually that we suffer and someday will grow old and even die. But the truth only becomes real when we feel these things in our bones, when we finally realize in our stomach that they apply to us.
A colleague recently died. He was a good man and just a bit older than me. He turned 60 which I will face next year. I’ve meanwhile experienced a certain minor but annoying health problem that affects my ability to experience the world. All of a sudden, I do feel quite mortal. This is not a profound discovery. After all, we already know not to ask for whom the bell tolls. It is always for us. But it is perhaps the start of true wisdom. For a long time I followed Socrates in believing wisdom lies in knowing that in the end we know nothing. But maybe it is really in learning what Siddhartha did.
A colleague recently died. He was a good man and just a bit older than me. He turned 60 which I will face next year. I’ve meanwhile experienced a certain minor but annoying health problem that affects my ability to experience the world. All of a sudden, I do feel quite mortal. This is not a profound discovery. After all, we already know not to ask for whom the bell tolls. It is always for us. But it is perhaps the start of true wisdom. For a long time I followed Socrates in believing wisdom lies in knowing that in the end we know nothing. But maybe it is really in learning what Siddhartha did.
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