Anthropologist Nicholas Conard (left) and filmmaker Werner Herzog examine artifacts from the Chauvet caves in southern France
Werner Herzog’s new film, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, joins my favorite filmmaker to a subject that has fascinated me since I was a kid. Herzog, as he puts it, “talked his way into the Chauvet Cave” in France. With a three man crew and a lightweight 3D camera, the documentarian, shot his film about the beginning of human graphical artistry. Trailer at bottom of page for film on Herzog’s web site. For a Herzog film, significant buzz.
Another documentary has just gone into very limited release, and I guess I’m going to have to be patient. An Ecology of the Mind is about the great systems thinker, anthropologist, and, multi-disciplinary investigator Gregory Bateson. He was, and his thinking is, second-to-none as a main source of my own outlook and ingredient for my own undisciplined poking around, and, research. His daughter Nora is the filmmaker…and it’s about time.
The hardest saying in the Bible is that of St. Paul, addressing the Galatians: “God is not mocked,” and this saying applies to the relationship between man and his ecology. It is of no use to plead that a particular sin of pollution or exploitation was only a little one or that it was unintentional or that it was committed with the best intentions. Or that “If I didn’t, somebody else would have.” The processes of ecology are not mocked.
On the other hand, surely the mountain lion when he kills the deer is not acting to protect the grass from overgrazing.
In fact, the problem of how to transmit our ecological reasoning to those whom we wish to influence in what seems to us to be an ecologically “good” direction is itself an ecological problem. We are not outside the ecology for which we plan—we are always and inevitably a part of it.
Herein lies the charm and the terror of ecology—that the ideas of this science are irreversibly becoming a part of our own ecosocial system.
We live then in a world different from that of the mountain lion—he is neither bothered nor blessed by having ideas about ecology. We are.
I believe that these ideas are not evil and that our greatest (ecological) need is the propagation of these ideas as they develop—and as they are developed by the (ecological) process of their propagation.
If this estimate is correct, then the ecological ideas implicit in our plans are more important than the plans them-selves, and it would be foolish to sacrifice these ideas on the altar of pragmatism. It will not in the long run pay to “sell” the plans by superficial ad hominem arguments which will conceal or contradict the deeper insight.
The closing page from Bateson’s Steps to An Ecology of the Mind; my emphasis.
We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.
Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness and wise consumer choices has never worked – and it won’t work now. (Paul Ryan, leading intellectual light of feudal Tea Party Republicanism.)
Newt with his Peeps
Newt Gingrich is another leading intellectual lantern of Conservatism it is believed and said by some.
Despite all the ideological pieties leading Republicans wrap themselves in, and wish to ensnare ‘us’ by, I can reduce their ‘end’ to six words: Cheap Labor, and, Show Me the Money.
These are the values inspiring those brave workers in Poland … They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. (Ronald Reagan)
Cheap labor. I do wonder about the psycho-social factors in political behavior. The point remains that in our current climate the proponents of the miniaturize-the-government ideology are looking for culprits to punish. Actually, they’re looking for the usual culprits: liberals, labor, the professional classes, cosmopolitans, homosexuals, non-Christians, immigrants, teachers, professors, the unemployed, minorities.
Track: the affect-laden and rhetorical language/artifacts moved to explain why all sorts of groups need to be sacrificed, need to be summarily tossed from their, as Ryan puts it, hammocks. (h/t to the psychohistorian Lloyd DeMaus.) But, sure, if the people will have a plutocracy, then so it will be. I do note the awesome bait-and-switch pulled off recently by Mr. Ryan. This could get ugly, but then there is the Mittster!
From another perspective, it’s all Object Relations. Donald Trump, a laughing stock who doesn’t appreciate to any degree that he is so, said something revealing. He said that America needs a leader who will restore the world’s respect for America. Daddy’s home! This calls to mind the certain fact that Mr. Trump is surrounded by people who fawn over him.
Every candidate is surrounded by Yes people. No doubt Newt’s handlers affirm his assertion that Islam is posed to infiltrate and take over the U.S. No doubt Pawlenty’s people affirm that, ‘yes, Tim, supply side economics really works.’
The overarching plan is diabolical. Can the Republicans do enough to sink the economy and then attach blame for their own accomplishment to President Obama? They are greatly advantaged by Obama’s apparent own inability to understand that his opponents sincerely and doggedly wish to destroy him, and his kind.
(DeMaus was on to something.) Given this prospect for wringing out the ‘socialistic’ impurities by delivering diverse culprits into the noose of this budget cutting device, we can expect an uptick in pundits and thought leaders joyfully explaining how the banks, General Motors, Fannie and Freddie, should have been allowed to devolve and disappear. This would be them speaking of scapegoats who weren’t sacrificed, as a way of sadistically offering a sneak preview about those who remain and are to be sacrificed.
The third phase of the business cycle, the Time of Sacrifice, is usually seen as a reversal of the manic, or inflationary, phase, but it actually is a continuation of its guilt-reducing process, only now all economic activity is “depressed” rather than wildly sped up. A fantasy is shared during this phase that things had gotten “out of control.” The nation is imagined to be a giant body with two parts: a top, which must be fed, and a bottom, which must be punished. The role of the top part of the body is taken by the rich, and the fantasy is the familiar “trickle-down theory”-that if the rich are fed, the poor might somehow benefit. It is the same fantasy expressed by the primitive Anyi of Africa, when they used to say as they brought gifts to their king and his court in time of trouble, “When the king’s breasts are full of milk, it is his people who drink.”(24) All “supply-side economics is based on this magical fantasy, whether carried out by David Stockman in the 1980s or Andrew Mellon in the 192Os. What we wanted was to “let the hogs feed,” as Stockman phrased it,(25) to make the rich fatter, under the delusion that we were all infants dependent upon their maternal breasts for our sustenance.
That the “supply side” argument for feeding the rich-supposedly as a way to increase investment-was thoroughly irrational was revealed by studies made by the Federal Reserve Bank, Business Week and others(26) which showed that America’s investment rate was actually at its highest in decades, that there existed “a record $80 billion pile of ready cash” available for investing whenever the demand existed and that money shifted to the wealthier part of the nation at the expense of everyone else would only dry up demand further and produce lower, not higher, in-vestment. Few were surprised, then, when, as the Reagan plan took effect, investment plunged rather than rose. “Supply side” tax cuts for business and the wealthy had only felt right; few claimed it could be demonstrated as right. As Senator Howard Baker admitted when he passed the program, “What we’re doing is really a river boat gamble. we’re gambling that this new economics will work.”(27)
The other task of the Time of Sacrifice, that of “punishing the bot-tom,” involved a similarly delusional fantasy shared by most of the nation – that we were bad in enjoying so much prosperity and that part of us must suffer for our badness. Just as when we were children it was our bottoms which had to be punished, so too the bottom half of the body politic-the poor, the unemployed, women and children on welfare-would have to be punished for the indulgences of the rest of us. The first thing which was necessary was to strangle our economic bloodstream, our money supply. We suddenly “discovered” monetarism and reversed the growth of our monetary supply, “bleeding” our economic system of its life – giving blood, precisely as doctors used to bleed their patients to remove the “polluted” blood which they imagined had been produced by “overindulgences in food and sex.”(28) It was, of course, not just a “mistake” for the Federal Reserve Bank to allow too much money in the Seventies and then suddenly to squeeze the money supply so hard that interest rates went to 20 percent and no one could buy cars or houses. It was, rather, the purpose of the Fed to produce these erratic swings in money supply, in accordance with the manic-depressive cycle. If they hadn’t done so, we would never have had a Time of Sacrifice, and within a few decades our steady growth in productivity would soon have produced so much surplus that everyone in America would be living comfortable, and we would have no poor whom we could make suffer for our guilt.
In a similar vein, it is only when the sacrificial, “purging” nature of Reaganomics is taken into account that what seemed to be its conflicting parts can be viewed as a coherent whole. It has often been demonstrated that the two parts of Reaganomics-monetarism and “supply side” tax cuts – don’t make sense hitched together. Economist James Tobin states the case clearly:
The idea that money and prices can be detached and delegated to central bankers while Congress and the executive independently take care of budget, taxes, employment and output is the kind of fallacy that makes exam questions for freshman economics, a fallacy now elevated to presidential doctrine. If Amtrak hitches engines at both ends of a train of cars. . . one engine heading west to New York, the other east to Boston, and advertises that the train is going simultaneously to both destinations, most people would be skeptical. Reagan is hitching a Voicker engine at one end and a Stockman-Kemp locomotive to the other and telling us the economic train will carry us to full employment and disinflation at the same time.
What Tobin overlooks is that providing a train with two engines going in different directions is a plan designed to produce a train wreck, i.e., purposely set up to reduce surplus, sacrifice productive capacity and provide victims of the crash. The “supply side” tax cuts of Stockman were the “feed the rich” fantasy and the monetarism of Volcker was the punish the poor” fantasy. Reagan implemented both at the same time as a way of insuring the sacrifice of the minority to relieve the conscience of the majority. The only question which remained was, as Stockman told one reporter, “How much pain was the new President willing to impose? ”
When Stockman put his budget figures into the computer and found that even with the most optimistic assumptions Reagan’s actions would produce deficits in excess of $100 billion, he told the Atlantic Monthly reporter that he found the figures “frightening – ‘absolutely shocking,’ he confided – yet he seemed oddly exhilerated by the bad news.”(31) Why exhilarated by the bad news”? Because he knew we had hired him to produce bad news, to produce a Time of Sacrifice, to produce 150,000 victims. (Lloyd DeMaus, Reagan’s America)
We learn Paul Ryan was partly inspired to get into politics my Ayn Rand. Alright, this means the author of the novels that constitute the capitalist version of Mein Kampf, may have had something to do with the swinging hammocks.
Again: Cheap Labor. Randian Hayekalistic yokelism. Hey, didn’t save up the quarter million dollars for your cancer treatment? Too bad. Go die. Didn’t sock away a couple of year’s worth of salary for the years after we shipped your job off to Pakistan? Round up some cardboard. I fully expect Mitt and Tim to endorse a supercharged social Darwinism and get behind a Randian red in tooth utopia.
Did I really read that a majority of Republicans in Mississippi believe inter-racial marriage should be against the law?!? Because it is possible to find Republicans who join together: young earth creationism, neo-Birtherism, belief that Obama is a jihadist, racism, who think liberals are Marxists; reject climate science; understand the founders were evangelicals; despise the enlightenment; are TENthers; blame the real estate implosion on poor black folk who didn’t read the fine print, I do wonder about what would be the equivalent to this ripe melding of irrationality and ignorance on the other, leftward side.
All I could come up with was figuring there probably are a bunch of Democrats who think bringing Geithner and Summers into the halls of power was a good idea. But, it is hard to then enumerate some long list of daft beliefs and find actual Democrats who hold them all, as-it-were, together.
And people thought the birthers would go away! We’re to reassert the holy idea of American exceptionalism in this context of super-charged ignorance, paranoia, resentment, and, irrationality–where it became known in public that Ayn Rand inspired a budgeteer to go into politics? And, then, having claimed he (and his ‘own’) represent a sea-change in what “Americans want,” he shamelessly pulls a bait-and-switch. The only thing missing is Ryan hissing, “You suckers.”
(This week Kamelmauz released two new recordings, Poor City, and a free EP, Sleeper. You can listen to all the released Kamelmauz music at Bandcamp.)
Music is my number two* interest, and my number one obsession, and has been so for forty years and counting. Music is my primary metaphor too, because all of its features–listening, playing together, improvising, composing, etc.–provide interesting echoes for all sorts of human qualities, patterns and interactions. Also, both music and sound are, paradoxically, ubiquitous and mysterious.
For example, it is both common and strange that every person possesses musicality. I’m fascinated by the history of the universal human relationship to sound, and, how entangled are sound and language. I’ve tracked this relationship back by way of the anthropological scholarship about presumed prototypes for music and language. This becomes very speculative because a deep generalization about both is: before writing and musical transcription, aural productions are ephemeral, except inasmuch as the products were heard, stored, and made retrievable. …by mind. Much much later, the productive secondary instruments in both realms become part of the artifactual record. Last time I checked, a 40,000 bone flute marked the oldest sound producing artifact found so far–for either mode of production.
My quest for this sound of proto-music represents the centering discovery process for my musical cosmos. Around this orbits that which somehow, (or in various ways,) triangulates–for ‘prime’ example– Thelonious Monk, The Byrds, and Pauline Oliveros. The track leads, then, from the ongoing hearing to youthful enthusiasms and all the way back to the infancy of sound.
My productive musical alter egos are Kamelmauz, he of the naive yet vigorous approach to designing and making his music, or, evoking into a room the sound (he has) already heard. Another one is Dub Collision, who compiles mixes, nowadays in the form of downloads. In this way, he shares–I share–juxtapositions of songs from the vast archive. Ol’ Mr. Collision has been at his compilin’ art for a very long time. I blog my musical activities at nogutsnoglory studios blog, including Dub Collision podcasts at the rate of about one per month. Finally. ‘alter-ego-wise, there is the Hippiegoat, who does all the musically inspired graphic design for mssrs Kamelmauz and Dub Collision.
Kamelmauz’s recordings can be purchased at Bandcamp. (If you want a keepsake, you can throw a few smolians in the direction of the artist. If you LIKE Kamelmauz fan page on Facebook, I’ll send you a code for a free download of Poor City. If you email Kamelmauz, you’ll receive a code that knocks the price from $9 to $4.50.)
*My number one interest is observing and researching what makes people and relationships tick.
I went to the other day to the local bog box shoe store to see if they had a good price on socks. (This was after I dropped my worn out inventory off at the EPA.) As it turned out the sale the store had was fantastic, ‘buy one package and get the second one at half price. But, I had a choice to make, the Nike, for which twelve pairs in two packages would cost $25, or, the store brand, for which twelve pairs in two packages would cost $19.
I observed my brain. Nike is a well known brand. Their socks are made in Mexico. The store brand is made in China. Both have about the same so-to-speak chemistry, with the Nike’s cotton percentage at 80% and the store brand at 82%. But, I really don’t know if there is a hidden difference. I’ll ask the gal.
She tells me,
“Well, if you want to pay for Nike advertising, I suppose that’s why that package is more expensive.”
I chuckled to myself and bought the store brand. I suppose my decision corresponded to a tacit win/win, and the gal led me to the most profitable sale for us both. There’s a lot of psychology implicit in this interaction. No doubt another shopper would insist on the greater credibility of Nike; I presume as much.
Last week I read a news piece about the recent trend where food companies re-size quantities down and keep the price the same. Shortly after reading this I went to the grocery store and noticed as much.
Several weeks ago I went searching on the net for Coleman Barks. Barks, a poet, is most well known for his versions of Rumi. In fact, to the extent Rumi is known by the English-speaking world, a lion’s share of the credit accrues to Mr. Barks and to his colleague and co-author John Moyne.
Having done this same search years ago, I knew there are numerous resources and media, but, one such resource at the CBC had been taken down, an interview with Barks and Andrew Harvey by Mary Hynes (as part of Ms. Hynes’ Tapestry Series.) I made an inquiry.
Lo and behold a few days later a nice gentleman from the CBC emailed me and asked if I would be interested in providing an introduction for this archival podcast. I jumped at the opportunity to help bring the interview back into circulation.
The Big Red Bookis the newest exploration of Rumi by Coleman Barks. It focuses on Rumi’s relationship with Shams of Tabriz. One of the aphorisms of Shams is a touchstone for me:
Follow the perfume, not the tracks.
The following video provides a beguiling introduction to Rumi and Shams.
