One-Way Street

Misery

"We are annihilating melancholia," Professor Eric G. Wilson warns. Reading his essay, "In Praise of Melancholy," excerpted from his book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, we discover, to our surprise, this is a bad thing.  At first glance, Wilson's book seems like more definitive proof that people will complain about anything, especially if they're given a book contract to do it.

The evidence is chilling: according to a Pew survey, 85% of Americans are happy. Apparently, none of those 85% live in a state that's held a presidential primary so far. The presidential candidates have discovered that each primary state has its unique set of gripes. So who's to blame for rampant contentment across America?  Scientists. Wilson traces the conspiracy specifically to happiness studies, which, last time I checked, had found that we feel happiness and sadness in equal measures. In their determination to brighten our moods scientists have also come up with anti-depressants for doctors to foist upon an unsuspecting public. Never mind that anti-depressants can help with the unbearable anxieties our environments provoke. Nietzsche didn't take anti-depressants, so neither should you.

You know the rest of the argument. Drugs are blunting us from feeling depressed, a fundamental, and useful, human emotion. We suffer, although we don't know it because we're on anti-depressants, and our artists become insipid, for without depression we'd no longer have the stereotype of the suffering artist. Wilson says we should be very worried:

I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

The link between madness and creativity is as old as the Romantic poets. Before that, we should remember, artists were depressed a lot, but they were depressed in a way ordinary, non-artists could recognize and experience themselves. In other words, "the agitations of the soul" as the (perhaps sole) source of creativity is an ideology linked to the changing social position of the artist.

Then again, joie de vivre is an ideological belief, too, and undoubtedly a more pernicious one as well. Almost twenty years ago Phillip Lopate published Against Joie de Vivre in which he dismissed the whole self-help bromide to live in the moment as self-defeating narcissism. Jacques Lacan, with more theoretical élan, darkly warned against Anglo-American psychiatry and its "cult of the normal man," in which any anti-social behavior was hunted down and eradicated, by surgery if necessary.

Freud himself said, "the intention that man should be happy is not included in the plan of Creation." The whole post-Freudian European philosophical tradition has taught us to think of happiness as a trivial pursuit for the Oprah generation, a Shangri-La perpetuated by self-help gurus. Greatness of soul has always been linked to a clear-eyed stoicism. Lincoln's law partner, W.H. Herndon, once observed that Lincoln, prone to bouts of depression throughout his life, "crushed the unreal, the inexact, the hollow, and the sham." Lincoln's "fault, if any," Herndon said, "was that he saw things less than they really were." What Herndon is describing here is a kind of depressive realism, in which depression can stem from fundamentally accurate perceptions—a worldview that, in some situations, can be an advantage.

Depression, like wine and butter, is good for you in small doses. Depression can be the first step to changing one's life. Misery is a recognition that not all is right in one's life, and in this sense depression is a part of happiness. I don't think we have a chronic shortage of depression in this country, as Wilson wants us to believe. But cutting ourselves off from a human emotion makes us less human. People have jokingly speculated what Dostoevsky would have been like on Prozac. We should wonder how people on Prozac read Dostoevsky, or how they truly understand the world around them.

SimApocalypse

Back when I had spare time--i.e., before I had children--I sometimes played SimCity. As the game grew more realistic with each edition, SimCity grew more engrossing and more frustrating. I became exasperated with my lazy Sims' refusal to walk more than a couple of blocks to see a doctor. I proved to be as inept at managing city budgets as I was at managing my own budget. Whenever a coal-burning power plant collapsed in a toxic heap, I was invariably short of funds to build a cleaner one to replace it, forcing me to raise taxes during brownouts. My department heads were supposed to help me avoid this sort of problem, but their contradictory, at times nonsensical advice induced the same sputtering incoherence as Mayor Daley is exhibiting these days. I kept playing, though, spurred on by the game's combination of whimsical humor and authoritarian power.  The feeling of omnipotence is a nice complement to the cloistered effect of being on a PC for long periods of time. 

Yesterday Electronic Arts launched the latest edition of the SimCity franchise, SimCity Societies. SimCity has always included pollution as a factor in its games, but it's never been as important as placing a health clinic on every corner. The latest version ups the environmental ante, making environmental factors like rising sea levels a much more important element in the game.  Because the game was created in eco-friendly San Francisco, you can bet you'll have to disperse windmills throughout your city and make sure your waste water is recycled, or you'll hear plenty of loud complaints from your Sims--and Sims are a cranky lot. Supposedly, in this edition Sims can be induced to walk to work, but in my experience Sims wouldn't leave their houses if you issued them flying carpets.

If you can stand the whining, I would think creating a putrid metropolis would be most people's first impulse. The temptation to hasten global disaster is all part of the pleasures of apocalyptic thinking. The Western tradition is rich with apocalyptic brooding, and that strain of thought is just below the surface of some neo-conservative and Christian fundamentalist rhetoric. For this reason one would think these people would have been among the first to embrace Al Gore's message about global warming. Anyway, as any veteran of SimCity knows, after one has completed the sewer system and built the airport, you start to hope for a tornado or an alien attack to give you an excuse to clean up some of the less successful parts of your city. (Sims never die, but their houses burst into pieces very elegantly.) In short, disaster is all part of the pursuit of social perfection.

It's interesting that the game makers continue to carefully limit themselves to a single city, even when playing with global ecological disaster. A player is polluting one small corner of the earth, or constructing an oasis so rigorously green you can drink out of sidewalk puddles. This seems entirely consistent with our current approach to global warming: the solution rests solely in personal consumer choices; we're not going to force our national politicians to do anything about it, no matter how many hectoring columns Thomas Friedman writes. I once played the SimCity franchise's first foray into eco-politics, SimEarth. The game wasn't successful, in part, because of the totalized nature of the game. The Gaia theory upon which the game was based dictated that one oil spill meant your whole planet was doomed, and, since there were no department heads to blame things on, it was your fault alone. It was despairing. On the other hand, the rewards for keeping a healthy planet weren't exactly obvious. In my ecologically sound world, antelope munched on grass. Rabbits hopped around. It was boring. I longed to create one fetid corner of my world--one Gary, Indiana in paradise, just to keep things real.

SimCity Societies may end up teaching us the limits of our desire to clean up our world. Speaking for myself, I have a limited capacity for good acts that don't have an immediate payback. I've noticed, for instance, that the more I recycle the less I floss. If I buy the game and use up my thirty minutes of free time a week while both my children nap, I know I'll probably create a low-tax sinkhole and try to distract my Sims with stadiums and plenty of health care clinics. And this time I'll ignore my department heads.

Caught in the Matrix of the Housing Bubble

Cult films are a distinctive feature of post-modern cinema. In an earlier post I argued that Napoleon Dynamite is a recent example of the phenomenon. One could list others, of course, but one in particular stands out: the Wachowski Brothers' The Matrix. The cult film phenomenon involves, among other things, appropriating a public text for private, yet still shared, means, sometimes far beyond what the original filmmakers may have envisioned. The Matrix has inspired all kinds of speculation on the nature of reality--some of it interesting, some of it silly. The filmmakers themselves supposedly based the series on a misreading of a philosopher with a cult following, Michel Foucault.

Now the Matrix as metaphysics idea has come full circle. John Tierney reports in today's New York Times on an Oxford philosophy professor named Nick Bostrom who argues there's a good chance that we may be living in a computer simulation. Tierney explains,

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

Bostrom's theory is unprovable, but Tierney goes so far as to claim he has a "gut feeling" there's a better than 20% chance that our world is just a computer simulation. I guess it takes a more sensitive gut to detect this possibility than the one I have, because my gut has no inkings about being trapped in a computer simulation.

It's probably just a coincidence that Tierney raises the virtual world question during a financial crisis in which vast sums of money were made based on the fiction that the housing market would expand well past Americans' means to pay for housing. Still, if one wants to conduct a thought experiment about the nature of reality, then this is the direction I'd head toward.

Although Foucault is well known for his musings on the constructed nature of reality, Jean Baudrillard is our most systematic theorist of simulated worlds. His most famous concept is the simulacrum, i.e., the endless repetition of copies with no originals. Contemporary culture, according to Baudrillard, consists of the free exchange of signs without any referents. In earlier stages of Western culture the place of the referent was occupied by nature--raw materials and direct industrial production (e.g., turning raw rubber into tires), as well as artisan and craft modes of production. Now cultural products refer to nothing more than the circulation of commodities in late capitalism.

The recent housing boom saw a new phenomenon: flipping a house. At one time a private home was a middle class person's last tie to a specific territory, a small, but very specific slice of nature. During the housing boom the home became just another commodity to be bought and sold on a global scale. The "California Dream" is now the LA housing market, where one's mortgage starts off as a signed contract but quickly ends up as a chit in some vast investment portfolio in New York, Paris, Frankfurt, or Tokyo. The tangible reality of the home, where Bachelard tells us houses our daydreams, is like the bodies suspended in liquid in The Matrix: just a husk, its intrinsic value is determined in some obscure and complex marketplace few people truly understand. Life in today's real estate market is a gut-wrenching experience that may very well account for the intuitive sense that somebody out there is controlling our lives, and doesn't really care what happens so long as the lindens pile up.

Life Stories and the Novel

Die-hard Monty Python fans will remember the spoof of the Icelandic sagas in which the name of each character is accompanied by a long list of his forbearers: "Ethelridge, son of Barfleby, son of Clem the Meek, son of Clem the Destroyer," and so on until the dawn of creation itself. The joke is that the list is so long the hero (Michael Palin, if I remember correctly) falls asleep. Once the list is over, the hero snaps awake, hops on his horse and goes off to kill somebody. The Monty Python skit is a joke, of course, but it conveys the gist of pre-modern identity. The epic hero was all his forefathers rolled into one, and his actions were always sanctioned, even the bloody slaughters, because of the continuities of kinship and the unities of the social order. You don't see Beowulf (son of Ecgþeow, grandson of Hreðel, king of the Geats) fretting about killing Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a dragon, an endangered species. When Beowulf dies, no one suggests he may have had unresolved issues with his mother, causing him to be aggressive toward women. The very suggestion is absurd: you would have to psychoanalyze all his forbearers, even his entire culture.

Juxtapose this with a patient lying on a psychiatrist's couch recounting some humiliation in high school and trying to figure out how that incident may account for his current timidity before his boss. We tell these kinds of stories all the time, and not just to psychiatrists. We tell them because we have to, because we're not sure who we are and, more crucially, how we got to be whoever it is we are.   We also tell life stories because we'd rather be somebody else. American psychology has just discovered how stories integrate our stable sense of self with our everyday lives.  Yesterday the New York Times reported on this hot news.

Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones.

"When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn't that cool?" said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, "The Redemptive Self." "Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future."

Well, better late than never. For a century literary studies, philosophy, even some brands of Continental psychology have understood that these acts of narrative self-fashioning have been going on since Shakespeare's time. There's even a technology that has been developed since the 16th century to allow us to see ourselves as actors in a drama that is at once coherently plotted and open-ended. That technology is the novel.

In The Theory of the Novel (1920) George Lukács notes that Don Quixote--generally considered the first true novel--appeared exactly when "the Christian God began to forsake the world; when man became lonely and could find meaning and substance only in his own soul, whose home was nowhere; when the world, released from its paradoxical anchorage in the beyond that is truly present, was abandoned to its immanent meaninglessness."

In contrast with the epic hero who always feels perfectly at home wherever he is, the novelistic hero always feels a gap between his inner and outer selves, between what he thinks and how the world behaves. In a world of uncertainties and partial truths, the novel offers complete stories at the end of which everything (usually) makes sense. But unlike the heroes of the ancient epics, the hero or heroine of a novel has to learn what's possible in the real world and what's not. He or she must then reconcile themselves to those reduced possibilities. At the same time, the crucial innovation of the novel is that this compromise is freely chosen and serves as an act of self-definition. Think of Twain's Huckleberry Finn, in which a boy's dreams of adventure are transformed into a moral education, which in turn sets him on the path of a mature and autonomous adulthood. At the beginning of the story, he is a crude being trying to defend his own life. By the end, he is capable of making free choices--and the "right" choices, as defined by his particular place and time. By the end of his narrative, he is a recognizable person. He's a subject in the modern world. He may, however, have to undergo some therapy to get over whacking his father in the head with a shovel.

Virginia Tech and the Exhibition of Madness

The media coverage of the mass killings at Virginia Tech is following a depressingly familiar narrative. The first 24 hours were a mystery novel: who did it? Clues pointed to an Asian male around 19 years old. Someone who'd just arrived in the United States. From China, someone suggested. The solution to the whodunit mystery turned out to be more disturbing than the original speculation, which revolved around the image of a deranged foreigner. The accused killer is a 23-year-old senior named Cho Seung Hui. He'd come to the US as a grade schooler. He'd grown up in Virginia. On his arm he had scrawled the gnomic message "Ismail Ax."

And he was an English major. This shouldn't be so shocking, but it is to someone who still is, in a way, an English major. No discipline, of course, is any more or less prone to attracting psychopathic weirdos, but horrific nature of Cho's act is utterly contrary to the humanist tradition in which literary studies fits. This morning Matt Lauer interviewed Cho's poor creative writing professor, Lucinda Roy, on The Today Show. She had to read his deranged writings. She responded humanely but ineffectually. In keeping with The Today Show's lurid and mawkish approach to tragedies large and small, Lauer insisted on quoting from a play Cho had written--"Dick must die" and rantings along those lines--a passage that could have been pulled from a Mamet play. Naturally Cho isn't going to be rewriting The Sound of Music in his dorm room with a Glock in his desk drawer. I'm curious about what he read. What kind of literature speaks to a mind like Cho's? Had he read that great tome of madness and unreason, Mody-Dick?

Now that we know the identity of the purported killer, we're in the display of madness stage of the narrative. Today's edition of the Chicago Tribune carries the banner headline "A Monster Revealed." Two memes run through the accompanying story and most of the others I've seen so far in the press: implied rebukes of authorities for missing the warning signs and detailed recreations of Cho's physical appearance and his actions on April 16. Michel Foucault would have recognized both. In his newly retranslated (and newly controversial, judging from the reaction to my earlier post and commentaries from others) History of Reason Foucault discusses the exhibition of inmates European asylums, most famously Bedlam Hospital in London.  These exhibitions, Foucault wrote, "assigned to . . . madness a special sign: not that of sickness, but that of glorified scandal." In the eighteenth century "[m]adness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since suppressed."

According to Foucault the exhibition of madness was an attempt to control and ultimately banish unreason from civilization. He defines unreason as "reason dazzled," the experience of being overwhelmed by a contrary and repressed variety of reason. The Enlightenment banished unreason from everything but its art and literature--Moby-Dick, for instance. Not surprisingly, unreason can't remain repressed for long, and its reappearance still fascinates and horrifies us. That this violence broke out at a technical institution--in the engineer building, no less--is telling. The exhibition of madness allows us to locate the derangement of reason in other people. Otherwise, we might find it lurking within ourselves.

Programmed to Be Free

In today's New York Times Science Times Dennis Overbye takes up the question those of us who bother to make new year's resolutions face: do I have the willpower to fulfill any of the goals I set for myself this year? The real question, Overbye suggests, is determining whether or not we have free will at all. Overbye reviews the current state of scientific research and concludes, "A bevy of experiments in recent years suggest that the conscious mind is like a monkey riding a tiger of subconscious decisions and actions in progress, frantically making up stories about being in control."

Jean-Paul Sartre would probably do a lot of fist pounding in response to the bad faith of using the physical sciences to rationalize one's ethical choices. Yet Overbye paints a more nuanced picture of the state of our free wills. Science has shown that the means by which we make decisions are neither entirely random or determined. They're somehow magical, or at least we experience them that way. The explanation for the magic of human choice Overbye comes up with sounds vaguely Freudian. He cites Daniel C. Dennett who says we consciously control which urges we quash, and which ones we let fly, much like Freud said the ego acts as a gatekeeper. Our unconscious is structured like a computer program, albeit one of mind-boggling complexity. Your laptop has a set of predetermined instructions, but, as any close reader of Microsoft user interfaces can attest, the operating system has only an imperfect understanding of what it's doing at any given moment. The interaction between data, input, and software code constitutes the laptop's unconscious. The computer can't tell you how long it will take to boot up until it runs through all the computations. Similarly, we can't fully understand ourselves, so even though we may be fated by our genes (or whatever) to make a certain choice, the meaning of that choice can't be known until we act through it. And, if I understand the physicalist position correctly, we're free to construct the person who recognizes these choices as his or her own.

So we may be preprogrammed to make certain choices, but the math is so complicated no one will be able to sort it out.  One such elaborate math problem we experience is narrative. Narratives are both deterministic and contingent, especially genre narratives. In Time and Narrative Paul Ricœur argues that stories structure our experience of time. We know how the story begins, and we have a good idea of how it will end, but we still have to experience the story to know what it means. All the apparently random details of life get woven into coherence; its determination experienced as contingency. We know Othello is going to drive a knife into his heart at the end, but we still await each development in the plot as if it's happening for the first time.

Whose Metaphors?

Steven Pinker takes on George Lackoff, the Berkeley linguist who argues that the Democrats can take possession of Congress if only they can get the electorate to use different metaphors. Before I get to Pinker's criticisms, there's very large point in Lackoff's favor: conservatives have undertaken the long march to change the metaphors by which we define public policy. "Tax relief" and "death tax" have become common parlance. The latest innovation, "Islamic fascism," is struggling for acceptance. And Lackoff is right in his claim that Democrats are playing a losing game by playing on the Republicans' turf.

Affluence and Happiness Studies

After buying a new car this weekend, I suppose I should really ask myself if the car, which looks like a fleet hearse with an iPod connection, will make me happy. The economic historian Avner Offer would say, fat chance.

Good Riddance, Pluto

I'm a liberal on most issues, but I'm a conservative--no, more than conservative, I'm a neocon!--in solar system matters. In the indecision and deviousness typical of world organizations, Pluto's place in the planetary club was reaffirmed just a few weeks ago, which meant all kinds of  interplanetary riffraff qualified as planets, too. But reason has prevailed. Pluto is out. Well, good riddance. We had too many planets, anyway.

Pluto's pathetic attempt to sway public opinion doesn't move me. We must remember that Pluto is god of the dead and the ruler of the underworld. To think we've been teaching our children that the planet of death is equal to Venus, which is part of the culture of life! We should only have life-affirming planetary bodies.

And now Pluto is making terroristic threats  (see above left, to be found at Worth1000). I'm outraged that NASA continues to underestimate the threat from iceballs on the margins of the solar system that hate our freedom and our cozy proximity to the sun.

New Paradigms in the Middle East

Before I get to William Gibson's theory about why conservatives can't see why Iraq is such a disaster, let me say it's good to see Gibson blogging again. He gave it up a while ago to work on a book, and now he's back.

Gibson applies Thomas S. Kuhn's theory of the structure of scientific revolutions to explain "the apparently literal impossibility of explaining the fundamentally counterproductive nature of the United State's invasion of Iraq, or of what's currently going on in Lebanon, to those who disagree." Kuhn's theory holds that whenever scientific paradigms shift, the magnitude and quality of the shift is incomprehensible to those still mired in the previous paradigm. New scientific theories are paralogical breaks with old ways of looking at the world, and the languages used to describe the new paradigms are incommensurable with older forms. Consequently, there is no impartial, middle ground with which one could reasonable adjudicate between paradigms.

Gibson concludes,

The bad news is that the policy-makers of the United States and Israel apparently (still) don't get the new paradigm, and the bad news is that Hezbollah (et al, and by their very nature) do. Though that's only bad (or double-plus-ungood) if you accept, as I do, that the new paradigm allows for a more effective understanding of reality. So if you still like to pause to appreciate the action of phlogiston when you strike a match, you may well be okay with current events. So many, God help us, evidently are.

Gibson's analogy between scientific paradigms and political ones is very suggestive, but I'm not sure what's going on in Lebanon and Iraq constitute an absolute break with the past. While the tactics--net warfare and the like--seem new, they're driven by ancient and intractable hatreds. Besides, I could see somebody arguing that the real paradigm shift is on our side. Call it the holy crusade for democracy, the Bush administration has been trying to impose a radical break with past policies. Conservatives are trying to push a new paradigm; it's just a stupid one.

And How Do You Feel About Freud Day?

For those of you who live in Vienna on the Hudson, tomorrow is Freud Day in New York. Clyde Haberman's article, told in the nervous, jokey manner of someone who fears their analyst might be listening in, lists the associated events throughout the city. For those of you who don't live in NYC, you can celebrate by renting a Woody Allen movie, or maybe just making a Freudian slip.

Just Say No to Walking Out into Traffic

Ever wonder how some people can snort cocaine on a daily basis and still make it through Harvard Law School, while you say "why not?" to a third martini and end up loosing your car keys? We usually associate impulsive behavior with disaster, like the redesign of the New York Times website. Turns out if you have the right genes, the proper brain wiring, and were spared relevant traumas like parental abandonment, it's possible to make bold choices while putting on the brakes before things get out of control.  A tendency toward impulsivity, which peaks in adolescence, can lead to curiosity, an openness to change, and to higher education. Cutting loose every so often can be liberating, allowing one to indulge in hidden desires. It's all in how the risks are managed.

Impulsiveness can also drive people to smoke or turn them into assholes.Translated into self-help speak, people who deal well with risk are highly self-directed. They set goals and meet them, including, it seems, vowing to stop being an asshole. The story ends with a reformed jerk who learned to reign in his impulsive behavior, which usually manifested itself in brusque dismissals of other people's explanations. Instead of cutting them off after four words, he's learned to listen politely and let them finish before trashing what they've said.

Trying to Be Happier Is Like Trying to Be Taller

I've always liked review essays, and here's a good one: John Lanchester looks at happiness studies in the New Yorker. The field teaches us that our happiness tends toward a certain level, with only momentary fluctuations up or down. Furthermore, this level is genetically determined, apparently by a guy named Og (read the story). We also learn that we're happiest when we're engrossed in a task. But if we're programmed to be anxious nits like Og, how do we let ourselves go enough to lose ourselves in the flow of an activity?

The Climate Tipping Point

The NASA scientist who tried to warn us about global warming before the Bushies stomped on him had to go all the way to Britain to have his say. The news is pretty bad: the Greenland glaciers are melting even faster than people first thought. What's more, there's such a thing as a tipping point in ice cap melting:

Once a sheet starts to disintegrate, it can reach a tipping point beyond which break-up is explosively rapid. The issue is how close we are getting to that tipping point. The summer of 2005 broke all records for melting in Greenland. So we may be on the edge.

I wonder if Malcom Gladwell's concept of the tipping point, or more accurately, his popularization of it, has shaped our understanding of global warming. At the very least the concept absolves Hansen from having to explain why polar ice can reach a point at which the melting speeds up and can't be reversed. (Something to do with internal temperatures, I would guess.) Before it seemed like there would be a gradual warming and rising of the seas some time later in the century. At that point we'll all be really sorry we didn't do something earlier. Now there's a certain, but invisible, point at which we're screwed, and it's going to happen sooner than we thought. The concept of the tipping point has redirected our anxious gaze from the warm winters (January was the warmest ever recorded) to the rising seas.

It's also interesting that Hansen's parting shot to the neocons is an appeal to immediate observation. To those who would claim there's nothing to worry about, he says, "I prefer the evidence from the Earth's history and my own eyes." He appeals to the real and direct observation against the abstract and the ideological. Fair enough, but aren't his eyes directed to look at a certain place by Malcom Gladwell?

Get out of the way!

So this is why I feel like someone out of Beowulf just driving around town.