The Return of the Irrational

I'm not quite the classics geek I was before my girls were born. The project of teaching myself Attic greek, for example, died a peaceful death right around the time they started walking. My classics reading group, however, has persevered for eight years. While we rarely talk about classics anymore, some of us will still read the book and exchange some perfunctory geek-chat between the gulps of wine as an entré to discussion of something else.

We're rereading Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. a stately volume first published in 1903 by an unconventional woman scholar who didn't accept that the classics field was for men only. Harrison, through brilliant analysis of vase paintings and other art, penetrating study of the textual evidence, and a bunch of philological acrobatics that I pretty much skim through, establishes that much of what we think of as classical Greek religion — Zeus and shit — was an overlay on a far older and darker set of rituals that had to do with making bad things go away.

Classical Athens, that paragon of bright skies, wine dark seas, and cool reason, seethed with rituals to keep away ghosts, placate evil spirits, bring fertility, and all that stuff that people do in one way or another pretty much everywhere. A certain amount of this, it seems, is hardwired, and every time we deny it for too long, it comes surging back in distorted form. This has been called the return of the irrational.

The evidence, she says, strongly suggests that human sacrifice was still alive and well in the fifth century. This is the Athens of Pericles, Socrates and Euripides, thought by some to be the high point of civilization. Human sacrifice.

But here's the interesting part. They weren't just any humans. Once a year, they would take two of their most despised — people fed by the state, or maybe drunks or criminals — dress them up in ceremonial garb, and parade them around while everyone beat them with special branches. Then they'd burn them and have the wind scatter their ashes over the sea, after which everyone felt much better.

This wasn't a sacrifice of propitiation. It wasn't even about keeping evil away. It was about purgation. They were scapegoats. Through ritual humiliation, beating, and sacrifice, what was undesirable in the community was symbolically driven out.

And that got me to thinking about just how civilized we are, really. Take the death penalty, for example, which study after study says has no preventative effect. The revival of the death penalty has come with that of fundamentalist religion. It doesn't accomplish much, but it makes some people feel real good.

Maybe there's also something of the irrational in the burgeoning prison industry, where 1 in 42 Americans lives under the supervision of the criminal justice system. Maybe this is a sort of a magic amulet for the rest of us. We don't feel especially safe, but we make our sacrifices, and the evil goes away, sort of. But it always comes back to bite us in the ass.

Our Pale Imitation of Life

This weekend I'm reading Barbara Ehrenreich's new work on the demise of ecstatic experience and why it matters. It's called Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. This is a much better and more ambitious book that the title suggests.

Collective ritual that creates altered states of consciousness is something that has existed in cultures throughout the world since the beginning of recorded history. Its subversive aspects and inconvenience to capitalist production has, in most instances, led to its repression and virtual extinction. This, says Ehrenreich, has been an incalculable loss. The range of human experience is radically impoverished, and our unmet desires are exploited by less salubrious forms of collective immersion.



A few decades ago, a recording of the Balinese Ramayana Monkey Chant made a huge impression on me. When I saw photos of several hundred men seated in a tight circle, obviously transported by the experience, I thought, this is what is missing from our lives. This sort of group ecstasy is what we all hunger for, whether we realize it or not.

This surrender to the group can be experienced joyfully as a form of religious experience, or, in the form of Carnival, a subversive loosening of restrictions that creates cohesion. Or, it can take the more negative forms of nationalism, or its more extreme form, fascism. Bill Buford's remarkable Among the Thugs, which takes an immersion journalism approach to European soccer riots, offers yet another negative example of where this longing to lose oneself in the crowd can lead.

I'm only a bit more than halfway through the book, so I'm not sure if Ehrenreich goes here, but I think the desire to lose oneself in the collective is hardwired, and goes to the core of what it means to be human. We've been socialized to think of ourselves as a lone self, but somewhere, deep within each of us, lives the intense desire to merge with our tribe. The absence of this experience is part of why so many of us seem so tragically lost, and are so willing to be swept away by those who would profit from our emptiness.

Pan's Labyrinth

I don't get out much to movies these days. Last summer, we took the girls to see some Pixar thing about talking cars. And then there was some completely forgettable movie about a bear. I've regressed to mostly G ratings and movies that don't hold a 3-year-old's attention, much less my own.

But yesterday, grandma and grandpa hung out with the girls so that Carolyn and I could experience a rare taste of freedom. Most of the what was playing looked pretty pointless. Just when I was on the verge of ditching the movie idea altogether, I saw Pan's Labyrinth, which was described as "surreal fantasy with a moral core."

Normally, sci-fi and fantasy wouldn't be a big draw for me, but the setting in 1944 Spain — with Republican hold-outs waging a desperate guerrilla campaign against the fascist Franco regime — won me over.

I was blown away.

Although this film won Academy Awards for cinematography, art direction, and make-up, the truly amazing thing was that by convincingly portraying humanity at its best and worst, someone made an art movie in 2006 that truly matters.

I was reminded of A Midnight Clear, a remarkable movie from 1992 that most people missed. Also set in 1944, this one in France, Midnight Clear deals with similar themes of innocence and vulnerability, and the perils of moral clarity in a world corrupted by power and expedience.

This theme of radically opposed good and evil has been coming up for me a lot lately. It seems that, mostly, the bad guys win, but that we existentially invent ourselves by making things a bit tougher for them. And this it seems, is what it's all about.

E.L. Doctorow on "Moral Vacancy"

Doctorow declares 4DH the Sociopath-in-Chief.

An Essay on Our President

I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.

On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the WMDs he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him; you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion, which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life...They come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it.

So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.

This president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing --- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children....

He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead; he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over the world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war. The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into is his characteristic trouble.

Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective war making, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.