The Shadow War

We are in a new world-wide cold war. And ironically, the many new technologies from the West have given autocratic states extraordinary new powers. 

Paul Theroux had a remarkable passage in one of his travel books, as he was passing through Myanmar, a military dictatorship then and now, that illuminated attitudes towards China and from China. 

"I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it- China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrranous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money- 'rogue aid,' with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs." - Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, 2008

The world seems headed into another cold war, definitely rhyming with the last cold war. It is highly unfortunate, and testament to some defects in US management of the post-cold war era, to the surprising durability, even attractiveness, of authoritarian systems, and to the many weaknesses of democratic systems. This new cold war, which I will call the shadow war, features Russia and China as the main poles of opposition to democratic and developed countries, mostly in the West, but including many others. This time around, China is the stronger power by far, and both Russia and especially China are quite advanced in their development, so that the West no longer has a monopoly in any particular technology or kind of organization. China has adopted all the magic of capitalist market mechanisms to grow its wealth, and stolen (or forced the transfer of) huge amounts technology and knowledge to make itself a leader in all sorts of industries.

The West has lately begun to wake up to the problem. Our hope that capitalism was somehow related to, or a leading wedge for, democracy has been dashed several times over. Instead of China turning into Hong Kong, it is Hong Kong that is turning into China. Not only is capitalism, as has been tirelessly pointed out from the left, amoral and indifferent to human rights, (as we already knew from slavery in the US), but democracy is also far more fragile than we had hoped, requiring a wide range of civic understandings, media practices, and forms of education that are far from universal, or natural. We had, in the windup to the cold war, seen many countries make slow and fraught transitions to democracy (Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe), but have more recently seen countries backtrack into autocracy (Russia, Hungary).

Naturally, the war in Ukraine has put the most urgent point on this conflict, where Russia, which is to say its autocratic leader, felt that the existence of an independent and democratic Ukraine next door was too much to bear. Now, China also tells us that it loves its brothers in Taiwan so much that re-unification will come, no matter what the Taiwanese themselves might want. Love certainly takes some strange forms!

But it is a much broader issue, spanning the globe, and the depths of human psychology. On one list of countries ranked by democratic governance, the median country is Armenia, with a "hybrid regime" and scores of roughly five out of ten. This is not a great situation, where half the world, in rough terms, lives in various states of miserable, oppressive government. And as the quote above suggests, the authoritarians have in some ways the stronger hand. What happened?

We in the West had thought that democracy was the natural harbor of all peoples- the end of history, indeed. But in the first place, people power is a very limited power, if whoever has power is authoritarian enough to use tanks against it. And in the second place, democracy is not natural in many cultures. The Muslim culture, for instance, for all its virtues, has a fundamentally patriarchal and tribal governance model, with little room for democracy, though there are, traditionally, various forms of freedom, for men at least. So however attractive democracy is in theoretical terms, and as a model in the West that people from authoritarian countries like to vacation to... as a cultural pattern, it is not universal. And authoritarian patterns are hardly foreign to the West either. The Catholic church is an example of the preserved archetypes of patriarchy and authoritarian strong-man rule.

The Chinese dream is highly militaristic, and rather threatening.

But more deeply, the archetypes we have of leadership and politics are authoritarian.. the king, the hero. Jungian psychology, aside from its focus on archetypes, deals in the shadow, which is our real needs and instincts, insofar as they run counter to our surface goodness and conscious ego construction. A person like Donald Trump exemplifies all these trends. Why on earth are we still saddled with this sociopath after a decade of drama-queenity? He clearly touches a lot of people's archetypal conceptions of strength and heroism. His powers of psychological projection, reflectively rejecting his own shadow, are immense. He is rubber, others are glue. And his fundamental bond with the followers, by licensing their shadow sides of hate and violence, makes his every pronouncement right no matter what. We in the US are facing a cataclysmic political season, trying to repress the shadow of humanity, which is so amply expressed around the world in political / power systems that follow the logic of strength, ending up in states of terror.

Modern technology hasn't helped, either. After a brief flush of excitement about the ability of social media to amplify people power, especially across the Muslim world, it all went to pot as the shallow-ness and disorganization of such movements became apparent. The powers of databases, personal identification, surveillance, and media manipulation have been much more useful to authoritarian governments than to their antagonists, making state terror more effective than ever. Authoritarian countries now control their internet and media environments with great precision, increasingly project their twisted narratives abroad, and even hunt down dissidents outside their borders using the new information tools. So while information may want to be free, it doesn't really have a say in the matter- those with power do.

What to do about it? We in the West have lost control of our media environments. While we are waking up to some extent the the malevalent media from abroad, domestic media is controlled by money, which in the current environment of yawning wealth inequality, political fissiparation, and clickbait "business models" is just as crazy and corrupt. So there should be two approaches to this. One is to strengthen quality media, like PBS and its cohorts, with more offerings and deeper reporting. The other is to restrict how corporations can control media. The right to individual free speech can be preserved while making corporations more sensitive to social goods. The Dominion case against FOX was a small example of the powers available. Liability for lying should be a broader effort in the law, specifically against corporations, which are creatures of the state, not natural persons. We need to recognize the deep psychological powers we are up against in preserving enlightened, respectful civil government and discourse.

Obviously getting our own house in order, against the atavistic forces of political authoritarianism, is the first order of business. Abroad, paradoxically, we need to project strength as a democratic and developed community, holding the line in Ukraine and Taiwan, and against all sorts of authoritarian encroachments, until temperatures are lowered, and the current nationalist fevers abate. For what China has right now is an imperialist fever. It has been weak for so long and surrounded by so many unfriendly countries, that one can understand that it sees its recent economic prosperity as a special opportunity to recover a leading position in its neighborhood, militarily and politically as well as economically. That would be fine if it were not also trying to subvert free political systems and prop up tyrannical ones. There are good reasons why its neighbors are fearful of China.

Like in the last cold war, I think time plays a key role. We have to believe that democracies, for all their weaknesses, are better, and are seen as better, by people around the world. While today's authoritarian powers may have greater durability than those of the communist era due to their embrace of, rather than flouting of, market principles and modern technologies, they are ultimately fragile and subject to the opinions of their own people. Putin will not last forever. Xi will not last for ever. (The Kim regime of North Korea may, however, last forever!) Change is the achilles heal of authoritarian conservatism. So we are in for a very long haul, to keep spreading people power and peace internationally.

• Trade theft and IP warfare.
• Myanmar is a typical case of China's influence and values.
• Religion and war.
• Food oligopoly.
• Ghost roads and the end of nature.
• What, exactly, is the problem?

Love Beauty Truth

Book review of "Finding your Feet after Fundamentalism", By Darrell Lackey. With apologies to the other book.

An old friend has published a book. We had an epistolary relationship, fretting about creationism, intelligent design, and related topics back when those were livelier issues than today (and it directly inspired the birth of this blog). He was on his way out of Christian fundamentalism, and into something more liberal, even post-modern. His new book is a somewhat autobiographical account of the problems of fundamentalism, and of leaving fundamentalism as one's tradition. Naturally, evangelism dies hard, and takes this new form of broadcasting the good news of a more moderate and decent Christianity.

The book hits hardest on the issue of Donald Trump. No scandal has so thoroughly demonstrated the ultimate hypocrisy of fundamentalism than its allegiance to Trump. The transaction has given religious conservatives control of the Supreme Court, (though perhaps that owed more to Mitch McConnell), but in return, they showed their support for the most morally vile and incompetent person ever to hold the job. Lackey relates how he was fully in the FOX news orbit in the 90's, happily imbibing its bile. But then something snapped, and by the time of the Trump election, he had fully left fundamentalism and its communities behind. Living in California might have something to do with it, since liberalism, at least of a lip-service sort, is the dominant way of life here. Something that Republicans have learned the hard way. 

Yet the interesting part is how strenuously Lackey hews to Christianity, proclaiming that liberal versions are not gateway drugs to atheism. Quite the contrary- close attention to the actual New Testament provides ample justification for things like supporting marginalized communities, helping the poor, afflicting the rich, and viewing one's enemies as possibly reasonable human beings, if not friends in the making. He mentions how false it is for evangelicals to be so eager to spread the good word, but at the same time so deaf to the words of others that actual relationship is impossible- an evangelism of a closed-off community. 

For what are the fundamental values? Lackey cites love and beauty. Love is clear enough, (and damning enough regarding the FOX- driven culture of conservative Christianity), but the role of beauty needs a little more explaining. Religious thinkers have spared no effort in extolling the beauty of the world, but in the current world, serious artists are rarely Christian, let alone make Christian art. Why is that? Perhaps it is just intellectual fashion, but perhaps there is a deeper problem, that art, at least in our epoch, is adventurous and probing, seeking to interrogate narratives and power structures rather than celebrate them. Perhaps it is a problem of overpopulation, or of democracy, or of living in late imperial times, or of modernism. But whatever the framework, contemporary Christian communities have become the opposite of all this- anti-intellectual, tone-deaf, and art-hostile (not to mention power-mad). It must be exasperating to someone with even the least appreciation for finer things and for art that is "interesting".

Jean-Michel Basquiat- too messy for insensitive temperaments.

Beauty has deep Christian connotations. The world is god-made, good, and thus beautiful, as indeed we all feel it to be. But life is also messy, competitive, and dark. Death and suffering are part of it as well. If we refuse to own those aspects of the world, and of ourselves, we become blinded to the true nature of things, and expose ourselves to unintended and invisible expressions of the dark side, as we see in the deep hypocrisy on the subject of Trump, on sexual morals, and countless other areas within fundamentalism / evangelicalism. Lackey ticks off a lengthy list of subjects where conservative Christians have become blind to the obvious teachings of Jesus while fixated on relatively minor cultural flashpoints and red meat- symptoms of a general moral blindness borne of, arguably, flaccid aesthetic and intellectual habits.

So I would like to offer another value, which is truth. As a scientist, it is a natural place for me to start, but I think it is both illuminating of, and interrelated with, the other virtues above. What modern artists seek is to express truths about the human condition, not just ring out positive affirmations and hallelujas. Truths about suffering as well as truths about beauty. What scientists seek to do is to find how this world we find ourselves in works, from the cosmos down to the gluon. And they do so because they find it beautiful, and, like addicts, would like to unlock more of that beauty. Beauty inspires love, and love ... can only survive on truth, not lies. So I think these values live in a reinforcing cycle.

All that implies that there is another step to take for someone who has left fundamentalism. That is, to re-evaluate Christianity as a whole. While the achievement of decency (and better taste) by the renunciation of FOX and its religious satellite communities is an enormous step, indeed a momentous one for the preservation of our country's sanity, grappling seriously with the value of truth would suggest an extra leg to the trip. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Christianity as a whole is a questionable proposition, philosophically. As a narrative and moral system, it clearly has positive as well as negative potentials. But as a "truth"- with its miracles, resurrections, triune deity, and salvation at the end of the line, (whether for the elect, the saved, the good, or for all)- well, it is impossible to take seriously without heavy doses of tradition and indoctrination.

For his part, Lackey has headed in another direction, into the Eastern Orthodox church, finding a place that richly satisfies the fundamentalist urge to return to one of the most traditional and historically continuous churches in existence, and also one that does not tie itself into intellectual knots about literal truth, living biblically, and the like. Orthodoxy accepts mystery, and cherishes its ancient rites and structures as sufficient theology. It is not modernist, or goaded by the enlightenment to make a rational system of something that so obviously resists reason. 

For there is a fine line between lies, illusions, and truths. As anyone who is married will understand (or a citizen of a country, or part of a corporation, or part of any social structure), truth is not the only or necessarily best virtue. A bit of illusion and constructive understanding can make a world of difference. Narrative, ideology, framing, etc. are essential social glues, and even glues of internal psychology. So, given that illusions are integral, the work to identity them, bring them into consciousness, and make positive choices about them is what matters, especially when it comes to social leadership. Do we choose narratives that are reasonably honest, and look forward with hope and love, or ones that go down the easy road of demonization and projection? And what role should the most traditional narratives in existence- those of the ancient religions- have in guiding us?

• Beautiful? You be the judge.
• Kasparov on freedom and evil.
• Kids should be able to navigate neighborhoods.
• Lies and disinformation are a public health crisis.
• More variants are always coming along.
• We are not doing enough against climate heating.

Myth and Science

Stories we tell about how things work.

I am reading an ancient book about ancient myths, covering some of what was known of the ancient world's stories circa the mid-20th century (that is, the "developed" ancient world of Egypt, the Near East, China, India, etc.). The authors occasionally seem exasperated that their colleagues- the ancient authors of these stories and myths- do not always take their stories as seriously as scholars themselves do, after having so painstakingly learned the relevant languages, unearthed the precious tablets, papyri, inscriptions, and other sources, compared different versions, and interpreted them in light of the historical setting. No, ancient myths can be playful affairs, evolving in dramatic complexity, freely mutating to serve the needs of the moment in their mutable oral traditions. This is especially true the farther back you go into ethnographic history, such as into the stories of the Inuit and other First Peoples of North America. It is evident that ancient societies varied widely in their theological and mythological sophistication, and particularly how closely entwined these were with the centers of power.

Inuit mythologies and their custodian, the shaman.

The scholarly apparatus around myth studies has a very earnest and modernist cast, which derives from two sources. First is Christianity, which as an extreme political and social elaboration of ancient religions has progressively reified and codified its myths. Inheriting a grab-bag of disparate ancient myths and stories, Christianity shored up its social position and theological bona fides by insisting that it was all true. The more sclerotic and far-reaching its bureaucratic structure, the more tightly it held to the absolute truth of its dogmas. A second aspect was the enlightenment and the rise of scientific modernity. That world view was not interested in playful myths of psychodrama, but in hard truths of how the world really works, stripped of the colorful trappings. Competition with this world view helped to further push religious dogmas in an absolutist direction, to that point where today, both Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalist Islamists insist that their scriptures are literally true, handed down from an all-powerful god who really exists and is not fictive construct meant as a playful expression of our scientific ignorance on one hand, and our love of social drama on the other. Anthropologists took their cues from all this, assuming that the precious myths they were studying had to be expressions of a society's absolute truths, organizing principles, and deepest motivations. But perhaps they were originally ways to pass the time and enchant a few youngsters.

Science is telling stories, too. Are they really so different? On the one hand, our need to orient ourselves in the world remains unchanged from ancient times, so the core purpose of explaining reality and society through complicated tales of causes and effects remains. And to a lay person, the explanations of quantum mechanics or cosmic inflation are no less impenetrable than myths about gods and dragons. Thus the scientists who are the custodians of these stories find themselves in the ironic position of a new priesthood, cultivating the cultural narrative around origins, natural phenomena, biology, and the like, while extending these stories in systematic ways that the priests (and alchemists, and shamans, and druids) of yore could only dream about, if they could even conceive of such reliable beliefs untethered from social drama and social control. But today's scientists can't and won't inject ancillary drama into these stories, so they will remain split off from their traditional roles and uses.

So the telling of dramatic stories and the consequent management of society through the narratives of origins, myths, and meaning- if ancient myths really did fulfill these functions, which is perhaps an anachronistic construction on our part, or at least varied widely with the nature of ancient societies- are skills having nothing, really, to do with the scientific enterprise of today, and thus nothing to do with this new priesthood. Who takes these roles?

Theology would seem the natural place for the living and socially relevant myth. But theology has split definitively from science, from history, and indeed from reality, nurturing narratives that are absurd while claiming they are true, and which in their antiquity and provincialism are impossibly remote from our current concerns, morals, and social ability to relate even allegorically. Theology has thus become lost in a sterile wilderness, doomed to be cut off from its mythical and social power. Even the more liberal and elastic precincts, if they do not insist on absolute literal truth, adhere to the crusty old stories of the Bible, which while occasionally artistic, are mostly a maddening hodgpodge and, frankly, boring. What was riveting in antiquity about lengthy ancestor lists, angry gods, virgin births, and ascending into the clouds is ridiculous today. 

The story-telling mantle has obviously been taken over by Hollywood- by the Marvel series, Star Treks, Star Wars, Potter series, and similar epics of modern fantasy. They bend reality in classically mythical ways, make up their own theology as they go along, (and throw it away as casually with the next installment), and communicate constantly updated social mores. The graphics are otherworldly, the stories and morals are updated, but the fundamental sophistication of these stories can't really be said to have advanced much. They are speaking to human nature, after all- a conversation between our inborn archetypes and the social and technological conditions we find ourselves in.

The key point is that Hollywood myths are taken as intended- as fertile and mind-expanding fantasies with social and moral lessons that are (hopefully) beneficial and relevant for our times. They are not trying to claim their myths as true- that would be absurd. Thus they do not collide with either scientific or theological claims, and use myth as it was originally and truly intended- as the dreamlike realm of symbolic human drama, full of lessons, yes, but not scientific ones, or even pseudoscientific ones.

• An outstanding dissection of just how bad US policy and behavior was in Afghanistan.
• Facebook / Fecebook is a cesspool, by design.
• Dead ender racism.
• A mutagenic drug to save us all.
• How about those great vaccines?
• Some nice piano.

Who Can be a Shaman? Who Must be a Shaman?

Pasaquan and the modern Shamanism of St. EOM, Eddie Owens Martin.

While not religious, I am fascinated by religion. This mode of thought and experience is obviously instinctive, patently irrational, and strenuously defended and rationalized via theology, apologetics, and other formerly respectable modes of thought, not to mention jihad and other sorts of brute power. We are (mostly) in a much better position today than in the old days when every political system had its state religion, and woe betide anyone caught thinking crosswise. Yet in the even earlier days of our species, religion was much more free-form, and while the instinct of religion is/was shared universally, its expression varied widely among far-flung, isolated peoples. We may generally call it shamanism. The first ingredient was an acceptance that some people care a lot more about spiritual matters than others do. Typically this is because they are misfits, maybe mentally disturbed, and have a heightened appreciation of the unreality of this reality that we think inhabit. Mind-altering drugs provide a glimpse of this widened perspective, and naturally comprise a central part of many shamanistic sacraments.

It is striking how the shared appreciation of an alternate reality, whether though official scripture, traditional dogma, or via ecstatic worship practices or mind-altering drugs, contributes to social bonding and personal psychological healing- which are the ultimate positive impacts of religion. Maybe the starkest naturalistic reality, now that we have evolved to appreciate its full horror, is incompatible with psychic health. Maybe an alternate, colorful, humane, and supportive reality is essential, and is particularly binding and healing if everyone shares it, almost regardless of its particular nature or irrationality. But on the other hand, even religions of intolerance, war, human sacrifice and cannibalism have sustained long-lived cultures, so the binding may take precedence over the humane-ness.

Ideologies and value systems are in play as well. Societies run on particular views of what is right, who counts, what is meaningful, etc. While these touch on empirical reality in some respects, their values and social apparatus are relatively untethered, free to valorize some, deprecate others, and place values on obscure things and odd activities. A misfit will be, by definition, more likely to suffer under the ambient ideology and prone to seek an alternative. Whether the shaman supports the current culture or seeks to subvert it, her work is critical in framing a social ideology that most other members of society hardly even know exists, and are not generally capable of shaping or grappling with consciously.

At its best, shamanism provides more than a narrative or theory about the unseen forces that run the world. It also centers the society with a purposeful narrative of its existence and the essential part each member plays in its continuance. It can heal individuals via the power of this social cohesion- as even medical science is beginning to recognize- since even without any objective medicine whatsoever, the rituals of care, support, and confidence are themselves powerful expressions of our social nature and aids to healing.

But what about today? We are heading into a post-religious world, where neither shamanism nor mainline theology rings true, capitalist ideology reigns, and social atomization is in part the result. It was jarring and intriguing to run across an odd TV program about an autodidactic shaman in Georgia, Eddie Owens Martin, who died in 1986. As a gay man in rural Georgia of the early 1900's, he fled to New York and led an underground life, which led to a career in fortune telling. Eventually he inherited a property in Georgia, and moved back on his own terms, using the proceeds from his fortune telling to build a spiritual retreat / theme park, with ornate decoration throughout.

St. EOM painting from Pasaquan

The connection between fortune telling and other facets of free-form shamanism are obvious. Martin, who renamed himself St. EOM, was obviously a charismatic person, and attracted helpers who attended ceremonies and helped with the painting. There was a hair theme, where Martin thought that he received messages from the gods through hair that had to be pointed upward. After he went bald, he resorted to pointing the ends of his extensive beard to the sky in order to maintain this connection. And what about all the symbology? It seems to consist of benevolent faces and highly colorful geometric designs, as are common in other spiritual and ceremonial settings. It looks like an effort to capture positive and healing material from the archetypes, which are partly eternal, and partly influenced by the culture of the day, where multiracial themes of harmony were coming to prominence.

All this reminded me strongly of two other shamans of the day, Carl Jung and Walt Disney. Where Martin was a spontaneous and demotic shaman, Jung come at it from a scholarly, indeed logorrheic perspective, producing book after book of memories, dreams, reflections, and rationalizations by which he straddled the scientific and credulus approaches to spiritualism. Most evocative was his Red Book, which features highly colorful dreamscapes full of pregnant symbols and meaning, harvested from his forays into the inner world of his own fixations and archetypes.

Lastly, Disney obviously shared the fantasy and dream motivations of Martin, though seemingly without much of the spiritual baggage. Disney was also moved in some mysterious way to make these fantasies concrete by creating theme parks where this positive message of colorful suspension of reality was given relentless and popular expression. These are demotic shamanism on a vast scale, drained of any deeper significance other than the lightest symbology that fleetingly speaks to part of us that hopes for an escape from the humdrum and pressing constraints of reality.

• Another healing fantasy in glorious animation- Secret of the Kells.
• Private schools- the real scandal is that they exist at all.
• Slavery.
• Crytocurrencies are a criminal accelerant- and should be banned. Not to mention being an environmental disgrace.

Atheism, or Archetype?

Religion is built on a series of inborn archetypes and intuitions. Does that mean it is inevitable?

Religion is natural, but is it right? Increasing numbers of people in the US are giving up the practice and belief, if polls are to be believed. Hellfire and damnation is sure to follow, according to those left in the pews, at least those of the farthest evangelical congregations. As a student of Carl Jung, I appreciate the psychology of religion, seeing its processes as deeply reflective of our individual and communal psychologies, as well as the consequence of a complex evolutionary process whose aim has been as much social solidarity and reproduction as much, or more than, philosophical truth. At base, we are not rational beings, and follow a variety of themes and images, termed archetypes in the Jungian system, which persistently guide our dreams,  motivations, and cultures. We are not just economic units driven by profit and loss, but have richer dramatic lives and needs.

Father

What could be more obvious? We grow up in households with father figures who are unimaginably powerful. Food just appears, housing, furniture, love, care, and power and discipline. It is no wonder that, once we grow up, there is a father-shaped hole in our view of the world. In the usual patriarchial culture, the father stands alone, at the top, as both creator and moral disciplinarian, in an archetype that is expressed over and over again in cultures throughout the world, from Zeus to Allah, as it is in our political systems naturally as well. But the mother archetype is also in play, especially in Catholic and Hindu cultures, in the Marys and various powerful devas. Is it possible to see the world without using these instinctive lenses? That is what the scientific revolution and enlightenment attempted, in a cognitive revolution that remains, evidently, incomplete. Take prayer. In the form of requesting something from the father in the sky, it is pathetically immature and retrograde, however understandable in primitive conditions of complete existential mystery. On the other hand, some meditation, joy, and gratitude for the wonders of existence are surely healthy and consistent with mature knowledge of where we stand in the universe. Involvement with this archetype reflects quite directly how far one has gotten along the developmental road from childhood to maturity.

Heaven

The afterlife used to be a rather drab, depressing affair, in the classical Greek and Jewish systems. Then it was progressively gussied up into a lottery jackpot, in the Islamic and Christian systems. Buddhists and Hindus also find life after death, in the form of reincarnation, to be absolutely central to their philosophies. The magic of consciousness is incredibly hard to give up, and hard to get rational perspective on. It takes stringent dedication to naturalism and the evident facts of the world to accept, deep down, that death is really going to be the end- of everything. One need only think about animals- they are obviously conscious, and there are levels of consciousness all the way down the scale of evolution, to infinitesimal, then finally to nothing at all. How does that work, other than in direct proportion to their physical, brain-based endowments? What could be more clear, and in stark contravention of our intuitive and (weirdly) hopeful dream of life after death?

Tribe

We are not just endowed with intellect, but with a social nature, which focuses our striving and loyalty on the tribe. Our tribe is right and good, theirs is bad and wrong. Tribalism founds and plagues every new religious sect or philosophical school, which strains to show how it is right and its predecessors wrong. Jung vs Freud, Analytical vs Continental, Shiite vs Sunni, in endless profusion. Religions lack even the veneer of factual basis which characterize other divides like political polarizations or academic disputes. Doctrine, orthodoxy, and heresy are freely defined by whoever has social power. If one's village is Evangelical, woe to Catholics. If one's family is Seventh-Day Adventist, mere contact with outsiders is forbidden. Tribes have totemic symbols and artistic traditions as part of their identification / bonding apparatus, tokens of the archetypal processes at work.

Magical or zodiacal symbols in an Islamic Book of Wonders, circa 1400. 

Magic

Living in an enchanted word is natural, and wonderful. We all start there in childhood and treasure the dramatic, humanistic power of seeing the world through archetypal lenses- in animals with special totemic powers, crystals that heal, trees that listen. This is truly where traffic with archetypes is most fluid and explicit- bringing dreams to narrative life. Religious superstition raises this drama to existential levels, putting the magic on a celestial level of god(s), all-powerful father figures, and alternatives of eternal hell-fire or bliss. The chances of all this actually describing any kind of reality is nil- we are talking total fantasy. But its evident grip on billions of people shows just how powerful magical thinking is and how far we are from being rational.

Truth

All claim truth, but few prove it. Religions are notorious for splitting into sects, each possessing the final truth, the real story. Interestingly, atheists do not splinter in this way. There is plenty of bickering, about what humanism entails or is, how liberal humanists should be, etc., but there are no Seventh-Day atheists, or Twelver atheists, or other miscelleneous schools. Communism was atheistic, but was in truth a quasi-religious, authoritarian cult all its own. Once one has discarded attachment to these archetypes and the theologies they underpin, and to the need for truth as a matter of self-identification, why then it is easier to agree on what is actually true, as well as on the many areas where we just don't know, without the need to make up stories. This need, a dire need, for answers, especially to "big" questions, is a tipoff that we are dealing with archetypal energies, not with a rational level of thought.

One could compare atheism to the concept of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism- the release from the cycle of rebirth, from attachment to the archetypes, and escape to a level of intellectual / emotional freedom. Escape from rebirth is implicit, since the atheist doesn't believe in rebirth, heaven or afterlife at all. It focuses attention on this life, this moment, and compassion here rather than later. But to escape the causes of suffering, (especially the infliction of suffering upon others!), by regarding the archetypes intellectually and skeptically, and by distancing one's self from them, is far more important. To leave behind the seductive entanglements of archetypal belief and the often-abusive social relations they entail is personally momentous, and a healing balm for a planet full to the brim with faithful dogmatists.

• One moving, harrowing, story of escape.
• Viral data dump from a skeptic.
• Administration cut funding for surveillance before outbreak.
• Graph for New York.
• Unemployment-ocolypse.

Greedy, Hateful, Lustful Bastards

The shadow in Jungian psychology. Our motive force, but also our deepest secret.

As the Buddhists know very well, this thing we call the "I" is not a single thing, and may not be anything at all. It certainly isn't a coherent story of perseverence and triumph. The deeper you go, the less identifiable and singlular it is, since we knit together vast numbers and scales of activity, from the reactions of metabolism to the synapsing of neurons and the drive for social success, even to communal and shared culture, into this being entitled "I". Even on the psychological level, there are myriad unconscious elements, making the quest to know one's self a life-long and generally unsuccessful endeavor, for those who are so inclined.

In Freudian psychology, the contents of the unconscious (referred to sometimes as the subconscious) are uniformly bleak. It is the realm of lusts and drives, a pandora's box to be kept firmly repressed, in order for its custodian to be a functioning member of society. But the effort of repression is draining and costly, leading to a sort of hydraulic theory of the unconscious, where the more material there is to repress, the more effort is required, to the point that people "break down" from the strain. Likewise, releases of pressure through swearing, or watching violent films, or thrill-seeking and similar forms of "fun" relieve some strain, and help maintain the proper psychological pressure.

Jungian psychology sees the unconscious as a much larger and varied entity. It forms the basis of our positive as well as negative motivations, and operates, among many levels, at a level of archetypal symbology that is richly descriptive and informative when allowed expression via dreams, free association, and creative activities like writing and visual arts. It includes our intuition, and can be tremendously healing, persistently giving us images / glimmers of needed changes and goals.

Tibetan Buddhism hosts a large collection of monster and shadow figures. This is Palden Lhamo, who is a protector, but a wrathful one who rides through a lake of blood, spreading death and destruction to Tibet's enemies. Not enough to keep out the Chinese, unfortunately.

But even in Jungian psychology, the unconscious has a dark side- the shadow, which comprises the motivations we try to deny or hide. But can not get rid of- they are always with us and part of us. The greed, hate, and lust that undeniably drive us, but which we do not want as part of our persona- our face to the world. In the theatrical presentation of the self, we are good, virtuous, and respectful. Repression is the order of the day. While much of Jungian psychology is devoted to interpreting positive messages from the unconscious, managing the negative and the dark is very much a focus as well, as these aspects are universal and persistent. It is the work of consciousness to integrate the shadow into the ego / personality, in a controlled and accepting way.

One particular specialty of the shadow is projection, causing us to consciously reject bad traits in ourselves by ascribing them to others. Our president is a master of projection, insulting others, accusing them of the very things he himself is guilty of, as a way of keeping himself sane and narcissistically coherent. Why anyone else puts up with it is hard to fathom, but then certain bloggers have similar problems of casting stones from glass houses. There are also collective projections, like the concept of hell. An important goal of depth psychology is to come to a mature accommodation with all of one's own facets, in order to be able withdraw projections of this sort, to own one's behavior, good and bad, and thus to master the shadow, without giving up its motivating virtues.

Another way to engage with the shadow is to indulge it to a controlled extent, as happens in bacchanals, carnivals, video games, and Trump rallies. Giving free reign to our dark side is, in the hydraulic sense, very free-ing, re-creational, and possibly even an ecstatic experience. But it must be carefully bounded and controlled. It is no way to run a positive life or culture. One can grade various cultures and their religions on a sort of shadow scale, from the carnage of the Aztecs and Nazis to the perhaps unrealistic compassion of Buddhist culture as in pre-invasion Tibet. Many religions have shown shadow aspects, such as the duality of Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, and the jihads and crusades of the Islamic and Christian varieties. The happiest societies seem to have the least shadow aspect- places like the Scandinavian countries, with their increasing mild secularity, and pre-invasion Tibet. In contrast, the unhappiest societies are heavily driven by shadow, like the Islamic countries of today, who not only valorize violence, but mix in plenty of "honor" and misogyny as well.

I think the lesson is that the hydraulic theory of controlled shadow release is not correct, rather, that more repression is better, when done consistently and intelligently. Releasing the shadow is bad, whatever the dose. The Buddhist technologies of meditation and cultivation in ways of charity, compassion, and love are clearly successful in cultivating a wider society that reflects those values. Conversely, having a president whose tastes tend to beauty pageants and WWE, and whose modus tweeterandi is hate, fosters a society that will be experiencing the opposite values.

• Single payer health care.
• Pence in charge of science?
• Annals of the credulous.
• Bloomberg's peeps. 
• Oops- OAS was wrong.
• Amazing ancient book of the week.

The Participation Mystique

How we relate to others, things, environments.

We are all wrapped up in the impeachment drama now, wondering what could be going on with a White House full of people who have lost their moral compasses, their minds. Such drama is an exquisite example of participation mystique, on our part as we look on in horror as the not very bright officials change their stories by the day, rats start to leave the sinking ship, and the president twists in the wind. We might not sympathize, but we recognize, and voyeuristically participate in, the emotions running and the gears turning.

Carl Jung took the term, participation mystique, from the anthropologist Lucien Levy Bruhl. The original conception was a rather derogotory concept about the animism common among primitive people, that they project anthropomorphic and social characters to objects in the landscape, thus setting up mystical connections with rocks, mountains, streams, etc. Are such involvements characteristic of children and primitive people, but not of us moderns? Hardly. Modern people have distancing and deadening mechanisms to manage our mental involvement with projected symbologies, foremost among which is the scientific mindset. But our most important and moving experiences partake of identification with another- thing or person, joining our mental projection with their charisma, whatever that might be.

Participation mystique remains difficult to define and use as a concept, despite books being written about it. But I would take it as any empathetic or identification feelings we have toward things and people, by which the boundaries in between become blurred. We have a tremendous mental power to enter into other's feelings, and we naturally extend such participation (or anthropomorphism) far beyond its proper remit, to clouds, weather events, ritual objects, etc. This is as true today with new age religions and the branding relationships that every company seeks to benefit from, as it is in the more natural setting of imputing healing powers to special pools of water, or standing in awe of a magnificent tree. Such feelings in relation to animals has had an interesting history, swinging from intense identification on the part of typical hunters and cave painters, to an absurd dismissal of any soul or feeling by scientistic philosophers like Descartes, and back to a rather enthusiastic nature worship, nature film-making, and a growing scientific and philosophical appreciation of the feelings and moral status of animals in the present day.

Participation mystique is most directly manipulated and experienced in the theater, where a drama is specifically constructed to draw our sympathetic feeings into its world, which may have nothing to do with our reality, or with any reality, but is drenched in the elements of social drama- tension, conflict, heroic motivations, obstacles. If you don't feel for and with Jane Eyre as she grows from abused child, to struggling adult, to lover, to lost soul, and finally to triumphant partner, your heart is made of stone. We lend our ears, but putting it psychologically, we lend a great deal more, with mirror neurons hard at work.

All this is involuntary and unconscious. Not that it does not affect our conscious experience, but the participation mystique arises as an automatic response from brain levels that we doubtless share with many other animals. Seeing squirrels chase each other around a tree gives an impression of mutual involvement and drama that is inescapable. Being a social animal requires this kind of participation in each other's feelings. So what of the psychopath? He seems to get these participatory insights, indeed quite sensitively, but seems unaffected- his own feelings don't mirror, but rather remain self-centered. He uses his capabilities not to sympathise with, but to manipulate, others around him or her. His version of participation mystique is a truncated half-experience, ultimately lonely and alienating.

And what of science, philosophy and other ways we systematically try to escape the psychology of subjective identification and participation? As mentioned above in the case of animal studies, a rigid attitude in this regard has significantly retarded scientific progress. Trying to re-establish objectively what is so obvious subjectively is terribly slow, painstaking work. Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees stands as a landmark here, showing the productive balance of using both approaches at once. But then when it comes to physics and the wide variety of other exotic phenomena that can not be plausibly anthropomorphized or participated in via our subjective identification, the policy of rigorously discarding all projections and identifications pays off handsomely, and it is logic alone that can tell us what reality is.

• The Democratic candidates on worker rights.
• Was it trade or automation? Now that everything is made in China, the answer should be pretty clear.
• On science.
• Turns out that Google is evil, after all.
• Back when some Republicans had some principles.
• If all else fails, how about a some nice culture war?
• What is the IMF for?
• #DeleteFacebook
• Graphic: who is going to tax the rich? Who is pushing a fairer tax system overall? Compare Biden with Warren carefully.

Was Jung an Atheist?

Short answer: yes. Understanding religion, and believing in it, are two different things.

Jung was highly sympathetic to religion- Christianity in particular- seeking to explain its psychology and origins, and even to replicate it. There is an old joke among Jungians. A child asks her Analyst parent.. are we Christians? And the parent answers: "heavens no, we are Jungians!" While Freud was a rather vociferous atheist, Jung took a much more ambiguous, understanding approach to religion. Rather than a pack of lies, it was a truth, just not about the cosmos. What makes Jungians distinct is their respect for the power and psychology of religion, which they are generally obsessed with, and devoted to understanding. They are more anthropologists of religion than disparagers.

It is common for god and religion in general to embody the psyche of its practitioners. Even atheists take god's name in vain, to express strong emotions. Intellectuals customarily make of god whatever most interests them. Einstein and Spinoza took god to be the universe. Jung took it to be the self. While religion touches on many archetypes and psychic complexes, the nexus around which it all revolves is the self. Am I saved? Will I live ever after? Am I good? Is anyone? What is the meaning of my life? Jung took these questions to be significant and deep, not just the superficial reflections of repressed sexuality. Indeed, his view of the unconscious was much more positive than Freud's, seeing it as a fount of deep insight and healing, whose therapeutic power is not just the exposure and extinguishing of childhood traumas and instinctive conflicts. The unconscious has its own perceptual apparatus and methods of communcation (symbols, images) which can be seen as an autonomous entity within ourselves. I.e. god.

This is why symbology and ritual are so much more important in religion than is theology. All the Western attempts to rationalize the concept of god are so much wasted effort, not only because they are intellectually bankrupt due to the non-existence of the cosmic god they posit. They operate on a typically intellectual level that is totally inappropriate to the subject at hand.

An image painted by Jung, from his Red Book. The unconscious holds dark shadows as well as  compassion.

God is indeed real and an autonomous thing, at the same time it is a psychological construct, arising from our own selves and depths. The psychological concepts that Jung fostered, about an immense and fertile unconscious, which partakes not only of individual concerns, but of communal and cosmic ones, represents a significant and irreversible step in our understanding of religion and its panoply of symbols, motivations, gods, and other artistic paraphernalia.

Late in his career, Jung offered an interpretation of the evolution of Christianity, in "Answer to Job". God, as the manifestation of Israel's unconscious longings and strivings, is in the Pentateuch a thin-skinned, and fickle tyrant. He is immature, and when Job calls him to moral account for the Trumpian way he has toyed with his devoted subject, all god can do is blow up in an insulting twitter-esque rage. This exchange raises to consciousness the primitive nature of the god-concept in this culture, and rankles for several hundred years, at which point the solution becomes to make a better man of god by making him (notionally) into a real man. So, Pinocchio-like, he comes to Earth as Jesus, does good deeds, expresses some compassion, (though unimaginable ego seeps through in the commands for followership and claims of overlordship), and then ritually offers his self-sacrifice to assure us that he has really changed his ways and is now meek as a lamb.

Another self-explanatory image from the Red Book.

Obviously, this made a pretty modest impression on Jews at the time and since. But the combination of monotheism and a quasi-charitable, egalitarian form of god, leavened by Greek gnosticism and other intellectual additions, spread like wildfire through a West enervated by the relentless brutality of Roman civilization, and its fractured spiritual resources.

Many gods have come and gone, as cultures evolve and elaborate new images of themselves and their ideals. While Jung dabbled in some mysticism along the way, and was frustratingly ambiguous and unscientific in his writings on the subject, he laid what we can take as a very trenchant foundation for understanding religion as a psychological phenomenon. In this he followed the lead of William James, who recognized that it is a special area, so heavily subjective that philosophy has little hold. Like other freelance religious practitioners, Jungian analysts today split their time between writing books of uplift and psychological insight, and listening to clients bring up their difficulties, whether shallow or deep. They provide spiritual solace to the lost, while trying to heal the larger culture by bringing to consciousness the powers, compassion, and insight that lie within.

• The planet is burning.
• Workers, citizens, unite!
• An emotion in every chord.
• How China beat the recession- classic Keynes.
• What makes unemployed farmers so much better than other unemployed people?
• And why is the Labor party giving up on labor?
• Resignation- an excellent precedent!
• A difference between just desserts and business models.

The Quiet People

People who can focus, who invent and run today's technological world, who seek deeper insights and meanings, and who are introverted. Bad or good?

America is notoriously extroverted. A country of movers and shakers, networkers and gladhanders. We have a duty to be cheerful, competitive, and team-players. Everyone must sell, and the brand is one's self. Those who are quiet, introspective are not fit for this race, maybe damaged or not properly raised, losers. Middle and high school are generally where these tropes are pursued with greatest fervor, setting life-long patterns. Schools are "owned" by the popular students jocks, etc., who fulfill the partying and playing mantras of mindless youth. Later, workplaces are run likewise by extroverts, who come from sales and promote networking, "brainstorming" and open offices.

Who gets left out? Who cares? A landmark book on all this by Susan Cain, Quiet, came to the defense of introverts. Introverts are not antisocial. Quite the opposite- they are highly empathetic and value quality over quantity. They may not be the life of the party, but they are frequently the life-line of their best friend. They may not think on their feet so well, but think more deeply, if they are not constantly bothered. "Flow" is their métier. Introverts are not "wrong" or bad. Every species has them in large proportion- evolution has consistently tuned populations to benefit from the diversity of the adventurous and the careful, the brash and the thoughtful, each of whom contribute to survival and success, especially in our species.

Recent presidents offer instructive examples. Barack Obama is, by and large, an introvert. As president, he valued his quiet home life, studied briefing materials and pending issues carefully and deeply, and took time coming to decisions. He was notoriously uninterested in backslapping and entertaining with congressional delegations. He was cool, and a bit formal. Trump, on the other hand, has the attention span of a gnat, gets his briefing materials from FOX talk shows, and exhibits unparalleled aesthetic and intellectual shallowness. Which is the better presidential temperament?

Geeks have of late gained some recognition and cultural respect, through the computer industry, gaming, hacking, and the like. Even Big Bang Theory. But have schools become less frenetic and extrovert-oriented? Have workplaces dropped the open offices and the lets-have-a-meeting default setting for any problem? Do they pay introverts what they are worth? We have a very long way to go. The internet has had interesting and mixed effects. It has enabled telecommuting, a huge advance for those able to take advantage. It has also enabled thoughtful, self-paced learning and connection to others, not to mention anonymity for the shy. But the facebooks and twitters have turned these tools to a much darker place, with spewing ads, social competition for likes, and click-driven flaming, trolling, and bullying. It has been an object lesson in the limits of an extroverted philosophy of boundless connection.

This is a case where we can really all get along, given a little understanding, however. Yes, introverts need to work a bit on connecting with others, depending on their needs and capacities. But they also deserve a world that does not devalue them with unthinking prejudice and structures of social torture.

• Competition isn't everything.
• Malthus and the decline of empires.
• Apartheid as a solution for democracy.
• What is wrong with us? Revenge against meritocracy and decency.
• Wage growth is rather uneven.
• The state of antitrust.
• Full employment is a worthy, critical goal. UBI may keep people off the streets, but jobs give them (and us) dignity.
• Is there no decency left in this Republican party?
• Trump and Russia go way back.

Heroes, Superheroes, and Saviors

What do we see in the hero myth? With apologies to Joseph Campbell.

I was watching the TV version of Dune, which, while much better than the movie, hardly matches the book. Seeing it again made it painfully clear how this story, so gripping to my younger self, is a formulaic hero tale, just as Harry Potter would be for the next generation, Frodo Baggins was for the one before, and Arthur, Beowulf, Jesus, Buddha, Rama, and Odysseus have been since antiquity. What do we see in them, and why are they so riveting?

Obviously, these tales speak to the meaning of life, in a direct and comprehensive way. Though mostly for males- Heroes and their students are, as a rule, male. They go on adventures, lead others, resolve mysteries, and ultimately solve communal problems. What they achieve is status, renown, and perhaps the hand of the princess, who is the typical hero of the female archetypal tale (though see also Dorothy, Alice, Mulan, et al.).

These qualities have relatively little to do with one's purely individual path through life, judged by, say, happiness, or one's success in earning a living, attending to the humdrum affairs of personal life, comfort, and family. Rather, it is a wider social role and service that is the point, and fame is the coin of this realm. The hero slays monsters that have terrified the people and despoiled their crops. Or he retrieves the chalice that gives everlasting life and salvation. Or he uses a mysterious force to lead a rebel alliance against the totalitarian galactic empire.

Horses? This quest needs no horses!

Hero tales are formative for those in formation- the maturing child, who instinctively yearns to accomplish something significant, which is the path to status in the collective, and thus to relative power and reproductive success. But what defines success and significance? It is necessarily the collective that must define what is important, via its bards who recite its problems both perennial and topical, provide the grist of heroic adventure and conflict, and award fame for their successful conclusion. Whether it is raging beasts in the countryside, Orwellian tyranny, taunting goddesses, or a world-wide conspiracy of death-eaters, the threat is not individual, but collective, and thus the hero serves the collective, something "greater than himself", as many people express their seeking behavior. Success of any kind is attractive, but to be truly compelling, success needs to resolve big problems and be valued by others. (Though in fairness, the hero may toil in obscurity and only be recognized in retrospect, perhaps long after his death, to have solved the momentous problem. Such a tale may have additional romance, and happen in reality all too often, but is not typically what a reader wishes to emulate for her or his own life path.)

One characteristic element of the standard hero tale is the reckoning with the father. Luke Skywalker finally meets his maker in a climactic scene. Jesus naturally has mixed emotions about his father, whoever that might be, who has left him up on the cross. The father represents the existing system, which has formed the hero, but which also perpetuates all the problems that he exists to solve. The father must be transcended for the tale to conclude successfully. Paul Atreides has spiritual and temporal powers far beyond his father's, and succeeds where the father had failed. More interestingly, Jesus, while always respectful of the father and putatively acting in his service, ends up totally upending the father's theology and bringing a new dispensation, whether that was "in reality" his intention or not.

Sometimes the goal of a quest is so abstract and theologically attenuated as to be absurd. Maybe the quest was the important thing after all.

More complicated is the role of the special gift. Harry Potter has the mark of the lightning flash, and special powers of leadership and magic. All the Marvel heros have some special power. Heroes are typically born of noble houses, though they may be unrecognized or abused for some of the story. What is the function of all this apparatus? Isn't the point of the hero tale to inspire normal boys to seek glory for themselves from/for their collective? Why start with abnormal heroes? The quest needs to be done in a noble way, morally upright. But that hardly requires a particular form of birth.

I think much of this has to do with the inner quest, which is another aspect of the hero tale. In order to seek outer glory, the hero needs first an inner quest, to find the confidence, knowledge, and personal resources to do extraordinary things. Jesus grappled with satan in the desert, while Paul Atreides grapples with sandworms in the desert (always an epic setting; Lawrence of Arabia grappled there with a recalcitrant, but noble, Arab culture). Each person has some special gifts and skills, and an important aspect of life, particularly adolescence, is to find what those might be. The ability to be clairvoyant, or to accumulate The Force are symbolic of momentous discoveries about the self which happen during growth to adulthood. While few of us will find nirvanna, or that we are the son of god, nevertheless whatever we do find will be the key to our ability to differentiate ourselves from the crowd, while earning its respect. Each person follows this archetypal path, and it is typically a difficult and uncertain one, thus the universal interest it evokes.

The noble house and lineage aspect seems more atavistic. One of the hero's special gifts / typical traits (which is key to the story's cultural and pedagogical significance) is to be naturally noble in deportment, morals, and martial prowess. Given our instinctive racism and appreciation for inheritance of traits, it is then natural to make this occur by having the hero some secret child of the king, or an acknowledged child who breaks out of the mold and takes a different path (Buddha). Or who comes both from a noble family and from the planet Krypton. Surely we could come up with a more modern way to handle this! Even the Black Panther is of noble birth. Tolkein gets points on this score for his low-class heroes in the Lord of the Rings.

But there is also a superstitious element. Luck is one thing the hero needs to have on his side, and this has traditionally been bound up with cosmic forces and mysteries, instinctively (and animistically) personified. Special forms of communication with these forces, or at least encouraging signs from them, would by this primitive instinct, be essential to success. One can take this in more rational way, however, to indicate a certain humility and appreciation before the complex and often inscrutable real forces that form our basis of operations, including the social forces that may not be ready for the hero's revolutionary work and need to be brought along by way of their primitive beliefs, whatever their nature and value.

Maybe a little self-flagellation would help?

It is particularly pathetic when a hero is so venerated and his boons are so attractive that his devotees make a fetish or even religion of him, employing a priesthood to retail third-hand boons of a studiously invisible nature. Generally, the emulation of nobility, and inner quests modeled on that of the hero, are not a bad thing. But the whole point of the tale was to find and develop one's own self and one's own resources- one's unique gifts and path in life- rather than to adopt another's wholesale, or worse yet, to fantasize about fictional powers and benefits that can be cadged via supplication and abasement. That would be to fundamentally misunderstand the point of the hero archetype, going so far as to reverse it as an engine for the most unheroic behavior. Thankfully, such overblown renditions have been relatively rare over the recent centuries (though Scientology, and before that, Mormonism, stand as significant and unfortunate counter-examples). Yet overall, absurd hero-religions, mostly stemming from more distant epochs, remain all too common.

The quality of the hero story plays an important role in its society, of which it is a gauge and exemplar. Just think of the pervasive influence of Homer's epics, or of Christianity. It defines not only the archetypal problems to be faced, but the standard of morality / nobility the aspiring hero must have to engage in its quest / solution. Star Wars cast the enemy as a Stalinist totalitarianism, while Buddhism cast the enemy as Maya and attachment to outer and fleeting things. While moral good and bad are perennial problems of the human condition, other aspects can change. The balance between inner and outer quests is a key indicator of a tale's maturity and spiritual content. Our current tales seem to center on the Marvel universe, of which I know very little. But it seems generally dedicated to extravagant violence and justice, with a somewhat infantile/regressive tone, overall. There is limited inner focus. They seem on the level of the Bond franchise, but without the understatement or style. It was extremely disturbing when, after 9/11, there was a rash of corner-cutting hero tales that supported the use of torture.

John Cleese strikes a heroic pose.

At this time when the actual culture is run by those fitting an antihero archetype, (technically, the heel), and the planet truly in peril, it is even more imperative that the stories that form our hero mythology and guide our questing youth be well-constructed, compelling, positive, and timely in their selection and portrayal of problems. Vietnam was a watershed in this regard, sending us from the morally simple comforts of the old Westerns and Hollywood classics, into self-lacerating work like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, and most recently, Game of Thrones. This depressing trajectory reflects changes in American culture, which has become more complicated and self-doubting, (perhaps mature), even mean. Realistic? That is hardly the point of the hero tale, frankly. Many recent film-makers have tried their hand at the saving-the-planet story, surely the one we need most of all, (from Avatar to Independence Day), but none seem to have become canonical. Someone needs to do a better job painting the deep challenges of the day for tomorrow's heroes.

• Unfit to serve on a sewer board. But then, who helped elect him?
• In praise of curated data. Sort of the opposite of Twitter, Facebook, and the other new news, but not cheap to do.
• New tech, same as the old tech.
• Liberals sometimes can't help drinking the right-wing economic koolaid.

School of Hate

13 Reasons and the dark side of high school.

Why all the hate? Hate has elected a president, and is his tireless message over the twitter-waves. Hate is loose in the Muslim world, in a campaign to instill fear in its enemies. We seem to be prone to it, and can be consumed by it, unawares.

I have been enjoying a Netflix series, thirteen reasons why, which incidentally was partly shot in my city. The titular reasons are ones for suicide, of the main character Hanna. And they are recounted by her in tapes being played after the fact, as the series progresses, by her best friend, Clay. Generally, the production is not very innovative, but the flashbacks and dream sequences are done with great care and style.

Its topic is how horrible high school is in America. Leaders of Britain may be formed on the playing fields of Eton, but American leaders are formed in the hallways and locker rooms of our public high schools. Which are not a pretty sight. The series is a very frank, if lavishly dramatized, look at how teens jockey for power and status, mostly by running down and terrorizing their schoolmates.

Most obvious are the jocks. Having bought into the official / corporate / archetypal system of status through athletics, they are children of privilege, loved by the administration, confident that even if they are not liked, they will be popular anyhow- that is just the way the social system works. They don't come off well in this show, giving in to every amoral whim from booze to bullying to social media meanness, thoughtless when they are not being mean.

From there, we go on to other dramatic dilemmas, of closeted gay students, stalking photographer, catty ex-girl friends, and so forth, salted by a variety of subplots among the adults, like the big-box "Walplex" taking over the town and the school administration covering its ass from Hanna's parents' lawsuit. Hanna was evidently failed, if not terrorized, by a fair proportion of the student body among others. I have not gotten to the end, but she will clearly have plenty of reasons when we get there.

Clay in class

But why is hate so easy? Is hate fun? Is it natural? Yes on both counts. Fascists know well that crowds and hate are a potent, even easy, combination. But it is also one of the most primitive, selfish, and useless emotions. Children hate quite easily, and have grievances that erupt into towering emotion. Growing up means putting a lid on them, so that we can work with all sorts of people, and work effectively without getting side-tracked by emotional baggage. We have created a emotional petri dish for teens by concentrating them in schools, with lots of leisure time, and little serious work. No wonder that the devil finds them such easy prey. Which is to say, their childish emotions, not quite under control or under moral direction. That we elected such an immature person as president speaks to a larger failure of our educational system- that it has failed to advance not just one, but far, far too many US citizens to an emotionally healthy and insightful adulthood.

All religious traditions have technologies of controlling hate, even if they then channel it to their own ends. Buddhists take the most uncompromising approach, decyring all such emotions as false, and engaging in lengthy love-inflected meditation to expunge such thinking. Yet Buddhists have had their wars and hate speach all the same- pacifists have a problem when faced with adversaries more willing to hate than to love. Christians have an ethic of love, yet hatred of Jews (how ironic!) flourished for centuries all the same. Muslims have the Sufi branch, their relatively pacifist brethren. But on the whole, Muslims have a simple and straighforward relation to hate- a deeply tribal approach where infidels are hated, and believers are loved. Except when they are of other sects, in which case they are hated anyhow. The Middle East is about to blow up again, along the Saudi Arabia - Iran axis of hate. So religions are a useful source of ideas and methods of human cultivation, but by no means the or a general answer to moral teaching.

Is it good that American school students go through an education in bullying, hate, and power politics? Most make it through OK, and many find highly positive environments where they find support and direction towards a happy adulthood. Does sobering, even terrorizing, interaction with the dark side build maturity, as it does in fairy tales and dreams? Perhaps so, but the costs are enormous, since many children do not make it out whole and unscathed. Simply put, children do not make a mature society when left to themselves. The under-adulted structure of public schools leaves quite a bit to be desired, in that it does not sufficiently occupy or guide young people.

• Are all males this bad?
• Mentally limited. Mentally impaired. Corrupt. Treasonous.
• Krugman- have Republicans no decency, or spines?
• A wildfire on Greenland?
• Are protests with guns different from protests without?
• Corporate concentration and lack of competition has contributed to lagging pay.
• Notes on the conventional view of unemployment.
• Summers- monetary policy can not do it alone.