While exploring a bit of American literature last year, I stumbled onto a topic that many folks today would call “homeschooling.” I was surprised by the author who provided the occasion: it was Paul Ryan’s preferred sage, the extravagant Ayn Rand.

I have inferred from Jennifer Burns’ outstanding autobiographical work on Rand (Goddess of the Market, Oxford, 2009) that Rand’s cultish authoritarianism, her drugs, her infidelity, and her own irrational rage—while protesting anti-rationality—have not entirely eclipsed  her greatness, and her legacy they never could (you might recall Ted Turner’s 248 billboards asking, “who is John Galt ?”).  Perhaps some social conservatives will consider the truth of this suggestion after venturing the following passage from Atlas Shrugged (page 785 in my Plume by Penguin, 1999):

She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley—two fearless beings, aged seven and four.  They seemed to face life as she had faced it.  They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world—a look of fear, half-secretive, half-sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being in the process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred.  The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.

“They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart,” said the young mother. . . . “They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world. . . . I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband’s profession, but for the sake of my own.  I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings.  I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror.  You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart?  Yet the cause is so simple.  The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”

I am still writing my book.  I have been writing it for about five years. If you have no idea what book I refer to, this post might not be intended for you.  This is a friendly update for those who periodically check in.

The five classes I now teach (Philosophy and Humanities) have permitted me a day each week to continue the book steadily, although this might change with my firmer commitment to philosophy and cognitive science research.  I hope to have at least a rough-draft proposal by July 2012.  I do not, by the way, begin addressing The Kirk until Chapter 7.

The book has taken on different forms and sizes and purposes—in my imagination, in my notes and outlines, in the actual drafts spanning a number of genres. Last summer, after wrapping up some research on cognitive neuroscience, metaphor, and philosophy of freewill, I had some time to work on the book at Steamboat Springs’ public library, which provided me a more than sufficient setting of geography and architectural space – river rolling down from the last bit of melting snow, just outside the library window . . .   We also made it back to Moscow, Idaho for the first time (May/June) and our five weeks there was important. I enjoyed daily liturgical progressions through University of Idaho’s beautiful campus (running into The Beast on one occasion – ‘good to see you’, etc.).  I spent some time in Evan Wilson’s library, of course (and in the home of some Kirkers), and I regularly walked to Bucers for some note-taking time as the northern winter came to an unusually slow halt.

I will be attending this year’s Cognitive Science conference  in Boston: CogSci 2011 (33rd annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society).  I am looking for an economical room sharing opportunity for the nights of July 19th to July 23rd.  Please contact me if interested or, if you are so kind, please direct me to folks who might be interested: michael.p.metzler@gmail.com

(I am presenting a poster on Action, Imagery, and the N400)

Thanks!

Well, for a second time I forgot I had a blog. Don’t believe me?  Look at the date of the last entry for supporting evidence. But then, last week, I needed The Wood for a quick search—‘oh, yes, my blog-the-database-thing’ I said to myself.  Since this recollection I have been tempted to make another post, most recently an entry relating the new neuroscience findings reported in the New York Times. But why do a thing like that? That might lead to some readers, which could lead then to another readership, which would then lead to the unconscious itch to feed more material to that readership, and then I would have a blog again. But I do not at the moment want a blog. So instead, here is one piece of information I intended to make available for the last year but never got around to, my picture:

Last night, I completed Glen Beck’s The Overton Window, although I am not sure why – light reading that was just sitting there, perhaps, to punctuate my progress through Gone with the Wind.  In many respects, I did enjoy the book. No doubt less noble material currently sits on the shelves of the local book store. Yet, I was left confused over just what precisely I had read.  Still sorting it out, here are some timely thoughts. Today is the day before Beck’s “Restore America” event.

Beck is not a conspiracy theorist, he tells us.  In the opening “Note From the Author,” Beck prophecies that his enemies will try to spin such an attack without even reading the book – so goes Beck’s spin against his critics before they have yet written anything to not read.  No, not a conspiracy theorist, nor a spin-scum sophist appealing to the more crass emotions of the populist. Beck is rather a novelist, a master of humanities and critical thinking, a creative artist fostering “deeper conversations”.  In the Afterward, Beck writes:

It’s one of the intriguing potentials of this sort of fiction: When your mind suspends disbelief, it may also become more willing to consider a broader spectrum of possible outcomes to the events and agendas that are playing out around us every day (294).

But even here, in this one brief didactic attempt to set the record straight and explain his sober educational intentions, Beck cannot help but suggest a little bit more:  “It’s unlikely we’ll face anything close to the challenges” the protagonists are up against in the story.  “But after experiencing their scenario in its fictional setting, maybe it will become a little easier to have deeper conversations about the important forces that are actually at work in the real world.”  I call your attention to the critical phrases “anything close”, “experiencing their scenario,” and “the important forces that are actually at work in the real world.”  So the reader is given the green light to imagine just how non-fictional the simplistic, conspiratorial plot really is.

Character development within the story does little to mitigate a concern over conspiratorial intentions, even though Beck seems to make great efforts to moralize just here. The popular rhetorician, Danny Bailey, learns the importance in setting up careful boundaries on his own rhetoric and lust for attention, but only in so far as Danny might unwittingly incite literal violence, more specifically, the use of an atomic bomb on the city of Las Vegas.  That is not setting a high bar for carefulness, scholarship, self-critical inquiry, humility, and sobriety – to put it mildly. 

Therefore, despite how much I did enjoy the story and many of the interesting facts and cool quotes about authoritarianism and freedom, I can find little evidence from The Overton Window to warrant a rejection of Steven Benet’s hypothesis today regarding Glen Beck’s mental state (found in his Washington Monthly article ‘Political Animal’). This hypothesis was captured well by Benet’s quote from Atrius of the Eschaton blog: “The slightly interesting thing about Beck is that he appears to be an insane megalomaniac who is self-aware enough to be aware of that fact. It’s what allows him to be a huckster clown on top of it.”  

Benent’s on-line article provides Beck’s brief video advertising the event set for tomorrow.   The video’s narrator explains that “Man has always searched for a better way. . . . a new world founded on faith . . . by a people who believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a power greater than man guiding them.” Beck gets the nature of faith right here.  Faith is the unquestioned certainty that one knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that one’s thoughts are in fact Gods thoughts and that one’s will is in fact God’s will.  A monstrous proposition of course, and so it is not surprising that the narrator double-speaks: “Men guided by their own reason.” 

The Overton Window is not silent here.  The wisest sage of the story, Molly, explains that the difference between the American Revolution and the French Revolution was that “We believed we had the will of God behind us.”  Beware, I say, of someone who makes a career out of mocking Ivy League institutions and the ‘elitists,’ for it is perhaps only there where our history may be rightly preserved. 

But all this is perhaps too much rigor over the profoundly banal. If Beck wanted to gain the respect of someone like me, he would not be sharing the stage with Sarah Palin, and he would certainly not then state on Fox news that her presence was “nothing political.”  But we need not ponder even these facets of the man’s psychology. The tail was already pinned on the donkey. Earlier, Beck explained his expectations for tomorrow’s event:

And that’s kind of the point of 8/28: you just have to stand where the Lord wants you to stand. He’ll explain it to you when the time comes. You can feel the presence of the Lord. I mean, the Spirit is so strong. When you, two hundred, three hundred, five hundred thousand people on the Mall in that space right there between Washington and Lincoln with the Reflecting Poll – a spiritual space in our nation – the Spirit of the Lord is going to be unleashed like I think you’ve never felt it before. 

I comfort myself with the possibility that within some halls of our Universities, there remains a small flickering flame of what we are inclined to call progress.

 Four Items:

1) Mind Science
Benforado (of the Situationist) let’s us know after the fact of the interdisciplinary embodied cognition conference at Columbia University in NYC.  Or maybe he did let us know. I’ve been too busy writing my book the last three weeks to be checking up on these things.  But crickets!  Gallese, Barsalou, and Lakoff, three of my favorite mind researchers, were there.  And here is a list of the others with links to their websites.

2) Novel
So far coming to 50 chapters and 380 pages. 

3) Hitch-22
I completed Christopher Hitchens’ Memoir Hitch-22.  I think I am going to frame the last three pages for my . . . well, for walls of willing hosts?  . . . makes a nice metaphor anyway.

4) Making of Law, Science, and Prop 8
Dahlia Lithwick writes in Slate magazine on the “Brilliant Ruling” of Judge Vaughn R. Walker:

It’s hard to read Judge Walker’s opinion without sensing that what really won out today was science, methodology, and hard work. Had the proponents of Prop 8 made even a minimal effort to put on a case, to track down real experts, to do more than try to assert their way to legal victory, this would have been a closer case. But faced with one team that mounted a serious effort and another team that did little more than fire up their big, gay boogeyman screensaver for two straight weeks, it wasn’t much of a fight. Judge Walker scolds them at the outset for promising in their trial brief to prove that same-sex marriage would “effect some twenty-three harmful consequences” and then putting on almost no case.

Walker notes that the plaintiffs presented eight lay witnesses and nine expert witnesses, including historians, economists, psychologists, and a political scientist. Walker lays out their testimony in detail. Then he turns to the proponents’ tactical decision to withdraw several of their witnesses, claiming “extreme concern about their personal safety” and unwillingness to testify if there were to be “recording of any sort.” Even when it was determined that there would be no recording, counsel declined to call them. They were left with two trial witnesses, one of whom, David Blankenhorn, founder and president of the Institute for American Values, the judge found “lacks the qualifications to offer opinion testimony and, in any event, failed to provide cogent testimony in support of proponent’s factual assertions.” Blankenhorn’s credentials, methodology, lack of peer-reviewed studies, and general shiftiness on cross examination didn’t impress Walker. And once he was done with Blankenhorn, he turned to the only other witness—Kenneth P. Miller—who testified only to the limited question of the plaintiffs’ political power. Walker wasn’t much more impressed by Miller, giving his opinions “little weight.”

. . . The real triumph of Perry v. Schwarzenegger may be that it talks in the very loftiest terms about matters rooted in logic, science, money, social psychology, and fact.

Conservative response?

“Abusive”. “Tyrannical”.  “Judicial arrogance”.

The Mormon church, on the other hand, says  (from Rawstory.com):

 ”There is no doubt that today’s ruling will add to the marriage debate in this country and we urge people on all sides of this issue to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility toward those with a different opinion,” church spokeswoman Kim Farah said, as quoted at the Associated Press. 

In a recent article  for Slate,  Farhad Manjoo offers a critical look at WikiLeaks  through the lens of the release of Afghanistan war logs. Manjoo asks, “Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity?”.  With total anonymity of sources, which means that even WikiLeaks does not know and cannot know the sources of the leaks it provides, WikiLeaks has become “an opaque, insular organization” and has “shrouded itself in secrecy.”  As if the pejorative ‘insular’ and ‘shrouded’ and ‘secrecy’ were not enough, this is “a problem” Manjoo informs us, since “most whistle-blowers” have “some sort of agenda” and this agenda is “part of the story” and “could provide valuable context.”  Manjoo concludes, “would many leakers balk if WikiLeaks began asking them simple questions? Let me offer a few suggestions: Who are you, how did you find this document, and why are you leaking it now?”

As one who has been on the WikiLeak side of this kind of criticism (an experience originating a mild theme for my book in progress), I felt compelled to offer a reply.  I have not in the past spent much time on the political.  Perhaps I am finally getting drawn in, or perhaps it is not just politics at stake here. This issue regards our appreciation, or lack thereof, for the endearing role totalitarianism has played through human history, particularly with respect to the gruesomely attained discovery of that still globally rare and precious form of life we call freedom.  Freedom to think, freedom to know, freedom to talk, freedom to act.  Freedom from unknown microphones in one’s bedside phone and freedom from imprisonment and torture for failure to whoop it up for the local big-mouthed pathological monomaniac.  I speak of a Freedom not only for the guru or the state sponsored saint or the patriarch or the dear leader or all those deluded murderous tyrants we apparently cannot live without. I speak of a Freedom of the human mammal, which, by categorical definition, possesses some extent of at least a rough similarity to my own consciousness, emotions, and nervous system.

In answer to Manjoo’s question then—and I am glad he asks it—‘NO’, I do not think many leakers would “balk.”  They after all are in a position of simply trying to find a way to “balk” about their own immediate affiliations and social ties and daily life routines without the ramifications of, on the mild end of the whipping stick, the fine-tuned mechanisms of discrimination, shunning, ridicule, shame, and psychological torture.  These leakers would hardly have the arrogance, motivation, emotional energy, or concern to “balk” at WikiLeak for asking such questions.  These would-be leakers would simply not leak, but go on, oppressed by their knowledge of the truth that powerful people have so far succeeded in keeping under wraps.  The suggestion that “most whistle-blowers” have some “sort of agenda” is an insult to all those men and women who have suffered for the cause of truth.  I do hope that Manjoo’s easy dismissal of this possibility from even a quick reference does not reflect his own inability to empathize with this kind of “agenda”.  As WikiLeak alleges, globally, “Whistleblowers account for around half of all exposures of fraud.”  It is hard to imagine that this important source of truth in the world is primarily guided by private ambitions or more neutral selfish drives like “agendas”, irrelevant if not counter to, the knowledge of the truth. 

As for the charge of insularity and secrecy:  How does this smear—that is all it can be, right or wrong: a smear apt to cue strong emotions—fall even near the argumentative crux?  The military needs a mechanism to secure some information.  In this case, this mechanism failed. This was only ‘secret’ information though. So far, we have seen no ‘top secret’ information.  We have laws about leaking this information.  The leaker still stands the risk of discovery and prosecution according to law and under the protections of the U.S. Constitution—although the leaker is currently ‘innocent’ and will remain so until declared guilty by someone other than Obama and James Jones—while Wikileaks has established itself even more as a safe source to leak important information from within oppressive regimes throughout the world.

Manjoo stays clear of this more sticky point of law and the peculiar power of the executive branch and military to the more interesting epistemological point: how do we know? How do we know why the documents were leaked, or if these are all the relevant documents or if the documents have been tampered?  But the argument here is mangled.  Manjoo confuses two kinds of evidence: the evidence of primary documents and the evidence of testimony.  Understanding the source indeed will provide narrative context and such context is always “helpful”—as well as entertaining—but after 90,000 of official military documents have been presented to the court of public opinion, such “helpfulness” diminishes up an asymptotic curve.  The media has been concerned about what these documents say, with the interpretive context well secured over the fact that they do not know who leaked, why, if these are all the documents and, prima facie, if they have been tampered. And alternatively, the government simply wants the leaker’s head on a stick, regardless of who he is and why he leaked the information.  Manjoo has therefore simply played into the hands of the authoritarian and helped weaken our always tentative grasp on freedom.  

I leave you with Wikileak’s nailing of the epistemological point:

WikiLeaks believes that best way to truly determine if a story is authentic, is not just our expertise, but to provide the full source document to the broader community – and particularly the community of interest around the document. So for example, let’s say a WikiLeaks’ document reveals human rights abuses and it is purportedly from a regional Chinese government. Some of the best people to analyze the document’s veracity are the local dissident community, human rights groups and regional experts (such as academics). They may be particularly interested in this sort of document. But of course WikiLeaks will be open for anyone to comment.

Even with the six dependents of spouse and children, I attempted the life of a gypsy after moving from Cardiff-By-The-Sea a couple months ago. After only two weeks of camping the attempt failed. There have been so far too many ‘house sitting’ opportunities in residences that outdo what had been my own. As I write, I sit with windows to my left that overlook rolling hills and a meadow with a winding stream. A darker mountain ridge stands further up, backgrounded by storm clouds. We are in the mountains of Colorado, ten miles out of what is already a fairly small town.  As I pause and look now, cattle roam, a green tractor mows a large field at a distance, and two horses graze nearby at the foot of the hill on which I am perched.   To my front is a view of a barren hill that towers just above the house roof on which I see the three horses of this household—brown, white, gray—walking casually side by side. Two friendly dogs, at all times on this acreage somehow omnipresent, are still felt and seen in the abstract.  On the way here, we passed through what a sign labeled ‘open range’, a phrase I understood only after swerving to the left of the paved road so as not to rudely disturb the cows grazing on the road’s edge and for fear that a cow’s lazy decision over what side of the street to munch could end in its instantaneous death.

For some days or some weeks I had forgotten that I ‘have a blog’. Remembering caused a faint but irremediable twinge far on the periphery of what seems my background experience of agency and personhood.   Nothing remedies such feelings like swift action in the pseudo-social world of the internet and so I was not surprised by my quick resolve to provide those still checking on progress here in the Wood with something like an ‘update’.  This is the strange result.

As for things more academic or otherwise philosophical or scientific or literary: ‘my book’ was simmering in a crock pot that had eventually been unplugged. The unplugging came about for a variety of reasons. I will mention one: I was finding non-fiction too meager for my purposes and I had no alternative set of tools in my pouch.  Then, around January, independent of any book writing efforts or plans, I began reading fiction. I first read Melville’s Moby Dick for no specific reason I am aware of outside of having a copy at hand; yet a number of classics later, I still consider Moby Dick to be my favorite, and more than a favorite; I consider the work sui generis.  I then read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.  By the time I was half way through with this second classic a thought flashed: why not make my own use of the literary craft? On further thought, and a couple classics later, I determined that building from my first book attempt would require just this sort of retooling. With the art of literature, I could do almost everything I had set out to do with my first book and much more.

In March and April I invested time on mirror neurons, grounded cognition, conceptual blending, metaphor, vision, and the N400 ERP component (EEG)—not to be confused with my thoughts   from last year. By June I switched gears in my reading with the switch in living situation. While living out of a tent, I gave a start to a work of fiction. I have so far found the task sufficiently rewarding and productive. A number of chapters are close to rough draft form and the outline is fairly settled: 45 to 55 chapters for a total of 400 to 500 pages. Even with the change of genre, the title could remain the same, which has been The Kirk: Mother of War.

In order to compare notes: some of my recent reading also includes Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Hemmingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Yate’s Revolutionary Road, and for read-alouds to the kids: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth. I have started Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Tom Sawyer and Gone With The Wind (a better mix is hard to imagine, no?), and due to familial relatedness to the author, I am winding through the new thriller The Radix  (written by a psychology instructor; the best thing since ’24′ and only eight bucks at a fine book store near you). Recommendations for further reading from those who are familiar with the Kirk are welcomed.

As for non-fiction, I found Burns’ Goddess of the Market (Oxford 2009) vital explanation of Rand’s secondary world of Atlas. Damasio’s Descartes’ Error, an international best seller I discovered in the footnotes of the cognitive neuroscience literature, was excellent and I have started his The Feeling of What Happens. I also began Kennaelly’s The First Word, a laymen’s guide recommended by Pinker introducing the new field of the origins of language.  Curiously, Burns documents Rand’s cultish life and Kennaelly hints in this same direction for Chomsky.  I am also enjoying Hitchens’ Hitch-22 (of course!), in which he curiously details his own ‘cult’ experiences in prep school. I have just now finally started to read Nietzsche—a cult all to himself—beginning with Beyond Good and Evil and the collection The Will to Power. I hope to begin the two volumes I have here of Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar.

For your ongoing internet viewing I continue to recommend Harvard Law’s The Situationist.   They still ‘have a blog’ over there without question.  

Without ‘job’ and homeless and still responsible for six dependents, I am now accepting donations for a trip to Washington DC, Philadelphia, NYC, MIT, and Harvard. Donors decide what I blog on during and one month after my trip (you know that’s gotta be worth big bucks). My point of departure will be Florida. After that, the plan is Miami and Key West. At any point in time I would be happy to be dropped into any contested area elsewhere in the world.

Be back later with some book excerpts and further thoughts on semantics, meaning generally construed, and the ERP N400.

    “So, it would seem, then, you love this . . . young man?”
    “No-no-no! I can’t stand . . . your young man, I can’t stand him!” Aglaia suddenly boiled over and raised her head.  “And if you ever dare again, Papa . . . I’m serious; do you hear? I’m serious!”
     And she was serious indeed; she flushed all over and her eyes gleamed. Her father faltered and grew alarmed, but Lizaveta Prokofyevna gave him a sign behind Aglaia’s back, and he took it to mean: “Don’t ask questions.”
      . . . [a bit later] “Well, what’s the meaning of this? What do you think?” Ivan Fyodorovich uttered hastily.
     “I am afraid to even say aloud,”  Lizaveta Prokofyevna answered as hastily.    
     “But, in my view, it’s clear.”
     “And in my view, it’s clear.  Clear as day. She loves him.”
     “Not only loves; she’s in love with him!” echoed Alexandra . . .   (559-560).

In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, routine social events and conventional loves and hates are depicted with an intimacy that reveals their life and death significance. The reader is pulled into the social situation to accept without question the cosmic importance of a dying young man’s bitterness or a young girl’s prideful and fickle attachments.

As I gave myself to this text I began to muse: is not this dabbling in a bit of vain anthropomorphism, at least from the point of view of the serious minded philosopher and scientist?  At the very least, these romantic, imaginative constructs of the poet do not help get us at the hard science of the human animal, do they?

But I was also reading, it so happened, another book: Strangers to Ourselves (2002), by Timothy Wison. T. Wilson admits that key points of his thesis are considered controversial. For example, his thesis regarding our inability to accurately introspect our own psychological states has received even more skepticism than his sympathy with Wegner’s (2002) wild thesis regarding the illusion of conscious will. This was of interest to me since I took both claims, mildly construed, to be persuasive, and this all without doubt pertained to the more serious issues of science and philosophy – as hard and bizarre as they might be to our comfortable folk conceptions. I was therefore struck – with a chuckle, considering the mild discomfort I felt over Dostoevsky’s anthropomorphic craft – by the seminal role that literature plays throughout T. Wilson’s Strangers to Ourselves. These ‘controversial’ claims are introduced, for example, in the very first two pages of the book through a discussion of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past:

These words: ‘Mademoiselle Albertine has gone!’ had expressed themselves in my heart in the form of an anguish so keen that I would not be able to endure it for any length of time.  And so what I had supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole life, How ignorant we are of ourselves.” 

T. Wilson goes on to talk about a friend, Susan, who thought she was in love with a man, only to realize a year later what her friends had known all along: that she had never been in love with this man.   T. Wilson then notes how Elizabeth, in Pride and Prejudice, could not “exactly define” her feelings for Mr. Darcy (2). Later, a short story by Mary Kierstead is cited (118), involving two cousins that come to realize that they had always hated Topper, a pony, even though they had been, for years growing up, “conned into loving him”. T. Wilson notes William Carpenter’s over a century old observation that young people often have “unnoticed” feelings, powerful attachments “between individuals of opposite sexes, without either being aware of the fact” (129).

T. Wilson admits that these stories are “just anecdotes” and appeals to the empirical evidence “for the idea that people can possess one feeling while believing they have another” (130).  But appeals to literature do not end. A short story by D. Eisenberg (150), and then one by Julian Barnes (163), are made useful.  In Barnes’ narrative, a man and a woman infer from a distance, based on cues given by others, their own love for one another, until their private personal narratives come in contact with a concrete meeting years later, at which time they to learned they did not even know one another (164). Proust is then analyzed further (169-170), and the book concludes with a personal narrative from Joan Didion (219-220).

Indeed, just yesterday evening down the Highway 101, John Perry appealed to an interesting story in answer to Paul Churchland’s question about how private thoughts might play a role-based way of managing information.

So: My tentative conclusion, based also on the continuing analysis of Melville’s The Whale and my more recent opening of Dickins’ A Tale of Two Cities, is this: The human psychology that novelists of 150 years ago took for granted cross-culturally – throwing the mysteries and complexities of the human mind up on stage to probe before a watching world – is now considered by American academics within philosophy, law, and psychology to be novel and controversial.  Given my continued interest – nay! my unfailing commitment as a soldier preparing for battle! – given my interest, I say, in metaphor and narrative, this tentative conclusion places a new shining edge on the old, largely failed battle ax of doing philosophy through literature – whatever this might be intended to mean, precisely.  Hats must be tipped to Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge (Oxford, 1990) when noting such an idea, but with some reservation, given her courageous yet curious attempt at arriving at the necessary and sufficient conditions of an emotion in Upheavals of Thought (Cambridge, 2001); and one cannot forget her unblushing reference to ‘propositional content’ either. This result might have been inevitable though, at least after Nussbaum leaves aside Lakoff and Johnson’s revolution of embodied cognition and embraces an obscure and superficial substitute:

. . . we have at least a roughly demarcated category of phenomena before us that can be scrutinized to see what their common features might be, although we should be prepared, as well, to find that the boundaries of the class are not clear and that there are noncentral cases that share only some of the features of the central cases (24).

To my delight, I find something importantly different with T. Wilson, who crucially employees the word ‘narrative’ without trepidation or theoretical baggage when addressing the relation between the conscious and unconscious mind.  One cannot help but think of Lakoff and Johnson’s objectivism while reading T. Wilson’s concluding discussion – surprisingly simple and philosophically cogent – of narrative and truth (216-218).   T. Wilson’s success is found, I think, in the ability to self-consciously approach ‘personal narrative’ as an important analogy (162), and he notes that the “narrative viewpoint is perfectly compatible with the archaeology metaphor” [my emphasis].  T. Wilson makes no reference to Lakoff and Johnson. However, an entire chapter of Metaphors We Live By (1980) is dedicated to these sorts of ‘Complex Coherence across Metaphors’ (97-105), and the last chapter of Metaphors We Live By (four pages before the end of the book) foreshadows T. Wilson’s over-arching thesis:

But any really deep understanding of why we do what we do, feel what we feel, change as we can change, and even believe what we believe, takes us beyond ourselves . . . it comes out of our constant interactions with our physical, cultural, and interpersonal environment . . . The process of self-understanding is the continual development of new life stories for yourself (232-233) [emphasis mine].

 And so now I see another error in my thinking that crystallized about five years ago: Nicholas Maxwell led me astray by pitting literature against science according to the tension between the human world and the physical word, consciousness and matter.  But literature is a powerful tool in understanding the unconscious mind as well as the conscious; we perhaps have much to learn from the novelists of 150 years ago who wrestled with the physical complexities of being human despite the availability of a comfortable, conficting narrative of the Cartesian theatre. 

______

I will soon provide a ‘Part 2′ entry as follow up to these considerations, which will consist of an analysis of Part Four of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.  I will offer mild disagreement with Joseph Frank’s (1997) interpretation of the changes in Part Four’s narration perspective and suggest that Frank overlooks Dostoevsky’s sophisticated psychology on display, particularly those features of the human animal now understood as novel, controversial scientific discoveries. 

Taken from Penguin Books, 1992; 625 pages.  Key Conceptual Metaphors: MAN IS LEVIATHON; THE WORLD THE WHALE

In this series you will discover, through understanding world and self in terms of the unspoiled surface of the deep and its great Leviathan, that genuine morality requires unconscious, non-responsible action, and that also conscious will – at least as conceived according to pseudo-philosophical lore – is largely an illusion, and further still, that the Sperm Whale likely has two separate spheres of visual consciousness, in contrast to the result of the two mutually reinforcing visual portals of the human mind. As if this was not quite enough, there is much more to be gleaned from Melville’s narrative on The Whale, which happens to be the greatest novel produced within our envied American boarders.

I provide only brief selections, in the order they appear in the extant text, marked by interpretive headings and indexed by the number of the page from which they are taken, and in a way that will not spoil the plot for those yet to embark on this historical journey.

_____________

Opening line (a note on precision):

Call me Ishmael.  Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little to no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world (3).

On the Illusion of Conscious Will (already quoted here):

Now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment (7).

Some demotic, old-fashioned literary craft:

 . . . while in the deep shadows of his eyes floated some reminiscences that did not seem to give him much joy (17).

Breaking the spell, 1 (preliminary fearful fixation on the savage):

 . . . I thought it was high time, now or never, before the light was put out, to break the spell in which I has so long been bound (25).

Breaking the conscious spell, 2:

What’s all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself – the man’s a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him.  Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian (26).

Breaking the unconscious spell, 3:

For what seemed ages piled on ages, I lay there, frozen with the most awful fears, not daring to drag away my hand; yet ever thinking that if I could but stir it one single inch, the horrible spell would be broken (29).

Analyzing the half-civilized cannibal:

But Queequeg, do you see, was a creature in the transition state – neither caterpillar nor butterfly (31).

Faith:

But faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope (42).

Soul & Body:

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.  Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.  In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot (42).

Obeying God (from the sermon) [making a good man bad -MPM]:

But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do – remember that – and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade.  And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists (48).

Situation of moral and legal censure (from the sermon):

Now Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless (49).

The strong humility of Dear Leaders (from the sermon):

But again he leaned over towards the people, and bowing his head lowly, with an aspect of the deepest yet manliest humility . . . “I am a greater sinner than ye. And how gladly would I come down from this mast-head and sit on the hatches there where you sit, and listen as you listen, while some one of you reads me that other and more awful lesson which Jonah teaches to me, as a pilot of the living God. How being an anointed pilot-prophet, or speaker of true things, and bidden by the Lord to sound those unwelcome truths in the ears of a wicked Nineveh, Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa.  But God is everywhere . . . God came upon him in the whale, and swallowed him down to living gulfs of doom. . . and all the watery world of woe bowled over him. . . . the whale . . . vomited out Jonah . . . Woe to him who seeks to pleasure rather than to appall! . . . Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor!  . . . Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway! . . . Delight is to him [4 times repeated -MPM] who acknowledge no law or lord, but the Lord his God, and is only a patriot to heaven” (53-54).

The Heathen, Consciousness, & True Philosophy:

. . . having left the Chapel before the benediction some time . . . humming to himself in his heathenish way . . . I saw the traces of a simple honest heart . . . a certain lofty bearing about the Pagan . . . But savages are strange beings . . . at first they are overawing; their calm self-collectedness of simplicity seems a Socratic Wisdom . . . content with his own companionship; always equal to himself.  Surely this was a touch of fine philosophy . . . perhaps to become true philosophers, we mortals should not be conscious of so living or so striving.  So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester” (56).

Embracing the World & The Splintered Heart:

I felt a melting in me. No more my splintered heart and maddened hand were turned against the wolfish world.  This soothing savage had redeemed it. There he sat, his very indifference speaking a nature in which there lurked no civilized hypocrisies and bland deceits. Wild he was; a very sight of sights to see; yet I began to feel myself mysteriously drawn towards him.  And those same things that would have repelled most others, they were the very magnets that thus drew me.  I’ll try a pagan friend, thought I, since Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy . . . he pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be (57).

Idol Worship and a religious reductio:

I was a good Christian; born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church.  How then could I unite with this wild idolater in worshipping his piece of wood? But what is worship? thought I.  Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous God of heaven and earth – pagans and all included – can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible! But what is worship? – to do the will of God – that is worship.  And what is the will of God? – to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me – that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man.  And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? . . . ergo, I must turn idolater. . . we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.

Ishmael dusts his feet; a foretaste of Captain Nemo:

. . . how I spurned that turnpike earth! – that common highway all over dented with the marks of slavish heels and hoofs; and turned me to admire the magnanimity of the sea which will permit no records (66).

Genuine Morality requires non-Responsible, unconscious action:

The poor fellow . . . was swept overboard; all hands were in a panic . . .  Queequeg stripped to the waist, darted from the side with a long living arc of a leap.  For three minutes or more he was seen swimming like a dog . . . through freezing foam. I looked at the grand and glorious fellow, but saw no one to be saved.  The greenhorn had gone down.  Shooting himself perpendicularly from the water, Queequeg now took an instant’s glance around him, and seeming to see just how matters were, dived down and disappeared. A few minutes more, and he rose again, one arm sill striking out, and with the other dragging a lifeless form. . . . From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. Was there ever such unconsciousenss?  He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies.  He only asked for water – fresh water – something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted his pipe, and leaning against the bulwarks, and mildly eyeing those around him, seemed to be saying to himself – “It’s a mutual, jointstock world, in all meridians.  We cannibals must help these Christians” (68).

The Hermits of the Sea, untouched by even the wrath of God:

And thus have these naked Nantuckerters, these sea hermits, issuing from their ant-hill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders . . . The Nantucketer, he alone resides and rests on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation.  There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah’s flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China . . . With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall, the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales (70-71).

The Pequod:

She was a thing of trophies. A cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies . . . A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that (78). 

Implicit Bias:

I saw that under the mask of these half humorous inuendoes, this old seaman, as an insulated Quakerish Nantucketer, was full of his insular prejudices, and rather distrustful of all aliens, unless they hailed from Cape Cod or the Vineyard (79).

Speaking of animals and the law, I know of no where else to first turn but Melville:

Most mariners cherish a very superstitious feeling about seals, arising not only from their peculiar tones when in distress, but also from the human look of their round heads and semi-intelligent faces, seen peeringly uprising from the water alongside.  In the sea, under certain circumstances, seals have more than once been mistaken for men (The Whale, 570).

And vice versa. A San Diego fellow just last year met his watery grave by fooling a poor Great White (flapping as he did a ways out in a black wet suit).  When one thinks he is biting into a nice macaroni noodle, behold! a plastic coated worm!

But as with seals, so with pigs.  The posh Christopher Hitchens attempts an almost identical theory for the timeless trepidation over the pig:

The simultaneous attraction and repulsion derived from an anthropological root: the look of the pig, and the taste of the pig, and the dying yells of the pig, and the evident intelligence of the pig, were too uncomfortably reminiscent of the human (god is not Great, 40).

But here now is the thesis: Is not there a dispositional reason for our denigration of the pig? Is not there just something swinish, something messy, muddy, and chaotic, in their very nature? They cannot help but do otherwise, right?  As with humans, so with pigs; their freedom of character lies mainly in their inherited situation:

Orwell actually did dislike pigs, as a consequence of his failure as a small farmer, and this revulsion is shared by many adults who have had to work with these difficult animals in the agricultural conditions.   Crammed together in sties, pigs tend to act swinishly, as it were, and to have noisy and nasty fights.  It was not unknown for them to eat their own young and even their own excrement, while their tendency to random and loose gallantry is often painful to the more fastidious eye.  But it has often been noticed that pigs left to their own devices, and granted sufficient space, will keep themselves very clean, arrange little bowers, bring up families, and engage in social interaction with other pigs.  The creatures also display many signs of intelligence, and it has been calculated that the crucial ratio – between brain weight and body weight – is almost as high with them as it is in dolphins.  There is great adaptability between the pig and its environment, as witness wild boars and “feral pigs” as opposed to the placid porkers and frisky piglets of our more immediate experience.

Hitchens, for some narrative reason only known to my unconscious intuition, provides this information on pigs before getting on to the business of god without any trace of explicit theorizing on Situationism. Yet it is this peculiar note on pigs that betrays Hitchens’ adoption of the general thesis. And as with pigs, so with cattle. Clarence Darrow made exactly this argument regarding cattle, as provided by the recent entry  of the Situationist:

Some of you people have lived in the country. It’s prettier than it is here. And if you have ever lived on a farm you understand that if you put a lot of cattle in a field, when the pasture is short they will jump over the fence; but put them in a good field where there is plenty of pasture, and they will be law-abiding cattle to the end of time.

Not content with metaphor and analogy, Darrow went on to draw a scientific correspondence between human mammals, cattle, and in fact the rest of the animal kingdom. Darrow addressed the prisoners in the Chicago jail:

The human animal is just like the rest of the animals, only a little more so. The same thing that governs in the one governs in the other. . . . nine-tenths of you are in jail because you did not have a good lawyer and of course you did not have a good lawyer because you did not have enough money to pay a good lawyer. There is no very great danger of a rich man going to jail. . . .  I will guarantee to take from this jail, or any jail in the world, five hundred men who have been the worst criminals and law breakers who ever got into jail, and I will go down to our lowest streets and take five hundred of the most hardened prostitutes, and go out somewhere where there is plenty of land, and will give them a chance to make a living, and they will be as good people as the average in the community. There is a remedy for the sort of condition we see here. The world never finds it out, or when it does find it out it does not enforce it. You may pass a law punishing every person with death for burglary, and it will make no difference. Men will commit it just the same. In England there was a time when one hundred different offenses were punishable with death, and it made no difference. The English people strangely found out that so fast as they repealed the severe penalties and so fast as they did away with punishing men by death, crime decreased instead of increased; that the smaller the penalty the fewer the crimes. Hanging men in our county jails does not prevent murder. It makes murderers. And this has been the history of the world. It’s easy to see how to do away with what we call crime. It is not so easy to do it. I will tell you how to do it. It can be done by giving the people a chance to live — by destroying special privileges. So long as big criminals can get the coal fields, so long as the big criminals have control of the city council and get the public streets for street cars and gas rights, this is bound to send thousands of poor people to jail. So long as men are allowed to monopolize all the earth, and compel others to live on such terms as these men see fit to make, then you are bound to get into jail. The only way in the world to abolish crime and criminals is to abolish the big ones and the little ones together. Make fair conditions of life. Give men a chance to live. Abolish the right of private ownership of land, abolish monopoly, make the world partners in production, partners in the good things of life. Nobody would steal if he could get something of his own some easier way. Nobody will commit burglary when he has a house full. No girl will go out on the streets when she has a comfortable place at home. The man who owns a sweatshop or a department store may not be to blame himself for the condition of his girls, but when he pays them five dollars, three dollars, and two dollars a week, I wonder where he thinks they will get the rest of their money to live. The only way to cure these conditions is by equality. There should be no jails. They do not accomplish what they pretend to accomplish. If you would wipe them out, there would be no more criminals than now. They terrorize nobody. They are a blot upon civilization, and a jail is an evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill them with the victims of their greed.

You can read the entire address at the Situationist here.

Lest the reader think they have the full truth of what transpired during this address, consider H.L. recounting of Darrow’s speech at the Scopes Monkey Trial:

You have but a dim notion of it who have only read.  It was not designed for reading, but for hearing.  The clanging of it was as important as the logic.  It rose like a wind and ended like a flourish of bugles.  The very judge on the bench, toward the end of it, began to look uneasy (The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 14, 1925). 

But comparing man – the crowning jewel of creation, created from the dust of the earth to take dominion over everything living and non-living thing; comparing this lord of creation to the mere beast of the field; this will no doubt be ludicrous and shameful to many contemporary Americans, and with certainty, to an even larger percentage of our beloved yokels.  And so it remains true that, at times, the looking at nature objectively, and the  intellectual progress sure to follow in its wake, will not be permitted in our great country. The same was true for Darrow’s own close environment. Yet, this was no cause for locking truth away in the libraries of the elite. Darrow spoke of man qua animal boldly.  In fact, Darrow had to deal with this very issue formally while confronting William Jennings Bryan, a circumstance that very well could have contributed to Bryan’s close trailing death. Menken, an eye-witness, recounted the scene:

Once he had one leg in the White House and the nation trembled under his roars.  Now he is a tinpot pope in the Coca-Cola belt and a brother to the forlorn pastors who belabor half-wits in galvanized iron tabernacles behind the railroad yards.  His own speech was a grotesque performance and downright touching in its imbecility.  Its climax came when he launched into a furious denunciation of the doctrine that man is a mammal.  It seemed a sheer impossibility that an illiterate man should stand up in public and discharge any such nonsense.  Yet the poor old fellow did it. Darrow stared incredulous.  Malone sat with his mouth wide open.  Hays indulged himself in one of his sardonic chuckles.  Stewart and Bryan fils looked extremely uneasy, but the old mountebank ranted on.  To call a man a mammal, it appeared, was to flout the revelation of God.  The certain effect of the doctrine would be to destroy morality and promote infidelity.  The defense let it pass. The lily needed no gilding. (July 17).

And so as it is, American law, reverently obeying demotic Custom, has been wed to American Religion.  If man be an eternal soul with disposition to either do good or to do evil, bound for either eternal bliss and reward or everlasting torture and condemnation, either right now fully of the world or a God-filled saint of the universal ecclesia, then it follows plainly that man cannot be a social animal.  And if not a social animal, bound by the same laws as pigs and cattle, then society can continue resting content with a convenient and comfortable two-tiered universe: Us and the Other; the Good and the Bad. 

As a social animal, however, Darrow’s opinion of ‘justice’ might well be described by an alternative dualism; as Melville had it, man is as the great Sperm Whale, once yanked from its natural social environment and enslaved: to be, in the eyes of the law, either a Fast-Fish or a Loose-Fish (434-35):

Is it not a saying in every one’s mouth, Possession is half of the law: that is, regardless of how the thing came into possession?  But often possession is the whole of the law.  What are the sinews and souls of Russian serfs and Republican slaves but Fast-Fish, whereof possession is the whole of the law? What to the rapacious landlord is the widow’s last mite but a Fast-Fish? . . . What is the ruinous discount which Mordecai, the broker, gets from poor Woebegone, the bankrupt, on a loan to keep Woebegone’s family from starvation; what is that ruinous discount but a Fast-Fish? What is the Archbishop of Savesoul’s income of 100,000 seized from the scant bread and cheese of hundreds of thousands of broken-backed laborers . . . but a Fast-Fish? . . .  What was American in 1492 but a Loose-Fish?  What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish?  What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish?  What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish?  What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and Fast-Fish, too?