A surge of protoplasm

In the end they traded their tired wings, for the resignation that living brings, and they traded love's bright and fragile glow for the glitter and the rouge: in a moment they were swept before the deluge.

Jackson Browne - After the Deluge  

Life is the swelling and ebbing of our primordial fluid: a sudden surge of protoplasm. 

The bony endo-shell of vertebrates tends to hide this truth: it's clearer for amoebae.

A happy protozoan swims to and fro: in electrolytic bio-soup: by an osmotic wriggling of his waters:  toward a nutrifying chemical reward: fro-ward toxins.

O joyous microbe! Would we were so unconfused.

An acquaintance of mine, a medical doctor and psychiatrist to trade ( and therefore, one would think, somewhat knowledgable of matters human ), wants collagen implants in her tubercles. Her lips it seems are overly wee to her taste.

Now, one mustn't, as a well-known virgin once said, make windows into men's souls - nor indeed should we put padlocks on a soul's cravings for body modification: tattoos, piercings, scarification, gauging, and so on, are near universal modes of human cultural expression, and should be just as acceptable as clothes or makeup - but in this case I disagree with the basic premise.

The conversation went like this:

She: I'm going to get collagen lip enhancements.

I: But lips in their natural form are wonderful. Working on the same basic principles as the penis, they become engorged with  blood to signify positive, outgoing emotional states, and shrivel to display introversion, and the emotions of withdrawal.

She: No, it's not true. I don't believe you!

I:  It is so! Cheer yourself up by getting some good sex or even some regular exercise that you enjoy, and your lips will plump themselves up in no time.

She:  Nah! I'm gonna beat the system. Big lips will help me pull a hunk.

…

Now, what annoys me about this interaction is not so much that a professional head-med had never been introduced to such a basic tenet of anatomical hydraulics as labial motility, and such a clear sign of emotional condition, but that it's another example of how our culture ignores obvious aspects of our animal physicality.  I'm sorry that I even have to state this, in fact, to shout it:  WE SWELL WITH FORWARD, OUTWARD FEELINGS - WE SHRINK WITH BACKWARD INWARD ONES.

Consider a man in fear. He 'shrinks back'. The 'blood drains from his face', 'the hairs on the back of his neck stand up' (as the strong back muscles literally pull him away from the frightening stimulus). Even the most extreme symptoms of fear - 'he shits himself' - can be seen as a feature of the overall inward and backward movement.

The usual explanations given for this phenomenon are tenuous: either that defecating makes an animal lighter, the better to run away; or that the mess will make a predator believe it is diseased and not worth eating. The first is silly because losing the first seconds of a panicked escape in this way would be bad strategy, the second is unlikely because predators can invariably digest the gut contents of their prey. No, at least a significant factor in this behaviour is the mechanical pressure of a flow of blood away from the periphery and into the viscera. [...and, yes, Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory gives a more elaborate account of the neural signalling involved...]

Consider too the outward-going emotions of joy or anger: blood rushes to the face and hands: after a separation lovers meet and are pneumatically flung into an embrace: in rage, we surge forward faster than we possibly could (in a planned and considered action).

And in love, the lips swell. The same phenomenon occurs in bioenergetic therapy, with many patients reporting that their lips have grown after they begin to release the blocks formed by abuse, neglect and trauma.


But why do they swell: the mechanism is blood flow, but what is the purpose? The wonderful answer is that lips are for kissing. They're also for testing the temperature of food etcetera … but most of all, they're for kissing.

We are one of few species to give off such a symbol of affection, and interesting theories have been proposed to explain it. Desmond Morris saw much of human sexual characteristics as being the outcome of our upright stance. Other primates get swollen rumps when in oestrus, but we perform our mating dance face-to-face: lips have become visible analogues of genitals, and the large mammaries of women are proxies for the ancestral marker of fecundity - the buttocks.

So lips are the body's means of expressing emotion:  to stop them doing so by filling them with plastic  is an utter denial of the true self, in a sense it is the ultimate act of narcissism - irrevocably placing  image before integrity.

If Porges is right, and he is, and engagement of the myelinated mammalian vagus which controls facial expression is key to reducing stress and releasing the hormones of relaxation and trust - then by surgically modifying our faces we are cutting ourselves off from society, and from fulfillment... and possibly even increasing our risk of mental and bodily illness: definitely keeping our heartrates higher than they should be.


I'm nearly   done on lips, except to mention the remarkable fact that studies show that the bigger a woman's lips - particularly the middle tubercle of the top lip - the more likely she is to experience vaginal orgasms.

We are our bodies, and only by making peace with them do we make peace with ourselves and the rest of the world 

Repetition Compulsion: to be, or not to be.

Only the very safe can talk about wrong and right.

-Floyd Red Crow Westerman

My good friend's Gaelic granny had a trite response to any sudden vicissitude: "You live in hope, you die in despair". Such seems to be my lot as a philosophical blogger. With the rash optimism of the dilettante, I address basic points of a topic, state what my conclusions will be, lay out my premises and push through the main stages of an argument - before dropping the post like a ton of Sisyphean brick as soon as I'm faced with the final forceful heave that will bring it to a close. Again. And again. I've got eight half-written posts to this blog, still not published at all. Part III of my essay on Sanitivity is published in an unfinished condition as I write this, and numerous earlier pieces that could be doing with a touch of spit and polish are left in full view of these here public interwebs.

Why don't I just complete one project before moving onto the next?  That is the million dollar question of my life, and the lives of so many others. Of course, there's no point to being too self-critical: I'm using the blog to give some order and coherence to my rather unorthodox opinions, and as they say... Rome wasn't built in a day.

I could recite a litany of theories as to why I display this trait of incompletion: some laced with hubris, some with self-contempt. In fact, I shall recite it: just as an example of the many ways we can rationalise any phenomenon of human behaviour. Here we go...

• Perhaps I have a deep-seated unconscious fear of death. The concept of completion is somehow mixed with that of being done, perfected, dead... so I leave everything half accomplished.
• Perhaps, with the humility of a Navajo rugsmith, I acknowledge that only the Great Spirit can create perfection... so I leave gaps in the tapestry of my writing.
• Perhaps I have a dose of ADD
• Perhaps I don't want to do all the work of understanding for you: I leave you a little space to think in.
• Perhaps I do not attach sufficient seriousness to the prospect of truths being communicated in words. 
• Perhaps I am too lighthearted: as Samuel Johnson says, "I too have tried to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness kept creeping in."
• Perhaps I've introjected the maxim, "It's not the winning, it's the taking part"
• Perhaps at some point in my life it was an a successfully adaptive behaviour to leave things incomplete, perhaps to avoid hurtful criticism of my best efforts. Perhaps it's only maladaptive now.
• Perhaps I have a repetition compulsion, as Freud might diagnose. 

Let's consider that last option...

 Sigmund Freud's view of the repetition compulsion - of how people continue to commit acts (or get into situations) that are clearly not in their interest - led him to move psychoanalytic theory away from emphasis on the life affirming, pleasure seeking libido or eros, and towards the 'death urge' that he called thanatos - the energy behind the ego.  Examples of repetition compulsion would be the woman who continually chooses abusive partners, or the man who continually gets into unnecessary debt, or the baby who continually flings his toy from the pram, and shrieks with despair each time the toy is gone. The most dramatic repetitions are the 'acting-out' behaviours of survivors of extreme trauma: the war veteran who runs for cover when a car backfires; the survivor of childhood sex abuse who seeks out images of such abuse.

Of course, Freud's conception of how repetition compulsions worked - and his concept of a death instinct - were not universally accepted: thank goodness. Reich, who stressed the biological basis of life's drives and energies, saw these repetitions as an attempt by the organism to return to homoeostasis, by discharging the energies held in the initial traumatic event - because the presence of these energies was unpleasurable.

Later, scientists like Peter A. Levine have given a detailed biological account of trauma, acting out (repetition), and eventual healing - which accords with Reich's insight. Levine notes that  animals, when faced with a threat, will fight or run away if possible. When fighting or escape are made impossible, the animal freezes, 'playing possum', and awaits a chance to escape while still maintaining the highly activated energy state in its respiratory and nervous systems: primed to fight or flee when possible. He gives the example of a gazelle chased by a cheetah. If the cheetah catches it, the gazelle 'plays dead' rather than struggling, but it's heartbeat and breathing still race. Should the cheetah lose its grip for an instant, the gazelle will dart off at full speed.

dog

For non-human animals, there are instinctual behaviours which bring the body and brain back to rest after the high activation of struggle. A dog shakes it's body vigorously from head to tail after being startled... but only once it knows that it is safe once again.   For humans in modern society the place of safety cannot always be found: our physical shaking response to trauma  is culturally disapproved, we have never-ceasing social and economic obligations that can thwart our healing - in a sense, we all live in a cage. Wild animals are never traumatised or 'neurotic' - they can return to the healthy state of being biologically at rest, poised and alert. Domesticated mammals, people mostly, can suffer ongoing trauma states very easily.



The video below includes footage of a polar bear discharging the energy of 'freezing' (although the freeze is induced by anaesthetic rather than by an overwhelming attack).

When the release of the energy of shock is blocked, the human organism still tries to do so: with the stereotyped behaviours of 'shell-shock', and with more complex dysfunctional patterns of self-destruction and self-harm.  It will do so until safe places and safe people are found, and it is safe to return to the condition of pleasurable embodiment which is our birthright.

So, we nowadays have a clear understanding of repetition compulsions and acting out behaviour: which is so watertight that it can't be denied, except by the rankest cartesian or psychic platonist, who simply refuses to stop believing that she's an immaterial spirit, only accidentally associated with a physical body.

An effect of unreleased trauma energy is dissociation - the sense of being separate from the body and from feeling. Dissociation is nature's anaesthetic... it stops the frozen gazelle from suffering the full pain of being eaten alive.  Because of dissociation, it is often the most traumatised people, those most in need of feeling their feelings and discharging negative emotions, who cannot do so. Their illusion of safety requires them to believe that they are not their bodies, that anatomy is not destiny, and that the emotions are an unfortunate and embarrassing feature of life - that they would be better off without them. Trauma victims experience themselves as ghosts: ghosts in a malfunctioning, threatening machine.They lose their willpower and sense of self, and they also lose any potent empathy or compassion... in exchange for an illusion of being untouchable.

 Sadly, most everyone in the orbit of globalised consumer capitalism is traumatised, to some degree. Worse still - in humans, trauma can be passed down through generations, and even spread within social groups: as in 'mass hysteria', or in families who suffer, generation after generation, for the sad experiences of an ancestor. A traumatised parent can't attune emotionally with her baby, the child grows up with an underlying sense of anxiety and insecurity... primed for traumas of her own.

Are we ready to accept the full importance of trauma, and the repetition of unhealthy behaviours that it creates, as a factor in our societies and politics? Can we accept that many of our opinions, and many of the causes that we espouse most forcefully, suit us only because they help us re-enact our primal wounds? How credible is it that:

• the harsh, dehumanising stance of the Israeli State towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, and the treatment of Israel's Arab citizens as second class, is in large part an acting out of the traumas of the Nazi holocaust by the descendents of its victims, with the victim role being taken by an unwilling proxy? 
•  That the  destructive politics of Nazism was based on the compulsive acting out of childhood traumas suffered by the sons of disciplinarian fathers?
• That the disciplinarian fathers and grandfathers of Fascism were themselves brutalised by the trenches of the first mechanised war, and earlier by the upheavals and uncertainties of industrialisation?
• That the examples above are not unusual, and that every country suffers for the violent compulsions of its most injured members to some degree?
• That no matter how noble our aspirations may be, any of us is capable of great harm, if we act unknowingly based on traumatic pain?

If we can accept this sad story of human history, as a dialectic of psychic forces as well as of economic ones, we need not be dismayed. Technology has played a part in generating the horrors of the past centuries, but we are now beginning to find the psychic technologies - or spiritual technologies, if you like - to break the chain of cruelty and despair. Perhaps all it takes is a commitment to providing proper economic and social support to the caregivers of children... as our greatest priority, and to make personal growth, development and maturity the basis of social respect - and value the search for these attributes as much as we value wealth, celebrity or artistic skill. From what I know of the pre-capitalist world and indigenous cultures, wisdom and compassion were always highly prized in the past: they can be again.

....  so much for those lofty visions of a happy world. It may come, but for now we can only lay the groundwork, even if only in minuscule ways like blogging about it: tossing hopeful messages in a bottle into the electronic ocean of smut, scandal and fake Viagra. As for me, I'll no doubt continue to half-finish my posts (until I release some more trauma) : but at least there'll be bottles, and the bottles will at least be half full.       

  

Relationships ... à la Krishnamurti

Action has meaning only in relationship, and without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breed conflict. The understanding of relationships is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action

Jiddu Krishnamurti

The Krishnamurti quote given above is given in Scattered, Gabor Maté's excellent book about the origins and treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder, that peculiar disease of minds living under the American Empire. 

Krishnamurti said a lot of nice things in his time: a lot of profound things about healing and wholeness and autonomy and freedom from distress. He was also a nasty little piece of work.




Ho hum. We're none of us perfect.

A Passage from the Introduction to Paul Lafargue's 'The Right to Be Lazy', 1883

The revolutionary socialists must take up again the battle fought by the philosophers and pamphleteers of the bourgeoisie; they must march up to the assault of the ethics and the social theories of capitalism; they must demolish in the heads of the class which they call to action the prejudices sown in them by the ruling class; they must proclaim in the faces of the hypocrites of all ethical systems that the earth shall cease to be the vale of tears to the labourer; that in the communist society of the future, which we shall establish "peaceably if we may, forcefully if we must", the impulses of men will be given a free rein, for "all these impulses are by nature good, we have nothing to avoid but their misuse and their excess", and they will not be avoided except by their mutual counter-balancing, by the harmonious development of the human organism, for as Dr Beddoe says, 'It is only when a race reaches its maximum of physical development, that it arrives at its highest point of energy and moral vigour". Such was also the opinion of the great naturalist Charles Darwin.

Alienation of the Name-of-the-Father [pt1]

Thinking is the sickness of the Mind - Philip Kapleau

The Jesuits are reputed authors of the maxim, "Give me the child until the age of seven, and I will give you the man", and are supposed to have followed it closely in the education of their protégés. Their idea was that thorough indoctrination and habituation to Christian values,  carried out before a child is old enough to make its own moral judgements, will set the little blighter up for a life of virtue. Underlying this is the belief that human beings are born flawed, stained by Original Sin, and that only the most stringent pedagogical steps can make for ultimate Salvation. The practice of attempting to bring souls to God when their defences are weakest was widespread: another Jesuit technique was to seek conversions in the fever wards of hospitals, or after exposing the intended convert to prolonged fasting and isolation,  when he was at his most 'suggestible'... and most open to receiving the 'Good News'.

To anyone with a libertarian bent, practices that seek to tightly mould the thought patterns of an infant (or adult) and to break its will seem cruel and unnatural... amounting to a kind of spiritual pederasty. Contemporary theories of child development are much more to do with nurture and guidance, and less about the exorcism of innate wickedness. Yet the Jesuits' psychological insight - that behaviours learned at the beginning of life are hardest to  forget - can hardly be denied. I know of no-one who has studied the human mind, since the beginnings of the Jesuit Order in the 17th century, who has doubted this. With these points in view, I'd like to re-consider the writings of two of the most influential founders of modern (and post-modern) ideas: René Descartes and Jacques Lacan, who were both schooled by the Society of Jesus. While both rejected many aspects of their earliest training, its mark remained on their thought throughout their respective careers.

Descartes made Mind-Body Dualism fundamental to subsequent Western Philosophy and Science. Following the early death of his mother, he was sent to the Jesuit College Henri-le-Grand (pictured), where he excelled in his studies despite ill health. From the Jesuits, he gained the admirable pragma of accepting nothing that one had not rigorously scrutinised and found to be true by rational inquiry. Thus, he applied radical skepticism when producing his Meditations on First Philosophy, an attempt to find fundamental and indubitable truths on which to build the edifice of human knowledge. Famously, he concluded that because anything experienced by the senses might possibly be hallucinated, or implanted by some 'evil genius', the only thing that Descartes could be sure of was that he was thinking thoughts. Cogito ergo Sum... I think, therefore I exist: famously.  From the Cogito, a number of conclusions were gradually deduced [I'm omitting a great deal of reasoning here, read Descartes yourself if that bothers you ;)], the most important of which, for our present purpose is this:

 The material world, including the human body, is mechanical and governed by laws of cause and effect, but the mind/soul has free will, and must therefore be a radically different substance.      

Descartes thus creates the preposterous image of the human being as a 'Ghost in a machine', which went unchallenged in Europe for quite some time. How the immaterial ghost could make changes to the clockwork material universe was a bit of a moot point, although Descartes was happy to invoke God (and some mysterious vapours) as the agents which effected physical change when someone's mind willed his finger to twitch, say, or his eyelid to blink.

A consequence of this Cartesian Dualism was that a scientist could see himself (please note the male pronoun, it was pretty much all dudes) as a rational observer, abstracted from the physical world under observation. For the natural sciences this was a major boon, for the humanities it was a very stinky red herring. A physicist could record the result of experiments, and deduce mathematical laws of nature from them,  without being arrested for disagreeing with Aristotle or the Pope. Similarly, chemists could seek the fundamental elements without making sacrifices to Hermes Tresmegistus, or spending years purifying their souls. which was nice. But applying Cartesianism to people's individual and social lives was an enormous cock-up - I aver.

Such monstrosities as Bentham's panopticon rely on a cartesian viewpoint, indeed any practical utilitarianism relies on the cartesian view:  for a society to be governed in such a way as to create the 'greatest happiness for the greatest number' someone has to be rational and impartial enough to figure out what this happiness would consist of, and how to implement it. Such a person or group cannot be 'part of' the social system to be improved.

All imperialisms and totalitarianisms subsequent to Descartes have used similar rationalisations of their power. The hegemony is natural because the in-group are better educated, racially superior, more scientifically socialist, whatever, than society at large.  The ordinary citizen is in some respect less of a cartesian mind, and more of a mechanical object to be manipulated... due to some gap in his rationality, he is a victim of bodily or subconscious reflexes, or too muddled in his thinking to see the true facts of the larger situation. The citizen or the conquered race must be treated as a toddler in the care of benign Jesuits... to be improved by Discipline and Punishment, or simply to be administered and managed by the intelligent minority.

 Quantum theory in Physics, and many findings of modern neuroscience have undermined the ghost in the machine view of humanity... and depth theories in psychology have undermined the idea of a unitary, transparently rational mind. Yet our social structures are still set up as if the 20th century never happened. The ubiquity of CCTV is the mark of an improved panopticon, economic theories still assume everyone to act from rational self-interest (self-interest being equivalent to financial profit seeking, apparently). So it goes, blame Descartes!

One more point about mind-body dualism, before we have a peek at Lacan's jesuiticality. In the mediaeval, pre-Descartes, world... people felt at home in the world, now they feel much more isolated. Erich Fromm has a lot to say on this, he attributes the change in consciousness to the rise of proto-capitalist modes of production, and to the Protestant Ethic. I agree with Fromm here, but I can't overlook the power of Dualism to create a lonely, isolated subjectivity. Fromm is coming from a Marxist perspective, where changes in the cultural/subjective superstructure must be determined by the economic base. Be that as it may, Descartes theory alienates the thinking mind from its own physical body, as well as from the body politic, and the natural world. The ghost in the machine is a lonely ghost. In the language of contemporary psychology... the Cartesian position is a schizoid, even a psychotic one.

My fundamental contention - which I maintain throughout this blog, and elsewhere - is that the natural and happiest condition for human life is one where the distinctions between subject and object, body and mind are broken down. [this is not the same as the Hegelian concept of spirit realising itself in the world] I believe this is philosophically tenable, and I know it can be lived experience. In the next part of this post, I'll defend my stance against Descartes, and against his fellow Jesuit alumnus Jacques Lacan.        

   

       ... to be continued.