Welcome To Your Portable Prison
Santayana was wrong.
History does not repeat itself because we have failed to learn from the past.
History repeats itself because evolution and its phenotypic servants–culture and reason–have been structured to preserve the pugnacious, conservative behaviors that guaranteed human survival.
These inheritances are the invisible prison into which human is born; a prison that prevents an unmediated encounter with experience and the world. A prison that prevents us from accepting, and reconciling with, our mortality. For millennia they have maximized our fitness in the game of life. They cannot be surpassed because they are what we are.
For milennia they have pulled hard at the reins of a reality-testing self. They continue to steer the human reason into childish mis-identifications and shoaling behaviors that prevent emancipating breakthroughs. As Schopenhauer understood, in the contest between Reason and the Will there is no contest.
As one ages one may elaborate a few variations on life’s floor plan–adding a wing here, a visiting room there, or other pleasing domestic touches. In this way one is able to personalize and mask the starker aspects of his or her entrapment–so much so that looking back on one’s handiwork from the vantage point of middle age, a person might even come to think of his personal prison as an expression of his or her own will.
Thoreau saw all of this from his Concord cell; saw that many could immerse themselves in the sweet labors and sometimes onerous tasks of their busy days, imagining all the while that they were free. But what this radical knew was that there was not much difference between being inside a smallish prison cell–as he happened to be– or being outside on the street, if one was nevertheless chained to do what one had to do. He understood that while some folk inhabit capacious prisons–equipped with all the luxuries–no human being is ever really free. Erda was right about this after all.
In order that any society may function well, its members must acquire the kind of character which makes them want to act in the way they have to act as members of the society…They have to desire what objectively is necessary for them to do. (Spiro, 1987)
One is only free to choose what one must choose; and the menu of options from which one must choose is provided by culture and our narrow perception of the world. One simply does not, as in Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, come to the banquet of life in order to rudely demand a new and different menu.
Thoreau’s perspective was alien to the temper of his world. As one might imagine Thoreau to defend himself, he would perhaps smile and argue that the resistance of the half-alive to those who are more fully awake is only natural. Wisdom is often mistaken for folly when first it is heard.
He might also add, along with Ernest Becker, that since the blessings of material culture are not automatically distributed to those with a penchant for anguished self-reflection, multitudes of “inauthentic men…[are enabled to] avoid developing their own uniqueness [and licensed to] follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children” (1973).
After all, they have risen to the top and are able to enjoy a variety of creature comforts without angst. Isn’t this what people are for? “Don’t talk to me about prisons!” they might exclaim.
Thoreau believed that even a penthouse view of the city must be seen through bars of some sort, and that even the most prosperous among us, such as his Concord farmer, are chained to tomorrow: compelled to do what each has to do, and compelled by culture, circumstance or accident of birth to believe what each has to believe.
Because he was at bottom both Romantic and brilliantly naive, Thoreau did believe in the freedom to choose; but he also knew that one’s allegiance to the apparatuses of culture often put this freedom beyond an individual’s reach. His marine who encounters steep marching and wonders about the “foolish business” on which he is embarked illustrates how the automatic and other-directed nature of one’s existence can come to consciousness in a painful flash of insight. But the insight is mercifully fleeting, and is effectively blotted out by the impetus of duty.
The column of soldiers (like Escher’s Monks) moves on. And the degree to which it is difficult to stop, slip the collar, and take stock of one’s predicament is exactly the degree to which a person must consciously deny the transformational value of such reflection. The simple imperatives of survival– to keep moving, to keep an eye on the road ahead, to keep a positive, purposeful attitude about things– these erstwhile indicators of mental healthiness keep one from getting bogged down in time-wasting, progress delaying self-reflection. But the irony that he and Socrates were both aware of was that when such denial is practiced daily in an effort to keep one moving ahead, it only complicates the intricacies of that person’s entrapment.
Just how effective this denial is becomes clear when one encounters unfortunate others who inhabit the most constraining torture cells. This is the automatic or mass individual described by a Becker, Kierkegaard, Rank, Sinai or Ortega y Gasset; this is the person for whom alternative possibilities are beyond the pale. Faces pressed against disfiguring bars, bodies scrunched within the shrinking space allocated to individuation and choice, such personalities are bound-up by self-protecting mechanical responses and compulsive rules. Like the unfortunate Man in the Iron Mask, they are sentenced–and sentence themselves– to view the world through the tiny slits of an enclosing, defensive “character armor” (Becker, 1973).
But not even these individuals are conscious of their discomfort. Culture and repression enable even these to enjoy the illusion that they are free. Such shut-upness is not seen as an affliction; rather it is seen as a necessary defense against a variety of perceived threats. Thus may madness become cool calculation, and personal collapse may be misconstrued as strength.
The word perceived is crucial here. Ever since the pioneering work of an Epictetus, a Berkeley, and the later semioticians, it has increasingly forged a link between what reality purports to be out there, and what the mind itself projects from within the prison of the skull. “An intrepidly psychoanalytic [approach to knowledge] suggests that the world we perceive and inhabit is what we mostly project. It is much more difficult than we had originally thought to know prima facie where ‘history’ begins and ‘myth’ ends… It is the essence of culture’s tyrannical consensus to insist on the confusion between world and worldview, from which any deviation is frightening apostasy” (Stein, 1987).
In other words, our mental map of the world may not accurately describe its territory–necessarily and deliberately.
Without our being aware.
Truly, the world can be an alien and hostile place. Yet, armed with a variety of masking explanations– a political ideology, a religious affiliation, a glib recall of the exoteric intricacies of a variety of orthodox half-truths–most of humanity’s conscious fears and doubts may be successfully masked. Bewildering complexities may be boiled down into manageable slogans–an Axis of Evil if you will. A haunting intimation of one’s personal insignificance in the face of the immensity of intergalactic space may be mitigated by fabricating outsized attachment figures who pay attention and care–even though they live far beyond the unreachable stars.
Such political and personal mythologies enable one to “screen and edit feedback from within and without the organism in order to confirm premises that, for reasons of psychic homeostasis ‘must’ be true. Such faith may easily remain fixed “in the face of contradicting evidence” (Stein, 1987).
But while unbounded neurotics grapple pathetically with the problem of existence and elicit our sympathy, they differ from normal folk not in kind, but only in degree. Their anxiety and guilt balloon into genie-like proportions, and they elaborate heroic, sometimes absurdly unrealistic defenses against these threats.
Our fears are a bit more manageable because they are more successfully repressed from consciousness–a trick of self-deception that arose simultaneously with the invention of language, and which has proven its survival value in a multitude of ways (Badcock, 1986).
Contrary to what one might expect, lying has not been maladaptive at all–and the more one is enabled to screen reality out–including the knowledge of the degree to which one deceives both others and one’s own self, the more successful one is likely to be. The larger neuroses–those shared by the group–will therefore be seen to be reasonable, not sick at all.
But whether comfortable or cramped, most individuals grow used to their confining–albeit portable–cells, pushing and maneuvering them through the rush-hour vicissitudes of life. And so, in time, one even grows to love them. I love mine as dearly as you love yours. But as Frost observed about fences, they both keep-in and keep-out. Thus they both protect and enclose.
For a laboratory pigeon in a Skinner-box, the prison is quite solid, quite material. And though it has the freedom to peck at lights or levers of different colors, it does not have the freedom to crash through its enclosing walls should it wish to enter a larger world. Neither does it have the freedom to choose to be a subject of a different experiment–that choice is up to the designer gods who putter around in the university laboratory.
And it is precisely because a clear view of the extent of one’s confinement is withheld from most of us that so many individuals are licensed to continue with their unexamined lives. Prisons of brick and mortar are both dreadful and conspicuous. But the psychic prison–a Panopticon of cultural and biological inheritances that insist upon followership and obedience–is everywhere in operation.
All this, and there is much that we have left out for now, amounts to one thing: un-freedom seems to be a reliable fact about human life. The miracle is that humankind ever imagined itself free in the first place.
A mysterious, impenetrable Fate, it turns out, has many and varied disguises. And an increasingly clear view of the situation informs us that humanity is indeed lost, like Theseus, in an enormous labyrinth. But at the same time it does not know it is lost, which means that most individuals would never bother to look for the thread that might guide them back to a starting point.
Consider the irony. Promethean humanity has extended its reach into almost every domain: the mysteries of the earth and its seas, the distant reaches of the deep space– these are now commonplaces. The old agents responsible for human difficulty–the gods and their devils–have died a slow, hard death under the relentless assault of a reality-testing science.
But despite these developments, the great demons, serpents, Minotaurs and monsters–the foolish and ancient superstitious terrors–continue to endure, alive and well in the modern world. They come to life day after day in the mainstream media headlines–the Prisoner’s Gazette.
Doubtless, the continued healthiness of evil has little to do with what is out there. Millennia of vigilance, prayer, wars to end wars, or improved weapons have not diminished the problems that earth’s people believe they face. If she would seek an answer to these problems, the student must turn away from the external world and turn inward: inward to the psychic universe, the most heroic charting of which was begun, but not completed, by Sigmund Freud. There is no point in discovering new planets or new galaxies if the colonists will lug into these bright new worlds the same old disease.
Thus, the great question for post modern explorers of the future shall be: Can one come to understand who and what we humans are? And then: can we make a mid-course correction by unraveling the riddle of the Sphinx?
This is the quest of an Oedipus, naturally. But what new Teiresias will reveal to us the riddle of the gods? Does the answer appear as marks on a Delphic parchment unrolled by Creon and read from the porch of a Palace at Thebes?
Or does the answer insist on an even more impenetrable secrecy, lying inscribed within the cell perhaps, locked somewhere in the tight, furtively coded messages of the genes?
It may be that modern humanity is as pinned to an internal moira (destiny) of nucleic acids and creaturely ratiocination, much as Prometheus was chained to his mountain crag. If so, then the much vaunted individual self could be seen to serve merely as a kind of Ark of the Covenant. Carried atop the appetitive shoulders of a muscular, bodily tyrant, each captive, albeit sentient mind is borne forward on a personal Exodus out of a primordial Egypt. But the vehicle that bears us along carries within itself a divinely inscribed, Read-Only scroll of terrible commandments. These would act as a map or guide–rails or tracks– which natural selection had programmed into the self in order to get its genes safely through an existential wilderness.
Remembering the fate of Uzzah, we must ask: dare we approach the Ark and touch it? Can we gain access to its interior and lift its brazen, serpent idol to the light of reason without being struck dead?
If such divine commandments are hard wired into the apparatus of the Ark itself, they would perhaps remain unaltered by even the most dramatic personal or cultural change. Even worse: if they are anything like a computer virus, they would be designed to void detection by controlling both one’s thought about them and the human search program at the same time. If so, they would be in a position to subvert and redirect any rational attempt to describe them; thus camouflaging the controlling psychic and/or biological power structures lying hidden below the surface of most inquiry.
II
“Do men make history, or does history make men?” Tolstoy discusses this question on several occasions. He suggests that those who believe in free will may be as ignorant as natives on a beach who, spying their first sailing vessel off the coast, naturally conclude that the carved figurehead on the prow is pulling the boat forward through the waves.
We all know that the natives are mistaken. But their ignorance is no greater than that of a historian who thinks that the Napoleon who is at the head of the army is also leading it. Instead, Tolstoy suggests that great leaders of men, like the carved figurehead on the prow, merely find themselves out in front of a mass that has already been compelled by events to move. In order to avoid being crushed, Napoleon must himself advance. He is as much a creature and product of the times as those he leads.
Emile Zola, the great French naturalist, develops this same theme in the novels of his Rougon Macquardt series. His characters inherit the defects of their parents–and these lie in wait below the surface to take control and smash their lives.
This notion of an elemental, invisible force slumbering at the core of one’s being has its analogs throughout the ancient world, as we shall later see. But perhaps the most poignant, modern example of this awareness is found in our Zola’s Germinal, the story of life in the mines in nineteenth century France.
Racked by hunger, incapable of successfully resisting the mine-owners because they lack experienced leadership, the miners are at last driven to a paroxysm of revolt. Crazed by half-baked dreams of a socialist utopia, starved and near physical collapse, the miners and their long-suffering women rush out in a mad journey across the fields to destroy the apparatuses of the surrounding neighborhood mines.
“The women had appeared–nearly a thousand of them, their hair disheveled from racing across the country-side, their bare flesh showing through tattered clothes and exposing the nudity of female animals weary of giving birth to starvelings. Some of them had babies in their arms and were lifting them over their heads, waving them about like banners of mourning and vengeance. Others, younger, like full-bosomed Amazons, were brandishing sticks, while the old women, a terrifying sight, were shrieking so loudly that the cords of their emaciated throats seemed about to burst. Next came the men–two thousand madmen, a single, compact, swarming mass of mine boys, cutters, and repairers, so squeezed together that their faded trousers and their tattered woolen sweaters had merged into one uniform earth color. Their eyes were blazing, and all that could be seen were their gaping black mouths singing the Marseillaise, the stanzas of which were lost in a confused bellow accompanied by the clatter of sabots on the hard ground.”
Zola is at his best in his crowd scenes; they brim over with the sights, sounds and smells of passionate, heroic struggle. Yet it is precisely at this point; precisely when the miners appear to be taking control of their destiny, freely choosing to take matters into their own hands, that they are least likely to get what they want. To destroy the instruments of their oppression–the pulleys, cables, timbers and cages of the mines–is to destroy their means of livelihood. If they achieve their goal, they will starve.
Their inexperienced leader, Etienne Lantier, is at first bewildered by the intensity of the mob. He tries to assert some calming influence, but then is finally swept up in the madness as well. This is the same ego crushing fate that Henry Fleming experiences in Crane’s Red Badge of Courage. Each of these characters tries to keep his head; each tries to act freely and reasonably; but each is forced (against his calmer judgment) to participate in the Dionysiac madness of the moment.
The idea that freedom is a myth has come in and out of fashion over the centuries. Its stock began to rise with the advent of scientific method and the empirical spirit–Baconian observation, Newtonian mechanics, the whole notion of “man as a machine.” These are just a few of the ideas that have contributed to the oft proclaimed death of freedom.
At first, this seems something of a paradox. Scientific achievement conferred an intellectual knighthood upon its creators, it is true. The mysterious, became knowable, and the old demons withdrew before the batteries of a reality-testing science.
But there was a worm at the core of this world-mastering methodology: this was the growing suspicion that humankind’s uniqueness or spirituality were so much mythic confetti. The metaphor of the machine trampled upon ideas about the human soul–held them up to ridicule as the self-congratulatory products of a simian vanity. Alas, the mechanical principles of homeostasis were not only true for fluids, but for human minds as well–and minds were instruments designed to promote “the survival and multiplication of the genes that direct[ed their] assembly” (E.O. Wilson, 1978, pg. 2). Culture and mind as collaborative, not competitive, engines. Behavior and belief as homeostatic or reciprocating/ compensatory equations. All the complexity and wonder of organic creation reduced to the fewest mechanical rules.
New insights derived from evolutionary and sociobiological theory push the metaphor of the machine to even more advanced states of perfection. At the same time that they accomplish this feat, they also make allowance for even more sinister ghosts than those that haunted humanity in the expired ages. Their phantom traces are found in the presence of non-conscious, non-rational, psychogenetic proclivities which are increasingly acknowledged to be significant belief and behavior determiners. Thus, while the domain of the known expands, the empire of the unknown closely attends in a kind of shadowy, psycho-Fabian strategy.
Determinism as an idea is not itself new, and it can be traced back not only to the earliest philosophical traditions, but back even further to the earliest ideas of the gods. Indeed, the ubiquity of the belief in entities or forces beyond human control suggests that ancient humanity had an inkling that freedom was not to be taken too seriously as a metaphysical proposition.
What is suggested is the phenomenal possibility that modern investigations into the commandments inscribed within the genes might merely confirm the truth of ancient intuitions concerning the impossibility of freedom. The old formula of the Iliad–that the individual is a battleground for competing internal forces with different agendas–is now beginning to inform the discourses of the new sciences of neuroanatomy and sociobiology.
The pre-Socratic atomism of Leucippus and Democritus may be taken as western philosophical starting points for this new explanatory effort –as such they are the mechanistic, pre-scientific bases from which a much later bio-genetic determinism may be logically derived. According to these pre-socratics, nothing exists but atoms and the void. All the atoms in the universe are in motion, and that motion is eternal and unalterable.
The attractiveness of this perspective is that the universe is imagined to be orderly and rational. It eliminates the will of capricious, dangerous gods who might, on a sudden inspiration, either assist human beings or turn them into pawns. It eliminates “chance,” and so it seems secure.
But it also eliminates the freedom to choose. The future will have been already written, and a mortal’s task will be merely to play the role and recite the lines that have been assigned. The central dogma of sociobiology, perhaps best captured by Wilson’s (1975) remark that the individual is merely DNA’s way of making more DNA, seems fundamentally consistent with the deterministic spirit of this assertion.
The modern sociobiological argument that while there are epigenetic rules, cultural humanity may nevertheless concoct a variety of culturgens and mentefacts in order to express these (Lumsden, Wenegrat)–this too was also anticipated early on. It was Epicurus, one may recall, who introduced the possibility that the atoms which were in motion in the universe might swerve from their regular (lawful) motions. This random, accidental behavior would thus allow an element of chance and, ultimately, choice to enter one’s life–as in the sociobiological formulation which enables selective retention of experimental, but ultimately evolutionarily stable, strategies (Wenegrat).
Not quite everything, therefore, is utterly and rigidly structured; and the point to remember is that chaos enhances freedom whereas “order” diminishes it. Thanks to Epicurean unpredictability, an individual had some element of randomness, of freedom; and it is this same positive (and rehabilitated) “chaos” that makes successful mutation and adaptation possible within the evolutionary framework of life.
But while human beings had recovered some measure of freedom–and how drily intellectual that recovery ultimately was, for it was at bottom merely the freedom to work within the framework of the overarching rules–they had not yet recovered either their purpose or their sense of self worth in what was otherwise an emptied, mechanical cosmos. The gods may have been slain, but so also was the soul; and without the soul the way back to fusion with the idealized mother–the symbolic staple of mystical religious expression–was cut-off (Chasseguet-Smirgel).
And what is more, the most important problem of them all still remained: whether life was governed by inflexible, non-human physical law or by some saving Epicurean randomness, one could not discover a believable, purposive (teleological) explanation for life, or for the obscenity of death. And so it is today: new science tells us that chance, time and death are the principal instrumentalities of evolution. But this knowledge is cold comfort for wishing, desiring animals such as ourselves.
Always, then, a double imperative governed early ruminations about life and about the self. Knowledge in and of itself has never been completely satisfying. Almost always, it seemed, humanity needed a mythic counter-knowledge that would also address or justify the yearning component of its nature–a knowledge that would roll back the separation from the idealized mother and the idealized breast; a knowledge that would slay the sternest, judgmental fathers and redeem the cold universe by granting human beings the meaning and purpose–and the son-ship–that they needed to courageously get on with their perilous journey toward death.
This description of the human predicament seems apropos to Ferlinghetti’s famous poem, The Dog. Wandering lost through a galaxy of streets, a confused mixture of existential freedom, ignorance and unsatisfied yearning, the dog pauses at last:
With his head cocked sideways at streetcorners
as if he is just about to have his picture taken
for Victor records: Listening for his Master’s Voice,
looking like a living questionmark
into the great gramophone of puzzling existence
with its wondrous hollow horn
which always seems just about to spout forth
some Victorious Answer to everything.
The dog needs something after all; needs something beyond the interesting spectacle of “chickens in Chinatown windows,” “moons on trees,” or “cows hung up whole in front of the San Francisco meat market.” Anthropomorphosed as he is in the poem, the dog becomes a symbol for the thinking explorer: for the Prodigal adult who has strayed too far away from the comforting constellation of the parent-ruled and orderly home. As such, he needs an answer.
The burden of consciousness is to talk of and search for answers. This quest has analogs at even the most primitive level, say as in the case of Rilke’s Panther. All creatures seek gratification and an expansion of their powers: the desiring (and for some humans) reflecting mind pads back and forth in its cell, searching for a way out of its dilemma of entrapment or finitude.
Instead of stark purposelessness humanists dreamt of purpose; instead of cosmic indifference, many cultures and their rituals licensed them to dream of cosmic partiality; and instead of ruthless mechanism (Le Voreux, Civil War), some members of our species fancied that they were entitled to demand the fullness of freedom. Millennia of ritual and conjuring ghost-dances have been fecund in their diversity, and no wonder. As LaBarre has observed: “the whole intent and function of ritual appears to be a coercive group wish to hallucinate reality” (Stein, 1987).
Ironically, to secure these psychic goods for their constituents, the myth-makers were driven back again and again to ideas of the gods. Ironic, because the gods turned out to be just as unkind and just as unappeasable as the fates which the psyche strove to escape or, at least, control.
A survey of some of humanity’s attempts at theological rationalization reveals that it was only through the subtlest tricks of human intelligence that human beings could circumvent the terrible logic of necessity and have both their freedom and their gods.
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