Psychopath: The Use of Rhetorical Imbalance in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket

psy·cho·pa·thy

1. a mental disorder in which an individual manifests amoral and antisocial behavior, lack of ability to love or establish meaningful personal relationships, extreme egocentricity, failure to learn from experience, etc.

One of the fundamental issues of humanity is how we justify the use of violence and hostility for furthering personal or societal goals. We seem to be imbued from birth with the sense that any use of violence for personal gain, such as robbery and mugging, is inherently evil and unacceptable. However, as the perpetrator and victim grow in scale from personal to communal, the issue becomes more and more clouded. While street fights are looked down upon, we seem all too willing to engage in full-scale spectacles of carnage known as war. At what point in the expansion, then, does killing become justified, and what methods are acceptable? What about the methods with which we convince others to engage in aggression? Stanley Kubrick tackles both of these questions in his film Full Metal Jacket. In the film, he presents the stories of various men in the United States military before and during their involvement in the Vietnam War. Over the course of the film, we observe the ways in which each of them react to the prospect of being forced to remove all traces of super-ego from their system and succumb to a world where they make a living by killing other people. The military machine achieves this goal by subjecting its recruits to a psychologically and physically rigorous training camp so radically different from normal life that it nearly destroys all shreds of humanity present in the soldiers. Kubrick accentuates this message through a palpable imbalance between ethos, pathos, and logos to emphasize the dehumanizing elements of the military lifestyle. In the film, militaristic logos is over-exaggerated in such an ironic manner that the argument against military structure and indoctrination becomes a pathetic appeal.

Full Metal Jacket is notably divided into two distinct sections, each analyzing a different aspect of the military lifestyle and how it dehumanizes all participants. The first half looks at how boot camp and military training go about removing all human emotions from the trainees through the story of a private nicknamed “Gomer Pyle” (after the character on The Andy Griffith Show who was a dim-witted, well-intentioned farm boy who eventually enlisted in the marines). Pyle begins the film as the stereotypical “fat kid” who can’t seem to do anything right, but as the drill sergeant becomes more and more frustrated with his incompetence and increases his punishments, things begin to go horribly wrong for all involved. The key catalytic moment occurs when the sergeant decides that the best way to motivate “Private Pyle” is to punish the other soldiers instead of Pyle himself. This angers the other soldiers to the point where they beat him with bars of soap wrapped in towels in the middle of the night, even convincing the innocent Private “Joker,” who has been assigned as Pyle’s mentor, to join in. This turns Pyle psychopathic: he begins talking to his rifle, and becomes completely focused on military discipline to the point of secluding himself from his fellow platoon members. On the last day of training, he loads his rifle “Charlene” full of live rounds and shoots the Sergeant in the chest, and then commits suicide.

Pyle’s (and, consequently, Kubrick’s) focus on the logic-based mindset of the armed forces is what first warns the audience of the dangers of militarism. Upon first viewing it would seem that the overwhelming use of white, sterile environments and repetitive scenes of marching and chanting in unison would hint at an emotionless logos-driven rhetoric (As the Sergeant says, “You will not laugh, you will not cry, you will learn by the numbers”). The lives of the marines are detailed in quotidian monotony; they are simply numbers to an emotionless construct, focused all too highly on the ultimate goal at the expense of its own health and well-being. This instability and heartless discipline is the source of Kubrick’s discontent, the distaste with the military machine which pervades the movie and is the ultimate end of his argument. This argument is made most drastically through the first half of the film, through the tragic tale of Private Pyle.

What makes Pyle’s story so haunting and disturbing is not necessarily the plot itself, although the plot is certainly disconcerting, but rather the stark imbalance of the three rhetorical devices: ethos, pathos, and logos. The film almost completely abandons any use of ethos (other than the portrayal of Joker as a mostly kind and moral character), and only uses logos in a decidedly ironic manner, to the point where scenes of logos become inherently pathos-based. Kubrick has, through Pyle’s (and later Joker’s) story, planted in the audience’s mind the concept that the logos of war is something to be lamented and avoided at all cost, appealing to the emotions of the audience. However, these scenes are not only used with heavy-handed irony, exaggerated to the point where it makes the viewer uncomfortable to see such monotony and mindlessness, but also to provide stark contrast against the melodramatic moments such as the night beating scene and Pyle’s final meltdown. By first lulling the audience into an emotionless, logos-driven void, and then throwing in disturbing scenes of complete pathos, the dramatic scenes become all the more vivid. Kubrick uses this amazingly effective technique to drive home his strongest arguments once he has the audience in the palm of his hands: that war is an inherently cruel and dehumanizing machine, through which all participants are fundamentally corrupted into committing unjustifiable actions.

Once the narrative progresses to the second half of the movie, located in Vietnam, the tone of the movie changes slightly but maintains Kubrick’s signature use of long stretches of content without much emotion alternating against scenes of intense melodrama. Although the progression of the second half of the movie is not as cataclysmic and therefore not as heavy-handed as the first half, it is essentially the same story. The main character of this portion is Joker, who was Pyle’s mentor and is now a military reporter who, following the Tet Offensive, has been moved to front-line combat alongside his friend Cowboy. While Pyle of the first half of the film starts completely incapable and ends up going off the deep end into complete psychopathy, Joker starts as a more human and identifiable character, which makes his subtle transformation into a killer more subconsciously disconcerting.

The role of the cold drill sergeant from the first half of the film is now replaced by two characters. The first is a gunner on the helicopter that takes Private Joker to the action, shooting indiscriminately into a field full of North Vietnamese civilians, saying that any who run will die, and any who are still are “well trained.” This door gunner is the most purely psychopathic character in the whole movie; he shows a comically (and therefore shockingly) complete absence of any sort of empathy for any other person involved in the war effort. Again, Kubrick again shows that his absence of pathos is something to be pitied by cutting to multiple shots of our lead character, Joker, in complete disgust. The second is a more prominent character nicknamed “Animal Mother.” Animal Mother is the quintessential heartless soldier, who believes that the only worthwhile aspect of war is victory, which must come at any price. Indeed, his helmet reads “I AM BECOME DEATH,” a quote from Oppenheimer when reflecting on his contribution to the atomic bomb project. Animal Mother has “become death” in that he has sacrificed his identity, his real name, and consequently his humanity to the military. He is precisely what the United States army wants out of its soldiers, as Joker says in the first half of the film: “The Marine Corps wants killers. The Marine Corps wants to build indestructible men, men without fear.” Whenever Joker is around Animal Mother, he seems both amazed and disgusted: he is amazed at Animal Mother’s ruthless efficiency and military skill, yet disgusted by his sheer lack of compassion or empathy for his enemy, a sure sign of the psychopathy in which war encourages its participants to engage. Yet again, Kubrick is presenting a character so full of military logos that we, like Joker, are to be swayed through pathos to his apparent plight, his lack of a soul.

This contrast between military logic and its dire emotional consequences are present even in the plot points of the time Joker spends in Vietnam. We are constantly exposed to scenes where all participants act in a logical and precise manner, following orders and procedure to the letter, and yet arrive at unacceptable conclusions. Logically, based upon past evidence, there was no reason to believe that there would be an enemy offensive on the Tet holiday. Joker’s unit progresses by the book into their first city, which results in the death of their commander. Once Cowboy takes command, the metaphor is made more evident when they march to the incorrect location, an unacceptable conclusion, where members of the unit are “wasted” by an enemy sniper. Only here does the unit begin to disobey command, to both positive and negative results. While going by the book would require them to retreat from the non-essential map point despite the death of a soldier, the members of the unit are too filled with pathos to let the logos and ethos of military order dissuade them from leaving their friend behind. While at first this decision is catastrophic for the team, costing them yet another member and their commander (Joker’s friend Cowboy), the situation is resolved once the unit finds the sniper and Joker mercy-kills her. As we watch Joker wrestle with the decision of whether or not to kill her, we as an audience are asked the core questions of the film in tandem: is Joker’s decision to kill this woman justified? How did he come to the point where he is able to make such a decision?

Kubrick seems to imply in the scene that the shot is justifiable, and indeed it seems the only truly moral death of the entire film. Each kind of killing is presented throughout the film: militaristic, vengeful, psychopathic, merciful, and suicidal. Military kills are those which the soldiers have been ordered to do, kills for the furthering of political goals. Vengeful kills are murders done in repayment for personal wrongs, like when Pyle kills the Sergeant. Psychopathic kills are those which are done for no true over-arching reason, random kills like those of the helicopter gunner. Merciful kills are those rare instances in which the victim would be worse off alive than dead, and often wishes for death at the hands of the perpetrator. Suicide is obviously any self-inflicted murder. Each of these motivations and styles of killing is presented and then torn down as immoral throughout the film, except for that of the merciful kill. The immorality of the militaristic murders are emphasized through the audience’s knowledge of the ultimate fruitlessness of the Vietnam war, reminding us that all these lives taken in a war which was highly lambasted by the public and generally seen as one of the largest US foreign policy blunders of its history. The vengeful homicide of the sergeant is obviously immoral to the audience. This is specifically displayed by Pyle’s immediate regrets, contributing to his suicide (another kill which seems to have no virtuous achievement), along with the astonishment shown by Joker. The psychopathic helicopter gunner is immediately shown immoral by Joker’s incredulous questioning of his shooting of the women and children. The mercy killing, however, is committed by the only (near-)consistently virtuous character and is done at the request of the victim. Even this moral homicide, however, is considered at length by the protagonist. With this scene, Kubrick is telling us through the ethos established by Joker’s virtuous nature and the pathos of the pleading woman that even the only execution which could be justified in the film is still just barely acceptable. Even perceptibly moral killings are to be approached with hesitation and extreme consideration.

Through this ending sequence especially, Kubrick is showing how even when the soldiers make the humane decision, rejecting the military machine in favor of human bonds, they suffer greatly. The system of war is so entrenchedly evil and inhumane that no heroic decision can salvage them. Although Kubrick would argue that essentially all vengeance kills are not acceptable, he has set up one that is acceptable as one could be, and on top of that the kill a mercy kill, but even still the execution is fundamentally corrupting of the previously clean soul of Joker, the only character who has built up any ethos in the film. As soon as humanity enters into the act of war, all participants both direct and indirect are harmed as a result.

As is evident, Kubrick completely rejects the essential assumption of war: that through acts of evil, greater good can be achieved. When his characters follow the precepts of war, they are killed, and when they disobey, they still suffer. As his characters are trained for war, they are stripped of all things which would make them human, all elements of a soul or a super-ego, turned psychopathic by a system which requires them to kill for the greater good. Whether they end up going ballistic or are simply tarnished by finally having to pull the trigger on an enemy, all are dehumanized by an institution which treats them more as numbers than as people, as elements of logos rather than pathos.

"The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond" by Alan Kirby

I have nothing to add to this absolutely brilliant piece on modern modes of thought and culture:
(link: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue58/58kirby.htm )

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Alan Kirby says postmodernism is dead and buried. In its place comes a new paradigm of authority and knowledge formed under the pressure of new technologies and contemporary social forces.

I have in front of me a module description downloaded from a British university English department’s website. It includes details of assignments and a week-by-week reading list for the optional module ‘Postmodern Fictions’, and if the university is to remain nameless here it’s not because the module is in any way shameful but that it handily represents modules or module parts which will be taught in virtually every English department in the land this coming academic year. It assumes that postmodernism is alive, thriving and kicking: it says it will introduce “the general topics of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postmodernity’ by examining their relationship to the contemporary writing of fiction”. This might suggest that postmodernism is contemporary, but the comparison actually shows that it is dead and buried.

Postmodern philosophy emphasises the elusiveness of meaning and knowledge. This is often expressed in postmodern art as a concern with representation and an ironic self-awareness. And the argument that postmodernism is over has already been made philosophically. There are people who have essentially asserted that for a while we believed in postmodern ideas, but not any more, and from now on we’re going to believe in critical realism. The weakness in this analysis is that it centres on the academy, on the practices and suppositions of philosophers who may or may not be shifting ground or about to shift – and many academics will simply decide that, finally, they prefer to stay with Foucault [arch postmodernist] than go over to anything else. However, a far more compelling case can be made that postmodernism is dead by looking outside the academy at current cultural production.

Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.

The reason why the primary reading on British postmodernism fictions modules is so old, in relative terms, is that it has not been rejuvenated. Just look out into the cultural market-place: buy novels published in the last five years, watch a twenty-first century film, listen to the latest music – above all just sit and watch television for a week – and you will hardly catch a glimpse of postmodernism. Similarly, one can go to literary conferences (as I did in July) and sit through a dozen papers which make no mention of Theory, of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard. The sense of superannuation, of the impotence and the irrelevance of so much Theory among academics, also bears testimony to the passing of postmodernism. The people who produce the cultural material which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to, have simply given up on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will appear, to widespread indifference – like Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park – but then modernist novels, now long forgotten, were still being written into the 1950s and 60s. The only place where the postmodern is extant is in children’s cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers. This is the level to which postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop culture aimed at the under-eights.
What’s Post Postmodernism?

I believe there is more to this shift than a simple change in cultural fashion. The terms by which authority, knowledge, selfhood, reality and time are conceived have been altered, suddenly and forever. There is now a gulf between most lecturers and their students akin to the one which appeared in the late 1960s, but not for the same kind of reason. The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception; all that happened, to rhetorically exaggerate, was that the kind of people who had once written Ulysses and To the Lighthouse wrote Pale Fire and The Bloody Chamber instead. But somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).

Let me explain. Postmodernism conceived of contemporary culture as a spectacle before which the individual sat powerless, and within which questions of the real were problematised. It therefore emphasised the television or the cinema screen. Its successor, which I will call pseudo-modernism, makes the individual’s action the necessary condition of the cultural product. Pseudo-modernism includes all television or radio programmes or parts of programmes, all ‘texts’, whose content and dynamics are invented or directed by the participating viewer or listener (although these latter terms, with their passivity and emphasis on reception, are obsolete: whatever a telephoning Big Brother voter or a telephoning 6-0-6 football fan are doing, they are not simply viewing or listening).

By definition, pseudo-modern cultural products cannot and do not exist unless the individual intervenes physically in them. Great Expectations will exist materially whether anyone reads it or not. Once Dickens had finished writing it and the publisher released it into the world, its ‘material textuality’ – its selection of words – was made and finished, even though its meanings, how people interpret it, would remain largely up for grabs. Its material production and its constitution were decided by its suppliers, that is, its author, publisher, serialiser etc alone – only the meaning was the domain of the reader. Big Brother on the other hand, to take a typical pseudo-modern cultural text, would not exist materially if nobody phoned up to vote its contestants off. Voting is thus part of the material textuality of the programme – the telephoning viewers write the programme themselves. If it were not possible for viewers to write sections of Big Brother, it would then uncannily resemble an Andy Warhol film: neurotic, youthful exhibitionists inertly bitching and talking aimlessly in rooms for hour after hour. This is to say, what makes Big Brother what it is, is the viewer’s act of phoning in.

Pseudo-modernism also encompasses contemporary news programmes, whose content increasingly consists of emails or text messages sent in commenting on the news items. The terminology of ‘interactivity’ is equally inappropriate here, since there is no exchange: instead, the viewer or listener enters – writes a segment of the programme – then departs, returning to a passive role. Pseudo-modernism also includes computer games, which similarly place the individual in a context where they invent the cultural content, within pre-delineated limits. The content of each individual act of playing the game varies according to the particular player.

The pseudo-modern cultural phenomenon par excellence is the internet. Its central act is that of the individual clicking on his/her mouse to move through pages in a way which cannot be duplicated, inventing a pathway through cultural products which has never existed before and never will again. This is a far more intense engagement with the cultural process than anything literature can offer, and gives the undeniable sense (or illusion) of the individual controlling, managing, running, making up his/her involvement with the cultural product. Internet pages are not ‘authored’ in the sense that anyone knows who wrote them, or cares. The majority either require the individual to make them work, like Streetmap or Route Planner, or permit him/her to add to them, like Wikipedia, or through feedback on, for instance, media websites. In all cases, it is intrinsic to the internet that you can easily make up pages yourself (eg blogs).

If the internet and its use define and dominate pseudo-modernism, the new era has also seen the revamping of older forms along its lines. Cinema in the pseudo-modern age looks more and more like a computer game. Its images, which once came from the ‘real’ world – framed, lit, soundtracked and edited together by ingenious directors to guide the viewer’s thoughts or emotions – are now increasingly created through a computer. And they look it. Where once special effects were supposed to make the impossible appear credible, CGI frequently [inadvertently] works to make the possible look artificial, as in much of Lord of the Rings or Gladiator. Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer.

Similarly, television in the pseudo-modern age favours not only reality TV (yet another unapt term), but also shopping channels, and quizzes in which the viewer calls to guess the answer to riddles in the hope of winning money. It also favours phenomena like Ceefax and Teletext. But rather than bemoan the new situation, it is more useful to find ways of making these new conditions conduits for cultural achievements instead of the vacuity currently evident. It is important here to see that whereas the form may change (Big Brother may wither on the vine), the terms by which individuals relate to their television screen and consequently what broadcasters show have incontrovertibly changed. The purely ‘spectacular’ function of television, as with all the arts, has become a marginal one: what is central now is the busy, active, forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability. It is made up by the ‘viewer’, if not in its content then in its sequence – you wouldn’t read Middlemarch by going from page 118 to 316 to 401 to 501, but you might well, and justifiably, read Ceefax that way.

A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.

The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert. Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adapt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time.

The roots of pseudo-modernism can be traced back through the years dominated by postmodernism. Dance music and industrial pornography, for instance, products of the late 70s and 80s, tend to the ephemeral, to the vacuous on the level of signification, and to the unauthored (dance much more so than pop or rock). They also foreground the activity of their ‘reception’: dance music is to be danced to, porn is not to be read or watched but used, in a way which generates the pseudo-modern illusion of participation. In music, the pseudo-modern supersedingof the artist-dominated album as monolithic text by the downloading and mix-and-matching of individual tracks on to an iPod, selected by the listener, was certainly prefigured by the music fan’s creation of compilation tapes a generation ago. But a shift has occurred, in that what was a marginal pastime of the fan has become the dominant and definitive way of consuming music, rendering the idea of the album as a coherent work of art, a body of integrated meaning, obsolete.

To a degree, pseudo-modernism is no more than a technologically motivated shift to the cultural centre of something which has always existed (similarly, metafiction has always existed, but was never so fetishised as it was by postmodernism). Television has always used audience participation, just as theatre and other performing arts did before it; but as an option, not as a necessity: pseudo-modern TV programmes have participation built into them. There have long been very ‘active’ cultural forms, too, from carnival to pantomime. But none of these implied a written or otherwise material text, and so they dwelt in the margins of a culture which fetishised such texts – whereas the pseudo-modern text, with all its peculiarities, stands as the central, dominant, paradigmatic form of cultural product today, although culture, in its margins, still knows other kinds. Nor should these other kinds be stigmatised as ‘passive’ against pseudo-modernity’s ‘activity’. Reading, listening, watching always had their kinds of activity; but there is a physicality to the actions of the pseudo-modern text-maker, and a necessity to his or her actions as regards the composition of the text, as well as a domination which has changed the cultural balance of power (note how cinema and TV, yesterday’s giants, have bowed before it). It forms the twenty-first century’s social-historical-cultural hegemony. Moreover, the activity of pseudo-modernism has its own specificity: it is electronic, and textual, but ephemeral.
Clicking In The Changes

In postmodernism, one read, watched, listened, as before. In pseudo-modernism one phones, clicks, presses, surfs, chooses, moves, downloads. There is a generation gap here, roughly separating people born before and after 1980. Those born later might see their peers as free, autonomous, inventive, expressive, dynamic, empowered, independent, their voices unique, raised and heard: postmodernism and everything before it will by contrast seem elitist, dull, a distant and droning monologue which oppresses and occludes them. Those born before 1980 may see, not the people, but contemporary texts which are alternately violent, pornographic, unreal, trite, vapid, conformist, consumerist, meaningless and brainless (see the drivel found, say, on some Wikipedia pages, or the lack of context on Ceefax). To them what came before pseudo-modernism will increasingly seem a golden age of intelligence, creativity, rebellion and authenticity. Hence the name ‘pseudo-modernism’ also connotes the tension between the sophistication of the technological means, and the vapidity or ignorance of the content conveyed by it – a cultural moment summed up by the fatuity of the mobile phone user’s “I’m on the bus”.

Whereas postmodernism called ‘reality’ into question, pseudo-modernism defines the real implicitly as myself, now, ‘interacting’ with its texts. Thus, pseudo-modernism suggests that whatever it does or makes is what is reality, and a pseudo-modern text may flourish the apparently real in an uncomplicated form: the docu-soap with its hand-held cameras (which, by displaying individuals aware of being regarded, give the viewer the illusion of participation); The Office and The Blair Witch Project, interactive pornography and reality TV; the essayistic cinema of Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock.

Along with this new view of reality, it is clear that the dominant intellectual framework has changed. While postmodernism’s cultural products have been consigned to the same historicised status as modernism and romanticism, its intellectual tendencies (feminism, postcolonialism etc) find themselves isolated in the new philosophical environment. The academy, perhaps especially in Britain, is today so swamped by the assumptions and practices of market economics that it is deeply implausible for academics to tell their students they inhabit a postmodern world where a multiplicity of ideologies, world-views and voices can be heard. Their every step hounded by market economics, academics cannot preach multiplicity when their lives are dominated by what amounts in practice to consumer fanaticism. The world has narrowed intellectually, not broadened, in the last ten years. Where Lyotard saw the eclipse of Grand Narratives, pseudo-modernism sees the ideology of globalised market economics raised to the level of the sole and over-powering regulator of all social activity – monopolistic, all-engulfing, all-explaining, all-structuring, as every academic must disagreeably recognise. Pseudo-modernism is of course consumerist and conformist, a matter of moving around the world as it is given or sold.

Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.

This pseudo-modern world, so frightening and seemingly uncontrollable, inevitably feeds a desire to return to the infantile playing with toys which also characterises the pseudo-modern cultural world. Here, the typical emotional state, radically superseding the hyper-consciousness of irony, is the trance – the state of being swallowed up by your activity. In place of the neurosis of modernism and the narcissism of postmodernism, pseudo-modernism takes the world away, by creating a new weightless nowhere of silent autism. You click, you punch the keys, you are ‘involved’, engulfed, deciding. You are the text, there is no-one else, no ‘author’; there is nowhere else, no other time or place. You are free: you are the text: the text is superseded.

© Dr Alan Kirby 2006

Alan Kirby holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Exeter. He currently lives in Oxford.

Mind Over Matter: An Eidetic Reduction presented in Dialogue

PROLOGUE: In writing this dialogue, I wish to explore the ongoing debate within the philosophical community over the nature of thought, consciousness, matter, free will, and all such related concepts. This is, quite obviously, an immense topic, so I will attempt to keep the dialogue focused, especially on the concepts of qualia, phenomenology, and emergence. That said, brief escapades into religious, existential, and scientific thought will surely arise, as it would be foolish to take the debate and its implications out of context.

The characters are as follows: Victoria, an overbearingly secular materialist; Phoebe, a demure philosopher wont to take up any side of the debate but hesitant to believe any conclusion; and Brooke, a dedicated dualist, but unsure of the actual, precise nature of Being. The setting is the parlor of Phoebe’s winter lodge in the mountains, the time is quite anachronistic—the language and maturity of debate imply the late scientific revolution era, but certain evidentiary data employed by the characters are from a much later date. Such a merger of antiquated etiquette and modern science and technology is classically referred to as “steampunk”, but that is neither here nor there. Onward!,

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

BROOKE: […] you see then, Phoebe, the mind must be separate from the body! It is the only way in which these things may come to pass, our own experience confirms it.

PHOEBE: I simply will not and cannot take you at your word, Brooke. Your arguments at this moment do entice me, but, as certain as the tides, yet another will entreat me thusly ere the week be through. Words alone can do the subject no justice, I must conclude. Man is a fool to think he has power o’er the meand’ring follies of logic when approaching this matter. I--

BROOKE: --But do listen yourself, dear Phoebe! Clearly we are fools to think we have this thing concluded, but we must soldier onward. Most certainly we must. Indeed, this whole issue in and of itself seems evidence to me the very point which I wish to make clear: our minds, “spirits”, if you will, can see the picture clearly for what it is, yet they cannot communicate to this corporeal essence the complete logic of the thing. Petty details aside, do you not reach my same conclusion? That matter in and of itself simply cannot explain all that we experience, nay, cannot explain experience itself?

PHOEBE: It would seem, but I must maintain my reser—

VICTORIA: --And why, pray tell, can it not, Brooke?

PHOEBE: Victoria! Wonderful to see you again! What brings you to my humble lodgings?

VICTORIA: Why, the promise of this fine debate, of course. I would be a lesser person for having abstained from its luscious draw in the past, despite our momentary mutual ire immediately following. But now we have lost the train of the thing—Brooke, do explain!

BROOKE: I simply find it obvious, Victoria. The stones do not cry out, the tree does not ponder, even the lesser creatures do not concern themselves with the philosophical arguments and self-reflection which so dominate our thoughts. Dust is no source of feeling, and the dirt hath no consciousness—our minds are a precious commodity, rare in nature.

VICTORIA: You must see your error, Brooke. We are not stones, trees, or lesser creatures. Why should we expect them to think? We do not expect ourselves to be made of stone, grow leaves, or any other such qualities not becoming of a human being. We are unique, but it is no fault of anything other than the very arrangement of our molecules.

PHOEBE: But what, then, accounts for our experiences?

BROOKE: Yes, Victoria, what do you think of this thing called “qualia”?

VICTORIA: Explain if you would, please.

BROOKE: Well, the idea is that our experiences, our sensory data, have more than material considerations to it. The color red does more than simply transmit photons of a certain wavelength to our cornea, produce electrochemical reactions, and send a nerve impulse to our visual cortex where the information is processed and sent to the other parts of the brain as needed; there is a specific feeling and experience associated with this physical phenomena—one which cannot be explained materialistically.

PHOEBE: Here I am in agreement. We seem to know this intuitively: we speak of thoughts and feelings and emotions as completely separate concepts from our matter-based bodies. We have an idea of ourselves, our identity, not as a physical thing but as a thought-based entity, continuous through our physical maturation. Most every religion speaks of such concepts, be it a soul to be reincarnated or a pantheistic notion of oneness crossing material boundaries. Some are even wont to believe that we have no physical component at all, but are rather solely our thoughts!

VICTORIA: Ridiculous.

BROOKE: But how so?

VICTORIA: What evidence do they have for such doubts? Why believe these religious convictions? Utter nonsense.

BROOKE: What evidence do you have for the existence of the material world, Victoria? Although I do believe its existence as well, I find no foolproof reasoning for it. Our belief in it is based on experience, and these experiences, to my eyes, carry as much weight as our experiences with the non-material nature of our thoughts.

VICTORIA: What if I should say that your intuitive belief of non-material thought is simply cultural conditioning? Or, perhaps more accurately, a by-product of a language in which the words for thoughts, feelings, and emotions carry spiritual connotations and definitions? What if we should have words which conveyed these mind-states for what I believe they are—electrochemical patterns in an extremely complicated neural network? You say that there is something more to these “qualia”, some “experience” which cannot be communicated or explained with physical means, but I simply take that to be the shortcomings of scientific understanding. Neuroscientists say that when they stimulate certain areas of the brain, they can make someone perceive “spiritual transcendence” or any number of similar mind-states.

BROOKE: But the fact that electrochemical states of the brain can cause qualia experiences is not what I intend to question—indeed, my position requires it to be true. Otherwise, how would day to day phenomena ever affect our consciousness? The point I wish to make is that these experiences seem to be acting on a specific entity, continuous agent, which is receptacle to these qualia. But it would seem that my words even now can do it no justice. Perchance the idea of qualia is in and of itself a qualia, which I can no more communicate to you than you can communicate sight to the blind or sound do the deaf.

PHOEBE: As all knowledge seems to be, in my opinion. Language is but a hopeless attempt at communicating our beliefs with antiquated measures. Would that we all spoke in qualia.

BROOKE: Yes indeed. Anyway, Victoria, you must not mistake me for some old-fashioned dualist which derives all conclusions from religious conviction. I do see the importance of the material side of the issue. Indeed, I believe the “spirit” or “mind” to be fundamentally connected to and intertwined with the physical body to which it is ascribed.

VICTORIA: Ah yes, I was thinking of raising this point myself. It is good to hear that you do not ascribe to that ridiculous notion of a spiritual substance which resides above and beyond our world. Such ideas are foolishness.

PHOEBE: Why would you believe that, Victoria?

VICTORIA: There is no evidence for it, again! Ockham would be appalled.

PHOEBE: Once more we arrive at this conundrum. You seem to imply you have definitive evidence for the physical world where I can find none! But we will not go down that road again, believe you me. Instead think of my objection in this context: why would there not seem to be something above the physical world? If, indeed, the immaterial cannot interact with the material, we would see no evidence for it in our physical experience, so the absence of substantive evidence is quite the logical result. But of course that would have no effect on us, so we may consider it an inop’rable conclusion. Instead, we may consider that this nonmaterial substance only can causally interact with the physical world through the intuitive means of mind-body interaction.

VICTORIA: And what is this intuitive means? Physics quite strongly dictates that the only the physical can affect the physical. From whence arises this interaction?

PHOEBE: I do not know.

VICTORIA: Well then, I--

BROOKE: --Victoria, you raise a valid point: causal interaction between the material and immaterial seems nigh upon impossible, but what do you say to the concept of emergent consciousness and of “property dualism”?

VICTORIA: Oh, well, please do explain!

BROOKE: The idea is generally postulated as follows: that the properties of the mind, while completely reliant upon their material substrates, are irreducible to any specific aspect of these parts and must be treated as in their own category. In other words, the mind is more than the sum of its parts, and is not immaterial in the substance sense.

VICTORIA: I am intrigued, but hesitant to agree completely. Please do continue.

BROOKE: Well, truth be told, there are numerous different ways of phrasing the concept, each with its own specific connotations along with unique flaws and advantages. My personal preference is for that of, as I have already stated, emergent consciousness. I would argue that the specific arrangement of atoms and molecules to make up our neural pathways are so designed that, from their interactions, a “mind” emerges.

VICTORIA: I still do not quite understand. What do you mean, a “mind”? What do you mean, “emerges”? Because phrased as such one could take your statement to imply my original point: that our perceived consciousness is no fault of anything other than the very arrangement of our molecules.

BROOKE: Well, that point I must disagree with, so let me attempt to explain precisely. I guess I would say that each area of the brain is mapped to another area of thought or experience, such that the brain is the originator of all thought and emotion, but the specific thoughts and emotions which occur are not of the brain, but of the mind.

VICTORIA: I do not see the need for this mind to enter the picture, although I admit this concept is still infinitely more attractive to me than the other types of dualism you have presented in the past.

BROOKE: Again we return to my insistence upon a mind. I believe that the evidence for such a thing is unmistakable, but we have exhausted that topic most thoroughly, and will gain no further ground on it until one of us can think of a bridge between our two opinions. Perhaps this will serve as the bridge: it is typically called the “Chinese Room experiment”.

In one room, there sits a man with a massive book. In this book, every possible arrangement of Chinese characters is entered, and a consequent “response” is also listed. There is a slot in the wall of the room, through which another person will pass sheets of paper with Chinese characters inscribed upon them. The man with the book will look up the phrase given to him, and reply with the appropriate series of characters. To the person who first gave him the note, it would seem that this man is fluent in Chinese! However, we as an outside observer know that the man with the book has no idea what he’s reading or writing—he has simply been given an instruction manual which he follows precisely. We would never in our wildest imagination say that he understands Chinese. This dichotomy, between understanding and action, highlights the importance of consciousness to our very definition of understanding.

PHOEBE: In much the same way, we can imagine a person who acts functionally exactly the same as any other human, but has no consciousness or awareness of what he is doing. A veritable zombie walking among us!

BROOKE: Precisely. Once we see this concept of understanding as a distinct idea, the holes in materialism begin to appear.

VICTORIA: I am beginning to see it now, though I am wary. Would you then argue that intelligence and consciousness are inherent properties of matter? That any set of molecules can be rearranged such that they have a consciousness? That marble can be made flesh, and dust to spirit?

PHOEBE: I do not think so.

BROOKE: I, too, am hesitant to make such a conclusion.

VICTORIA: Well, I am still insistent upon that point. How, then, do you account for the fact that each of the atoms in your body is replaced constantly, such that you are never numerically identical even to yourself as you pass through time? It would seem that any old atom will do, so long as it retains its arrangement.

PHOEBE: Indeed, I believe that this only supports my refusal to say that the mind arises completely from matter, even given our new concept of emergence. It would seem that there must be something more to the issue; that there is some part of the mind which is separate, not affected by physical changes. What it would be, a God, a soul, or something else entirely, I daren’t even begin to postulate.

BROOKE: I do not know either. I do not wish to cement myself in one position before considerable thought. If I am to accept a substance-based dichotomy between matter and mind, as I was wont to do in my early days, then we arrive at the issue of causal relatedness. If I instead rely on property dualism, it is quite difficult indeed not to concede myself entirely to physicalism, but dread physicalism ignores all of my a priori and a posteriori concepts of consciousness, understanding, and qualia.

PHOEBE: Perchance the best hope is to return to substance dualism, but ignore the issue of causal relatedness?

BROOKE: Continue?

PHOEBE: What if you simply allow for the fact that the mind cannot affect the matter? That our experiences are properties of our minds, but the immaterial, as Victoria says, does not return the favor and affect the material

BROOKE: Well, then, what about how the material can affect the immaterial? It would seem that the same conundrum presents itself.

PHOEBE: So it does.

BROOKE: Of course, one can just postulate that the mind is of a particular substance such that it can interact with, i.e. act on and be acted upon, the material? To explain in a more plausible way, that the brain is one particular organ that has that possibility, accounting for the ways in which brain states can affect thought processes and vice versa?

VICTORIA: You can’t possibly be returning to substance dualism! For shame!

BROOKE: Forsooth, you are correct, Victoria: the beast continues to have its flaws. But it would seem that all do. Moving onward, I believe that if one finds the right way of defining property dualism, then we may satisfy all issues.

VICTORIA: Or just accept that qualia are illusory…

BROOKE: Have you listened to none of my arguments for it?

VICTORIA: And you none of mine?

PHOEBE: Indeed, you each argue well. But return to the idea at hand!

BROOKE: Certainly. Upon reflection, I believe that it is that concept which will be the saving grace of my predicament: ideas. What constitutes an idea? How is an idea stored in the brain? If one attempts to explain an idea in terms of physical states of matter, something is obviously lost. Above and beyond this lossy conversion, consider that this idea can be stored in countless of brains, each with a different structure, in handwritten documents, electronic programs, differing languages, perchance even in art! What, then, makes this infinitely variable physical arrangement of atoms constitute the same entity? Here we see emergence: abstraction. Contained within each of these things is an immaterial concept, one which is all but independent of its physical grounding. It cannot exist without its material basis, yet it is not the matter in and of itself which makes it what it is, just as it is not the brain which defines the mind, yet the mind requires a brain to exist. As this information is transferred between media, it can modulate in minutia, but remains ontologically irreducible. These variances in minutia can, in many ways, cause the meme to evolve and perfect itself, in a manner which could almost be mistaken for an external will, as is often mistakenly perceived in evolution. In other words, when the concept is read, thought about, and rewritten, it will have, in essence “altered” its physical makeup. In this way, the mind can also alter the physical actions of the brain—the mind, by receiving conceptual data, thinking about it, and resending it to the realm of physical properties, can affect the matter! I believe that this free will is not mistakenly perceived, but that is a debate for a different day entirely […]

END

EPILOGUE: Clearly, these formulations of young minds are far from perfection. However, I believe between the lines and between the characters, some minutia of truth resides. Clearly, Victoria represents a repentant Diderot (read backwards as “Tory did”, leading to Victoria), one who believes firmly in the materialist explanation of all reality, but is willing to at least accept other possibilities for the sake of debate. Phoebe, then, is a young Princess Elizabeth (“theba…” easily becomes “Phoebe”), doubting Descartes’ insistence upon causal interaction between mind and matter, but ever hungry for new ways of accounting for dualism’s allure. Brooke (from my own middle name) is the moderator between the voracious materialist and the doubtful dualist: she is fairly certain of her convictions, yet moderates them with a knowledge of her own lack of knowledge, and thusly treads bravely the thin alley of overlap between substance dualism and materialism. Brooke, representing most accurately my feelings on the issue, sees an immaterial world as inherent twin of the material world, and is convinced of the limits of human knowledge as not a hindrance upon thought, but rather a tool which can be used to invoke the necessity of something above and beyond what lies before us. As Brooke says in her conclusion of the dialogue, ideas continue beyond their origins in a manner which defies material constraint, and I hope that the ideas I have encoded into this document may spread and evolve to new minds, fertile with want of knowledge. Thank you for reading.

The Pillars of Thought

The human mind is a curious thing. Its nature has been the subject of inquiry throughout philosophical history, spanning millennia. Whether this questioning was based on its capacities, its physical or immaterial make-up, or any other such qualia, humankind has had an innate desire to know and discover, above all else, the very methods and ways through which it can know and discover.

Core to the majority of this inquiry was a strategy and mode of thought known as “logic”, a mode of thought which seemed inherent to the human mind. Through a fundamental set of principles, pieces of information could be synthesized to form a conclusion, which by the very definition of logic, must be true if said principles were true. This system was formalized in Greek tradition, specifically through the work of Aristotle, but similar systems were being developed and formalized all over the world. As logic’s power grew and spread, it began to infect all other disciplines. Suddenly, any truth which did not withstand the withering gaze of logic’s due process was subject to skepticism, such as that practiced by followers of Pyrrhonism, or even flat out refusal.

This rigorous form of reasoning soon birthed a newly formalized mode of thought called “science”, wherein a system is recognized, a hypothesis is made about the specifics of its functionality, the consequents of said hypothesis are deduced, and experiments are run to see if the consequents are violated. Essentially, science became a new, formalized mode of thought for collecting evidentiary data about the world around us and predicting future occurrences based upon past observations. This evidently superior mode of thought became wildly popular both for its inherently elegant reasoning and for its controversial results such as Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. As the scientific revolution spread like wildfire throughout Europe in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, René Descartes came forward with a work entitled Discourse on Method. In this work, he lays out, among many other things including the famous “cogito ergo sum”, what he refers to as the “four rules of the method”. These four rules are not so much another formalization of the rules of logic, but rather a set of precepts on which Descartes believed the application of logical thought should be based. On the whole, the work is a successful one, but it makes a few key errors in its foundational principles that persist throughout and weaken many of its conclusions.

The first of the four rules of the method was essentially to never believe any false premises. As Descartes puts it, “never to accept anything as true that I did not plainly know to be such […] include nothing more in my judgments than what presented itself to my mind so clearly and so distinctly that I had no occasion to call it in doubt.” When a logical argument is constructed in a valid manner, the most common (indeed, likely the only) way to refute the conclusion is to deny the premises. If, as Descartes advises, the premises are accepted only after strenuous analysis and careful thought, then it becomes all the more difficult to arrive at a potentially faulty conclusion.

The second of these rules is “to divide each of the difficulties I would examine into as many parts as possible and as was required in order better to resolve them.” This is less a specific logical stratagem but moreso a general approach to thought. If one can take a large concept and break it down into its component pieces, analyze each of these pieces individually so as to understand them in a fuller capacity, then when the concept is reconstructed it can be more easily understood as a whole.[1]

The third of the rules is to progress naturally through the component pieces of an idea or train of thought, beginning with the simplest and building slowly towards the most complex by means of small steps of logic. In this manner, as with the second step, each small bit of information can be duly processed and understood before moving on to the next, more complex step. This rule also makes sure that one does not have any errors in the ordering of premises or logical steps, as this would make the argument or line of thought hard to follow, both for the thinker and a potential outside observer.

The fourth and final of the rules of method is “everywhere to make enumerations so complete and reviews so general that [one is assured] of having omitted nothing.” This rule attempts to emulate the scientific method in the sense that the process is repeated over and over again through review such that any flaws are revealed and consequently addressed. The hope is that the human mind is capable of spotting errors and omissions that were made the first time through the argument and then correcting them.

Despite the overall quality of these rules and their strength in most instances of thought process, it is here in the fourth rule that the general flaw of the method begins to become apparent. This assumption—that an observer can always find every flaw and omission in the argument—is not entirely accurate. While it certainly is common for one person to be able to see the problems in another’s arguments when the arguer cannot see them, this does not guarantee that every flaw will be exposed, or even that every flaw is apprehensible by the human mind. This oversight runs throughout the four rules: a fundamental inability to conceive of modes of thought which do not follow logical processes and as such are not subject to logical rules.

When one inspects the foundation of logical thought, doubting all of its claims in much the same manner as Descartes’ line of thought which lead him to “cogito ergo sum”, he or she is left with one major foundational assumption on which logic is based: that logic is a functional system. The rules on which logic are based have no inherent, provable truth value to them, and as such are doubtable premises. This structure on which logic is built essentially boils down to a system of circular reasoning, providing its own definitions and set of tools with which it suggest one observe its validity; i.e., logic is a valid system only by the rules of logic. While I do not personally believe that it is beneficiary or even “right” to doubt the validity of logic, it is important to note the possibility of its short comings, which Descartes fails to do. Descartes seems to have his own reasoning for this absence of doubt, but again, he arrives at this certainty through a logical train of thought, which again dodges the issue entirely (indeed, it seems to be a logical fallacy on the order of petito principia, not to mention his specific use of argumentum ad populum).

This circular reasoning system is an important concept to recognize as inherent in every mode of thought—science, logic, and faith—and as such, not a destructively negative condition, but one that should always be remembered. Science, the mode of thought which makes predictions based upon models crafted from previous experiences, is only used because when it has been used in the past (previous experiences), its predictions have been correct. As such, the scientific method is a scientific model. The reasoning of faith, belief in that which cannot be arrived at through logic or science, is circular in much the same ways: in the end, there is no foundational proof for its validity, but there are a few fundamental precepts on which it is placed.

When one does not accept the circular nature of reasoning systems, and instead tries to fit the entirety of truth under one lens, under one mode of thought, then errors are quick to arise. This is especially evident in Descartes’ attempts to logically prove the existence of God. God, above all else, has classically been a concept taken as an article of faith, and for good reason: the task of proving through logic a being which is all-powerful, prior to time, and immaterial is a difficult one indeed. Great philosophers throughout history, however, have tried, with varying degrees of success, to fit God into the lens with which they are most comfortable: philosophy and logical thought.

For these reasons, Descartes’ specific arguments for God fail from the outset, but they are also relatively weak even within the history of logical proofs of God. They even violate a few of Descartes’ own Four Rules of Method. From the outset in his first gesture towards a proof of God, he makes a number of assumptions which would clearly violate the first rule: that “things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true”, that “it is a greater perfection to know than to doubt”, and that being able to imagine something more perfect than one’s self is proof of something more perfect than one’s self. Each of these is refutable after quick deliberation, despite the fourth rule that each process should be thoroughly reviewed for errors such as these. What, for instance, if those things which we believe to see “very clearly” are indeed not at all true, and that notion of seeing them clearly is a false perception, one of the very false perceptions he doubted to arrive at “cogito ergo sum”? There seems to be no evidence or reasoning behind this belief other than personal faith. The following point, that it is greater to know than to doubt, seems to be slightly more reasonable, but still could be questioned on a number of levels. The final premise of his proof, that imagination proves existence, is immediately questionable. His decision “to search for the source from which I had learned to think of something more perfect than I was, and I plainly knew that this had to be from some nature that was in fact more perfect” assumes that for an idea to be present in one’s head, it must have a reasonable source, is flawed on many many levels. Human beings are eminently capable of envisioning things which do not exist and have no root in the reality around us, and this ability does not at all prove the existence of unicorns or martians.

As such, Descartes’ Discourse on Method is a flawed logical and philosophical work, but is still, despite my critiques, largely successful in its aims. Indeed, although it fails to acknowledge modes of thought other than logic, it defines the philosophical lens very effectively and reasonably. His proof of “cogito ergo sum” is also profoundly famous for good reason—it is an essentially perfect logical proof of existence above all else, from which a vast majority of western thought has arisen. Once the Discourse on Method is taken in this lighter context—as a high quality work of logic, but a work which does not in any way disprove the other modes of thought—its imperfections can be glossed over and that which remains is quite solid, or, as Descartes puts it, one can “cast aside the shifting earth and sand in order to find rock or clay”.

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[1] Although the rebuttal to this point will not be discussed at length in this paper, it should be noted that this rule fails to recognize the possibility of some points which cannot be broken into component pieces, points which become more complex when broken up, or points in which the “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”

Mass(ively Available) Media: The End of the Lowest Common Denominator

One of the greatest driving forces in human progress is the increased mobility of data and objects. The horse. The chariot. The boat. Writing. Currency. The train. Telegraph. Radio. The car. The plane. The space shuttle. The internet. With increased mobility, the price of interaction with others decreases, allowing for increased profits resultant from external investment. Larger and larger social webs develop and strengthen, and here we sit, reading blogs on the World Wide Web.

When nearly the entire planet can create culture and media (the driving force behind "web 2.0") and share it instantly, there is enough out there to satisfy even the most ravenous collector. However, because data can move so rapidly, it becomes ubiquitous. "Spam", or unwanted data, flourishes. Tools which allow people to filter out such unwanted memes become increasingly attractive, which is why we have Google and gated neighborhoods. With the right filters in place, one can "stumble through" page after meme after blog after video after social network devoted to nearly any topic.

As such, niche cultures quickly form. Joseph from Albuquerque, NM used to think he was the only person in the US who loved old B-studio horror flicks. Now he chats regularly with DontGoIntoTheWoods and NailGun1985 over an Instant Messaging service. This has been an absolute boon for independent artists. When the only way to experience music was either going to a local live show, buying a professionally printed LP or listening to the radio, you had to be able to appeal to a wide audience to merit the investment of a record label. The label, then, would print up your record, put out a few ads, send it to radio, and hope that they were right when they thought everyone would like you. When anyone can upload a track they record in their basement with their laptop built-in microphone and a open-source multi-track audio recorder and have it tagged with the appropriate genre-related metadata, the fans can find you.

This is kind of like free trade. The textbook argument for free trade goes as follows: when countries are allowed to trade freely, they will specialize in what they are best at, and trade it for whatever they need. As such, more of everything/better everything is made, and people's consumption frontiers expand. This applies quite easily to creative endeavors: when everyone can make what they're really good at, and find an open market without the big-corporate-studio "tariffs" of entry, people will specialize, the market will diversify, and everyone will be able to consume more, better product. (If you want to know what I actually think of free trade as it is typically meant in current political discourse, you can read some of my other posts, but I digress)

This is why last.fm, which tracks users' listening habits when they install a plug-in on their media players, has charts (MGMT,  Andrew Bird, Glasvegas, Rogue Wave, Fleet Foxes) which read quite differently from the top singles on mass-market radio (Beyonce, TI feat. Rihanna, Kanye West, Britney Spears, Katy Perry). To generalize, everyone can listen to and at least partially enjoy Kanye. Not everyone can listen to and at least partially enjoy Andrew Bird. But, with piratebay.org, last.fm, pandora, myspace music, youtube, and the rest of the plethora of online music sites, everyone at least has the chance to know about Mr. Bird should they know how to look.

Now, Mass Media is not going to die. At least not any time soon. But what more and more people are beginning to realize is that Mass Media is not really so massive. Not too many people actually actively listen to Miley Cyrus. People are beginning to find that there's music out there that they like more than what appeals to their lowest common denominator, if they invest a little time, effort, and emotion into it.

Of course, then the resulting question is: where do we go from here? Not to cop-out, but we really don't know. Well, at least we don't know the specifics. But, if we step back and blur the picture a little bit, I think we can expect a few trends to emerge which have really been there all along.

Poets Within: Lessons from Aboriginal Songlines

“Men vent great passions by breaking into song, as we observe in the most grief-stricken and the most joyful”

-Vico, The New Science, LIX

The history of music is perhaps the most complex and compelling history we have, both as a species and as a planet. It is inextricably linked to life and death, sorrow and joy, that which we think of when we think of our existence. Man has used song for a very long time, perhaps even before spoken language. Other animals, such as birds and whales, use it as their language when, as far as we can tell, they have no actual words. In the Aboriginal culture, this potential of music is realized, with the entire existence of the universe hanging on the notes of the songlines.

Man’s first written songs were religious chants, and this directly ties into one of the most important uses of music. The songs were religious tribute to the world around them, acknowledgement of a spiritual connection above the confines of the physical. Aboriginals use song in much the same way: each song is a tribute to a certain trail of land, a certain ancestor, and a certain species. These trails of song, called songlines, run throughout the entirety of Australia, creating an infinitely complex web of different ideas. As Bruce Chatwin notes on page 13 of Songlines, “In theory, at least, the whole of Australia could be read as a musical score […] One should perhaps visualize the Songlines as a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every ‘episode’ was readable in terms of geology.” Each songline has its own distinct melody, relating to the story of the ancestor, so each member of the clan, while not knowing the whole story, can recognize his song even if the words are different. In this way, every person in Australia is tied together through clan relations, the links between maintainers of specific songlines, and tribe relations, the people that the person lives and travels with.

These multi-layered webs very much reflect the effects of music on our lives today. We all are deeply connected with song: it can take us on journeys very few other endeavors can, even within the arts. We are defensive of the music we feel attached to, as evidenced in the heated battles between students over which musicians and songs are better that others that go on in the halls of high schools every day. This is closely related to the Aboriginal idea of the songline: we feel like certain pieces of music are our own, under our watchful eye, and we must protect their integrity from all intruders. We feel an instant connection with others who share our musical interests, much like an Aboriginal would feel connected to his clan mate. This is the purpose of religious hymns and national anthems: to link the people through common song. And these pieces that we call our own are profoundly blended into our minds and hearts. There are songs that bring tears to my eyes every time I hear them: they can communicate on so many levels that our conscious mind cannot begin to understand.

Even with the study of music, one never can really find why certain melodies and harmonies affect certain people so deeply; why Sibelius’s Karelia suite is more moving to me than even the most complex arrangements of Hot Cross Buns. What is this driving force behind music that entangles itself within us? From the purely physical view, all music is simply rapid changes in pressure of air, which moves our eardrums in extremely fast pulses. These pulses are converted to streams of electric signals and sent to our brains. What can we derive from this? What knowledge can we gain from it? It brings to mind the question of all our experiences: they are all electrical impulses interpreted by our brains. The most interesting of paintings is, on the most simplistic level, just a certain pattern of atoms that release light waves with different frequencies. However, something in there, some certain arrangement touches us, moves us.

One of the first things that totalitarian societies ban is music and the arts. Behind the Iron Curtain, jazz and rock were not allowed to be performed. In the 1800s, slave owners disallowed the slaves from owning musical instruments. To have a drum or be seen beating a drum was punishable by beating or death. This need for control is in fact just a backhanded recognition of the power of the human spirit of creativity. To control the masses, the leaders must ban all individuality and expression, to the point where the people have no will to fight back. Music is a huge player in this aspect of human consciousness, and is punished accordingly. However, the need for song is often so great that the oppressed will rise above the restrictions, breaking this law more than most others, to make music. The spirituals sung by the slaves are still with us today, and the jazz and blues of New Orleans live on. Through control, the slave owners simply made the spirit all the more desperate to break out, to pull song from the mind and heart into being. These hymns are some of the most powerful harmonies of all, for they were created in the heat of struggle. They can speak to us much more than through their words alone.

My compositional teacher has a severely autistic son by the name of Michael. Michael cannot speak, can barely move, and is confined to his room for the majority of the day. However, he is amazingly responsive to music. When the speakers start to vibrate with the sounds of Holst or Liszt, he often cries out, reacting to the harsher harmonies and rhythms. He can sense changes in the music before they occur, as if hidden in each tone is a story of what is to come. However, when you put on some of his favorite songs, he instantly is pacified. He will begin nodding and humming along, seemingly without a care in the world.

This essentially sums up what we all find in music: a sense of escape, while at the same time, a sense of connection. We are taken on journeys, yet reminded of the web we have between each and every thing around us. Every person, whether a composer or not, has song inside them. As Saul Williams states in his song “Black Stacey”, “I plan to have a whole army by the time that I'm through; to load their guns with songs they haven't sung.” He also states in “Fearless” that, “I am a poet who composes what the world proses, and proses what the world composes.” This is what we all are, whether we do it through song, dance, painting, writing, or even just thinking. Each of us has that history of creation deep inside of us, waiting to burst through the earth into being.

Democracy and Diplomats: A Primer on India-US relations (circa '05)

“There have been few countries more worthy of America's friendship than India. India has taken the American side on crucial geopolitical issues such as missile defense and containing China. It has emerged as a vital economic partner, sending tens of thousands of its citizens to work in high-tech jobs in the United States and attracting billions of dollars of investments from American companies. And, perhaps most importantly, India has fully subscribed to the political ideal to which the United States subscribes: It is a multiethnic, multireligious society; a vibrant democracy--indeed the world's largest democracy--thriving in a part of the world that is woefully unaccustomed to such freedoms.”[1] Despite this, ever since India’s independence and subsequent wars with Pakistan over Kashmir, their relations with the US have been shaky.

One would think that two largest democracies on the planet would be able to get along, especially when both are interested in similar things and have similar histories. Both the US and India were once part of the British empire, and both broke away to form democratic societies founded on the ideals of personal freedom and justice. However, after all the similarities, they are constantly having small scuffles, much like a sibling rivalry. The common belief is also that democracies are peaceful governments, only interested in spreading freedom and justice to the rest of the world. Why then, do the USA and India have such a troubled relationship? They do because they come from different eras of world power alignments, and have populations with different ideals and goals.

The US, although a very young country compared to Europe and to other regions, it still very much follows the old world order of Europe maintaining dominance over the rest of the planet. India, however, gained its independence in the mid-1900s, after the two world wars, and thus came into being under a vastly different circumstance. European powers were starting to release their colonies, and were preaching “self-determination” to the rest of the world. India took this very much to heart, and had few qualms attempting to overthrow the European countries for world power. This attempt has yet to pay off, but is bound to soon enough. As reported by the New Statesman, “The National Intelligence Council, which pools thinking from all US intelligence agencies including the CIA and the National Security Council, has just published Mapping the Global Future, a report by the council's 2020 Project. Its main prediction is that the 21st century will belong to China and India.”[2]

One main aspect of the differences between the United States and India is their economic struggles with each other. Recently in the US, many people have become concerned about “outsourcing” jobs to other countries, thus depriving Americans of work and raising the unemployment rate. However, what most American’s don’t realize is that it is not just their own jobs that are disappearing, but the jobs in every country. As discussed by Geoffrey Colvin, reporter for Fortune, “The election foofaraw [sic] over manufacturing jobs going to China--a hot-button issue in every swing state but Florida--was always nonsensical. The overriding reality isn't that manufacturing jobs are being exported but that they're evaporating everywhere, including China, as makers of everything become more productive.”[3] And it is not only businesses in the United States that are hiring outside of their own country. A major German software company, SAP, has recently erected a research and development center in Bangalore, India.[4]

The main reason for this wave of outsourcing is that Indians are nearly to just as well trained, but cost a fraction as much to hire. As pointed out by Time Magazine, “R. and D. in India may prove to be too good a bargain to ignore: the cost of developing a basic software product in India is about $2 million, or just 40% of the cost in the U.S.”[5]

India’s rise to the economic spotlight has been a long and troublesome one. Since their independence in 1947, they have been a relatively poor country. As said in The Economist, “At best, India has been a qualified political success and a barely qualified economic failure […] 320m Indians remain below the poverty line today, almost as many as India's entire population was in 1947. A mistaken socialist experiment has cost India dear.”[6] Upon India’s independence, they began a shift towards socialism. Thinking capitalism to have failed, and the evidence thereof being the two World Wars, they took the USSR as a great model for alternatives to capitalism. The Soviets industrialized and experienced a rapid growth in GDP as a result of their five-year plans, so the Indians adopted similar socialism-based economic systems. They began by depriving the feudal lords of their lands and giving the land to the peasants, and industrializing. Soon this spread to nationalization of corporations, and state intervention in private business. Even after Soviet Russia fell, the Indians continued their series of five-year plans. However, they began to go bankrupt. In 1977 they were forced to relax controls and re-privatize business. This lead to a general upward trend in GDP, but was still short of what India could achieve.[7] Since then, India has become an even more open economy, leading to monetary input from various countries both in terms of import/export relations, and in hiring overseas.

This influx of job transfers to the subcontinent could just be the solution that many have been waiting for. With an investment upwards of $9 billion just from the United States, and a reformed, open economy, one can expect India to be a very significant economic force in the years to come.

The United States is also very involved in India’s political affairs, especially when it comes to the famed dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. The interest stems mainly from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), an incarnation of the United States’ long held view of limiting and controlling nuclear weapons. Both India and Pakistan, as of the 1970s, are countries outside of the NPT holding nuclear armaments. Delhi has long viewed the limiting of nuclear arms as hypocritical, claiming that all countries should destroy all their nuclear bombs. As such, when the superpowers would not agree to mutual worldwide destruction of advanced weaponry, India began and continued production of nuclear arms. Many critics of India have stated that Delhi’s nuclear program is simply an attempt to get a jump-start into world-power status. However, no amount of criticism can take away the fact that an arms race has begun between India and its long-time rival, Pakistan. Both countries have realized this, as evidenced by their continual swap of a list of nuclear production sites each new year.[8] However, neither country is doing anything to stop weapons buildup from continuing.[9]

As pointed out by The Economist, “If a new arms race does start, it will mark a return to the situation of the 1980s. Then, America poured billions of dollars of weapons into Pakistan, its frontline ally against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. India too went on an arms splurge, spending about $7 billion on Swedish howitzers and Soviet tanks and fighters. But when the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, America stopped winking at Pakistan's nuclear programme and cut off arms aid. That was in line with a law, the Pressler amendment, forbidding arms sales to countries going nuclear”[10] India has long had a problem with US weapons sales to Pakistan, citing the investment as a clear signal of favoring Islamabad in the conflict. However, Pakistan is not so much an ally of ideals and values as an ally of convenience, being almost essential for America’s goals in the Middle East.[11] Politicians on Capitol Hill have long tried to balance aid to the two countries, promising sales of certain arms to one in response to sales of relatively equal amounts to the other. Despite this, both countries still see the US as on the other one’s side.

In fact, the US is truly on both sides: it has long played a mediator role in the conflict between the two, especially in regards to Kashmir. As stated in The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “As a matter of both short-term strategy and long-range U.S. policies, it clearly is in Washington's interest to rein in the subcontinent's two nuclear-powered rivals, India and Pakistan. This, however, is not an easy task, given the imbalances between the two countries and their endemic disputes and mistrusts.”[12] For a long time, Capitol Hills plans of mutual deterrence of arms did not work. Recently, though, planned peace talks have begun to settle the issue of Kashmir. Preceding the talks, US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott visited each country to revisit common issues regarding their relationships with each other and with the United States.[13] Soon peace talks independent of the United States began. A cease-fire in the region of Kashmir was announced November 2004, and peace talks were planned for this February of 2005.[14]

Many other interesting aids to the Kashmir issue have been suggested. One such idea, as reported by UPI NewsTrack, is an oil pipeline connecting the two countries. “[Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat] Aziz said that a gas pipeline to connect India with Iran via Pakistan and a move to open banking links were among possible measures which could improve relations.”[15]

After all of the struggle within India-United States Relations, what will come of them? And why does this all matter? It matters because, as the Mapping the Global Future report referenced earlier stated, the 21^st century will not be another century of American dominance. It will be a century of gradual erosion of American prowess and a gradual increase in the influence of India and other south-east Asian countries. If the US plans to have any chance in the upcoming years, it needs to found strong relationships with tomorrow’s key players today.

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[1] “Friends. (India, Pakistan, United States relations).” The New Republic Jan 14, 2002: 7.

[2] Hilsum, Lindsey. “World view: the 21st century, say US analysts, will not be American. It will belong to China and India, and it may bring a cyberspace caliphate that commands Muslim loyalty across the world.” New Statesman Jan 24, 2005: 16.

[3] Colvin, Geoffrey. “Think your job can’t be sent to India? Just watch. (Value Driven).” Fortune Dec 13, 2004: 80.

[4] Adiga, Aravind, Matthew Forney and Jyoti Thottam “The New Idea Labs: As more firms send research to India and China, could the U.S. fall behind?” Time Jan 31, 2005: A6.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “Happy anniversary? (politics and economy of India).” The Economist August 16, 1997: 17.

[7] Ibid.

[8] “India, Pakistan swap nuke plants list.” United Press International Jan 1, 2003: 1008001w0320.

[9] “Race to the finish; Warheads and missiles. (What's in the Indian and Pakistani stockpiles).” The Economist Jan 19, 2002.

[10] “More weapons, please: India and Pakistan. (arms buildup).” The Economist Dec 16, 1995: 34.

[11] “Friends. (India, Pakistan, United States relations).” The New Republic Jan 14, 2002: 7.

[12] Ali, M. M. “With U.S. prodding behind the scenes, confidence-building measures continue.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Jan-Feb 2005: 37.

[13] “Progress, perhaps: America, India and Pakistan.” The Economist April 16, 1994: 36.

[14] Adiga, Aravind, Aryn Baker, Ghulam Hasnain and Alex Perry. “A Glimmer of Hope: After decades of darkness, can the peace talks planned between India and Pakistan save Kashmir?” Time International (Asia Edition) Jan 19, 2004: 14.

[15] “India-Pakistan relations hinge on pipeline. (UPI Top Stories).” UPI NewsTrack Jan 31, 2005: NA.