Part 1: From the Drawing Board: Reflections on Mind and Ideas
PART I. Alchemy
In junior high school, Mr. Smith, the earth sciences teacher, told us that, “Water is the universal solvent.” This was a science class, the domain of precision. We were dealing with objective truth, with things that were empirically verifiable.
Mr. Smith had piqued my interest. The idea of water as a solvent was obvious, but ubiquity had placed it beneath conscious awareness. What is a solvent but an agent that when introduced to another causes its disintegration?
This seemingly innocuous idea catalyzed in my thoughts a perceptual revision of the world. Suddenly everything—material and immaterial—was a composite that was subject to disintegration. And what was that “perceptual revision” itself but the disintegration of my previous and relatively more ignorant view of the world by a simple idea that had acted upon it as a solvent?
Of course, as that world-view dissolved, an ostensibly more accurate revision asserted itself. But according to the principle, the revision had to be equally vulnerable to dissolution.
The concept of solvents applied to the world of the mind, that much was clear. The metaphor became the paradigm and was driving the alignment of its ramifications.
What exactly were the mental equivalents of chemical solvents and the things they dissolved? These had to be ideas. There was, therefore, a whole chemistry of ideas. Ideas could be inert or they could be combustible. They could be stable or unstable. Ideas could be soluble or insoluble. They could compose and decompose; be catalysts, like the idea of solvents had been. Most importantly, ideas could be neutral, or have positive or negative charges; they could be polarized.
Functionally, ideas viewed as chemical elements and reactions could be seen as on- and off- switches, as triggers, as medicines, as balms, as poisons, as incendiaries. Ideas could affect people like opiates and narcotics, like tranquilizers or stimulants. The analogy seemed completely coextensive. It all made sense and was fascinating.
Had Mr. Smith noticed my vacant expression, he would probably have assumed that it was due to adolescent distraction. Instead, my thoughts had gone off in pursuit of the full extent and boundaries of the metaphorical implications. Ideas, like chemicals, I realized, deserved their own periodic table.
Somewhat more disconcertingly, I had become aware of ideas as things independent of the flesh they inhabited, things certainly capable of running the show for reasons that had nothing to do with the appearance, the gender, or the ethnicity of a person, or with the word or image used to contain and transmit them. They are active elements operating powerfully in the metaphysical dimension that I would learn is known as the noösphere.
In this view of ideas, people are just crucibles and test tubes and beakers. Skulls are laboratory glassware carried on primate bodies driven by reptilian brain stems.
When you interact with someone, or an image or text, the mix or compound of ideas in that beaker is what you are really seeing and hearing. Speech, text, and image store, and transmit elemental ideas. They are splashing solvents and catalysts, stable, unstable, and polarized elements, into your own lab-glass head. No power in the world can prevent their entry and subsequent reactions.
That is what Mr. Smith was about when he poured this idea into a classroom full of beakers—our minds. In my case, at least, the idea of solvents acted as a solvent, and then as a catalyst of further reactions. This is what all teachers, parents, politicians, friends, counselors, pundits, and institutions are about doing.
Unfortunately, knowing what is happening or that it is happening, is no protection. A person may think that being conscious of the process is tantamount to being defended, or “inoculated,” against ideas as active agents, but such is not the case. On the contrary, it is a delusion, one of many delusions inherent in consciousness, that blinds a person to the fact of its happening, and this is yet another of the ideo-chemical reactions of which I was becoming aware. Seeing, reading, listening and hearing with comprehension is tantamount to getting the full dosage.
Several years afterwards, in college, we learned that, for ages already, philosophers have been admonishing people: “Know Yourself!” But knowing that our heads are beakers containing some stable, some unstable, some potentially volatile mixtures of ideas made this admonition patently absurd. Which of these ideas in the mix was to form a stable basis from which to evaluate the others?—particularly when one considers the fact that all of those ideas are reactive elements in and interactive components of one and the same dynamical system: the ecology of mind.
If all human beings are ambulatory beakers containing complex ecologies of volatile ideological processes, then where within that is the inert and ultimate standard from which to evaluate all the rest? That there could be such a thing was contradicted by the metaphor. This would have to be some non- or super-human eye, looking and judging from a perspective outside the noösphere.
It seemed obvious that religions had been contrived to play this part. Their authority, their essential reality, to my view, collapsed with that realization.
There is no sentient eye in the universe behind which some volatile ideological soup isn't roiling and spattering; and that can only mean that there is no objective truth.
But for every ideological cauldron in a human body there are subjective truths; albeit, impermanent ones. Truths that are more or less transient. Any so-called truths would have to be the "heaviest" elements (by the metaphorical weight of social and cultural convention) or the most stable ideas, or complexes of ideas; those that dominate and endure at least long enough to manifest themselves in some form of expression through the body: in the emotions, on the face, in the behavior, speech, in writing, or in images. These subjective and relative truths are the ideas and complexes of ideas that constitute the beliefs, the values, and the assumptions—the structural elements of mind.
These transient truths, these passing shadows, are the structural elements of the cultures of humanity.
And these relatively persistent truths, the pillars of our cultures, can at any time be dissolved; for example, by a capable humorist, or by that supreme solvent: time.
PART II. From Complexity: Duality
It is an almost automatic behavior of the mind to apply a bipartite frame to the conceptualization of any phenomenon—things, after all, are only knowable by contrast with other things. Consciousness distinguishes itself from nothingness and imputes to itself existence only by contrast to the physical self, in the primal generation of two from one.
These bipartite frames are variously called dichotomies, or binaries, and they create artificial oppositions, choices, dilemmas, and pairings of concepts that by this very imposed association come to entail the implication of antagonism.
It is very important to realize that these conceptual pairings may not reflect actual paired conditions in nature. Not only that, mind accomplishes this ideational mitosis in a matrix of oversimplification which is as likely to result in fallacies of false premises, such as false dichotomies, as it is likely to constitute a functional model analogous to real circumstances, states, or conditions.
I view this as the metaphor of the coin—the tendency to think that all matters can be reduced and composed onto the opposed faces of one dichotomy. Because the universe, the mind, society, ecology, and culture are all dynamical systems of overwhelming complexity, the human mind grapples with an understanding of them by first reducing them through the application of simplifying assumptions, like the metaphor of the coin, and this is always a gamble with equal odds of being accurate with regard to any instantaneous static state of any one isolated facet of these systems. The fact that these systems are dynamic, not static, is customarily and blithely assumed away.
Regardless, of all these deficiencies, the human brain appears to have no recourse other than to try to reduce matters to binaries.
A large part of the appeal of binaries is founded upon the mutually definitive dynamic that operates between the two juxtaposed facets by virtue of logic: the act of postulating the obverse brings the reverse into existence by the dynamic of logical contrast. What the obverse is defined to be instantaneously excludes and therefore sequesters to the reverse all that which is excluded. At base, once the binary is framed, it engenders consequent reasoning by disjunctive syllogism: either p or q; not p, therefore q.
Although under certain carefully defined and qualified circumstances this may be valid, it is also irresistibly seductive, and invites minds to indulge in applying the formula in waves that radiate outward across categories: “us or them; not us, therefore them; we are good; they are not us; therefore they are bad; we are right; they are not us; therefore, they are wrong”; et cetera. As the process cascades, it creates an entity on the reverse side of the coin that is everything that the obverse is not, and attributes a range of potentially devastating characteristics to it by simple disjunctive imperative.
The disjunctive cascade rolls out automatically and seems to answer a range of questions with enough logical certainty that somatic markers are likely to be created by the subsystems of the brain to reinforce the conclusions so generated; that is to say that visceral feelings of certainty are secreted to psychically reinforce such conclusions.
It is important to remember, however, that the entire process proceeds within the mind and without reference to external proofs, and therefore is likely to possess an exclusively human reality.
PART III. The Source of Motive Force
Binaries are major players: as heuristics, they determine courses of action with great efficiency; collectively, the binaries compose higher order systems in the mind. The antagonism inherent in the disjunction drives the binary like a dynamo. They are polarized ideas that function like logical machetes for cutting through tortured tangles of ideological undergrowth.
Disjunctive framing is incomparably effective at arriving at the fast provisional conclusions required for making decisions and taking action. Through its reductions, ideological complexity is reduced to a single antagonistic pair as quickly as circumstances demand. As I learned in Mr. Smith's class, consistent with the notion that ideas interact in complex ways like chemicals according to their ideological properties comes the aspect that some ideas could, like water, act on other ideas like a solvent. Such ideas can and do dissolve other ideas and are, thus, functionally tyrannical.
Polarization, or the binary disjunctive, also functions like a solvent. In a fast process, it reduces the immediately relevant universe to a pair of antagonistic alternatives, dissolves one of them by the process described in the preceding section, and leaves the other to authorize action almost instantly. The process requires virtually no conscious thought whatsoever, and thus is a transformation that leads to fast and decisive action.
The binary, in the context of American culture, holds that fast and decisive action is positive, while its reverse, indecision or inaction, is negative.
Beside such stable binaries, there are ideologically unstable binaries which cause various degrees of chaotic perturbation in different societies. One of these is the unstable binary: Accomplishment / Process. In the context of American culture, the polarity of this binary is unstable: it vacillates, or oscillates, leading some to pursue as superior absorption in process, while leading others to pursue manifest or durable accomplishment—the diametric opposite.
In any particular culture, innumerable unstable binaries may be found wreaking havoc among the stable ones.
The inherently hierarchical nature of polarity itself—an ordinate positive obverse, and a subordinate negative reverse—is the source of the motive force that makes it a binary machine.
PART IV. Small Binary Machines
A culture, then, is a relatively durable complex of such small binary machines—an ideological compound that comprises an extensive array of hierarchically-determined binaries. The determinations, like the binaries themselves, are durable, perhaps by virtue of their emplacement as functional inter-operative components of the large machine that is the culture.
To clarify with several examples, the American culture has positioned the following as relatively stable polarized binaries, and has determined that one facet of each pair is positive, or operationally dominant: the idea of more as superior to less; the idea of material over spirit; the idea of individual over group; of action over thought; of new over old; of now over then; of fast over slow; of us over them; of might over right; of appearance over content, and façade over truth; of rich over poor; of white over black; of ends over means; of young over old; and of fun over practically everything else. The full array is too lengthy to list here—even if that were possible!
PART V. Enculturation
The machines of culture, ironically, take on lives of their own—and lives not necessarily aligned with the best interest of the species. Just as small binary machines compose machines called cultures, so too do cultures compose the larger machine of the global human community. The cultures are systems of ideas and valuations that often compete with one another for dominance and power in the larger sphere of the human community. This accounts for the fact that this larger machine of the global human community is and has always been characterized by threats of and actual violence, slaughters, murders, rapes, genocides, and mass-enslavements of both the physical and the economic kinds.
All of the people enculturated to one cultural complex become facsimiles of the cultural paradigm, but not true stereotypes (in the original sense of being exact duplicates). This hearkens back to part one. By virtue of enculturation, the beakers that are the brains of people are, for the purpose of illustration, the identical piece of laboratory glass among them all, but the individual minds are not identical by virtue of their contents. Each fully enculturated brain may be conceptualized as the (approximately) identical beaker, while each individual mind contains a unique ideological mixture.
In attempting to produce perfect stereotypes, cultures encounter difficulties arising from: a) physiological variations among the brains of the population; b) imperfections in the process of enculturation; c) the interference wrought by antagonistic ideas and competing cultures; d) free and divergent ideas, strings of ideas, and partial and complete ideological complexes such as religions and national, ethnic, and gender identities. If not for these difficulties, each individual enculturated in the same cultural matrix would be as alike to all the others as peas of the same pod. The only differences between members of the species would be manifest in physiological variations, even as mannerisms, gestures, and expressions cleaved to one norm.
PART VI. Heroes and Identities
The hero is a cultural paradigm, not a specific (as in species) one. The hero is an idiosyncratic embodiment of his or her cultural complex. The hero is socially constructed to manifest a preponderance of redeeming culturally positive attributes. This is a quantitative matter. The hero comprises a mixture of positively and negatively charged attributes, but is redeemed by a quantitative or qualitative preponderance of the positive. A hero constructed entirely of positive attributes would exceed the boundaries of credibility established by the culture for adult members of the societal group.
The array of positive attributes embodied in the hero-image are the points of adherence and communion for a culturally homogeneous audience. The cultural identities of the audience members comprise that same array of culturally determined attributions, more or less, so the audience cannot help but assimilate to the hero, there being no salient difference between themselves and the hero. Members of the audience are, potentially, duplicates or stereotypes of the identical cultural complex and thus, avatars themselves. The enculturated audience melds with the properly constructed hero like water into water.
In hero stories, as the hero dominates the extra-cultural world as manifested by various nemeses, and does so by virtue of the strength and power inherent in the shared cultural complex of positive attributes that he or she embodies, the audience is confirmed in its faith in its culture, and individuals are confirmed in their identities. Those cultural attributes inform, invest, and inspire the gender identities, national identity, and the range of socially acceptable persona-identities of the audience.
PART VII. Societal Dynamics
The positive attributes of the cultural array are the touchstones of social and societal communion. They confer upon their bearers existence itself, within the socio-cultural context. The greater the number of culturally positive attributes displayed, the greater the social substance, ontological status, and power of the one who manifests them.
The one who displays evidence of a full array of culturally positive traits is said by members of that milieu to have character. In the event of an encounter with an individual or group that fails to manifest a sufficient number of positive culture traits, a defensive reflex erects in-group/out-group boundaries (in accordance with strategic polarization, as discussed in part two). This defensive reflex runs down the full array of culturally positive attributes defining disjunctively the out-one, or out-group, by contrast, building an exclusionary boundary around them.
People, and characters in texts, without these cultural traits become progressively insubstantial, or unreal. To the extent of the lack, these characters drift toward social insignificance, toward social invisibility. Such a defensive social reflex is automatic and tends to run to completion; at which point, the perceived outsider or out-group has been defined by an array that is everything that the in-group is not. It is an identification constructed by attributing to the individual or group so objectified the inverse of the cultural paradigm. It is inevitable that this entails for the one(s) objectified a potentially lethal loss of ontological status and moral protection. Such objectification often reaches the extreme binary determination: “We are human; he/she/they are not,” with tragic dehumanization resulting. It is the bedrock binary of social construction: “it exists / it does not exist.” Once this point has been reached, the objectified character has lost all ontological status and no longer merits human compassion. Such an “outed” character may be utterly ignored, or cruelly used; murder is freed from its moral sanction; the killing, the torture, the exile of the out-one(s) no longer carries moral or ontological significance.
Although the enculturated mind is a beaker made of the rigid glass of the culture and full of ideas in which every kind of chemical reaction known to science is occurring somewhere, the visible face may be impassive, and the mouth silent. Nothing in the appearance of a person can or could, under normal circumstances, expose to view the mad chemistry of the ideas in his or her mind. People have no recourse but to judge one another by what is manifest and perceptible: the appearance, the behavior, the words; and these, like the culturally determined array of polarized binaries, are mostly conventional signs expressive of socio-culturally sanctioned ideas.
Within a cultural paradigm, appearances, behaviors, and verbal expressions are formalized to express specific ideas and identities. The ideas associated with visual and aural signs are matters of cultural convention. They cleave to cultural value judgments. For each member of the society, generally speaking, to the extent that the ideas associated with the appearance are not belied by the ideas associated with the behavior or those associated with the language used, a person is adjudged honest, or sincere, or true, and will be accorded the trust and credibility of an in-group member. It is basic social competence to harmonize one's appearance, behavior, and verbal expression. Conversely, to the extent that any of the ideas transmitted by the visual or aural signals presented by a person seem dissonant, unease will be triggered in response, and social trust and credibility will dissolve, dissipate, or fail to materialize.
There are ways to camouflage such dissonance. The relative strength of any one of the three signal sources—appearance, behavior, language—can effectively squelch the others. Ultra-massive ideas conveyed in words can render deficiencies or dissonances in appearance and behavior negligible. A blatant example of this can be found in the case of Abraham Lincoln and his 1863 Gettysburg Address. The words he spoke were powerful enough to reconfigure the collective national ideology, and they rendered insignificant by contrast his humble appearance and unpleasant speaking voice.
PART VIII. From Culture to Species
Years have passed since those first years in college. I know that complexes of ideas called ideologies—the cultures, the disciplines, and the religions—construct whole, internally consistent worlds that structure the minds of people; that each such world is an artificial construction distinct in ways from others and in competition with them; and that all these are distinct from the nonhuman, acultural, natural world. In the context of the latter, acultural world, humanity is actually one species, not the seething tangle of warring tribes that results from ideological conflict. I know that these artificial worlds comprise interactive chemistries that create dynamic ideological ecologies of the mind, and that no one of these artificial worlds constitutes a valid basis from which to judge another.
Since Mr. Smith's class in junior high school, I have known that knowing of this, being conscious of it, is no inoculation. The ideological processes of mind occur beneath the level of consciousness. But the fact that investigating these matters does not confer immunity is not a good reason to retreat from it. Compelling puzzles remain unanswered.
For all my preoccupation with ideas it might be thought that I had forgotten the human body. Such is not the case. People, by their behavior, make this impossible to forget for any length of time. Here is another thing I know: that beneath the cultural beakers and the ideological alchemy, humans are animals driven by hungers, and by such strong emotions as fear. We are one of the five species of Great Apes with whom we share membership in the family hominidae of the order of the Primates—but with one critical difference: the lost capacity for true contentment.
The complacency of our cousins, the chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and bonobos, is striking by contrast to the restlessness of homo sapiens. It is the large, sophisticated neocortex of the human brain and its expanded capacity for consciousness, memory, language, awareness, and thought, that accounts for the difference.
In humans, the neocortex supports the emergent human mind, while the mammalian and reptilian brain complexes beneath it and immediate to our sensory engagement with the natural world sustain the physical human animal. If these latter brain complexes had never been surmounted by the enlarged neocortex, humans would never have left the forests of Africa. They would be, ceteris paribus, as the chimpanzees remain: social animals content with their ecological niche. But with the enlargement of the cortex came the emergence of the mind and its ideologies and capacity for idealization; and consequently, the engine of movement in discontent.
PART IX. Bifurcation and Plasticity
It is the ideologies, the cultures, the religions, and the disciplines that conceive, frame, and construct the systems of mind—the ideals and the complexes of ideals—that drive psychic bifurcation; and it is the bifurcation, or branching of consciousness, that is the genesis of the dualism to which we have been referring all along—the genesis of a complementary light and shadow world of mind that is the birth of goals and striving.
Before the bifurcation of mind occurs, the human animal is immersed in reality and at one with it, like the other apes. After the bifurcation, the here-and-now of the physical body fixed in time and place loses ontological status as it comes to exist as the less desirable moiety in juxtaposition with a constructed conceptual world of ideals. Thereafter, the projected or envisioned universe of homelands, utopias, Gardens of Eden, idealized communities, and of satiation and contentment, grows in power in the psychological ecology of mind to the detriment of the actual reality of physical experience.
The existence of the idealizations—and the powerful emotion called hope that charges and gilds them—denigrates the actual so that the negatively-charged emotions of dissatisfaction, discontentment, dislocation, and alienation become associated with actual physical circumstances. It is the dynamic of binary polarization. Mental focus and energy shift toward the ideal and away from the actual, reducing psychic presence and efficacy in the body. The powerful emotions of hope, faith, and desire continue to drive the bifurcation of mind as they charge positively the ideal world, the future, and such goals as pleasure, harmony, happiness, adventure, fun, fantasy, satisfaction, fulfillment, and homecoming. By the force inherent in disjunctive polarization, the complementary negative and equally powerful emotions of disillusionment, disaffection, and disengagement drive the psychic energy, or spirit, away from the actual physical circumstances of the individual. This polarization is the source of dynamic energy that drives the individual to strive away from the actual and toward the ideal. In the process, contact with reality is progressively diminished. The psychic friction of engagement between mind and the physical world is lost as emotions lubricate the interface. To the extent—and it is a broad spectrum of degrees—that emotions are aroused in response to ideals and become strongly associated with them, rational thought processes are squelched.
Idealizations are, in fact, highly evocative of emotions, and highly likely to be strongly charged with them. The individual driven by a strongly bifurcated, ideal-real mind, gives up driving and is driven, often quite predictably. Grifters, salespeople, politicians, propagandists, lawyers, authors, and the proselytizers of various disciplines, faiths and religions, all know of this vulnerability and exploit it as a tool of their trade.
As individuals become removed from reality and immersed in a bifurcated world, the means of crossing from the shadow world of hunger into the illuminated world of satiation become paramount. To escape from the unfulfilling actuality of the present to the fulfilled ideal of the future, ways and means of transformation and translocation become supremely important—journeys, migrations, metamorphoses, and programs, designs, schemes, and plans to effect change, such as missions and quests, are initiated. The conceptualization of human life departs from metaphors that entail stasis or contentment to replace them with metaphors of journeys, voyages, and metamorphoses. The bifurcated mind posits the ideal against the real, and between them is born the concept of universal plasticity. Everything is plastic and subject to transformation, metamorphosis, to re-shaping, re-modeling, re-creating—even to every dimension of the human being: body, soul, personality, and identity.
The world is contrasted to the mind in the ultimate polarized binary in which the mind sequesters the positive charge to itself and its envisioning, to its ideas and ideals. On the other side of the coin is a negatively charged world from which people are detached by virtue of their minds, and through which they go adventuring. This conceptualization crystallizes and is preserved in the anti-natural cultural array. The contentment of the apes, their embodied lives in their ancestral groves, is betrayed and abandoned. Humanity has forgotten that it is one species of ape, preferring instead to see itself as a race of demigods. Humanity is descended from Cain, the other apes from Abel.
The metaphors of journeys travel roads, those of voyages sail the seas, and both traverse a world, a sea, of change. The individuated self assimilates to its idealizations, and by disjunctive framing, all other people assimilate to the world.
PART X. Ideals Are Solvents, Emotions Are Narcotics
In its idealizing, each individual self conceives of itself as one unique paradigm, sui generis, distinct from and superior to the rest of humanity, while the rest of humanity becomes an element of the landscape or sea that is traversed. As such, people are reduced to obstacles or objects to be used; they become semi-transparent ghosts, pernicious pests, or resources to be exploited. Idealizations are solvents of realistic conceptions. The connectedness of humanity as one community is an idea that is dissolved in them.
To those whose identities assimilate to idealized heroes, and whose lives are idealized as journeys, or quests, the world is reduced to a theater of uncertainty, complexity, and threat; its dimensions are chaotic, dynamic, all in flux, and there is risk inherent in every passing instant.
Hope is an emotion that blinds to all but its vision just as the physiological sense of sight overwhelms the processing of the other sensory stimuli. In the same way that sensory input from the eyes overpowers the processing of information from the other senses, so does a strong emotion like hope squelch other, more cortical, more rational thought processes, and motivate with a sense of inherent value and self-justification that defies rational analysis—crushes it, in fact.
There is what I call the “romance of the singularity,” for example. The emotion of hope, like the better-researched emotions of anxiety and fear, throttles the brain down to an intensified but radically narrowed focus that quiets other brain systems in favor of presence. In this state, the brain sees the one chance, the one possibility, that inspired the hope, while fogging out all highly relevant but peripheral considerations. Take for example, the typical state lottery in the United States. A player's odds of winning range from 20 million to one (20,000,000 : 1), up to 120 million to one (120,000,000 : 1); still, the player sees in the pinpoint focus of the narrowed mind's eye only the one chance of winning because it is the one that triggers the flood of slow neurotransmitters that we commonly call hope. The emotion fogs out the entire field of 20,000,000 losing chances and the extremely high probability of failure.
A very similar process occurs when a person “falls in love.”
On the opposite side of this coin is the “tragedy of the singularity” whereby a single scapegoat is hanged to expiate collective guilt or outrage.
All expediencies become glorified along with the goal of reaching the envisioned ideal state as if the emotion bathed equally all of the ideas, or neural networks, that fire along with the goal. The quest, the journey, the mission, require mobility; thus, freedom is glorified as precious in itself, and everything associated with freedom basks in glory along with it.
PART XI. Journey as Entitlement, Goal as Undefined
So, malcontented humans postulate idealized outcomes, and neurochemicals acting under the rubric of emotions like faith and hope charge them with immanence and ontological weight, seemingly at the expense of the ontological status of actual physical circumstances. Life becomes conceptualized and culturally preserved as a journey down a road or a voyage over a sea that leads toward the so-called “dream” of the individual. Because of the crystallization of this conceptualization in culturally durable form, the journey metaphor is enculturated throughout the population as one component ideology, and its goals therefore become matters of cultural entitlement. That life is a journey is enculturated, but for many, the object of the journey—the dream—is not articulated. For these, it is purely the discontent with actual circumstances that drives them on their journey away from the status quo ante. It is an orientation and a motivation that comes into existence as a logical consequent of the original bifurcation, the emotionally-charged polarity: ideal=good / real=bad. Heuristic corollaries cascade from it, a few of which include: “This is not good enough for me”; “Anywhere is better than here”; “Anything is better than this”; “I'm too good to settle for second-best”; “Why not? What have I got to lose?” None of these has any goal other than to justify the leaving behind of present circumstances in favor of moving onward, moving forward—the inherent assumption being that all movement is progress toward betterment. (In fact, such a goalless journey contradicts the connotations of the journey by road metaphor in having no navigational component. The goalless journey is better suited to the metaphor of a voyage on the trackless seas where winds play the vital role in “navigation.”)
The malcontents who seek the undefined ideal in the general terms of a quest for happiness, or fulfillment, employ the language of adventure, opportunity, and the delving of mystery to justify their journey. Some seek to justify their amorphous journeys further in terms of exploration, or enriching discovery. In most cases, the desire to move from the real toward the ideal is construed as a liminal phenomenon of metamorphosis, of becoming new, more, or better than what one actually is. It is always a forsaking, a leaving, a going, an ending, an abandonment, a molting, a shedding, a rejection. It is always a roaming, a seeking, an ambition, a lusting, a harvesting. It is always a devaluing of what is here, now, in hand, and an overvaluing of what is potential, ideal, envisioned. And in one obvious way, it is always tragic.
PART XII. If I Am Not A Hero, Then What Am I? In literary terms, journeys are defined by the actions of a hero or heroine who overcomes monumental challenges in both cognitive (spiritual) and physical domains. I am no hero, and my goal(s) are not heroic. Albeit, none can live through life without overcoming obstacles and achieving certain goals, I do not believe that this process, or arriving at true knowledge itself, is served by framing it in hoary mythological terms. If, then, I am not a hero on a journey, then what is my identity?
First of all, the problems of conception and naming: the idea of vagabondage, or mendicancy, initially appealing, was finally understood to be both socially frightening to the vested interests and denotative of directionlessness: of the goalless journey. Vagabonds, mendicants, gypsies, hobos, and the like, evoke fear and anxiety responses in people who own land and property, which the majority of Americans do. Taking as one's identity such a mien would initiate in others a reflexive rejection of that persona. If perceived as a vagabond, one would be subject to the defensive and reflexive disjunctive objectification that was described in part seven. The "vagabond" would be sequestered to the status of outsider or a member of some out-group, stripped of ontological status, deprived of social credibility, and become persona non grata. It is the identity of the pilgrim as one who travels or wanders yet with a valid destination in mind that is the best choice of capsid. The pilgrim is an archetype—a prominent figure in mythology from ancient times to the birth of the American nation. The pilgrim's goals are always inherently, socially, and spiritually worthy. It is the appearance of having a valid goal that justifies and sanctions the wandering pilgrim in the socio-cultural matrix.
PART XIII. Active Principles as Function MachinesA collection of the best words in the dictionary cannot much beguile the mind if the words are put down completely at random, but organize them in a way as elementary as rhythmically, and they begin to be suffused with poetry. Organization is the essence of beauty.
The elementary-level algebra teacher draws a box on the chalkboard and says that it is a function machine. S/he says that numbers go in one side, are processed by some particular function, and that which is fabricated comes out the other side. Fascinating. And strangely beautiful. A box that houses an active principle, or function, becomes elevated to the status of a machine; and being a machine, it becomes suffused with the beauty of organization.
It is the awakening awareness of the presence of an active, functional principle within something that is the essence of aesthetic appreciation. That function residing within machines is akin to what we call spirit.
Imagine this: both people and texts can be conceptualized as function machines. In both, ideas go in, are processed through active principles, and come out changed. In texts, we read the long string of words from start to finish in order to discover what the function is—or in terms of more advanced algebra, what the functions are—that inhabit that function machine. The text might include vivid description and rich detail, and it may be couched in the best words the language has to offer, but it will not excite and satisfy the mind if it is not inhabited by a fascinating function or functions that can be recognized or derived; in that case, the text will remain a string of words suffused with poetry. A text that composes a story may be, and perhaps must be viewed as a machine of fabrication.
I read John Krakauer's narrative recounting the Herculean trial he posed himself when he went alone to climb the tall rock known as the Devil's Thumb in Alaska. The text is well-crafted. It is suffused with poetry. In the end, however, it is unsatisfying. The main character in the story comes through the trial unchanged. The Devil's Thumb is surmounted, and diminished in stature as a result, but there is no transformation, no metamorphosis, no apotheosis of the character or the nemesis as a result of the trial. The story begins in the fashion of a heroic journey, but ends up dissolving. Some dimension of the story contained an idea that acted as a solvent to reduce the entire exploit to insignificance. But whatever that may have been, what is important is that the text is a box without a function. It is not a machine. Krakauer simply ends his story by writing, “The euphoria. . .faded, and an unexpected melancholy took its place. The people I chatted with. . .didn't seem to doubt that I'd been to the top of the Thumb, they just didn't much care. [. . .] Somehow, it didn't add up to the glorious transformation I'd imagined in April.”
If a text, like Krakauer's, goes only as far as to present a socially valid character enduring stoically a succession of hardships, it will be limited to being a simple template, or function, of hero celebration. Hero celebration is an ancient template in which a hero, as avatar of the culture and exemplar of the people, endures and overcomes successive challenges and defeats the nemeses of society. All of the people sharing the cultural identity of the exemplar are uplifted by the indomitable hero to whom they assimilate. It is an ancient pattern and one easily recognized. This particular function machine is one of enculturation. It does not stimulate adults who are already enculturated to it as much as children who are in the midst of being enculturated by it. A great many American television programs follow the pattern closely. In them, American avatar-heroes have a duty to society and are completely willing to sacrifice themselves in its performance. This is phrased as “having a job to do, and by all means, getting the job done”—the ultimate statement of mission over morals, a small binary machine in the constituent array of the cultural function machine. These avatars of American culture—be they policemen, detectives, crime scene investigators, psychics, geniuses, soldiers, or leader-figures—display some or all of the traits that constitute The American Hero: 1) devotion to the Protestant work ethic; 2) selflessness to the point of being a willing martyr; 3) saintly compassion and generosity; 4) a sense of high moral justice and righteousness; 5) amenability to seamless and fluid teamwork; 6) physical beauty, strength and endurance; 7) fantastic mental and psychic acuity and powers of reasoning; 8) a strategically brilliant mind; and 9) a robust catalog of romantic poses. This type of story is a celebration of the culture by itself; it is epideictic, or celebratory. It is a very basic function machine: The characters go into the texts as potential heroes or demigods, and they come out as bona fide heroes and demigods, saved or redeemed by their cultural traits. The function is to demonstrate by tests and trials the superiority of the cultural values and characteristics embodied in the avatars.
Needless to say, the function of the textual machine is not limited to epideictic celebrations of cultural values and their embodiments—unless profit and fame are the motives of the author, for these are perennially popular.
A text that is a story will unfold a series of occurrences, but the series of occurrences will be random and meaningless—like that list of the best words in the dictionary—if there is not some function, some logic, to rationalize them. There must be present a structure that imparts or reflects a logic, for it is this logic that supplies the codec of rationalization that organizes all that is and all that happens in the text. In the simple hero celebrations, the occurrences are trials and tribulations in the form of social and cultural nemeses in a thousand manifestations. In a story, however, elements or characters go in one way and comes out differently according to the function of the story. The series of occurrences must be formative, transformative, or informative.
PART XIV. Pilgrims, Heroes, Adventurers, Drifters
Certainly, all that has been written here holds as true for the pilgrim as it does for the other archetypes of the questing hero, the opportunistic adventurer, and the drifter. In all cases, the identity of the character is generic. Each is an archetype who may be virtually anonymous. It is the manifest goal of each—the pilgrimage, the quest, the adventure, the search for self—that is the true protagonist, not the person of the character. Each of these archetypal motives, even if represented to others in the person of a single individual, is a collective endeavor—the search for nemeses to conquer, for better lands and climates, for wealth and power, the search for true knowledge and enlightenment, the search for destiny.
Heroes journey for the glory of their culture. In a pilgrimage, one pilgrim dies and another carries on. Adventurers are followed by more adventurers. And since consciousness began, humans have sought to know their identity and purpose in the universe by wandering. The motive always transcends the character. Each one moves for some greater purpose.
Of course, human purpose is not by any means encompassed by these four archetypes. The range of human purpose is a wide spectrum of degrees that descends from the rarefied atmosphere of the spiritual into the depths of depravity. By personal inclination and moral compass, I am repelled by the color-range that departs too far from the moral, spiritual range. Human behavior that seems more animal than human seems to me unworthy of recording. Lust, violence, sex, insanity—all popular matters in fiction writing, to be sure—seem no more than stories by the limbic brain for the purpose of stimulating the limbic brain, the emotions.
De gustibus non est disputandum. There is no accounting for matters of taste.
There can be no doubt that each of the archetypes is human and is driven by and for lust, violence, sex, and insanity. These are inherent to the human animal; but to my mind, the reason for writing at all is to record for the sake of universal identity and understanding the dimension of humanity that transcends its animal basis, not to wallow in it. The purpose of writing and of reading and of art in general is not merely glandular. I believe that the purpose must be to bring the enlightenment of knowledge and understanding to human minds by which they may become more aware and more responsible small function machines in the ultimate function machine that is the universe.
Unlike a hero's quest, an adventurer's expeditions, or a drifter's wanderings, a pilgrimage may be as transgenerational as any great migration. A migration is a pilgrimage. Individual monarch butterflies are not in any way, shape, or form subject to heroic conceptualization. They are undifferentiable, like the honeybees, and rightly so. In them, and in all of the migratory animals, the species moves to seek its own perpetuation. Individuals are only so by the intervention of the anthropocentric human brain as it asserts its dichotomies. The pilgrim moves for powerful reasons that he or she cannot completely understand, as an agent of the species, not the culture. The pilgrimage is not a journey, not an adventure, and not a wandering. Confused individuated human beings lust after the status of the hero, or the adventurer, for its material and social rewards; less so after the status of a pilgrim or a drifter, although even these succumb to such desires. In reality, there are no individuals, only the species pursuing perpetuation. Cultures are just one of their means.
People move as agents of their species, or as agents of their culture. Otherwise, like our brother apes, we move only for meals and mates.
