Give Kant a Chance'

Foxglove

 Yesterday we risked an emotional breakdown by mentioning and then using a sociobiologist description of the origins of jealousy in us hominids to explore the difficulties Schlegel had in his attempt to emancipate the flesh in his personal life and in his novel, Lucinde. Yesterday was an uncomfortable and frustrating experience.

 So let's get this straight. Three to four million years ago at the moment when our hominids and chimpanzees went their separate ways, the men of the creature that became us people started getting bigger and more aggressive and our children started taking longer and longer to leave the nest to fend for themselves. Even back then, apparently the males of our species spent a lot of time obsessing on their Paternal line. If a chap had to put a lot of time and money into rearing a child, even if that child only had one leg, that child had better be his and not the Pool Boy's, or whatever. It wasn't just boys, the girls too had to spend valuable time raising children and the prospect of losing a prime source of food and protection inclined girls toward aggressive behaviors whenever hubby's eye wandered. Sociobiologists seem to be stuck in the 1950's and have of course unashamedly concluded that one of the results of this dramatic biological change to tall men short women was the emergence of jealousy in us people. Worth remembering that only 10 to 12 thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens moved from hunter-gathering to agriculture, a change that was accompanied by increased stratification, property rights, accumulations of inheritable wealth in our expanding societies and monotheistic linear thinking that produces such abominations as triadic thought processes that demand the discovery, or invention, of a cohesive whole on the straight line that sociobiologists and the frail lust after.

 The obvious question is this : What would Kant say to the hubris of sociobiologists?

 He'd stamp his Lutheran foot, he'd say "F-that" and remind these inheritors of the enlightenment that the existence of an internal law does not mean biology, it points to something beyond the biology of an animal reaction to the visual of someone else boffing the girlfriend and  suggests we people put value on things that are much more than simply useful.

 Go ahead, say mean things about Kant's almost complete absence of a personal life, he was no Schopenhauer, but in my world the best reason to read and try to understand Kant, is the fluidity he demands from the Ten Commandment-esque quality of Newtonian mathematics, and the consequent attempts to find certainty in most cathedrals of learning that's led to us people becoming either commodities for, or the playthings of, an oligarchic class of sub-par hominids more closely related to the pre-ape Old World Monkeys such as the Olive Baboon, than is comfortable.

 We all know that Immanuel Kant might have had the odd glass of Port, thought beer a source of "taciturn fantasies and impolite behaviors," but otherwise he was a life long bachelor preferring the routine of a disciplined intellectual life to anything remotely resembling the patter of tiny feet. His views on marriage and sex was to advise a legally binding contract that maintained mutual respect rather than allowing individuals to be treated as mere objects.

 And Oh Yes! We're talking about who to blame for the disappearance of the enlightenment. 

 

Transcendental Structures. Jealousy?

Ice of Cards

 These pitiable days Class Structure is called Stratification. Why? Three reasons: (1) The Means of Production are less and less relevant to social scientists. (2) Chicken-shit professors petrified of being branded Marxist by American billionaires who wear their beaky hats backwards. (3) A Cell Phone in every ear. But rest assured, in the configuration of large modern, societies, class, as the divide between rich and poor, is alive and well because, since the advent of surplus as an often odious virtue our species has yet to learn how to live without class.

 The peoples of more modern societies can be divided into Somewhere People and Anywhere People. Somewhere People are wedded to a sense of place, they remain where they came from, they stare at strangers and talk about great-great-great grandpappy. Anywhere People, on the other hand, might have less than idyllic memories of the farm, their sense of place travels with them, New York, Oldham, Paris, Karachi, then retirement in Bury Saint Edmunds.

 This Somewhere/Anywhere divided is a class divide, whether positive or negative it's characterized by an almost instantly recognizable mentality. We can begin to call the distinction between Somewhere and Anywhere, Tory and Liberal.

 Confused? In the American Colonies, during the Revolutionary War the Tories supported the English Monarchy, specially in the Carolina's, Georgia and so on. In the USA as it is today, the Tory Somewhere People are represented by the RBHM. (The red beaky hat movement) They have a somewhere to re-invent, it's English Speaking, it's white skinned, it's Protestant.

 It's been argued by Evolutionary Psychologists that male jealousy is an evolved defense against what they call Paternity Uncertainty. I mention this because we have spent time with Friedrich von Schlegel, the author of a scandalous novel, Lucinde, which is about the emancipation of the flesh, the idea that sexual and intellectual freedom were inseparable, true freedom was a commingling of souls and bodies until some pain in the neck boy started getting jealous. Most of us might have come to terms with that, but Schlegel, to make himself feel better, decided to commingle with the conservative social values of white christian nationalism.

The point I'm trying to make might be clearer if we follow the meanings in the word sacred, and to do that we need to talk about boundaries. If there are no boundaries there is nothing sacred. Our friends, the Somewhere People, have a tighter understanding of the sacred and its boundaries. When it comes time for Somewhere People to defend their boys against Paternal Uncertainty, according to biblical scholarship, girls cannot be trusted which means that emancipation of the flesh is out of the question.

 Schlegel could go on all he wanted about freedom, and it might be that Anywhere People think of Freedom as an absence of boundaries but Somewhere People will not blush when they declare that without boundaries, Freedom is impossible. Without boundaries emancipation of the flesh is not possible because a trait in our transcendental structures that puts a premium on bi-parental parenting. Schlegel got himself baptized as a Catholic.

 Worth noting, in the USA there's a higher rate of births outside of marriage in rural areas (Mostly Somewheres)  than there are in Urban Areas (Mostly Anywheres.)

 

Sensitive Amygdala! Is That the Best You Got?

Location of the Amygdala in the Temporal Lobe

 We've seen how Friedrich von Schlegel, the German Romantic and horn-dog, as well as Sir Kenneth Clark, of Television, Civilization and other lordly spectacles both turned into super conservative and extremely irritating puddle-ducks in their later years. One way to look at it, they both felt an emptiness, an existential gap they needed to fill.

 We've asked the question "why" hundreds of thousands of times, shrugged a bit before having low down and cynical thoughts about the character and guilt ridden nature, the spoilt brattiness of the better off and advantaged who suddenly decide they need a life after death. We've bravely tried to understand approaches to the workings of the mind that sees it as a neurotic bundle of unfulfilled passions.  We've looked for answers in a number of other places and have essentially decided that Hunter Gatherers loved the moments of life too much to ever get bored.

 What we haven't done is turn any kind of corner that leads us down the path toward a visit to the priest, followed by an engagement to a triadic religious compromise, an embrace of conservative cultural norms. Tomorrow, if my sums are right, I'm 74 years old and I'm a person who has felt empty for at least 69 of those years and I still have an allergic reaction to the phrase conservative cultural norms . 

 The theory of an inevitable surrender to these norms would probably have better traction if we could find an alternative way of saying "conservative cultural norms." Currently the definition of conservative cultural norms is a tad inadequate, it includes, "The protection of the cultural heritage of a nation state" and the idea of culture "not defined by state boundaries" such as Welsh. What it needs to include is an idea of surrender exemplified by Schlegel, Clark and billions of others. If we do that it allows for the question "Is that the best you got?"

 My own favorite answer to this problem at the moment is: "I have a sensitive amygdala." 

The Spectacle and the Fetishism of stuff

1968 Barricades in Bordeaux 

 The lessons of "I love you! Oh! Say it with paving stones!" requires us to look at the night of May 10th, morning of May 11th 1968. It was the Night of the Barricades, when French Students and French Riot Police engaged in a battle of astonishing fury which resulted in a wave of public sympathy for the student cause and great dishonor for highly armed and brutish Police. French Industrial Unions declared a General Strike. In anticipation of the confrontation the students had built obstacles some of which could be set on fire, they tore up cobble stones, these were the paving stones of the "I love you" slogan.

 The Next two slogans refine the Situationist influences on 1968 relate to the workers and their unions:

 "Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life I've been a chump. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them."

 "Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century."

 In 1968 there were a number of large production facilities in and around Paris employing a huge numbers of unionized workers. Many of these workers had a Marxist sympathies, they were inclined toward a more socialist society and had been since the second half of the 1800's. There was an active Communist Party in France which had made up a high percentage of the French Resistance fighters in the Second World War. The French Communist Party along with other European Communist Parties had traditional and fraying ties with the Soviet Union. By 1968 Marxist thinkers had moved on from the corruptions of the Soviet Union and French Students contemptuously referred to members of the French Communist Party as The Stalinists. 

 "Down with the Stalinist carcass! Down with the recuperator cells!"

Recuperator cells in this context came from the Situationist understanding of the way in which often subversive and radical ideas were co-opted, absorbed, basically neutralized by mainstream, bourgeois society. And indeed, in the years that followed the uprisings of May '68 was widely commercialized.

 When thinking about the differences between student and worker action in that year, the workers addressed the desire to improve terms and conditions of work. The students many of whom were aware they were bound for middle management, not greatness, wanted society to change.

 The French Sociologist Alain Touraine, who taught at a new university built in the 1950's outside Paris called Nanterre, in his study of 1968 made the observation that as the structure of the Economy moved away from Industrial Production to Services, a post industrial society would be characterized by Social Movements rather than the industrial actions of unions looking for better working conditions.

 "In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society."

 We have the stuff, the Situationist influence suggested, what we want is a different sort of Spectacle. What's a spectacle, you ask. It's an understanding of stuff that doesn't see it as the work, the hopes, dreams, the essence of a man, but as an appearance, a spectacle, an image that can be both fetishized and as a commodity it can be bought and sold in a market place. It traps us in an eternal present by breaking down time and history and putting us in a continuous, unchanging, superficial now.

"We are pacified by distractions!" Alain Touraine saw in the revolt of his students, not a struggle for the power of the state but demands for cultural autonomy and a fight for self-management. It was an uprising against conservative cultural norms.