Posted November 22:

Remarks on "Precious"

I saw "Precious" recently. It had gotten attention at the New Orleans Film Festival, and I had to see that it wasn't a "teenage girl movie" before I was motivated to take it seriously. I highly recommend it. It regards a young girl growing up in Harlem who is sexually abused by her father and emotionally and physically abused by her mother. There are two aspects to the film that I thought made it highly worthwhile and effective. The style of filming powerfully conveys the inner experience of the young girl, and both her response to her situation and the overall portrayal of that situation make for a very good proportion each of realism and idealism. Capturing the right amount of each is a key task of American film makers today.

I continue to be impressed with the way many American film makers capture something unique about human life in a way not done by other cultures. There are two aspects to what I understand American film makers to be doing: 1) A treatment of and focus on human relationships as the fundamental reality in human life. This focus has both a descriptive as well as prescriptive element; and 2) a focus on a subjective experience of reality, often through the eyes of a protagonist. The key concept here is "reality". "Reality" in this paradigm is in contrast to "Ideal". This trait then, stressing an "experience of reality in the context of relationship", is in marked contrast to the older emphasis by American film makers of glossing over and quite consciously "concealing" reality, with this gloss being the central feature of American film at this time. (Compare, for example, the American version of 'Carousel' from the 1940s to the British-inspired Broadway version from 1994.)  This glossing- over-reality can be seen in the tradition of placing the words "The End" at the termination of a film, the lack of stress on good acting, the general tonality of unrealism in the story-lines, and the lack of relationship of story-line to any psychologically or spiritually deep understanding of what it meant to live a good life. Perhaps the most important film to capture this aspect of American civilization is "The Wizard of Oz". It is not a contradiction to point out that this film is also one of the deepest to come out of Hollywood. The pre-1970s stance of the film maker and writer as one responding to the American psyche, had to assume that this psyche believed that will alone can create reality; that the Ideal can become Real. This way of being in the world can be beautiful and powerful, and it has roots in both Plato and Kant. It is accurate to see our ideas as having efficacy; as believing that our attitude can shape our lives. I see myself as quintissentially American in this respect. But when the content we use to make these ideals concrete in our lives is not connected to any morally, spiritually or psychologically robust understanding of human life, this way of being in the world is likely to become disordered. In this case, the conscious disconnect from reality begins as an expression of willfulness and pride, eventually transforming into small-mindedness and its attendant isolation and fear.

Since at least the late 1960s, most artists and writers in our society have consicously and quite deliberately taken a very different stance towards the real and the ideal. It isn't that they are anti-ideal, or "cynical" or "negative", as many Americans will perceive any film or public discussion that gets too close to some subject matter that goes against the tone of that attitude endorsed by a major national political party. Whenever one is exposed to a public discussion of ideas, fiction or non-fiction, film or writing, and responds by feeling "this is negative", it may be that you are experiencing and expressing an important part of our civilization: the high priority placed on "being positive"; on possibility; on the idea expressed in that well known song, again from the 1970s, "if I can make it here, I can make it anywhere". Again, such positivity; such idealism, and any claim that "attitude" matters is good and true.

This way of being in the world becomes a problem and even detrimental to our psychological and spritual well being - as well as economic I may add - when as a product of this cultural trait we find ourselves consistently avoiding any focus; any attention on portrayals - fiction or non-fiction - of those apsects of human existence that bring us as individuals to experience our own limits. We often treat our limits as if they are purely relative to a social context - e.g. I may feel badly that I have not achieved some goal while comparing myself to another in a negative light. But the harder limits to face are those that are part of human life itself; part of nature. When we are open to reality in this latter sense, then we become open to the possibility of grace. But only then. This possibility, a possibility that I believe is deeper and richer than that kind of possibility stressed so much in American culture, entails being somwhat humble and mindful of tendencies towards willfullness concerning my "ideal of life".

 The belief; the sensibility, that my own sense of happiness; my Personal Ideal of Life, is the totality of Reality is an affront to goodness, truth, and reality. Moreover, if anything makes God lonely, it is such an attitude. It is worth repeating: the notion that my inner subjective sense of Life is the Limit of the Real develops and takes root in us to the extent that we allow our idealism; our positive attitude, to bring us to dismiss or ignore any fictional or non-fictional presentation of reality that does not fit with our own Idea-of-Life. When an Idea-of-Life makes me shut down in the face of truth, then my Idea-of-Life has become a force for falsity and keeps me from truth and goodness. Such an approach to life keeps me from true relationship with others. I cannot be in true relationship with others, including those closest to me in my life, if I heavily stress the Approved Ideal, for no human being can, does or should live in the way prescribed by the form of idealism dominant in our society since 1980, one which defines itself in opposition to truth. (There is not the space to discuss the political reaction beginning in 1980 to the intellectual movement begun earlier on, the latter against what we might loosely term "shoddy, or false, idealism" and the former an attempt to sustain this at all costs.)

The single most influential way in which our culture has harmed us in its idiosyncratic stress on an ideal is in its tendency to avoid any consistent, in-depth focus on reality, no matter what aspect of reality. There is profit to be made in the cultivation of this trait, and once the media age began what was heretofore a benign and somewhat healthy cultural trait has transformed into what is for a significant part of our society a tempting illusion that makes it very hard to remain faithful to actual truth. In the final analysis, as one writer has put it, "happiness is the hiding place of despair". When the artist or writer responds to such a situation, if we are patient and to the extent that we are open and receptive, we might become more truly human and thus live better lives. The nature of our civilizational weakness - noted above - makes it more difficult, however, and less likely that the American will be receptive in this manner. It is the job of the artist and writer to bring to light those aspects of the culture which either "gloss over" the good and the true, and to work on "unconcealing" those parts of our lives that, in some profound way and for some ulimately unknowable reason, we put great energy into keeping hidden from view. The front-lines in a culture-wide movement towards such unconcealment and "truth seeking" is the making of the sort of film that "Precious" signifies. In a society that stresses "being positive", where positive content becomes a way of concealing the true, the first part of a movement away from this will necessarily appear to be "negative". But this is only an appearance, and one that we would do ourselves well to move beyond by heeding art that shows us another way of living.

 

Posted October 1, 2009.

Here's the primary economic issue Americans confront today in a nutshell:

Globalization and the free-market fundamentalism preached as a religion by the American right, a force which has never admitted it was wrong about anything going back to the Vietnam War and McCarthyism and today, Iraq, threatens to leave us in a situation where the "few strong" once again have power to set the rules of the game. The United States has enjoyed prosperity and relative stability since the Great Depression mostly because the Depression created the political will to establish clear rules of the game in the form of robust regulations of finance/banking. (See article in First Things - a conservative quasi-scholarly journal on the willful resistance of the American government to properly regulate banking in the last decade). This political will has been eroded by a combination of intellectual types and activists who argue that economic freedom is a moral good and "the few" central to Plato's analysis of the structure of societies which fail to apply reason-based standards to politics. In the 20th century, a good example of applied reason is the kind of regulations which guided the American economy up until the 1990s. The function of rules and regulations is to protect us from the "few" diagnosed by Plato. In our day, these "few" show up simply as those who want the freedom to earn more money no matter what the effect is on the larger society. It is odd that so many argue for this freedom, even though they themselves would not engage in the relevant activity. It is a clever lie to insinuate that any argument for regulation of the banking industry or a reform of health care is "socialist" or "Marxist".

One of the greatest sources of instability in the West since the time of Reagan comes from Anglo-American economic culture, which has become excessively laissez-faire in the economic realm and remains so one year after Obama has been elected. The "dark side" of this culture has gained more of a foothold in our nation in the last 15 years especially, and I mark the Republican "Contract with America" as a turning point away from moderation towards the intrusion into our political life of a fanatical spirit. Very powerful cultural, political and economic forces in our society today assume that they have the moral right and ability to assert that the profit motive alone should guide society. It does not help that for profit "news" outlets have learned that hiring hosts who are deft at whipping up moral indignation creates a compulsion to watch and listen to "conservative" talk shows in enough people to bring in significant advertising money. Thirty years after we were taught that there is no truth, we should not be surprised that a whole industry has grown up on the basis of telling listeners that "truth exists and we will tell you what it is." The American right today manifests as a sublime expression of Nietzsche's claim that "Men would rather live for Nothingness than nothing." Their party exemplies a nihilism not seen since the early 1930s in Germany. In this post-relativist context, any variety of destructive assertions can be made by those with no training to guide public policy, all with the common theme that "government is bad" and "we have our rights". These voices seek to cultivate resentment of listeners against imagined elites, while they in fact are financed by the "few" who are the actual elites, "elite" being simly another word for Plato's "few". It is ironic, then, that the American right has no respect for truth and reason, and is in fact the true child of the radical relativism of our recent history. Its moral passion blinds it to the truth of its own status. While the left of center shows a degree of respect for civil society and ethical decision making in economics and the environment, the American right has been transformed into a rebellious teenager who thinks that if he just yells louder he will not have to face the truth. The fact that this party sees itself as "for the truth" in a way which never resonated on the left of center makes it that much more difficult for a true transformation to occur within it, a transformation that would have to start within. Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh are the poster-children for a deep resentment hiding behind the pretense of moral indignation. (See transcript by Ron Tannenhaus regarding his book "The Death of Conservativism")

So if freedom is not the only or even highest moral value that should guide economic activity, how do we learn this? We learn that there are limits to freedom when we start trading with other cultures that have lower ethical standards. One example: Shrimpers in Louisiana losing their jobs because the shrimp from Thailand is cheaper. What is not taken into account by a tarriff regime that enables shrimp to be imported is that the shrimp may be unhealthy, and that the conditions under which it produced may be both unethical and illegal within American society. Another example: After Katrina, many homes in New Orleans were rebuilt with wall-board from China which it turns out are toxic. That this has been allowed to happen is on its face value irrational as well as unethical, but it nonetheless happens because we have allowed a philosophy that says "economic freedom" is the only moral value that matters. If economic freedom is the highest moral value of this society, then cultures which have lower ethical standards must gain influence and wealth, while those with enforced higher standards must decline. (See the flip side of this in an article on European firms exporting toxic waste to the third world to escape European regulations.) The winners in an international system in which society does not collectively enforce rules of the game are the Platonic "few", those who are motivated by a desire to gain somewhat in the way an addict is motivated by a desire get another hit. It is important to note that those who argue for total free trade effectively have no ethical values, for if they did, they would not promote or engage in activities that employe young children, pollute the environment, cause fellow citizens to lose their livelihood, lower the quality of life at home, increase the trade deficit of their own nation, simply because they are under the trance of a "fixed idea" (French: ideé fixe) that freedom is all that matters or because they have the talent to build an import business. To really argue that we should be able to import shrimp from Thailand in the name of freedom and saving some money on a purchase is materialistic, irrational in the long run and anti-social. It is not rational to choose a policy that harms those we live close to and with whom we have something in common: our society! The libertarian claim that all we have in common is our individuality is a semantic sleight of hand, and meaningless. Such arguments come from a time when the British traded within a narrow cultural realm where those involved in economic activity had similar ethical values, e.g. Christian. To argue that freedom should trump ethical values in international trade implies a society no one would consciously chose to live in. The moment one thinks through the logic of an international or domestic market system without the ability to apply robust regulations, one sees more clearly the meaning behind the term "race to the bottom." In addition to the shrimp example, we can apply the same argument to all other low-skilled/low technology jobs such as textiles in the American south. Free trade can only be rationally carried out within a framework that robustly enforces ethical standards, including care for the livelihood of the less educable. To suggest that we are all equally educable and to base policy on such a sentiment is mean spirited.

Did I see a glimmer of hope coming out of Pittsburgh regarding the need for ethical standards applied to the world economy? The article below suggests the US and other nations may actually allow each other to act as a "check" on their own dark side. Regulations and rules of the game are essential for long-term economic well being for "all men". While the American right today claims it cares about the "little man", it is obvious that their rhetoric, a rhetoric which not coincidentally in recent times tends to support private corporate action, increases the wealth of a very small percentage of the society while harming the stability of the culture we all live in. Economic freedom does not exist for the sake of a few, although it does make it possible for a few to become wealthy. There is no problem with the latter. There is a serious threat to civilized society when the argument is made by corporate-backed talk radio and TV that the moral purpose of freedom is to allow "the individual" to earn great wealth. This is false. No philosopher or founder of the U.S. ever made such a claim. The American right - which today is functioning much like the "Know Nothing Party" of old, continues to fail to understand this distinction at their and our peril. Speaking up to reclaim a role for reason-based regulations is an essential today.

See article here : Leaders of G-20 Vow to Reshape Global Economy

Excerpt with emphasis added:

The ideas are not new, and there is no enforcement mechanism to penalize countries if they stick to their old habits. But for the first time ever, each country agreed to submit its policies to "peer review” from the other governments as well as to monitoring by the International Monetary Fund.

That in itself would be a big change, given how prickly national leaders have often been toward outside criticism of their policies. American officials, who pushed for the plan during weeks of negotiations before the summit meeting, argued that governments were so shocked by the economic crisis that they were willing to rethink what was in their self-interest.

"I’m quite impressed,” said Eswar S. Prasad, an economist at Cornell University who had initially been skeptical about the proposed "framework” for stable growth. "A commitment by the U.S. to take the process seriously is a potential game-changer that would give the framework some credibility.”