The Teeming Brain

In case you haven’t gathered it from some of my previous posts, I’m convinced that right now in this first decade of the twenty-first century C.E., we’re living at the dawn of a new dark age.

One of the most nightmarish things about a dark age is the degradation of life’s tone that it entails, the dehumanization that occurs when a people’s intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, political, social, and cultural life in general is reduced to a ghastly level of brutishness and ignorance. As is now plainly evident all around us in the industrialized world of present-day info-technocracy, this coarsening of life can occur even in circumstances of relative material prosperity. It doesn’t always have to be a dark age like the one that gripped Europe in the aftermath of Rome’s fall, when starvation and plague were rampant and most people barely scraped by at a miserable subsistence level.

Sometimes it’s oddly comforting — if only in the sense of providing a pleasurable experience of “Aha! Yes! That’s it!” — to dwell upon the words of other people who have also seen today’s dark age of dehumanization unfolding. When it seems like the world is full of robots instead of people, or when it begins to feel like we really are living on the planet of the apes as Robert Anton Wilson used to like to say, it can be a powerfully affirming experience to see that other people have observed the same thing.

A few of my favorite articulations of the matter, as found in various books and films, are as follows.

(Incidentally, please note that I’m typing this blog post after having attended yet another faculty training meeting, this one titled, “Investigating Data to Determine Depth of Knowledge.” It’s another entry in the ongoing series of seminars devoted to promoting the “new” way of teaching public school students and assessing their achievement levels based on the outcome-based model. As such, it is a blatant manifestation of the ongoing push to transform America’s public education system into the nation’s human resources division. This isn’t conspiracy theorizing; it’s just the plain facts. Do a Google search for John Taylor Gatto, and for Marc Tucker, and for helpful combinations of words like “history compulsory schooling,” in order to be exposed to the wonderful underside of the American public education enterprise. My current cynical mood is a result of my having been obligated to attend a meeting where this educational apocalypse is being implemented. Teachers and schools are now contributing, and for a great many decades have been contributing, to manufacturing the empty-headed, soulless, flesh-colored robots that have replaced almost all of the people in America. But that’s probably a subject for another, later post.)

1. From the movie Network (1976), written by Paddy Chayefky, directed by Sidney Lumet

THE SETUP:

Howard Beale has gone from being a normal network news anchor to being “the mad prophet of the airwaves.” The dialogue below is his impassioned rant to an eager television audience, in which he implores them to wake up from their television-induced trance. What he says reflects screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s real, personal views. Note that Chayefsky was one of the most revered writers in the history of television, a man who wrote during the early years of live dramas and then later became deeply and utterly appalled at what the medium of television had become.

HOWARD BEALE’S ANTI-TELEVISION RANT:

“Edward George Ruddy died today! Edward George Ruddy was chairman of the board of the UBN Broadcasting Systems and he died this morning of a heart condition. And woe is us. We’re in a lot of trouble.

“So a rich little man with white hair died. What has that got to do with the price of rice, right? And why is that woe to us? Because you people and million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube.

“Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people, and that’s why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communications Corporation of America. There’s a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy’s office on the twentieth floor. And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?

“So you listen to me. Listen to me. Television is not the truth! Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We’re in the boredom-killing business!

“So if you want the truth, go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves. Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you’re never gonna get any truth from us. We’ll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell. We’ll tell you that Kojak always gets the killer, and that nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker’s house. However much trouble the hero is in, don’t worry, look at your watch, at the end of the hour he’s going to win. We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there, day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know! You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here, you’re beginning to believe that the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube, you even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name, you people are the real thing, we are the illusion!”

* * * * *

Later, in another televised rant, Howard changes his tack and gives in to his generally grim view of things. Once again, the dialogue reflects screenwriter Chayefsky’s real-life views.

HOWARD BEALE’S SERMON ABOUT DEHUMANIZATION:

“At the bottom of all our terrified souls, we know that democracy is a dying giant, a sick, sick, dying, decayed political concept writhing in its final pain. I don’t mean that the United States is finished as a world power. It is the richest, most powerful, most advanced country in the world. I don’t mean the communists are going to take over. They’re deader than we are.

“What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being that’s finished. It’s every single one of you out there that’s finished.

“Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some two hundred-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods.

“Well, the time has come to say: Is dehumanization such a bad word? Because whether it’s good or bad, that’s what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid – creatures that look human but aren’t. The whole world. We’re the most advanced country so we’ll get there first. The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered.”

2. From the movie My Dinner with Andre (1981), written by Wallace Shawn, starring Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, directed by Louis Malle

THE SETUP:

Wally and Andre, playing themselves, sit together in an expensive French restaurant and discuss many things. At many points the conversation turns to the palpable sense of wrongness that characterizes so much of modern life.

ANDRE’S THOUGHTS ON THE DEHUMANIZED FUTURE:

Andre: Things don’t affect people the way they used to. I mean, it may very well be that ten years from now people will pay ten thousand dollars in cash to be castrated, just in order to be affected by something!

Wally: [Quieter] Well, why…why do you think that is? I mean, why is that? I mean, is it just because people are lazy today? Or they’re bored? I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children who’ve just been lying in the bathtub all day just playing with their plastic duck and now they’re just thinking, “Well, what can I do?”

Andre: [After a pause] Okay. Yes. We’re bored. We’re all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brain-washing created by a world totalitarian government based on money? And that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it’s not just a question ofindividual survival, Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep will not say “no”?

See, I keep meeting these people, I mean, just a few days ago I met this man whom I greatly admire, he’s a Swedish physicist, Gustav Björnstrand. And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers and he doesn’t read magazines. He’scompletely cut them out of his life, because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now, and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot!

And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert who had devoted his life to saving trees. He just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods. He’s eighty-four years old and he always travels with a backpack because he never knows where he’s going to be tomorrow. And when I met him at Findhorn he said to me, “Where are you from?” And I said, “New York.” He said, “Ah, New York! Yes, that’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?” And I said, “Oh, yes!” And he said, “Why do you think they don’t leave?” I gave him different banal theories. He said, “Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all. I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. They’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia, where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison.” And then he went into his pocket and he took out a seed for a tree, and he said, “This is a pine tree.” He put it in my hand and he said, “Escape, before it’s too late.”

You see, actually, for two or three years now [my wife] Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out, that we really should feel like Jews in Germany in the late thirties. Get out of here! Of course, the problem is where to go, because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. You see, I think it’s quite possible that the nineteen-sixties represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished. And thatthis is the beginning of the rest of the future now, and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts. And that history and memory are right now being erased, and soon nobody will really remember that life existed on the planet.

3. From The Twilight of American Culture (2000) by Morris Berman

If the redistribution of wealth . . . reflects a “seismic shift” in American society, a similar kind of shift can be seen in the tenor of American attitudes and intellectual abilities (nor are the two trends unrelated). Thus, for example, in an interview with Peter Coyote on National Public Radio (circa 1995), the actor matter-of-factly alluded to the great “hostility toward intelligence” that was now a part of American culture. Or consider the repeated, and accurate, use of the phrase “dumbing down” in everyday discussions and in the press. The celebration of ignorance that characterizes America today can be seen in the enormous success of a film like Forrest Gump, in which a good-natured idiot is made into a hero; or in the immensely popular TV sitcom Cheers, in which intellectual interest of any sort is portrayed as phony and pretentious, whereas outright stupidity is equated with what is warm-hearted and authentic. If my colleague at Midwest U now has a student who never read a novel, how long before he has a student who asks him, “What’s a novel?” (In fact, millions of Americans already don’t know the difference between fiction and nonfiction.) If the students don’t recognize Browning now, how long before they have never heard of Shakespeare? How long before the New York Times and the Washington Post fold for lack of subscribers, or until the English language becomes as inaccessible to the majority of Americans as Chaucer’s Middle English is to them now? How long before intellectual excitement is regarded as a historical phenomenon, or a bizarre frame of mind, or just — not regarded?

In his introduction to the book Dumbing Us Down: Essays on the Strip-Mining of American Culture, John Simon notes that a whole world of learning is disappearing before our eyes, in merely one generation. We cannot expect, he says, to make a mythological allusion anymore, or use a foreign phrase, or refer to a famous historical event or literary character, and still be understood by more than a tiny handful of people. (Try this in virtually any group setting, and note the reaction. This is an excellent wake-up call as to what this culture is about, and how totally alien to it you are.) Indeed, using Lewis Lapham’s criteria for genuine literacy — having some familiarity with a minimum number of standard texts (Marx, Darwin, Dickens . . .), and being able to spot irony — it may even be the case that the number of genuinely literate adults in the United States amounts to fewer than 5 million people — that is, less than 3 percent of the total population.

In 1953, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451 — later made into a movie by Francois Truffaut — which depicts a future society in which intelligence has largely collapsed and the reading of books is forbidden by law. People sit around interacting with screens (referred to as “the family”) and taking tranquilizers. Today, nearly five decades later, isn’t this largely the point at which we have arrived? Do not the data cited above suggest that most of our neighbors are, in fact, the mindless automatons depicted in Truffaut’s film? True, the story does contain a class of “book people” who hide in the forest and memorize the classics, to pass on to future generations — and this vignette does, in fact, provide a clue as to what just might enable our civilization to eventually recover — but the majority of citizens on the eve of the twenty-first century watch an average of four hours of TV a day, pop Prozac and its derivatives like candy, and perhaps read a Danielle Steel novel once a year.

I think all the missed days of work due to recent severe winter weather have thrown my inner clock temporarily out of whack. It didn’t occur to me until late last night when I was lying in bed that yesterday was my weekly blog-posting deadline. Oops.

A couple of days ago an online friend posted a comment here at The Teeming Brain asking about the contents of Dark Awakenings, my forthcoming second collection of short fiction. He also asked who the publisher will be. Although the answer to the second question seems fairly well cemented at this point, ink hasn’t dried on paper yet, so even though I’ve mentioned the publisher a time or two elsewhere on the web, I should probably hold off making what will amount to an “official” announcement here at my blog.

I can speak more freely about the book’s planned contents, though. The order isn’t decided for sure, but the contents will likely include the following items:

• “Teeth,” originally published in The Children of Cthulhu (Del Rey, 2002)
• “The Stars Shine Without Me,” originally published at Horrorfind (2002), soon to be reprinted in In Delirium II (Delirium Books, 2007)
• “The Devil and One Lump,” originally published at Horrorfind (2001), reprinted in The Best of Horrorfind II (Horrorfind Publications, 2003)
• “Snapshots from a Feast,” scheduled for first publication any day now in issue #4 of editor/artist Allen Koszowski’s Inhuman Magazine
• “Desert Places,” originally published in Alone on the Darkside (Roc, 2006)
• “Unfinished Nightmare,” originally published in Dark Lurkers (Double Dragon Publishing, 2004)
• “Nightmares, Imported and Domestic,” originally published in Dark Arts (Cemetery Dance Publications, 2006)
• The God of Foulness, originally published as book 5 in the Dark Homage: Lovecraft series from Delirium Books (2004)

All of that adds up to a length of about 65,000 words. More stories may or may not be added, including one or more new and previously unpublished ones that I’m working on right now. The publisher and I have discussed the possibility of including one or more of the stories from my Divinations of the Deep collection, since the press run on that one was small and there’s a wide audience that hasn’t read those stories. Plus, they’re a natural fit with the collection’s theme as stated by its title.

We have also discussed the remote possibility of including one or more of my unpublished academic essays dealing with religion and horror, since my fiction and nonfiction both tend to circle around those same themes and make many of the same points. This may or may not come to pass, based on whether it feels like a good idea. If anybody would care to offer feedback, maybe give me a reaction to that thought, I’d love to hear it, because I still can’t decide whether it would be effective or simply bizarre and disruptive to the flow of the book to include some nonfiction among the fictional works.

There’s also the issue of securing rights to the stories that were recently published. So several things remain to be done. But that’s the gist of the project. I hope this description satisfies those who have been asking about, and in some cases (much to my gratification) clamoring for, a new collection of my work for the past several years.

It’s always amazing and exhilarating to find your own experiences mirrored in the words of another.

Readers of this blog are no strangers to my antipathy towards America’s public school system, wherein I am employed as an English teacher (although I still maintain after nearly five years in the profession that I’m merely posing as one).

At my former, short-lived blog titled Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic, I railed mightily against many of the things I saw going on around me at my job, and none of these rants was more passionate and pointed than a post that I wrote and uploaded on January 5th, 2006 titled “Deaf and Blind, Not to Mention Dumb.” That day we had been treated at my school to a fascinating presentation by Ibiyinka Alao, a Nigerian artist who achieved worldwide fame in 2001 when he became the “United Nations Ambassador of Arts” by winning first prize in an international U.N.-sponsored art competition. The whole student body and all of the faculty were were required to attend his presentation in the gymnasium.

The whole thing turned out to be something of a travesty. Even as I was feeling electified by the words and images that Mr. Alao was sharing (the latter being projected on one wall of the gym), I was also growing increasingly horrified, disgusted, and enraged at the behavior of the young people around me. If you’ll allow me the luxury of quoting myself at medium length, here are some excerpts from my (very long) post about the situation:

“When the lights first went down and he began speaking, and when he brought up the first PowerPoint slide, there was a momentary hush as all attention focused on him. This lasted maybe a minute or two before the first evidence of fidgeting became apparent in a low, steady hiss of shifting bodies, followed by the feathery sound of whispering and murmuring as amplified by the hard, hollow gymnasium surfaces. The grade schoolers were seated on the gym floor, while the high school students and their teachers were seated in the tiered rows of folding chairs above. From my raised vantage point, the grade schoolers looked en masse like an undulating carpet of seaweed: bodies swaying and writhing, arms rising and lowering, heads bobbing and weaving. The letters ‘ADHD’ came to mind and would not go away.

“Having said that, in truth the grade schoolers were relatively and surprisingly well behaved. . . . [I]t was the high schoolers and middle schoolers who were misbehaving, and who were infuriating and embarrassing me with their noise and inattention. . . . They let their boredom be known with little reservation. They whispered and joked with each other. They punched each other in the arms. They giggled at Mr. Alao’s frequent childlike laugh, which I personally found to be one of his most charming and endearing traits. Many of them slept, which at least kept them quiet, but since the light of the video projector was bright enough that Mr. Alao could see the audience, I suspect he probably noticed some of the sleepers, and I can’t imagine this made him feel very good.

“The worst part of it was the contrast between how the students were behaving and the content of what he was saying. The man was laying his heart bare before us, in both his paintings and his words. He explained that he had always been a taciturn young man—and of course he paused to define the word for the younger ones (as well as the older ones)—and said it was only three years ago that he became able to speak before audiences like us without a lot of fidgeting and nervousness. While explaining the origins of several of his paintings, he filled us in on his private emotional life and told us about his personal and family histories, giving us an intimate glimpse inside the soul of a sensitive artist who constantly struggles to make sense, and to make beauty, out of the confusions and hardships of his life.

. . . . “Aside from my anger and embarrassment—both for him and for the student body, not to mention us teachers who rightfully shoulder some (but hardly all) of the blame for this state of affairs—the main thought that occurred to me during this fiasco was how sad it all was. Whether or not he was aware of it, Mr. Alao was fighting a losing battle against the influence of television, video games, and the Internet. He couched his delicate and profound insights in chains of sustained, coherent thought which simply did not and do not fit the cognitive and emotional capacities and patterns of present-day American teens. These kids are ‘adequate’ to something else entirely, something whose shape conforms to the lines of the flash-cut editing and mind-mushing rhythms of music videos, C.S.I., and video games, and whose content conforms to the idiotic and sentimental/nihilistic tropes of (un)RealityTV and maudlin pop songs. As a generation they are deaf and blind to anything that doesn’t fit into this shape. And as such they are dumb not only in the sense of being stupid, but in the sense of having not much, or perhaps nothing at all, of value to say, since their inner world is informed by the basest kind of trash, and the outer world appears to them as a solipsistic reflection of their shallowness and barrenness—although very few of them realize this even when it’s pointed out to them directly.”

My feelings really haven’t changed since that day in January of ‘06, just over one year ago. And that’s why I was mesmerized by a month-old post, dated December 16, 2006, that I discovered just today at a blog titled the eerie apricot. Titled “Sliding Expectations” and written by a public school teacher whose location I can’t pinpoint (her profile says she’s located in the U.K. but some of the posts make it sound like she’s located in a U.S. city), the post describes the reaction of this teacher to a school concert last month at which the audience — both adults and children — were so ill-behaved that the teacher says she’s concluded she can’t teach there anymore. The main problem in her eyes is that the school administration itself was obviously not serious about requiring respectful attention and decent public behavior. She also takes the opportunity to talk about the disservice the schools are doing to young people by failing to prepare them for life outside the school walls.

Browsing through the rest of the blog, I see that it’s stocked with similar agonized and despairing thoughts about contemporary schools and the teaching profession. And of course I’m enthralled. Not all of this blogger’s opinions line up entirely with mine — she seems too optimistic to me about the actual achievement potential, however latent it might be, of today’s teens — but I’m still fascinated by her shared observations and insights.

I urge you to follow the link above and read the entire post. But for the time-pressed, here are some highlights:

“It’s not that the children are the issue or that I feel hopeless about their possibilities and their futures; it’s that all the adults in their lives have sliding expectations and do not encourage them to achieve. When the students do only the minimum, we all shower them with praise and attention. Later, in advanced classes or the real world, when they are asked and expected to give one hundred percent, suddenly the students are overwhelmed and their self-esteem suffers. No one has ever asked or expected one hundred percent from them before. Every task becomes ‘too difficult’ and they give up without a fight.

. . . . “Students I recommended and pushed for advanced classes return to me [from college], some of them weeping and/or punching lockers, because they think the work is too difficult for them.

“‘I spent two hours on homework every night!’ they exclaim, expecting me to be shocked.

“I quickly inform these students that two hours on homework isn’t nearly enough for students of their caliber. I explain to them that they have to make some decisions about what to do with their time. The fact is that the regular level classes are more about pulling students up from a first or second grade reading level and that the advanced classes are the only thing that can adequately prepare the more advanced and motivated students for higher education. They want easy ‘A’s’. They want to mess around with video games and I get that.

. . . . “Last night, I watched the families of the students on stage behave so poorly during the concert that I had to leave early. The auditorium was packed which was great to see. However, cell phones went off full blast with loud obnoxious music during the performance. People talked at the top of their lungs and wandered up and down the aisles goofing around. People screamed across the auditorium so late-arriving family members could see where the rest of the family was seated. In the meantime, the students kept singing and playing their instruments, although they told me later that they found it difficult to concentrate with all the noise coming from the audience.

“Of course, if the school were serious about having the audience be respectful, they would have made announcements in all three languages and had security patrolling the aisles to quiet audience members. Instead a ‘proclamation’ was read in a phony old English voice about how cell phones should be silenced and conversations ceased during the performance. Three-quarters of the audience didn’t hear the announcement because no one asked the audience to be quiet because the performance was starting and even if they could have heard the announcement, it wouldn’t have made sense because three-quarters of the audience did not speak English.”

Background: Last week somebody posts a famous quip from Oscar Wilde at a popular message board: “In the old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.” This leads to a conversation about what the quote means and whether it still applies today. The question of just what is meant by “men of letters” becomes a live issue, and somebody says, “For my tastes, post-modernism (or is it post-post modernism now) really made a lot of the fiction from these types pretty unreadable.”

This of course opens the floodgate for a conversation about the definition and meaning of post-modernism. I myself reply to the above-quoted assertion by saying, “But that indicates a problem with post-modernism, not with the pre-post-modern (um) writers or their work. I personally have profited enormously from my study and absorption of the post-modern outlook and worldview, but I also harbor a healthy measure of loathing for it because of the very effect you’ve described: that it has served to kick off a kind of semi-dark age by rendering the artistic works of a former age inaccessible for a great many people who were raised and weaned under its philosophical influence.”

Several other people offer their own thoughts about and definitions of post-modernism. Then somebody says she’s still confused and not sure what to make of it all.

Naturally, I’m unable to keep my mouth shut. My extended reply, in which I try to chase down the general meaning of post-modernism, is as follows.

Oh, but before I launch into it: Here’s wishing a very happy Monday to you all. I’m located in southwest Missouri, where we were pretty much pulverized by the massive ice storm that swept through the United States’ midsection over the weekend. Amazing to say, my family and I have not yet lost electricity at our house. But Missouri has been designated a disaster area, a state of emergency has been declared, the National Guard has been called in to help with the cleanup, and as I type these words more than 300,000 people in the state are without electricity and are likely to remain so for three or four more days. And here I sit, still managing to find time to update my blog late on a lazy afternoon (lazy because school was cancelled today and has already been cancelled for tomorrow) in the comfort of my cozy, warm house. Yeesh.

But anyway, somebody in that online conversation last week expressed continuing confusion about the meaning of the term “post-modern,” and so I reached for my keyboard and began to type. . .

* * * * *

The question “What is post-modernism?” has been the subject of entire book-length explorations, so don’t feel bad about your confusion. Nobody’s really sure how to define the whole phenomenon/movement/worldview.

That said, the answer given by the French philosopher and literary theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard in his 1979 study The Postmodern Condition has long seemed the most useful and helpful one to me. And not only to me, but to a great many other people as well. If there’s a standard answer to the question at issue here — and there isn’t — then Lyotard’s is it, by wide popular recognition.

Lyotard was commissioned to write The Postmodern Condition by the Conseil des Universités of the Quebec government at a time when they were considering incorporating computers into university-level education. “Post-modernism” was a buzzword at the time and they wanted Lyotard’s investigation of it to frame their discussions of the computer issue. In the end his book achieved a far wider scope, as indicated by the subtitle he gave it: “A Report on Knowledge.”

His argument is intricate and fascinating but his definition of post-modernism is a one-liner that’s arguably become the catch-all definition. He said post-modernism is, or is characterized by, “incredulity toward meta-narratives.”

That phrase simply refers to the collapse of meta-narratives — that is, totalizing storylines that cultures tell themselves to make sense of their experiences — as believable things. Lyotard also called meta-narratives “grand narratives,” which term may give a better sense of what he was getting at. He looked, for example, at the grand storyline of the 18th century Enlightenment, which told England, Europe, and America that science was the answer to everything, and that it was leading societies into a golden era of reason, peace, and justice. This kind of meta-narrative legitimates or justifies, and therefore elevates, certain types of knowledge, and also certain moral and social attitudes, social practices, political systems, educational practices, and so on. It organizes a society or civilization around a set of guiding principles that determine what does and does not count as “knowledge,” and therefore it creates the foundational assumptions that the society comes to consider as metaphysical givens, as “self-evident.”

Lyotard claimed this type of thing doesn’t hold up any more in the post-modern age when we’ve become all-too-aware of that very process of legitimation, and when computers are redefining the meaning of “knowledge.” We recognize that foundational societal assumptions aren’t objective facts but are instead manufactured agreements. Thus, we come to disbelieve in meta-narratives on principle.

The thing is, this incredulity blankets everything and has an especial relation to the arts, which are so very central in forming and playing upon generalized cultural assumptions. And that’s where the literary connection comes in. In the literary world, the idea of the death of grand narratives can be seen in the deconstruction movement, which holds that authorial intent means nothing, that any text can mean anything, and that the locus of meaning is not in the text but in the person, or rather in the interaction between them. (This way of putting it is a crude simplification, but it does get the idea across.) And so this naturally does away with assumptions from former eras about the distinction between high art and low art. Suddenly, everything’s up for grabs, and the aesthetic literary principles that former eras took for granted are regarded as mere ideologies, mere legitimations of certain types of writing.

In fact, the very idea that entire peoples shared the same set of aesthetic assumptions is attacked by post-modernism, one of whose most significant effects has been the “recovery” of “marginalized voices,” such as those of women and — in Western Anglo culture — non-whites. The idea is that throughout history those fictional meta-narratives were not only providing a coherent shared worldview but were also excluding and obscuring other viewpoints and types of knowledge that were just as real and legitimate. Hence the rise of multiculturalism, feminism, and other such movements.

There’s a lot more to say, but maybe I’ve said enough to get the idea across. Andy Warhol’s soup-can art is post-modern because it deliberately sidesteps or negates the traditional artistic goal of expressing a specific meaning, and therefore a mini-meta-narrative, by organizing certain elements into a coherent whole. Warhol took material from everyday life and put it in what seemed like an artistic context, and left it up to the viewer to make sense of it. This is entirely post-modern. In literature, metafictions like John Barthes’ “Lost in the Funhouse,” which frequently interrupts the fictional narrative with ruminations upon the writing of fiction itself, qualify as post-modern because they keep on reminding the reader of the fact that he or she is reading a story.

To sum up, consider these definitions of post-modernism that I snagged from the web, which amplify what I’ve been saying here:

“Contrasted with Modernism, whose authors attempted to come to new terms with old ideas in attempt to find the ‘deep structure’ of the human experience, Post-Modernism is identifiable by authors who were highly skeptical of any ‘deep structure,’ regarding all structures as subjective and ideologically tainted.”

“Catch-phrase or jargon term used extensively in film and literary studies to identify certain trends in contemporary media and fiction. Post-modernist works tend to be highly self-referential and are typically saturated with irony and allusion. Such works also tend to subvert traditional models of unity and coherence and instead try to capture the sense of discontinuity and apparent chaos characteristic of the electronic age.”

Obviously, one can see the presence of Lyotard’s influence here. His identification of the central premise of post-modernism has proved most helpful to me personally in my considerations of both artistic matters and other matters, since it provides a satisfying explanation or interpretation of the various fragmenting tendencies of modern Western life. Multiculturalism can be viewed as a post-modern phenomenon since it’s predicated on the idea of multiple legitimate cultural viewpoints — i.e., “knowledge” — that should not be flattened by a single totalizing ideology. The 20th century’s collapse of high culture into low culture and vice versa, not just in the arts but in terms of fundamental American social mores and attitudes, can be viewed the same way. The rise (and possibly, depending on your present viewpoint, fall) of MTV is a product of the post-modern thrust. America’s present “culture war,” including, especially, some of its most prominent manifestations such as the ongoing raging controversy over curriculum issues in public schools, hails from the same philosophical country, since the absence of an agreed-upon grand narrative naturally leaves a vacuum when it comes to the question of what government-sponsored schools should be teaching the nation’s youth to know and do.

The mention of the school issue brings me back to what I said in a previous post about the measure of loathing I feel for post-modernism. While I have profited hugely from studying the movement and looking at the world through its eyes, I have also shared the views of many of its critics who point to the cultural nihilism that’s inherent in the whole thing. If all shared knowledge is merely legitimation, then where the hell does that leave us? In the artistic realm, it leaves us in a place where the shared meanings of former eras become inaccessible to entire generations of people, since these people themselves have little or no idea of what a shared meaning even is. Allan Bloom expressed the idea I’m getting at when he wrote in The Closing of the American Mind about the pitiable state of a hypothetical modern American young person who is ignorant of the “grand tradition” of Western cultural achievement and finds himself or herself wandering through the Louvre or the Uffizi. Bloom says the meanings of the great works of art housed in those places is utterly inaccessible to such a person, who is able to see them only as abstract, as mere form devoid of significance. I personally think the collapse of the high/low culture distinction, as well as the cultural gridlock over school curriculum issues, as well as the general cultural disagreement over what’s worth knowing, has produced and is continuing to produce exactly this type of person. I’m talking about the type of people that Ray Bradbury posited in Fahrenheit 451, those robotic denizens of a dystopia who told themselves that they were so very enlightened and happy, but whose thoughts and attitudes were so stunted and infantilized by immersion in trivia and lack of exposure to matters of real depth that they were really just walking corpses. Not to wax too dramatic, but I spend a lot of time around high school kids, and I’m telling you from personal experience that the cultural confusion in this era of the post-modern influence has led to a situation where successive generations of teens are being raised in an intellectual and moral vacuum, and are thus coming perilously close to F451 territory.

Then again, the truth of an idea shouldn’t be judged by its practical utility or effects. As Nietzsche observed in Beyond Good and Evil, in one of my favorite philosophical passages of all time (as evidenced by the fact that I quoted it in my short story “Teeth” in the Children of Cthulhu anthology), “Nobody is very likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes people happy or virtuous. . . . Happiness and virtue are no arguments. But people like to forget — even sober spirits — that making unhappy and evil are no counterarguments. Something might be true while being harmful and dangerous in the highest degree.”

And so I’m conflicted over the fact that the post-modern epiphany does seem true, and even inescapable, when I really consider it, and that its influence appears to be largely negative. Does the culture-wide collapse of meta-narratives necessarily result in a state of permanent cultural confusion and a de facto descent into an F451-like dystopia? Was Plato right when he wrote in The Republic that a “noble lie” is necessary to serve as the foundation for the best society? If so, is it desirable — or even possible — for us to pursue such a self-delusion? Or is there a way to avoid an awful cultural fate while still staring unblinking into the void of indeterminacy? I just don’t know.

I was rather stunned to receive the news today that two of my most cherished philosophical and spiritual influences have just died.

Robert Anton Wilson (1932-2007) was an American author, philosopher, wiseguy, and all-around mega-genius who co-wrote, along with Robert Shea, the legendary Illuminatus! trilogy that became an instant counterculture classic when it was published in the 1970s. He also wrote a huge number of additional books, both fiction and non-fiction (or perhaps they all fell somewhere in the gray area between those polar distinctions), dealing with consciousness, evolution, mysticism, occultism, conspiracy theories, linguistics, semiotics, self-programming, intelligence increase, life extension, quantum physics, the philosophy of science, space migration, human idiocy, religion, meditation, money, and more. He was one of a kind and will be sorely missed by pretty much everybody. Do a Google search is you’re not familiar with him, and revel in the wealth of material you’ll find. I myself came to him via Illuminatus! when I was in late high school, and I was never the same again. Bob’s been a constant companion ever since. I was pained to read in recent years of his agonizing struggle with post-polio syndrome (he suffered through the disease itself as a boy), but now he’s free of that.

Douglas Harding (1909-2007) was a British philosopher and spiritual teacher whose most famous books are the monumental The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth (1952) and On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious (1961). He taught a practical, on-the-ground method of spiritual awakening based on the immediate first-person experience of headlessness. From one’s own first-person vantage point, as a matter of immediate personal experience aside from any speculation or abstraction, one manifestly has no head (look for yourself right now and see). From this central truth Douglas developed a philosophy, and just as importantly, a practical method of transmitting its primary experiential realization, that synthesizes and integrates elements of all the world’s great spiritual traditions. He was recognized early on as a genius of startling vision; when he sent the unpublished draft of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth to C.S. Lewis, who by that time was already a world celebrity, Lewis wrote back in a letter dated Easter 1950 and raved, “Hang it all, you’ve made me drunk, roaring drunk as I haven’t been on a book (I mean a book of doctrine; imaginative works are another matter) since I first read Bergson during World War I. Who or what are you? How have I lived forty years without my having heard of you before and my sensation is that you have written a book of the highest genius.”

Lewis went on to write the preface for the first published edition of the book. In it he said, “This book is, I believe, the first attempt to reverse a movement of thought which has been going on since the beginning of philosophy. . . . If [this book] should turn out to have been even the remote ancestor of some system which will give us again a credible universe inhabited by credible agents and observers, this will still have been a very important book indeed.”

Douglas’s influence grew in the 1960s and 70s when such prominent figures in the burgeoning countercultural spiritual movement as Alan Watts referred approvingly to his work. I myself encountered him for the first time in the late 1990s through some of his articles and interviews published on the web, and it was like meeting a lifelong friend for the first time.

So to repeat, today, January 11, 2007, saw the departure from this world of Robert Anton Wilson and Douglas Harding. Rest in peace, Bob and Doug. You will be missed.

To clarify before I’ve even said anything: No, I’m not going to step up here at my blog and bash hip-hop as an anti-civilizational force. I’m not going to criticize the whole hip-hop musical-cultural nexus for its elevation of crass consumerism to the perceived status of the Ultimate Ideal in the eyes of millions upon millions of American teens and twenty-somethings. I’m not going to lay into hip-hop for its egregious glorification of misogyny, gun violence, drug use, pornography, and all the other “gangsta” elements that have come to dominate it over the past two decades. And I’m certainly not going to come down on it for the brutalizing, coarsening, barbarizing influence it exerts over its makers and minions. No, I’m not going to do any of that.

Instead, what I’m going to do is point to something that’s currently going on in hip-hop culture, as reported in an Associated Press article that was carried yesterday in my local-area daily newspaper, and then use this to back up something I’ve been saying with increasing frequency in recent years.

But first, a brief preface: Are you aware that Jane Jacobs, the renowned, and indeed the legendary, social philosopher who died only a few months ago, and whose epochal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has served for more than three decades as the practical and theoretical template for modern urban planning — are you aware that Ms. Jacobs’ last book, published in 2004, was titled Dark Age Ahead? Are you aware that she specifically defined a dark age in terms of loss of cultural memory, as a period when people have not only forgotten previous knowledge, but have forgotten that they’ve forgotten? And are you aware that in this final opus she argued that America and Canada are probably entering just such an age with all of its attendant human suffering and misery?

Are you aware that cultural historian and social critic Morris Berman, who touched a nerve with his 2000 book The Twilight of American Culture (which The New York Times named as a “notable book of the year”), wrote a follow-up book, published in mid-2006, titled Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire in which he argues that America has passed from a twilight phase into a true dark age, and that it seems likely that nothing will be able to reverse the cultural death spiral?

Are you aware of Neil Postman’s famous warning to America in the age of television? In Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Postman wrote, “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when a cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.” Do you recognize that when Postman wrote these words, he thought — and feared — that the transformation he described might already be well underway?

Are you aware that all of these and many more dire cultural warnings from the recent past were presaged by a number of dystopian fiction classics such as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which depict future dark ages in which cultural memory has disappeared and entire nations full of people are obsessed with trivia and titillation even as they live in unacknowledged misery and desperation?

Thinking of all this, in recent years I’ve talked repeatedly to classrooms full of high-school students about the galling transiency and vapidity of the things that occupy the attention of the pop media culture, which itself encases their consciousnesses like the matrix in The Matrix. I’ve pointed out that the span of cultural attention and memory in America has become so narrow and shallow that what seems so momentously important to these teenagers right now — the movies and movie stars, the pop music songs and icons, the clothing styles, the video games, the television shows, all of it, virtually every last element — will be forgotten with a swiftness that they’ll find hard to believe. I tell them they’ll be shocked only a handful of years from now when they’ll find that the new younger generation that’s replaced them knows virtually nothing about the things that they, today’s teens, have been programmed to regard as so earthshakingly important and entertaining. (Note that those last two qualities have increasingly collapsed into each other and become all but synonymous in the collective pop culture consciousness.)

And so, with all of that as background, my attention was instantly captured by an article in the entertainment section of yesterday’s newspaper titled “Reality Show Examines Race in Rap.” It seems there’s a new reality show debuting on VH1 today titled The White Rapper Show. As reported in the article, “The setup is simple and instantly amusing: Ten white amateurs are picked to live in an apartment in New York’s South Bronx (the birthplace of hip-hop), where they must prove their rhyming skills and gain respect. The winner gets $100,000.”

Then comes the part that really hooked my interest in relation to the dark-age ideas outlined above. I’ll quote it at length, adding my own emphases:

“The host is Michael ‘MC Serch’ Berrin, known for the early ’90s hit ‘The Gas Face’ with the group 3rd Bass, who schools the 20-something contestants on the history of hip-hop and the art of the rhyme.

“‘This generation can’t answer basic hip-hop trivia,’ says Berrin, 39. ‘Early on, there was a history that you had to know. I had to know who the Funky 4+1 was, who Sha Rock was. I had to know this because when I was coming up, guys would test me.’

“Like rock, blues and jazz, hip-hop began as a distinctly African-American expression. Unlike other genres, though, rap has remained a predominantly black art form.

“The guys of [the producing media company] ego trip (none of whom are white) are well aware that rap is now mainstream popular music and that its record-buying audience is mostly white. They joke that the show presents a vision of the future.

“‘There are more white kids who are captivated by the music and the culture than ever,’ says ego tripper Jefferson ‘Chairman’ Mao. ‘I think it’s a terrific thing because music should be shared. It’s for everybody — you just don’t want the origins of it to be lost.’”

So do you see why this drew my attention? I’ve been preaching for some time that in an age of shallow and transient cultural productions that are framed and marketed as being somehow “important” by the corporate-controlled media, it’s not only the memory of the ancient past but of the immediate past that’s going to be forgotten. I’ve preached that our situation is becoming just like in Fahrenheit 451, where the pathetic, zombified citizens of that hellish future society are captivated repeatedly by endless rehashings of the same meaningless, phony entertainments and distractions, to which they have been rendered susceptible by the infantilizing of their consciousness. And now we have a new television show whose makers have become emblematic of this truth in their very attempt to say something that’s supposedly important.

For the “ego trip” collective that’s behind The White Rapper Show really is trying to get across the idea that this show represents a significant reflection on race and culture. Ego trip, which began as a magazine, “has grown into a media company that produces books and provocative television shows (’Race-O-Rama!) often dealing with race and hip-hop.” One of its founders, Elliot Wilson, says of the new reality show, “The power of the show is that when you hear the title, you already have images of what it’s going to be, whether good or bad. . . . Most of them are thinking, ‘Oh, it’s going to be some dumb nonsense.’ But it’s not that — it’s smart.” If you do a Google search using the show’s title, you’ll find all kinds of press-release material that claim the show will try to be provocative by testing and exposing the contestants’ views on race. Ken Mok, the show’s executive producer, claims the whole thing is “really about race and the context of white culture versus hip-hop culture.”

Leaving aside Mok’s interesting, if not downright astounding, choice of words (instead of contrasting white and black culture he chooses to contrast white culture with hip-hop culture, as if “black” and “hip-hop” are entirely equivalent), the most fascinating thing about all of this is the illusion of cultural gravity that the show’s makers are attempting to surround it with, in combination with host Michael Berrin’s comments about the dying sense of history among the younger hip-hop crowd. It’s been less than 20 years since he hit his heyday in the rap/hip-hop scene, and yet he’s already talking in terms of a loss of memory among the up-and-coming generation of young hip-hop artists. In other words, Berrin is recognizing the advent of a miniature dark age within his beloved musical/cultural milieu.  And that, my friends, just seems par for the course in the future that currently surrounds us and awaits us. Short of a radical deindustrializing of everything, spurred by the advent of peak oil, that will short-circuit the machinery of the military-industrial-technocratic-entertainment complex and push us all into a future of depopulation and neo-agrarianism, this accelerating cycle of disposable entertainment being consumed by a lobotomized public and then forgotten almost immediately will become the norm. Indeed, it has already done so to a remarkable degree, and this accounts in large part for the historic blunders in America’s foreign policy over the past fifty or sixty years, which have led to such increasing misery abroad and at home. The American public is sleepwalking into the future while the economic and political power brokers — who are often fundamentally just as somnolent themselves — ply their trade.

But hey, The White Rapper Show debuts tonight on VH1 at 9:30 Eastern Time, and it’s going to rescue the fading memory of hip-hop’s history and origins while simultaneously offering a serious meditation on race and culture. So all’s well, I suppose. Just switch on your television set and plug into the coziness of our ready-made matrix.

While you still can.

Here’s wishing a happy 2007 to whoever’s reading this. The holiday break is now over and I’m back in my classroom, typing these words on my lunch hour. In the past I’ve been seriously and dramatically demotivated about the imminent resumption of my teaching duties after a brief break, but none of them compares to the supreme disdain and inertia that have taken hold of me at present. Who knows how this will turn out? It’s a struggle even to contemplate performing the various activities associated with the job.

On a completely different note, some years ago, after I had already spent several years working through the graduate program in religious studies at Missouri State University, and also the teacher certification program for secondary English, I began to reflect on the kind of scholarship I had pursued. I had already written a long paper examining Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a nihilistic parable about the destructive interplay between objective science and visionary fervor in Western culture. I had written the initial version of a paper, which I later expanded to greater length, that read the biblical book of Isaiah as a horror story in which Yahweh plays the part of a (roughly) Lovecraftian extracosmic monster. I had written a couple of papers about Thomas Ligotti and his works. I had written a paper that argued for the ability of modern horror films with their combination of self-reflexiveness and hardcore gore to serve as spurs to a psychological-spiritual experience of felt transcendence. And there was more. My professors and instructors had all been very generous in allowing me to pursue my horror-oriented interests within the boundaries of their various subject areas (literature, psychology, film studies, philosophy, religion).

It was after I had written all of these papers that I began to notice in retrospect that while I was quite good at using the typical scholarly apparatuses to present my ideas — e.g., the extended paper with its scholarly schema of notes and references — I was completely uninterested in the traditional scholarly goal or approach of pursuing and manufacturing knowledge for its own sake. In fact, I was pretty much unable to undertake any project at all unless it ignited a kind of fire within me — that is, unless it resonated with a kind of internal homing beacon (as it were) that was constantly on the lookout for sympathetic subject matter. This was far more than simply saying that I was interested in some things and uninterested in others. Everybody can say that. All scholars pursue lines of thought and research that interest them, and only enter into their respective fields to begin with because they find them interesting and enjoyable. But I felt as if I were positively driven to attend to certain things and pursue certain projects, and that short of feeling that drive, I was incapacitated from the start.

This led me to start speculating about the concept of “scholarship as poetry,” scholarship pursued in the interest of a kind of visionary drive more akin to the poetic impulse than the traditional scholarly one which values research and the pursuit (and production) of knowledge for its own sake. I couldn’t help viewing the latter approach as dry and dead, at least when I considered trying to adopt it myself.

Then, as often happens, I stumbled across a passage written by another author that articulated exactly what I had been trying to say to myself. It occurred after I had attained the master’s degree and the teaching certificate and had worked as a high school teacher for two or three years. And it happened here at school, at my job, in the classroom where I now sit typing these words. The author was none other than Robert Frost, the 20th century American poet par excellence. I had stumbled across a volume of his complete poetry in the school library and had brought it back to the classroom to browse. The book opened with Frost’s essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” and I sat mesmerized as I read him state my meaning with vibrant clarity as he first explained his experience of writing poems and then ended with a brilliant distinction between the fundamental working modes of the poet and the scholar:

“For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from a cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seems always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere.

….”But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity.

….”Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge, but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of knowledge; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs when they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild freeways of wit and art. A schoolboy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old places where it was organic.”

How well I know that feeling of fullness, of “unexpected supply,” that Frost writes about. It’s awesomely exhilarating when one sits down to write (or to compose music or pursue any other artistic endeavor) and discovers that the fund, the well, the supply of emotional impressions and imagery, is right there for the using and is ready to arise as needed. The thing is, I encounter that experience not only when I write fiction but when I write nonfiction as well. And in that regard I am inclined and even driven, as Frost describes, to remove all types of impressions from their customary contexts and assign a kind of proprietary meaning to them. But in the category of “impressions” I’m including not just sensory and emotional experiences but concepts and data as well. I’m including items drawn from wide-ranging reading in whatever field it is that I’m studying in preparation for writing a given project. I organize these things around a thesis — and indeed I formulate the thesis itself — more in the spirit of, and in the pursuit of the emotional resonance of, poetry or fiction than in the pursuit of scholarly precision. I produce scholarship as a kind of fiction that speaks to me emotionally.

So this probably makes me a lousy scholar. And maybe a lousy fiction writer as well. In any event, here endeth the lesson.