Tale of two cities

Just 'cause, I've started using a random number generator to select episodes of Mad Men. I stole the idea from the guys who do the Creek of the Week podcast. I got Episode 10 from Season 6, A tale of Two Cities. It's fitting to start with this one, Season 6 is easily the worst season of Mad Men and this episode is well, pretty meaningless. That's pretty much what you'd expect from random selection.

The big time cue on this one is the August 28 riot at the Democratic convention of 1968. It's hot, it's late summer and lots of drugs are being consumed. The skirts are short so we get to see lots of actresses legs but the fashion is ugly. The point of the episode seems to be that times are changing, the existing authority structures are crumbling and there is nothing you can do about it. Ginsburg is going crazy and that's good because I always hated that guy. Bob Benson is thriving and that's good because I always liked him. I thought it was a great tragedy when they let him go, Bob was one of a very small number of good things in season 6.

Anyway, one of the great advantages of things being out of control and nobody can do anything about it is that you don't need a plot arc to make the point. A bunch of stuff happens, Don and Roger both respond with their usual cynicism, Roger is more fun than Don about it, until Roger gets sucker-punched in the testicles and Don nearly drowns in the pool. We get lots of clichéd 1960s shots involving parties, swimming pools, riots and drugs. And one of Don standing on the edge of the pool contemplating his own seemingly drowned body.

In California, Roger starts wearing double-breasted jackets with an ascot. It's a good look. I may steal it.

And ... really, there is nothing to say about this episode. They shouldn't have made it.

House of Bamboo

Things that make you feel nostalgic even though you never experienced them. This song is from a few months before I was born. I'd never ehard it before today.

When and why should we care for other people's feelings? Or, for that matter, our own feelings?

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood both have cultivated feelings. That is to say, they have put a lot of effort into their feelings. They both believe their feelings should be taken seriously and the proof is that both have taken their own feelings seriously, albeit it in different ways. We see this most clearly in an odd section well into the novel when Marianne becomes very ill and Willoughby shows up to see her. He does not speak to her but he does meet with Elinor. It's very important to Elinor that Willoughby actually loves Marianne. Later, when she has recovered physically, it will be terribly important to Marianne that John Willoughby really loved her, that he, in fact, still loves her even though he has married another. And Elinor, sensing this, makes certain that she does know.

This novel, to a degree we never see again in Austen, takes the view that the validation of feelings is terribly important. People have behaved badly but all is okay if, in the end, feelings can be validated. John Willoughby really loved Marianne even though he tossed her over in order to get financial security. He ended up having to do that because he's been a first class shit in seducing, impregnating and abandoning Colonel Brandon's ward Eliza.

Here's a thought: another way for the novel to end would have been for Willoughby to go to his aunt, admit that he behaved abominably towards Eliza and say that he is willing to make all right now by marrying Eliza. That doesn't happen for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that Willoughby is a shit and he'd never do anything so honourable. And he gets away with being a  shit because he's highly attractive to women. Marianne's vindication, to the very limited degree she has one, is that Willoughby, while married to wealth, isn't in love with his wife.

Which sounds rather like the mirror image of her own situation doesn't it?

In the meantime, Marianne has been rather worthless as a sister. She has been rebuking Elinor for what she perceives as Elinor's lack of feeling. When she finds out that Elinor was actually suffering terribly because of her own frustrations in love, frustrations that Marianne was utterly oblivious about, she apologizes. We need to note that all Marianne's fine feelings did not make her any more perceptive.

We think of feelings as a kind of sensitivity. Someone sees something, hears something or touches something and they are moved. Feelings are supposed to be connected to something on this model. But Marianne's feelings are remarkably disconnected. Her feelings for Willoughby come even though she has no understanding of his character. Her feelings for her sister are absolutely useless in helping her figure out what Elinor is going through. Her feelings have nothing to do with her judgment. Or, as Austen would put it, her sensibilities have nothing to do with her sense.

That's puzzling for us because the word "sense" seems to be related to the senses. It seems like a purely mental thing. For that matter, so could judgment.  We think of these things as being "in our heads". We believe that you have to have sense or good judgment and then you act on it. On this model, it's possible to conceive of someone who has sense, who makes very good judgments, and yet never acts on them. And that's kind of odd for how could anyone know that this person has good sense if the only place that sense existed was in her head.

A thought experiment

Let's imagine that Elinor is actually a sneaky little bitch who is only out for her own happiness. She has very little real power. Her mother is a ditz, the family has no money or influence and her sister is younger and hotter than she is. She is, for all intents, a helpless mouse who can only achieve happiness if others go along with her plans. Any one of a number of people could crush her dreams simply by not playing along.

Worse, her only chance for happiness is a longshot. She and Edward have connected. She senses that and she is probably correct. Why do we know this? Well, we do. This is not science requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Everyone has had the experience of meeting someone and feeling that a real connection has been made. We don't know this with 100 percent certainty, so we wait until there have been a number of conversations. Elinor has done this. There have been a series of conversations and she now knows that Edward feels something for her and she for him.

Unfortunately, this is not science requiring specialized knowledge and skills. Other people have noticed too. (And this ought to be a reminder for us that whatever sense, sensibility, feeling and judgment are, they aren't things that happen inside our heads but things that show up in our behaviour for anyone to see provided they are willing to pay attention.) One of the people who has noticed is her ditzy mother and the other is the evil Fanny Dashwood. Elinor has no power in her relations with these people. She is a helpless mouse.

We might also note that one person who has not noticed is her sister Marianne who only finds out by being told  by her mother. It's interesting that Marianne, who supposedly loves Elinor, cannot even be bothered to pay enough attention to notice what this sister she loves is feeling. She's more aware of her own (negative) feelings towards Edward than of Elinor's.

And Edward has not declared his love. He keeps showing interest in her but he never comes out and says it. There is no actual promise, no commitment. She hopes him to be a good man but she doesn't know. Her sense/judgments manifests itself in her reticence. She holds back. She will not risk the same sort of disaster that Marianne courts and finds.

And then she finds out that Edward, like Willoughby, has a prior attachment. Unlike Willoughby, he's not a complete shit about it. He has a real sense of responsibility towards Lucy Steele. He doesn't love her anymore but he made a promise and he's not going to break it. He doesn't know that Lucy is after him only for the money he will come into. No one could know and it's entirely possible that Lucy herself is unaware and her feelings or sensibilities towards him aren't going to help if she doesn't understand own motivations.

Elinor sees a shot at happiness but it's an outside chance. All she can do at this point is to limit the damage that others with more power—Marianne, her ditzy mother, Fanny Dashwood and Lucy Steele—can do to her hopes and the only tool she has available to her is her ability to manipulate these people through her understanding of THEIR feelings. It's not her ability to feel anything herself that works for her but rather her ability to sense what others are feeling and to direct, assuage and soothe these feelings.

We might get distracted by her behaviour towards Colonel Brandon here. He seems a genuinely nice guy who acts for the benefit of others and Elinor really seems to care about his feelings. On the other hand, he turns out to be incredibly useful to her. He sets Edward up with the living that makes her happiness with him possible. He also takes Marianne off her hands by marrying her and thereby freeing Elinor to concentrate on her own happiness.

And so too we might say of her being surprisingly understanding towards Willoughby when he shows up during her sister's illness. For it is essential that she can tell Marianne that her feelings for Willoughby were valid because he really did love her. Otherwise, Marianne might have crumbled completely and Elinor would have been stuck with a helpless basket case on her hands instead of w woman willing to make a (probably loveless) match with Colonel Brandon so that Elinor could stop worrying about her.

Okay, maybe the sneaky little bitch in this scenario is actually Jane Austen plotting her novel to achieve the desired end and not Elinor who is simply hoping for the best and merely has to wait until her creator gets all her ducks lined up for her. In the end, though, I think the moral conclusion we should draw is the same: we shouldn't care about other people's feelings. We might notice them and respect them because not this person will be more likely to cooperate with us but the feelings themselves have no moral significance for us. If someone loves me, I will see that in their actions and not their feelings. If someone consistently fails to deliver, they don't love me no matter how intense their feelings for me may seem. Those feelings don't, on their own, mean anything at all.

They can have tremendous consequences and that is why we have to be very careful about how we cultivate them. We should not just let them grow. And we should not trample on the feelings of others, even when those others have shown that they don't particularly care for our own feelings. But the moral significance of feelings is zero. They are just something we need to manage in life.

This is particularly true in love. There are feelings that go with love but to love someone is to deliver and to keep delivering. If you don't do that, then you don't really love.

Exotica and the comforting presence of primitive religion

"No anthropologist, observing a community in which the tenets of religion have taken root, would wish to disabuse his tribe of their sacred rites and stories. It is only those brought up in faith who feel the impulse, on losing it, to ruin the faith of others."

That's Roger Scruton from An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. Casanova made more or less the same argument against Voltaire. He believed, and told Voltaire, that rather than abolishing superstition a proper philosopher would have remained silent on the subject. Wittgenstein made similar aruments.

The opposing view, popular since the Enlightenment, is that it is an act of bravery to shed our sacred rites and stories. This idea has been subject to relatively little scrutiny however. In any case, there are no knock-em-down arguments on either side. The best we can do, as Wittgenstein said, is a sort of propaganda in which both sides seek to remind the other of past weaknesses and failures. In this respect, the Enlightenment view is particularly vulnerable as all past attempts to strip the world clear of the dreams of superstition has tended to produce nightmares much as sterilizing a surface tends to prepare it for new and massive bacterial growth.

So let's put aside conclusive arguments for a while return to the album cover we were looking at yesterday.

Here's what it says about that cover in Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi:

The splendid album cover designed by William George portrayed a couple dancing among "threatening pagan idols."

But are they threatening? A lot would depend on how you looked at it. For millions of Catholics, the image of the crucified Christ is a source of comfort. That's a bit odd when you consider that it shows us a spectacularly cruel form of capital punishment. It's odd to see the torture and brutal murder of the person you place your hope in as comforting. And the Catholic seeing the crucifixion portrayed knows this. They would insist, in fact, that the spectacular cruelty and seeming hopelessness of the situation portrayed is the very point.

Something similar is happening with this cover. It's an altogether more commonplace instance and the deliberate use of the pejorative term "idols" above tells us that this is intentional. (We don't know who originally said or wrote "threatening pagan idols" as Adinolfi doesn't tell us where he gets this from or why he puts it in quotes.)

And we can grasp the real point of both the cover art and the music if we take the trouble to notice that the couple isn't dancing. It shows us something rather ambiguous: a man who wants to kiss a woman and a woman who isn't certain whether to refuse or accept his kiss. That's something like dancing and virtually all dancing is a ritualized encounter meant to recall such situations.

What will the woman be agreeing to if she accepts his kiss? Well, sex for starters. Perhaps not full sex that night but some sort of sexual interaction is being proposed. But what exactly? This could lead to some more kissing, hugging and squeezing and then never again. Or it might lead to sex. Or it might lead to love or even marriage.

And it's ambiguous both ways. She only knows that he wants to kiss her. She doesn't know what he hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what he'll settle for.  She also doesn't know what she really hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what she'll settle for.

Think of how a woman kisses her husband and then think how the same woman, about to begin an affair, kisses the man she will have that affair with for the first time. She might tell herself that the second kiss is "just about sex" but is that ever true? Conversely, she might give her husband a kiss and think to herself, "this is about love and not sex", but is that ever true?

No matter how you cut it, the possibility of a kiss is never the purely rational interaction that Enlightenment thinkers of all eras want us to believe it is. Something more is going on and, if we see things that way, the pagan idols surrounding the couple make perfect sense. They fit the situation not because they bring a threat with them but because they allow us to recognize a threat that exists in the very situation and which threat it is that makes the whole thing so enchanting.

To return to Scruton:

The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest. This de-consecration of the reproductive process is the leading fact of modern culture.

Scruton, however, is guilty of the very thing he accuses the sexual revolution of doing. We see this in his use of the term "the reproductive process". Is there anything more disenchanting that a process? Imagine the couple above thinking to themselves, "I'm engaged in the reproductive process?" As Wittgenstein once said, the parsons are equal partners with the philosophers in doing the "infinite harm" that Enlightenment disenchantment has caused.

Since I must stop somewhere, I'll simply note that Exotica and Tiki culture were an act of rebellion more profound than the rock and roll that followed. What we see here is a movement not to re-enchant the word, for the world can not be disenchanted. Rather, it's a movement to recognize the primitive enchantment that never goes away. It matters little what the original context those "pagan idols" were taken from, nor does it matter who has an authentic right to invoke them. All that matters is what anyone can see in that picture if they are open to it.

Exotica

The roots of Exotica was something I wondered about, but didn't do much about, on my previous blog. There is a lot of good writing on the subject by Sven A. Kirsten. His works, however, are mostly about the pictures that accompany the writing. There has been one academic work on the subject that I know of, Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi, but it's an intellectually lazy, sloppy work (anytime you see the term "the other" playing a big role in analytic writing, you can be sure the writer has turned his brain off so he can better spout the reassuring clichés that modern academic writing traffics in).

Adinolfi's work does, however, give us a notion of how not to go about looking into Exotica and Tiki. For starters, it's just too broad and sweeping in it's approach. It also places far too much emphasis on Romantic sources for Exotica and gives not nearly enough scrutiny to modernism and, more specifically, to modernist primitivism.

That should be an obvious move given the subtitle on the album cover above. If exotica started anywhere, it began with this 1951 Les Baxter album. "Le Sacre du Sauvage" is a pretty clear homage to Stravinsky. Baxter loved and was much influenced by Stravinsky and Ravel.

He was far from the only twentieth century popular musician to be influenced by modern music turned out by what we sometimes confusingly call "classical" composers. The most influential of whom was, although he gets little credit for it, Paul Whiteman. Through him, everyone from Bix Beiderbecke to Frank Sinatra picked up on a kind of jazz modernism.

The other big jazz influence, and this very much acknowledged by Baxter, was Duke Ellington. Ellington also used some of the harmonic ideas of the European modernists but more importantly for my purposes here, he also trucked in a certain kind of "exotica", by which I mean fantasy stories of western men going to exotic locations and finding love.



Ellington didn't invent this type of song but he certainly trafficked in it and his efforts were called jungle music at the time.

I could go on about that but I prefer to return to a little discussed aspect of Stravinsky's Sacre du printemps and that is that the ballet itself was rarely performed. It received a handful of performances in 1913 but was soon abandoned for audiences simply did not like the ballet. The music, however, was considerably more accepted. It was as program music—stuff you listened to while imagining images "suggested" by the music—that Sacre du printemps had its influence. And that is what influenced Les Baxter.

Primitivism

Ethnography didn't play much of a role in the fantasies that Stravinsky peddled. We can't distinguish the modernist primitivism of the early 20th century on the grounds that it was more authentic or better researched than that of the 1950s. The difference was more a matter of intent; the early modernist primitivism was meant to be disturbing.

The subjects of "civilization" are trapped in an alienating, inauthentic culture, but can escape by cultivating the "primitive" hidden within themselves: grotesque, even terrifying, but authentic in its drives, desires and relationship to the world. Known as primitivism, this diagnosis of cultural failure and its purported cure profoundly influenced modernist artists.

By the end of the 1950s, primitivism was literally the stuff of theme parks, a fun-filled escape. This shift is usually cited to the disadvantage of the 1950s but I think it points to a fundamental failure of the early modernists. The primitive simply isn't grotesque or terrifying. It's fun, familiar and harmless seen with modern western eyes. We fully appreciate that life would be nasty, brutish and short in a genuinely primitive culture but that's not where we live. The post-World-War-2 generation, correctly saw that primitivism is not alienating or threatening but fun.

And how could it be any other way? This stuff is open to anyone and, for that reason, comforting and familiar even if you've never experienced it before. After the horrors of modern technological warfare and the brutal oppression of modern socialism, who wouldn't want to escape to the Quiet Village?

Commonplace Book

An image from John and Willian Atkins' Book of Boats.

That's a type of boat called a Canoe Yawl. These started off as sort-of canoes. A Scotsman named John MacGregor went back to Britain from North America and described a kayak to a local boatbuilder who built his best approximation*. It wasn't anything like a kayak and nothing like a typical canoe used by North American aboriginal people but it became incredibly popular. The original one built for MacGregor was powered by paddle and was under 15 feet long. But others experimented with the type and added sails. And then they started to make them bigger. Eventually they became yachts.

* Something similar happened with the loafer which is a European shoemaker's effort at making something from a description given him of a moccasin.

To cultivate absurd dreams

I have the impression that fascism and adolescence continue to be . . . permanent historical seasons of our lives . . . remaining children for eternity, leaving responsibilities for others, living with the comforting sensation that there is someone who thinks for you . . . and in the meanwhile, you have this limited, time-wasting freedom which permits you only to cultivate absurd dreams. 

Frederico Fellini

The modern world is prone to fascism. As Fellini notes, it grows out of an adolescent worldview and adolescence is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It ought to worry us especially now as we live in a world where adolescence has run wild; the generation that currently obsesses about microaggressions and trigger warnings and that has already embraced a cult of personality in Obama is ripe for fascism.

At the same time, we too easily look outside ourselves for someone or something to blame. Fellini looked to the Catholic Church. He wasn't crazy to do so. There was a lot about the Catholic church, especially in the period of high Mariology that culminated with Pius XII, that lent itself to an adolescent worldview and the sort of immature fantasies that fascism grows out of. But it didn't have to be that way; the people aren't responsible for the culture that they inherit but they are responsible for how they respond to it. You are responsible for the sort of soil you provide for the seed that is sown.

Today, we might just as easily blame the universities and there is no doubt that a lot of appalling nonsense seemingly designed to churn out adolescents who forever put off growing up, who comfort themselves by letting others think for them and wallow in empty freedom where they cultivate absurd dreams. Ultimately, however, they still have the power to embrace responsibility.

Shame that manifests as anger

This is a pretty commonplace phenomenon but, as sometimes is the case, is really quite strange if you think about it. I saw an example of it a while ago in someone who momentarily seemed intensely angry but, I later realized, was actually feeling intense shame. I suspect everyone has done this at some time; I know I have.

But ... why?

I think it's a habit more than something specific to the situation. Googling around, I see that puts me at odds with professional opinion which tends to the view that deep analysis is the way to figure it out. My guess is that it starts in childhood when adults, especially our parents, shame us into doing things. We start to respond to feelings of shame with resentment. It's resentment and not anger because we can't act on our resentment.

But one day we lash out in anger and, to our surprise, it works. The adult is fully aware that they are manipulating might shame and they cave when we explode.

The problem is that we never learn how to process shame and guilt properly. We have to teach ourselves this skill as adults. We do things we feel badly about but know no way to achieve reconciliation. As a consequence, the feeling of shame is always there below the surface. When something happens to remind us, it feels like a rude invasion of our privacy and the anger flashes up because that is way we have trained ourselves to feel and to act. We have no notion. All we think we're feeling is shame but our face shows repressed rage to everyone else in the room.

Nothing good can come of this but, as I say, we have no idea how to fix it. We think we are faced with a series of individual problems that we cannot fix. But it's not really those things but our general habit of responding to bad feelings about things we have done.

I think that's it.

If the central character isn't an anti hero then he's a ...?

The answer is that he's a hero. I'm going to argue that Don Draper is a hero and that we cannot understand him or appreciate his appeal if we don't recognize that. My big challenge in convincing anyone of this is going to be that a lot of people believe that he is an anti hero.

Don Draper is the apotheosis of the antihero. He’s a selfish, self-destructive womanizing drunk who stole another man’s identity, but the character’s elegance and eloquence — coupled with Hamm’s sleek good looks and subtle performance — made it all OK, and typically quite interesting to watch.

On the flip side we have Draper's primary creator Matt Weiner who insists he isn't.

If you watch the video of Matt Weiner at that link you'll come away wondering what exactly an anti hero is. The definition that comes up first when you Google "anti hero" is, "a central character in a story, movie, or drama who lacks conventional heroic attributes". That's not much help for all heroes have flaws and some of them have a whole lot of flaws such that there are lots of heroes who at least start of lacking conventional heroic attributes. If Achilles isn't a hero then no one is and he spends most of the Iliad sulking in his tent.

What makes a hero a hero is action. He's the guy you can depend on to act effectively when it really matters. That's what makes Achilles a hero despite all his negative qualities and the same is true of Don Draper. Often times, a story will open with someone who seems deeply unconvincing as a hero but whom we find heroic by the end.

Okay, but what is an anti hero then? I think an anti hero is someone whom we we continue to resist accepting as a hero even after the story is over.

But that isn't helping my case much. Lots of people, starting with Robert Rorke quoted above, resist very strongly the notion that Draper is credible as a hero and advance all sorts of reasons for that. In fact, there are no shortage of people who feel a need to dismiss the character completely. He becomes just a peg to hang social criticism on, and mostly male bashing at that.

What I want you to consider is what Weiner doesn't quite get around to saying: that Don Draper is a hero! That he's a man worth emulating.

This requires an esoteric reading of the series. That is to say, it requires us to see a meaning that is in the series that is not merely hidden, that isn't just a "deeper meaning" but is deliberately hidden by writing that appears to say the opposite while laying clues that make it possible to dig out a different meaning. Not da Vinci Code style with all sorts of mysterious symbols and secret codes. That sort of thing can happen, of course, but most esoteric writing is more mundane than that.

Teddy the Greek

To get a grasp on it, imagine that you meet a child who has a villain—a sports figure, a pop star or fictional character. This child asks you if you too fear and dislike their nemesis. Only a jerk would crush the child's worldview but you actually quite admire the character. So you find something affirming to say. Okay, but let's further complicate the problem. The child has a hot older sibling and you want this hot older sibling to know that you're cool; that you don't have any illusions. You need to find a way to say something that will feel genuine and sincere to the child but will be just enough off that the older sibling that they get it.

It's my contention that Mad Men did this all the time. It fed the childish illusions that many want to believe about who the heroes and villains of the 1960s were while making mistakes that more thoughtful people would notice and begin to wonder about. One of these illusions is central to the way we tend to think about the period and that is that any positive aspects we might see in the 1960s and the 1950s before are obliterated by the racism and sexism of the period. Nostalgia, for modern liberals is an illegitimate and distorting emotion to be resisted. This is especially true of any nostalgia for the period before the sexual revolution, the antiwar and civil rights movement and feminism. A show like Mad Men challenges that simply by exiting.

The show's writers face the problem squarely in the final episode of the first season.

There is the rare occasion where the public can be engaged a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product. My first job. I was in house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, Greek, named Teddy. Teddy told me the most idea in advertising is 'new". Creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.  

He also talked about a deeper bond with the product, "nostalgia". It's delicate. But potent. 

Teddy told that , in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "the pain from an old would."

Now, the interesting thing here is that Don reverses the way our era treats these things. For our era, nostalgia is the easy sell. It creates the itch and then you give the people La belle epoque, American Graffiti, Animal House, Happy Days, The Waltons or some other nostalgic entertainment as a sort of calamine lotion and everyone is happy. Everyone except the professor teaching popular culture at the local university. He/she wants you to know that there were problems with that era that should trouble us because she/he doesn't want anyone admiring any of the values of that era. The professor wants you to embrace "new".

And Don Draper represents the past. He never changes. He always embraces a set of old values. They aren't mainstream values of the period to be certain but they are old. They could be loosely described as 'the hobo code". And he creates a nostalgia for a certain kind of man; a man who is secretive, strong and independent; a man who can cut his losses and move on, not without pain but he can and will do it whenever necessary.

That Don represents this challenge is no problem. He can be dismissed. He is easy to hate. The problem is that he is also easy to love and millions did and do.

The hint that there might be something esoteric going on is in the last line where Don gives a definition of nostalgia. It's not just wrong, it's very wrong. "Nostalgia" uses Greek components but it was coined by A German speaker to describe a condition where people were incapacitated by a desire to return home. The Greek words combined to make it literally mean "aching to go home". As conceived by Johannes Hofer, nostalgia means the exact opposite of what Draper says it means: it means a desire to escape a new wound into a safer past.

But this is where it gets interesting. Right from the beginning, nostalgia has been very compelling. Hofer's definition, echoed by the many who criticize it today, makes nostalgia into a childish emotion, an escapist fantasy. Don Draper gives us a more interesting option: that nostalgia isn't about wanting to escape but a way of confronting loss. And the show appears to back this up by giving us to aspects of the man: Don who deals with situations masterfully and Dick who runs. Those who see Don as an anti hero take that "inner Dick" as the real man. Those of us who admire him take the teleological view, that the man Don wants to become is the real man.

If we take this second option, we'll see the way events spin out in the rest of the story different. The common interpretation of the ending of that first season was that Don did such a good job of selling the men from Kodak that he sold himself too and returned home hoping to find the very thing he'd sold others on.

It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone ... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again ... back home again, a place where we know we are loved.

But "a twinge in your heart more powerful than memory alone" isn't real so much as it is religious. "Our hearts are restless Lord until they rest in thee."

Donald Draper did not, as Robert Rorke and many others claim, steal another man's identity. He used his dog tags to get out of the army and he kept up that deception to break ties with his past as Dick Whitman but he does not adapt the identity of the other man. Think of the man who pretends to a famous actor to get sex or who pretends to be someone else so as to apply for a credit card and then leave this other person stuck with the bill. That is what "stealing another man's identity" is. What Donald Draper does is more akin to giving a false name so as not to be arrested.

You may say, "So what, it's still illegal" and that it most certainly is. But it's still important to get a correct grasp on what is happening. Donald Draper is not a assuming another man's identity, he's a man running away from a shameful past. He's running away from "death". We might well say he is running away from sin.

The first man

Why does Adam commit suicide? "Because he finds his brother whom he thought was dead but his brother rejects him." Okay, but why would that dictate suicide? Adam has seen the loss of his mother and his stepfather. He's had to make it on his own and he has managed. Why would he kill himself? It doesn't make sense.

If I'm right, it doesn't make sense because it isn't supposed to make sense.

Adam, at least according to a flashback and I think we should treat these as mythology not history, was named so by his mother "after the first man". If you know your Saint Paul, however, you'll know that there is a second Adam who follows the first Adam and yet existed before him. I'll grant you that's an odd bit of mythology for a Jew such as Matt Weiner to seize upon and yet I think he does just that. Unlike a believer like myself, this mythology is just like any other mythology for Weiner. Adam is important, not as a real character, but for what he represents to Donald Draper, a past he flees but also a loss.

That's all for now.

Virtue signalling (2)

I do not know whether the term virtue signalling will catch on or not. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it describes something human beings actually do. On the other hand, it was quickly appropriated by the perpetual outrage community as a cheap and easy put down.

The key fact is this: virtue signalling is a normal and unavoidable thing that all human beings do. It's not evil. You, me and everybody else we know will, under most circumstances, express the values the we believe the people we are with want to hear. It's a normal, and even productive, thing to do.

A friend of mine is pregnant with her second child. She noticed that her first child has started to grunt when he bends over. He does this because mummy, heavy with child, grunts when she bends over. That's virtue signalling. He's expressing a value, bending over is hard, because his mother expresses that value. In her case, it's actually true. In his case, it's not. He does it because he, like all human beings, is hardwired to learn by imitating others and because his very life depends on his mother.

That is true of us too. Our very life depends on the community around us. If you find yourself stuck with people you don't know well for an extended period of time, you will begin to mirror their behaviours and attitudes.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this. The most commonplace one is the that it takes courage to speak up for your values. Most of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in the presence of someone who brashly says things we deeply oppose but found ourselves unable to respond. We just sat there while things we found hateful were said. But there is a deeper and more important lesson here and that is that our expressed values are often at odds with our real values.

Think of the example I give above in a slightly different light. Imagine you are in a group and someone says things you deeply oppose and you do not object at first but soon notice that the others in the group do. And now you join in. Or maybe you wait a little longer to see if a few others also join and then you join in. Perhaps you wait until it's obvious that the person is rejected and reviled by the rest of the group and then you join in (perhaps "pile on" would be a better term by that point).

We've all done these things. What this tells us is that fitting in is a value we treasure deeply.

To return to the previous example, let's consider a further hypothetical: if the group started to be angry with the person who had expressed offensive opinions, at what point would we pull back? We hope that it would be sometime before someone got a rope to lynch them with but who knows what we are capable of.

We live in a deontological culture. That is to say, we live in a world where morality is largely defined in terms of duty defined by rules. Be tolerant. Don't use violence. Recycle. Don't have sex with teenagers. Be faithful to your spouse. Don't text while driving. And many more. Each of these rules comes accompanied with a justification in terms of duty. "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling."

This is a very compelling morality. It's clearly expressed and relatively easy to understand. Compared to utilitarianism, Do what will give the greatest happiness to the largest number," or virtue ethics, "Act in a  way to train yourself to be a better human being, " there is clarity and ease of application to be found in, "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling." You know what to do and you can easily figure out if you've done it. It's also liberating in one sense—once you've done what the rules tell you to be your duty, you can stop. "I've recycled, I can get a beer and watch television." That's nothing to sneer at, although we all do sneer at it.

But, at the same time that we accept deontology, we also reject it because we cannot and do not fully internalize these values. My real attitude toward recycling is something like: "I will do this up to a point but if I just have to get the place cleaned up because guests are arriving or because I've been getting depressed at the kitchen being so messy and I know I'll feel better if I can clean it up quickly then those plastic containers are going straight into the garbage and I don't think that will do any real harm so long as I don't do it too often but, at the same time, I don't want everyone thinking this is okay so I will continue to hold the hard line when expressing my attitudes towards people who don't recycle."

It's not that we have some alternative set of values that we really follow. It's more that we are willing to make a whole lot of exceptions that we aren't honest with ourselves or others about. And that is why we fear and love the expression "virtue signalling". We fear it because we know it can be justly applied to what we do. We love it because it can be justly applied to what other people do and that makes it a useful tool for making others talk and behave in a predictable fashion.

What do we do about this? I'll try and come back to it.

A rum thing

In this we are victims of our own antihistorical bias. The dizzying pace of change in the last hundred years has left us stranded. We somehow think that the way things are is the way they have always been; that the Present is the same as the Natural Order. 

And yet our culture knows better. Buried in the way things are is a long chain of used-to-be's. If we get out the shovels and go below the surface a bit, we find five parallel stories that tell us why X matters.

The X, for which the above was written is rum. The book I quote here is a Short Course in Rum: A Guide to Tasting and Talking About Rum by Lynn Hoffman. His point, however, could applied to a lot of things, not the least of which is Catholicism. Much of what people declare to be the "unchanged teaching of the church going back two thousand years" is really the product of the last few centuries.

Virtue signalling (1)

From On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in Society, 1840

By Thomas Carlyle

It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. 

By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. 

But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere skepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. 

Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Skepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? 

Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them.

Praxis and theory

Melzer and, I assume, Leo Strauss, argue that esoteric writing arises from a perceived conflict between theory and praxis. The ancients believed that there was always such a conflict because "the many" would never be able to appreciate philosophy. The moderns, beginning with the Enlightenment leaders, believed that there was a temporary gap between theory and praxis but, once praxis had been reformed according to theory, it would disappear. On this modern account, esoteric writing is only a temporary thing until social practices had been reformed.

If that Enlightenment notion puts the stink of Auschwitz in your nose, go to the head of the class.

The ancient view also has its problems. Commenting on the Seventh Letter attributed to Plato, Melzer writes,

The passage begins, for example, with the classic Platonic view that philosophic knowledge is the supreme good of life and that helping others to acquire it, where possible, an act of highest beneficence.

There is something about this reading of Plato that has more in common with religious mysticism than with the kind of philosophy I like to do. I, like Wittgenstein, see philosophy as something we do on a temporary basis in response to puzzles that arise and we do it not as an end in itself but in order to be able to go back to leading our lives. That is not to say, as some have misread Wittgenstein, that all philosophical puzzles can be made to go away but rather that we should not be bewitched by the language. The central mysteries of life will always be there and one of the best things about doing philosophy in a Wittgensteinian manner is that we can face these mysteries as mysteries much as a good Catholic doesn't claim to comprehend the Trinity. We will recognize mysteries through ritualistic behaviour rather than try to dissolve them through analysis.

This approach puts praxis ahead of theory. To put it in ordinary language, it's more important to live well than to be able to say what living well is. And that reverses the order of esoteric thinking: we will now be esoteric in order to protect our praxis from theory, our own theory as well as that of others.

Encountering another as a person definitely does not mean "dissolving" that person, taking him or her apart psychologically and thus seizing power over the other, but seeing the other in his or her difference, even strangeness. Whoever wants to truly recognize another as a person must expect to encounter the unexpected and be led into a new world of which one previously had no idea—a world whose strangeness fascinates but also frightens.

That's Gerhard Lohfink and the primary example he has in mind is Jesus who needs to be protected from our ego which would reduce him to a concept. But the same is true of us in our encounter with social groups beginning with our own families. Others will always want to reduce us to their idea of what we should be. And this would lead to something like the reverse of what Arthur Melzer and Leo Strauss have in mind when they speak of esoteric writing: it would be a way of appearing to go along with theory so as to be able to protect a praxis that is at odds with that theory.

This will be more than what is implied by the common expression "lip service" for we will want not only to provide lip service but also to communicate with others who share our values not as expressed in some theory but as actually lived.

Violet-le-Duc on restoration

Both the word and the thing are modern. To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to rebuild it; it means to re-establish in a completed state, which may in fact have never existed at any given time.

Violet-le-Duc is a controversial figure, a fact that wouldn't bother him at all. What impresses me about that quote is the courage it shows. Courage that the man demonstrated in the work he did.

It seems to me that this attitude applies to more than just restoring buildings. To restore anything at all means to take the risk of creating something new in the process. To think that anything else is possible is delusional and the risk of paralysis is very real.

Psychological reactance

An excerpt from a NYT article about the appeal of Donald Trump:

Haidt describes reactance as

the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination.

The theory, first developed in 1966 by Jack W. Brehm in “A Theory of Psychological Reactance,” is directly relevant to the 2016 election, according to Haidt. Here is Brehm’s original language:

Psychological reactance is an aversive affective reaction in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy. This reaction is especially common when individuals feel obliged to adopt a particular opinion or engage in a specific behavior. Specifically, a perceived diminution in freedom ignites an emotional state, called psychological reactance, that elicits behaviors intended to restore this autonomy.

I thought of something I wrote myself a short while ago:

If your life experience is anything like mine, one of the things you've had to face is sudden aggression from other people and yourself about things that make no sense. A conversation about subjects that it seems like no one should have any personal investment suddenly becomes very heated. Without knowing how you got there, you find yourself arguing about things that shouldn't matter. Part of you thinks you could just give in, as this is something that shouldn't matter, and part of you thinks you shouldn't give in as this is something that shouldn't matter so you are rightfully suspicious of this other person pushing so hard to make you give in on an issue that shouldn't matter.

Family does that to you.

I've been rereading Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing by Arthur Melzer. He lists a number of reasons why someone might engage in esoteric writing. All these are either to avoid evil or to attain some good. On the avoidance end:

• We might write esoterically to protect ourselves from condemnation by the larger society.
• We might write esoterically to protect the larger society from truths it cannot bear.

We might also write esoterically:

• As a form of propaganda aimed at similarly minded people.
• As a way of teaching for the reader will be obliged to figure things out for themselves.

I think psychological reactance raises another possibility: that we might write, indeed live, esoterically in order to gain a private sphere for ourselves. We could get this, of course, simply by locking ourselves in our rooms alone for long periods of time. Indeed, just about every teen does this when puberty comes along and they are suddenly subject to needs and desires that would cause extreme shame if they were not kept private. Ultimately, however, this privacy will be empty. We need a private sphere that includes other people, a world we can share with others, that also excludes people who "try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you".

The word "perceive" carries a lot of weight here. You might simply be wrong in your perception and you can never completely shake the feeling of doubt that comes with that. Combine that with a family member who has authority because they are a parent, or who is self righteous in their anger and is threatening you with exclusion, or, and this is gruelling, is both of those things, and you will crack. Thus the need to carve out a sphere where you can express thoughts esoterically that others might suppress.

The good news is that everyone feels this need and you will find others playing the same game and it, like most games, is more fun to play with others. And, because all games have an implied teleology, that teleology will become the basis of your personal mythology. You will have a notion not of who you are, which is what your family bombards you with, but of who you should be trying to become.

That creates tensions within the family. Seeing you develop independence as a consequence of having this teleology, some family members will try and reign you in. Mothers are particularly prone to this, which is why I advocate that every man and woman intentionally blow up their relationship with their mother at some point. There is another danger, however, and that is enablers: these are family members who set themselves up as the unofficial police for the family mythology. They do this largely because of fears and insecurities of their own but that doesn't mean they won't make you hurt.

Another subject about which there will be more to say.