Sometimes I think my biggest objection to reality is aesthetic. I had hoped the destroyer of the constitution would replace it with something imaginative, instead of using tricks that were already stale when Lincoln used them, much less Pompey. Historians sometimes date the fall of the Roman Republic from the establishment of his 1st Triumvirate with Caesar and Crassus, but to those who lived at the time, the difference was not so obvious. As I live through these dark days, I wonder, will future historians see this darkness as the twilight of the American Republic, or as merely an eclipse? If twilight, is the fall imminent, or will they say the Republic has already passed? If the Republic has already fallen, when did it happen? Will the theft of the 2000 election be seen as the Republic's end, or will the point of inevitable collapse be seen as having been still earlier, perhaps with the treasonous deal of guns for hostages which a Hollywood hack and a CIA stooge staged in 1980? Or will they find the establishment of the Imperium still earlier, with the founding of the National Security Agency, perhaps?
Historians paint neat pictures from the perspective of hindsight (which is still not near 20/20). Living in the middle of these interesting times, we might not see the forest for the trees, or rather, we may not see the fields of stumps covering the harvested hills, as they are hidden behind the bill boards. Still, one must try to maintain hope if one is to live, and I try to reassure myself by applying perspective to the illusion. I tell myself that when small men cast long shadows, it is a sure sign the sun is setting, but it has not yet set, and the juvenalis carnifix, the Kid Butcher Pompey of our Republic's long fall, is no Caesar.
We arrived at last at the Democratic rally, to which I donated my presence. No signs were allowed here. Freedom of speech was impaired, as when we were given tickets, it was understood we could bring no signs. I did distribute more fliers on our Peace Jam, and then I sat down and read Malevil by Robert Merle while the John Ritter doppelganger droned on about the conservative old-fashioned virtues of social fascism. After the theocratic absolutism I had just protested, it was as pleasant as the distant drone of bees on a summer day.
Malevil is a French view of survival after nuclear apocalypse. I first read it when Reagan was in office, when it was as fresh as tomorrow's newspaper today. I enjoy stories of the slate being swept clean and the survivors picking up the pieces, but Malevil is the only example of the genre I recall reading that was written by a non-Anglophone.
Although I don't have a statistical sample, Malevil seems to show some typical divergences between French and Anglophone psychology. I have read a number of post-apocalyptic tales, some of which were post-nuclear, such as Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon or John Bear's Eon, although Anglophones tended to imagine other disasters, from plagues, as in George Stewart's classic study of ecology, The Earth Abides, to meteoric impacts in Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer, or to a combination, as in John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids.
In such stories, the web of social relations is destroyed and human atoms are thrown into the state of nature. The key plot of such thought experiments as novels involves the forging of a new community. This is achieved on at least two levels. One is the framing of a social contract, as Locke imagined it. This is the level that defines how we shall live. In Day of the Triffids, the only example I have cited written by an Englishman, the influence of Locke is overwhelming, and within 24 hours the survivors of London, conscious of being in the state of a blank slate, have assembled by Robert's Rules of Order and formed the beginning of a new community. In Alas, Babylon, the crucial event is the hero declaring his authority under martial law. In The Earth Abides, the formation of a community of law takes twenty-two years, and only occurs when the few survivors are forced to condemn a stranger to death for having a venereal disease, rather than risk his spreading it to the next generations among the four dozen survivors.
Lucifer's Hammer is unusual in postulating survival of authority. The conflict is between those who would save as much civilization as they can in a world that has fallen back largely to slave power, and a new community based on a religious foundation. This is the second level on which social relations are reconstructed, the level that rationalizes why we live, the community of religion. Lucifer's Hammer is exceptional in setting these two modes in opposition. The religious community is legally so bankrupt that it falls below the level of slavery into literal cannibalism. The community of law, on the other hand, coalesces around the Promethean cause of rebuilding civilization.
In Day of the Triffids, after the bankruptcy of traditional values is shown, religion is created as consciously as was the community of law, out of the selection and emphasis the founders give to the story of the fall of the old world and the founding of the new. The Earth Abides shows seven survivors developing an ad hoc life-style based on their economic preconditions until forced to define themselves as a people by the act of condemning the outsider to death. The new religion arises spontaneously among the children. Eon, written in 1985, amusingly has the new religion founded on the works of Ralph Nader, the "Good Man" who strove to give technology a human face.
Malevil, as I said, is the only example of this genre I have encountered that wasn't written in English. The differences seem typically French. First and foremost, the survivors are rude to each other. Second, the social contract follows Rousseau rather than Locke. The constituent assembly of the new order seeks its legitimacy by affirming a neo-feudal Catholicism as an organizing principle at once legal and religious. Yet, being French, they rationalize a group marriage of the two dozen survivors in the community of Malevil. In American stories, the survivors bind in monogamy before coming together in larger communities. The English, oddly, seem to go for polygamy. In short, Anglophones have revolution without general copulation, and the French have general copulation without revolution.
Perhaps it is true that there can be no revolution without general copulation. Certainly, as Wilhelm Reich pointed out, the organization of the sex economy is probably the most fundamental decision in determining the nature of the society. I admit, however, that I missed the Sexual Revolution. Since I have not copulated much outside of marriage, and that broke up as much because of sexual incompatibility as anything, there may be an element of sour grapes in what follows.
The 60's Sexual Revolution was the last gasp of free love outside of the pre-AIDS gay community. It was co-opted to consumerism by the Playboy philosophy, and evolved to a culture of illegitimacy in which the pimp is the male model, and females have gone from being girls to being hos. Some blame feminism for this. I don't.
I do blame gay lib for allowing itself to become the consumer culture par-excellance, and I blame feminism and gay lib both for allowing themselves to be co-opted into making the right to serve in the army the acid test of integration. As James Baldwin asked, "Who wants to integrate into a burning house?" Gay marriage? I am reminded of how the left campaigned to abolish war in the 1920's, and by the 1940's, the left was campaigning for adequate furloughs for soldiers.
The rally ended, although the world didn't. I expropriated balloons, as I am wont to do, and then we departed for the vegetarian restaurant and the simple question I have yet to answer completely. That night, I encountered a former student of mine who I hadn't seen in two years. She is a Pentecostal, something else we once had in common, and she urged me to make an act of faith and pray. I said God and I were having problems, which was an understatement. I haven't even heard from God since I started taking medications, although the last thing He said was "Don't be so hard on yourself. That's my job." I am no longer able to suspend my disbelief that I am talking to or hearing anyone other than myself when I pray.
I have said the super-ego evolved to domesticate our sexuality and aggression into the patterns of our community. Basing my thoughts partly on An Essay on Morals, Philip Wylie's explanation of Jungianism, and partly on my own experience, I derive the following model of the workings of instinct. The first fact that must be grasped is that humans have instincts. Most obvious are the instincts of aggression and sexuality, but there are other, subtler instincts as well. There is the instinct to find a place in the hierarchy, and the instinct to use our voices as other primates use their hands, for social grooming. My ex-wife claimed that at the edge of six she spontaneously "remembered" how to knap flint knives of Cro-Magnon sophistication.
The second datum to be aware of is that instincts do not represent inevitabilities, but faculties, and the manner of their expression is determined by the manner in which the instincts are brought into operation, by the imprint they take from their earliest and strongest conditioning. For example, humans have an instinct to establish a pecking order, but it is one's early positioning in various pecking orders that imprints one with the habits of dominance and submission.
Third, in the long millions of years before the emergence of individual consciousness, humans evolved a group consciousness, a sense of place in the primate band that allowed the band to function as a unit, and not just in day to day operations, but in the times of stress, such as inter-band conflict, or the song and dance of the season of courtship (and many hunter-gatherers do still confine sex to one season a year). We know humans have had the technology to produce rhythms by the knapping of stones since at least the time of Lucy and the habilines, three million years ago. Rhythm created the possibility of a more thorough integration of actions than anything outside of the social insects. One can imagine the millions of years when the ancestors gathered around the fires at night and danced to rhythm, and sang, as the Ituri Pygmies and Kalahari !Kung still did not so long ago, and may still be doing, at this moment..
Trying to discuss human instinct from a position of authority is a loser's game. The issue becomes clouded at that point by the question of when humans gained individual consciousness, which moved instinct's operation to new levels. As pointed out by Alan Turing, we could not determine if a computer is conscious of itself. We could at most determine that it isn't. I have applied the Turing Test to humans, and have seen few rational responses that could not conceivably be simulated by a sufficiently elaborate computer program, but I have seen many indications of utter lack of self-consciousness. Does self-consciousness exist? Or, to cast the thought in a logically meaningful manner, is the null statement "self-consciousness does not exist," falsifiable?
"Cogito, ergo sum," I think, therefore I am, although I am not sure about you, and come to think of it, I can exist for periods of time without thought as well, when drunk, when copulating, sick or sleeping. I feel, therefore I exist, is a more accurate and universal statement. But my ego largely mediates reality through words. Mine is a word-bound time-binding self-consciousness, and I encountered instinct most clearly as verbal messages from the other side of the skull. My own experience shows the complications that can occur when instinct vies with a self-consciousness attempting Vulcan logic.
I had experienced the internalized parental command as my mother's voice when I was three, and had the thought, in precisely the words, "When I grow up, I am going to kill my Daddy and marry Mom," at the age of six. Thank you, Art Linkletter, for letting me know such thoughts are "normal" and "silly". After these experiences, I had developed a healthy disrespect for "the voice" by the time it tried to instill group pride and identification by telling me "You are a white male American, and people like you rule the world."
Of course, instinct need not present itself in words. Most obvious to my mind was the way my right brain started emitting erotic images every fifteen seconds once I hit puberty. I had already disassociated myself from my instincts, and I considered this a biochemical impertinence and an animal irrelevancy.
And of course, instincts could not have presented themselves in terms of verbal commands before the emergence of language. In between such instinctive targeting on the image of the goal, which I experienced at puberty and which probably occurs among at least some of our kindred species with binocular vision, and instincts that present themselves as verbal commands, there were those other mechanisms of presenting the commands of instincts.
I have mentioned the song and dance of courtship. From the tribal dances of the Masai, through the peasant polkas and Morris dances of Europe, to the meat-rack discotheques of electronic age, one can see song and dance still being used in the original manner, as biological courtship. These are behaviors that are unique to humans among primates. Their use in group banding is apparent when one considers the uses made of rhythm, song, dance, and ritual by religions, sports, and armies. From the instinct to sing and dance evolved the instinct for ritual, and from all of these arose the ability to symbolize, both verbally and visually.
Here I must pause, and reflect I am slipping into idealism, and mistaking the model for the thing itself. As the evolutionary record shows, and as Engels pointed out before the Piltdown Hoax, the hand preceded the brain, and verbal symbolization appeared, early if not initially, when certain sounds accompanied certain actions. This was the Marxist economic precondition of the very existence of humanity, the ability to use the hand to perform work. The rituals of song, dance, and language are, in Marxist and Jungian terms, the religious superstructure, and are a functional effect, not a cause.
But if I have dissociated myself from the verbal commands of instinct, I am deaf to these other appeals. I have no sense of rhythm, and my Protestant loathing of idolatry has immunized me to the appeal of visual symbols, be they the totems of sports teams, the logos of corporations, or the flags of nations, although I can see the behavior of the primate bands they appeal to, and I fear their power.
So we have three points one must remember about group behavior: first, humans have instincts, second, instincts represent faculties, and their expression is determined by imprinting, and third, humans evolved a group consciousness before they evolved a self-consciousness, and this group-consciousness was religious.
A fourth point to realize is that religious taboos are functional, given the sex-economy they evolve to re-enforce, and however much they work by misdirection. Who would guess that the cult of the Virgin and Child was a necessary precondition for the ideological expulsion of the Jews from Western Europe in order to allow the local bourgeoisie to take over their economic functions?*
Religion is the method evolved by "unfallen" pre-word-bound humans to create group identity, and integrate one's place in its sexual and productive economies. Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind postulates this unselfconscious state still existed at the time of Homer, and only broke down due to the emergence of literacy. I consider that extreme, and although it is not impossible, it seems to be unfalsifiable, but it also seems true in my own experience. My consciousness is the word-bound time-binding self-consciousness Jaynes said replaced the holistic bicameral consciousness of unfallen humanity. At the other extreme, #43, a pre-literate, fails my Turing Test, as he shows no signs of ever having ever engaged in thoughtful self-consciousness, and indicates frequently he operates on instinct.
Wilhelm Reich, who may have been the most original thinker of the 20th Century, is little known today since the US government ordered all his works burned in the 1950s and then imprisoned him until he died. He had developed, from his practical experience as a Marxist and a psychoanalyst working in Germany, a theory of instinct that is more complete than Jung's because it was rooted in biophysical and sex-economic functions. His The Mass Psychology of Fascism (which was burned, with all the rest of his work, including his classical Freudian text Character Analysis, for allegedly advocating "cancer-quackery") was written after he had run the youth campaign for the Communist Party in the second to last free election of the Weimar Republic. In it, he explained why he told the central committee of the German Communist Party that there could be no revolution without general copulation, or more precisely, "There can be no Revolution without the legal equality of women, which cannot be achieved without free access to birth control information and the means of birth control, including abortion, and the abolition of all laws pertaining to consensual copulation!" He also explained why the central committee told him, after the election, that come the Revolution, he was the first one they would shoot.
Reich believed instinct had been deformed by the economic preconditions of human consciousness at least since the invention of slavery, so that the instinct for human solidarity had turned finally into the worship of the nation-state, and so that all the conditioning of our instincts is designed to reproduce children who bear our own character defects as sexual cripples fit for wage slavery. He identified two tendencies in governments of industrial societies, tendencies that have manifested themselves in our two-party system. These are "national socialism," which makes no bones about serving the race, the rich, and instinct, and "social fascism," which at least pretends to be concerned with problems of "the people," but due to the defective character structure of the human race, still actually serves the rich and the instinctive arrangements of the existing social order.
One may argue about whether we are still sexual cripples, but it must be noted that, in a country debating replacing a law forbidding copulation with one regulating it, we have a long way to go before women's liberation and the Sexual Revolution are complete. It must also be noted that, while "general copulation" is a necessary precondition of a successful revolution, it is not sufficient. A successful revolution would also demilitarize and socialize, and in order to do that, it is probably necessary to eat the rich.
I look forward to a world where my biggest worry is how much benefit of the doubt I should give Kerry, but he is not even a social fascist. He is a rich "Great Society" conservative, concerned with campaign contributions from abortion clinics and making the military industrial establishment more efficient and popular. While Edwards, a self-made millionaire, may believe, as a former non-millionaire, in the brotherhood line he spouted, Kerry does not seem to be making even a pretense of serving "the people," but simply Democratic Party interests.
Still, we know #43 is a national socialist with theocratic absolutist overtones, and he makes no bones about serving God and the rich. He is also an idiot who hasn't even the brains to be a hypocrite. Jonnie's slogan sums it up on an optimistic note, "Vote for Kerry! Not as Scary!" As a pessimist, my sentiments are closer to "Vote for Kerry! Put off the Draft for Four Months!"
Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky have both stated that, being in "safe states", they will vote from Nader. I would vote for either of them before I would vote for Nader, who seems to be a genuine social fascist, serving the rich by dividing the poor, but I admire their tactics. I presume a "safe state" is one whose electoral votes will count against Bush. Texas has gone Republican in every election I recall. In every presidential election, whether I have voted or not, my vote has counted as a vote for the Republican Party. Kerry lost my vote when he failed to mention abolishing the Electoral College.
In every election, in addition to asking who I would prefer as Antichrist, I have asked myself a more practical equivalent question, "Who would you prefer to see destroy the Constitution?" After the hijacking of the 2000 election and the Patriot Act, the question is moot, and Kerry does not seem to plan on restoring the Constitution of 2001, much less repairing the Constitution of 2000.
What is more, El Paso is in the Mountain Time Zone and is temporally disenfranchised. By the time I vote in the evenings, my vote has already been counted against me. If I perform that empty rite, it will be entirely an act of faith.
*If you would like demonstrations of how this works, I recommend reading Marvin Harris' Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches : The Riddles of Culture, and then contemplating the place and function of the blood-libel in history.
T. S. Ross was a staff reviewer for Unlikely 2.0 in 2004.