Over the weekend I finally saw Avatar (on IMAX 3D) and it struck me, on the most superficial level, that we are one step closer to fully immersive virtual reality. The movie was, as so many have commented, visually stunning in its depiction of a new planet with a complex biology (although the biology, for all its complexity, seemed rather animal-species poor and the waters appeared to be uninhabited.) On the other hand, the story was simple and simple minded. James Cameron is a brilliant film maker but the movie suggests he knows next to nothing about the complexities of business or military affairs, religion, biology, or a host of other disciplines, which is why his humans and aliens are so one dimensional.
Coincidentally, Clare Spark posted on The Glenn Beck Problem on Saturday:
This blog is about the danger of allowing media personalities to do our thinking for us. As my long-time friend political scientist Stephen Eric Bronner wrote in one of his first books (this on German Expressionism), making a passionate work of art or viewing it, though valuable in itself, cannot substitute for the thoughtful study, investigating, organizing and other activity that resists illegitimate authority. [Emphasis mine-SW] Professor Bronner wrote enthusiastically about Rosa Luxemburg too, as well as other radical social democrats who were associated with the Second International. These activists were called left-wing social democrats, because they meant to educate the masses in the most advanced industrialized societies and through majority acquiescence (as opposed to bureaucratic centralism) make the transition from capitalism to socialism. Luxemburg herself was an anti-Bolshevik and argued with Lenin about issues that are still red-hot today, such as supporting anti-colonial social movements that were antidemocratic and backward. (I am updating the debate between Luxemburg and Lenin, originally about the nature of imperialism, and about self-determination in the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, not about Third World dictatorships of today. (Thanks to Steve Bronner for the correction. But as Robert Brenner and Perry Anderson taught the debate in a session I audited, the issue concerned left-wing alliances with antidemocratic entities, so I extrapolated to the present, when the hard Left does ally itself with dubious entities.)
[I have been reading Clare Spark's blog for quite some time and can't figure out her politics, beyond a baseline Libertarianism, which is either an indictment of my powers of discernment, an indictment of her writing, or a tribute to her thinking, which is my preference.]
Now, consider these comments about Ted Kaczynski from a June, 2000 profile in The Atlantic: [HT: CBDenver, in a comment to my post Friday on Terror and Terrorism.]
Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber
It was at Harvard that Kaczynski first encountered the ideas about the evils of society that would provide a justification for and a focus to an anger he had felt since junior high school. It was at Harvard that he began to develop these ideas into his anti-technology ideology of revolution. It was at Harvard that Kaczynski began to have fantasies of revenge, began to dream of escaping into wilderness. And it was at Harvard, as far as can be determined, that he fixed on dualistic ideas of good and evil, and on a mathematical cognitive style that led him to think he could find absolute truth through the application of his own reason. [Emphasis mine-SW] Was the Unabomber -- "the most intellectual serial killer the nation has ever produced," as one criminologist has called him -- born at Harvard?
By this time you might reasonably be wondering what common thread I could have possibly found between Avatar/James Cameron, Glenn Beck, and Ted Kaczynski/Harvard?
Splitting is the quintessential mental function which becomes the quintessential primitive defense mechanism. It is based on the earliest operation of the differentiating mind as the infant begins to recognize the difference between himself and an external world filled with other minds. As the child matures, his sense of those who fit into the primary categories of "self/like-self" and "other/like-other" becomes more sophisticated and nuanced. A fully mature adult appreciates that there are many people who live in his tribe(s). "Like-self" begins with the family and then over time enlarges to include his friends, his classmates, his communities (social, religious, business, professional, political, sports, etc), his state, his country. All through development, the core organization of self/not-self persists, overlain by more mature mental organizations, but always existing in potential for expression during periods of stress induced regression.
The tendency to resort to splitting into "all good" and "all bad" objects and their derivatives is ubiquitous. In an immature person, who lacks the leavening afforded by an appreciation of the complexity of people and the world, or who needs to simplify his experience in order to mitigate anxiety, the basic defensive splitting can overwhelm intellectual knowledge and lead to extreme views.
Anyone who is engaged politically must struggle with their own tendency toward splitting. Confirmation bias is an aspect of splitting that is recognized and manageable when done in moderation but can become the source of significant problems when unrecognized or unmodified. (We see the edifice of AGW crumbling primarily because the proponents became so convinced of their correctness in the absence of adequate significant data that they systematically elided inconvenient data and eventually began to invent data in the service of their "greater truth.") Political partisans will almost always have an initially positive reaction to proposals from their "side" and negative reactions to proposals from their opponents. It takes mental and psychological effort to consider the actual proposals themselves; it is easier and requires far less energy to accept or dismiss an idea because of it's provenance.
The Atlantic story on Ted Kaczynski (which I came to for the first time this weekend) is a classic story of a young person following the logic of his beliefs, unaware that his immaturity led him to rely on his perception of the world filtered through a prism of splitting. The author, Alston Chase, believes that Kaczynski was started on his intellectual road to despair and animus (which reinforced his emotional bleakness) by the Gen Ed program at Harvard, meant to inculcate the Judeo-Christian ethic but used by the sophisticated Harvard profs to teach the opposite, that there is nothing more than a relativistic morality; from Part II:
According to a study of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates that included Kaczynski's class of 1962, conducted by William G. Perry Jr., the director of the university's Bureau of Study Counsel, the undergraduate curriculum had a profound impact on the emotions, the attitudes, and even the health of some students.
According to Perry, intellectual development for Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates typically encompassed a progression from a simplistic, "dualistic" view of reality to an increasingly relativistic and "contingent" one. Entering freshmen tend to favor simple over complex solutions and to divide the world into truth and falsehood, good and bad, friend and foe. Yet in most of their college courses, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, they are taught that truth is relative. Most accept this, but a number cannot. They react against relativism by clinging more fiercely to an absolute view of the world. To some of these students, in Perry's words, "science and mathematics still seem to offer hope."
Nevertheless, Perry wrote, "regression into dualism" is not a happy development, for it "calls for an enemy." Dualists in a relativistic environment tend to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude "requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any 'establishment'" and "can call forth in its defense hate, projection, and denial of all distinctions but one," Perry wrote. "The tendency ... is toward paranoia."
As is evident in his writings, Kaczynski rejected the complexity and relativism he found in the humanities and the social sciences. He embraced both the dualistic cognitive style of mathematics and Gen Ed's anti-technology message. And perhaps most important, he absorbed the message of positivism, which demanded value-neutral reasoning and preached that (as Kaczynski would later express it in his journal) "there was no logical justification for morality."
It is not a surprise but worth reinforcing that the distinction between the soft sciences and hard sciences represents a basic (and illusory) split in our mental apparatus between emotion and reason. It requires mental work to struggle against the easy splitting and maintain complexity; few consistently succeed and the lies people tell themselves to celebrate their embrace of a complexity they fail to grasp are telling. The idea, for example, that morality must be all-or-none is itself a result of splitting. Morality can neither be wholly relativistic (which can easily lead to anarchic social organization) nor can it be puritanically inflexible (which can lead to the Talibanization of society.)
This is already long enough and has only scratched the surface of the problem of duality/splitting and the development of a functional morality; further, both the story of Ted Kaczynski and Avatar, in their own ways, share a failing that is worth its own post: both fail to appreciate the need for Integration and Synthesis.
To be continued...
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