The art thing in the brain

Sometimes I’ll be writing a poem or a scene in screenplay or novel, and I know I hit it just right. I can feel it grow heavy with symbolic meaning that will transmit and stick. Why? Because the “symbolic meaning” behind the configuration at hand is easy to name and identify? No, quite the contrary.  It’s because I’ve set it up just right to hit the symbolic generator in the reader’s brain. We all have one. Part and parcel of our evolution is an instinct to search for the meaning behind events, behind all the visual and auditory signs that make up our daily life. All animals with optic powers might take note that the raven is black, but homo sapiens by nature drives toward a second plane of knowledge, a symbolic plane that stands at a distance from the visual percept but gives it the weight of meaning. What does it mean “when a raven flies to the right or a crow to the left,” as Cicero ponders it. The quest for the meaning behind things separates us from other animals, with whom we share the raw perception. This is what I call “the art thing in the brain” – the thing that makes us want to see a depth of meaning in an otherwise simple percept, the thing that makes us want to override the pleas of poet William Carlos Williams and read his “Red Wheelbarrow” as something rich in symbolic meaning.  And when you hit it right, you get the reader’s symbolic generator pumping, giving them a scenario pregnant with meaning but without fixing meanings and pre-empting the reader’s own process of symbolic generation.

The art thing in the brain goes to the heart of one of higher education’s dilemmas today. STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) do not have to explain their value to the parents of prospective college students. (See fellow blogger, Oxford Dphile.) Nor do the subject disciplines in the College of Business. But the Humanities are on the defensive. Parents frequently seem to have both monetary and philosophical concerns about their children majoring in the Humanities. Will he or she be on a line cook’s salary in ten years? And isn’t it frivolous, anyway, for a young man or woman to choose Art History or English Literature as a lifelong vocation?

To the first and monetary question, I’d say that if you think making money is the highest form of human achievement, don’t major in the Humanities. But consider that once minimal needs are met, a deeper understanding of the riches of cultural history and of the human imagination and of human subjectivity and connection is probably more fulfilling than generating profits and buying more and more stuff.

To the second and philosophical issue, I’d say that whether a lifelong vocation in the Humanities is frivolous depends on your frame of reference. Since roughly the time of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), homo sapiens has become increasingly defined as homo economicus. If you buy into that frame of reference, which views the human individual as essentially an economic unit, then you may conclude that such a choice is frivolous. But I’d argue that the representation of our species as homo economicus is an invention of capitalism, a modern-day mirage that serves the interest of a market economy but is itself frivolous in that it ignores the rest of our evolutionary history. In particular, it ignores the art thing in the brain. But pretending it isn’t there doesn’t make it go away. People will still crave to find deeper symbolic meaning behind the things they see and live through. Their symbolic generators will always be at work.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the disciplines of other university colleges. We need scientists who study the first plane of information, the plane of material observation that is prerequisite to any symbolic plane of meaning. We need engineers who can put their brains and hands together and make things work.  We need people with business skills to manage the enterprises of the other groups. But we also need theater and literature and art and most of all a body of intellectuals who understand inside and out how those symbolic generators work and have worked throughout human history. You can try to dismiss the value of that enterprise, but you will only be degrading the value of the human spirit. Be careful what you wish for, because without the Humanities we might truly become homo economicus, nothing more than units in a vast economic machine, without imagination or spirit or symbolic sensibility.

Taxes, Private Property, and the Age of Aquarius

Re: the argument against ending the tax cuts for the wealthy because “it’s their money,” not the government’s (and the corollary that to think otherwise is to be a vile socialist)

It doesn’t require a socialist to argue as billionaire investment banker Warren Buffett does — that the wealthy are far better off than they ever have been, are disproportionately benefiting from the productivity of the nation, and can chip in a little more as they used to do. However, my position goes beyond Buffett’s and perhaps beyond socialism, or at least beyond Marx’s version of socialism. To see how profoundly dangerous my world view really is, see below (but please don’t assume that one has to be as radical as I am to advocate letting the rich keep their full tax cut on the first 250k and pay Clinton-era rates on what falls over that).

1.      Private Property and the Age of Capitalism

The capitalist notion of private property as the fundamental basis of political economy, which is presented as a kind of “natural order,” has only really emerged in the last few hundred years. To be sure, there was private property prior to that, but the realm of private property was a kind of second-tier ownership, a veneer covering the world we all shared. Consider the UK, the very cradle of capitalism. Traditionally, land was fundamentally common grazing land. A rare spot or two may be set aside for the king. And vast areas might be – not owned really, but held for the king by the Duke of Cornwall, the Duke of Northumberland, etc. But in practice, it was pretty much commons. Then the initial seeds of capitalism were sown, of all places, in the field of agriculture. The enclosure movement. The old norm of common-use land (albeit with exceptions and conditions) yielded to a new norm of “all land is essentially private property.” Common rights disappeared in village after village, and a new class of landless workers was created.

A great philosopher, I forget his name, said that in every age, the ideology of the dominant class presents itself to all classes as the “natural order.” So during the precapitalist landed order, based on patrilineage and aristocratic tiers, the idea of a “Great Chain of Being” was successfully promulgated through all classes of people as the eternal, natural order. Pretty much everyone at every station in life bought into it, except for a few lonely radicals.

As economic power passes from the landed order to the capitalist order, the paradigm for the eternal, natural order changes in ways that suit the new dominant class. The view of the cosmos changes from an organic view to a mechanistic view. (Isaac Newton will lock this world view in for at least a couple of centuries – one could argue that this is still the dominant view, or one could argue that Einstein’s theory of relativity is a fundamental shift – a shift perhaps commensurate with the rise of multinational corporations as a new kind of decentralized power that replaces an older, more nationalistic form of capitalism.)

A second paradigm shift with the emergence of bourgeois capitalism over landed aristocracy is in the realm of private property. The enclosure movement was already gaining speed when Locke wrote his treatises on government. But Locke, by making private property the cornerstone of the social order – indeed, the cornerstone of human identity – gave emerging capitalism its master narrative – the “discourse” through which it becomes presented to all as the eternal, natural order. Just as decades of impressionistic speculation about evolution suddenly all came together under the powerful gaze of Darwin, and similar decades of speculation about the unconscious were pulled into a powerful, coherent master narrative by Freud, so “the ingenious Mr. Locke,” as he was often called in the 18^th century, provided a powerful, coherent discourse for socioeconomic trends that were forcing a paradigm shift at the end of the 17^th century.

2.      Gary’s Conclusion: Two Visions

So if “private property” is not the natural relationship between people and resources, but merely the relationship between people and resources that controls the present age, do I believe private property should be eliminated?

Short Term Vision

I am all in favor maintaining private property in the foreseeable future. But recognizing that there is nothing “natural” or “eternal” about this paradigm liberates us to rationally re-think the relationship between people and resources. (One thinks of that great passage in Frederick Douglass where his biggest problem was convincing his fellow slaves that slavery was not the natural and necessary order of things.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating a Bolshevik or Castro-like seizure of resources. My immediate ideal is much, much closer to the socialist/capitalist democracies of Western Europe– and “immediate” is actually ambiguous. One cannot skip steps and leap to the Western European ideal before the cultural and material infrastructure is in place. Not even looking at foreign countries, New Orleans is less ready for that ideal than the Northeast, and my local votes in New Orleans would be comparatively more conservative than if I were up there. However, once you see that the “private property” paradigm, like all paradigms, is historically determined and not an eternal part of nature, you can step back and re-envision the building blocks of how we see the world. Our GDP is $15 trillion a year. Let’s say that’s the sum total of our productivity as a nation. Of all the wealth generated by this productivity, the top 1% sucks out about 21% for its own use. Is it their money? I can see why one might say that. But at least consider the counter view. That’s the slice of our collective productivity that they are taking home. The vast majority of infrastructure, labor, and other economic formations were in place before they came along. They didn’t print their own money; they didn’t personally generate the productivity; they merely did their part in the collective enterprise of generating productivity. In the case of CEO salaries, let’s say that their part involves a higher level of expertise and risk. I think it’s fair that they make 10, 20, say 42 times as much as the average worker (as in 1980). But can they really suck out 354 times the average worker’s salary (2012) on the grounds that “it’s my money.” I think that’s excessive. Or if they continue to suck wealth out at that accelerated level, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they put a little extra back in on the percentage that falls above a certain cap. You may convince me that they deserve 42 x the average worker’s salary, or that their tax rate should only go up on the part that falls over that 4200% line, but the evil socialist in me will not accept that it’s “their money” until you can show me that they generated it without drawing on any pre-existing infrastructure, labor, or other economic/cultural formations.

Long Term Vision

Does private property survive my long-term vision?

I take no position on that. Future generations will be better equipped to make that call. I can only recommend keeping private property into the foreseeable future.

For the full long-term vision, the hippie world view deep in my brainstem (perhaps in the form of LSD residue) is key. The hippie vision was much more revolutionary than Marx’s vision. Marx was a man of his time. Since Adam Smith, homo sapiens was recast as homo economicus. Homo economicus is the foundation of classical political economy and perhaps still the dominant paradigm of human nature. Marx did not break from this. He was all about economic redistribution, but it was still all about economics and who gets what share of the pie. The radicals of the 1930s were still in this pattern. The radicals of the 1960s, however, envisioned human nature in a fundamentally different way — in a way that would transcend homo economicus. In some ways, the “cultural” liberals of the 1960s were very strange bedfellows for the “economic” liberals rooted in the 1930s and the trade unions. The economic liberals, like Marx, were looking for a revolution within the age of homo economicus – a centennial kind of revolution. The cultural liberals of the 1960s were looking for an Age of Aquarius somewhere past the horizon line of homo economicus – a millennial kind of revolution. Private property may survive such a paradigm shift (for all I know), but it couldn’t survive as the primary relationship between people and resources (or the primary end of human relations, as it seems to be for homo economicus under capitalism). The idea is that the species has technologically evolved, or very nearly evolved, to a point where the production and distribution of resources can easily accommodate the entire world population, were it not for the intransigent barriers of politics and the primacy of private property as a paradigm for self-actualization. This means that the time is right for some whole new paradigm to emerge. Astronomers for centuries (possibly millennia) have said that between 2012 and 2026 the Age of Pisces will pass into the Age of Aquarius (technically one constellation passes a certain point relative to another constellation, but I don’t know the details). And of course we all know about the Mayan calendar. The end is near, brothers and sisters, but it ain’t what you think it is. The Age of Pisces is over.  A new wave of hippies is coming. Brace yourself.

(For expansion and follow-up, see From Fashion Anarchy to German Socialism.)